"Can we keep walking, Mitsui-san?" They had reached the train station, and their shadows stretched long in the fluorescent lighting. Kasumi's murmured request came unexpectedly. She tugged her jacket around her school uniform. "Of course, if you have a curfew, and I understand that seniors have a heavier workload…"
Mitsui shook his head. It was only 9p.m. "Of course. If your ankle can take it."
"This pace is fine." They proceeded to tread down the road, passing several establishments. A LAN café, several izakaya joints, a public bath on the corner with a classical landscape painting on its noren indicated the blue serenity to be found within. The day had cooled to a comfortable temperature, but the atmosphere dipped as they turned onto an avenue lined with trees.
"What do you think of Sei-chan, Mitsui-san?" Kasumi said.
A thick, unkempt mat of jasmine bushes added to the greenery, the white and pale yellow flowers sprinkled among the glossy emerald leaves. They infused the air with a lingering perfume.
"Whoa, that's a huge question," Mitsui said. He swung his bag over one shoulder. "Norohiko-san is a sensitive person. Empathetic."
"He said something to you," Kasumi said. She wasn't guessing.
"Yeah." They were content to walk in silence.
"You're not going to give me anything?" she asked.
"Private and classified correspondence," Mitsui declared.
"Fine." She swept a few fallen blooms from the ground as they walked, and put them to her nose. "I don't believe that one should bare all, either."
A torrid image popped into Mitsui's mind. "What an interesting… opinion," he finished quickly. "You don't think that, in a relationship, one needs to reach a point of knowing someone inside out? I mean that purely on platonic grounds."
"Inside out, wide and deep, back and forth… What is a relationship but the tiny moments accumulated together, along the irreversible continuum of time? Here, open your hand." Kasumi dropped the jasmine flowers into Mitsui's palm. "What do they smell like?"
Mitsui lifted them to his face and inhaled. "Sweet, but with more complex notes."
Kasumi cocked her head, and continued to stare at him expectantly. He reached for his poet's soul.
"Like nimble fingers running over cream-coloured piano keys. A tune lingering and powerful, for a warrior in battle-stained armour come to warm his feet by the fireplace. A flower of the night." Mitsui was gratified by a smile.
"How will you remember this moment?" she asked. "As I am talking to you, the pattern of a memory crystallises in your brain: how I make you feel as I speak, the placement of my hands, the micro-expressions of my face."
Kasumi's voice was akin to rivulets of fine white sand, running over the crags of his chest, belly, and thighs. He noticed a small mole just under one of her eyes, and a tiny, tiny cleft in her glossy bottom lip where it had been torn.
"You see, another I exists apart from myself, an I of memories. An I that I wouldn't know. You say you know me by the feeling you apply to this knowledge. But a memory changes each time you draw upon it. The crystal evolves. Therefore an I that isn't me exists in your brain. I, as an autonomous being, and that Mitsui-san-I, may progress in tandem, in parallel, in alignment, but they will never, ever be the same. How, then, can you say to know someone else inside out?"
Mitsui could walk all night by the cadence of her mild words. His hands worked as he tried to strain through the thoughts her argument had aroused.
"Epistemological notions of memory and consciousness make a conflicting sea. You therefore propose that no knowledge can ever be passed on in its pure form. Even as I create this relationship with you, it stands on a history that shifts like a house built on sand, and its inhabitants spectres merely rubbing elbows with each other." He paused. "Maybe not sand. More like a house built on shale, with shifting layers." He was sure Kasumi would appreciate the allusion to what little knowledge he had gathered at the florist's.
The streetlights ribbed the road with alternating windows of orange and dark. The land rose a little as they passed among several two- or three-storied apartment buildings. Someone exited a driveway to check his mailbox. Washing hung limp and ghostly from balcony railings, between clusters of large house plants.
Kasumi had yet to digest the implications of his response, but she was, for now, content to be impressed by his eloquence. His quick perception of the philosophical concepts that she had thrown out grew her excitement at the thought of being able to coax his intellect into its full.
Really, she ought to have been more grateful to Akagi for dragging her into his scheme; no doubt Miyagi and Rukawa could be stimulated as well. As for Sakuragi, she would have to spend more time with him to guess which type of teaching style he would best respond to. Everything considered, the 'red mark' team could very well find a synergy off court as they did on it.
"What is knowledge anyway? Can it be pure? Can any thought be original, so to speak," Kasumi wondered softly.
"I don't know," Mitsui said simply.
She glanced at him.
"Mitsui-san, I really liked your analogy of the house and its spectres. And I don't expect anyone to be able to answer questions such as these. I'm only babbling."
"Oh, you can babble all you want, Kasumi-san." Mitsui finished the artifact wrapped around his fingers. "For what it's worth, I think there's a danger in being too cynical, or perpetually trapped in intellection. Some things of the heart stand truer. Us humans were made to be fallible creatures, and we often find delight in our silly, foolish little moments. Here–"
He lay the white flower chain onto Kasumi's head.
"–a bagatelle to crown a bright, bonny lass. Humour me. It's an irreconcilable paradox."
The esteemed reader must pause at this juncture, and offer a moment of recognition for how far the basketball player had exceeded the expectations that his English teacher, Kataoka sensei, had any reason to impose upon him. Not a lick of that reticent, stuttering reader remained in that tall frame, which cerebrum had managed to produce a joke relatively comparable to a rabbit mastering phrenology. How passion fuels the imagination, and eagerness to please gilts tongues!
It would have been the most romantic moment, had not said lassie felt an overpowering need to foil Mitsui's genius.
