AIKO

Aiko could have stopped this. She was everything. She had strawberry half-moons on her finger tips. A constellation of flaming stars fluttering like snowflakes. Nothing about her made sense. That was why I loved her. She was perfectly imperfect. Her eyes were too big and her mouth was too small; it sloped down to the left if you looked closely enough. She was a cartoon made whole. Her lines sketched by some hidden genius. Fingertips flaming like sun spots on closed eyelids. Skin surely warm to the nervous touch. Hair flopping over her right eye. Fingers brushing it back behind an ear. The left slightly lower than the right. I studied that ear for hours. I watched it through history, centuries passing by. It never rose or fell as civilisations died. It flushed with embarrassed heat in winter. Roses bloomed it to life in summer. Everything I thought I wanted. So much in one small, perfectly lopsided ear.


Her breasts were nothing to speak of, her legs were short and bowed like all the others, and her keitai was at least two years old. It wasn’t even a clamshell. I thought no-one else noticed her, noticed how she cupped her fingers when she covered her mouth to speak, how the sock glue on her left leg always failed and she walked around half-sock-up half-sock-down. She was never the most fashionable girl in my class, never the one flashing flesh under a too short skirt. She never wore make-up on her face, never laughed inanely, never got fake tanned. She didn’t dye her hair, never squatted outside the konbeni in the evening, never sat in the back row staring into her compact for hours on end.

Her face was a teaser, never easily read. Half-smiles curling up like wavelets. Spreading like ripples through her cheeks. Dying eyes that concealed more than they saw. I thought I could save her. But she bobbed along, never waving for help. I thought I knew her. But her face was always ahead of me. One emotion too late, one glance too slow. Connection lies in anticipation, not reaction. Time is earned as it passes. Is lost with each missed flicker. She was always one desk too far away. One seat from sharing her happiness. One chair from consoling her sadness. The strawberry stars fell to other Earth’s. Gravity held me back.

I over-thought everything in those classroom days. Built sand-castles too far down the shore. Teenage currents swept me away, melting my dreams. I would watch her hand for hours. Cradling her head over the chewed-spine books. Holding her high above the scratched weary desktop. Fingers buried in her hair. A thumb rubbing under that left ear. Wearing down the bone beneath her porcelain skin. A patch of shining white. Catching shadows from certain angles as afternoons bled. Eroding the foundations below the lobe. Dragging it down away from parity. A millimetre a year at the most. Three years of watching the shadows deepen. Caught in that bowl beneath the lobe. Drops of light pooling and dying. Caught in the hollow of her skin.

I thought no-one saw how she floated as if driven by the breeze, never making quite enough of an impression to ever be memorable to anyone, except me. I lived a world dreaming of glances and smiles, of looking away in embarrassment when our eyes met for too long, of walking in the same direction, if never actually together. She was the girl I had loved since elementary school, back when her fringe used to bang against her forehead when she walked, just as her pink thermos on its yellow strap used to bump against her right thigh. They always seemed to slow her down, driving her ever so slightly backwards for every step she took, as she pushed the thermos aside when it strayed in front of her and the fringe away when it crept into her eyes. Both of us marched in the crocodiles of children that snaked around monuments and through tourist-crowded temples during school excursions.

I had it all planned. We would walk out after school, down along the overgrown river bank to the avenue of cherry blossoms blooming and shedding in the April sunshine. I had two bento boxes, bought especially from Kenzo-san, the old lady from the back-street shop that had somehow survived the developers. She makes them so beautifully, the real version of those plastic models you see in restaurant windows. Salmon and pickle and rice and tofu and vegetables – every grain, every drop, precisely where it should be.

I should have known she would do it. I pleaded with her on the sandy baseball field, the two of us alone amidst five hundred others screaming, shouting, running. It wasn’t too much to ask, was it? I already had the bento boxes, and a flask of cool cha. But she didn’t want to know, said I was mad, said I hadn’t talked to her in eight years and now I wanted to sit under the cherry blossoms with her. I grabbed her wrist, wanting to pull her towards the gate, knowing that if she would only come with me and think about everything she would know that it was what she wanted. She jerked her hand away, a red ring on her wrist where her blood had rushed to meet the pressure of my fingers. I held out a Kenzo bento, its many parts perfect under plastic. She dashed it out of my hand, and when it hit the ground, it exploded in a spray of pinks and greens. I asked if she had a boyfriend, wanting there to be someone for me to hate, wanting to know that she was with the captain of the baseball team, or a senior from the upper class. I wanted there to be someone else I could point to and tell myself that it wasn’t my fault; that he was better than me and that’s why she chose him. But there was no one and she didn’t need anyone, she said. She was much happier alone.

There was no-one better, how could there have been in that place of sand, slippers and sadistic bullies? Not all of them wore uniforms, and none stood out. Just her, and she was my way of being someone. But I wasn’t good enough for her, and the whole school knew it after that day. Kids who didn’t even know me would seek me out just to laugh in my face, my lunch rations were always slopped out with an extra grin, and an invisible wall had formed around Aiko that repelled every atom of my being.

I was one hand in a forest of upright palms and outstretched fingers. Clawing at the ceiling for attention but she could only ever pick one, and it was never mine. Too much competition for me to be noticed. My voice died in my throat, unheard for so long that it withered within me, curling itself into a knotted ball that may never be unravelled. Every time I am ignored another layer of knots was added, pulled tighter and tighter by the group’s laughter. The most delicate of fingernails could not untangle them. Somewhere in the middle of that ball of other’s voices was me, held prisoner within their strings of words.

They wore me down on the playground, in the classroom and in the toilets. Wherever I went followed the sniggering knowledge that I had died a public death. From there there could be no afterlife. There was nowhere else to go but home. What else was there?