Chapter 3
Chapter 3
Kento’s fervent practicing over the weekend came back to bite him in the butt on Monday.
His knee had been aching since morning, and he had no appetite.
“Normal size, please,” he ordered in a feeble voice, instead of the extra-large he normally ordered. The woman over the kitchen counter looked at him wide-eyed.
“Kenny, what’s gotten into you?” she said.
“I had a snack earlier,” Kento lied. Tomoya was right behind him, and Kento did not want the boy to worry.
However, his smaller portion at breakfast came back to haunt him during Physical Education in third period. Now, in addition to the pain in his leg, his hunger was sapping the energy out of him.
They were practicing on the vaults in Physical Education today, and to make things worse, they were practicing a particularly difficult move called the handstand vault. Students had to do a handstand on the vault, somersault in the air, and land on the other side.
Physical Education was a strong subject for Kento, but he was definitely not in his best condition right now. His right knee bothered him and prevented him from concentrating.
He, along with the rest of the students, jumped the vault in order and went back to the end of the line after their turn. They had gone through the routine a number of times before the accident happened.
When Kento stepped onto the springboard with his good foot, the familiar pain shot through his knee. He regained his balance, but barely, and did a handstand on the vault. The moment he sprung off and landed on the mat, the pain shot through his leg again ? but this time, it was his left leg.
“Agh!” The pain made him curl up on the spot.
“What’s wrong?” The PE teacher came running up to him.
“I think I sprained my left foot.”
“It’s rare to see you trip up, Yamashiro,” said the teacher, touching Kento’s right foot. “You should go to the infirmary. Can you walk on your own?”
“Yes, I’m fine.”
Truth be told, his right knee also hurt, but it wasn’t so bad that he had to humiliate himself and lean on someone’s shoulder. Tomoya was giving him a concerned look, so Kento flashed a peace-sign at him to show him he was alright. Kento dragged his foot as he lurched into a walk.
It was like a textbook case of bad luck. First it was his right leg; now his left foot was hurt.
“This sucks,” he muttered as he left the gymnasium. He went outside and walked along the edge of the schoolyard instead going into the school, mindful of the classes still going on. The infirmary was located in a separate wing at the end of the long main building.
When Kento rolled open the glass door, he was met with the stinging smell of disinfectant. Although he had come here several times to get cold compresses for the unbearable pain in his right knee, he could never come to like this smell. The school nurse, Kazue Fujimoto, was a kind, plump woman in her fifties. Although she was nice, Kento did not want to become a regular visitor to this room if he could help it. But today, he couldn’t afford to be picky.
“Mrs. Fujimoto,” Kento called as he stepped inside.
A corner of the quiet room was partitioned off with a curtain, and there was a presence behind it. When he drew closer, he heard a deep man’s voice.
“Just bear with me a bit… it’ll prick a little. There, all done. You can open your hand.”
The curtain was drawn, revealing a man in a white lab coat. There was someone lying on the bed, hooked up to an IV bag that was hanging from a metal stand resembling a coat rack. The man in the lab coat adjusted the speed of the infusion.
“It’ll be over in about two hours, so take a nap until then,” he said to the boy in the bed. He then closed the curtain and turned to look this way.
“Hey?you’re…”
It was the man Kento had met in the hallway of his dorm last week. The lab coat made him look different, but there was no mistaking his slim stature and gentle face.
The man also noticed Kento. “Hi there, what’s the matter? Coming down with a fever?” he said, his eyes smiling at him from behind his glasses.
“No. I kind of sprained my foot,” Kento mumbled. The man’s eyes turned worried.
“I’ll have a look. Have a seat on that chair.”
“Where’s Mrs. Fujimoto?” Kento stared warily at the man’s face.
“Mrs. Fujimoto isn’t here right now. Would you rather not have me instead?”
“That’s not what I meant. I wanted to ask who you are.”
The man, still smiling, ushered Kento onto a round stool in front of his desk.
“I’m the school doctor, or rather, a substitute. My name is Yuri Orihara.”
“School doctor?”
Kento tilted his head in perplexity over a phrase he wasn’t used to hearing. He sat down on the round stool as Orihara patiently explained to him.
“The school doctor does medical checkups and administers vaccines to you and your fellow students. You remember having checkups every April at school, don’t you?”
