The bonfire glimmered in the distance, its flickering light illuminating the students gathered in jubilant celebration around it. The girl who watched them through the window, in contrast, seemed lonesome—and yet at the same time, her solitude seemed self-imposed, as if she were dedicated to rejecting anyone and everyone who might try to approach her. At any other moment, I might have hesitated to try.
“MAKINAAAAAAAAA!!!”
“Wha—?!”
At that particular moment, however—a moment in which a ghost was surely breathing down my neck—I didn’t have anything even remotely close to the mental leeway to register any of that. Kinda the opposite, actually: The second I saw a familiar face (well, a familiar back), I mustered up the last of my stamina to shoot forward in one final burst of speed and hug her—no, tackle her!
“Thank...goodness...” I wheezed as I gasped for breath. “I’m so glad it was you, Makina...”
“Y-Yotsy?!” Makina yelped.
“Halfway here, I started wondering if maybe the silhouette I saw in the window wasn’t you after all, and was actually a ghost instead, and I got so worried, and... Wait. You are Makina, right? You’re not a ghost in disguise, right?!”
“I-It’s me, really! I’m the one and only Makina Oda.”
“Thank goodneeeeeess!!!” I practically wailed. Relief hit hard as the adrenaline rush faded, leaving me more or less dangling from her shoulders.
I’m saved... There’s no doubt about it—a ghost would never be this warm! Everyone knows that ghosts are cold!
Against all odds, I’d managed to make it to class 2-A’s room. I had no idea what Makina was doing here, or why she hadn’t bothered to turn the lights on, but I’d made it and I could finally rest easy, in more ways than one.
“Yotsy...? What are you doing here?” Makina asked.
“What do you mean? I’m here because you are, obviously,” I replied.
Makina hesitated. “That’s not true,” she finally said, shaking her head as she gently pushed me away from her. “There’s no way you could have recognized me from outside—not when it’s this dark. You said it yourself, didn’t you? You were worried that I might have been a ghost.”
“Well, yeah... But it’s still true that I thought it was you! Why else would I have come here?”
If I’d given myself the time to actually think about it, I might have stopped or turned around. The truth was, however, that “thinking” had never entered the picture. The moment I saw a figure in the window, my intuition had told me it was Makina, and I’d run off without doubting that hunch for a second. There wasn’t much else that could’ve driven me into the pitch-black, utterly terrifying schoolhouse...and in the end, I really had managed to meet with her. The process that brought me there didn’t really matter—or at least, it wouldn’t change the fact that I was glad I’d found her.
Makina’s expression, however, was as glum as ever. Glum enough to make me wonder if she hadn’t wanted to see me at all.
“Did I, umm...do something wrong?” I asked.
“Ah!” Makina gasped. “N-No, that’s—”
“Wait, what am I saying? I’ve done so many things wrong! Like sneaking Mio into school without telling you, for one thing, or how you told me how you felt about me and I still haven’t...”
“No! That’s not it! That’s not it at all...” Makina said. She reached out to grab my sleeve, clinging to it like it was her only lifeline. She was trying to communicate that she didn’t want to drive me away...but even more than that, it made me realize just how unlike herself she was behaving. There was a frailty to her bearing that reminded me of the old Makina—of how she’d behaved when we first met.
We’ve both changed. We’re nothing like the people we were back then... But that doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with acting the way we used to every once in a while, does it?
“Makimaki?”
“Ah...”
I went out of my way to use my old nickname for her as I grabbed onto her wrist. It wasn’t a big gesture at all—just a single word—but that was all it took for Makina’s eyes to widen with shock and transparent emotion.
“Let’s sit down and talk, okay?” I suggested. Our desks were right next to each other, and I’d shared textbooks with her a bunch of times, but we hadn’t had the chance to talk face-to-face since she’d transferred into my class.
The classroom felt nothing like it did during the daytime. It was just about pitch black, but my eyes had started adjusting to the darkness and just enough light was filtering in from the courtyard outside for me to see Makina’s face. Her expression was totally clear to me.
“Okay, go ahead!” I said. “Say whatever you want to me!”
“Umm...” Makina hesitated.
“Lay it on me, Makimaki! Anything at all! If you want to gripe about me, then that’s fine, and if you want to talk about something else, that’s totally okay too. I mean it—you can say anything at all...like you used to.”
“Like...I used to...” Makina repeated.
