The Third Attempt of Our School Life

The Third Attempt of Our School Life

***

I woke up pleasantly to the nice and warm rays of sunshine streaming through the classrooms’ windows and blinds. It revealed dust particles idyllically flying about the direction of the morning breeze. It read exactly six o’clock on my wristwatch, so I got to keeping the mattress and folding the sheets, the first chore of the day. As I was folding my blanket, I noticed Kyouko’s blanket was left untidy. As usual, I thought. I didn’t really mind tidying her bed, actually. I’ve gone through the motions of folding blankets and putting aside pillows that it’s become normal, and besides, it’s just another small bed to tidy up. But that’s exactly what left her no excuses for not doing this. I reminded myself to remind her about this later on.

I looked out the window. The flood was still high, still way too high to wade into. I could see the top of an SUV, which was barely above water. I couldn’t see anything else past that point of the murky waters. It looked like we were still going to be stuck here for a long time.

She was gone so early, so I decided to do the day’s second chore myself. After putting the mattress and all in one corner of the room, I went to the blackboard and put down another line on our calendar. On the board were fourteen lines, each representing the number of days we’d been stranded in school. The one I added was the fifteenth one. That meant Kyouko and I have been stranded here for fifteen days. Fifteen days. Three hundred and sixty hours, I computed.

That’s an awful long time to be alone with someone, right? So, what have we done these past few days? I reflected. We’ve gotten closer to each other, for sure. Fifteen days ago, she and I were just class president and class vice president that were friendly enough to work together without much trouble, but now we’ve gotten used to calling each other by our first names. We found out more about each other. Academics, interests, habits, favorite insert-noun-heres, and even our own family lives. Then together, we managed to build a stable life here in school, despite the scarcity of resources the big flood caused. Here we developed our own way of life with what we had. And lastly, we’ve met zero people in our entire fifteen days. Nevermind that our school was big, it was just her and myself that have been stranded. We haven’t even seen anybody swimming around the flood, or rescuers coming towards our area in big cargo choppers. Just us. We were staying long hours after school to complete some class project of ours when the storm hit us. It made sense to her at first that it was just us that got stranded, since almost all of the student body went home already. But she found it weird that nobody was coming for us the day after. Not even our parents called. She tried hard to look for any signs of life or send signals to any passing rescue teams, but as time went on, she just accepted that we were probably all alone in this ordeal. She’s all but gotten used to our school life here.

She still wasn’t back by the time I was finished thinking about the past. She’s probably out jogging around the hallways, I thought. Maybe I should just read one of our books while waiting. I woke up an hour earlier than our agreed breakfast time, so I decided I could read at my own leisure.

Seven pages of pretty crappy light novel and a short bathroom break later, I caught a whiff of what was unmistakably the smell of burnt rice. It was faint, but my experience was telling me I was right. Upon getting to our kitchen—the Home Economics room two classrooms away—I saw Kyouko standing in front one of the gas stoves. On top of that gas stove was a pot. I watched her turn off the stove, peer into the contents of the pot, slowly turn the stove on again, before quickly turning the thing back off.

“Hey,” I said.

She turned around. “Hiro, I’m in a pinch. I think I burned the rice.”

“You don’t say,” I replied as I walked past her and opened the pot. My face was met with a thick fog of steam that carried the unmistakable smell of burned rice. It wasn’t that of the slightly burnt rice, which was still edible—it was that of the burnt burnt rice, the kind that stuck itself to the pot the hardest.

“I’m sorry, I can’t do anything about this,” I said.

“Eh? Really?”

I took another look. The rice on the surface looked so dry. Upon tasting a fingerful I confirmed that it was still undercooked. “Did you pour in enough water?” I asked.

“Yeah, I swear I did. I made sure to measure the water levels with my finger too, like you taught me to.”

I sighed.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

I waved it off. “It’s okay. I’m hungry anyway, so let’s just get into your gourmet rice already.”

We got ourselves two bowls and two spoons for eating. Kyouko showed me a small bag of potato chips. “Want some?” she asked.

“Sure.” I took some and crushed them on the spoon with my thumb, then I sprinkled the little bits onto my mound of undercooked rice. Kyouko was watching the entire process take place, so did the same thing. Then we dropped onto each of our mounds a good amount of soy sauce, for extra flavor. It would have seemed weird to the people we thanked for preparing our food—rude, even—but that’s what getting stranded in school for fifteen days does to you. No room to be too picky or ethical in these times.

