“Maybe you could read this when you have a second,” he said slowly. “Tell me your answer after you do.”
“…Mm. Gotcha.” She nodded and put the file into her own storage before lifting her face, as though she had just remembered something. “That reminds me. Is Hoo gonna be able to stay with Kao?”
“Oh. Right.” He told her what Thistle Porcupine, aka Kao Fukaya, had told him immediately before he burst out of the emergency Legion meeting. “Fukaya said they also have a northern white-faced owl named Loco, so if it looks like Hoo’s going to fight with Loco, then they can’t keep him. They’re gonna leave him in his cage for the night and see how it goes. Right now, neither of them are bothered by it, I guess.”
“Yeah?” Reina said. “It’d be great if they got along.”
“Yeah.” Haruyuki nodded firmly.
Hoo had been taken into Utai’s care when he was found huddled up with blood streaming down his leg on the premises of Utai’s school, Matsunogi Academy elementary division. The cause of his injury was his former owner digging the individual identification microchip out of Hoo’s leg before abandoning the owl.
Because of this, Hoo didn’t trust any human being besides Utai, and while he’d started to get more comfortable around other people lately, he was still sensitive enough to pick up on when Haruyuki was upset and refuse to take food from him. Kao said it was fifty-fifty as to whether he could settle into this new environment.
But if he could get along with Loco, then that would no doubt help heal Hoo’s trauma to some extent. Haruyuki strongly prayed in his heart that this would happen, before conveying to Reina what Kao had said when they parted.
“Thi—Fukaya—also said that if Hoo’s move goes well, you have to come see him, Izeki.”
“For real?! I’m so psyched!” she cried excitedly, and he felt a dull throb in his heart.
Reina had picked up on the fact that Haruyuki, Utai, Kao, and Niko were connected by something she didn’t know about. If he were in her position, he would have tried to do a slow fade, unable to stand being the only one left out of the loop.
But even after the start of summer break, she’d been coming to take care of Hoo pretty much every day and continued to be her usual cheerful self with them, without so much as a question about their secret. Haruyuki automatically respected her for this, and thus, he had invited her to be a member of their team for the student council election. He searched for words, wondering if there was a way to explain this somehow without touching on Brain Burst.
But as if to get the drop on him, Reina said, smile fading from her lips slightly, “Sorry, Prez. I got no right to run for student council.”
“Huh?” He frowned. “But that’s totally not…”
“You remember, yeah?” she continued. “The day the Animal Care Club was formed, I left you holding the bag with cleaning the hutch and took off, pronto.”
“…”
Now that she mentioned it, he did have a vague memory of that. Wait, it was actually…
“It wasn’t…pronto,” he replied slowly. “I’m pretty sure you helped clean up the leaves for twenty minutes or so, yeah?”
“That’s basically the same as doing nothing at all. Me and that other guy… Um…”
“Hamajima.”
“Right. After me and Hamajima left, you and Utai worked your butts off to get all those hardened leaves that were stuck to the ground out of there, yeah?” She hung her head. “Like, I am seriously the worst, dude.”
“B-but!” Haruyuki earnestly shook his own head. “You came back. Hamajima never showed up again… And you didn’t leave on the first day just ’cause the work was annoying, right? You had stuff going on, didn’t you?”
“…”
Even when he asked this earnest question, she kept her eyes lowered. After a few seconds, she began to speak very slowly at a volume he probably wouldn’t have been able to pick up if this weren’t a dive chat.
“Making excuses is basically the weakest thing ever, but… Back then, okay, it was like, dark. Our mom’s gone, y’know? And my old man’s a designer, but he’s basically like a giant baby who can’t do anything besides that, so, like, me and my brother’s mom, and Shiika’s mom, they both left him.”
“…Oh wow,” Haruyuki responded in a similarly quiet voice. Now that she mentioned it, he did feel like she had told him not too long ago that she had a little sister from a different mother. But in Japan, when parents got divorced, he thought custody of the kids went pretty much automatically to the mother, like in his own family.
Perhaps guessing at his question, Reina began to explain without him having to ask. “Mom—me and my brother’s mother—she’s kind of a mess herself. She was seeing some other guy even before she divorced Dad, and she said she didn’t want custody of us, since she was gonna marry the guy. Shiika’s mom’s not a bad person, but it’s like… She’s the gullible type, falls for all kinds of stuff. And she went all in on this maybe religious group that says stuff about how Neurolinkers and social cameras are government brainwashing devices, you know? My old man hated her talking his ear off about this stuff, and she sort of stopped coming home…”
“…I’ve maybe heard of that group,” he said slowly. “Didn’t they make some kind of gated community in Hokkaido or somewhere?”
