12. 自分探し

A Voyage of Self-Discovery

Anna noticed that Makoto was preoccupied with putting test tubes back on a rack. She picked up a wayward Bunsen burner and took the opportunity to give Makoto a furtive sidelong glance. He had the tall and somewhat rangy body of a young man who had experienced a growth spurt and hadn't filled out yet. Anna estimated that the top of her head drew level with his chin. His black hair was cropped fairly short and was neatly styled in broad spikes that further exaggerated his height.

Anna had been avoiding looking at his facial features, because she knew she would see the black eye she had given him. It reminded her of what she and Akira had discussed during lunch - her tendency to lash out impulsively and without regard for consequences.

She decided that it was time to address the elephant in the room.

"How's your eye holding up?"

Makoto turned around to face Anna, test tubes peeking out from between his clenched hands. He shrugged. "It still works. I was worried there for a while. You're surprisingly strong," he said, shaking his head in wonderment.

"What's surprising about it?" Anna asked sharply. "You assume I'm weak because I'm a girl?"

"No, not at all," Makoto said in a genial tone. "I used to do karate. Girls have kicked my ass more times than I can remember. I just meant that I don't recall you playing any sports."

"You recall correctly," Anna said. "I don't play well with others." She stowed the Bunsen burner in its home under one of the sinks and turned her attention to a rusty ring stand. "Sports just aren't for me. But I take it that you're on a sports team?"

Makoto looked offended. "Why, because I'm tall and slim? Now who's making assumptions?"

Color rose to Anna's cheeks. Makoto laughed. "I'm just kidding. Sometimes stereotypes are true. I'm on the football team."

"I knew it, you son of a -"

"Whoa, whoa," Makoto said, backing up a step. "I was just playing around. Anna-san, it seemed like you could use a good laugh. Dark and brooding isn't a good look for someone as pretty as you."

Anna felt her blush intensifying despite herself. "You're lucky I don't want to get expelled," she said, balling up a fist tightly.

"Would you relax?" Makoto said, stowing the test tube rack in a cubby. "I'm not hitting on you. I swear I'm not. I'm just saying, person to person, no bullshit, you're very pretty."

"Keep your compliments to yourself, thanks," Anna said icily.

"I'm serious, though!" Makoto insisted. "Yoh-kun doesn't know what he's missing out on."

"Oh, so now you're an expert on Yoh, huh?" Anna's expression soured further. "Don't speak for someone you clearly know nothing about."

"I don't have to know anything about Yoh-kun to know his life was better with you in it," Makoto pointed out.

"You really don't know when to stop, do you?" Anna hissed through gritted teeth. "You don't know Yoh, and you're proving you don't know the first thing about me, either."

"Sure I do," Makoto countered. "I know that you're fresh off a breakup, and," he continued, pointing to his blackened eye, "I also know you're not looking for a new partner at this time. You made that very clear. Like I said, I'm not trying to hit on you. So can you take it down a couple notches?"

Once again, seeing Makoto's black eye reminded her of the hot-headedness she was trying to temper. She unclenched her fists and breathed deeply. "You're right. Old habits die hard. I'm sorry."

Makoto didn't know Anna well enough to understand just how rare it was to hear her apologize for anything. Despite that, he handled the situation like a gentleman. "No apology needed. I've never been engaged, of course, but if I were, and she broke it off, I'd probably be in a pretty bad mood myself."

"Well, you can probably relate a little," Anna said. "I'm sure you've broken up with a few people. I can't possibly be the first girl you passed a note to in class."

Makoto clutched at his chest dramatically. "What do you take me for? That was something way out of my comfort zone. Definitely not something I normally do." He picked up a graduated cylinder and started turning it over in his hands nervously. "I've never been in a relationship, if you want to know the truth."

Anna looked at Makoto skeptically. "Not the relationship type, huh? I guess it doesn't surprise me that you wouldn't want to get tied down to any one girl while you sleep around."

Makoto nearly dropped the graduated cylinder in shock. "Anna-san," he said incredulously, "where is this coming from? I'm starting to realize you don't know anything about me, either. I've never even kissed a girl. I get picked on all the time for it."

Anna's eyebrows perked up at Makoto's honesty. "Really?"

"Really," Makoto said, spreading his hands wide. "Well, there was that one time I got to play 'Seven Minutes in Heaven,' but I don't count that. I ran out of the closet when she tried to give me a really awkward, dry, yanking hand j-"

"Excuse me," Nakajima-sensei's voice cut in urgently from the back of the lab. "I'm still here!"

"Eep! Sorry, sensei," Makoto said, promptly turning a bright red.

Anna actually cracked a smile at seeing Makoto's embarrassed face. "I can't believe I just told you that," he said, a little softer now. "I don't like to admit my lack of, uh, experience to anyone, let alone someone who was engaged. It makes me feel like such a loser. I bet you guys got busy every night."

