Chapter 8: 2.3

However, the bullying escalated instead.

 

It was as though the school was full of merciless bandits, with her every possible possession stolen, thrown away, or burned.

 

Yuzuki could not do anything. It was a losing battle from the beginning. Like how the person who confesses first is doomed to lose in romance, goodwill stood no chance against bullying.

 

On the way back from school, I heard three girls from Yuzuki’s class chuckling mirthfully.

 

“That feels good—. Don’t you think she’s getting uppity because her piano’s good?”

 

It was a bad-mouthing contest. On one of my unfortunate days, I had to walk home with these three in tow.

 

“I tell you, she might have won a few competitions, but she’s not that special. If I practice hard enough, I’d easily become better than her”

 

“You’ll never do it.” My voice spooked the three, and even myself, I had no intention of speaking out loud. “You’ll never know how much she practiced. You don’t even know why she was playing piano. Your dumb brains simply can’t comprehend how amazing she is.”

 

They paled. One of them quietly said, “Let’s go,” the rest of them pulled to the other side of the road without objection.

 

Not so quietly, their chatter resumed. “Who’s that guy?”

 

“See… there’s this guy, he follows Yuzuki like a shadow…”

 

My anger peaked when they referred to me as a “shadow.” Before I could shout back,  I suddenly felt empty and decided not to.

 

It was as though I had become a shadow on the spot.

 

 　　　８

 

Yuzuki went to the regional competition of the Chopin International Piano Competition in Asia with the muddy, murky sound and yet won by a landslide. Bad condition or not, a prodigy was a prodigy, not to be taken lightly. The next stage, competition on national scale, will be held in January. If she performed well there, she would be able to compete in the name of Japan.

 

However, Yuzuki stopped playing the piano altogether.

 

It was the beginning of December when snow still hadn’t piled up yet.

 

We holed up in our secret base. The air was getting colder, but strangely, I remembered it to be warmer than anything. We would put on winter clothes and spend the day wrapped in a lumpy blanket. Every day, Yuzuki would dress in a bright white coat, a knit cap, and a red scarf.

 

She was trying to escape reality. From piano, from school, from her mother, even from my apartment. For her, there was probably no gentler place than the abandoned bus. Or perhaps she was looking for solace that could only be found in abandoned buildings.

 

Inside, there was a mountain of manga and books, in which she spent most of the time there reading. Of them, only a few were mine.

 

“Where did you get so much money?” I asked when she hauled in more manga.

 

“My dad, he kept giving me money.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Probably forfeiture.”

 

I could fully comprehend, but her voice rang sadly. In my mind;t eye, I recalled Sousuke-san’s pale, passive face as he looked down at me from the balcony.

 

Forfeiture—for what?

 

No, Dad paid for my living expenses too, was that a kind of forfeiture too?

 

In the blink of an eye, the early sunset of winter came. As the night drove us out of the base, Yuzuki protested, “I don’t want to go.” 

 

“I don’t want to go back to that house. I don’t want to go to that school. I don’t want to play piano. Why do I have to do any of those things? Yakumo-kun, let’s stay here forever, together…”

The dark purple sky deepened. I exhaled a single white breath.

 

“…We can’t do that.”

 

I tried to get up, but Yuzuku clung to my arm, her hand was as cold as a polished piano key. She pulled me closer and rested her head on my shoulder.

 

A long time must have passed, but the color of the sky remained the same. Left on the verge of dusk and night, she asked in a whisper.

 

“Yakumo-kun… i-is there someone you l-like?”

 

Her cold hands become hot.

 

“If there is, then it wouldn’t be anyone other than you.”

 

She broke into a smile.

 

“Me too… If I happened to like someone, it’d be no one other than you.”

 

Our eyes met. She had a slightly teasing, devilish smile. Even in the dark, I could see that her cheeks were a little red.

 

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 　　　９

 

The next day, my mind was a haze.

 

I hadn’t slept a wink, the class was a blur. My head was still full with the hue of last night.

 

On the way home, she said this to me, “Yakumo-kun, let’s go somewhere far away together. First, let’s head for Inawashiro Lake, and then we’ll continue going anywhere we please. We can live happily for months.”

