“Based on age, you and this pretty lady would be…in your fourth year of college now, right? Is this your graduation trip?”
“Something like that.” Technically it was more of a warm-up to that, but I wasn’t confident I could explain it to her.
“Are you friends from college?”
She was just making small talk, but truth be told, I was a teensy bit unsure how to answer. While I was hesitating, however…
“We’re dating,” Adachi replied firmly, before I could.
Senpai came to a stop three steps before the intersection and looked back at us. When our eyes met, I raised our held hands in place of a response. Yes, we’re dating.
Adachi was now at the point where she could say it without stumbling. I peered at her face in profile, and though perhaps it was weirdly patronizing, I admired her for being such a hard worker.
“Oh ho,” Senpai smirked.
“And what exactly is ‘oh ho’ supposed to mean?”
“I’m just surprised you’d ever love someone,” she said point-blank to my face—quite possibly her rudest comment yet. “I mean, you never had any crushes in junior high.”
“Sure I did… Well, something akin to a first love, anyway…”
“What?!” It was Adachi, not Senpai, who reacted with shock, and I quietly regretted letting it slip. “Sh-Shimamura…you had a crush on someone?”
“Wow, not you too! You guys make me sound like some unfeeling monster!”
In my case, I was pretty sure it was different from a crush. Something about that woman just…appealed to me. But if that was what it meant to like someone, then sure, perhaps it was romantic.
“The fact that I love you is proof that I’m capable of loving another person, so… Wait, why are you looking at me like that?”
Adachi was biting her lip with her face all scrunched toward the center, the way my little sister looked when she ate sour candy. But she didn’t need to explain it out loud when the word UNACCEPTABLE was written all over her face like a neon billboard.
“Adachi, you look like you’re about to take a bite out of the first hamster that comes along.”
“What does that even mean…?”
I couldn’t think of an explanation, so I went to take a picture of her face to show her, but then she grabbed my phone to stop me. I tried playing tug-of-war with her for a bit, but it was so unproductive that I gave up. “Anyway, why are you looking at me like that?”
“I don’t know,” she replied, her expression still posing a threat to hamsters nationwide. “I mean…”
I hadn’t seen Sulky Adachi for so long that it actually warmed my heart.
“I wanted your first love to…be me.”
“Sure, that would be great and all, but… Oh, but you’re still the first person I’ve ever dated, though!” I offered, hoping to reach a compromise. She nodded, but solely as a gesture of goodwill, because she only looked half-convinced.
“Interesting. So the misanthropic little girl I knew was a pure-hearted maiden on the inside,” Senpai remarked.
“Let’s not talk about it anymore. But for the record, my ‘first love’ was just someone I thought was interesting, that’s all,” I told her.
“And what a mild first love it must have been.”
Her tone was pregnant with implication. Was she suggesting her first love was spicy? What would a “spicy romance” even look like? Like a burn you couldn’t get rid of?
“Junior high, huh… So who was it? Kidou-kun? Shinkawa?”
“Whomst?”
“Oh, c’mon. How should I know? Tee hee hee!” She laughed like a kid half her age. “But if it was a girl, then it might have been someone on the team with us. Oh, duh! It was totally me, wasn’t it?”
“As if!”
Not to be rude, but this chick used to be a lot more normal, or at least, she took things fairly seriously. Her personality was so different now, I wondered if maybe she’d hit her head at some point. When I tried to pinpoint what had changed, I glanced to the side—and realized there was another radically different girl sitting right next to me.
I guess people change.
Then Adachi noticed me looking at her. No clue how she interpreted my gaze, but her eyes began to fill with fear.
“Seriously, it wasn’t her!” I pressed, just in case.
“Yeah, I figured. I was pretty boring back then.”
“I wouldn’t say boring. You just seemed to have a lot going on.”
Senpai chewed on my opinion for a moment. Then her lips spread into a smile. “These days I’m trying to focus on having fun, but now I’m so busy that I don’t have time for romance. Life sucks, am I right?”
“Busy with work?”
“I’m a rare breed, y’know, and I’ve got a pretty face to boot. Thank god I was born beautiful.”
“And with such modesty, too.” She wasn’t wrong, though.
“Though I will say customers by and large prefer someone who looks like a local. Someone well-educated who knows the town—and it certainly doesn’t hurt if they already have a baseline of fame from… Well, let’s not get into it. My point is, good looks pay off. I mean, that’s how you hooked Shimamura, right, pretty lady?”
Senpai directed the conversation to Adachi. The two beautiful women stared at each other, blinking, and then…
“Is it?”
Adachi turned to me to ask for confirmation. Was I in some capacity hooked by her pretty face? She always did have a hint of melancholy peeking through, which was what caught my attention to begin with, and it was probably a factor that kept me going back to the gym loft to see her.
“Well, I thought you were pretty from day one,” I admitted.
The end of my sentence painted red across her cheeks like a brush, an effect that was especially bewitching under the purple shadow of the paper parasol.
“I see…”
Her voice rippled like a stone had been skipped across the surface of her heart. And those small ripples rocked me gently in turn.
“Oh, um, same here. I’ve always…thought you were beautiful, Shimamura.”
“Third-prettiest in our class?”
“Number-one prettiest in the whole world.”
When I gave her a little verbal prod, she responded with the equivalent of a shove, feet rooted firmly to the ground like she wasn’t about to give a single inch.
“Th-thanks.”
To me it was an exaggeration, but to Adachi, it was a universal truth. When I contemplated this difference of viewpoint, it filled me with relief at the reminder that she was still here.
“See? Won’t this be a nice memory to look back on later?”
“Just like the memory of the respect I used to have for you.”
“And over here we have a very famous torii gate! Everybody passes through it, from couples to newlyweds to little grade schoolers on field trips! Follow that path straight down and you’ll find a shrine!”
Suddenly, she started reciting canned lines like a proper tour guide. Sure enough, in the direction she indicated was a large torii gate standing tall in the center of the street, with large stone-carved guardian dogs flanking it on either side. And she wasn’t kidding about its popularity, either; a group of women, ostensibly tourists, were currently posing under it for a photo.
As I glanced around, taking in the sights, I spotted an entrance to the train station on the other side of a mini-mart. It wasn’t the same one we departed from, but it was an indication that we were looping back around to the station square.
“It’s a classic photo op location. Each time I pass by, I wonder what would happen if I crashed my whole rickshaw straight through them like a bowling ball.”
“Um, I think you would lose your job.”
“Life is hard…”
In the rickshaw, we crossed the street in front of the torii gate, and as I watched the flow of the crowd on the other side from my high vantage point, the lights seemed to blur my vision. It was surreal and entrancing, like seeing night festival lanterns during the day. Because we were up high, the sound of the wind rushing down the street was loud in my ears, but if I focused on the scent, I could faintly pick up what might have been the sea breeze.
Once we finished crossing the street, Senpai suddenly looked up. “Sooo, that’s the mini-mart,” she explained lazily, pointing at the building on the corner. Almost all of the paid parking spots were filled.
“Yes, we have those back home, thank you.”
“Seriously? That town’s getting too gentrified! By the way, ladies, your fifteen minutes is nearly up. Can I interest you in an extension?”
“We’ll be getting out.”
“Exit’s on your right! Make sure you have all your belongings, blah blah blah!”