He left the house just past nine AM.
“Have fun, Sakuta!” Kaede yelled, carrying Nasuno into the bathroom.
Outside the building, he was greeted by a blue sky.
Clear spring air and not a cloud in sight.
The polar opposite of his overcast heart, which made that blue look positively fake.
He stared up above for so long he got dizzy and had to bring his gaze back down to earth to collect himself.
At that precise moment—
“Yoo-hoo!”
That voice was too cheery for the hour.
He turned to the building across the street and saw someone waving at him.
It was the leader of the Sweet Bullet idol group, Uzuki Hirokawa. She’d been enrolled at his university but dropped out halfway through the year.
She came running over. “You good? I’m good!” she said, beaming as bright as the spring sun.
Nodoka was lurking behind her.
“I’m, uh, getting by.”
“Oh! Sakuta, it’s finally happening!”
“Kokugikan? Kaede told me.”
“Noooo! It’s the Budokan!”
“I could swear you said that was still a long way off.”
Six months back, she’d definitely said as much. So had Nodoka.
“We worked really hard, and our fans cheered us on! Didn’t you?”
“I can’t wait to see you on that stage, Zukki.”
He meant that.
“Woot!”
Uzuki threw both hands up, demanding a double high five.
“Either way, congrats.”
“Thanks!” she said, as revved up as when she was onstage.
“Same to you, Toyohama. All good news,” he said, glancing over Uzuki’s shoulder.
“Yeah, well…,” Nodoka said, rather subdued.
He’d have thought she’d be happier.
“You seem disgruntled.”
“Nodoka’s just sulking,” Uzuki whispered. “Mai’s announcement sucked all the hype out of our big news!”
“That’s not true!” Nodoka snapped, hearing every word of that.
“Then what is it?”
“We live together, yet I had no idea? How oblivious am I?”
“You too, Toyohama?”
“Me too, what?”
“You think Mai’s Touko Kirishima.”
“Huh? She said so herself yesterday. Onstage.”
“I saw the stream! What a show!” Uzuki said, leaning in enthusiastically.
“But Mai herself denied it repeatedly,” Sakuta insisted.
“That’s because of the contracts, obviously. Agency…record company…,” Nodoka grumbled, not meeting his eyes.
“The commercial I did had a contract like that! I couldn’t tell anyone until they ran the version that showed my face.”
“……Yeah, that’s what Mai said, too.”
It was a logical explanation. The industry was full of those deals.
But Sakuta still found it hard to swallow. And it bugged him that Nodoka, Uzuki, and everyone else was so easily convinced. The nagging feeling that something was very wrong had taken up residence inside him. An unpleasant feeling that was only getting worse over time.
“What, you don’t believe her, Sakuta?” Nodoka asked, seeing the look on his face.
“I dunno. It just doesn’t sit right.”
“What do you mean?!” Uzuki said, genuinely puzzled. If this had been a manga, there’d have been a question mark floating over her head.
“You were at the festival, right?” Nodoka asked. “Did you not talk to her in person?”
“I did.”
“Huh? So what are you on about?”
When she asked, Nodoka looked baffled. As time went on, that shifted to anxiety and concern. All those emotions were directed at Sakuta.
For a moment, Uzuki glanced from one to the other, but soon she settled on giving him a worried look. She was obviously wondering if something was wrong.
“Are you okay, Sakuta?” she asked aloud.
Clearly, they suspected he wasn’t.
They felt really far away.
They were right in front of him, but it didn’t feel like it.
Close enough to touch…
But it seemed like if he reached out, they’d move that much further away.
Each word he used to close that gap pushed them away.
To escape that sensation, he changed the subject.
“Gonna miss my train.”
“Ack, we’ve got a rehearsal to get to! Nodoka, let’s book it!”
“If we miss the Romancecar, it’s all your fault, Sakuta!”
All three started walking fast.
They pumped their legs one after the other, setting a high pace.
