5. Ichi, ni, san . . . hyaku, sen, man!
Jackhammers were partying it up and my brain was their bouncy castle.
I didn't get my belly rub. Just this freaking headache. To make matters worse, Kotoha had sat me at the dining table and dropped stacks of scrap paper in front of me. She gave me lines and homework before leaving the room with the still smoking collar in one hand and her teddy bear in the other. The whole time, she used her body like a shield to protect the bear. One of its arms looked to be hanging on by a thread. I guess I'd really messed up when I threw it, huh? As soon as I learned how, I was going to apologise so hard all its limbs would drop off.
But lines? Really?! If I wanted to do mundane stupid stuff like this, I'd have gone to school. Then again, skipping school that day to go to a comic fair had led me here. What the lesson to take away from that was, I didn't know. So, I scratched my head, winced, and looked at the paper in front of me. The lines could wait. They were too much like getting a slapped wrist and the homework was bound to be more interesting anyway.
One look at the top sheet and I groaned. This was the real punishment!
Maths. I hated it. It hated me.
Roman numerals, Arabic numerals, tally marks. It didn't matter. I struggled with numbers. Just couldn't hold them straight in my head or on a calculator screen. There was a word for this, but I couldn't spell it. The numbers confronting me now were even more confusing, and I didn't have the collar to help me.
「全然やってないじゃないですか！？」
I jumped at Kotoha's raised voice and hit my knees on the underside of the table.
She peeled the math sheet off my cheek and waved it at me. 「駄目ですよ、ガイさん・・・もしかして・・・あっ！ 待ってて！」 Just as quickly as she had burst in on me, Kotoha sprinted back out the room. A distant crash and a tiny squeal echoed from a few rooms away.
「はい。これ」 When she came back, Kotoha handed me a beaten up smart phone. Her hands were wet and they left smudges on the cracks that snaked over the screen. She popped open the fridge and took out a small bottle, cracked that open and exclaimed, 「ぷっはぁ！」 after gulping down mouthfuls. How many of those had she drunk today?
She plopped a matching bottle on the table for me, said 「頑張ってくださいね」 and left me on my own again. The cat and dog plushies watched from a safe distance away like guards.
On the phone was a video of Kotoha in a cramped room with green wallpaper. An army of blurry frogs was just visible behind her on a small shelf.
「一」 said video Kotoha, holding up one finger. 「二」 she continued, holding up two fingers. Did it have to be those two fingers in that orientation? 「三」 was accompanied with three fingers. When she reached ten (which she said as 十) things got interesting. First the view changed. I guess she'd been holding the camera so far. Now it gracefully glanced over her chest...
...I hit pause and stared. These were assets I'd die for...
Pressing play, the video continued on its journey to finish squashed between two frog plushies. I could now see the other side of this room. It sure was narrow and filled with more frogs. Plastic, porcelain, plush. A mis-matched colony of ribbiting amphibians.
「十一」 tiny plot filled Kotoha said from the smartphone. She held up ten fingers then closed them and opened one. She did similar for 十二, holding up two fingers. I guessed this was eleven and twelve. So that would mean that thirteen was 十三, right?
「ピンポン！」 I said to myself when micro Kotoha counted thirteen.
At twenty, teeny Kotoha flashed ten fingers twice. 「二十」 Then she skipped to 「三十」 which I guessed was thirty or three tens. I kept up my guessing (and getting it right) and Mini Kotoha soon reached ninety or 九十. Heh. Counting's easy! One hundred had to be 十十, right? Ten tens. No doubt about it! I had this.
「百」 corrected smartphone smarty pants Kotoha, flashing ten fingers ten times and proving I didn't have anything at all. I wish she'd flash something else already. The camera changed view again, this time to one from a lower shelf that viewed the tiny room at an angle. Sadly, it only showed the ceiling and the dark abysses of Kotoha's nostrils in its latest voyage. I was going to have bad dreams tonight.
From the new angle, Kotoha was mostly out of frame. I could hear a strange rattle before her counting began anew. One finger waggled in the centre of the screen and she repeated, 「百」 Then two fingers, 「二百」 said disembodied Kotoha. Three fingers filled the screen, 「三は？」 prompted Kotoha's voice.
I figured she was asking about three hundred. So, 「さんひゃく」 I said to my plushie guards.
「ブブー！さんびゃくでした」 Laughter came from the phone. This was a recording, wasn't it? There was a thump, followed by an exclamation of 「いって！」 and a frog toppling from somewhere into view. After an awkward moment of Kotoha rescuing the frog while doing her best to remain out of view, she continued with her counting. For four and five hundred, she used ひゃく again after each number. 「さ」 she said, just before six hundred. 「次は何ですか」
I wasn't falling for any traps again.
