Chapter 2 Chapter two

In high school, I was just your average teenage guy everywhere.That was the second phase of my life—becoming normal.For me, this is a process of evolution.I am no longer special, I have become ordinary.Needless to say, it shouldn't be difficult for someone who looks closely to see that I'm a teenager with problems of his own.But after all, where in the world is there a sixteen-year-old who doesn't have his own problems?In this sense, when I approach the world, the world also approaches me. At any rate, by the time I was sixteen, I was no longer the sickly teenager.After entering junior high school, by chance, I went to a swimming school near my residence, where I formally learned freestyle and swam two standard strokes every week.In no time, my shoulders and chest widened and my muscles strengthened.I'm no longer the feverish bedridden kid I used to be.I often stand naked in front of the bathroom mirror and take the time to examine my body carefully.Obviously, my body is undergoing unexpected and drastic changes.I rejoice.It's not that I'm glad that I'm getting closer to an adult step by step. Rather than the growth itself, I'm more pleased with the transformation of myself.I'm glad I'm not the same person I used to be.

I often read books and listen to music.Originally I liked books and music, but through my association with Shimamoto, both habits were further promoted and further perfected.I started running to the library, reading the books there one after another.Once you turn the page, you can't stop halfway.Books are like hallucinogens to me. I read them during meals, on the tram, under the covers, and secretly read them in class at dawn.Before long, I got a small stereo system for my own use, and whenever I had time, I would close my room and listen to jazz records.However, there is almost no desire to talk to anyone about the experience of reading and listening to music.I am myself, not anyone else.On the contrary, I feel at ease and have nothing else to ask for.In this sense, I was an unusually lonely and arrogant teenager.I don't like sports that require cooperation with my peers, and I don't care about competing with others for points.

The only sport I like is endless silent swimming alone. That being said, I'm not completely alone.Although there were not many, I still made a few good friends in school.To be honest, I never liked the school thing. I always feel that the school is always trying to squeeze me to death, and I must always maintain a defensive posture.If I didn't have such friends around me, I would have been hurt even more deeply as I passed through the unstable years before my twenties. And since I started doing sports, I don't eat much less food than before, and I blush less when I talk to girls for no reason.Even if it happened to reveal that he was the only child, no one seemed to take it seriously.It seemed that I had—at least on the surface—been freed from the grip of my only child.

At the same time, I have a girlfriend. She wasn't exactly pretty.That is to say, it's not the type of mother who will sigh "what's the name of this child, she's so beautiful" when she looks at the group photo of the class, but I found her cute from the first time I met her.It can't be seen in the photos, but in reality she has a natural and unpretentious warmth that touches people's hearts.It's true that I'm not a beautiful girl who can be admired everywhere, but when I think about it, I don't have the kind of things worth bragging about. In the second year of high school, I was in the same class as her and had a tryst several times.At first it was a double tryst of four people, and then the two got along alone.When I'm with her, I feel strangely relaxed.In front of her, I can talk freely, and she always listens to my stories with great interest.It wasn't a big deal, but she listened so intently that she looked like she was witnessing a major discovery that could change the world.It was the first time since I hadn't seen Shimamoto that a girl would listen to me attentively.At the same time, I wanted to know her, everything, down to the smallest details—such as what she ate every day, what kind of room she lived in, what kind of scenery she could see from the window.

Her name is Quan.What a name, I said to her when we first met and spoke, like throwing an ax into it and elves popping out.Hear me say that, she smiled.She has a sister who is three years younger and a brother who is five years younger. Her father is a dentist. She also lives in a single household and has a dog.The dog is a German Shepherd named Karl.Her father was a member of the Japanese Communist Party.Of course, there may be more than one dentist who is a Communist Party member in the world. If all of them gather together, they might be able to fill four or five buses.Still, the fact that my girlfriend's father was one of them baffles me.Her parents are quite persistent tennis fans, picking up a racket to play tennis every Sunday.The fact that tennis fans and communists were a member of the Communist Party was miraculous enough, but Izumi didn't seem to mind much.Although she has no interest in the Japanese Communist Party, she likes her parents and often plays tennis with her, and she also persuades me to play tennis. Unfortunately, I don't like tennis anyway.