"Oh, Mitsui-san, continue to whisper your precious English sophistications to me," Kasumi said, smiling sweetly and clasping her hands together.
Mitsui almost tripped. He was struck by the way that she looked at him with such an open expression: chin dimpled, lips parted with pleasant surprise.
"I…"
She continued, "If only you could know how my heart leaps so in my breast; foolish, foolish desire! I can see that A grade of yours within reach."
"Intolerable," Mitsui retorted, and plucked the flower crown away. "This cursed thing shall be destroyed."
"No!" Kasumi tried to snatch it back from Mitsui. "It becomes me, Mitsui-san, does it not? Deliver me from my destiny of a miserable spinster."
He could not disagree. The beatific turn of Kasumi's mouth further persuaded him to leave the jasmine flowers like so many soft pearls in her hair.
Continuing in the same unburdened manner the two wended through the unfamiliar locale, the night settling comfortably over its nooks and vacant arterial streets. The modulations of their dialogue were subdued by the falling blanket of restfulness, but Kasumi's words trilled brightly nonetheless, Mitsui's deeper bass barks evincing their shared engagement.
"The number of times I've considered the existence of a hip hop-loving emergency nurse," Mitsui said, "is never."
"Itoh-san made the decision for me while I was out of it in the emergency room." Kasumi tilted her head and ran a finger along the line of the side shave. "She said she'd always wanted to try the hairstyle, but was never brave enough to do it on herself."
"So she tried it on an addled patient?"
"She could, and she did." Kasumi stifled a laugh. "She even showed me the photo that inspired it the following day."
"Damned if I don't admire her for it," Mitsui admitted.
"You're not alone," Kasumi said, sweeping her bangs to the side. "Actually, I shall add some Salt-N-Pepa videos into the remedial syllabus. You guys would go out of your minds."
She smiled inwardly, thinking about how Rukawa would react. He would most likely flip open his notebook in that levelheaded way, and inscribe more slang terms under the existing list of colloquialisms, enunciating the syllables below his breath. She knew he was excited whenever that ratty notebook came out.
Mitsui remained quiet. He was thinking that Kasumi was very good with entertaining people by her little anecdotes, but he never really knew her part in them; it was as if she had incised herself out of these memories, preserving them for the sake of small talk without revealing anything of that past I. He supposed that Kasumi had Seniichi clinging to her back like a macaque; having had anything that she said used against her accounted for this unconscious inclination.
"How was recovery, though?" he asked.
"Hmm?"
"You didn't tell me that you had to go to the hospital, remember."
The memory of Mitsui's censure and the gong of the cistern seized Kasumi.
"Yes," she said levelly. "I'm not sorry about that; it was only three days."
He made a sound of frustration, and tried very hard not to reproach her. "I've been hospitalized, and I know you wouldn't go in for no reason."
Kasumi touched his hand, and Mitsui lapsed into silence as she quickened her step. A white glow infused the air above the houses in the adjacent street. They arrived at a corner piloted by a defunct traffic light, which framed the oncoming road like a dread portal. One van trundled past them, its engine rattling loudly. Here they stopped, and Mitsui could see one side of a chain link fence under the luminosity of the court lights. As he caught a glimpse of Kasumi's face, he understood at once.
It was a long while before she roused.
"I wish you had been there with me."
Mitsui continued to gaze at the distant basketball court, not wishing to spook her, but her words stirred him.
"There was nowhere to run, or I would never have been 'brave' enough to face up to them. It was the gang from Seishiro's gakuen, and some others with motorbikes. One of them they called Steel, and he had a mullet even more quintessentially 1980s than my hairdo."
Tetsuo? Mitsui thought, feeling horror writhe in his chest. He could not acknowledge her humour.
"The gang caught me and held me against the fence, and he conducted a very straightforward interview. The leader gave me a head-butt for punching him–" Kasumi touched her mouth "–and one of his guys wore a ring which grazed me on the neck. I blacked out after they left me. I think I cut my head on some sharp corner of the wire when I fell. Mother refused to let me stay at home because the headache and nausea continued for a day or so. She was right, as usual. The doctor gave me a few stitches for the scalp wound, too, and confined me to bed for fractured ribs and concussion."
Mitsui swallowed past the dryness in his throat.
"I… I wish I'd been there to help."
When had Tetsuo switched over? He would gut that traitor first and interrogate him after, God damn it.
"No, Mitsui-san. It was wrong of me to say that." Kasumi ducked her head and scuffed a heel against the curb. "Then we'd both have been beaten up."
Her logic was undeniable.
"You've left your gang days behind, haven't you?"
Mitsui dropped his chin to his chest. "Yes."
"This is only a reprieve," she said pointedly. "They will run you down for your disrespect."
And probably murder me, I know, Mitsui thought. When he had gone down the path of delinquency, he had never cared to consider the possible ramifications it would have on his family, friends, or sporting career. The thought of Kasumi's suffering on his behalf troubled him much more than his own endangerment.
"No fear. Even with the Dragoness' granddaughter indisposed, I have Hotto-kun and my old friends. Sakuragi, too, probably." It was a secret kept within the basketball club, but Sakuragi had already destroyed Steel once.
"Hotto-kun?"
Mitsui thought for a moment. "The noisy one who waves the 'Mit-chan' banner at the games."
"Ah. You two must be close."
"Yeah." A note of embarrassed pride tinged his reply. He had never mentioned to Hotto how valuable his cheering had been to the team, and made a mental note to do so as soon as he could by paying him a visit at his after-school workplace with a drink, or some sort.
Kasumi noticed the affection that stained Mitsui's cheeks, and was glad for it.
"Come on, Mitsui-san. Let's leave."