Sure enough, smug phone Kotoha soon said, 「ろっぴゃく！」
To get a feel for this, I repeated the word. There was a short pause between 「ろ」 and 「っぴゃく」 and I wasn't sure I was getting it right. Well, I could ask about that later. Seven hundred went back to ひゃく. But eight hundred... 「はっぴゃく！」 This was enough to make my head spin. Nine hundred again ricocheted to きゅうひゃく.
千, it turned out, was a thousand. And like 百, 一 was not placed at the start for one thousand. Three and eight thousand also followed the same pattern of changing pronunciation: さんぜん for three thousand and はっせん for eight. Again with that little pause between は and っせん. Six thousand didn't undergo any change.
The video ended with another attempt at a question I wasn't going to try to answer. 「九千九百九十九の次は何でしょうか」 Thankfully I didn't have to. A close up of a refreshed looking Kotoha supplied the answer, 「一万！」
Delaying the inevitable could only be done for so long, and the smart phone wasn't willing to do the math for me.
Just looking at the problems made my head throb more. The jackhammer party was a slight tickle in comparison.
After several pages of this, I knew how the bear plushie must be feeling.
「何これ！？」 Kotoha looked frazzled. Had she never seen a paper airplane before? Or was it the airport's worth of such planes on the floor that had her perplexed? I ran a finger over the paper in my hand, pressing firmly on the folds, then threw the latest jet toward Kotoha. It fell short. She snorted and joined me at the table.
Her hands moved swiftly and with precision. The plane she folded also flew true and far. I guess she'd never seen badly made paper airplanes before. She also, apparently, had never seen homework like mine before.
I looked at the corrected answers again and slumped further into my chair.
It didn't make sense. How could I have gotten the first few sums wrong?! For that matter, how on earth 2.0 could I have gotten those last ones right? Every time I tried to do those ones, I came up with a different answer.
「どうしましたか」
By her tone, I guessed Kotoha was asking what my problem was. I wanted to tell her that there was no way that even I got 1 + 2 wrong, so why had she circled it like she was pointing out a problem with my answer? And why had she ticked 507 as the correct answer to 356 + 21? It took me a while, but I noticed my mistake, so I knew that was wrong! But how...?
Wait.
What had she said to me earlier when she was scolding me? Think Guy. Think! You might not have the collar to help, but it wasn't that long ago... だ-something. だ・・・ね? だ・・・め・・・ That was it! 駄目. She'd said 「駄目ですよ！」 And I'm sure she'd used it other times too. Could I use that here?
駄目, I figured, had to have a negative meaning. So perhaps I could ask something like "Is this not bad?" or "Is this not wrong?" I remembered back to when we were asking about various household items, formed what I hoped was a suitable sentence, tapped the circle around the first sum and asked:
「これは駄目ではありませんか？」
「駄目じゃない・・・よ？」 Kotoha blinked, counted off fingers. 「うん。駄目ではありません。一＋二は三です。正解ですよ」 She made a circle with her fingers and said, 「丸です」
I tried again. 「一＋二は一です」 I said.
「違いますよ。不正解です」 Now she formed a cross with two fingers, 「バツです」
This time I wrote the two sums down, putting a tick next to the correct one and a cross next to the wrong one.
「なるほど！」 Kotoha said as she watched. 「ここでね、丸は正解という意味です。チックマークはバツと同じく、不正解という意味です」 She went silent for a moment, before getting excited and leaving the room. 「あ！そうだ！どこにあるかな・・・」
I listened to the usual sounds of Kotoha's clumsiness before she returned with a small item. It looked a little like a ping-pong racket. On one side was a red circle, on the other a blue cross. Kotoha tapped that first answer again and showed the red circle to me. As she did, the item made a doorbell-like sound, which reminded me of my still missing collar. Next, she tapped an answer she'd ticked while showing the blue cross to me. This time, the item made a buzzer-like moan.
So that was it. Here, a circle indicated a right answer, not a mistake that needed review. A tick or cross showed a wrong answer. I was hit with a vague recollection of something from my world. A new console had changed which button was accept, confusing and annoying certain markets. Now I felt I understood why. What a silly change.
I took a swig from my bottle of drink, only to discover it was empty. When had I drunk that?! More pressing was my sudden need to pee. I dashed out of the dining area in a desperate search for relief.
Much better, I thought, having found the right room. To think that despite being here several days, I hadn't needed to do any business until now... Death really messed up your internal workings, huh? I would have said excuse me to the amphibian plushie that was obstructing the handle, if it wasn't for the noise that prevented me from speaking English. Instead, I quietly flushed the toilet, moved the frog back to its place on the cistern and left the oddly familiar frog-filled restroom with its green wallpaper.