How many years had it been since I didn’t even feel like playing Atafami?
Even that summer of my second year, after that first split with Hinami at Kitayono Station, I’d immersed myself in Atafami to get away from it all even with my fuzzy head. Now that I think about it, I can’t ever remember a time I had lost the energy to engage with Atafami.
Right now, I couldn’t even do that. I was lying in my bed in my room as if I’d been tied down.
The same thing kept spinning around in my head.
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“Life is a shit game.”
That’s what Hinami had said.
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In the year since I’d started taking the game of life seriously, I had been thinking earnestly about my involvement with people and what I wanted to do. Eventually, that had changed into the goal to make Hinami’s life fun—but I hadn’t been able to change anything for her.
“Weren’t you the one who showed that to me…?”
Was it frustration, or was it sadness?
“That life is one of the best games there is…”
Now that I had lost to Hinami, I couldn’t even use my ace in the hole: “talk once you’ve beaten me.”
Even though she had changed my life and had given color to everything, I’d been robbed of the ability to return the favor.
“Now I don’t want to do anything…,” I muttered to myself, and then my consciousness dissolved into the night.
✦ ✦ ✦
The next day was a Monday, and I stayed home from school.
I came up with some whatever lie for my parents.
I didn’t do anything at all.
I felt spaced-out, lazy, and tired, with less and less will to do anything. So I had no choice but to lie around and recover my energy, but oversleeping just robbed the clarity from my thoughts even more.
In this hopeless negative spiral, not being able to think right actually helped. If I’d been considering everything between me and Hinami with a clear head, I’m sure that I’d come to hate everything so much that I would want to hurt myself.
“Agh…”
I rotted like mud in bed, the boundary between myself and the world blurring.
✦ ✦ ✦
As I was in that halfway space between waking and sleeping—
—my phone suddenly vibrated.
“…Hmm.”
I looked the pale light shining at my pillow to see the icon and name telling me I had a call from Kikuchi-san.
She would be worried after I missed a day of school. Maybe she’d sent me a message on LINE that I’d missed.
“…”
Frankly speaking, I wasn’t sure whether I should answer. I didn’t know if I could act normal. She’d told me that she was feeling lost with her reasons for writing, so she was stressed enough dealing with her own problems. But despite that, she was worried about me enough to call. I had to respect that.
Head still feeling hazy, I took the call. “…Hello?”
“Fumiya-kun…!”
I could hear the sincere relief in her voice.
But—I was feeling so zoned out, even that sounded gray to me.
“Am I right to assume that after we spoke…you were able to see Hinami-san?”
“Huh…?” I was surprised. She’d figured it all out, even though I hadn’t told her anything yet. “H-how did you know…?”
“Of course I knew.” She spoke quietly, but with a firm core to her words. “Because I’m your girlfriend.”
“…”
I was grateful to her from the bottom of my heart.
But still.
“What did Hinami-san—?”
“—There’s nothing we can do anymore.” I cut off Kikuchi-san. “I mean, I sent her messages on LINE, I waited by her house, I met with Haruka-chan multiple times, and then I finally got to see her. I told her what I wanted to say. I even played her in Atafami…but I lost.”
Even as I said that, I kind of realized.
“Well, I think me losing is beside the point.”
My loss had just been a single trigger. I could get serious about practicing Atafami now and beat Hinami again, but that wouldn’t solve anything. She wouldn’t have a change of heart and be like, I’ll believe in nanashi and move on.
“At the end of the day, this and what happened during summer vacation were both just band-aids.”
I’d even realized it myself, and I knew I wasn’t really getting to the heart of the issue. But I’d believed we could take our time finding the real answers afterward. I’d thought we had enough time for that.
But my voice wasn’t reaching Hinami anymore.
“…It’s frustrating, but the time I’ve spent with her wasn’t enough.” I could hear Kikuchi-san’s breath catching. “Obviously. She’s lived with her family for over ten years… I’m still just a guy she played the game of life with for only a year…” Sadness spilled out of me as I spoke. “…‘Just’ a guy. That’s how unimportant I am to her…”
Even I could tell my voice was trembling. I’d done everything I could, but I’d still been rejected and lost at the thing I was best at. I felt miserable and pathetic.
“That’s…not true,” said Kikuchi-san.
“It is…! I mean, I think she’s special to me, but to her, I’m just…!”
“No! I’m sure to her, you’re more…” She must have been about to say special. But she trailed off instead.
“So you can’t be sure enough to say it…huh,” I said, though I realized I was putting myself down.
“That’s…that’s not true.” I could hear Kikuchi-san’s voice growing shakier. “It’s just that…”
“That what?”
The trembling turned to breathy sounds, reaching my ears as emotional noise.
“…saying that the two of you feel the other is special…”
That rough sound became louder and louder.
✦ ✦ ✦
“…just makes me feel…bitter.”
✦ ✦ ✦
“!”
✦ ✦ ✦
“When you’re supposed to be…my boyfriend…”
✦ ✦ ✦
I realized—I really hadn’t even been paying attention to Kikuchi-san. It should have been obvious that Kikuchi-san, who had worried so much about me and yet still reached out to me anyway, was watching my fixation with Hinami and sucking it up.
“You…wouldn’t understand,” I said.
But out of my own misery, my shame over not having been able to even consider her feelings, I said some harsh things in attempt to look away from my own weakness.
“Since I’m…always alone. Even if I make friends with someone or date someone, I always am.”
The karma that swirled around me turned into a rejection of others, spilling out of my mouth.
Eventually, both of us fell silent.
She was the one to break it. “So my words…haven’t reached you, either.”
Her sad voice and the quiet after she eventually hung up the phone crushed my heart.
✦ ✦ ✦
The next day, on Tuesday, I stayed home again.
If someone asked me if I was sad about my parting with Hinami or about my fight with Kikuchi-san, the answer was neither.
I was simply filled with the utmost despair.
Thinking about it now, I’d always handled the things that mattered to me using words.
Like with the game of life. At first, I’d come to the conclusion that it was a shitty game based on my own experiences and logic, and I’d chosen to spend my time with the far superior Atafami.
Eventually, that had slowly changed because of what Aoi Hinami had said to me, as well as the words I’d prescribed for myself.
✦ ✦ ✦
When I first clashed with Hinami—I’d become aware of the decisive rupture that divided us, but I still wanted to bridge the gap.
She had only believed in her cold mask, while I’d wanted to believe there was something she really wanted to do, and I’d used words to connect us.
I had forcibly bridged those two feelings, extending our relationship with words: first, with the cheap argument that I was good at Atafami, and secondly, in saying that you could have both the mask and what you really wanted to do. There was nothing right about that in the real sense—at that point, words were all that connected us.
✦ ✦ ✦
Most likely, this wasn’t just about me, either.
✦ ✦ ✦
After the student council election, words had also resolved Mimimi’s inferiority complex and contradictions.
Mimimi had always wound up comparing herself with others. She was at the mercy of her nature, unable to feel confident about herself without producing results, so she had been unable to shake her sense of inferiority toward Hinami. But then Tama-chan said, “You’re the best to me,” and that cleared up the murky feelings inside her. With that, the issue had been settled.
But maybe this could be called Mimimi’s karma—when you considered that her tendency to always compare herself with others hadn’t changed, that resolution hadn’t really resolved the fundamental structure of her problem. Mimimi had just been feeling positive at that moment because Tama-chan had called her the best.