Can’t Get the Words Out
by Sawako NATORI
Video Game Scriptwriter/Novelist

Head writer for ToE. Freelance scriptwriter and novelist. Latest news: a neighbor I run into every morning just asked me, “Did you cut your hair?” I nodded yes, but the last time I cut it was the end of last year.

A Secret Cheer for (Ex-)High School Girls

I was doing some work in a cafe one day, when two high school girls sat down at the table in front of me.

The two girls sat up neatly in their chairs and peered at the menu, giving it careful consideration before calling the waiter over. “After you,” they said, each offering the other to go first.

“OK… I’ll have a cake set. Napoleon pie and hot black tea, please.”

“No way. That’s exactly what I was gonna get!”

They burst out laughing, “We’re so alike!” Next, when the cafe worker asked, “Would you like your tea with milk, lemon, or plain?” they both replied simultaneously, “Lemon!” and laughed again.

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After some time had passed, I sighed at how I had barely made a dent in my work, and looked around the cafe. At the table in front of me, the two high schoolers had stacked their empty cake plates in the corner, and were chatting animatedly while looking at something spread out on the table.

From what I could tell from their conversation, they seemed to be browsing through a graduation album. That meant that these two must be fresh graduates, making this the last afterschool side trip of their high school career.

As the girls flipped through the photos in the album, they made fun of people’s haircuts, laughed at their love affairs, and mocked others in a way that virtually denied them dignity as human beings, holding back nothing, while clapping their hands and guffawing. They seemed the very picture of invincible youth, brimming with promise for the future.

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Just as I was about to return to my work, I heard the voice of one of the ex-high school girls murmur musingly, “But I guess we’ll forget about them, huh?”

The tone of her voice was suddenly so gentle, so different from the voice I had been listening to, that I looked up in surprise, and saw her friend also peering at her quizzically. This former high school girl took the photos of the people she had just been thoroughly mocking, and was now lightly stroking them with her fingertips.

“It’s just that people get old in the blink of an eye, and I think I’ll forget the way the people in this album sounded and acted before I know it. Unless they’re, like, really close friends I’ll still keep in touch with, I feel like I’m going to forget everybody’s names, and their nicknames, how I felt about them. It’s like a premonition? Or a certainty? Something like that.”

Her friend, who had been listening quietly, said, “That’s cold!” But her voice was timid, as if she too might have been vaguely steeling herself, I thought.

“Even though right now everyone’s around so much that I get sick of ‘em. Feels kind of lonely, huh?”

“Yeah. It does.”

The girls nodded at each other, then turned their eyes toward the album, and let out a small sigh.

“Let’s go.” I wasn’t sure which one said it since I had already turned back to my notebook. Either way, the girls were already getting up, closing the album, and walking out of the cafe while scrolling through their phones. “Oh, that was so funny,” I heard them saying.

Their loud voices were again overflowing with invincibility. But I already knew that deep inside the eyes that gazed detachedly at their phones, at the very bottom of their hearts, there must have been something soft there that twitched and trembled.

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Once April comes around, what kind of new life awaits those girls?

Feeling a touch concerned, I’m now praying for their happiness in all sincerity.

Natori, Sawako. "A Secret Cheer for (Ex-)High School Girls," Viva☆Tales of Magazine, May 2012, p. 148.