My time at the bus shelter passed by in the blink of an eye.
“Hey, Suzuki.”
Was it lunch break? Yeah, it was during my lunch break. My seat neighbor Tanaka, ever incorrigible, had struck up a conversation. Ever since those few days where I had been the one to speak to her first, she’d grown much more familiar with me. In retrospect, I should have thought of an approach with fewer drawbacks.
“You think she’s on some kinda drugs or somethin’?”
I turned my face to see her pointing to Saitou, who was sitting some distance away from us. Honestly, just how easy did she think it was for someone to get their hands on drugs of all things?
“How should I know?”
“So a cult, then?”
“I definitely wouldn’t know.”
“Why would a cult be less obvious than drugs?”
“Well, drugs are a real thing. Beliefs are a state of mind, so you can’t see them.”
“Oh…”
I looked at Tanaka, who gave an impressed nod. I suddenly felt a bit foolish for answering so seriously. I didn’t care if Saitou used drugs or was some kind of religious fanatic. If she was, she could just keep living her life in those deluded dreams.
Something I had discussed previously with Chika crossed my mind. If there was a dream you could never wake from, then there was no point in recognizing that it was a dream. Drugs and religion at least held meaning for whoever took part in them.
…Not. Even thinking that for an instant was ridiculous. Chika was encroaching on my boring, everyday life. I was growing twisted.
“But like, I mean…” Though I’d asked for no follow-up, Tanaka continued the conversation. I decided to let her keep talking because it would be more trouble to stop her. “Hasn’t she been kinda weird lately?”
I answered her question with a noncommittal reply, using as little of my facial muscles as possible. The response was meant to convey my utter lack of interest in Saitou, but deep down, I reluctantly agreed with Tanaka.
I wasn’t interested in her at all, but if I did had it in me to reply, I would have had to agree: Saitou was acting strange lately.
It had been two months since the incident with Izumi. We were in the rainy season now and had switched to our summer uniforms. The newspapers and radio reported to the citizens that the situation with the war was changing by the minute, while online foulmouthed pundits bashed each other over it, as they always did. As an experiment to test the theory that I could have any effect on the way that wars were conducted in this world, I tried spreading information about the way wars were fought in Chika’s world on various social networks, but I was either ignored or chewed out by people with even more free time than me. It was only a week before, in the midst of these horribly uneventful days, that I noticed a change in Saitou.
“S-see you tomor…”
I couldn’t quite make out the end of those trailing words, but she was clearly saying, “See you tomorrow.” The “Wha?” that came out of my mouth wasn’t because I didn’t understand, but because I had never in a million years imagined that Saitou, who had left the classroom at the end of the day and headed promptly to the shoe lockers as she always did, would ever turn back to talk to me before she departed. My reply to this greeting was a rude one, but it came so suddenly that I had no chance to react. Well, I supposed now I sort of got what Tanaka felt when I greeted her out of the blue. For better or worse, Saitou left immediately after she spoke, so she probably didn’t catch my confusion.
Before I could even make sense of this suspicious behavior, the next day, the same thing happened again.
“S-see you…tomorrow.”
This time I was prepared and heard her all the way to the end, so I replied with a simple, “Yeah, try not to get caught.” I knew that my words had gotten across from the rare smile that quirked Saitou’s lips, the first I’d ever seen, one corner of her mouth tipping upward.
I passed the next week overly on edge, hoping that she didn’t have something to tell me or anything annoying like that, but now it seemed that I was not the only one who had noticed the change in her. I doubted she had started taking drugs or joined a cult, but I wondered if someone had maybe advised her to start being more friendly. The next day, she greeted me yet again.
Tanaka continued, as though my response had been utterly irrelevant to begin with. “Like, she’s started talkin’ to me about all sorts of random stuff. She never did that before. And, like, since this was all brand new, I asked her if something happened. And you know what she said?”
I hated people who thought it was funny to ask questions you couldn’t possibly know the answer to, like blood types or star signs. Even more so when they then answered those questions themselves.
“She said she had ‘an encounter.’”
The hell? I mean, that was the sort of answer you might expect from a new religious convert. It was far more likely that she had started dating someone and was learning to socialize, but that was an awkward way to put it. And it was all the more irritating that Tanaka hadn’t asked the most basic of follow-ups: “An encounter with what?”
Fundamentally though, it didn’t matter what she had encountered. I was a little concerned that any encounter could alter her behavior in that way, but I didn’t need to get emotionally invested in that. There were things far more deserving of my attention than Saitou.
It had been over two months now—I’d met with Chika five more times since I talked about Izumi—but through all our discussions, we had yet to draw any further conclusions about the connections between our worlds. The most we had been able to determine was that the weather in my neighborhood was the same as in Chika’s home area. When it was clear here, it was clear there too, and when it rained here, it rained there as well. I wondered if the climates in the corresponding regions in each of our worlds were the same, but Chika’s world map seemed to be completely different from ours, and we did not have the time to be making any fastidious investigations into which countries corresponded to which.