South of the Border, West of the Sun Page 0,8

seemed more like an illusion I’d dreamed up. School ended without my getting a chance to talk to her. At recess she was with her girlfriends, and when classes were over she went straight home. Just once, when we were in the hallway changing classes, we managed to exchange glances. She beamed when she caught sight of me, and I smiled back. That was all. But in her smile I caught an affirmation of the previous day’s events. It’s all right, her smile seemed to tell me. Yesterday really did happen. By the time I was riding the train home, my confusion was gone. I wanted her, and my desire won out over any doubts.

What I wanted was clear enough. Izumi naked, having sex with me. But that final destination was still a long way down the road. There was a certain order of events one had to follow. To arrive at sex, you first had to undo the fastener of the girl’s dress. And between dress fastener and sex lay a process in which twenty—maybe thirty—subtle decisions and judgments had to be made.

First of all I had to get hold of some condoms. Actually, that step was a bit further down the chain of events, but anyhow I had to get my hands on some. Never know when I might need them. But I couldn’t just duck into a drugstore, plunk down some money, and waltz out with a box of condoms. I’d never pass as anything other than what I was—a high school junior—not to mention that I was too much of a coward to make the attempt. I could have tried one of the vending machines in the neighborhood, but if anyone caught me red-handed, I’d be up the proverbial creek. For three or four days, I turned this quandary over endlessly in my mind.

In the end, things worked out more easily than expected. I asked a precocious friend of mine, who was sort of our local expert on these matters. See, the thing is, I asked him, I’d like to get some condoms, so what should I do? No sweat, he deadpanned. I can get you a whole box. My brother bought a ton of them through a catalog. I don’t know why he bought so many, but his closet’s full of them. One missing box isn’t gonna kill him. Fantastic, I enthused. The next day he brought the condoms to school in a paper bag. I treated him to lunch and asked him not to breathe a word. No problem, he said. Of course he spilled the beans, told a couple of people I was in the market for condoms. These people told some others, and it made the rounds of the school until Izumi heard about it After school, she asked me to come up to the school roof with her.

“Hajime, I heard you got some condoms from Nishida?” she asked. The word condoms didn’t exactly roll off her tongue. She made it sound like the name of some infectious disease.

“Uh … yeah,” I admitted. I struggled to find the right words. “It doesn’t really mean anything. I just thought, you know, maybe it’d be better to have some.”

“You got them because of me?”

“No, not really,” I said. “I was just curious about what they were like. But if it bothers you, I’m sorry. I’ll give them back, or throw them away.”

We were sitting on a small stone bench in a corner of the roof. It looked like it might rain at any minute. We were all alone. It was completely still. I’d never known the roof to be so silent.

Our school was on a hilltop, and we had an unboken view of the town and the sea. Once, my friends and I filched some records from the Broadcast Club room and flung them off the roof–like Frisbees, they sailed away in a beautiful arc. Off toward the harbor they flew, happily, as if life were breathed into them for a fleeting instant. But finally one of them failed to get airborne and wobbled clumsily straight down onto the tennis court, where some startled freshman girls were practicing their swings. It was detention for us. That had been more than a year before, and now here I was in the same spot, being grilled by my girlfriend about condoms. I looked up at the sky and saw a bird etching a slow circle in the sky. Being a bird, I imagined, must be wonderful.