“Aki?”
“Hm? O-Oh, sorry. I’m back.”
“Right...”
I’d fallen totally silent while reminiscing; I must have worried Mashiro. She was awkwardly staring at the floor.
“I’m sorry for lying to you all this time, Aki.”
“D-Don’t call it lying. You’ve done so much for us, Makigai-sensei, and I don’t consider what you did to be dishonest at all!”
“Don’t talk to me like I’m your idol. It’s creepy.”
“O-Oh, uh, right, sorry, Maki—Mashiro.” My words came out so janky, it was almost laughable, like my throat had suddenly rusted over. In my head I could see two blurry silhouettes of the person in front of me overlapping. One was Tsukinomori Mashiro, and the other was Makigai Namako, but no matter what I did, those silhouettes refused to merge neatly. I didn’t know who I was looking at anymore. My mind was fuzzy, but I managed to squeeze out a question: “Why’d you hide it all this time?”
“I couldn’t tell you. The novels I write... They’re like a direct window into my mind.”
“But I love those novels.”
“I know,” Mashiro replied, almost immediately. “That’s exactly why I couldn’t say anything.”
“I don’t get it...”
“I didn’t want you to be disillusioned by the truth. I mean, it wouldn’t be fair.”
“How so?”
“Remember what you said to me in that cinema, right after I transferred to our school? You said you really sympathized with Makigai Namako’s work.”
“Yeah... I meant it too.”
We’d had a run-in with Mashiro’s former bullies, and she’d hidden away in a cinema screening a B movie. There, I’d waxed lyrical about how great Makigai Namako-sensei’s work was. I was using it as an example to cheer up Mashiro, who was down because those bullies had made fun of her for writing her own story.
Though, now that I knew I had been grinning and fawning over her own work right in front of her, I wanted to die of embarrassment.
“It’s no wonder it resonated with you,” Mashiro said. “Because I put all the stuff I admire about you in there.”
I stared at her in surprise—but what she’d said was perfectly logical. Obviously the book was going to click with me on a deep, emotional level. After all, it was written by somebody who knew so much about me. It was overwhelmingly simple, like the kind of twist at the end of a mystery book that only made the reader mad.
“Hearing how strongly you sympathized with all the characters and their nuances made me very happy to hear, and it was greatly encouraging.”
Over a year later, and the hidden meaning behind that once-throwaway line was suddenly clear to me.
Why should an author be “very happy” to know some random reader sympathized with their characters? At the time, I was so ecstatic he’d accepted my offer, the strangeness of that line hadn’t stuck out to me at all.
Seriously... Sometimes I wish I weren’t so dense.
“I know you’ve already said it, but I wanna ask you again,” I said.
“Go ahead.”
“You’re Makigai Namako-sensei. Aren’t you?”
“I am.” She didn’t hesitate for even a second, and her gaze didn’t waver as she looked me right in the eye.
I knew for sure then.
Mashiro wasn’t a good liar, especially when it came to a lie of this scale. She wasn’t the type to come up with an elaborate joke to tease someone either.
“Okay. I got it.”
The full-blown realization caught up to me the moment I said that. Once that happened, my chest was filled to bursting with a sudden myriad of emotions.
I’d met Makigai Namako-sensei in the flesh. I remembered—there was something I’d always wanted to do if I ever met him.
I heard Mashiro gasp in surprise. At some point without realizing it, I’d taken her hand in both of mine. Pressing my forehead tight against her hand, I let out everything that I’d been storing up inside me for so, so long.
“Thank you...so much! I’ve always wanted to tell you how grateful I am...in person.”
“Huh? Wait, Aki... Are you...crying?”
“No!”
My eyes did feel a little hot, and my cheeks did feel slightly damp, but I didn’t actually see a teenage boy crying like a wimpy little kid around here, so it was safe to say that wasn’t what was happening. Perhaps it was because my emotions were so unstable at the moment that Mashiro’s gaze seemed extra kind to me, filled with a strong affection.
“I wasn’t expecting this. I rarely see you getting so emotional,” she said.
“I’ve always wanted to thank you,” I repeated. “It’s because of you that Koyagi is played by so many people, and that the Alliance is in such a strong position to negotiate in the adult world. It’s because of you that the path we walk isn’t so hazy... That it’s not a dead end, but a smooth, paved road that’s actually going somewhere.”
“Aki...”
“I had to make Koyagi big, no matter what. I was reckless. I took the whole team’s lives onto my frail shoulders, and I was gonna break... I was on the verge of throwing in the towel...but then you reached out to me. Without you, everything could’ve ended.”
“I...didn’t know...”
“You gotta laugh, right? I remember when I saw you again. You were so small, so frail, so delicate... I had this urgent sense I needed to help you, to support you. And then it turns out you’re the one who saved me all along. It makes me wonder which of us helped the other out more, y’know?”
“Don’t say that. I’d be lost without you. I know I helped you out a ton as Makigai Namako, but it’s nothing compared to all the stuff you’ve done for me. And I’m not about to let you say otherwise.”
“Yeah, I know, it’s just... Mashiro?”
She’d started to giggle—and I couldn’t work out what there was to laugh about. I thought we were having a pretty serious conversation myself.
“Sorry, it’s just all so funny. The Alliance’s members are really special to you, right? All this time I’ve been talking with you online, I never realized how much you actually cared.”
“O-Of course they are...”
What with the rise of social media and video meeting platforms these days, it was normal to communicate with people without ever meeting them face-to-face. But even now, there was a surprisingly high amount of information you could only pick up on by seeing someone’s face and hearing their voice. It was only then, too, that you could feel their warmth as a fellow human being.
I bet it sounds weird for someone so obsessed with efficiency to hold such old-fashioned values, huh?
Even then, I was far more comfortable communicating in the flesh than by any other method.
“I wish I’d told you earlier then,” Mashiro said. “If only so I could’ve found out how deeply you cared.”
“Yeah, you should’ve! D’you know how much I was dying to meet Makigai-sensei? I... Well, I guess I already had met him. Y’know, you could’ve told me, and I wouldn’t have batted an... I would’ve batted several eyelashes, actually, but there’s no way I would’ve been disillusioned!”
I was confident enough in who Makigai Namako-sensei was to me that he could have been anybody and my feelings wouldn’t have changed. The only thing that changed was that I now had an added respect for Mashiro herself.
“So then, why did you pick today—and right now—to tell me the truth?”
“Well...”
She hadn’t said anything before because she’d been too scared. Flipping that phrasing around, it meant something had gotten rid of that fear, since she was now being open with me—but it seemed a little hasty to jump to a conclusion like that one.