Punctual

Punctual (Part Six)

Mmmmm, paint fumes...

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My hand freezes in midair, halfway to my mouth as a clump of rice falls from the pair of chopsticks clutched between my fingers.

“No, seriously,” I blurt out, bewilderingly, at the boy sitting across from me. “Can’t you ever just stay in your own classroom?”

“I could,” Yoshiharu replies, halfway through unwrapping his school-bought lunch. He starts eating.

“... But?”

“Hmm?” The boy glances up through his overgrown fringe, looking perplexed. “Oh. I like it here better.”

Fine. I give up. We eat in silence as I skim over my handwritten notes for an upcoming chemistry exam, the bicycle fool content to simply listen to the sound of turning pages.

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“Yoshiharu-san?” I’ve moved on to annotating an article on rhetorical strategies given in Japanese class.

“Yeah?”

“...Why do you have green on your uniform?” The bicycle fool widens his eyes in slight amusement as he twists around and spies the expanse of emerald splattered across part of his dress shirt. Yoshiharu’s face breaks out in a grin as he rubs the back of his head and goes back to eating.

A full five seconds pass.

“Uh...”

Yoshiharu catches my dumbfounded look, swallowing the rest of his food as he reaches across my desk to clap me on the shoulder. “Don’t worry about it!” He says easily.

I blink. “I...Okay...” I trail off, gingerly shrugging off the boy’s hand.

After the bell rings, Yoshiharu beams once again, balling up his napkin and shooting the trash into the waste bin halfway across the room before getting up and heading out the door, waving as he does so. I stare at the boy’s retreating back for another couple of seconds before finishing up my lunch, wondering what on Earth I’ve gotten myself into.

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I’m rifling through my bag, searching searching searching, making sure I have my sheet music, swim goggles, article drafts, tutoring schedule, nearly having a fit when I realize I didn’t bring backup batteries for my graphing calculator -

I stop, taking a few steps back in the emptying corridor as I spy Yoshiharu in the art studio, currently making a mess of his shirt sleeves as he concentrates on a huge piece of canvas, both hands and forearms almost entirely covered in gray.

Oh. Well, that explains a lot.

I start off once again, only turning back around once curiosity gets the better of me and I march back to the art room.

Plopping down on a metal stool, I sit around for about five minutes before Yoshiharu even notices. He looks up, hair slightly mussed to the side with a few fringe hairs poking the edges of his eyes. There’s a smear of charcoal on his brow bone.

“Ah!” Yoshiharu exclaims as he pushes up his sleeves (and distributes a hefty amount of black-gray onto the cuffs). “If it isn’t Hiyashi-san! Don’t you have one of your fifty-thousand after-school activities to get to?”

“I don’t have to tutor for another half an hour.” This is true; I usually arrive early and spend the waiting time in the library making flashcards of English vocabulary words. “What are you doing?”

The boy gives an impish grin, clearly delighting in the attention. “Doing what I do best!” He gestures to the half-finished sketch on the canvas board, displaying a rough-outline of a woman’s retreating figure, a tiny toddler following along by a firm grip on his mother’s skirt. It’s good. Really good.

“So?” Yoshiharu nudges me slightly. “What are your thoughts? It’s nowhere near finished; I just started going back over the sketch to really define the shadows and everything, but what do you think?”

It takes me a minute. I examine the beginnings of a piece of art that could have very well been a photograph, swallowing up the individual sections of the canvas before I can get any words out.

“It’s good,” I say finally. “It’s very realistic. Even though you’re just starting, your lines are really sharp and make it seem less of a handmade scene. It looks real.”

I can tell immediately that the bicycle idiot isn’t satisfied. I’m right, as I usually am. Hesitantly turning my head towards the artist, I catch Yoshiharu looking at me with a strange mix of incertitude and awe.

“What?”

“You don’t understand art at all, do you?”

I’m appalled. “What?” I shoot back. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

This gives him pause. “Hmmm,” he mutters, running a hand through his fringe and catching some of the grey splotched on his forehead. “You... How should I put this? You... Don’t understand the purpose.”

I deadpan. “What, the purpose of art?”

Yoshiharu grimaces, clearly still searching for a way to phrase his words. “Sort of?”

“Oh, so because I don’t understand why you want to die in an art studio huffing all these paint fumes means I don’t understand art?”

The boy is twisting his hands, fingers stretching as he attempts to gesticulate what he can’t put into words. “More like... You don’t feel it.” Yoshiharu sighs once, rubbing the back of his neck. “You don’t really get the emotional reason of it at all.”

Oh. “So? So I give a perfectly objective point of view when critiquing your artwork. Is that bad?”

“Well, no. But you can’t really comprehend the intention at all without understanding the emotional value that a piece of art is supposed to hold.”

I blink. So does Yoshiharu.

“I don’t get it.”

The fool just gives me a pitying smile (I hate it when people do that!) and slumps back down into his chair. He laughs. “Well then, that’s all right!”

“Oh really,” I retort. “How so?”

The boy stops laughing as an overjoyed look overcomes his face. “If you really don’t get it,” he says. “Then I’ll just teach you!”

The next few seconds pass in an uncomfortable quietude as I contemplate Yoshiharu’s offer, only realizing that my half-hour break is up when I glance up at the clock. I’ve got to give some sort of answer.

“No,” I say simply, double-checking my bag to make sure I have a backup scientific calculator.

“No?”

I extricate myself from the stool, readjusting the grip on my book-bag as I make my way to the exit. I reach for the doorknob and reconsider. “I’ll think about it,” I amend. I step out into the hallway and hear the door click shut.

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