It feels...like I’m suffocating.
For some time—in fact, ever since I woke up that morning—a strange, murky sensation had been spreading through me. The closer our performance time came, the stronger that feeling grew. I’d stood upon countless stages before, many of them far larger than the one in Eichou High’s gym, and performed for crowds that dwarfed the scale of today’s gathering...but somehow none of the arena concerts I’d been a part of, none of the music festivals or live TV broadcasts I’d been featured in, had ever affected me like this. This time, stepping up onto that stage...scared me.
That’s right. It scared me. I was terrified. I had been for a very long time. Some part of me wished that the day of my performance would just never arrive.
“I would like the two of you to perform onstage with me at the cultural festival...and I would like us to use that performance to settle things between us.”
Whoever received the most accolades on the surveys we passed out to the attendees would be the winner. I’d suggested our little contest myself, and I’d done it with complete confidence that I would emerge victorious. The thought that I might lose never so much as crossed my mind. No matter how incredible the two of them—Yuna and Rinka—might have been, I believed that they could never be any sort of match for my experience and ability.
“If I win, I’d like the two of you to refrain from interfering at all whenever I try to make a move on her.”
It was just a matter of romance. Just a first love. Just a very old piece of emotional baggage I’d never quite gotten around to discarding. If anyone else learned about our contest, they might very well laugh at me. At the very least, they would never imagine that I had really wagered something I considered more precious than life itself on some tiny performance in a middle-of-nowhere suburb.
I, however, had been throwing myself into contests like this throughout my whole life. Their terms hadn’t always been so clearly articulated, but I’d been faced with countless situations where failure would spell the end of my life as I knew it. Each and every time, I’d risen to the challenge and claimed victory. This time would be no different. I was sure of it.
“If I lose...I swear I’ll never approach Yotsy again, in the romantic sense of the word.”
What could possibly be stupider? I’d set the terms of our wager myself, and here I was, shaken to the core by them—far more so than my opponents were. In retrospect, the fact that I’d gone with a stilted, roundabout phrasing like “approach in the romantic sense of the word” was proof positive that I’d already been fixated on the possibility all the way back then.
I couldn’t help it, though. That was just how important Yotsy was to me. The petty promise we’d made when we were children—my purehearted desire to make her happy—was the driving force that had propelled the idol Maki Amagi to the heights of stardom. It was what gave Makina Oda’s life meaning.
I wanted to make Yotsy mine. I wanted her to make me hers. She was my everything, and I wanted to be her everything too.
I loved her. More than I could bear. Over all those years we’d spent apart, that had never changed. My feelings hadn’t...but she had found someone else who was special to her. Two of them.
Yuna Momose. Rinka Aiba. I could tell that both of them were good, nice people—very much so. At the bare minimum, I didn’t get the sense that they were the sort of people who would trick or use Yotsy at all. The month and a half or so that I’d spent giving them lessons to prepare for the show hadn’t changed that impression at all.
They were idolized by their peers at Eichou High—called “the Sacrosanct” by them, even—but their fame never seemed to have gone to their heads at all. To the contrary, they both seemed to be quite strong-willed, and had both had a positive influence on Yotsy, if anything. In that sense, I genuinely appreciated them.
And then there was how they acted around me. There was no way they’d forgotten about our contest, or about my feelings for Yotsy, and yet they were perfectly friendly toward me. They treated me like a fellow performer. We’d even come to call each other by our first names, in time—it just felt natural to do so. By most people’s standards, we might even have been...well...friends.
In spite of that—no, because of it—my fear only continued to grow. And it wasn’t just their personalities that fed my apprehensions. Their talent was an equally pressing factor.
I’d realized that the two of them had potential as idols the moment we met. The rate of growth that they displayed over the course of the lessons I taught them, however, blew my expectations clear out of the water. As they quickly learned to sing, dance, charm an audience, and put their strongest traits on full display, my confidence drained away from me. While at first I would have declared that I had an almost hundred percent chance of winning, before long, I found myself admitting that there really was a chance I could lose.
