“Whew! Looks like we just barely made it!”
“Whoa! Look how many people there are!!”
Junichi and Minoru jumped off the bike and started running.
We’d arrived at the seaside hill where Moshimo Lighthouse stood. Only a few minutes remained before the fireworks display was set to begin at seven PM.
We could see Moshimo Beach below. It was bustling with crowds of people and strings of lights formed by the long corridors of vendors’ stalls. We could see the dim silhouette of Moshimo Island poking out right in the middle of the bay. The dark outlines of several people were swarming about the island like ants. They must have been the fireworks crew.
Just as Kazuhiro had asserted in the classroom, the hill we were on appeared to be perfectly to the side of where the fireworks would be launched.
“So which are they?! Round?! Flat?!” Minoru’s voice was a mixture of excitement and exhaustion.
“They haven’t even started yet. And they’re gonna be round anyway,” Kazuhiro shot back, full of confidence.
Junichi’s reply came equally fast. “If they’re flat, though, we’re serious about the homework. All of it… Hey, and since we’re here anyway, how ’bout we watch from up there?”
“You mean up on the lighthouse?”
Junichi was pointing a finger toward the slowly rotating beam of Moshimo Lighthouse.
“Yeah! That sounds awesome!”
Minoru approached the base of the lighthouse and tugged on the handle of a small door, which was only about three feet tall. It opened easily but with a drawn-out metallic screech.
“Whoa! Cool! There’s a staircase!! Come check it out, guys!”
Minoru, still staring inside, waved us closer with a hand stretched out behind his back.
“Oh, sweet! Think we can go in? Kinda scary in there.”
Despite any hesitation he might have been feeling, Junichi’s voice was also full of excitement.
I peered through the door from behind Junichi. A spiral staircase wound through the dim light of the interior. I’d been to the lighthouse several times—my first visit was on a field trip all the way back in kindergarten—but this was the first time I’d ever seen the inside.
“Are you sure it’s okay? It says NO UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY.” Kazuhiro was looking at a metal sign attached to the side of the door.
“It’s fine! And anyway, it’s not like anybody’s unauthorized us! Come on, let’s go!”
Junichi’s logic was questionable—it was clearly a matter of needing to be authorized, not the other way around. But before anyone had a chance to call him out on it, we were already starting to file inside the door.
The spiral staircase was punctuated at regular intervals by bluish-white emergency lamps. It was narrow enough that we would have to ascend in single file.
“Hey, Kazuhiro! You be in front!”
“Why?!”
“’Cause you’ve got the flashlight!”
Even though Junichi had been the first to walk inside, he was already chickening out. He pushed Kazuhiro forward, and we began a gradual ascent with Kazuhiro in front, then Junichi, Minoru, me, and Yusuke in back.
Kazuhiro’s flashlight revealed a stairway full of cobwebs. Everything looked eerie, straight out of a horror movie.
“This is seriously giving me the creeps,” Kazuhiro whimpered as he brushed away the sticky threads with his hand.
While it was true we had a lighthouse in Moshimo, it wasn’t spectacular enough to draw attention on a national scale. It was about fifty feet from bottom to top, and climbing it shouldn’t have taken more than a minute.
But Kazuhiro’s feet weren’t moving forward at all.
“Come on, just go! The fireworks are gonna start!”
Junichi was becoming irritated. He pushed at Kazuhiro’s back.
“I know they—!!”
Fyuuu… Boom! Boom-boom!!
The tail end of Kazuhiro’s reply was drowned out by a sudden cacophony from outside.
“Oh no!”
“They’ve started!!”
“Go! Go!!”
With Junichi still pushing him from behind, Kazuhiro seemed to break through his uncertainty. He started charging up the staircase, flailing his light and screaming out a war cry: “Ahhhhhh!” Cobwebs clung all over his body as he made his way to the top.
“Yeah!”
“Here we go!!”
Junichi and Minoru dashed up just behind him.
“Are they round?! Flat?!”
“I keep telling you, they’re gonna be round!!”
