Chapter Text
She’s already done all her preparations when Hajime returns from the store. The chicken is seasoned and diced, the carrots and onions are chopped, and the potatoes are soaking in a large bowl of water. All the other ingredients she still had in the house are spread out neatly on the counter. Her locally famous, home-made stock is still on the fire and spreads a warm cloud of vegetables, spices and comfort through the kitchen. But all that still wasn’t enough for her to keep her busy, apparently, because in the meantime she also started to wash the kitchen window.
‘You finally decided to show up again?’ she asks when she sees Hajime enter, stretching out on a chair to reach the top of the window. ‘I thought you went looking for ginger in Tokyo.’
Hajime puts her linen bag containing lots of ginger, a box of eggs, a bottle of soy sauce and a can of coffee next to the bowl of potatoes. ‘Be careful, Oba-chan. You could fall.’
'Have you ever seen your grandmother fall off of something? No, you haven’t! I climbed on chairs before I could walk.' She stands on tiptoes and rubs her light blue rag back and forth on the glass. Her legs tremble a little. ‘You got that from me, Hajime-chan. You were climbing trees before you could walk too.'
‘But I often fell out.’ Hajime goes to Oba-chan and holds the chair.
‘Not everyone is as talented as I am, dear.' She finally stops swiping.
Hajime offers his hand to help her off the chair, but she hits him in the face with her wet rag. ‘I can do it myself, thank you.’ She grabs the backrest and lowers herself to the floor like a sputtering engine. 'So. Let's see if that ginger from Tokyo is worth it.'
She pours a good splash of oil into a cooking pot and adds the onions. Hajime is instructed to cut the garlic and ginger, but she begins to complain that it isn't fine enough, so she then takes over from him. His new assignment is to watch from a distance how the gray-haired, barely one hundred and fifty centimeters tall grand mistress of the kitchen makes a curry.
‘How can I ever learn if you always do everything?’ Hajime asks.
'You don't have time to cook anyway. It’s only studying and training with you. And when you're in America next year, it’ll still be like that. And then you go pick up that rubbish in between, you know, hot dogs and hamburgers and stuff.' She adds the chicken pieces to the translucent onions.
‘I'll just be in Japan next year if the University of California doesn't accept me.’
‘For heaven's sake, don't tell such nonsense, Hajime-chan. Why wouldn't they accept my grandson? Come on, give me that spoon.' She snatches it from his hands. ‘You're going to America and that’s that. And then, when you finish your studies, you become a busy sports physiotherapist. And then it’ll be your wife who cooks for you.'
Hajime stares at Oba-chan stirring the pot with her wooden spoon. Your wife. 'Can't you keep cooking for me?’ he asks. ‘You can come and live with me when I have my own house.'
'And leave your father here on his own? Ha! That bastard doesn't even know the difference between a carrot and a hot dog. Or the value of a homemade stock. Imagine!'
'Otou-san can also come and live with me. This house is too big for you and him alone.'
‘If you plan on letting us all move in with you later, you might as well just live here forever.’
Hajime takes a slice of carrot and rolls it back and forth. Live here forever. As a six- or seven-year-old, he wouldn't have asked for anything else, but a lot of things have changed since then. His mother's clear eyes look at him from the family photo on the windowsill, where the three of them smile at the camera: his mother, his father, he himself as a chubby child. Carefree under a Japanese cherry tree full of blossoms.
Oba-chan pats his hand. 'Don't play with your food, Hajime! Come on, make yourself useful for a change and put those carrots in the pot.'
‘Can they all go in at the same time?’
'Well, what do you think? Were you going to throw in the pieces one by one?' She shakes her head with a sigh and then tastes her vegetable stock. Then she scoops some more onto her spoon and waits for Hajime to complete his task before bringing the spoon to his mouth with her hand underneath. ‘Don’t forget to blow.’
Hajime blows and slurps down the barely cooled soup. ‘Perfect,’ he says with a half-burnt tongue. 'As always.'
'You can count on it. Hand me that big soup spoon.' Oba-chan pours some of the stock into the cooking pot with the onions, carrot and chicken. Then she adds the potatoes, takes a sip of her supposedly secret ingredient honey (she always says it’s a secret but she reveals it to everyone who asks and also everyone who doesn't ask) and puts the heavy lid on the pot. Satisfied, she tosses the kitchen towel over her shoulder and puts her hands on her sides. 'Now we just have to wait.' She glances at Hajime. 'Hopefully the waiting won’t take as long as I had to wait for my groceries. Where have you been all this time? Don't tell me you've actually been to Tokyo.'
Hajime leans the side of his head against the humming fridge. 'No. I just went to Kimura's grocery store.’