Now that he thought about it, he did. He remembered back in primary school, he was always getting some kind of vaccine or medical checkup. He vaguely remembered a certain Dr. Someone in a lab coat consulting him, though he hadn’t realized that this person was the school doctor.
Was there one in junior high school?
Kento still kept his head cocked as he replied, “Yeah.”
Orihara smiled wryly at his half-hearted response.
“Well, we only see you students once in a while, anyway. I guess it can’t be helped if you don’t know about us.”
He was right. It was impossible to remember the school doctor if you only saw him once or twice a year.
“So, what’s a school doctor like you doing here?”
“Mrs. Fujimoto asked me to make a house call to a student who was in bed with a fever,” Orihara explained as he crouched down on his knee in front of Kento. “Is this the leg that hurts? I saw you trying not to put weight on it.”
Orihara touched his right foot as he spoke. Kento shook his head vehemently.
“No. It’s the other one.”
Orihara took off Kento’s sneaker and touched his left foot with his slender fingers.
“Can you try moving your big toe?”
Then, he supported Kento’s ankle as he carefully rotated each toe.
“There’s no swelling, so your ligaments and bones should be alright.” Orihara took poultice from the medicine shelf, applied it from the heel to the ankle, and wound an elastic bandage around it.
The sliding door opened with a rattle, and a portly middle-aged woman appeared.
“Oh, Doctor, I’ll handle that.”
Fujimoto, the school nurse, was back.
“You again, is it?” she said with a smile when she saw Kento’s face, but her tone of voice changed when her eyes fell on his bandaged left foot. “Have you hurt your other leg, too?”
At her words, Orihara furrowed his brow and adjusted his glasses.
“So he has hurt his right leg, hasn’t he?” he said to Fujimoto.
“That’s right. Lately he’s been coming here all the time to get poultice from me.”
Kento shook his head as insistently as he could. He hadn’t wanted word to get out about his right leg in the first place. There was no way he was going to see a doctor about it.
“It’s nothing. There’s nothing wrong with it.”
Orihara nevertheless directed a sharp gaze at Kento’s right leg. He ran his fingers searchingly along it. He held the knee and lifted the heel with his other hand.
“Does it hurt?”
“No.”
Orihara carefully studied the front of the shin just below the knee.
“Does it happen to hurt around here, by any chance? Especially when you put weight on it?”
The pair of piercing eyes right beside him looked at him steadily, as if they could see through everything. Kento reluctantly nodded.
“Yeah. How can you tell?”
Orihara rested his chin on his fist and lapsed into thought.
“I don’t think I got your name,” he said as his face softened.
“Kento Yamashiro.”
“And how old are you?”
“Sixteen.”
Orihara turned to Fujimoto beside him, who was listening in with a worried look. “Do you know how much he’s grown in the past year?” he asked her.
Fujimoto extracted some documents from the cabinet and looked for Kento’s personal record. She let out an exclamation of dismay.
“He just transferred here in September, so we don’t have any of his former records.”
Orihara turned back to Kento. “Do you know how much you’ve grown in this past year?”
“Not really… but I did get a lot taller. Maybe about fifteen centimetres more.”
Orihara’s eyes widened in surprise, but pointed at Kento’s large sneakers and let out a sound of amazement.
“You probably did grow quite a bit, didn’t you? You have pretty large feet, and you’re almost as tall as me.”
Orihara crouched down again and applied another poultice on Kento’s right knee. He wound a support around it, then spoke to Kento in a grave tone.
“Kento, I think you should get an X-ray taken of your right knee. Since there’s no X-ray machine in this infirmary, would you be able to come to the clinic I work at tomorrow instead?”
“Clinic?”
“Dr. Orihara works at Miyashita Clinic, right in front of the back gates of the school,” Fujimoto jumped in to explain. “Dr. Miyashita is actually the school doctor, but Dr. Orihara is his nephew and he’s filling in for him.”
Kento was a little overwhelmed by the bombardment of information, but one thing he did understand was that he needed to get an X-ray taken and examined.
He was suddenly overcome with anxiety.
“Am I seriously hurt?” he asked Orihara in a trembling voice.
“No. We’re just going to take an image just in case. Could you come by with one of your parents tomorrow?”
