when there are no second chances
10: Graduation
Their class is still two students down when graduation comes. Shoko is confirmed to have moved to another town, and flowers still sit on Makoto's desk. They're fresh flowers today: a bouquet the class has pitched in to buy from a proper florist this time, instead of the cheaper ones from the supermarket up till now.
It's a special occasion, after all. Some of them might forget all about the missing two by next year. And that's okay. That's part of growing up, growing older, and growing apart. And others will remember: those who are already old and won't move much further, and those who were too close.
Today, at least, they're all close. Today, at least, they remember. And they remember the good.
It's been four months since. Winter has passed into spring. They've all changed a little along the way. Finished their entrance exams. Found high-schools across the region to go to. Now they're saying farewell to this school and the friends and memories they've made in it.
And without fuel to feed the fire, they only speak of happier things.
It's surprising how much they remember, and how much they forget. Makoto's painting hangs behind them and they talk about the school festival and how his paintings would always fetch a high price in the auctions. And there'd always be a few offered by the art department, because Makoto painted too many paintings and didn't take most of them home. He called them incomplete, some of the other students would say. None of them really understood why Makoto would consider them incomplete, when they were so beautiful. Even if he hadn't been that beautiful, or so admired.
They talk, now, of a future that'll never be. Wonder if he'd been planning on going to some art school, and Saotome who knows that's not true doesn't speak up to correct them. Perhaps he's also wondering if Makoto would have gone somewhere like that, if he they hadn't become friends. Or maybe he's thinking he's the one who turned Makoto away from that path.
They're all moot points, now. Things that mattered once upon a time but are only parts of precious memories, now. But that's the point of thinking of such pointless things: keeping those memories alive, in a time like this where they're celebrating and reminiscing and mourning as well, together.
The funeral should have been something like this, their homeroom teacher thinks, but it had gotten too big and too noisy and somewhat out of control. Or maybe that's what funerals are supposed to be: drowning in raw emotion and people digging in the closet to drag out every skeleton they find. Even when it's bad manners to speak ill of the dead. Even when the media should have only written a small obituary and not blown the whole thing out of proportion.
The students are more subdued than the usual graduating classes, but their homeroom teacher is satisfied with how things have gone by the end of it. Like all teachers in his shoes, he wishes his two absent students had been present as well. But they're there in spirit, their contributions to the classroom and the school still remembered… and then they'll pack it all away and there'll be a new graduating class in this room next year.
He may be teaching them as well. He may not. He wonders how long they'll recall the boy who painted their school from the rooftop last summer, and how long that painting will hang on the wall before the class or their decide to take it down and put something else there instead.
Slowly, the objects that house those memories will disappear from the school. Some of them will forget immediately. Others will remember a little longer.
He thinks, as a homeroom teacher whose student died, he'll remember for a good while longer. But the rest of his class is graduating, and much of them will be replaced by his new next year's class.