“Mmm, thish acshually doeshn’t tashte sho bad,” she said.

“Hey, don’t talk while your mouth’s full.”

“Ah shorry.” She quickly finished chewing and swallowing her food. “As expected, you’re so husband material. Even while you’re scolding me like ‘Don’t talk while your mouth’s full,’ it’s so nice and kind in a way. It’s like, you’re my mom, but minus the bitchiness and control-freakishness.”

“Thanks,” I said before chomping down on another spoonful.

I watched as Kyouko ate more rice. She was a girl of tall and athletic stature. As in, she’s got me beat in terms of height, by about two, two and a half inches tops. Then she’s the kind to work out before every morning before school. Judging by the fact that she’s wearing her biking shorts and the dark spots on the top of her shirt, she-

“Excuse me, my eyes are up here, you know,” she said, pointing up towards her face. An ordinary girl would have gotten mad, but she actually wore a teasing grin all while saying that.

“Excuse you, madam, it’s not for the reasons that you think.” I changed the topic. “You went out running again, didn’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“I see,” I said. “It’s kind of funny though, you kept complaining in the past about your ‘dickhead of an uncle’ for making you run every morning for biking training, but you never skip a morning of running, ever.”

“Yeah. Old habits die hard, I guess. It’s healthy anyway, so I don’t see why not.”

“True.”

She wiggled her finger at me. “By the way, don’t change the topic. You were totally checking me out a while ago.”

“Was not,” I said. “I just saw the dark spots on your shirt and wondered why that was, that’s-“

“Liar, then why’s your face turning red?”

“Whoa, wait, really?” I felt my face with my hands. Holy crap, she was right. My face was heating up.

“You perv,” she said in a low voice. “But that’s okay. I know I’m pretty, so I guess it can’t be helped. Since you’re a first-timer, I’ll let you have me all night tonight, for free.”

“Let’s just eat already. I’m hungry,” I complained. I quickly made a motion of eating everything else in my bowl so I wouldn’t have to concentrate on looking at her. It didn’t matter though, as she was laughing so hard she was already banging her hands on the floor. It didn’t help that my failure to make a comeback only made my face even redder, which only made her laugh even harder. My ability to make comebacks was probably dulled by the fact that I just woke up.

After washing the dishes, we went and took inventory of our resources. We counted thirty bottles of purified water, five one-liter pitchers full of faucet water before the water supply was cut off, thirty bags of salted chips, eight granola bars, and other food supplies like that. We looted most of these from the cafeteria in the second floor, some from the Home Economics room, and some from the empty classrooms and lockers we broke open. We would have had more, if not for the fact that the flood submerged all the vending machines in the first floor. Nonetheless, we had more than enough to last us for two more weeks

After that, we counted all the clothes we had with us. Mine were all hung on the windowpanes in one classroom, and hers was all in another classroom. Apparently ethics and chivalry still applied in our practically post-apocalyptic situation. Though judging by how teasing she was, I wondered if she’d actually get too mad if I went in the classroom of her laundry. I reckoned these clean clothes could last me another week if I conserved well.

After that was the our maintenance of our school facilities. Checking for any breaks in the windows, or leaks in the pipes, things like those. Halfway through, Kyouko got really bored and restless following me around as I examined the classrooms we had already sacked.

“Hey Hiro, why do we have to do inventory?” she said.

“So we can gauge how much food and water we have so we know how much we have to conserve per day and not die of food mismanagement,” I replied. I didn’t spare her a glance as I was checking the walls of some classroom.

“No, yeah, I get that part. But why go around to the other classrooms? We don’t even live in here? Can’t we just check our own and leave it at that?”

I shrugged. “I dunno, I just want to be sure, I guess.”

She groaned again. “I knew it. I take back, you are like my mom. You biiiitch.”

“Thanks for the compliment,” I said. “But if you really don’t want to do this right now, why don’t you just go back to the classroom or something?”

“Ouch, that hurts, telling a pretty girl like me to go get lost.” Then she sniffed. “Huhu.”

I retorted sharply. “Hey, stop twisting my words, you hag. I’m just telling you if you’re bored, you’re free to head back and read something to entertain yourself or something. I’m not forcing you to go through this with me. And I’ll have you know, my words had no intention of hurting you, unlike that ‘get lost’ phrase you claimed I said.”

