THERE SHE WAS before me, in the flesh.
Akiyoshi… Akiyoshi was there.
There, without a doubt, was Akiyoshi Hisano.
Though she was a bit bedraggled with dark circles under her eyes, her clothes were the ones I had seen her wearing on the day of the meet-up, her makeup the same as I had seen in that photo with Ten. However, here before me was not an Akiyoshi whose attention was elsewhere, nor a smiling Akiyoshi, but the real Akiyoshi, plain and simple, looking at me with lost eyes.
It had been two and a half years since we last stood face-to-face.
It would be far too silly of me to ask what she was doing here. I almost certainly knew exactly why she was here. As the person most responsible, she would have wanted to arrive at the hall well before anyone else. Even so, I did not think she would arrive this early. I figured she would be a bit more cautious than that.
From the way she was holding her hand out towards me, I could tell that she had been worrying over whether or not to say something to me and had panicked when she realized I was about to leave.
As I froze on the spot, Akiyoshi averted her gaze and then looked back at me.
“So, um…”
She obviously was choosing her words carefully.
“Long time no see, Tabata-kun.”
Tabata…kun.
“…Mm,” I mumbled to fill the silence, if only as an expression of how uncomfortable I felt.
Not Kaede, Tabata-kun.
Both of them were undoubtedly me.
“Um, sorry for startling you,” she said.
“I’m fine,” I replied.
I’m sure that the two of us looked like nothing more than friends who had not seen each other in some years, which was in fact true. As I stood there wondering what I ought to say, Akiyoshi answered a question that I had not yet asked.
“So, I just…”
“…”
“I wanted to talk to you about something, if it’s all right,” she said, looking at me and then at the bench I had been sitting on.
Something she wanted to talk about. I could think of far too many things.
“Oh, right, so I tried calling you the other day, but I guess you changed your number. Your e-mail address too.”
“…Well, it has been two and a half years.”
This probably sounded like a dig at the fact that she had ignored me for over two years and then suddenly decided to contact me again now, but she just gave me a puzzled smile and said, “That’s true,” still staring at the bench.
She was clearly bewildered.
I could think of a number of reasons why she would be so lost, like, should she even have said anything to me? How should she speak to me? What should she talk about? Well, no, she said that she had something to talk about, so it wasn’t the third one. I suppose in that case it was perhaps more a question of whether this was the right place to be talking.
As I began to fill with both fear and anticipation of what she was about to say to me, Akiyoshi took a deep breath, small enough that I hopefully wouldn’t notice, then looked me firmly in the eye.
“How…have you been?”
“…All right.”
“I see… Right, so, there’s something I wanted to talk to you about,” she again declared. I was plenty prepared to have a conversation here and now, but I offered no response. If I said anything, it would create the assumption that I was prepared to accept whatever she had to say.
Seeing her eyes head-on, they lacked all of the clearness they had once had. The cynicism that had been imprinted on her over the past two and a half years had now sullied her entire world.
“Um, have you heard the news?” She had never been so roundabout in conversation, either. I simply tilted my head in reply.
“Uh, Moai is, um, in pretty bad shape right now. There’s been an issue, so we’re going to have a meeting to talk to everyone about it.”
“…I know.”
Her well-groomed eyebrows flexed.
“…Yeah, so. Moai’s in pretty bad shape.”
I nodded back, if only to acknowledge the facts as facts, but her already wide eyes opened even wider.
“Don’t you…have any thoughts about that?”
I understood what emotions she was moving through right now. Knowing this, I offered a meaningless reply.
“…I mean, I don’t really know.”
“We’re in a lot of trouble right now.”
“That’s none of my business.”
“But it’s…Moai. The group we founded together.”
“It isn’t anymore.”
I regretted that I had phrased this in a way that sounded like a criticism, slightly irritated at the way she had phrased this. I really shouldn’t have. I could hear her drawing in a large breath.
“Yes it is.”
“…It’s not the same.”
The look in her eyes shifted.
“Yes, I suppose…the things we do…might be different now…”
“They are different,” I declared, pressing.
“What’s different about it then?” she asked, as if posing a question to the class.
“…Beats me.”
I meant to imply that she should know better than I did, but Akiyoshi seemed to have taken this in a different way.
“Beats you?”
I felt both disappointment and anger from her.
“You say that you don’t know.”
“I’m telling you I really don’t know.”
“You say you really don’t know, and yet…”
Her face twisted in despair as her already unnatural tone grew harsher. She bit her lip once, and her brows furrowed. I felt that I knew what it was she was so upset about. Even so, I was the one who should be hurt, I thought. Everything had changed beyond my recognition.
I could tell from her expression that she already knew everything, and I assumed that she was about to unleash some kind of emotional tirade. However, she merely sighed, fighting to hold back what was clear on her face, just as the head of a massive organization should.
“You know, I did want to talk to you.”
“So you said.”
“…Forget it, let’s cut to the chase.”
It would be a lie to say that I was not frightened by this preface. It was idiotic to be afraid of something that hadn’t even happened yet, but looking back on life, there’s about a fifty-fifty chance of unfortunate futures one predicts coming to pass. That’s why people are constantly afraid.
This was yet another of those times.
“I’m guessing…it’s no coincidence that you’re here.”
“…”
“It was you, wasn’t it?”
Somewhere deep down in my heart I had been practicing tilting my head in ignorance.
“What was…?”
The picture in my head had been more accurate than I anticipated, down to both our expressions.
“Moai.”
She did not appear lost anymore.
“You posted on the internet about us exchanging personal information with businesses.”
“You think I did that?”
“I do.”
I could see the conviction behind her nod. It was not doubt or assumption. She was absolutely certain. Naturally, she was, of course, correct. The question here was how she had come to that conclusion and how exactly she felt about it.
Still keeping up the same bewildered expression I had predicted, I had to ask, “I’m not sure what you’re talking about, but why would I do something like that?”
“I don’t know.”
She shook her head slightly, as if she truly did not understand it. I could see her trying to drop her hubris.
“But I know it was you.”
The sound of my heart pumping more and more blood through my veins resounded throughout my whole body.
“What do you mean?”
Perhaps it was simply because of the temperature, but I swore I felt my blood curdling.
“I saw that image.”
“Image?”
“When I saw what was written on it, I remembered right away.”
“…Remembered what?”
“Your philosophy,” she said, her forehead dotted with sweat.
I was silent. I was afraid that if I opened my mouth, she would hear my heart racing from within me.
I tried to swallow, but it didn’t work.
I had been found out.
She…had noticed me.
Apparently, she took my silence as an affirmative.
“Why would you do something like this?”
What I had not expected was the tone of her voice, which carried no hint of an interrogation.
“Tell me.”
This was not an entreaty. It sounded like admonishment. It was the sort of voice you heard from a parent or teacher scolding an elementary schooler who had done something bad.
I did not care for that at all.