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only answer questions when she felt like it. When she didn’t want to answer, or when
she clearly had no intention of responding, she simply ignored the questions, as if she
had never heard them. Like Komatsu. The two were much alike in that regard. Which
made them very different from Tengo. If someone asked Tengo a question, any
question, he would do his best to answer it. He had probably been born that way.
His older girlfriend called him at five thirty.
“What did you do today?” she asked.
“I was writing a story all day,” he answered, half truthfully. He had not been
writing his own fiction. But this was not something he could explain to her in any
detail.
“Did it go well?”
“More or less.”
“I’m sorry for canceling today on such short notice. I think we can meet next
week.”
“I’ll be looking forward to it.”
“Me too,” she said.
After that, she talked about her children. She often did that with Tengo. She had
two little girls. Tengo had no siblings and obviously no children, so he didn’t know
much about young children. But that never stopped her from telling Tengo about hers.
Tengo rarely initiated a conversation, but he enjoyed listening to other people. And so
he listened to her with interest. Her older girl, a second grader, was probably being
bullied at school, she said. The girl herself had told her nothing, but the mother of one
of the girl’s classmates had let her know that this was apparently happening. Tengo
had never met the girl, but he had once seen a photograph. She didn’t look much like
her mother.
“Why are they bullying her?” Tengo asked.
“She often has asthma attacks, so she can’t participate in a lot of activities with the
other kids. Maybe that’s it. She’s a sweet little thing, and her grades aren’t bad.”
“I don’t get it,” Tengo said. “You’d think they’d take special care of a kid with
asthma, not bully her.”
“It’s never that simple in the kids’ world,” she said with a sigh. “Kids get shut out
just for being different from everyone else. The same kind of thing goes on in the
grown-up world, but it’s much more direct in the children’s world.”
“Can you give me a concrete example?”
She gave him several examples, none of which was especially bad in itself, but
which, continued on a daily basis, could have a severe impact on a child: hiding
things, not speaking to the child, or doing nasty imitations of her. “Did you ever
experience bullying when you were a child?”
Tengo thought back to his childhood. “I don’t think so,” he answered. “Or maybe I
just never noticed.”
“If you never noticed, it never happened. I mean, the whole
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