‘Is that store suddenly a hundred miles away?’
'I paid Toru a short visit in between. He wanted to tell me about a book he’d read.' A book of one thousand three hundred pages about genetic engineering, aliens and another reality. In this reality, that corresponds to an over-enthusiastic Toru who, without being asked, gives Hajime an in-depth analysis of what the writer meant with his book, which metaphors are hidden in the story, what is real and what is complete nonsense and why one alien said this and the other alien said that.
‘So you were with Toru-chan again. I can't say that's a surprise.'
'I’m sorry. I lost track of time.'
His grandmother turns the heat down when the curry starts to boil. ‘How long will he stay in Japan?’
‘Just over five months.’ One hundred and fifty seven days. Hajime keeps track of it on his calendar.
'How fast time goes. I can still picture it, how he came to introduce himself to me with a bouquet of flowers behind his back, all picked from our own garden. He even stole my rare roses. Ha! A charmer and a bandit at the same time. Always has been.'
'I gave him permission. For those flowers.'
‘So you were a bad influence on him? I thought it would be the other way around.'
‘We were both a bad influence on each other.’
'You sure were!' Oba-chan sits down on the nearest kitchen chair, the one where the paint has peeled off the most and on which his mother used to sit. ‘You challenged each other to do all sorts of things you weren't allowed to do. Always competing with each other. Always wanting to be better than the other. And all the arguing! It used to be worse than now, I had to intervene all the time.' She hits her knee. 'And both of you still can't live without each other, weird boys. I still don't understand.'
Neither does Hajime. He's been wondering for as long as he's known him.
‘How will it go when you're each in a different part of America? You can't even go get some groceries without visiting him on the way. You're going to have to take a long detour for that in America, you know.'
‘It wasn't my plan to visit him.’ But he asked. And Hajime wanted it. Until he sat with him on the mattress in his room, listening to his philosophical insights about the universe, a universe in which it was possible to be so close and so far apart at the same time, and the clouds outside slid in front of the sun so that everything about him darkened. Then Hajime thought: So. Here I am again. Against better judgement.
‘Then maybe it's not a bad thing that you're finally getting separated,’ Oba-chan says. 'Then hopefully you can follow your own plan from now on. Without having that Oikawa-boy disrupting the plan.’
'Yes. Hopefully.' Hajime clears his throat. ‘Do you need any further help, Oba-chan? If you don’t, I'm going to do my homework.'
‘Get out of here.’ She pats him on the arm. 'Because you are disrupting my plans. Just so you know.'
***
‘You did that on purpose!’ Hajime shouted.
‘I did not!’ Toru roared.
‘Yes you did!’
‘Did not!’
‘You said: “I don't want to play in the sandbox,” because I can build bigger and better sandcastles than you, and because I didn't want to play with you, you threw your ball at my Godzilla castle!’
‘Did not.’
‘You did!’
‘You can't even build bigger and better sandcastles than me.’
‘I can!’
It wasn't long before Oka-san was with them. She squatted down. The brim of her large straw hat fluttered in the wind. ‘What's going on here, boys?’
Hajime crossed his arms. ‘Toru is acting stupid.’
‘I’m not.’
'Yes, you are. He threw his ball at my sandcastle and now everything is broken and I have to start all over again.'
'I did not do it on purpose.' Toru bit his lip and looked at his bare feet.
‘You did, you did, you did! You did it on purpose!'
‘Come, come now,’ said Oka-san graciously, her voice clearer than the pale blue sky. 'We won't get anywhere that way. Can't you build a new sandcastle together? Then it's done twice as fast.'
'That won't work. Toru is not good at building sandcastles. And he doesn't know what my Godzilla castle should look like.'
‘Then you must show him how you want it, dear.’
‘But…’ Hajime frowned.
‘I'd like to build a sandcastle together, Iwa-chan,’ Toru said. He dropped his ball. ‘I promise I'll do everything you say.’
‘How nice of you, Toru-chan,’ Oka-san said. ‘What do you say, Hajime?’
Hajime curled his toes in the warm sand. He wasn't sure whether this was a win for him or not. It certainly didn't feel that way.
Oka-san ran her index finger over his cheek and looked into his eyes with hers, in the grey-green color they shared. 'I've often seen how well you can work together. I'm sure you can build a beautiful castle together too. Give it a chance.'
Hajime looked at Toru, who was staring at him with a stupid smile on his face. ‘If I really have to.’
'Very good.' His mother ran a hand through his hair and stood up again. Then she staggered and took a step back. She clutched her head.
‘Oka-san?’ Hajime asked. 'Is something wrong?'
