Water Lily (4 page)

Looking out at the faces she realized that she would miss them. It was so completely Jun’s class that she hadn’t given much
thought to the others and now she was sorry. A couple of boys were folding their arms on their desks, ready to drop their
heads and snooze as soon as they knew the next speech had begun. Ties were loose, socks were rolled down to the ankles, and
every now and then some spiritless voice would murmur, it’s hot, it’s hot. Even the most dedicated students were taking little
notice of the speakers, but were reading through their own speeches, rehearsing silently at their desks.

A shrill voice pierced the thick air. Runa looked up at the platform and saw an earnest, bespectacled sixteen-year-old girl
reading from the paper in her hands.
And I think the world would be a happier place if we all remembered to do this every day
, she shrieked.
That’s all
. And she stepped down, to feeble applause from her two or three best friends.

“Thank you,” Runa said. “Who’s next?”

She should be concentrating, last day or not. She must not arouse suspicion. Among the titles listed on the board were
Always Reach for Your Dream, The Importance of a Smile for Human Beings, Things I Have Learned from My Grandmother
. Runa’s favorite was
What We Can All Learn From Growing a Pumpkin
, though she was not sure she cared to know the answer. She couldn’t believe that it would be much help today.

She walked to the back of the room, tried to imagine she was Jun Ikeda watching his favorite teacher moving around at the
front. She saw herself stretch up to write on the board, lean over desks to solve problems, toss her hair lightly when she
turned to answer a question in a different part of the room. She laughed at their jokes, helped them with the harder aspects
of English pronunciation.

She looked at the space in front of the blackboard and the image of herself was clearer than if she were looking in a mirror.
It was not difficult to see through Jun’s eyes. She understood Jun’s way of absorbing her. She knew how he looked at her.
He thought she was beautiful, incredible. He thought that every part of her was something special.

Runa found herself smiling at the small girl who had just arrived on the platform. Her hair was in two high bunches with little
green bows. This was against the school rules; they could have two braids but only one ponytail and no ribbons. But the girl
had a sweet and honest face so everyone knew that even the principal would let her pass in the corridor without comment. The
girl was in the cheerleading club, the Cheer Girls, and Runa had seen her sometimes, standing at the top of human pyramids
behind the school, somersaulting through the air with her yellow pom-poms flying like dandelion heads. The girl smiled back
at Runa as she recited. Runa tuned in to listen to the speech and realized that it was about to finish.

For the remainder of the lesson she focused. She was not sure how to advise the speakers, since they seemed to know more than
she did. She admired their certainty, their sweeping ability to make the world right and keep it simple. We must reach for
a dream because we can’t live happily without a sense of achievement. We should smile because it will make other people smile
and then we’ll all be happy. Grandmother lived to be a hundred and two and she never got up after six o’clock in the morning
and she ate a fish every day for breakfast.

What I learned from growing a pumpkin is that some things are difficult and they die if you get it wrong. But you can always
try again next year
.

Runa wanted to tell them they were ridiculous, nonsensical, but she didn’t. She nodded encouragement. Between speeches she
corrected their pronunciation, made them practice
th
,
l
and
r
. She smiled as she talked—she couldn’t help it—and they frowned in concentration, repeating the words and sentences to themselves.
In her sleeplessness she wondered if perhaps they were right and it was indeed so simple. You could brush away all the problems
of the world with a heartfelt platitude.

And then, what she wanted and feared the most: Jun Ikeda hauled himself to the front, stepped onto the platform. She felt
acutely self-conscious but was not sure whether for herself or for him. He was handsome in his uniform, easily the best in
the school. The sun glinted on his hair, showing a glow of red, and she wondered if he had been dyeing it. She would have
liked to go forward and touch it, push back the strand that had fallen over his forehead, as she did after sex, when his face
shone with sweat and his hair clung to his skin. Knowing she could do nothing intensified the desire. All the hiding, the
pretending there was nothing illuminated and heightened what there was.
Yes, yes, Nanao,
she said inside her head,
I know it is wrong
. Of course she knew—just by looking around at the other pupils who needed her to belong to them too. She saw that she had
a role to play and rules to follow. But at moments like this she knew who she was. She wouldn’t want to live without them.