Kento bowed his head, unsure of what to do. “Neither of them are in Japan. That’s why I’m living in a dormitory.”
“Oh, dear. What shall we do?” Fujimoto said worriedly.
“Do you have any sort of guardian?”
As soon as Orihara said those words, a boyish voice spoke up behind them, making everyone turn around.
“What about the manager of the agency?”
The sliding door stood open, and Tomoya was poking his head in.
“Remember whenever we’d get sick at concerts out of town, the manager would take us to the hospital with our health insurance cards?”
“Manager?” Orihara turned his body to face Tomoya.
“We’re part of an agency called Sion Promotion.”
Orihara nodded, looking convinced. “Ah, so you boys are entertainment personalities, then. Part of what they call the entertainers’ club? Alright, then in that case, I’m expecting to see you tomorrow with your manager.”
Fujimoto patted her voluptuous chest with firm resolution. “I’ll phone the manager.”
After watching Orihara leave the infirmary, Tomoya immediately pounced on Fujimoto.
“Mrs. Fujimoto, who was that?” he asked. “He’s really handsome. And he looks nice.”
“Really? I thought he was normal,” Kento said indifferently. “Besides, what’s up with him, anyway? He said there was something wrong with my leg. He gets on my nerves!”
Fujimoto patted Kento’s shoulder with an air of exasperation.
“Dr. Orihara is just concerned about you.”
“Is that his name? Dr. Orihara? So if he’s a doctor, he must be really smart!” Tomoya gushed excitedly to Fujimoto.
“He’s the school doctor, dear.”
“But he’s not Dr. Miyashita. That’s who usually comes.” Tomoya at least appeared to know about Miyashita, since he had been at Shonan since seventh grade. “Is he a new school doctor? So he’s replacing Dr. Miyashita?”
A school doctor was more or less just a doctor who came to school on a part-time basis as necessary. Most of the time, schools asked doctors at a nearby practices to be their school doctors, like a side job to their regular practice. The school had asked Miyashita to take the position since his practice was right in front of the back gates of the school. Shonan Private School also had a dormitory full of students to take care of.
“He hasn’t replaced Dr. Miyashita. He’s a substitute.” Fujimoto told the same story to Tomoya which she had just told Kento.
Orihara was Miyashita’s nephew. Recently, Miyashita had been hospitalized due to an injury to his cervical spine. At the hospital he was also found to be suffering complications from diabetes, and was forced to extend his stay. Since he could not simply close his clinic during that time, in a last-minute effort he had summoned Orihara from his post at a university hospital to act as his substitute.
“He’s also taken over as our school doctor while he’s at it.”
Now that he knew that a university hospital doctor like Orihara had told him he needed to undergo a thorough examination, Kento was at once seized with uncertainty.
Don’t tell me I’m actually seriously ill? With bone cancer, or something like that?
Kento had had to put weight on his right leg in order to protect his freshly-injured left leg, which meant by the time Kento crawled into bed, the pain had gotten utterly unbearable.
What if I have to amputate my leg? There was no stopping his imagination now. Tomoya noticed Kento’s ashen colour and propped himself up in his bed across.
“What’s wrong?” he said. “Does your leg hurt?”
“No.” Kento maintained his bravado and pulled the covers over his head. In the dark, he gritted his teeth against the pain and clenched a fistful of his sheets.
Mom.
He called the name of the person he wanted most by his side. He felt a stinging at the back of his nose. He rubbed his nose against his pillow to distract himself from the pain. He could not let the tears spill. Not at any cost, even if no one was looking.
I’m not a kid anymore.
That was what he had said to his worried mother when he had decided to live in the dormitory alone. I’m not a kid anymore, he had reassured her.
He didn’t want to worry his mother in London, nor his father in New York. Both of them were chasing their dreams; that was why he had convinced them that he wanted to chase his dreams too, since he wasn’t a child anymore.
But… what if there’s a disease in my right leg?
Both of his legs throbbed painfully, along with the beating of his heart. When he realized it, he was groaning in pain.
“Kento! Kento, your leg hurts, doesn’t it?” He lifted his covers to see Tomoya peering at him with concern.
