I’m juvenile. [Do-over]

While Hanji was not in my computer science class, two other familiar faces were.

“Hey, Taro, right? Wanna sit here?” Yosuke offered me the seat to his right, the one to his left occupied by the silent Akane.

“Uh… sure. Thanks.” I take up his offer and sit down, silently unpacking my laptop from my bag and hoping the subject of Hanji wouldn’t come up.

Although I didn’t really get to talk to him yesterday, Yosuke seemed like the easiest member of Hanji’s entourage to talk to, so a breathe a small sigh of relief that I’m sharing a class with him.

“Guess you’re probably not set up on the shit we need for college yet, right?” He looks over my shoulder at my laptop, which is currently bare of anything except an empty google chrome tab.

“Ah- right, I guess I need to install the python software we’re using and stuff…”

“Don’t worry man, I gotchu.” In the fifteen-or-so minutes before the lecture start, Yosuke meticulously goes through every single bit of setup I need, from logging into the school’s intranet to installing any and all necessary software. His directions are thorough, direct and unambiguous, which is a breath of fresh air from the flowery way lecturers tend to speak.

He waves away my barrage of thank yous, insisting that it’s just common decency. I’m glad to find someone so unconditionally helpful in an environment that’s been little more than hostile thus far. It’s no wonder he’s the one looking out for Akane.

On the subject of Akane.

“Christ, she’s fast.”

“Yeah, Akane’s the quickest coder I’ve ever met. Somewhat puts me to shame.”

Not thirty seconds after the day’s workload had been given to us, Akane was hammering away at her keyboard at a thousand words per second, as if entering some perfect flow state I can’t even comprehend. Although she briefly breaks from her task to give me and Yosuke a quick smile and what I believe I recognise as the sign language for ‘thank you.’

“From what I’ve seen, you two are pretty joined at the hip,” I observe, while typing my own code at a much slower pace, “how long you known each other?”

“Hmm… it was two years September gone. Akane was already here when I got moved in at the start of year 11.”

“Come to think of it, why are you here? No offence, but you don’t really seem to fit in at a school for the mentally ill and handicapped.” While I hadn’t spoken to him much, Yosuke didn’t seem nearly as socially abnormal as the others I’d met here.

“Buncha kids at my old school reported me for ‘insensitive remarks’ or whatever.”

“…what sort of insensitive remarks?”

“Nothing that was objectively true. Said the fat guy was fat. Said the girl with big tits had big tits. Stuff like that. Dunno what the problem was, but eventually they got sick of me and shipped me here.”

Ah, I had an autistic friend in secondary school who was similar to Yosuke. Nice guy, but no social filter at all. He always said what he meant and meant what he said, managing to offend people while ‘just telling the truth,’ as he put it. Considering the friction my old friend caused with our peers, Yosuke’s move to this place makes a little more sense. Conventional social etiquette isn’t exactly all that important here.

“How’s you guys end up so close?”

“We both got treated like the lowest common denominator, basically the ones excluded by every other social group. Me for saying too much, Akane for not saying enough. Ended up getting put together for a bunch of stuff as a result, and eventually she just adopted me as her caretaker. We’ve pretty much been inseparable since.”

“She adopted you? Not the other way around?”

“She’s surprisingly forceful at times, it was too scary to say no.” Akane turns away from her laptop for a second to punch her grinning friend in the arm and pout, to which Yosuke responds by ruffling her hair like a child. They both seem to find this interaction incredibly funny.

The rest of the lecture passes peacefully, with me and Yosuke making casual conversation throughout. When he’s not cracking jokes that could get someone put on a watchlist, I find he’s good company to keep. His direct and unabashed way of saying things is a nice change from the awkward sidestepping that neurotyps tend to do in conversation.

Considering it has yet to come up, I’m assuming he doesn’t know about what happened between me and Hanji.

“By the way, Hanji was acting all stroppy and sour when someone brought up your name today. Somethin’ happen?” Or maybe I should go fuck myself.

“We… uh… had a moment of misunderstanding…” I say, trying to evade the actual event.

“She tried to hook up with you already, huh?” And my efforts go completely in vein.

“Already? Does this… happen often?”

“Oh yeah, constantly. I think me and Akane are the only two she’s close to that she hasn’t tried it on with yet. Doubt she’ll ever kick that habit.” He chuckles as he speaks, as if Hanji’s sexual promiscuity is somehow incredibly funny.

“Isn’t it… kind of awful, though? That she treats sex like it’s some bargaining chip to trade with? Like it’s nothing more than a favour to give or receive?”

Yosuke looks at me, his flat expression showing just a hint of surprise.

“What are you, twelve?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Your view on this is kinda juvenile, man. Casual sex exists, not everyone sees it as some great act of passion reserved only for couples or whatever.”

“But… it’s like she’s selling her body for favours. Using it to repay some debt she thinks she owes. Isn’t that… wrong?”

“Only if you’re choosing to see it that way, bro.” Suddenly Yosuke’s blunt manner of speaking serves to confuse me. What other way of seeing it is there? “You’re being close minded about this. You see sex as something with meaning, Hanji sees it as a quick buzz. Neither is wrong.”

“But to treat it as completely meaningless…”

“Is perfectly okay. It’s just a difference of opinion, you can’t get on a high horse about this.”

I… don’t really have anything to say back to that. Logically speaking, I don’t have an argument against Yosuke’s point. Am I just projecting my own idea onto other people and getting upset when they don’t follow them? I’m not sure, but something about all of this just still doesn’t feel right to me.

“Regardless of all that, things between me and her are gonna be awkward. Where do you go after walking out on a hookup?”

“Well, why’d you walk out in the first place?”

“I guess… we just…” why did I walk out on it? There was certainly a part of me that wanted to just go through with it (and that part was probably receiving more blood flow than my brain at the time), but I still decided against it. I guess it was just… “we wanted it for different reasons, I guess. Part of me was desperate to make some sort of connection, but she had no feeling. It’s like she was doing it on autopilot.”

Yosuke rubs his chin, seemingly in deep thought. As someone who kind Hanji much better than me, he probably has more insight into this.

“I think you’re wrong, bro.”

“What?”

“About Hanji, I mean. I think she was probably trying to make some sort of connection too.”

“…what makes you say that?”

“Cos she seems really interested in you, man.” She… what?

“She didn’t seem all that interested yesterday.”

“Trust me, dude, you should have heard at lunch today, barely went a full sentence witho it bringing up your name. Even if it’s just fascination about your condition, she seems genuinely interested in being close to you. She just doesn’t know how.”

“So her go-to is sex?”

“It ain’t easy for her, man. She and Koto get along like a house on fire, but with the rest of us it took a lot longer for her to develop any real relationship with us. Hell, even now I find myself doubting if she actually cares about us at all. But she is trying. She’s trying to latch on to anything she can to forcibly make some sort of bond. It’s just… really hard for her.”

That… makes a lot of sense. I guess I didn’t even stop to think about what it’s like for her. How frustrating it must be to hear people talk about things like love and friendship without being able to fully understand those feelings.

I… guess I owed her an apology.