Jun began to speak and she smiled to herself, ran her finger along a scratch in the desk. He was reading badly on purpose,
his pronunciation all Japanese, his tone flat and bored. He was embarrassed to be good in front of her with his friends watching.
Being successful at school had nothing to do with pleasing teachers; she knew that. His speech was a standard piece about
teamwork in basketball. The text was not bad but he would not win any prizes for such a mumbled performance. And she knew
how good he could be. She had spent a night in a tiny karaoke room with him and no one else, and she had heard him sing English
love songs with perfect pronunciation. She knew what he could do.

Her mind wandered off again, to the last time they met, over a week before and she let herself half doze through the memory.

That night they had climbed onto the school roof. They stood directly above Jun’s classroom. They had been walking through
the woods, and when they emerged, Jun threw his arms wide and said that he wanted to climb a mountain. None of the mountains
in the region was close enough to reach without a car, so Runa led him up the fire escape, through a door and out onto the
rooftop. No one will know, she told him. See how high we are.

And Jun said, we’ve conquered the school, we’re turning it inside out, into something else. Runa was already in her underwear—white
and silky—dancing around the edges of the roof. He told her to be careful and Runa said, no, I don’t want to be. She laughed
and waved her arms around. I’d rather jump than be careful, she said. Jun was standing right in the middle, swinging his arms
gently through the space. We could meet each other in the middle of the day up here, if no one was watching the fire escape
and then we could be together even at school. Runa walked to him. No, she said, people would see us if they were on the field.
Not if we were lying down, he replied and kissed her neck. We could smoke up here and everything. Runa laughed at Jun’s sweetness
and he blushed. Then they heard a voice from below. They peered over the edge and saw an old woman passing in front of the
school gates. She was calling, who’s there? Who’s there? Runa said, she’s probably demented. Jun knelt between her legs, stroked
her thighs, kissing her through the silk. Maybe, he said when he emerged, she heard us talking but didn’t think to look up
here. Who would?

It was exciting, once, to think they might have been caught. But now the idea made Runa sick.

She knew that as he stood in front of his classmates, talking about the pleasure of belonging to the basketball team, he was
thinking of her. Her eyes were burning into him like torches, and she knew he felt the glare.

He looked up and met her gaze. He had finished speaking. His head was bent forward as though he could only face her from a
slight angle. She looked back steadily and spoke in her projected, teacher’s voice, giving basic advice on how to improve,
and he took it with surly nods. Did he resent her, his girl-friend, talking to him like this, or was she just a teacher now?
Perhaps he was as aroused as she was by this polarizing of their roles. Really, his speech was so bad that she should have
made him do it again but that would be cruel. She wrote a note, a dangerous note, and handed it to him. “Practice these points
and you’ll be fine,” she said.
Tonight
, she had written.

The electronic bell chimed to end the lesson. The class leader shouted for everyone to stand and bow. Chairs scraped. The
twenty-four boys and twenty-three girls gave a perfunctory dip of the head. Runa nodded back and left the room.

She headed upstairs for the teachers’ room, saying good morning to teenagers and staff all the way. She flopped down at her
desk, slid forward on her clunky swivel chair, and waited for the midmorning meeting to begin.

The principal made various announcements about weekly, monthly, and special tests, also about building giant structures for
the school festival next term. Runa’s classroom was to be-come the ballroom of the
Titanic
for the weekend. She wrote down what he said, to show that it mattered to her, to show that she was not planning to run away
long before the school festival.

