“Sorry, I have plans with a friend today.”
“I’m guessing it’s someone I don’t know? Don’t join a cult lol”
“Nah, I’m not into all that conspiracy theory nonsense, so I should be ok ”
Ducking an invitation from Shin, Akane headed back to that district after school. As she watched the scenery race past outside the window, she donned a fitting expression. Chances were good someone from her school was on this train, so she couldn’t afford to let her guard down.
As always, she hated the moment the doors slid open and that smell rushed in—the stink of human skin piled up like cabbage, trapping in the humidity. But at the same time, she knew she probably reeked of it more than anyone. Her exterior layer was so thick, daring to take up so much space, that no one in her family or at her school could hope to compete. In her eyes, she’d never actually felt the wind against her bare skin.
You’d never tell just from looking at her, but right now Akane was the most nervous she’d ever been—even more than the first time she ever took her clothes off in front of the opposite sex.
What was Ai going to say?
In the book, when Ai figured out The Girl’s true nature, the first thing he said to her when they met up was, “I want to know what the girl inside you is thinking.” The real world, however, didn’t work that way. Most people started with a greeting, followed by small talk to feel the other person out. But that stuff was so mundane that the author didn’t feel the need to include it…according to Akane’s interpretation.
Their specified meetup location was a cafe where the tables were widely spaced out. Spotting Ai inside, she waved and walked over, then slid into the booth across the table from him. Today he was dressed in all black, pairing nicely with the black fabric of the seats.
As she ordered a lemon tea, his voice reached her ears.
“Sorry to spring this on you, Itobayashi Akane. I kinda wanted to know what you’re thinking.”
Akane gasped and swallowed, careful not to exaggerate it too much. “You really care that much about me?! Well, the feeling’s mutual.”
“I wouldn’t go that far. It’s just…I’ve been thinking about you a lot the past few days. Not in a weird way—well, okay, maybe it is weird, fundamentally…”
She frowned, looking puzzled, but internally, it clicked. Ai took great pains never to doubt his friends. The realization that one of them was two-faced wouldn’t sit well with him; this was explicitly depicted in the story. Once again, he was the bona fide Ai in every way. “Wait, what’s going on?”
“Okay, I know this is sudden, but can I just lay it all out?”
“Of course.”
As always, her racing heart and burning impatience were both fully suppressed by the need to be liked—the demon whose reign of terror was fated to end today. For now, she would let it rampage as much as it saw fit. And so, with visions of a great evil exorcised from her bare self, she waited for Ai to speak.
For the moment she’d always dreamed of.
“I don’t really get this.”
“Huh?”
From the bag next to him in the booth, he retrieved something small and rectangular and set it on the table. She quickly realized it was a pocket paperback. But it was wrapped in a disposable paper cover, so she maintained her confusion until she could find out what he was getting at.
The slightest expression had the power to influence people. In this case, the look on her face pushed him to remove the cover. From his perspective, perhaps there was only one book it could have been, but the possibility didn’t even occur to her until she saw what was underneath.
To express her emotions, she widened her eyes.
Doodles of knick-knacks adorned a crisp blue background with the book’s title wedged neatly in between. The original paperback must have sold remarkably well, because this smaller cover didn’t deviate from that design much at all. The bottom one-third, however, was soiled (in her opinion) by an advertisement for the film adaptation, complete with photos of the actors.
She didn’t need to open it to check.
“You read it?”
“Yeah, over the past week or so, which in my case is a new personal record.”
“I can’t believe it!”
“I wanted to surprise you.”
And he certainly succeeded. Akane never thought of Ai as someone who might read a book; in Girl’s March, he wasn’t interested in plain text. But his next words bridged the gap in her perception.
“I’m not big into books usually, but you said this one inspires you, and I wanted to know why.”
If it was something a friend was interested in, he was willing to go out of his way to do things he normally wouldn’t. That was Ai in a nutshell. But one question still remained: were fictional characters allowed to read their own source material?
She realized her mistake so quickly, she was actually embarrassed. Of course he could read it. After all, she had read it, and she was a character too. “Now you’re really being a guilt-tripper.”
“I told you, I’m not! Not sure about you, though.”
Had Girl’s March exposed her? The thought was frightening. But then she realized that he’d probably already figured it all out, so really, there was no point in being scared. “Hey, I’m not a guilt-tripper either! So what did you think?”
If anything about her could be described as genuine, it was that she was excited to hear his opinion of Girl’s March. A character commenting on his own story! As a fan, she couldn’t imagine a better treat. She believed without question that his opinion would further prove that The Girl was not destined to be alone. Thus, it didn’t bother her that he hadn’t started to address her true self.
But in this instance, she had misinterpreted his actions.
“It was more readable than I thought. I haven’t touched a novel in years, but there were no complicated words, and it felt like the author was trying to keep it simple. Though I wasn’t expecting the narration to be so stiff the whole time.”
As she would soon find out, from the moment he showed her the book, he was already starting to ask questions.
“Wait, but…then what are you confused about?”
“It’s nothing like what I expected.”
Commanded by the need to be liked, Akane tilted her head approximately two degrees less than she wanted to. Then she reached out, picked up the paperback, and flipped through it. She didn’t actually need to do this, since she’d practically memorized the story, given how many times she’d replayed each scene in her head—but she decided it would make for a nice punctuating moment in the conversation. “Well, it does go in some unexpected directions, like timeskips and stuff…”
“Not what I mean.”
The barista walked up and set her lemon tea down in front of her. Ai must have seen this as an opportunity. He held his hand out, so she set the book into his palm. Now it was his turn to flip through the pages, though she had no way of knowing if he actually needed to or if he was just angling for punctuation like her.
“It’s not about the storyline or whatever.” Closing the book, he looked directly into her eyes, as if willing her not to run from him…and warning that he would give chase. “Here’s what I don’t get, Itobayashi Akane. How serious were you when you were telling me about it all this time?”
In terms of story structure, where exactly did this moment fall? Unless she could somehow read her entire life like a book, Akane would go to her grave never knowing.
“What do you mean?”
“All right, listen.”
But whether she was the author or merely a reader, perhaps the entire “story” was nothing more than her imposing her own biased interpretation on the text, without ever stopping to truly understand its characters.
“This Ai character is nothing like me.”
He was still wearing the face of Ai, looking at the friend across from him.
“And she’s pretty clearly a woman.”
But The Girl was looking into the blank stare of her real self, locked away in that white room.