One fateful day in second grade, I was at my rambunctious friend Snowy’s house with two other girls. We sat around a table and a question was asked of me in a teasing voice. I was mostly fluent in Japanese; I drew blanks much less frequently than I had even a year before. Still, I didn’t want to admit to not understanding the question at all. I couldn’t even try to make sense of a part of it to guess at its meaning.
So I turned to my friend Shino and asked her to answer first.
Snowy and I weren’t especially close at the time, having been in separate classes for over a year and not having spoken for most of first grade after she deemed me a liar unworthy of her time. Snowy and I had always been more of fellow outcasts than close friends anyway, so I’d recovered and found myself another friend.
We used to spend hours at her house, drawing different versions of the Sailor Senshi from the comic and animated show Sailor Moon. But her father had been transferred to Indonesia at the end of first grade and she’d moved away. I’d been alone again for a time.
Making friends was particularly hard in second grade, because the teacher weirdly singled out myself and one other girl as her “favorites.” I was selected because I was foreign. The other girl Belle was in voice training and had an amazing singing voice. She sang a capella to the entire school and parents at sports day and a few other occasions: a role created especially for her because she was such a talented singer.
I went to Belle’s house to play with her a few times, but we didn’t quite have the chemistry to become close friends. She also didn’t have that much time after school, since she took classes like calligraphy and voice. I may have even resented her a little for having been singled out for her talent, where I was only singled out because my existence was a novelty. Belle shone under that teacher’s wing. She was the first to learn to recite the multiplication table. Her penmanship was exquisite (and this was very important in schools I attended in Japan). She was poised. And she could sing. I, on the other hand, was never better than average in anything.
I floated around for a few months, playing with various classmates from time to time but never really developing a connection. Then I became friends with Shino. Shino was a sweet, pretty girl who had been in the same class as me for a year and a half by then. We had never had any noteworthy interaction that I could remember. I wasn’t socially conscious enough yet to be aware that she was fairly popular among the other children in our class.
One day in the second term of second grade, the two of us had just gotten off lunch duty, returning our class’s lunch tray to the kitchen. We started playing a game in the hallway, tagging each other and running to the other end of the hallway, then trying to run back without letting the other tag us. We weren’t supposed to be running indoors, and a teacher passing by scolded us, but laughingly and indulgently. We apologized to the teacher. We stopped running and started talking.
We became fast friends. Finally, I had someone that I could honestly call a friend.
There was a duplicity in Shino that I wasn’t wise enough to see at the age of eight. She was wonderful to be around when it was only the two of us. But when others were around—especially girls—she seemed to become more plastic: she smiled and was nice, but never stood up for me. It never occurred to me that this was odd.
So that day at Snowy’s house, when I turned the question to her, Shino smiled sweetly and redirected it to Snowy instead.
Snowy shrugged and gave the name of a boy in our class.
This was a boy I’d never taken any particular note of. He was extremely good at sports and among the fastest runners. He was always cracking jokes and wore flattened, blackened slippers, since he couldn’t be bothered to take the time to put his heels into the indoor uwabaki slippers we all wore inside. I’m going to call him Kasanova, Kas for short.
So Snowy named Kas.
“Oh really?” gasped Shino. “Kas for me, too!”
“Me too,” said the third girl. “Kas.”
Now it was my turn to answer, but I still had no idea what the question had been. All I knew was that all the other girls had named Kas.
So, “Me too!” I said, widening my eyes and looking between them. “Kas!”
And then as they began to talk about him, it dawned on me what the question had been: “Whom do you like like?”
The next day at school, during a study hour in the library, Snowy announced loudly, “Kaaas!! Kai likes you!!”
Kas glanced at me (he looked a little puzzled) and I ducked my head back into my book. He turned away, apparently completely unconcerned. The rest of the class snickered while the librarian shushed Snowy.
I was seething. You like him, I wanted to say. You and the others all like him! I couldn’t admit that I had lied. I couldn’t out the others, because that would make me just as bad as Snowy. Shino was there, laughing lightly along with the others, but sending me an apologetic look. The anger left me: I couldn’t expose her in front of everyone.
So I said nothing.
Oh well. I supposed I’d best like Kas, then.
For the next two years, even after my friendship with Shino was reduced to a pile of ashes, I maintained the fiction that I liked Kas. At some points, I even convinced myself that I liked him. He was athletic. The other girls liked him. It wasn’t a bad option. I liked Kas. Over two years later, on the very day I transferred to a new school in fourth grade, my “feelings” for Kas vanished and I only felt relieved. Even after two years of faking it, there still wasn’t a single drop of genuine feeling there.
Twenty years later, reminiscing over drinks, my friends Rilla, Windy and I realized that every single one of us lied to each other about who we liked in the third and fourth grades. We laughed and commented on the idiocy of our childish mindsets.