When I first got there, the school felt like it was at the end of the world. So, for lack of a better option, I’m going to call it “The End of the World Elementary”.
OK. Back to the dorm.
Shit hit the fan as soon as I arrived. I wasn’t allowed to keep sleeping in. DORM is a four-letter word. Right up there with FUCK or SHIT. It really was the “change of environment” they said I needed. No joke. My world was violently upended. The director was of the professional opinion that my attachment to my bed represented “a deep desire to return to the womb”. Or something like that. So when it was time to get up in the morning, she had my bed taken away. Rise and shine.
“Get up! Time to go to school!”
So I got up. I went to school.
And that was the end of my dream diary. I mean, there were other factors for this. Maybe you figured this out already—the director was a practising psychoanalyst, an expert in all things Freud, probably in her late thirties. When I got to the dorm, the analyst in me had little choice but to scram. I might have been a really ignorant kid, but even I knew that Freud was a total relic. Session’s up, Herr Freud. Plus, I wasn’t allowed to bring my bible to the dorm (they were pretty strict about what you could have there), and the place had zero privacy. What if someone got their hands on my dreams? Just thinking about it sent shivers down my spine. It’d be like someone messing with your corpse.
And something told me that the director wouldn’t hesitate to sneak a peek.
She was a shrink, after all.
So that put a stopper in my dream-diving. This sucks. I cursed the so-called reality they forced me back into.
That also marked my return to education. Every morning, I made the trek to school with everyone else. To The End of the World.
They made me.
OK. About the other kids. What kind of “pupils” were they? What did these dropouts have in common? Not a damn thing. Each one was like a snowflake. Like, unique. Well, some were sort of typical. They got chronic headaches or stomach aches. Some simply couldn’t stomach school lunches. There were perfectionists and the opposites of perfectionists. Fat kids and skinny kids, bullies and crybabies. It was a zoo—a human zoo.
One kid per cage.
We were like brothers. And sisters. There were girls in the dorm, too. Our living quarters were strictly separated, but we made the walk to school and back together.
There’s one more thing I need to mention about The End of the World.
It wasn’t bad. When I first saw the village, I was convinced I was going to be stuck in some shabby, cobweb-infested schoolhouse. All wood, no windows—just a giant box. But that was all in my head. This place was all right, not in any way inferior to my school in Suginami.
Really, if I had to choose, I’d say I was happier at The End of the World.
The ruins of the stone Buddha (nothing left but his ankles) on the way to school. The thatched roofs on old farmhouses we could see from the schoolyard. The smell of dirt and grass all around us. Now and then, misguided cicadas would land on the monkey bars and cry their hearts out. Even in class, we could hear thirty different kinds of birds singing outside. Behind the school a warning sign read: BEWARE OF BEARS. This place had it all.
But—most important of all—she was there.
She showed up about three weeks after I did.
The day after the last day of school, a new load of loser-track kids gets dropped off. Seven boys, four girls. Summertime at Camp Dropout. Even though I’m still pretty new to the place, I find myself playing mentor to kids even newer to this game than me.
We line up, face-to-face, checking each other out. Nobody says a thing. Not a hello, nothing.
And there she is. She’s in the sixth grade—a year above me—and I guess you could say she’s a looker. Except my eyes aren’t on her face. Because the magnetic thing about her is, like, her… chest. I mean, whoa. My first impression: this girl has some serious boobs.
I’m a little young to notice things like that, but I’ve got stirrings. And something kicks in, makes me stare. This girl’s not a freak or anything, but stuffed into her tight little bra are the finest, fullest-formed sixth-grade boobs in the Greater Tokyo Metropolitan Area. Some things you just can’t hide. And some things are hard to ignore. (I guess I wasn’t ideal mentor material.)
Aside from her boobs, nothing about this girl really stood out. At first meeting, that is. But within twenty-four hours, it’s clear to everyone that she’s nothing like the rest of us. What’s so different about her? Not what you’re thinking. It’s her mouth. It never shuts. Ever.
This girl talks and talks and talks.
Talk—even a lot of talk—isn’t necessarily rare or weird, either. But in my brief time on this planet, I’d never met anyone who talked the way she talked. I was amazed. To use the language I have now, I’d call it hyper-talk—not overtalk. She doesn’t blab endlessly on some boring subject, or gossip about stupid things, or ask a bunch of mind-numbing questions. Blabber like that I could handle. All the kids could. Because that’s how kids are. But she was on a different plane. If she was just darting around, hitting sixty topics in under a minute, we could’ve coped. No sweat. But what came pouring out of her mouth was more like a mash of sixty conversations happening simultaneously—jump jump jump—and she’d go on like that for an hour straight, barely stopping to breathe. What do you do with that? No way you could, like, try to have a conversation with her. What’s she saying? Total gibberish, right? Maybe. Maybe not.
She was like an alien.
Or maybe she was manic? No, this was something else, something—I don’t know—superhuman? I was only ten or eleven at the time, same as the others. But I felt something, like an aura. I could tell she wasn’t fake. She was kind of real. Like, her hyper-talk was about something deep. Even someone in their twenties probably wouldn’t get it—forget about a bunch of grade-school rejects. No hope. So the kids kept their distance.
Within a couple of days, her mouth had totally devastated our peace and quiet (if we ever had such a thing). She rattled everyone’s cage.
In class, it was even worse. We were supposed to be on summer break, but class went on at The End of the World. Like always, only different. For the summer, misfits of all grades were thrown into a single classroom. The powers that be had some plan in mind, to get us to adjust, or readjust, to being in a school environment, being around other students. It was a strange sort of rehab. They wanted us to communicate with other students and relate to kids in other grades.
Communicate.
Her hyper-talk ruined any chance of that happening.
We didn’t have assigned seats. It was, like, sit anywhere, next to your friends, or some kid you don’t know, or on your own—if that’s your thing.
The director was like a saint, kind and easy. But the kids were not.
“Back off, weirdo.”
“Ugh. Don’t even think about sitting here—I don’t care what grade you are.”
“Omigod. Shutupshutupshutupshutup. Put a sock in it!”
“Pleeeze, does anyone have a spare pair of headphones? I can’t take it any more.”
“Yo, Grade Six,” somebody yells to her, “try speaking Japanese for once!”
“I am speaking Japanese!” she yells back. Then—two seconds later—she’s back in orbit, rambling about some alien life form. Next thing you know, she’s going:
“…Millions-in-Ethiopia-starved-to-death…”
Then, without skipping a beat:
“…You-ever-see-Eight-Samurai-with-Hiroko-Yakushimaru?”
You who? Anybody, I guess.
Anybody at all. But who could respond to that? By the time she says something, she’s already in the middle of the next thing.
Our class was totally at the mercy of her careening motor-mouth.
And where was I in all this?
Sitting there, speechless. I didn’t talk for the longest time. The other kids left me alone, or left me out… of everything. Now, for the first time, I was watching it happen to another kid. They avoided her like the plague, rejected her, shut her out.
I didn’t share their view of her. For me, it was the total opposite. I wanted to get closer. I mean, yeah, I wanted a closer look at her boobs, too, but that wasn’t all…