happening, time just keeps on passing by.
“Ken.” My father turned suddenly and looked at me. “What if you get expelled ?”
Obviously the two of them had done some talking while I was gone.
“Well, I'll take the high school equivalence exam. I’ll go to college anyway.”
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “All right. Go to bed.”
“The police contacted us yesterday. This isn’t a problem that can be dealt with just by reading you the riot act. The principal will announce your punishment once it’s been decided. At any rate, try to keep your noses clean till then.”
It was the morning that summer supplementary classes were due to begin. Matsunaga, the guy in charge of our class, had called Adama and me into the teachers’ room. There was a strange atmosphere in the place. It was nothing like when you were discovered smoking in the john or got caught cutting an exam to go and listen to some jazz. The teachers were cold and distant. “You again, Yazaki?
You jerk. Why don’t you try getting called in here for doing something right once in a while?”—nobody said anything like that. The P.E. instructors and the guidance counselor sat at their desks across the room and stared at us. Some of the teachers even looked down at their desks when our eyes met. I suppose they just didn’t know how to deal with the whole thing. After all, it was the biggest disgrace in the history of the school...
It was the same in the classroom. The other kids were reading The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon , trying to look as if nothing had happened. People like Adama and me were as much of a puzzle to them as to their teachers, here in darkest Kyushu. Between classes, a few close friends gathered around the two of us. I started talking in a loud voice about how much fun it had been. I told them about the planning, the execution, and the police interrogation, playing it up for laughs. The part about Nakamura’s “doo-doo” was punctuated by one burst of laughter after another, and the crowd around us grew till it included about half the kids there. Telling the story made me a star . I learned something from that. If you got all gloomy and apologetic, you’d be on your own. No one there was capable of judging the right or wrong of it all. No one was capable of assessing the barricade in ideological terms. Victory went to whoever had the most fun. Behind the blasé front, of course, I was afraid of being expelled, but to put everyone else at ease it was best just to shrug it all off and tell them what a ball we’d had. The fact is that most of that crowd—or at least half of them—would have liked to have done it themselves. The rest, no doubt—the ones who thought I should get down on my knees and beg for mercy— only hated me more than ever. Aware of their hostility, I kept on talking. Even if I am thrown out , my heart was warning them, you’re the ones who lose. My laughter will ring in your ears for the rest of your miserable lives.
After class, Adama, Iwase, and I had a talk in the library.
“How did they find out?” Iwase asked.
“Fuckin’ Fuse,” Adama said. “Fuse lives way out in the suburbs, right? The dumb fuck rode his bicycle home in the middle of the night with paint splattered all over himself. So a cop stops him. Nobody rides a bike around in the middle of the night way out in the sticks except a burglar or something, right? If he’d come up with a good story—I mean, country cops don’t know shit, right? It would’ve been easy as hell to bullshit your way out of a situation like that. But Fuse starts babbling and screws everything up. At that point the cop’s got no reason to suspect he’s coming back from barricading the school, of course, but he asks Fuse his name and the name of his school just in case, because he’s acting so suspicious. Once he heard the news—I mean, even the dumbest cop is going to start putting two and two together. They picked Fuse up right away, and he
“Ken.” My father turned suddenly and looked at me. “What if you get expelled ?”
Obviously the two of them had done some talking while I was gone.
“Well, I'll take the high school equivalence exam. I’ll go to college anyway.”
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “All right. Go to bed.”
“The police contacted us yesterday. This isn’t a problem that can be dealt with just by reading you the riot act. The principal will announce your punishment once it’s been decided. At any rate, try to keep your noses clean till then.”
It was the morning that summer supplementary classes were due to begin. Matsunaga, the guy in charge of our class, had called Adama and me into the teachers’ room. There was a strange atmosphere in the place. It was nothing like when you were discovered smoking in the john or got caught cutting an exam to go and listen to some jazz. The teachers were cold and distant. “You again, Yazaki?
You jerk. Why don’t you try getting called in here for doing something right once in a while?”—nobody said anything like that. The P.E. instructors and the guidance counselor sat at their desks across the room and stared at us. Some of the teachers even looked down at their desks when our eyes met. I suppose they just didn’t know how to deal with the whole thing. After all, it was the biggest disgrace in the history of the school...
It was the same in the classroom. The other kids were reading The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon , trying to look as if nothing had happened. People like Adama and me were as much of a puzzle to them as to their teachers, here in darkest Kyushu. Between classes, a few close friends gathered around the two of us. I started talking in a loud voice about how much fun it had been. I told them about the planning, the execution, and the police interrogation, playing it up for laughs. The part about Nakamura’s “doo-doo” was punctuated by one burst of laughter after another, and the crowd around us grew till it included about half the kids there. Telling the story made me a star . I learned something from that. If you got all gloomy and apologetic, you’d be on your own. No one there was capable of judging the right or wrong of it all. No one was capable of assessing the barricade in ideological terms. Victory went to whoever had the most fun. Behind the blasé front, of course, I was afraid of being expelled, but to put everyone else at ease it was best just to shrug it all off and tell them what a ball we’d had. The fact is that most of that crowd—or at least half of them—would have liked to have done it themselves. The rest, no doubt—the ones who thought I should get down on my knees and beg for mercy— only hated me more than ever. Aware of their hostility, I kept on talking. Even if I am thrown out , my heart was warning them, you’re the ones who lose. My laughter will ring in your ears for the rest of your miserable lives.
After class, Adama, Iwase, and I had a talk in the library.
“How did they find out?” Iwase asked.
“Fuckin’ Fuse,” Adama said. “Fuse lives way out in the suburbs, right? The dumb fuck rode his bicycle home in the middle of the night with paint splattered all over himself. So a cop stops him. Nobody rides a bike around in the middle of the night way out in the sticks except a burglar or something, right? If he’d come up with a good story—I mean, country cops don’t know shit, right? It would’ve been easy as hell to bullshit your way out of a situation like that. But Fuse starts babbling and screws everything up. At that point the cop’s got no reason to suspect he’s coming back from barricading the school, of course, but he asks Fuse his name and the name of his school just in case, because he’s acting so suspicious. Once he heard the news—I mean, even the dumbest cop is going to start putting two and two together. They picked Fuse up right away, and he
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