And so the four drinks Tobe carried in hand were all smoothly sold out. Hmm… It seems now there’s nothing left at all for our friend Tobe…
“Sorry, I’ll pay for Komachi’s drink,” I said quietly to him. Even if Tober Eats was a functionally free delivery service, Komachi had joined the others just now, so she wouldn’t have been in his original count.
“Nah, nah, we’re good. You don’t hafta…,” Tobe answered casually in that who-knows-where-it’s-from accent, not seeming bothered at all as he cackled and waved his hands.
The hell, is he a good guy or what…? I was thinking when Tobe finally noticed Komachi’s presence.
He gave a melodramatic “Whoaaa!” of surprise, snapped his fingers, and pointed at her. “Wait, you’re, like, Hikitani’s little sister! Dude! You’re basically, like, Sistertani-chan! I haven’t seen you in forever! Hey, hey, what’s up, whassup? What’s goin’ on? Oh dude, we gotta catch up. We’ll have, like, piles of things to talk about, am I right?”
“Ohhh! It’s been a long time! It really has been a long time! We have so many things to talk about next time absolutely absolutely honestly we have to later!” Meanwhile, even though Komachi had a wide and bright smile on her face, when Tobe scooted toward her, she backed up a step. She was even answering him with the kind of expressions you use after everyone’s been out drinking together and you’re about to leave.
Her skillful snapback made Yuigahama and me jerk away in horror.
“That’s how you push someone away when you have no intention of ever talking to them…,” I said.
“That thing girls who aren’t friends like to do!” Yuigahama cried.
Next time, absolutely, later. In this case, next time and later will absolutely never come. I’m very informed on this matter.
“Wait, why are you here, Tobe?” I asked. I could basically get Yukinoshita, Yuigahama, and Isshiki being together. But adding Tobe to that didn’t really make sense.
“I invited Hayama, but for some reason, this guy just showed up instead,” Isshiki answered in an utterly emotionless tone, and Yukinoshita concurred with an equal lack of emotion.
“Indeed. He just showed up.”
Ohhh, looks like Miss Yukinoshita’s energized now! She’s gotten her cutting edge back! Nice, nice!
As for Tobe, on the other hand—you would expect him to cut loose and snap back after that, but there was nothing at all cutting about him. As if he wanted to tell us, I’d be impressed if you did get me mad, he chuckled a wry na-ha-ha. “Hey, hey, I just came ’cause, like, Hayato told me he’d be worried if the girls went alone.”
“Hmm…” I made skeptical noises.
“I mean? Me too, though? Like harassment from dudes and stuff? I wouldn’t let that happen?” Though nobody had really asked him, Tobe ruffled up his hair and started to put on a weird show of what a good guy he was. Leave him like this, and he might grow up to be the kind of adult who tries to look cool by tweeting things that everyone will have a hard time reacting to, like I might look like a troublemaker, but when I saw a young kid drop a can on the ground, I picked it up and tossed it. Well, Tobe is a good guy…
When everyone there was unable to react, Isshiki let out a deep aaagh. “Yeah, he was reeeally going on about that… I should’ve just sent him a LINE rather than talking to him when I was at the soccer club.” Then she gave Tobe an ice-cold look. “You don’t have to show off so much—drop it. You really should stop doing stuff like that, okay?”
“O-okay… Dude… She’s actually lecturing me…” Tugging at the hair at the nape of his neck, Tobe kept muttering, “Dude…dude.”
The way Isshiki was saying it was pretty, uh, yeah, but she was replying to him instead of ignoring him, which made me think she was actually being fairly nice.
I get it now; I see basically what happened. Probably, when Isshiki had shown up at the soccer club, she’d mentioned the fest to Hayama, saying something like I’ll feel anxious if it’s just us girls… And then good ol’ Hayama had used that against her, putting on a charming smile and carelessly commenting that they could count on Tobe. He is really good at that sort of thing. Saying that in Tobe’s presence would also flatter his pride and chivalrous spirit, which is what brought us to now… In this world, the nicer you are, the more you get used…
As I was keenly feeling this fact, Yuigahama felt bad for Tobe (of course) and came in to defend him. “H-hey, now. It is something to be thankful for…”
Pacified by that highly dubious remark, Isshiki also reluctantly agreed. “Well, sure, true, I guess…”
Hmm, the way you put it is kinda sketchy, Gahama-chan!
Komachi immediately jumped in then to butter him up. “For sure! I’m thankful! Hey! Mr. Reliable! Thanks for the drink!” While she was at it, she tried to get out of paying for the drink she’d just gotten, too.
Uh, Big Bro will make sure to pay for that, okay? Come on, that’s just mean.