“You don’t know that!!”
Yusuke and I seemed to have missed the cue; we found ourselves alone near the bottom of the staircase. Yusuke refused to look in my direction anymore, and he’d been staying out of any conversations among the other three.
“Let’s go…,” I said without turning around.
There was no response. I brushed it off and started climbing.
“…Hey!”
I was two or three steps up when Yusuke’s voice rang out from behind.
I turned. He glared into my eyes, causing me to flinch.
“…Yeah?”
For whatever reason, I felt like if he saw my fear, he’d win at some unspoken competition we were having. I tried to respond as confidently as I could, but Yusuke’s follow-up was even louder.
“…As soon as summer’s over, I’m gonna ask her out!”
“Huh?”
“When second term starts, I’m gonna tell Nazuna that I like her!”
As Yusuke made his declaration, he shoved past me and began running up the spiral staircase.
What’s his deal…?
I didn’t know how to respond, so I just followed him up the stairs.
At the cramped landing at the top, Junichi and the others had encountered an obstacle.
“It won’t open! What gives?!”
“You gotta push harder!”
The door leading outside was rusted shut. We could hear the explosions of the fireworks on the other side. The sounds were coming closer and closer together.
“Hurry up and open it! The show’s gonna be over!” Kazuhiro was frantic.
“Oh, come on. It just started! …Okay, let’s all push at the same time.”
Junichi shoved his sleeves up to his shoulders.
“On three! Ready? …Come on, get over here!”
“R-ready…”
Caught up in his enthusiasm, we all crammed ourselves in front of the door.
“Here we go… One…two…three!!”
At Junichi’s signal, all five of us threw our weight against the door.
Slam!!
After all the fuss we’d made, it swung open fairly easily—leaving us all collapsed in a big heap under the doorframe.
“Ow…”
“Hey! Get off!”
“Which one of you is on top of me?!!”
Amid our shouts, Junichi was the first to pull himself free and stand. He ran to the railing, leaned over the side, and exclaimed, “Which is it?!”
Minoru and Kazuhiro were next. They lined up beside Junichi at the railing.
Fyuuu…
I heard the sound of another shot fired and looked intently at the night sky.
“Round or flat?!”
As if in response to Minoru’s question, the firework burst open.
Boom! Boom-boom!!
The first firework I’d ever seen from the side…was flat.
“…No way…”
I stared dumbfounded. The dark sky filled with more bursts of color, but every single one was a thin, flat oblong… It was a pathetic imitation of the fireworks I was used to seeing.
“See! They’re totally flat!!”
Junichi grinned and gave Minoru a high five. Kazuhiro, on the other hand, was mute with shock.
Junichi and Minoru clung to each other and cheered, “Whoo! No homework for us!”
But to me, their cheers seemed to be coming from some other, faraway place.
It wasn’t supposed to matter whether fireworks were round or flat. But for some reason, I just couldn’t accept what I was seeing.
Weird. This is weird. Something isn’t right.
As I continued to stare, I heard Kazuhiro mumbling to himself.
“This makes no sense! There’s no way they should be flat!”
He was right. What we were seeing couldn’t possibly be correct. Fireworks…were supposed to be round. A world where fireworks were flat wasn’t supposed to exist. Yet, the ones right before my eyes were most certainly flat.
How could this be?
And why had I thought fireworks were round?
“…Impossible. This can’t be happening…,” Kazuhiro said.
“Impossible. There isn’t a world where that can happen.”
Kazuhiro’s words echoed something I’d heard Yusuke say before.
The two tangled threads of memory I was carrying around jerked themselves free, and finally everything became clear.
“Back there… If only…I’d won…”
That was the thought I’d held in my mind as I hurled the mysterious orb with all my might.
The fork in the road—the fork in my memory—had started there.
Everything that had happened must have been caused by that orb Nazuna picked up. And when I’d made my desperate wish…that had been the beginning of the repeated day.
“Yusuke,” I started.
I didn’t wait for him to respond.
“…I’m gonna get Nazuna back.”