“I’m kind of a low-key guy. The spotlight doesn’t suit me. I’m more of a side dish—cole slaw or French fries or a Wham! backup singer.”
“Which is why you were paired with me.”
“But still, you were pretty damn cute.”
“Is there something about your personality that makes you prefer the past tense?”
The young man smiles. “No, I was just directly expressing how I felt back then from the perspective of the present. You were very cute. Really. You hardly talked to me, though.”
He rests his knife and fork on his plate, takes a drink of water, and wipes his mouth with a paper napkin. “So, while you were swimming, I asked Eri Asai, ‘Why won’t your little sister talk to me? Is there something wrong with me?’ ”
“What’d she say?”
“That you never take the initiative to talk to anybody. That you’re kinda different, and that even though you’re Japanese you speak more often in Chinese than Japanese. So I shouldn’t worry. She didn’t think there was anything especially wrong with me.”
Mari silently crushes her cigarette out in the ashtray.
“It’s true, isn’t it? There wasn’t anything especially wrong with me, was there?”
Mari thinks for a moment. “I don’t remember all that well, but I don’t think there was anything wrong with you.”
“That’s good. I was worried. Of course, I do have a few things wrong with me, but those are strictly problems I keep inside. I’d hate to think they were obvious to anybody else. Especially at a swimming pool in the summer.”
Mari looks at him again as if to confirm the accuracy of his statement. “I don’t think I was aware of any problems you had inside.”
“That’s a relief.”
“I can’t remember your name, though,” Mari says.
“My name?”
“Your name.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t mind if you forgot my name. It’s about as ordinary as a name can be. Even I feel like forgetting it sometimes. It’s not that easy, though, to forget your own name. Other people’s names—even ones I have to remember—I’m always forgetting.”
He glances out the window as if in search of something he should not have lost. Then he turns toward Mari again.
“One thing always mystified me, and that is, why didn’t your sister ever get into the pool that time? It was a hot day, and a really nice pool.”
Mari looks at him as if to say, You mean you don’t get that, either? “She didn’t want her makeup to wash off. It’s so obvious. And you can’t really swim in a bathing suit like that.”
“Is that it?” he says. “It’s amazing how two sisters can be so different.”
“We live two different lives.”
He thinks about her words for a few moments and then says, “I wonder how it turns out that we all lead such different lives. Take you and your sister, for example. You’re born to the same parents, you grow up in the same household, you’re both girls. How do you end up with such wildly different personalities? At what point do you, like, go your separate ways? One puts on a bikini like little semaphore flags and lies by the pool looking sexy, and the other puts on her school bathing suit and swims her heart out like a dolphin . . .”