I put everything I had into teaching the two of them, of course, and I didn’t regret that decision. I believed that no matter how much they polished their skills, I would come out ahead...but however unlikely failure was, its consequences still ate away at me.
If I lose...I have to give up on Yotsy.
This wasn’t like any other contest I’d taken on before. In the past, I’d only been wagering myself—my reputation, and my future as an idol. This time I was wagering her. Something far weightier was on the line. Having to give up on Yotsy would hurt more than death ever could.
A one-in-ten-thousand chance morphed into one in a thousand. One in a thousand became one in a hundred. As the odds of my defeat grew, it felt like an invisible knife dug deeper and deeper into my neck. The pain made me tremble.
That was why Yuna and Rinka...were my enemies. They were a wall I had to surmount. And that was why... That was why...
“Most likely...I think that Makina just wanted all of us to accept her.”
Once again, her words rang out in my mind. I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about them, ever since Yotsy told the class what she believed my true feelings really were.
“You all remember what she said, right? She said that she’d be willing to perform, but only if she didn’t have to do it alone. She’s not getting up onstage as Maki Amagi... She’s performing as Makina Oda, a student in Eichou High’s class 2-A! She’s doing it so that she’ll be accepted at our school—accepted as a member of our class!”
No... No, I’m not. You don’t understand, Yotsy. You don’t understand at all!
The truth was that all I wanted...was to compete with Yuna and Rinka. The cultural festival had just been a convenient opportunity in the near future to make that happen. Yotsy couldn’t have been further off the mark.
“It can be hard to understand your own feelings, sometimes—and by the same token, sometimes it’s as easy as can be for an outsider to see through them in a heartbeat.”
In the end...which was it? What did I really want? If all I wanted was to claim Yotsy for myself, there were any number of better, simpler ways I could have made it happen. I probably hadn’t really needed to involve so many people in my affairs. But I had. I’d put my idol career on hold to transfer into this high school, then chosen to perform as an idol at the cultural festival anyway. I’d made it happen through a mixture of hints and provocation. At the time, it had been the only option I could come up with. After all, the truth was that I... I...
I...wanted someone to acknowledge me?
“Hey! Earth to Makina?” a voice rang out from my left.
“Huh...?”
“Were you not listening?” came a second voice from my right—Rinka’s. She had spoken away from the microphone she was holding, making sure that only I could hear her. Rinka was smiling, while Yuna was looking at me with a sullen pout on her face. “It’s your turn to speak to the audience.”
“Oh. Ah... Right. Excuse me,” I replied as I accepted the microphone in a fluster.
Of course, I thought. This was the moment before the third song, when we were each supposed to give our thanks to the crowd. We’d planned it all out in advance. What was I thinking? How could I let myself space out onstage? It was unprecedented for me. Had I even sung the second song right...? I could feel a bead of sweat dripping down my back.
“It’s all right,” said Rinka.
“What?”
“I do think you could stand to enjoy yourself a little more, though. We certainly are,” she added with a grin as she patted me on the back. It was a very gentle sort of touch—one that was meant to calm me down.
“Sorry, everyone! I think Makina might be just a liiittle nervous. After all, this is the first time Makina Oda’s ever performed like this!” Yuna called out to the audience, retroactively turning my moment of mental absence into a cute little joke in the blink of an eye. “I mean, who wouldn’t be nervous? I sure am, and I have been this whole time! I hate to say it, though, but time’s one thing we’re running a little short on.”
“Yes...we are,” I said. “I’m sorry, everyone. I guess I just lost focus for a moment.”
My mind was in a panicked frenzy as I spoke into the microphone, but I reflexively made sure to keep my expression as composed as could be. I took a step forward, glancing around at the audience...and found that, judging by their faces, none of them seemed to have made much of my lapse. From this distance, I could tell very clearly how much they were enjoying the show. I was relieved, and began putting together an outline of what I wanted to say as I spoke up once more.