Tsk. Clicking her tongue, Aisaka took one of the notebooks nearest her hand, as though it were bothersome. She flipped through the pages until her fingers stopped. Her face distorted unpleasantly as she looked from the page to Ryuuji.
“What is this, really? What’re you trying to pull?”
“Do you know what that list is? Bet you don’t, huh? That’s a playlist I made in case I ever got to put on a concert for the girl I liked. And there’re four sets, for each of the four seasons. Of course, I also made an MD.”
And here, he turned on the MD player. He stuck the earphones right into Aisaka’s unwilling ears. A faint sound played—the summer concert’s first song.
“And then around the time I made this, I also made this note, which had the theme: ‘What would I get her for our first Christmas after we started dating?’ I settled on perfume. More precisely, an eau de toilette. I even narrowed down a list of brands and got the prices from the stores selling them. I researched everything and wrote it all down… What do you think? I’m always doing stuff like this.”
“Talk about gross!”
Aisaka tore out the earphones and flung them back, as though they were dirty. They thwacked Ryuuji, but he didn’t even flinch.
“Of course it’s gross! But even though you know about this, I wouldn’t ever think about killing you! What’s wrong with liking a girl, huh? Until I work up the courage to tell her how I feel, all I can do is fantasize… Which is really pitiful, but… but I still don’t think it’s anything to be ashamed of!”
Truthfully, it was a little embarrassing, but he still spoke those words—and at that moment, it happened. He’d been keeping something hidden behind his back, to keep so Aisaka wouldn’t see it. Now, as he moved around, he lost his balance—and it slipped, falling right down onto Aisaka’s lap.
“Ah! Oh no…”
“What’s this…? An envelope?”
He rushed to get it back, but he was one step behind her small hands. His own hand writhed as it danced uselessly through the air.
“From Takasu Ryuuji…to Kushieda Minori-sama… Kushieda Minori-sama?!”
“Th-that’s… Wait, wait a second, that’s not—!”
“A love letter?! And it’s…to Minorin?! From you?! To Minorin?! This too?! And this?!”
She left him no room for denial. He’d been satisfied just writing that letter; he’d never planned to actually send it. But now, it was fully exposed beneath the bright fluorescent lights.
“Whoa…! You and Minorin… Blech! Tell me it’s not true! You insolent…!”
“A-are you really in any position to say that?! What do you mean ‘blech’? Besides, you’re the one who likes my friend, Kitamura.”
“…Shut up. Do you still not get that I told you to forget about it? You sure are dead set on being dense.”
“You’re the one that’s being dense!”
They fought loudly over her picking up the wooden sword, over him trying to get rid of it, then over whether she would hit him—or rather, who would hit whom.
“Hah!”
Ryuuji came back to himself. Before he knew it, the signs of morning light began appearing outside the window. “Oh no, it’s already four…”
It was about time for Yasuko to come home from work. Having Aisaka in the house would be bad. Having Yasuko scold him was a depressing idea, but more than that, he wanted to avoid anyone seeing Yasuko say, “Ryu-chaan, your mother is uguh uguh waaaah.” She began to wail.
And if the morning paper comes, the landlady downstairs will get up and might come complain about the noise… No, she might already be awake, and just waiting for the right moment to complain. The color of Ryuuji’s face suddenly changed. Actually, that’s really likely. That’s bad—if we’re thrown out now, we won’t have enough money for a move… And last month, we (Yasuko) used up (on her own) way too much of our savings on a flatscreen TV…
“A-anyway! Anyway, please. I’ll never say anything about what happened to anybody. I won’t act like you’re stupid, either. Honestly, we’re in the same boat, now! So, come on, just tell me that’s good enough.”
“…I can’t.”
“Why. Can’t. You. Go! Home! Please. Go. Home! My sick mom is going to get back…”
In one sense, she really did have a disease. He wasn’t completely lying. But…
“No! I can’t trust you, and also… and also…”
Suddenly, like a child, Aisaka curled up and held her legs. She sat down in the middle of the living room. She rubbed her cheeks into her knees, tracing words into the old tatami mats. “…Hey, that…love letter… I wonder if—you don’t think it’s too early to send one, right?”
Now she was asking for love advice! Arrgh! Ryuuji tore at his hair. “W-we can spend plenty of time discussing stuff like that—next time! So! Please! Go! Home! I’m begging you!”
“…You mean it? You really will give me advice next time?”
