“Hey, nanashi.”
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She suddenly used the name she’d used when we first met.
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“Do you know what hurt the most about it?”
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I’d meant to be asking about her, and now she turned it back on me. I flinched. Her eyes seemed to be asking me if I was prepared, capturing me tight and not letting me go.
“I’m guessing…it wasn’t just losing the little sister you loved?”
“Of course there was that. But…not just that.” Hinami was slowly starting to sound like she was talking about someone else. “The driver who hit Nagisa really regretted it. They were crying the whole time and said they’d spend the rest of their life trying to make up for it. So I think they were telling the truth.” She didn’t sound quite like the perfect heroine or like NO NAME. “They said that Nagisa… She just wandered out into the road. No crosswalk or light nearby. Just suddenly drifted out into traffic.” The gravity in her voice held me there, as if I was listening to the Aoi Hinami from that time.
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“What do you think that means?” Hinami asked me.
“Why are you asking me?” All I could do was ask her a question instead.
Hinami sadly smiled.
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“—Because I don’t know.”
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Her voice made me think of someone flinging themselves into a lake.
“Maybe she was just tired. Maybe she was dizzy. Maybe a car came at the exact wrong moment and it was all a big coincidence…”
I was being dragged into deep blackness, where there were no handholds or hope.
“Or maybe it was all too much for her, and she did it on purpose.”
I thought that was what it looked like from her point of view.
“Was it an accident, or suicide?”
Hinami’s world was not gray.
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“—I’ll never know.”
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Maybe light had never shone there to begin with.
“…I see.”
Even if I understood the meaning of her words, what she was saying still didn’t feel real.
“So I don’t even know what kind of regrets I should have. Should I have told her to sleep lots so she wouldn’t get dizzy? Should I have told her to keep her head down during the bullying and protect herself first? If she was lonely, should I have told her she wasn’t wrong, it’s okay, you’ve got your big sister here with you—”
After a long speech blaming herself, she drew in a breath and let her voice steady out.
And then she laughed, as if at herself.
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“I know what happened, but not why or where it started. So I have nothing to go on to make sense of it.”
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That was counter to the aesthetic that Hinami had always committed to.
“It was like Nagisa’s death was completely separate from my world.”
I thought that somehow resembled the way Hinami lived as a player.
“Like her death had been pushed out to some world beyond a screen. Whatever that is, it’s somewhere I have no connection to.”
The world she saw had reality and games all mixed up; even the past and future felt vague. When she spoke of the past, dragging the words out of her—she couldn’t fully make sense of what had happened. Even her chance to grieve was taken from her.
She gazed out over the world in resignation. “There’s no point in even talking about this, either,” she said. It was like she was crushing her own dried-out heart in her hand.
“…I see.”
I hesitated to answer too readily, or even to give her my thoughts.
But…
“Thank you for telling me.”
“…It’s nothing.”
Hinami fell silent, and the dinosaur we were riding on circled back to the beginning.
I didn’t think she was lying. But I didn’t think that was all of Aoi Hinami’s story, either.
Reality and video games, the past and the future, masks and truth.
Aoi Hinami and NO NAME.
Those few minutes wavered over various boundary lines, and once it was over, we got off the ride, tossed out carelessly by the world into our everyday lives.
The sand under my feet when I got off felt particularly gritty.
“—Come on, Tomozaki-kun. Let’s go!” Hinami said brightly, a little mask appearing on her face once more.
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Now seven of us—it was minus Mimimi and Tama-chan, who had left early to arrange the surprise—were at the Yontendo World gift shop.
“I want this! And this! But I don’t have the money for it!” Takei cried.
“Ha-ha-ha, well, licensed merch can cost quite a lot,” Mizusawa replied.
I was watching Takei and Mizusawa fool around like usual from a little ways away. My body and spirit hadn’t fully come back yet from Hinami’s past, and I was caught up in a sort of floaty feeling.
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“Talk with Hinami about how we really feel.”
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I’d managed to accomplish the goal that I had come up with before going on this trip.
I was sure this was just a small part of what she was dealing with, but I’d been able to share a part of her story.
So then—for Hinami and me going forward—
—what could I change, now that I knew?
As I was thinking, my gaze was drawn to a corner of the shop.
Hinami was over with the character minis, studying them carefully. She looked like she could vanish at any moment. That was probably just because I still had feelings I hadn’t dealt with.
There were already a number of mugs in the shopping basket hanging from Hinami’s hand.
I watched as Izumi approached her then.
“Oh! That’s the ninja from before!” Izumi addressed her brightly.
“You noticed? Sure is,” Hinami replied calmly.
There was a large illustration of the character we loved, Found, on the mug that she held up to show Izumi.
“You getting gifts?” Izumi asked.
Hinami averted her eyes like it was hard for her to say. “…Yeah.” Eventually, she nodded slowly.
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“This one is for my sister.”
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Hinami’s tone was lower than usual.
Izumi must have taken that as fatigue from the trip, as she didn’t treat it as out of the ordinary. “…Ohh! Is that right?” she answered, and then she started rummaging around on a nearby shelf.
I took a few steps up to them, but I wasn’t able to talk with Hinami again.
I’d noticed her shopping basket—
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—and the three mugs inside it.
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“Waahhhh! I wanna have more fun!”
“Then should we leave you behind?”
“Don’t leave me alone!”
It was seven in the evening. There was still time until USJ closed, but we were leaving now for the party.
“I’m glad we were able to ride everything we wanted to! The big roller coasters were pretty scary! Just a little!” Izumi said jokingly.
Kikuchi-san nodded. “I enjoyed myself a lot… Thank you very much,” she said politely.
Everyone responded casually with things like “It’s fine!”
“Right. I had fun, too,” said Hinami.
“You really seemed like you were having a good time, Aoi,” Mizusawa shot at her.
“You have a problem with that, Takahiro?”
Were they able to have a lighthearted exchange like that because they’d gotten closer through this trip, or was it really just an extension of the skills and formalities they’d already mastered? I didn’t know. I’ve grown a lot, but I know I’ll never be able to see into the depths of people’s hearts.
And so after having fun at USJ, we left.
It’s always sad to leave an amusement park. I think it’s childish to want the fun to go on forever, but that urge hadn’t changed even now that we were in high school.
It’s got to be a human instinct, the fear of the magic spell wearing off.
But today was different—what came next was actually the main event.
“That was so much fun! I want to come again someday!” Hinami said, putting on a bright tone of voice and expression.
I hope she really means that, I thought.