“I was hoping we could just both forget it...” Makoto said softly. “I was hoping we could forget how I asked you out, how I ran away when you were hurting, and how I like you. I was hoping that we could just pretend none of that happened.”
“I saw you leaving my room. I was still half asleep, so I’m not a hundred percent it was you, but...”
“Oh, I see... I guess I stayed a bit too long,” she said, smiling as if to mock her own mistake. She put her hands on the windowsill. “You know, this last year and a half, I’ve been wondering why I fell for you specifically.” I stayed silent to listen to her.
“Like, I have a lot of other guy friends, right? There’s Yamato, Sota, Shoma, but...somehow it was you. But I could never come up with an answer and I could never get you out of my head. There was no way this would’ve ever worked out since you have Minami-san. I’m not so rude as to try and get in between two childhood friends, nor do I have the courage. But all that only makes me wonder even more...why you?” I still stayed silent.
“I don’t have any guy friends in high school. The girl group I’m in has a kinda power dynamic. I’ve gotten pretty tired from how much more annoying maintaining relationships is in high school compared to in middle school. It’s really made me nostalgic for how we used to just laugh at stupid things back then. Then we had that mini reunion and I saw you again, and...” In the next moment, she had a smile on, but she looked ready to cry. “When I heard that you and Minami-san broke up, I thought it was my chance.”
So that’s what started this. It made her feelings that she didn’t let surface in middle school come out.
“When we left your place, I pretended to go home, but then went back, pretending I forgot something, and then in the heat of the moment, as a joke, I gave myself an out, and I said it in such a lame, nervous way...”
I could see the scene in my head. As I cleaned up the mess in the living room, she might’ve helped. She might’ve gotten a reason to stay over that way. I could see her helping to clean up and using the sounds to cover her unnatural non sequitur.
“‘If you’re not dating anyone, then...would you wanna date me?’ Sheesh, hearing it out loud really makes me realize how doomed my confession was before I even tried.” She let out a dry laugh. “And then you went pale as a sheet and asked me if I was serious. At first, I meant to just play it off as a joke because you reacted that way, but I couldn’t back down, so I told you that I was. As soon as I said that, you threw up—I had no clue what was going on.”
“So why did you come back in the morning?”
“I was worried. When I came back, your door was unlocked and nobody answered when I called out.”
This must have been after Minami ran out of my place. It makes sense that it wasn’t locked. “I peeked into your room and saw you sleeping there basically naked. I saw a long strand of hair on your bed and...it all made sense.” She had no choice but to run and that was what I saw. “Why did you throw up? Even if you don’t remember exactly what happened that night, you must at least know why you threw up, right? Do you have some kind of chronic illness or something?”
“No, it’s because of a trauma...” And then, I began to talk about everything I’d been quiet about. “Whenever a girl shows me affection, I suddenly get sick. I’ve gotten a lot better now, though.”
“Now that I think about it, you were in the hospital in our third year because of ulcers. Was that it?”
“Yeah, that was the start...”
“And Minami-san has to do with this?”
“She does.” More than anyone. “She was the one who broke me, and also the one who fixed me.”
She spent an entire year and a half to atone for what she did to me.
“I see...” Makoto let out a long sigh. “Yeah, I can’t win against that...” I still didn’t say anything, but it was already clear inside her. Even if she’d run over to me when I’d collapsed...
“Makoto...you’re an important friend to me. It’s not that I don’t see you as a girl or anything, but...the way I see you just hasn’t changed.”
“Yeah...”
“Also, I can’t forget about the person who was always there for me in my most difficult times. I mean, sure, she’s also the cause of those difficult times, but...she’s also the one who saved me.”
“Yeah...”
“That’s why I’m sorry, but I can’t date you.”
Makoto quietly closed her eyes and calmly nodded. “Yeah.”
I felt like I finally was able to face the fact that within the story of people falling for each other, the story of people falling in love with people, I wasn’t just an observer. I was part of that story.
“You’re a lot more serious a person than I thought, Kogure.”
“Huh? A-Am I?”
“Yeah. If you knew everything, then there wasn’t really any reason to talk to me face-to-face. You could just pretend like nothing ever happened. But you set things straight, you settled everything, and you...respected my feelings,” she said with a sad, lonely, but refreshed smile. “That’s why I fell for you.”
Kogure Kawanami: Answer
A fire blast appeared in the night on a distant mountain, but it wasn’t a Pokémon move. It was the Gozan no Okuribi. My room was on a pretty high floor, and from the balcony I could kinda see the burning Japanese characters in the mountains far away. It was so far away that I could only really tell what it was with certainty if I used my phone’s zoom, but this was loads better than going to a place where you could see it up close and suffering the crowds.
It felt like a signal that summer break was coming to an end. As much as it used to feel like a tribute to the past, right now the Gozan no Okuribi felt more like a tribute to the future. I felt like I could do the things I couldn’t in the past. I was freed from my shackles, as if a curse had been lifted—like a weight had finally been lifted from my shoulders. For some reason, I felt a refreshing sense of empowerment, despite not having done anything specific to achieve it. The way I am now, I feel like I could even give her an answer.
“A-chan,” I said, speaking to the person on the balcony next to me. We were separated by a white partition that instructed tenants to break it in the event of an emergency.
“What?” A-chan, Akatsuki Minami, said while gazing at the Gozan no Okuribi off in the distance.
“You’re the one who undressed me and put me in bed, right?” She didn’t answer. “After Makoto ran away, you found me passed out after vomiting. You took off my dirty clothes, put them in the washing machine, and put me in my bed. The reason you didn’t put clothes on me was because it’s hard to dress someone when they’re passed out, right?”
A-chan stayed silent, but I could tell that she was listening to me. “The reason you were with me in bed was probably to make sure I stayed warm, right? To do that, you needed to raise your body temperature and...that’s why you drank the beer. But since you’re not used to drinking and downed it all at once, you lost your memories of that night, right?”
A-chan didn’t deny anything I was saying. Her silence was enough to confirm my theory. That night, the two of us hadn’t done anything at all. That was the truth. I’d hurt one of my friends and then my neighbor and childhood friend had come to my rescue.
“Thanks. You really saved me. I just wanted to tell you that.”