Episode 38 — The Right Answer
I saw the car off into the evening dark and went back inside. Back to a room that was mine alone. I sat cross-legged on the floor. The room I usually find small felt, just today, a little larger. But that spaciousness was not a positive thing — the words that fit inside it were loneliness, emptiness, things like that.
I tried to fill those words with other words, to light a small flame against them. I turned over what Shion had said.
“I’d decided I wanted to spend lots of time with you over summer break. So supplementary classes would be a problem”.
Apparently I’d managed to slip into Shion’s summer holiday plans, by some stroke of luck. I wasn’t arrogant enough to think I was at the centre of them — but at least I seemed to be tucked into some corner. That alone was enough to make me want to try.
I’ve never been interested in anything I don’t love, so I’ve never once had to face studying, which I do not love. But the moment Shion attached herself to even that unloved thing, I immediately wanted to do it — and I laughed at myself for being so easily moved. I’d been aware, lately, that I was tilting too far toward Shion — and felt the alarm of that, belatedly.
But then — it was only the sight of Shion at the piano that had made me pick up a novel I’d sworn off and start again. Shion had been at the centre of me from long before any of this, probably. Putting it all together, the current state of affairs — Shion as the guiding principle of my actions — made a certain inevitable kind of sense.
Riding the momentum of that Shion-tilt, I firmed up a certain resolution, opened the laptop, and pulled up the usual posting site. But I wasn’t going to write. Instead I opened the Updates tab I’d never once used before, and wrote:
“I’m pausing updates until the exam period is over”.
Like placing a rest in a piece of music — that one line, and I pressed post.
Then I closed the laptop, and in its place opened textbooks and notebooks. I tackled the problem Shion had described as pulling the numbers apart and squeezing them back together at the end.
Just recalling that description made me smile, and made me want to try. Strange.
◇◇◇
The Updates tab, being less-frequented than the main posts, drew almost no response to my hiatus notice — with one exception. Otonashi-san.
“Updates being on pause will be lonely — but please do your best with exam studying. Really, truly — please do your best”.
Unusually fervent for her. I’d thought her a cryptic sort — leaving riddle-like comments — but now she’d switched into impassioned cheerleader mode, and I reflected, somewhat fondly, on how difficult to pin down this person I’d never met actually was.
With that small mental pause, I turned back to the problems.
The quiet air of the library also helped concentration. The only noise was my own heart, loud because Shion was beside me — but that was ordinary life by now, so I forced myself to ignore it.
For that matter, the library tables seat four, and sitting across from each other would present no structural obstacle whatsoever. Even so, Shion sits beside me. It isn’t just the library — wherever we are, Shion is always making herself as close to me as possible. I assumed this was a proximity sense that had malfunctioned from lack of experience with other people — the problem being that my own experience was roughly as sparse as Shion’s, and so I kept stumbling dangerously close to reading something into that closeness.
Though what exactly one would read into something between friends — I couldn’t have said.
And so the after-school hours had shifted venue — from the music room to the library. In place of the vanished sound, my overactive mind, trying to stand in for the noise, needed forcibly quieting as I turned back to the notebook.
Something I’d realised since Shion and I started these after-school study sessions: studying was surprisingly enjoyable.
Every subject required some initial effort getting the foundational knowledge in place. But once you got past that threshold, there were moments — repeatedly — where memorised dots connected into lines. The satisfaction of so this connects to that — similar to catching up with a planted detail in a story — wasn’t an unpleasant feeling at all.
Hard at first, but once it starts flowing it gets easier — rather like writing fiction, I thought. I was probably at the level of barely-not-failing, and already feeling as though I understood things. In all likelihood I was energetically climbing what they call the Peak of the Fool. Even so, I told myself growth was growth and moved on.
And so, devoting a portion of my brain’s resources to these useless thoughts as I worked methodically through equations — Shion murmured something, quietly, slipping it into the silence.
“That whole page is right. Impressive.”
What’s truly impressive is that you can tell it’s all right from a sideways glance, I thought — but I didn’t mind the praise. And as if to match my mood, to make up in action for a shortage of words:
Shion placed her small white palm on top of my head.
“Good girl, good girl.”
Slowly, Shion stroked my head. Close enough that our shoulders touched. Gazing at me steadily, leaning in to see. With the clumsy phrasing and awkward gestures of a small child playing house, taking the role of the mother.
That my heart was sent into complete disarray by something so transparent was entirely my own fault.
“You’re too close.”
“Is that bad?”
“…Not bad.”
I mumbled it like a child in the middle of a rebellious phase, and Shion smiled, pleased. That smile — all the polish and beauty of something wholly adult, entirely at odds with the clumsy gestures — was what it was.
My head went completely to pieces, and I felt close to losing every equation I’d managed to retain.
And so it went: knowledge packed in, spilled out into the notebook, and periodically scattered by Shion. That cycle, repeated. And as it repeated, the days without sound or words passed — until, at last, the final exams themselves arrived.