They did have a point. If I really was going to kill myself, then there was certainly no point in studying for entrance exams I’d never take.
“Don’t waste what little time you have left doing mindless bookwork, my dude,” wrote Ryo. “Spend it doing stuff you actually like to do.”
“Hard to argue with that coming from a guy in your position,” I admitted.
Still, part of me felt it best to continue living my life like normal up until the very day I chose to end it all. If I started slacking off and enjoying myself now, my mother was sure to notice, and that would only make things harder in the long run. As such, my current plan was to continue playing the role of the dutiful honor student for her until I had everything I needed to commit suicide all planned out and ready to go.
On the private message boards where the three of us first met, you’d occasionally see recruitment threads pop up in which people attempted to arrange mass suicides with anyone and everyone that was interested. But the three of us hadn’t even discussed that as an option. As of right now, we were all planning to do the deed separately—on our own time and in our own respective ways.
“So, when are you two planning on dying?” I asked the room. “I figure I’ll probably do it sometime around the end of the year. Wouldn’t want to overlap too closely with you guys.”
“Wait, why can’t we all just do it on the same day?” asked Ryo.
“Well, if we spread it out, then those of us who are left can at least go to the others’ funerals. Thought that might be kinda nice,” I answered.
“Wait, don’t tell me… Are you the obsessive, gotta-have-everything-planned-out-months-in-advance, right-down-to-the-minute type, Tomoya-kun?” asked Aoi.
“I take it you’re not?”
“I kinda wanna wait and see what the weather’s like the morning of, before I decide for sure. I mean, you only die once, right? Might as well pick a nice day to do it, then, if I’ve got the choice. Feel like I could rest nice and easy beneath a big blue sky.”
Just then, my cram school instructor walked back into the classroom, and all of the other students who were hanging around talking to one another quieted and returned to their seats. I slid my smartphone back into my backpack. After the instructor handed out the next worksheet, the only sound to be heard in the classroom for the next hour was the frantic scribbling of pencils.
Being the middle of summer, it was still relatively light outside after cram school let out. I’d gotten a text from my mother letting me know that she expected to be home very late tonight. I waffled back and forth for a few moments as to whether I should just head straight home and make the most of my alone time or not—but in the end, I settled on making a second trip out to the abandoned airfield. I stopped by the hardware store to buy a small set of fireworks, hopped on the bus, and watched out the window as it carried me away from the city into remnants of suburban sprawl that became more and more bleak.
I wanted to speak with the Summer Ghost again. It was a spur-of-the-moment impulse based on my mother’s text, so I didn’t bother asking Aoi and Ryo if either of them wanted to come. We didn’t even know if it was possible for the same person to encounter her more than once yet, after all. For all we knew, her appearing to us the other day could have been a one-time, freak occurrence. This was another reason I felt compelled to go back—pure curiosity as to how the phenomenon worked.
I hopped off the bus at the edge of the prefecture and got to walking. It was still pretty hot out as I trudged my way up the unpaved road, but I soon found myself at the top of the hill, staring down at the giant airfield surrounded by a rusty old chain-link fence. Just like last time, I slipped into the lot via the break in the fence and made my way through the tall grass to the crack-ridden pavement of the runway. I put down my backpack and got straight to work unwrapping the set of fireworks I bought on the way.
Last time, she only appeared after we’d gone through all of our other fireworks and were down to only a single pack of Japanese-style sparklers. This led me to wonder if perhaps these were the only fireworks that could summon her, so I tried using a more universal torch-style sparkler first to test this theory. It was a morning glory, a type that shot forth a powerful spray of multicolored sparks—pink, green, and blue—from the end of a stick for about thirty seconds or so before fizzling out. As the half-light faded and dusk began to fall, its dazzling array of colors almost seemed to pierce straight through the descending veil of night.
But the Summer Ghost did not appear.
Next, I pulled out one of the Japanese-style sparklers and held my lighter up to the bottom tip to set it aglow. In seconds, the gunpowder combusted, and the chemical reaction of potassium sulfate, potassium carbonate, and sulfuric acid created a viscous blob that soon swelled up into a molten, spherical slag. And it was within this glowing red orb, which almost seemed to radiate with the fragile flicker of life itself, that tiny pockets of unstable gas began to build up in the form of countless bubbles. When these finally burst, they sent tiny droplets of white-hot mist spraying out from it—and it was these microscopic beads of molten matter that we called sparks.
These pinpricks of light left trails in the air as they flew out in their initial arcs, then burst due to even further chemical reactions within the droplet into even tinier sparks, which then fired off in all directions to form those branching, pine-needle patterns we knew so well. It was a softer, warmer sort of sparkle than you could get from any other type of handheld firework.
If you were to stop time and examine any individual instant of this dazzling phenomenon from one millisecond to the next, you’d be looking at nothing more than a series of simple chemical reactions, all of which science could easily explain. And yet we humans had the uncanny ability to perceive within them a kind of beauty—an allegory for the fragile, fluctuating nature of our own lives that moved us deep down inside, often with a profound sense of melancholy toward the ephemeral. It was the sort of thing that, just by watching it, could stir up deep emotions from within our hearts. If you asked me, it was this very ability to appreciate these inexplicable, abstract forms of beauty that made us human—and this was a feeling I often tried to capture by depicting these same, seemingly mundane yet highly evocative things in my own artwork from time to time.