“Yeah, that’s them.” Reina scowled for a moment before continuing. “So her mom says she’s taking Shiika and going up to that community. But Shiika was born with this metabolic issue, right? She’s got this embedded device that administers her meds, and it’s controlled by her Neurolinker. As long as the thing’s working properly, she can play and eat and do stuff like normal. But obviously, they don’t let Neurolinkers into that community, so she could die if she went there. Me and my brother explained it, like, a million times, but… Mom was convinced that Shiika being sick was because of the Neurolinker.”
She let out a long sigh, as if to tell him to go on and guess what happened next, so Haruyuki nodded silently.
“And then!” she said. “For real, it was wild. Stuff happening all over the place. Mom divorces Dad, runs off to Hokkaido. I mean, that’s the only way it could’ve played out for Shiika’s sake. But then my brother started this job as a buyer, and Dad wasn’t coming home as usual. So I ended up watching out for Shiika. She’s my baby sister, and I don’t hate it. But, like, before all this, I used to go hang with my friends in Shimokita or Shibuya after school, and now I can’t do any of that stuff at all. So I kinda feel like I don’t fit my usual group anymore…”
“So then, that first day, that was ’cause you had to go pick up Shiika?” Haruyuki asked, and Reina cocked her head slightly to one side.
“Mm, yeah, basically. But we applied for afterschool care, too, so I mean, I had the time to clean a hutch, at least. But I was cheesed that I lost the draw and got stuck being in the Animal Care Club, so I took it out on you, Prez. I know it’s kinda late for this, but I am sorry about that.”
She put both her hands on the table and was about to lower her head in a bow, but he hurriedly stopped her.
“You don’t have to apologize!” he protested. “It’s totally normal to put picking up your sister over any club thing. And shouldn’t you have been exempted from the draw anyway?”
“Hmm? What?” She glared at him suddenly. “You saying you would’ve been better off if I wasn’t in the club?”
“N-n-n-n-n-no!” He shook his pig head with such force, it nearly flew off. “That’s not what I meant. I’m super glad you’re a member of the Animal Care Club, Izeki. I just thought if they’re gonna decide it by lottery, they should honestly take family situations into account is all…”
“Ha-ha-ha! Kidding! Joke! Relax.” She burst out laughing again and locked the fingers of both hands together. “But, situation or not, the fact is I totally blew off the cleaning and left you high and dry. I’m just not fit to run for student council. No matter how you look at it.”
“But you are!” He shouted this, and some kind of hot lump rose from deep inside his avatar. He began to speak, carried away by his own emotion.
“You felt bad about leaving in the middle of cleaning that day and apologized to me, right? So then we can call it done. You don’t have to go on blaming yourself forever. If you carry that kind of darkness around in your heart all by yourself, it just gets bigger and bigger. And at some point, it spills over to the outside, and you end up hurting yourself and the people around you. The election’s one thing, but the cleaning thing, and everything else, too, it’s okay to forgive yourself… You have to forgive yourself.”
These were not words he’d carefully thought through but rather ones that welled up from somewhere in his heart and revealed themselves as is. But it seemed that they did reach Reina.
Transparent droplets suddenly welled in her eyes and glittered with the reflection of the flames in the fireplace. A moment later, she herself appeared to notice them and hurriedly brushed the drops away before responding in a hoarse voice, “Mm. Thanks, Prez. I dunno if I’ll put my name in the hat, but… I’ll read that file you gave me and really think about it.”
Without waiting for his reply, she stood up, turned her back to him, and wiped her eyes once again.
She probably couldn’t see it, but he nevertheless nodded firmly twice.
“Thanks, Izeki,” he said. “We’ve still got time, so no rush.”
“Got it,” she replied. “Shiika is totes in love with you, by the way, so maybe you could come play with her again?”
“Of course! Call me anytime,” he said, and she looked back and smiled.
After the dive call with Reina Izeki was over, Haruyuki took care of a little bit of his summer homework before taking a bath and going back to his own room. The instant he fell back onto the bed, his upper and lower eyelids practically glued themselves to each other. The clock displayed in the lower right of his field of view read 11:22 PM.
It had been a long—interminable—day. He shouldn’t have been that physically tired, but perhaps because he had completely exhausted his mental energy, his limbs were as heavy as lead. Normally, when he went to bed, he took off his Neurolinker, but it was too much of a hassle to do even that.
With the last of his strength, he pulled the thin blanket up to his shoulders and closed his eyes. All he could hear was the faint whrr of the air conditioner and the faint sounds of the city coming through the window.