“Oh, but first things first—let’s work on your tone, okay?”
“Huh?”
“What’s with all the hesitating? I know that being polite and proper and thinking everything through really carefully before you say it is just what’s normal for you these days...but honestly, it makes me feel like we’re not really connecting. It feels like you’re putting up walls and keeping me at a distance.”
“Th-That’s not what I was trying to—”
“Yeah, I know. I’m reading too much into it. But still...just give it a try, okay? Try to loosen up and tell me what’s really on your mind, for me,” I said. I was doing my best to do the same—to tell her exactly how I felt, slowly but surely, looking her in the eye with her hand still in mine.
Makina didn’t try to escape, but she also couldn’t quite seem to return my gaze. Her eyes were wavering anxiously in a way that didn’t seem to be entirely under her control. The natural response when someone was acting in a really intense manner was to lower your own intensity level, but the opposite was also true: When faced with someone who was far more depressed and distressed than I was, it just felt natural to be there for them in as gentle of a manner as I possibly could.
“Makimaki?”
Makina hesitated for just a moment longer. “All right,” she finally said with a nod that was both clearly unintentional and just a little too exaggerated to come across as natural. She returned my grasp on her hand, squeezing mine back...as a tear rolled its way down her cheek.
“I... I challenged Yuna and Rinka to a contest.”
“Wait, what?”
“The stakes were that if I won, neither of them would get in my way when I tried to flirt with you.” She spoke slowly, forcing the words out one after another.
I’d been confused this whole time about why Yuna and Rinka had ended up joining the performance. Now I was finally learning the truth.
“And if I lost...I would promise to never, ever approach you in that sort of way again...”
It had all been about me. All of it—for Yuna, for Rinka...and for Makina as well. Everything they did, they did for my sake.
“When you got up in front of the class and said all those things about what I wanted...that whole time, I was thinking about how you were wrong. About how I’m not the sort of pure and perfect person you think I am. And that’s why...”
“Oh...” I said. “That’s why you’ve felt a little distant ever since then.”
Makina looked away from me. It wasn’t exactly a direct confirmation, but for all intents and purposes, it might as well have been.
“After I heard what you said about me, I started questioning everything. What if you were right, and that really was how I felt? What if I just hadn’t understood my own feelings...? I couldn’t stop wondering and worrying, and I still hadn’t figured anything out by the time the performance started...and in the end, Mio saw right through me.”
“Oooh...”
I’d had no idea that the circumstances behind Mio’s outburst were so involved...but I had suspected that Makina’s less-than-perfect performance was my fault, and on that front, I’d been completely correct. There was no way for me to turn a blind eye to how massive my influence was on her anymore.
“Getting up on that stage...was harder than it’d ever been before. I had to put on a good show. I’d lose you if I didn’t. But Yuna and Rinka had both improved so much, and they looked so confident in the moment that I just panicked...and then it hit me.”
“What did?”
“The truth. About my own feelings... About why I decided to propose that contest in the first place, and why I decided to perform at the festival.”
Makina’s voice was so feeble, it seemed like she might break down in tears at any second. I squeezed her hand tightly and did my best to keep a straight face, even though I knew that some of my own nervousness was probably showing through regardless. I had plenty of things that I wanted to ask and say to her, but compared to her troubles—compared to the sheer courage and trepidation that laced each and every word she forced herself to speak—everything I could’ve brought up seemed trivial.
“You mean...you figured out why you decided to make your contest with Yuna and Rinka be about the performance, even though you knew there were a ton of other ways you could’ve done it?” I asked.
“Right...” said Makina.
I’d learned a lesson from my bet with Mio: Using an idol show as the subject of a contest was a lot harder than you’d think it’d be. It wasn’t like you could put a clear point value on everyone’s performances to figure out who had won and who had lost. It was all about subjective impressions, in the end, and even if you managed to come up with some sort of answer, the odds were good that it wouldn’t come across as particularly compelling. I was, by the way, shocked to learn that the three of them had had a bet of their own going on at the same time I had, but I decided to put my surprise on hold for the time being. That could wait till later.
“The truth is... The real reason I wanted to perform was...” Makina began, tears once again overflowing as she grasped my hand. “I did it...because I wanted you to see me. I wanted you to know that I’d become one of the idols we watched and looked up to back in the day. I wanted to prove that I was the real thing...”