“I’m fine… go back to sleep.” With that, Kento rolled over. Suddenly, a fierce pain shot through his legs, and a groan escaped through his gritted teeth. He managed to swallow it before he turned to the wall. He pulled the covers over his head again.
The pain grew worse, and tears pried his eyelids apart. Kento bit his lip.
Damnit, I will not cry.
He wasn’t sure how long he had endured the pain like that.
“Are you alright?” he heard a low voice suddenly whisper at his ear. “Look this way, Kento.”
As he lethargically opened his eyes and twisted his neck, he saw Orihara looking down at him.
“…It’s you.”
“I’m sorry. If the pain was that bad, I should have prescribed you painkillers.”
Orihara was wearing a collared shirt and pants instead of his lab coat. A large black bag was sitting at his feet. Orihara opened the bag and took out a medicine pouch.
“Are you up for taking some medication?” He looked around. “I’ll go get some juice for you,” and left the room. After some moments, he returned, out of breath and a can of orange juice in hand.
“Ah, that was a long way to the vending machine,” he laughed as he pulled the tab and handed the can to Kento.
“Can you get up?”
“Yeah.”
Kento managed to prop half of his body up. He took the medicine capsule from Orihara and washed it down with orange juice.
While he was busy with that, Orihara examined both of Kento’s legs and changed his poultice.
The cool compress made the pain fade away, and Kento’s head finally cleared enough for him to think. He was still a little dazed, but he managed to thank Orihara.
“How did you know?” he then asked.
Orihara smiled gently. “Tomoya contacted Mrs. Fujimoto to tell her you were in pain. Mrs. Fujimoto asked me to make a house call here.”
Fujimoto, the school nurse, lived in this dorm. Tomoya had probably gone running to her room.
“Where’s Tomoya?”
“He said he would stay over at Mrs. Fujimoto’s room tonight.”
Kento looked at the bedside clock and saw that it was two in the morning. He whipped back to look at Orihara in surprise.
“You came all the way here at this hour?”
Orihara shook his head as if to say it was of no consequence.
“Just to let you know, Mrs. Fujimoto used to work as a nurse long time ago at my uncle’s clinic. That’s why she often asks me to make house calls, and I usually can’t say no. Besides, after I heard you were in pain, there was no way I could leave you like that.”
Orihara suddenly lowered his head with an apologetic look on his face.
“I’m sorry. I should have prescribed you pain medication. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize…”
Kento crawled under the covers again and looked steadily at Orihara. For a fleeting moment, he remembered how the man had been panting after hurrying to get him juice. The weight lifted from his heart, which had been heavy with anxiety. He felt a warm glow.
“Hey…” he mustered the courage to say what came next. “Can you stay with me a little longer?”
Orihara smiled and nodded. He took a handkerchief out of his pants pocket and wiped Kento’s sweaty forehead.
“Um...” Kento mustered the courage to open his mouth again. “Would I have to amputate my right leg?”
Orihara widened his eyes and hastily removed his glasses.
“Not at all! Don’t tell me that’s what you were worried about?”
Kento began to think his concerns were immature, and blushed from the embarrassment.
“No, I just thought I’d ask,” he mumbled brusquely.
The apologetic look crossed Orihara’s face again, and he bobbed his head down in apology.
“I’m sorry. I should have filled you in properly. Instead I made you worry about needless things.”
Kento realized he was the one causing Orihara trouble.
“Don’t apologize,” he raised his voice in a hurried tone. “My imagination was just getting carried away.”
Orihara shook his head silently. Suddenly, he lifted his face and looked somewhere far away.
“You’re right. If you thought you were going to have to amputate your leg, you’d be surprised… and probably devastated.”
He reached out to take Kento’s hand.
“That won’t happen to you. I promise. You can rest easy. I’ll make you better.”
“Okay.”
Orihara’s hand was surprisingly smaller than Kento’s, but it was soft, and he could almost feel the man’s body heat flowing into him.
The painkiller seemed to have worked, for the throbbing in his leg gradually ebbed away. At last, Kento closed his eyes in peace.
When he opened his eyes next, the dazzling sunlight was streaming in through the window.
His leg still ached occasionally, but it wasn’t unbearable.
“Was that a dream?”
He saw the can of orange juice and the medicine pouch on his bedside table.
“It wasn’t. He really did come for me.”