Then I added, “Also you go on and on about how pretty you are, but let’s face it: you’re not pretty. Stop lying to everyone.”

“Ack! I feel like I’ve been stabbed in the gut by a million sharp daggers!” Cough, cough. “I’ve never thought mere words could hurt me this much. How could you be so harsh, Masahiro Takano, you handsome devil?”

Playful banter. It became customary at this point for both of us, even if we both admitted what we would always say was pretty dumb. It was necessary, though. Otherwise we’d go insane. As usual, she apologized and admitted she did that because she was bored, and I apologized afterward too and told her I was just kidding, just in case she felt hurt.

“Hey, Hiro,” she said. We were already in the next classroom. I was already speeding up my examination of the rooms so we could get this over with.

“Yeah?”

“That thing about rationing food that you mentioned a while ago, it got me thinking. How much longer do you think we’ll be staying here?”

A second of silence, where it felt as if the world was voided of all human speech.

“I don’t know,” was all I could give.

Again, the silence. The moment I told her this, I noticed there was something that changed in her face. I couldn’t pinpoint it. Even with my observational skills I couldn’t find it. I could only hypothesize that maybe it was a small movement in her eyes, or a slight slackening of her lips. Whatever it was, it made me feel incredibly heavy.

So I quickly took her hand and held it in the same way I did whenever I affirmed my guy friends back when they were still around. I squeezed it firmly while giving it a small manly shake. “Don’t worry, Kyouko. I’m with you, always. I won’t leave you, ever. You can lean on me when you’re feeling down. We’ll get through this and get out of here together, I promise.”

I cringed at those words I said, especially the last two ones. It’s never a good idea to make promises you weren’t sure you could keep, especially to a girl. She’d never forget.

But she looked me in the eye for a moment. Then she squeezed my hand back, she squeezed so hard it hurt. “Yeah,” she said. “Let’s get through this.”

She let go with lifted spirits, but I still ended up feeling heavy by the end of it. Something was wrong with me, I knew, but I tried not to mind it.

***

Not too long after we were on to watering the garden upstairs, the last of the morning chores. Actually, we were still on inventory for the rainfall water drums (the Gardening Club collected rainwater as part of some effort to conserve or something), but we were near the plants so it may as well have been the same thing.

Some of the plants there were tomatoes, cabbages, eggplants and carrots. Or at least those were the plants I prioritized, since they could yield food for us.

“Hey, Hiro, check this out.”

I moved over to where she was. In her hand was a tomato, nearly red all over with only a small hint of green near its crown.

“Can we harvest this already?” she asked.

I examined it. “Actually, it’s ready for harvesting. But let’s do it later on this afternoon,” I said.

“Why not now?”

“Let’s follow the schedule. We agreed we’d pick out whatever’s ready on the second watering of the day.”

“Aww, I see.”

I turned to go back to watering the plants, but she stopped me.

“By the way, how do you harvest these things?”

“Oh, it’s easy. You just pull them off, that’s all.”

I realized I shouldn’t have told her when she grabbed the nearest tomato, then as she made fierce eye contact with me, yanked it off the plant’s stem.

“Hey! What the hell?”

“That’s my line!” She yanked off three more in a row. “You’re so strict about things all the time it’s already pissing me off!”

“Stop it! You’re going to damage the plants!”

I tried to step in and shield the plants from her, but before I knew it, I was drenched from head to toe. Kyouko had spilled all the contents of her watering can onto me.

I froze at what she had done. Her eyes widened and she put a hand to her mouth. It was an awkward moment of what had just happened sinking into our minds.

She spoke up first. “H-hey, Hiro, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know what came over me, I’m sorry, please don’t get mad…”

I didn’t bother to hear what else Kyouko had to say, as I had already started to walk away. She must have thought I was stomping off because I was mad. She might have also been feeling guilty at that moment. But contrary to what she might have been expecting, I came back running in her direction with a bucketful of water in my hands. And with one big heave, I sent a clean blanket of water flying towards her. There was nowhere to run. Though she tried, in an instant she got wet from the shirt down.

“Fuck you, Hiro,” was her reply when she got up and looked at the work I’d done to her. It felt a pang because I thought I only worsened my mood, but I realized I shouldn’t have when she grabbed the bucket next to her and did the same to me.