“I will. I definitely will. I’ll do whatever you want, I’ll help with whatever you want. I swear.”
“You’ll help? With anything? For me?”
“I will. I will, I will, I will. I’ll do anything.”
“Anything, right? You said anything, right? Like a dog, you’ll do it? Like you’re my dog, you’ll do anything for me?”
“I will. I’ll do it. I swear. Whether it’s as a dog or whatever, I’ll do it. So, please. Let’s just leave it at that? Okay? Okay?”
“Okay…I guess I’ll go home.”
Seeming to finally accept those terms, Aisaka grabbed her wooden sword and stood up. When he looked very closely, he noticed tiny shoes discarded by the window. She really did break in through the window, then… Ryuuji groaned, and she cast him a sidelong glance as she carried the shoes toward the entrance.
Suddenly, she turned around. “Hey.”
Instinctively, Ryuuji braced himself for even more suffering.
“Do you have any extra fried rice?”
“Huh? Ah, no… You ate all of it.”
“I see. That’s fine.”
“You don’t mean you didn’t have enough to eat? That was about two people’s worth. Were you that hungry?”
Without answering, Aisaka turned her back to him and put one foot into a shoe. Once again, without warning, she turned around and muttered, “…The sliding door.”
“Yeah, there you go with another huge change of subject.”
“I made a hole in the sliding door, but…does that cost a lot of money?”
Looking up at Ryuuji’s face, Aisaka’s big eyes blinked twice, three times. It took him by surprise and made him feel uneasy, so Ryuuji didn’t return the look. It wasn’t that he was scared—he was bewildered. It felt like this was the first time he had seen Aisaka when she wasn’t angry.
“Uhh… Well…it’s something I could do myself if I tried my hand at fixing it…I think. From what I saw earlier, the hole itself was small, anyway. But it would be better if I had nice paper, and around here, you can only buy shoji paper in half sheets.”
“Hmm.” She was still wearing an expressionless face, intentionally hard to read. “Why don’t you use this? It’s washi.”
Aisaka thrust something at him. Even if you say to use this… Ryuuji thought, puzzling over the thing she thrust into his hand, do you really expect me to use your empty love letter envelope…?
“If you can fix it with that, then do it. If it costs money, I’ll pay for it.”
“Uhh, well…okay.”
Without answering his question about whether she had had enough to eat, Aisaka started to don the straps of her bothersome-looking shoes, one by one. Her bent back somehow made him think…
“Hey, wait.”
She didn’t look happy to be interrupted. “What?”
“Just how many meals have you been skipping?”
“Why are you worried about that? It’s not like I haven’t been eating. I kind of got bored of the food at the convenience store… Even when I buy it I don’t really…”
“At the convenience store? For all three meals? No way is that good for you!”
“In front of the station, there used to be a bento place, right? That closed down last month, right? And other than that, there really isn’t anything except convenience stores, so… And the food in the supermarket delis is kind of… I don’t know how to buy it.”
“Come on, you can just put however much you want in the transparent container. And then you have them weigh it at the register… But what about your parents—haven’t they taught you about all this?”
After she clicked her shoe strap closed and got up, he thought he saw Aisaka faintly shake her head to the side. I’ve made a mistake, he thought. Every household had its own issues, but given that Aisaka’s was already mysterious, it wouldn’t be surprising if her family situation was well outside a normal person’s imagination. Even he had learned to handle a strange household environment as a kid. And that was probably putting it kindly. Uneasy as he was, he couldn’t ask any more questions. He could only watch her long hair as she opened the front door and started to leave.
“Hey, wait! I’ll walk you over! Being by yourself this late is…”
“I’m fine. It’s close. And I have my sword.”
“I think that makes it even more dangerous.”
“It’s really close. Bye, Ryuuji. See you tomorrow.”
Turning around, Aisaka left.
Flustered, he put on his sandals and went after her without even locking the door. But when he looked downstairs from the entrance, she was nowhere to be found. She really was mysteriously fast. “I let her go home alone. But then…”
Just now, hadn’t she used his first name?
Ryuuji’s eyes constricted into slits, his cheeks distorted, and he glared in the direction Aisaka had disappeared. He wasn’t angry—he was confused.
Well before the night ended and Yasuko returned, he finished cleaning the entire room. His speed was probably thanks to the fact he tidied up on a daily basis.
From that day forward, a cleverly cut, light pink cherry blossom remained magnificently affixed to the Takasu household’s sliding door, among the myriad of other flowers.