Quan envied me as an only child.She doesn't like her younger siblings very much.No strings in his head, hopeless fool, she said, how happy he would be without them, and how wonderful it would be to have no brother or brother. "I always want to be the only child. Then no one will disturb me, I can be free, and I can do whatever I want." On the third tryst, I kissed her.That day when she came to play at my house, my mother said she wanted to buy something and went out. Quan and I were the only ones at home.I moved my face closer and pressed my lips to hers, but she closed her eyes and said nothing.I had prepared a dozen apologies in advance for when she got angry or turned her back, but it didn't work.I kiss her and wrap my arms around her back to bring her closer.It was late summer, and she was wearing a sisaka dress with a ribbon at the waist and a tail hanging down the back.My palms touched the bra hooks on her back, and I felt her exhale on my neck, my heart pounding like it was about to jump out of me.The thing that was so hard that it was almost bursting touched the base of her thigh, and she moved her body slightly.But that's all.It seemed that she was not unnatural or unhappy.

The two hugged each other on the sofa at my house.The cat squatted on the chair opposite the sofa.When we were hugging, the cat looked up, but without making a sound, it stretched itself and fell asleep again.I stroked her hair and kissed her little ears.I thought I had to say something, but I couldn't think of a single word.Besides, let alone speaking, it was very difficult to even inhale.Then, I took her hand and kissed her lips again.For a long time she said nothing, and neither did I. After sending Izumi to the tram stop, I was so restless that I collapsed on the sofa when I got home and kept staring at the ceiling.I can't think of anything.After a while, my mother came back and said that I would prepare dinner, but I had no appetite at all.I put on my shoes without saying a word and wandered the streets for two hours.Incredible.Although I was no longer alone, I fell deeply into a loneliness I had never felt before.It's like wearing glasses for the first time in life, unable to grasp the distance of objects.The scenery in the distance seems to be close in front of the eyes, and the things that should not be vivid are vivid.

When we parted, she said "I'm so happy, thank you" to me.Of course I am also happy.It was unbelievable that a girl would allow a kiss.Impossible to be unhappy.However, I cannot embrace this 100% happiness.I am like a tower that has lost its foundation. The more I want to climb up and look far away, the more violently my heart shakes.Why is it her?I asked myself, what do I really know about her?But I met her a few times and talked casually.Thinking about it this way, I became very anxious, feeling that I was neither sitting nor standing. I suddenly thought: If the person I hugged and kissed was Shimamoto, I wouldn't be so at a loss.We will accept everything about each other naturally without words, and there is no anxiety or confusion at all, nothing exists.

However, Shimamoto is no longer here.Now she was in her own new world, as I was in mine. So there is no way to compare Izumi and Shimamoto together.Comparisons are also useless.This is a new world, and the back door to the world that once existed has been closed.I had to try to orient myself in the new world I was in. I kept my eyes open until a faint white edge appeared in the eastern sky, and then I went to bed for two hours, took a shower and went to school.I want to talk to her on campus, I want to reconfirm what happened between the two of us yesterday, and I want to hear from her clearly whether her mood is still the same as that time.She did say "I'm so happy, thank you" to me at the end, but when I think about it at dawn, I feel that it's all a hallucination in my head.At school, I finally couldn't find an opportunity to talk with Quan alone. During the break, she was always with a girl she was close with, and immediately went back alone after school.The only time I was able to meet her in the hallway between classrooms was changing, and she gave me a quick smile, which I smiled back, and that was all.But I can catch the fact that yesterday was true in that smile, as if to say "don't worry, yesterday is true".On the tram ride home, my doubts had all but disappeared.I really needed her, a much, much healthier desire than the doubts and bewilderments I had last night.