A satisfied smirk on her face. If pictures told words, that expression of hers would have said, Two people can play at that game! I cracked my knuckles in response.

The school’s rooftop quickly turned into a water playground. She tried to hide behind the stalks of plants, but I found her and drenched her even more. I tried to run away when she found me, but as expected of a fit cyclist, she managed to catch up to me and give me what I deserved.

By the end of it we had so much fun it turned nearly eleven o’clock without us realizing. We hurriedly watered the rest of the plants and brushed floor of the rooftop before it got too hot for us to handle. We probably did a half-assed job of it, but we didn’t care.

“Hiro, let’s have these for lunch.” Kyouko said on the way down. All the tomatoes she picked out were bunched up together in her impromptu shirt-basket.

“Sure,” I replied.

Because of our little war upstairs, I had forgotten all about that. Now that thing she got angry about came back to mind. I dwelled in the thought, and it made me feel heavy thinking about it.

“Why are you looking down?” she asked.

“I’m sorry, Kyouko. You’re right. I think I was being too strict on us. On you. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t get hung up on it. This is the first time I’ve had fun in weeks, and that’s all that matters to me.”

I looked her way and was greeted by a smile. It was a small one, but it was a warm one. No mischief, no malice. Just joy.

“Thanks, I’m glad to hear that,” I replied. It made me feel nice, thinking about it. Damn, I thought. I take it all back. She is pretty when she smiles.

Btu soon I found myself looking elsewhere again. That smile, her being with me right now in school, it was all my fault. I caused all of this, and I knew exactly how. The guilt ate at me, but I tried to push it away by occupying myself with other thoughts, like how I’d cook lunch.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to endure it for much longer, as we reached our classroom quickly.

“Take this,” Kyouko said. She threw me a towel from her duffel. It was nice and thick, so I dried myself with it. I gave it back to her and she did the same too. However, it was kind of cold with the wind blowing strongly into our classroom. It was the kind of cold wind that wasn’t strong enough to blow someone away, but was strong enough to send paperworks dancing around wildly in mid-air. Even if we closed the windows off, it was still too chilly for me to stand without shivering.

She gave it back to me and told me, “Keep yourself warm with this so you don’t get a cold.”

I accepted it. But I had to ask, “What about you?”

“I’m used to biking in the mountains, so I’ll be okay. Besides, I think it would be a much bigger loss for us if you got sick.”

But I quickly realized that she wouldn’t be okay. From the beginning, she already had her arms crossed while she was talking to me. A basic attempt to preserve heat in the upper extremities and the upper torso. Another giveaway was the fact that she sat behind a bunch of chairs and tables in the room, probably thinking that would better shield her from the breezes coming in elsewhere. The next one was when she tried to wring her clothes again and again, even if there wasn’t anything else to wring out anymore. And lastly, I knew it for sure when she tried to discreetly rub her hands against each other and against her thighs.

“It wouldn’t do you any good to lie like that,” I said. I moved over next to her and draped the towel over ourselves. Now we were huddled over close to each other, under a blanket, hidden behind tables and chairs, within the privacy of our classroom, away from the wind, alone. Then I said more softly, “I think it would be the biggest loss to me if you were to get sick.”

For a long while she said nothing and kept staring straight on. I thought I saw her face having a slight tinge of red that I’ve never seen in her face before, but the lights weren’t on so I couldn’t tell for sure. That’s new, I thought. She doesn’t have anything to say for once. She would have said something along the lines of, Smooth moves, Mister Takano, but you’re not getting me that easily tonight.

I realized she could have just put all the blankets in the room on herself, or changed her clothes, or at least I could have just told her to do those things. But oh well. I was there with her already like that, and I thought I’d rather not have it any other way. After thinking about it for a long time and working up all my courage, I made a move. Holding the towel in place with my right hand, I reached around her back and put my left hand on her shoulder. To my momentary despair, she scooched away a bit, but to my surprise, she rested her head on my shoulder. Made sense, she was taller than me, after all, I thought. She continued staring off into outer space or something.

