Charles and Richard Chapter 7

Richard, who had been answering smoothly, found himself at a loss for words for the first time. His hand, which had been rubbing the back of Cherry’s neck, stopped dead. Charles just quietly watched Richard. Richard thought desperately in that moment, but nothing truly came to mind. What is it that I like about Charles? What was it I liked about Charles? What did I have fun doing with Charles? Not a single thing came to mind. He liked Charles’s sisters, Charles’s parents, Charles’s dog, but when it came to Charles himself, there was nothing. He knew nothing and liked nothing about him.

Understanding each other was not easy for the two of them. They had begun to get hurt by each other little by little in their mutual lack of understanding, but since it was no one’s fault, neither Charles nor Richard had anyone from whom they could receive an apology. Richard did not really know who Charles was. Since Charles did not open his heart to Richard, he, too, had never had the chance to know Richard.

They tried to move forward somehow, but what each of them faced was the thick wall of a dead-end alley. The path to each other was so complex and tiresomely tangled that they had to go a long way around just to reach. Richard had just now sensed that fact.

C: Why do you only hate me?

That was not true. Richard did not hate Charles. On the contrary, he was the one wondering why Charles hated him.

Looking closely in the darkening landscape, Charles was crying. Richard took a step back without realizing it. Cherry whined and pushed his head under Richard’s hand. He was begging to be petted. Richard pulled his hand away as if burned. He didn’t know what to do. Charles, tears streaming down his face, did not avoid Richard’s gaze and looked straight at him. Richard was even more bewildered and at a loss. In that moment, Richard could only say one thing.

R: Don’t cry, Charlie….

C: No.

Charles retorted sharply, then slammed the front door shut and went inside. Richard stood there vacantly, staring at Cherry’s brush lying discarded on the front step.

∞ ∞ ∞

After the day of the pool party, Richard stopped all the efforts he had been making to act friendly toward Charles. Going to school together or returning home together ceased immediately. He awkwardly ate lunch a few times tagging along with the group of friends, but eventually stopped even that. Richard took a step back for a while from Charles and everything that belonged to him. He also stopped going to Charles’s house. Instead, his visits to the grocery store and the repair shop increased, but in any case, he stopped going to Charles’s house. He watched Charles from a distance. He would often hear stories about him from Charles’s friends who shared classes with him.

He remembered the day he first saw Charles. Because he talked about that day with Emily so often, like a habit, he would probably never forget it for the rest of his life. Charles had been very quiet the whole time. The image of him slumped down next to his sister, utterly exhausted, and the image of him silently eating fruit cake were about all that came to mind. How much things had changed since then. Richard would often glance at Charles, who sat at a different table in the cafeteria.

Charles, who was particularly sensitive to the cold, always wore a scarf wrapped around and around his neck as winter drew noticeably closer. Sometimes the scarf was colorful, sometimes just black, and Richard could quickly distinguish which ones belonged to each of the sisters and which one was Charles’s own. His healthy cheeks, flushed rosy with color, dimpled deeply whenever he smiled. Richard spent more and more days intently studying those dimples.

Watching quietly, Richard realized that Charles smiled more often than he had thought. Though he was very shy, his was a disposition that smiled quite a lot. He also knew how to be cheerful quite easily. His smiling face with its deeply carved dimples naturally brought Christine to mind. Come to think of it, his palate that hated beans was actually exactly the same as Emily’s. Charles’s green eyes were his father’s eyes, and his pale face and delicately handsome features closely resembled the beautiful Christine.

As the days went by, Richard found more and more things Charles had in common with his family. The traces of all the people Richard loved were left intact in Charles. Finding these discoveries fascinating, Richard observed Charles more and more carefully. But from some point onward, he could no longer read anyone in Charles’s face. He could find the trace of no one in Charles’s little habits. Charles was simply Charles. Up until then, Richard had never once managed to meet Charles’s eyes.

Even Richard, who had been meticulously avoiding Charles, eventually had no choice but to face him. Richard, who had gotten a bit of grease on his uniform while messing around with the mechanics and was walking toward the village entrance to get his car, ran into Charles coming toward the repair shop. Without even being able to look at Charles’s face, Richard awkwardly greeted him. Charles stood silently before Richard. He didn’t ignore him. He didn’t act bluntly either. He just stood there quietly.

The winter wind blew by, coldly disheveling their hair. Richard roughly combed his hair back with his hand and lifted his head. Charles, wrapped up in a black scarf, did not tidy his wind-tousled hair and just gazed quietly at Richard. Through the brown hair falling messily over his straight forehead, pale olive-colored eyes were visible. It was the first time they had looked straight into each other’s eyes at such a close distance since seeing that crying face.

Once more, a gust of winter wind fiercely blew and wrecked the hair Richard had painstakingly combed back. But Richard no longer cared about his hair at all. He had resolved to change himself to win Charles’s love. Of course, the result had been utterly disastrous. But Richard, in this moment, understood one thing he had never understood at all, with an almost absurd ease. It wasn’t that Richard had changed himself. Charles had changed Richard. Charles had changed him so that he would love himself. The wind blew once more.

C: Goodbye.

Charles gave a short greeting and walked past Richard.

∞ ∞ ∞

Meanwhile, Charles’s parents were worrying about the two boys. Both were as docile as could be, so there would be no fistfights or brawling, but the couple had noticed that their relationship had been flowing in an unusual direction recently. Richard, who had come over for dinner every evening starting some day, had suddenly stopped coming altogether. Instead, Richard stopped by the repair shop and the grocery store every day to chatter before leaving. The parents decided not to pry, but when Richard had skipped dinner for nearly a whole month, they began to worry.

It seemed Richard’s parents did come home occasionally, but most of the time, the young boy ate alone. The fact that a boy now barely fourteen was accustomed to eating meals by himself was something that weighed on Charles’s parents’ minds. Richard was already no different from their own son to them.

In the end, the father drew his sword first. Richard, who had stopped by the grocery store after ballet class, was sitting slumped in front of the heater warming himself, and the father sat down behind him, pretended to watch television, and casually broached the subject.

Father: Richie, are you not coming over for dinner again today?

R: Um….

Father: It’s spaghetti today.

R: …But I have a lot of homework and…

Father: Spaghetti loaded with meatballs.

R: …Does Charlie like spaghetti too?

Father: Of course.

R: Ugh….