Emi and Hidori

Late in the afternoon at Yamaku High, during track practice, the once star of the Yamaku track team, Emi Ibarazaki, quietly navigated the halls of the school to the nurse’s office, where a light was on.  She opened the door and laid her backpack upon the Nurse’s chair before dutifully entering a smaller adjoining office from which the light emanated.

The sight of Hidori-chan on her toilet chair was something that had deeply unsettled Emi prior to her commitment to volunteer caring for the girl.  She had her hands placed in her lap, neatly trimmed nails barely fidgeting, almost motionless where they lay on the pleated school uniform which was worn in a longer style than many of the students liked, almost concealing the portion of the girl’s legs that were not covered by her white ankle socks in simple, black dress shoes.  Emi had owned shoes like those before, and secretly considered them somewhat childish for a high schooler.  The girl’s skirt was, of course, subtly hiked up behind her so that she could make liberal use of her toilet chair as needed, a dignity apparently preferable to wearing diapers.  Tubes that were hooked up to several machines that Emi had grown familiar with, and could even name, emerged from different entry points on her school uniform.  And between her shoulders, above the ribbon ineffectually attached to the top of her uniform blouse, was the empty space where the girl’s head would be.

“Good afternoon, Hidori-chan,” said Emi with a little less cheer than she could normally muster.  The girl did not reply or give indication of hearing.  This used to bother Emi, and she had even asked Nurse whether it was meaningful to speak to the girl at all.  Nurse had assured her that Hidori’s parents insisted she could understand plain speech, and had responded to it before.  Emi was doubtful of this at first, but found that speaking to Hidori helped her to pass the time as she carried out her tasks.

Emi began sanitizing one of the new feeding tubes that was to be put into Hidori’s gastronomic region.  She heard a slight gurgle from the girl’s throat, something that spooked her the first time she had heard it, but had since taken to imagining it as a kind of conversation cue.  She smiled softly.  “Oh, I’m sorry Hidori-chan, I’m not my usual cheerful self today, huh?  You noticed that, did you?”  She put a hand on Hidori’s, stroking the girl’s twitching fingers lightly, and let out a sigh.  “To be honest, things haven’t been going so great for me lately.”

Hidori hiccupped and her arms shifted a little.  Emi sat down beside the girl and lifted the bottom of her blouse to remove her feeding tube, dabbing the area around the hole with disinfectant.  “You know Hisao, don’t you?  The transfer student with the messy hair.  You must have seen him in the office once or twice.  Me and him have been kind of going out lately, and, well… he’s sort of a jerk sometimes, a bit of a couch potato, but he’s funny and he makes me laugh.  You know how it is, the kind of guy that will just hold you when things are bad, listen to your darkest secrets…”

Hidori sat attentively on her toilet chair, adding nothing to the conversation, but in so doing displaying her own skill at listening to and hearing out her friend.  Emi slid the new feeding tube into her stomach, taped it into place, and pulled the brim of her shirt back down again, concealing the area.  She took a second to admire Hidori’s nicely manicured fingernails.  The girl’s mother took such good care of her.  Emi thought briefly about the last time she and her mother had bonded over something like this, and how lucky she was to still have her, at least.  She thought of how sometimes her mother would brush her hair for her, and wondered whether Hidori’s mother had put that extra effort into caring for the girl’s hands.

“We had another new transfer student, after him,” Emi continued, as she rose up and started putting away some of the medical supplies on the shelves.  “Someone I never thought I would see again.  You remember how I lost my legs in the car accident, Hidori?  Well, it turns out they’d been saved after all.  It took them longer to recover, but, well, now they’re back at school just like I am.   Doctors say it’s a miracle that they were able to survive.  Medicine is amazing, isn’t it Hidori?  Maybe me and you can be doctors someday and take care of people.  Wouldn’t you like that?”

The girl’s throat briefly sputtered as she listened to Emi talk.  Her chest appeared to be heaving somewhat, as if her heart rate were accelerating.  She sometimes did this during Emi’s visits and Emi liked to imagine it was her enthusiasm becoming infectious.  But it was hard for Emi to hide the fact that, today, she was putting on a bit of an act to try and keep her spirits up.

“My legs.  Well, they’re back.  My mom was so proud.  Nurse was amazed.  The whole school was astounded.  Especially when they joined the track team…  and well, long story short, I’m not the star runner on the team anymore.”  She chuckled darkly.  “Crazy how that works, huh?”

Emi had finished what she’d come to do, but had taken a seat next to Hidori, the patient listener whose warm hand Emi was holding in hers.  Her breaths heaved as she listened to Emi, who had begun crying quietly.

“Sorry, Hidori-chan.  I shouldn’t be so ungrateful.  Everyone was so nice to me when I came here and they encouraged me and made me so proud of myself.  I owe it to my legs to show them the same courtesy.  And I try, Hidori-chan.  I try so hard.  But it’s just like… there’s only so much support to go around, you know?”

“They started staying with me and Rin.  I told you about Rin, right?  We’re like pants and a shirt, she used to say.  Well I don’t know, but Rin seemed to stop needing me as much.  She and my legs would just… stay up and have these great conversations.   I always thought Rin was neat but I guess I never really listened to her like that or took her that seriously… she always seemed sort of random or aloof, and she never spoke to me that much.  Well, she at least helped me learn to care for someone, right?  I hope I can be a better friend to you at least than I was to her, Hidori-chan.”

Hidori’s fingers moved slightly, the knuckles straightening out at the joints.  Emi clutched the hand with hers.  Words aside, this might even be the most direct way of communicating with the girl.  If she never heard a word of this, she could at least connect with Emi through this basic touch.

“I guess,” Emi continued, her voice choking up a little, “it wasn’t so bad until Hisao started hanging out with them, too.”  Emi had begun outright crying at this point, the tears running down her cheeks.  She wiped her nose with a tissue and sniffled.  "Until I caught them in his dorm room… and they weren’t wearing socks!”

Emi had to consciously restrain herself after this.  She was being loud, and it would hardly be any help to her if someone else overheard this rant of hers.  Hidori dutifully gurgled something from her throat, and the sound made Emi feel somewhat at ease.

“I know, I’m bellyaching when I should just keep my head high and press on.  Me and you, Hidori-chan, we’re lucky to even be alive in the first place, huh?  We may not be the biggest miracles in the school, but we’re still pretty amazing, right?”

Emi looked down to her “feet,” the bare prosthetics adjacent to Hidori’s slender, well-dressed, honestly rather cute legs and feet, with those childish black dress shoes.

“You noticed I stopped wearing those socks, huh?” Emi said, smirking in spite of herself.  “I guess it’s not like I’m fooling anyone anymore.  If they want to see those legs of mine, they can look somewhere else.  We don’t need those old pieces of ourselves to be any good.  We can just carry on, can’t we, Hidori-chan?”

In the theatre of Emi’s imagination, Hidori reached her other hand over to touch her friend’s, cradling her one hand in both of hers, and gurgled some words of comfort.  This didn’t happen in actuality, but Emi comforted herself with the thought that maybe, if Hidori could really express herself, this is what she would do.

The girls sat there in the room quietly, saying little, making a bit of small talk, until Nurse returned to notify Emi that her shift was over, and that Hidori would be taken back to her dormitory.  Outside the track field had fallen silent, and the students had all gone back to their places of rest for the evening.  As Emi left the Nurse’s office she imagined her friend, Hidori-chan, waving goodbye to her.  So she stopped in the doorway and waved back, mouthing something to her silently.

“Thanks for listening, pal.  See you soon.”