It was a poetic moment. The room was in half-dimness, lit only by the light of the noontime sun overhead reflected by the leaves of the trees and the roofs of nearby buildings. Nothing could be heard except the muted sound of the wind raging outside and the rustling of the big trees. But I listened as well as I could, and heard Kyouko’s soft breathing. She breathed in through her nose, and breathed out through her mouth. A habit drilled into her by athletic training, she said. Breathing like that helps out, she said. It gets more oxygen into your brain, therefore helping you think more clearly. Each breath was long and loaded. A continuous cycle of rising and falling. A slow rising, then after a short pause, a much slower, much heavier falling. I wondered what she was trying to think clearly about.

“Are you checking me out again?” she said without looking at me. I said nothing. “Go ahead,” she said. I said nothing again.

It wasn’t long before the long and slow rhythm of her breathing began to shorten and quicken. When I heard her sniff, I realized that she was crying.

She broke down. “I’m.”

Sniff.

“So.”

Sniff.

“Sorry.”

Sniff.

“I’m so.”

A fit of labored breathing, then she continued.

“Useless.”

There was a loud wailing for a long while, where she let out all the guilt and sorrow she’d been holding in. In between tears and more fits of labored breathing, she spilled about how I’d been helping her all this time go through our ordeal, how I’ve been the kindest person she’s met in the longest time, but how she’d done nothing but drag me down in our situation by having nothing to give back to me. She’d been feeling that way ever since I helped normalize our lives in school, but now’s the only time it’s hurt so hard it burned a hole in her heart every time she thought about it. I did everything, while she did nothing, she said, and that was her greatest sin against me.

I waited for her to calm down, before saying, “It’s okay. I’ve done so many things to you too.” Then I told her everything. I told her about how I’ve been crushing on her for the longest time, ever since the first day of school. I told her about how I’ve never thought I’d fall for a girl like her. It wasn’t my perceived type. I told her about how the feeling uncontrollably grew stronger, to the point that I screamed everything I had been holding in to the storm that happened weeks ago. I told her about how I screamed that I wished I could be with her and her alone for the rest of my life, and that I’d go through all the world’s suffering at once just for that to happen. That night I experienced the worst nightmare one could ever have. The fabric of reality, time and space, I witnessed it all get warped. All the knowledge that could have been contained in the world was flashed before me. All the sad, dark truths that humanity should never discover, ever, I discovered them all in one night. I awoke in the morning drenched in my own sweat. It drained so much of me that I couldn’t find the will to get up from bed for an hour. But my mother had forced me out of bed, and I went to school. The storm came back granted my wish that fateful Friday night when everybody was gone and we were alone in school. Now, I was here with her and I was going to be with her alone. For the rest of my life.

I felt something wet on my cheek. I was crying. I revealed so much already. There was no point in hiding it anymore. It was time to let it all out.

“Kyouko Kamihara, I love you and you mean the whole world to me. You mean so much that I’d have the guts to scream amidst rain and lightning again just to let the gods know that I want to be with you forever. So please, don’t say you’re useless. If not for you being with me all this time, I would have drowned myself a long time ago. So please. I love you.”

Soon I had difficulty in breathing straight too. It was just us crying for what felt like a long time.

“Yeah,” she said finally, when she had fully calmed down. “I love you too.”

Those three words were short. Simple. But small as they were, they contained all the bliss and warmth that could ever be found in the world.

I looked at her. Her long black hair on my shoulder, her mellow, coffee-brown eyes curtained by thin eyelashes, and her light, glossy lips which were at peace. She closed her eyes, and for a long time, she didn’t open them.

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But everything came back to me. I experienced the nightmare again. All the truths about this world came rushing to my head. All of the million facts and beliefs I held about this world were then torn apart, then rebuilt, again and again, each one of them.

By the end of it, my skin had gone ghostly pale and I had gone weak. Kyouko was still resting her head on my shoulder, asleep. She knew nothing. But I knew everything.

What an immersive game, I remarked. So immersive that you could literally forget about everything going on in your life and lead a new life. I looked at my hands. I opened them and I closed them carefully. Truly a wonder.

Everything felt so real. Even the love she had given me. This was the best part of the game, they said. I wanted to experience it again. I couldn’t get enough.

I closed my eyes, and departed control of this body, and taken control of my real body, which was lying in the comforts of my home, under this simulation. I felt around for the remote, and pressed the button I felt was for the replay.

I watched as everything turned gray and powdery and got blown away by the raging winds outside. Before the world was consumed in black for good, I saw the words, they were getting burned into the retina of my eye:

The Fourth Attempt of Our School Life