Suddenly, his father was there too. Hajime hadn't even noticed he was in the garden. He grabbed Oka-san by the upper arms. ‘Are you okay, honey?’
Oka-san nodded.
‘Did you upset her, Hajime?’ Otou-san asked loudly. Otou-san was never loud otherwise. He must be worried. 'You know you can't upset your mother, right? She needs to rest a lot now. She really can't use it that you two—'
‘It's not because of the boys,’ Oka-san said. 'It's the sun. I've been in the sun for too long. It'll be over in a minute.'
‘Come on, I'll help you in.’
‘I can do it, sweetheart. Thank you.' She straightened her crooked hat. ‘Will you two make me a big sandcastle together?’
‘Yes,’ Hajime said.
‘The most beautiful sandcastle you've ever seen!’ said Toru, jumping up and down.
‘Come and get me when it's done. Then we can eat an ice cream afterwards. Hard work should be rewarded.'
She walked out of the garden, closely followed by Otou-san. She wore the white dress with the red poppies that Hajime and Otou-san had once chosen for her at a clothing market in Shiogama. Her favorite dress. It fluttered around her frail, pale body.
***
When they play volleyball together, that's all. Then nothing else crosses their minds. Then the ball, the net, the field and the players on it are all they see. Then they just feel the hard leather of the volleyball bouncing off their forearms, tapping their fingertips, leaving a warm, red spot on their palms. Then they don't have to worry about who they are and what they're going to do. With what’s going on between the two of them and what it once was. Or what it will be.
But now that the volleyball season is over and there are no more tournaments, and few reasons for anyone but Toru to continue training, and a whole lot of reasons not to, it's like the screen that shielded them for so long against the wind is gone. It's not that Hajime is afraid of a little wind. A little wind has become inevitable now. But sometimes a little wind can turn into a lot of wind. Or a storm, in the worst case.
On the umpteenth lunch break in a row where Hajime, Issei and Takahiro want to study and Toru wants to play volleyball, it’s sunny, cold and windless outside. Inside, in the canteen, it’s noisy and warm. Toru sighs after each fried tofu cube he puts in his mouth as Hajime tries his best to focus on the protein synthesis chapter. His sweet potato miso soup is getting lukewarm on the tray.
Toru sighs again. ‘I can't believe you guys are going to let me train alone again. You are the worst friends imaginable.’
Nobody responds. Hajime reads how the ribosomes in a cell scan and translate the information from an mRNA strand into a specific sequence of amino acids, which together form a protein.
‘You guys are so boring when you study.’ Toru digs into his half-empty bowl of rice with his chopsticks and sighs again, so deeply that it raises the edges of the papers in Issei's script slightly.
Issei stares at it for a moment and turns a page in his textbook of biochemistry. 'Do you think we're doing this for fun? Some people have to study to get good marks, you know.'
‘Oh, Mattsun,’ Toru says, pleased that he's finally getting some attention. ‘I admit I'm smarter than most, but that doesn't mean I don't study hard.’
‘When do you study then?’ Issei asks without looking up. ‘The morning before the exam?’
'Well. If you took notes as well as I did, you could take it easy too. But look what kind of scribbles you have.' Toru points his chopsticks at Issei's notebook, which lays open on the pages dealing with amino acid sequences. 'You can't study from that. You just write everything down one after the other. And it’s all in black ink! You get depressed if you read that. And no drawings, no pictures, no stickers, nothing at all!’
‘Do you use stickers?’ Takahiro asks.
‘He uses stickers,’ Hajime mumbles.
‘Of course I use stickers,’ Toru says.
‘But why should I use stickers?’ Issei asks.
‘To brighten up that dead notebook of yours,’ Toru says. 'Even a simple drawing would make a world of difference. Like Iwa-chan does. Look.' He pulls Hajime's notebook from under his elbow and places it on Issei's handbook. 'You see? He draws cells and cell nuclei and DNA and all that. Nice huh? Oh, and somewhere in the beginning he once drew a naked man's body. With the names of the muscles and joints.' He flips back to the first pages. ‘Where is it again?’
Hajime closes the book, Toru's hands still halfway between them. 'That’s mine.'
Toru pulls his hands back and holds them in the air. 'Excuse me. I didn't know you liked your notes that much.' He lets Hajime take his book back. ‘But don't overestimate yourself either, Iwa-chan. Except for your drawings, your notes are a disaster. You write ugly, there is no structure at all and you make dirty ink stains everywhere.'
‘I don’t get any bonus points on my exams for having pretty notes.’
'You wouldn’t know, since you’ve never had pretty notes. But hey, at least you and Mattsun have notes. Unlike Makki.'
