I deliberately hit her with a barrage of assertions, intrusive arguments, and pity, all of which would be hard for Saitou to swallow, given her character. I didn’t mind if she got angry at me for this—same if she was sad or spiteful. I didn’t even care if how incomprehensible this was had frightened her. Whatever her reaction was, all I cared about was that she distanced herself from me. Having spent enough time with her, no matter how idle, I had some measure of faith that she was wise enough to know when to give up on a relationship.
“Kaya-kun.” When she finally broke the silence and said my name, there was neither anger nor sadness in her voice. “What was your gale?” she asked as though that was the most important thing, though I couldn’t see why it mattered.
Though I couldn’t comprehend how she was feeling, I actually had planned to tell her about this, regardless of whether or not she cared. I needed her to know what had shaped me into the person I was today. I needed her to know that I was a unique specimen even among all those who had tasted that gale in their lives. And I needed her to be able to give up on me.
“If you really wanna know, I guess I can tell you.”
“Tell me.”
I had never told this to anyone before. I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t nervous. However, there was a reason that I was sharing this special thing that existed within only me to Saitou.
“My gale blew back then.”
I spoke with placid emotion, falling into the memories of those days that lingered in my heart, as I always did. As I had done so many times before.
“Back then? You mean when we were in high school?”
“Yeah. When I was sixteen, to be precise. I have no idea how others saw me back then, but I was bored with living and always irritable. I was constantly looking for something that would give my life some real meaning.” It sounded stupid when I said it out loud. “I spent my time trying out lots of different stuff and getting disappointed with it. Then I met a girl, and I fell in love.”
Saitou’s eyebrows lifted ever so slightly.
“She lived in a different world. One separate from this one. I could only meet with her at a specific bus stop, and all I could see of her body were her eyes and nails.”
Unsurprisingly, Saitou looked at me inscrutably.
“Was she a ghost?”
“Not to me. That bus stop connected our world to hers, and I’m 100 percent certain that she existed. I was able to touch her, and I was even able to put things from her world in my mouth.”
“That’s…”
She appeared to be desperately trying to align what I was saying with her own common sense.
“Are you sure you didn’t just dream it? For some reason or other?”
Though she didn’t spell it out, it was obvious that she thought I had hallucinated this, whether from an illness or some other foreign contaminant within my body. Though it should go without saying, I was not showing any symptoms of such an illness at the time, nor had I ingested anything strange.
“It wasn’t a dream. I saw her lots of times. Whether or not anyone else believes me though, it doesn’t change how vividly real it was to me, so much so that I could never forget my memories. So it’s fine if you don’t believe me.”
“…Keep going.”
It was probably a point of pride for Saitou that she would never claim to believe something that easily. Her achingly pointless pride—pride that would never accept that all the time she spent with someone like me was a complete waste.
“Every night, I went to that bus stop to see her. I’d wait inside the pitch-black bus shelter for her to arrive.”
I realized that maybe I should explain that she came down into a basement safe house, but that would have complicated the story a bit, so I left that part out.
“Once every few days, she would arrive from that other world. I couldn’t see her whole human form, only her glowing eyes and nails. I thought that she’d have some kind of knowledge, some intel I could get from her that would make my life special, but that didn’t go very well. As much as we tried to share our cultures with one another, we couldn’t share tastes or smells, and it was impossible to read any writing. The only things we could share were our words, but there’s not a lot you can do with just learning rules or customs from another world.”
I shared my memories with her, from start to finish.
“What’s most important is that we were able to have some sort of real effect on each other’s worlds. The same sort of stuff happened in both places, like if you broke something here, something there would break too.”
We had now reached an unavoidable subject, something that we could go no further without discussing.
“We tried to find out if there was a way to utilize this connection to help one another.”
The next name I spoke was not an accident but fully intentional.
“In the course of these experiments, I lost a dog belonging to Tanaka, the girl who sat beside me in class.”
“Hm…?”
As I had predicted, Saitou looked at me suspiciously. She was probably trying to weigh whether my story or her own recollection was more accurate. However, she swiftly demanded an answer of me.
“Okay, sorry if I’m just remembering wrong, or if I forgot something, but…”
“Yeah?”
“…was there ever a Tanaka in our class?”
“Nope.”
There was no point in waiting for her to ask the obvious follow-up to that.
“Back then, I tended to just lump all our classmates together, classifying them as ‘Tanakas.’ A common, average name for the sort of common, average person you’d find anywhere and everywhere. Nothing special about them.”
The words seemed to hit her with some measurable force, the impact of which spread across her features. But I wasn’t done talking yet.
“Did that include me?”
“No.”
Her face immediately relaxed at this, but unfortunately, I had to burst her bubble.
“The ones who conducted themselves a little bit differently from the Tanakas got a different name.”
I looked her in the eye.
“I thought of you as ‘Saitou’ back then, and that hasn’t changed one bit. Even now, you’re a Saitou to me, nothing more, nothing less.”
There must have been a million different emotions overlapping within her, informing her expression. Seeing where her face ended up put me at ease.
“What the hell?!”
That night, for the first time ever, I saw a true despair in the eyes of Saitou Sanae—or rather, Sunou Sanae.