On Equal Footing

Uchimura caught me at my shoe cubby on a Thursday.

First of all: Thursday. The worst possible day. 

Thursday is when the week has been lying to you for four days straight about being almost over and you finally figure it out. 

You're depleted. 

Spent.

Your defenses are down. 

You have been running on the fumes of Wednesday's optimism and there's nothing left. 

You are not prepared for information. You are barely prepared for shoes in my sad case.

He wasn't even looking at me. 

He had his phone out, forty-five degrees, the angle he uses when he's doing something but wants to seem like he isn't doing something. 

It is a very specific power move and I respect it in the same way I respect a closed beehive. 

Structurally impressive. Not something I want to be near when it opens.

"He mentions you," Uchimura said.

I stopped moving.

My hands stopped moving. My thoughts stopped moving. I think my circulation briefly paused to assess the situation and determine whether to continue.

"Sugihara," he said. Still not looking. "Council. When things come up. He — references you. Like a fact. Like you're just. A thing that exists and is relevant."

I turned very slowly.

"Why," I said, "are you telling me this?"

He put his phone away.

He looked at me.

Here's the thing about Uchimura's face: it's designed to not tell you anything. 

He has resting poker face. He probably sleeps with resting poker face. 

He has probably had it since birth. 

And yet — and I cannot explain this — there was something. Very small. In the lip. 

The faintest suggestion of a person who had made a decision that he found mildly uncomfortable and was executing it anyway because he had determined it was the correct one.

"The booth performed well," he said. "The council looks good. If something falls apart because nobody said the obvious thing, I will have wasted a strategy that worked."

"That's so romantic," I said.

"It is not romantic."

"You literally just —"

"It is strategic."

"You brought us tea."

"Resource management."

"On your own initiative —"

"I'm taking my leave now, Ishikura." He picked up his bag.

"Wait, that's not —" I started.

He paused.

Just barely. The pause of someone who had decided to leave and then decided, against what I assume was better judgment, not to quite yet.

"He's careful," he said. Quieter. Different register. More like he was talking to his shoes or to some neutral point in space that happened to be near me. "That's his thing."

"Why is everyone—"

"When he cares about something. He's being careful." He cleared his throat. "With you." A beat. Like he was measuring the distance between what he was saying and what he was willing to say. 

"That's all."

He left.

I stood at my locker.

I stood there for a moment that was longer than standing at a locker usually requires.

Tomoe materialized. She does this. I don't know where she comes from. I have accepted it.

"Was Uchimura just —"

"Not admitting that his plan to get back at me didn't quite work out the way he expected it to and is still even now failing to accept defeat?"

"That's the most him thing ever."

"I know."

"Are you okay?"

I looked at the inside of my cubby. At the flyer I'd stuck up with tape, because I'd put it there the week after the festival without fully deciding to and then left it because taking it down felt like a statement I wasn't ready to make. 

His gears. My letters. The same page.

"Yeah," I said. 

And indeed I meant it, which was almost more surprising than anything Uchimura had said. 

I'd expected to feel weird about it — the information, the coordination, the fact that someone who communicates primarily in strategic calculation had gone out of his way to tell me something he didn't have to tell me. I'd expected to spiral. I'd prepared, in some background part of my brain, for a spiral.

Instead I just felt — settled. Like something had shifted into a position it had been trying to reach.

"Yeah," I said again, more certain this time.

Tomoe waved me goodbye.

I went to find Yuta.

He was in the workshop room. Obviously. This had stopped surprising me sometime around week five, which I suppose means I've started expecting him to be places, which is its own whole thing I'm still not ready to examine in detail but can acknowledge exists.

He looked up. 

I sat down across from him. 

He kept working, which I've learned by now is not rudeness. 

It's just how he is. 

He can be in two places at once — the task and also the conversation — and he doesn't perform attention, he just has it. 

It took me a while to understand that. 

I kept misreading the stillness as absence. 

It wasn't. It was just him.

"Uchimura told me you mention me," I said.

His hands didn't stop.

"Yeah. He told me he was going to," he said.

I blinked.

"He told you he was going to tell me."

"This morning."

"He TOLD you —"

"He said it was relevant information and that someone should make it available."

I sat with this.

"So it was coordinated," I said.

"Loosely."

"Uchimura. Coordinated a — on your behalf —"

"He also said it was strategy."

"He said the same thing to me!"

"It's a theme," Yuta said. 

His lips formed not quite a smile. 

A precursor to one. 

The thing that arrives before he decides to let the smile happen.

I looked at the clock on the table between us. 

Face off. 

Gears visible. 

Going back and forth and back and forth, measuring out the seconds with complete indifference to what was happening around them.

"How long have you —" I started, and then I wasn't sure how to finish it. 

How long have you what? 

Liked me? Known? Been paying attention? Been filing things? 

All of them felt too big and too small at the same time. Too much and not enough. 

"...Known," I said finally. "That this was a thing."

He set down his tool.

Actually thought about it. Really considered it, the way he considers things — like the question deserves the same care as anything else in his hands.

"The hallway," he said. "When you dropped the tools. Your paper was on the floor with the grade on it and you were embarrassed about it but you still picked up the pliers first. For me. Before your own paper."

I opened my mouth.

"You were having a bad day and you still did that," he said.

"That was — I was just. That was instinct. That's not —"

"I know," he said. "That's what made it interesting."

I closed my mouth.

I thought about that hallway. About the pliers. About how I hadn't even thought about it, how it had just happened, how I hadn't known it was being noticed or filed or kept.

"You noticed that," I said.

"I notice specific things."

"Like hairclips," I said.

He smiled.

"Three," he said. "Tortoiseshell. Small silver star. And the enamel one."

"Yuta."

"What."

"That is genuinely unhinged."

"You know how I take my tea."

I stopped.

No sugar. Too hot. He'd mentioned it in passing once, weeks ago, offhandedly, the way you mention something you don't think anyone's going to retain. And I had just — kept it. Without meaning to. Without deciding to.

"...Oh," I said.

"Yeah. It seems as though we're on equal footing."

We sat with that. The clock went back and forth. Back. Forth. 

Measuring time as clocks do.

"I came out of the corner," I said. "On Tuesday. I came back."

"Yeah," he said. Like he'd already known this.

"I wrote it down. What you said. That it's the coming back that matters."

"You wrote it down?"

"In my pencil case. On a folded piece of paper. It's very small."

Something shifted in his face. Not a lot. The small version of a lot.

"It does matter," he said.

"I know. I'm starting to think you're right about most things and I find that incredibly annoying."

"You could just say I'm right."

"I could. I won't. But I could."

"Okay."

I reached across the table. Put my hand over his.

He turned his hand over. Held mine.

No announcement. No moment-making. Just — held. Like it was easy. Like this was simply what hands did when they were near each other and the time was right.

The clock kept going.

The workshop room was quiet.

I thought: this is the thing I was scared of messing up.

And I hadn't.

I mean, I'd been in a corner.

But I'd come back out.

Same thing.

More or less.