‘I don't need notes,’ Takahiro says. He nods in the direction of Toru's rice. 'Are you still eating that?'
'Will you come and train with me?' Toru asks sweetly.
'No.'
'Then you won't get anything from me. You shouldn't eat that much if you're not exercising. If anyone deserves extra portions, it's me.'
‘You also need to eat enough to keep your brain functioning properly,’ Takahiro says. He reaches for Toru's bowl.
‘Hands off, Makki!’ Toru pats his arm hard with his chopsticks. 'More rice really won't make your brain function better, you know. I don't think there's anything that can do that.'
‘You can get my rice, if you want.’ Hajime slides his bowl towards Takahiro.
‘Thanks, Haji.’
‘Do you remember what the three stop codons are?’ Issei asks.
‘UAA, UAG and UGA,’ Hajime says without even thinking about it.
‘And they don't make amino acids, do they?’
'No, they simply indicate to the ribosome that the protein formation is complete.'
'Okay.'
‘Wait, what's a ribosome again?’ Takahiro asks, his mouth full of sticky canteen rice.
Toru slumps back in his chair. 'This is what hell feels like. Are you really going to do this every lunch break now?'
‘Even more often if you keep interrupting us,’ Issei says.
'Where is your passion for volleyball?' Toru asks. 'Your team spirit? Your love for the team captain?'
‘I take it you are already aware that Yahaba is team captain now?’
'Where is your love for me then? Is studying really that much more important than friendship?'
‘It's easy for you to say, Oikawa.’ Takahiro taps the back of his pencil on his blank sheet of paper. ‘You only have final exams left. We have to prepare for the state exam. You know, that exam that can pretty much determine your entire future if you live in Japan. No, you can ride around in sunny Argentina on llamas or alpacas or whatever they’re called.'
‘They're llamas. And it's not always sunny in Argentina.'
‘Whatever,’ Takahiro says.
‘Look, I can accept that you and Mattsun are abandoning me. But I expected better from Iwa-chan.' Toru looks at Hajime, his chin in his hand, his elbow resting on the table. ‘He's going to America. He doesn't have to participate in that stupid state exam, but he does anyway.'
Hajime marks something in his workbook. He could tell Toru once more about America and how uncertain it is that he'll be able to get there and that it’s better to have a back-up plan ready. But because Toru is stubborn and doesn't do backups plans himself and doesn't want to believe that Hajime might be refused by the University of California, there’s even less of a point to it than explaining to Takahiro what a ribosome is.
He can’t be refused if he doesn’t apply for it, of course. And he can't apply if he doesn't write his essay.
‘If I didn't know any better,’ Toru says, ‘I'd think you're just taking that ridiculous exam so you don't have to play volleyball with me.’
‘We played together two days ago.’
'That doesn't count! That was only ten minutes and you weren't even wearing training clothes!'
‘I just have more important things to do now, okay?’
And it annoys Hajime that Toru doesn't respond in his typically dramatic way. Like: “More important than me, Iwa-chan?" He could’ve easily said that. But Toru says nothing at first, and then, no louder than the buzz of the students eating and talking in the background: ‘I know that.’ Then he stands up and hangs the strap of his sports bag over his shoulder. He asks, in a more light-hearted tone now: 'Then you probably won't come after school either?'
Hajime bites his cheek, peers at the amino acids he's drawn in his notebook, and shakes his head.
'Okay. You won’t come either, Mattsun?'
‘Not tonight.’
'Makki?'
‘I have cram school.’
'Oh yeah, that's right. Forgot about it.' Toru takes his tray from the table. 'Maybe you didn’t have to go to cram school if you didn’t sleep the whole time in the normal school.’
‘Go train, Oikawa,’ Takahiro says, nibbling on a piece of beef that Hajime gave him.
‘Maybe you could even take notes if you stayed awake in class.’
'Very funny. We'll see you later?'
Toru winks. 'See you later. Study well, boys!’
Hajime doesn’t study well. It should go smoother with Toru out of the way, but he doesn't even get to half the chapter. When the lunch break is almost over, Issei tells him: ‘You haven't eaten much.’ Hajime just shrugs and says. ‘You heard Oikawa, right? You shouldn't eat that much if you don't exercise.' Issei looks like he doesn't agree.
After school, Hajime purposely misses his bus by asking Yamamoto-senpai a slightly too elaborate question about the conduction of nerves to which he actually knows the answer himself already. He has a new bus seventeen minutes later, but he decides to skip that one too and wait for the bus half an hour later. In the meantime, he hangs around the school, while the sky grows grayer and grayer. He flips through the chapter he didn't finish. He takes a carton of milk from the vending machine. He passes the gym.