Each step carried them closer to the station—even though Sakuta felt unsteady on his feet. His brain and body seemed like they were out of sync. It was almost as if he’d forgotten how he usually walked. The more conscious of that he was, the worse it got.
Uzuki and Nodoka pulled ahead, and the whole way to the station, Sakuta thought of nothing but how walking worked…all the while wondering if any of this was real.
✦ ✦ ✦
They’d jogged part of the way, and that proved enough for Nodoka and Uzuki to board the Romancecar to Shinjuku.
Sakuta saw them off through the Odakyu gates, then went up the stairs to the JR area. He tapped his IC commuter pass, stepped through the gates, and boarded an incoming Tokaido Line train.
Sakuta got off that train twenty minutes later, at Yokohama Station.
Ten AM, and the department store had just opened. Sakuta stopped in to buy some pudding. The kind that came in beakers with a hard-boiled detective featured on them.
The through-service train to Hachioji showed up just as he got back, so he boarded that.
One Kaede was back at the apartment, and one Kaede was staying with their parents.
To confirm that fact, Sakuta rode through Higashi-Kanagawa, Oguchi, Kikuna, and Shin-Yokohama and finally got off at Kozukue Station.
Outside the station, he followed the main road for a while, then turned onto a side street after around ten minutes. Already in sight of the company housing his parents lived in.
He took the stairs to the third floor, moved to the end of the row, and rang the intercom.
Three full seconds of silence.
“Yes?” That was his mother’s voice over the speaker.
“It’s me. Sakuta.”
“Oh, what brings you here? Give me just a moment!”
The intercom cut out, and he heard footsteps coming.
The door opened.
“You lose your key?” Kaede asked.
Definitely the original Kaede. Same hair, tone of voice, attitude—no mistaking her.
“Sakuta?”
When he didn’t answer, she shot him a frown, head crooked a bit.
“Left it at home,” he said, and he grabbed the door and slipped inside. “I brought gifts.”
He handed the box of pudding to Kaede and took his shoes off.
“Nice. Mom, he brought pudding!”
She happily showed the box to their mother, who’d also come to the entryway.
“Then that’s our three o’clock snack.”
“Aww, let’s eat them now.”
As they chattered, Sakuta stepped into the apartment.
“What brings you here?” his dad asked, looking up from his tablet—he was reading the newspaper. “Something going on?”
“Nah, once college starts, I won’t have much time, so I figured I should stop by before spring break ends.”
“Ah.”
His father nodded vaguely and looked back at the tablet.
“You staying for lunch?”
“Oh, can’t, got plans after this.”
The other Kaede had claimed he had a lunchtime shift at the restaurant.
“What, a date with Mai?” his mother teased.
“Something like that.”
He figured it best to go with her version. He was only here to confirm the original Kaede still existed with his own two eyes…and he wasn’t about to tell anyone that. They probably wouldn’t get it even if he did try to explain.
“Oh, right, Sakuta…,” Kaede said.
“Mm?”
“Can we swap shifts next week?”
Oblivious to his predicament, she was business as usual.
“Is there a Sweet Bullet show?”
“I’m going to the hot springs in Hakone with Mom and Dad.”
She glanced at the laptop on the table. It was open to the hot springs’ homepage.
“I’m not invited?”
“You already went with Mai over Christmas.”
“No rule against going twice.”
“Just take my shift.”
“Fine.”
There was nothing remarkable about that exchange; that’s how siblings always talked. How he and Kaede always talked.
And for some reason, that felt a bit odd.
He’d just chatted with the other Kaede this morning. They’d had breakfast and done the dishes, and she’d waved him out the door.
His internal alarm was going off.
They shouldn’t both exist.
And yet they both seemed real.
A weird place to be, and he could not find a convincing explanation.
Just being around Kaede was rattling him.
“……Sakuta? Is there something on my face?”
He must have zonked out. She was scowling at him.
“Nope. Enjoy the hot springs.”
“That’s it?”
“Bring me back something.”
That was the best he could manage now.