My need is actually very clear, that is to strip Quan naked, that is, to take off her clothes and do that with her.This is a very long way for me.Things can progress only by superimposing specific images one by one in stages.In order to achieve the goal of doing that, you must first start by unzipping the dress.And between doing that and the zipper of the dress, there are probably twenty or thirty procedures that require delicate judgments and decisions. The first thing I do is get a condom.Even if it is still a long way from reaching the stage where it is actually needed, it must be obtained anyway.Because no one knows when it will come in handy.But going to the pharmacy to buy it is absolutely impossible.Because no matter how I look at it, I can only be a sophomore in high school, not to mention that I can't show the courage.There are a few vending machines on the street, but the problem is that if someone bumps into them when buying them, it will inevitably cause trouble.For three or four days, I racked my brains on this.

As a result, things went unexpectedly smoothly; I had a friend who was more familiar with the tricks, so I gritted my teeth and told him: I want to get a condom, but I don’t know what is the best way to do it. "It's not easy. I'll give you a box if you want it." He said, "My brother bought a lot of them through mail order or something. I don't know why I bought so many. Anyway, the drawers are full of them." It’s full, and I can’t tell if I’m missing one or two boxes.” I said that, of course, I wish for it.So the next day he brought me the condoms in a paper bag to school.I treated him to lunch and told him to keep this matter absolutely secret from others.He said he knew it, and he would tell others about it.But of course he didn't keep his mouth shut.He told a few people about my need for condoms, and those people told a few other people.Even Quan heard about it from a female classmate.After school she called me to the platform on the roof of the school building. "Hey, Chu-jun, I heard that you asked for condoms from Nishida?" she said.She struggled to say the word condom, which sounded like an immoral germ of a terrible plague. "Ah, uh," I tried to find the right word, but couldn't find it. "It's nothing special. It's just that I used to think that one or two would not be bad." "But you got it for me?" "You can't just say that." I said, "I'm just a little interested and want to see what it is. But if you feel unhappy about this, I just apologize. You can return it or throw it away." We sat together on a small stone bench at the corner of the platform.It looked like it was going to rain soon, and there was no one on the platform except the two of us.It's so still and so still around.It was the first time that the platform was so quiet. The school is located on the top of the hill. From the platform, you can have a panoramic view of the market and the sea.Once we stole a dozen or so old records from the broadcast room and threw them off the platform like flying saucers.The record flew in a beautiful parabola, as if it had gained a short life, and flew triumphantly towards the port.Unfortunately, one of them didn't fly well, and it fell clumsily on the tennis court dangling, startling the first-year girl who was practicing her batting posture there, and caused a lot of trouble afterwards.That was a year ago.At the moment I am being cross-examined by my girlfriend in the same venue.Looking up at the sky, the eagle is slowly drawing a beautiful circle.It must be wonderful to be an eagle, I thought, as long as they fly in the sky, at least they don't have to worry about contraception. "You really like me?" she asked in a quiet voice. "You don't need to ask," I replied, "Of course I like you." She pursed her lips into a straight line, looked at my face from the front, and stared at it for a long time, which made me feel a little uncomfortable. "I like you too," she said after a while. "But," I thought. "But," she continued, as expected, "don't worry." I nod. "Don't be in a hurry. I have my own pace. I'm not such a well-behaved person. Many things take a lot of time to prepare. Can you wait?" I nodded silently again. "Can you make a deal?" "It's a deal." "Do not hurt me?" "Do no harm," I said. Quan looked down at his shoes for a moment.A pair of ordinary black leather shoes.Compared with my shoes next to me, they are as small as toys. "It's scary," she said. "Recently, sometimes I feel like I've become a snail without a shell." "I'm afraid too," I said. "Sometimes I feel like a frog without webs." She raised her face to look at mine and smiled slightly. Then we walked to the back of the building at the same time, hugged and kissed.We are snails without shells and frogs without webs.I pressed her breasts against my own, my tongue lightly touching hers.I felt her breasts through the shirt.She didn't resist, just closed her eyes quietly and sighed.Her breasts are not very large, and they sink into my palms affectionately, almost as if they were made for them.She put her hand on my chest, and the feeling of her palm seemed to be in sync with my heartbeat. She's certainly not the same as Shimamoto, I thought.This girl will not give me the same thing as Shimamoto.But this time she was mine and wanted to give me what she could.Why should I have to hurt her! But I didn't understand then, that sooner or later I might have to hurt someone, leave her with a wound that couldn't heal.In some cases, the very existence of one person hurts another.