Anna would have normally responded to such a declaration with a slap, but she found herself trying hard to keep her interaction civil. Instead she said, "Our relationship was not as intimate as you think it was."

"Oh," Makoto said thoughtfully.

"Yoh and I were strangers when it was decided we were to be married," Anna went on, a little surprised that she felt so compelled to open up to Makoto. "It was not our decision to make."

"It was an arranged marriage?" Makoto asked. "Like the ones we learned about in history class?"

Anna simply nodded.

"Wow," Makoto said reverently. "Are you - are you royalty or something?"

Anna didn't really feel like getting into the true reason for their arranged marriage. "Uh, it's just an old family tradition of ours. One of my distant ancestors was some kind of aristocrat," she lied.

Makoto looked like he believed her. "That makes sense," he said brightly. "You and Yoh-kun didn't get to test the waters at all."

"Test the waters?" Anna asked skeptically. She unplugged a hot plate and carried it over to its proper place.

"Yeah. You know how sometimes you go shopping and you see something that looks really cute on the hanger, but then you try it on and see it doesn't suit your body well? It's like that."

Anna full-on laughed at that. "Wow, that's a very … feminine analogy," she said.

Makoto shrugged. "I'm the only guy in a family of five. I'm close to my sisters and my mom. It is what it is. But like I was saying, you and Yoh-kun didn't get to shop around at all. You're a great person, and I'm sure Yoh-kun is too, but … maybe the two of you were not great in the ways that mattered to the both of you."

"I couldn't give him what he needed," Anna said.

Makoto wasn't sure if Anna was asking, making a statement, or merely rephrasing what he had said. "That's something you would have discovered on your first few dates. Only you never had that opportunity. In a way, your family set you up for disaster."

Anna thought about what Makoto had just said and nodded slowly. "Yeah. I can see what you're saying," she acknowledged. "But Yoh …"

Anna drifted off mid-sentence, unsure of whether she really wanted to open up to Makoto. Seeing her hesitation, he picked up a volumetric flask as a pretext to move closer to Anna. As he approached, she looked up at his face. Despite the black eye, he was a handsome young man, endowed with boyish good looks. His dark brown eyes, she noted, were expressive, almond-shaped, and somewhat widely spaced on his squarish face - and at that moment, they were earnestly looking directly into Anna's.

"What about Yoh-kun? You can tell me."

Anna decided she could trust Makoto and his sincere eyes. "Yoh is the most patient, laid-back, easygoing guy I have ever met," she said, not breaking her eye contact with Makoto, "and somehow I managed to push him away. No, this wasn't a matter of incompatibility. To make someone that good-natured angry enough to leave me … this was my fault, Makoto. You don't know him like I do."

A tear of frustration slid down her cheek as she finished speaking the words that had been gnawing at the edges of her mind for days. Somehow saying them aloud made them feel that much truer. She looked down and watched as the tear splashed down upon the open chemistry textbook on the workstation. Ionic and covalent bonds, read the words where she saw her tear had landed. It reminded her of her broken bond with Yoh.

"Hey," Makoto said, abandoning all pretense as he laid aside the volumetric flask and propped his head up on his elbows right across from Anna. "Please don't cry, Anna-san."

She didn't want to, of course, especially not in front of a boy she barely knew. But voicing her thoughts had caused something to break inside of her. All of the walls she had put up within her mind to shield herself from blame and hurt collapsed in that moment. She realized all at once that all Yoh had ever wanted was someone to reciprocate the love and kindness that had come to typify his interactions with her, and she had been unable to clear even that low bar.

Tears flowed freely from her eyes as Makoto came around to her side of the desk and put his arm around her shoulders. Her natural reaction was to jerk her body away, but she didn't. Instead, she allowed the words to continue flowing from her. "I loved Yoh," she admitted. "But I never learned how to express that to him without making myself feel vulnerable." Speaking to someone behind her while the emptiness of the lab stared her in the face felt odd, but Makoto's arm around her shoulders seemed to give her the resolve to push on. "Part of me thought that if I ever lost him, it would be that much harder if I allowed myself to fall so deeply for him. So I covered up my feelings. I hid them under cold stares and a hard heart. And I lost him for it."

Makoto shook Anna gently with the arm that was draped across her shoulders. "It's tough to let your guard down and be vulnerable," he said soothingly. "Don't be so hard on yourself."

"What would you know?" Anna demanded, shaking Makoto's arm off. "You've never even been in a relationship! You just told me so!"