He doesn’t enter. He looks through the window, which has some scratches on the glass that seem purposely placed. It could spell something, a name or something, but it's too small to read properly. Toru stands on the nearest field, practicing his serve, which he must have practiced a million times in his life. A million times, and in Toru’s mind more than a million times too little. There is no one else. Only Toru, who smashes volleyball after volleyball across the net with the regular ebb and flow and the force of the ocean, without the accompanying sounds of gasping lungs or sliding shoes almost peacefully to watch.
Toru never minded training alone. Sometimes he even wanted it; then he would slip away during school breaks to make his way to the gym alone, knowing that whoever was there would make room for him. Or he would train at the most inconvenient times, three hours before school or in between classes, when everyone else was taking a nap. If Hajime lost him, he never had to think about where he could be. Sometimes he would go up to him and force him to stop when it was enough. Sometimes he let him. He let him alone more and more.
Do you mind now, Toru? That I let you train alone?
He could join him. He still takes his volleyball clothes with him, every day he comes to school. A habit he just can't get rid of. It wouldn't take him long to get changed. He longs for it. To the firmness of his knee pads around his legs, the burning of his arms after taking Toru's serve. The soreness of the muscles in his calves, if he lasts long enough. He longs for how it will make everything feel familiar and natural again. How it will protect him from the wind.
For a moment.
And then what?
The days on which their plans overlapped are gone now. There is no longer a team they have to beat together. No team they want to be in together. There are only exams he has to score well on. An essay he has yet to write. Universities for which he has to apply, in America or in Japan.
Hajime rubs his finger against the scratches on the window. It could be a secret message. Braille for the blind. Shall we meet tonight in the park under the maple tree? Or: I hate school, I wish they all dropped dead. Whatever it says, it's not meant for him. He turns and walks away, following the wide path that leads to the main road, surrounded on both sides by bare trees. His hair moves with the cold breeze that has suddenly appeared. In the distance he sees the bus shelter.
***
‘Could you toss the ball to us for a change, Oikawa?’ It was Jun who asked, and Jun was someone who was bigger than them and had more friends than them.
'Yeah,' said one of those friends, the one with number eleven on his shirt and so much gel in his hair it was dripping down his neck, 'you almost always throw at Iwaizumi. Let us try too.'
Toru put his hands on his sides. ‘Don't you want to win then?’
'What do you mean?' Jun asked.
'Isn't that obvious? Iwa-chan always hits when I throw the ball to him. Unlike you.’
Jun's face turned white, then purple. 'We can't practice if you never bring the ball to us! That's not our fault!'
It was rare for Jun to say something sensible, but Hajime thought he did have a point now. So he said: ‘He has a point, Oikawa.’
Toru glared at him, and he glared at Jun too, and Jun's friends too. 'Fine, I'll give you a few sets too. But don’t think we’re going to win then.’
They didn't win. Not that it mattered much, because it wasn't a real match anyway.
As the two of them waited for Toru's sister to take them home, outside in the orange glow of the evening, their backs pressed against the cool concrete wall of the building, Hajime asked: ‘Did you do it on purpose? Giving worse passes to them than to me?’
Toru cocked his head. 'Huh? Why would you think that?'
'Just because. You weren't happy with what Jun said.'
‘I played like I always play. Do you really think I’d lose on purpose?'
Hajime had to admit that wasn't anything Toru would do.
‘We're just more attuned to each other, Iwa-chan. That's it.'
‘Can't you tune in to the others then?’
‘Never as well as with you,’ Toru said. 'Cause I trust you a hundred thousand million percent. I could even set to you with my eyes closed, because I know you'll always be there, right where I need you.'
Hajime half hid his face behind his sweater. He couldn't stand it when Toru said things like that. But after a while he himself muttered: ‘I trust you two hundred thousand million percent.’
‘I trust you for three hundred thousand million billion percent."
‘I trust you for seven hundred and twenty thousand billion trillion thousand trillion percent.’
They kept making up higher numbers until his sister arrived.
***
When Toru was cornered during a match and he couldn't go anywhere with his sets, he always passed the ball to Hajime. That wasn't something they had agreed to one day, he just did it. He always chose Hajime. It must be the one thing that always stayed the same between them. Even as their friendship changed overnight one year ago, Toru continued to use him as a safety net on the volleyball court when things seemed to go wrong. And no matter how stupid Toru was, no matter how mad Hajime was at him – in those moments he always let the ball come to him and did exactly what Toru wanted him to do.
Because he liked it, of course. He liked being Toru's last resort. He liked being the only person who Toru could find in his most desperate moments.