“Damn it… God damn it! What did I ever do to deserve this?! This is such bullcrap! I worked harder than anyone, goddammit…! Baseball was the one thing I had left… The only thing Dad ever said I was any good at… Ugh, why me…?”
This shook me up significantly. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for my brother after that. I wasn’t at all surprised to hear that he based his entire sense of self-worth on his baseball skills, what with baseball being the only thing he ever truly loved and worked hard at. I wasn’t only talking about the time spent during his school career, either. I could remember him and my dad playing catch outside our apartment each and every day back before he was even in kindergarten.
I never liked my older brother very much. Ever since we were little, he’d done nothing but pick on me. He also loved to boss me around and would take his anger out on me anytime his feelings got hurt in the slightest. I’d always tried to put as much distance between me and him as possible for this reason, both physically and emotionally. In that moment, though, I felt nothing but sympathy for him. Unfortunately, that same moment marked the beginning of my brother’s slow but steady decline. It was from this point on that he started letting his entire life veer way off course.
In the end, I wasn’t able to stop Kanae from moving to Tokyo. He passed his entrance exam and got into the U of I feeder high school, and arrangements were made for him to move in with his father in the big city that upcoming spring. I, on the other hand, couldn’t care less what high school I went to if I couldn’t go to the same one as Kanae, so I settled on Sodeshima High since it was the cheapest and closest option. When they announced the results of our entrance exams, I was neither overjoyed nor devastated. I felt nothing. Next came the day of our graduation ceremony, and with it, the last day I would ever get to walk home from school with Kanae.
“You sure you don’t want to go to the end-of-the-year party?” he asked me as we walked back from the ceremony. “I’m sure your classmates and fellow swim team members were really hoping to see you there.”
“Eh. I’m not into big parties like that.” I shrugged. “Anyway, I figured it’d be nice to have at least one last chance to talk to you before you go.”
“We go home together pretty much every day, though.”
“I mean, yeah. So what?”
“…All right, then whaddya say we have a little year-end shindig of our own?”
We stopped by the candy store for the first time in months, only to make an unfortunate discovery: the old vending machine that had been parked out front—the one with the glass-bottled Cheerio we always loved so much—had been taken away and replaced with a newer, state-of-the-art model. This made me feel a sort of profound, yearning sadness, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. Maybe because I might never have the chance to enjoy the flavor of dissolved glass molecules again.
“…You okay, Akari?” Kanae asked.
“Huh? What do you m—” I started to ask, but then I figured it out. My voice was nasal and cracked; I’d started to cry without even realizing it. “O-oh, sorry. I tried my best not to cry during the ceremony, but I guess I couldn’t hold it back any longer…or something…”
My lacrimal glands were getting awfully weak lately; I found myself crying over the tiniest, most trivial of things. And once I got started, it was nearly impossible to stop.
“Sorry,” I said, snot dripping from my nose. “I’m really sorry…”
“Here, use these,” said Kanae, handing me a pack of pocket tissues. I graciously accepted them and sat down on the nearby bench to dry my eyes and blow my nose. Kanae took a seat next to me, but he didn’t say a word. He sat there and waited patiently for me to stop crying. Some year-end shindig this turned out to be, I thought to myself. More like a funeral.
We sat there for some period of time—I didn’t know how long—whiling away the early afternoon together. The skies overhead were clear and blue, the wind through my hair cool and crisp, and as we sat together my eardrums were tenderly caressed by the lulling sound of rolling waves off in the distance. The moment was perfect, and I knew this might be the last opportunity I’d get.
Don’t leave me.
I just couldn’t bring myself to say the words.
“REALLY SORRY ABOUT THAT!” I apologized in a flustered voice, but it was too late.
The Rollback had already occurred, and now the rosy-faced drunkard I knocked down seconds ago was nowhere to be seen. My consciousness had been sent far away from the festival grounds in the blink of an eye. I looked around and soon discovered that I was someplace very familiar—standing near the window in my own bedroom. I could just about make out the sound of Greensleeves on the other side of the glass. I reached down and pulled my cell phone out of my pocket to check the date, almost by reflex at this point. The screen flashed on to tell me that it was Monday, April 2nd, at 6 p.m. Feeling somewhat defeated, I sat down on my bed and pinched the bridge of my nose between my fingertips.
“Well, that didn’t work…”
In the end, I didn’t manage to apologize to the middle-aged man after knocking him over, let alone remove myself from the festival grounds. Unfortunately, I knew exactly what was going to happen after that: he would try to start a fight with me, only to be talked down by Hayase, meaning I was unable to test my hypothesis about disconnecting the past from the future I’d already experienced. I should have been a lot more careful. I needed to not let myself get sidetracked by eavesdropping on some random guys’ conversation and get the hell out of the festival like I was supposed to. It really shouldn’t have been that hard. I could only blame my own poor judgment.
The other possibility was that time paradoxes just didn’t exist in the real world. The past was already set in stone, in other words. Maybe our entire lives were predetermined, and there was nothing I could do to escape from whatever fate had decided for me. Though if that were the case, I could kiss any hope of saving Akito’s life goodbye.
“…No way. Screw that noise.”