Makoto hastily took a couple steps back and nearly knocked down a buret. "Yeah," he said, a little defensively. "But why do you think that is? I have a hard time admitting that maybe I'm not as macho as I think I am. I try to get girls with this big act of being a hotshot, but they can see right through me." He picked up the flask again and started to spin it in his hands slowly. "I'm afraid that if any girl got to know me, the real me, not just this hyper-confident wisecracking version of myself that I present to them - they'd hate it. And that would hurt. Because they're not just rejecting a persona I made up. They're rejecting who I am at my core."

Anna took a moment to process what Makoto had just said. "Okay," she acknowledged, "but really, what's the difference? If you put a mask on and wear it all the time, doesn't that become your 'real' personality?"

"Hmm," Makoto said, slowly stowing the flask and picking up some stray pipettes. "That's a good point. This hasn't been working out for me. Maybe I should start being myself more often. It might help with my relationship troubles."

"It couldn't hurt," Anna said. "God knows that concealing my true feelings was my downfall."

Makoto was tossing the pipettes one by one into a box as if they were darts. "So what are your true feelings?" Makoto asked casually. "Who are you, really?"

Anna's crying had stopped. She trapped her tears inside the textbook, slamming it shut. "I don't know. I was with Yoh for so long. And once I started having feelings for him, I forced myself to act a certain way. To be detached, to be a taskmaster and not a companion. But like I said, if you wear a mask all the time, it starts to take over. I wasn't always that way. But that mask, that coldness, came to define me."

Makoto scooped up a stack of petri dishes and nodded with understanding. "And now, because of your breakup, you want to take off your mask. But you're finding out that maybe it's not so easy to be yourself. You're not sure who you really are, even."

"Yes," she said, surprise registering in her eyes at Makoto's astuteness. "That's it exactly."

Both students said nothing for a while. Only the soft sound of Makoto stacking petri dishes in a box broke the silence around them. Finally Makoto licked his dry lips and spoke.

"You know, I'm kind of in the same boat too."

Anna put down the textbook and looked up at Makoto as he went on.

"Maybe," he said, in a voice that faltered and came in fits and starts, "we can find out - we can discover ourselves together."

Anna laughed, an outburst that sounded foreign to her own ears. "Is that all?" she asked. "Why do you sound so nervous? I thought that's what we were doing right now anyway."

"Ah -" Makoto's stack of petri dishes toppled over as he reacted with a jerk to Anna's reply. "Well, actually, I … I meant, like, what if we got a chance to get to know each other … and ourselves … outside of school?"

Makoto's words hung so thickly in the air that they nearly fogged up the pair of goggles Anna had picked up. She looked at him, a scandalized expression on her face, and her reaction was vintage Anna. "Are you - are you asking me out on a date?!" she shrieked.

Makoto, to his credit, looked cool and collected. "Why don't we just think of it as …" His eyes went out of focus as he lost himself in thought, trying to find the right words. "... As a voyage of self-discovery."

Anna crossed her arms. The rubber straps of the safety goggles wiggled in time with her tense body's convulsions. "Oh, 'voyage of self-discovery,' huh? That seems like an awfully fancy name for an attempt to get a girl to give you a better hand j-"

"No, no!" Makoto hastened to interject. "It's not like that at all! It just seemed like we both could use someone else to help figure out who we really are inside. That's it."

"Uh-huh," Anna said drolly, her arms still crossed. "And the fact that you hit on me just this morning … I'm supposed to conveniently ignore that, am I?"

Makoto finished restacking the petri dishes. "Well, it would make my job a lot easier if you did," he said optimistically.

Anna scoffed. "All right, let's cut the crap," she said. "What are you really after? I admit I don't know you well, but you've never struck me as the self-improvement type."

Makoto sighed as he paused halfway through coiling up a length of rubber tubing. "Okay, fair enough. Anna-san, I really think I like you. And I really do think you're the prettiest girl in school. But I meant what I said earlier, too, about not wanting to wear a mask anymore. I think you're just what I need in my life to do that. You'll call me on my bullshit and force me to be genuine. And I think if you gave me a chance, I could help you to remember … you know, what it's like to be warm and caring and all that."

It was enough to get Anna to uncross her arms. "Damn," she said after a moment's reflection. "You're good."

"I'm okay," Makoto acknowledged bashfully. "Won't say I'm good until I get a yes."

Anna stared off into the distance, past the lab tables and the centrifuges and the emergency eye wash mounted at the back of the classroom. They all blurred as her eyes focused in her mind on a spot thousands of yards away: the En Inn. Could Makoto be the one to help her get a step closer to mending her broken home and getting Yoh back in her good graces? Was the gamble worth the very real chance that she might find herself falling for Makoto in the process?

"Keep waiting," Anna said at last. "I need some more time to think it over."

Makoto gestured at the mess that surrounded them in the lab. "For the next two weeks," he said, a slight grin emerging on his features, "we have all the time in the world."