As guilt was rising within me, Yukinoshita was starting to smile with exasperation. It was like she’d been waiting for an opening to strike. “If a certain someone would have just come from the start, there wouldn’t have been the need for Tobe to get hurt for no reason.”
“You were just hurting him, too, though?” Have you forgotten? You were just treating him like he wasn’t invited? And thanks to that, now I’m feeling like I have to apologize for you, too?
Like a parent apologizing for their problem children, I bobbed a little bow at Tobe. “Well, sorry for making you go along with us.”
“Nah, nah, it’s no biggie at all, man! …I totally love being surrounded by sound, too, y’know?” he said, acting super-self-satisfied.
“Ah, I see… All right, then…” I felt like I’d wasted my energy apologizing to him, but just this once, I would let him act cool with that look on his face. He had actually seemed to have fun during the prom, so I’m sure he does enjoy events like this.
“Well, you do seem like you’d be into this stuff,” I said, which basically implied, But the rest of you don’t really, right?
Isshiki picked up on that and quickly replied, “Oh, no, I just thought this would be a good reference for future events. Well, this one is on a way bigger scale, so yeah. But Chiba has some great music festivals, right?”
“Ahhh, true. They do have some really big events,” Yuigahama said, nodding a few times, and she was quite right. Chiba actually does have large concerts pretty frequently.
“Ahhh… Like that—that one thing.” I nodded along as well and brought up the name of the most famous large-scale event in Chiba’s musical history. “…Like the Glay two-hundred-thousand-person concert.”
“That’s, like, another era?! How old are you, Hikki…?” Yuigahama was aghast.
Don’t be stupid; legends surpass eras. That was the event that made the people of Chiba prefecture aware of large-scale music events (personally researched).
Or so I seriously considered arguing back at her, but before I could, Yuigahama shrugged in exasperation. “If you’re talking about fests in Chiba, normally you’d bring up Summer Sonic. Or Countdown Japan.”
“Well, I’m not very interested in that stuff, so I don’t really know…”
“Whaaat? How can you not know them when they’re that famous…?” Isshiki offered her opinion, seeming a bit annoyed, or maybe shocked.
There was even a hint of pity in her dumbfounded expression, and I hurriedly shot back, “Hey, I do know about them. I do, okay…? Well, just the names, and I’ve never actually gone. Living in the neighborhood actually makes it harder to find the time to go. It’s like people who live in Tokyo not going to Tokyo Tower.”
Only Tobe responded to my random nonsense with nods of agreement, arms folded. “Yeah, dude, I get that.”
Everyone else was looking at me with quite a bit of skepticism. As if she was their representative, Yukinoshita eyed me dubiously and asked, “Do you even go to fests in the first place?”
“Well, that depends on your definition of fest…,” I said, considering for a while.
The only event I’ve ever been to that you could properly designate as a fest would be BanNam Fest. Would Anisama also count? I’m sure you could call it one, in the broad sense of the word… Would Lantis Matsuri count? Hmm, well, I suppose it does. That’s a fest.
Once I’d come to that conclusion, I gave her a big nod. “I go to a lot.”
Yuigahama seemed rather surprised. “Huh, that’s unexpected. Which ones?”
“I just went to one recently. Two days at Tokyo Dome.”
“Two days at Tokyo Dome… Huhhh.” Yuigahama sounded impressed, as did Yukinoshita.
“That’s quite an amazing artist.”
Quite so—Tokyo Dome is one of the major pillars of large music venues in Japan and the pride of the nation. Boasting of a capacity of fifty-five thousand, only the greatest artists can hold concerts there.
Reflecting on that moment, I said, “Well, yeah. Since the second day was Aikatsu!…”
That…was…so good…
Man, right from when the narration from Aoi-chan started at the beginning, I had goose bumps. And then after that, the Aikatsu! system background music played, right? And also, they call the first song “Daihatsu.” And then after that with “Shining Etude,” I thought I was gonna die right then and there and find sweet relief. And then when I was ascending to heaven, “Start Dash Sensation” came, and I was falling to my knees somehow even though I was sitting down. Originally, the concept for the second day was an idol festival, but the shared cast there was so incredibly good, I think the way it was put together was nothing short of a miracle. I really felt like I’d gotten a glimpse of the live entertainment of the new era, overcoming the pseudoreligious fervor with which we stan our own personal biases, and it was just emotional. Ah, soooo eeeee…eeeemo…
It was such a feelsy vicarious experience, I had degraded into an emotional bot that would endlessly tweet Emo…emo…e-emo… One slip, and I would start droning on and on about how good the second day was.
But that’s the sort of thing you can write only in a concert report on Twitter, and if you try to do it verbally, your spinal cord will just start saying emo without consulting your brain.