The principal paused to take a deep and dramatic breath. Every gesture, every sound that came from him, seemed rehearsed for
the stage, as if, after years as a high-school principal, he couldn’t communicate in any other way. Runa had once taken time
off work with flu and when she returned, the principal asked after her. He barked his concern as if she were a class of forty-five
delinquents. Today’s performance—the long inhalation and half-closed eyes—said that he was shocked and appalled, and by someone
present. There were squeaks from all around the room as the teachers swung round on their chairs to see. He clutched a piece
of paper in his right hand and stared at the staff with gravity. He said that he had one more announcement. The knot in Runa’s
stomach pulled tighter. She wrapped her arms around her abdomen and pressed hard.

He had received a letter informing him that somewhere there was a photograph of a teacher and a pupil leaving a love hotel.
He had not seen the photograph so couldn’t know whether or not it existed. If it were true, he said to the gathering, the
man must tell him immediately. As a private school with a formidable reputation, such a scandal would not be tolerated. If
the girl’s parents found out, it would be a disaster. He, personally, would do his best to ensure that the teacher in question
never worked again.

Kawasaki, who sat behind Runa, whispered to another colleague, “I heard that the teacher is female. But that’s hard to believe,
don’t you think?”

Runa and Kawasaki had had a fling a few months before and she was glad to hear that he didn’t suspect her.

The other teacher grunted in surprise and the conversation ended.

Runa filled in her registers, keeping her back to him, hunched over her desk. This was bad news though she was finding it
hard to stay awake. She knew she must be alert now but her eyes kept closing. There was a jar on her desk containing a water
lily. A first-year girl had presented it to her the previous week for no special reason. Runa was so happy at the time that
she felt proud to be a teacher and, for a few moments, forgot her usual feeling of being a fraud. For almost a whole day she
had believed that teaching was her vocation. Her head nodded for-ward with sleep and her hair brushed the glass jar. She jumped
up quickly. For now she was safe—the principal thought she was a man—but she had little time. That night she must call Ping
and tell her to have a bed ready.

*   *   *

The school was burning up in the midday heat. The windows along every corridor were open and a weak breeze blew through. A
couple of boys had stopped by the drinking fountain in the stairwell and were soaking their handkerchiefs to squeeze over
their necks. They laughed with pleasure as cold drops of water slid under their collars. They were small, first-years probably,
twelve-year-olds who were safe to teach because they were quite clearly children, could not be otherwise if they tried. It
was lunchtime and Runa must find Jun Ikeda, tell him that his life was about to change, that there was no point in meeting
tonight because she was about to disappear.

Navy uniforms filled the staircases, flowed into the hall and burst out through the main doors like flood water. Runa stood
still and let them rush past. Any one of these children could have known about her and taken the picture, but she would hate
that most of all. She would have preferred the anonymous schemer to be another teacher, or some nosy person in the village
with no connection to the school, even a member of Jun’s family.

The sun scorched the dirt sports field, turning it from brown to orange. Runa hovered on the edge, wiped sweat from her fingers
and forehead with a handkerchief as she looked across. Jun was in front of the gym building with a few other boys. Taller
than his friends, muscular and deeply tanned, he twisted a basketball around in his hands. She walked toward the group, as
if heading for the door to the gym, and tried to catch his eye. He ignored her. They had both become used to not-seeing, but
she had to tell him. He may know nothing of the letter and photograph, the impending scandal.
Look at me
, she wanted to scream.
Don’t you want to know what I’ve done to you? There’s no point in ignoring me now. We’ve been found out. We’re not having
a secret affair anymore. It’s over and it’s known. Look at me
.

A small gust of wind cooled the playing field and the air seemed to bump between them. One of Jun’s friends said some-thing
and the ,group laughed, a teenage boy laugh that Runa recognized from the classroom; as soon as each one realized that the
others had joined in, he laughed harder still, a laughter of reassurance as much as of humor. It was so different from the
giggles and shrieks of the girls. With the girls, you would never know if one were being murdered.