 

Surprised, I replied, “That’s impossible. I don’t have that much money.“

 

“I’ll steal some” I stared at her, not sure how to feel. “Dad kept it in the closet. There’s about a million and a half yen there, in cash. When I ask for money, he gets it from there… So, that’s probably intended for me anyway. We can take it…”

 

“A million and a half…”

 

“We don’t have to run away forever, just for a little while, from all of this… Please. Will you come with me? Tomorrow, I’ll wait at the secret base–”

 

Before I could reply, she waved bye-bye and went inside the house. I wondered detachedly whether Ranko-san would get mad at her late return.

 

During the entire day, I pondered. Should I go with her? Even for a few months of absence could cause a string of problems. Above all, the competition—Chopin International Piano Competition in Asia. Is this really for the best? Could I just throw away the manifestation of her efforts until now?

 

While walking around aimlessly during lunch break, I unexpectedly ran into Yuzuki.

 

When she saw me, her almond-shaped eyes were wide open.

 

However, she walked past me without a word.

 

At the moment when she overlapped me, she casually brushed my hand with her fingertips. She did not look back.

Afterwards, I felt a gaz on me. Sakamoto was standing there with a stunned look on his face. I turned and rushed away.

 

In a flash, the school was over. I went straight home and prepared for the trip. I packed a change of clothes and a toothbrush set in my backpack. With the increasingly full pack, the feeling of loss doubled. My anxiety grew and grew. I knew that she needed to do this, to run away from home once, but all my thoughts were lost in a maze, caught by unknown dark feelings. Was I helping her in going with her? Or I was ruining her life?

 

The chatter of the three girls before rose into my consciousness.

 

“See… there’s this guy, he follows Yuzuki like a shadow…”

 

What if, what if it was merely her shadow. The deep shadow behind her bright, bright spotlight.

 

If I was half my dad, another half Mom, then a half of me would be a shadow, another half salt.

 

What if I wasn’t a proper human from the start? What if I left her like how Dad left Mom? Wouldn’t that be the same as hurting her?

 

I wasn’t good enough. I was not qualified to run away with her.

 

I thought about all of this in circles. It was illogical. But I couldn’t do better, it was as though there was a black hole inside my mind, bending and distorting my every thought.

 

I sat down, the pack wide open in front of me. Time passed like it did. Dusk turned to night. Snow fluttered outside the window.

Was she still waiting for me?

 

What if she was freezing alone right now?

 

I wondered and wondered, but hadn’t moved a single millimeter.

 

Unable to sleep, I huddled like a stone statue until morning.

 

　　10

 

Yuzuki did not blame me. On the contrary, she hadn’t said a word about yesterday. Maybe it hadn’t happened in the first place, I lied to myself.

 

But, it was undeniable that something had changed definitively between us.

 

It was subtle by the magnitude, yet ruthlessly clear in definition, like a zero turning into a one in an exponent equation, abysmal but pivotal. 

 

She hadn’t played the piano in front of me since. She stopped going to school and practiced for the competition at home all day, either alone or while being barked at by Ranko-san.

 

I became an outlet of her frustration, and we would spend hours on weekdays talking about nothing in particular. Maybe being an “outlet” to frustration was a fitting role of a “shadow” like me. If anything, it was a position I had chosen for myself.

 

As a matter of course, she won the national round, proceeded to international, and won the first prize in the third and fourth grade category. The competition committee announced that a commemorative album featuring the performances of the gold prize winners will be released. Although it was not until September that the CD containing Yuzuki’s performance was released.

 

I put on the CD, excited to be able to listen to Yuzuki’s performance for the first time in a while; she had stopped playing piano in front of me since the day of “running away from home.”

 

Her performance began. It was Chopin’s Venetian Boat Song

 

I was astonished. Only a few months ago her sound was muddy, and yet, the sound streaming from the CD was crystal clear. No one would have expected a performance of that quality to come from a child not yet ten years old.

 

There was a boat, on the canals of Venice, beautifully scored, but gone were the hopes and dreams she put into her piano.

 

She had ceased to hope and pray through her performance.

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