Of all the students at Tokusou who had come from Shirasaki Kaijo, Nishikawa was closest with Fujieda and Takayama, who I met during the entrance ceremony. Whether or not I wanted it, I often found myself around the three of them.
When they learned where I worked, the bourgeois trio entertained themselves by visiting the yakiniku place. I was not pleased to see them.
Takayama could hold her drink, and she was too cool to drink herself stupid; the issue was Fujieda Minami. She loved alcohol, even if it didn’t love her back, which made things very annoying very quickly.
“Sacchan, another beer!”
“That’ll be one ginger ale for you, miss. Takayama, get her home already.”
“She won’t stop until she’s unconscious when she’s like this. Sakata, a highball for me,” Takayama said.
“One highball coming right up.”
“Oolong tea for me,” my roommate and boss said.
“And one oolong. You really don’t drink, huh?”
After inputting their drink orders into the machine, I added a plate of meat that wouldn’t get counted toward their total. I couldn’t help my need to treat someone.
“Again? You must really love your friends.”
Leaning out of the kitchen window was Ozaki Sakura—she was a full-time employee here. She must have seen the order I’d just sent. She’d found work right out of high school and was only two years older than me.
“Not particularly. The sooner they’re full, the sooner they’ll leave.”
Ozaki-san got the hint and laughed. “Then you’re better off giving them rice, not meat.”
She wasn’t wrong.
“Maybe we shouldn’t have you serving, Sacchan. You always lie and say it’s from me.”
“No, this is my job, ma’am.”
She let out a hearty laugh and slunk back into the kitchen. From the first moment we met, I always thought she smiled a lot, but it was very different from his.
They both had beautiful smiles, but hers was a different sort. It threw me for a loop, but not in an unpleasant way.
After having their fill of drinks, they said goodbye and left. When I finished my shift, I checked my LINE messages for the location of their after-party and joined them there. At some point, this had become our routine.
By the time I arrived, Fujieda was on her last legs.
“Yay! It’s Sacchan! He caaaame!”
“Can she get home like this?” I asked.
“You’d be surprised. Apparently, she remembers everything, even like this,” Takayama said.
“Wow, okay,” I said, sitting as far from Fujieda as possible. By necessity, this placed me next to Takayama.
Fujieda sat next to the rich boy we all knew, and Takayama sat across from Fujieda. This was their norm. Fujieda wanted both to sit next to him and for Takayama to sit close. They all accepted this.
Apparently, Fujieda was in love with him and had been for a long time. She was leaning on him, half asleep. He treated this as normal, drinking his oolong tea without concern.
“You know, you can just tell her if it bothers you,” I said.
“Hmm? It doesn’t bother me, though,” he replied.
“That’s probably worse. She’s confessed her feelings like thirty times, dude.”
“You think so?”
“If they’re both okay with it, it’s probably fine,” Takayama added. “Not that I approve of it. Minami deserves better.”
The girls have been hanging out with him since middle school. Fujieda fell in love with him at first sight and boldly approached him. Being Fujieda’s longtime friend, Takayama ended up in their circle before long. I was a wrench in their well-oiled machine, but they readily accepted me. Mainly because he wanted me there.
It was a good friend group. They were very different from Toyota, so I couldn’t help finding them annoying sometimes, but they must have had their fair share of culture shocks with me as well.
“Sacchan, drink with ussss!” Fujieda babbled.
“Minami, Sacchan is too young to drink,” Takayama said.
“Sucks to be born in February!”
“We’ll leave you in a ditch.”
By the time Fujieda became unresponsive, Takayama, who lived in her area, called a taxi. That was our signal to end things for the night. Since he and I lived together, I would of course be stuck with him the entire way back to our place.
We lived only a few stops away, but he always insisted on going home on foot. We walked side by side through a deserted residential area late at night.
“I had fun today.”
He hadn’t drunk any alcohol, but by now he was tipsy on the energy of his friends. He seemed to sway a little. His behavior also felt somewhat erratic.
“Are you that bored? Why do you keep coming?”
“It’s fun to watch you serving customers, Sacchan.”
“I sincerely doubt that.”
“You know you don’t even have to work there.”
“If I spent all my time with you, I’d go insane.”
In the three years since I’d met him, the number in my bank account was constantly rising. Since we started university, he’d been paying for my rent, food, and utilities, and because I didn’t spend much compared to my income, the money had been steadily piling up. Financially speaking, I had no need for my restaurant job, but I didn’t want to forget what working felt like.
Our sophomore year was almost over, and once we were juniors, I’d have to start job-hunting.
Every day would be hectic. And then we’d be seniors. We’d graduate, and my freeloading “job” would be over. The salary I would be paid as a new graduate—and the lifestyle it could support—would be incomparable to what I had now.
His world and mine would normally never intersect. By now, pulled by his whim, my entire being was immersed in his world. More than I liked to admit, I had begun thinking like him.
I couldn’t live like that.
I would have to return to my own world eventually. I wouldn’t be able to stay here forever.
This restaurant job was a reminder of what that world was like.
“Two years to go,” Nishikawa said.
“What a comfy job it’s been...”
I’d been poisoned.
I’d been soaking in this peace for so long that even my hands had gone soft.
Exasperated, I looked up at the sky. It was dark this time in January. Three years ago, I’d been looking at the sky almost every day.
That was back when I’d been working at the construction site after lying to the company about my age. Back then, I lived and breathed the night. Graveyard shifts paid better. I needed every yen I could get. But now, I chose my part-time job not based on the money, but on working short shifts, which felt ridiculous.
It was all so strange.
How will I feel when I look back on this period of my life? Will I think that life was a breeze for these few years? Will I feel like I was living the dream, getting paid just to live with him?
Whatever the case, that had to end now.
I would return to my own world. I would leave everything behind.
I had no choice. If anything, I should have never been here at all.
By the time we reached our apartment building, dawn was beginning to break.
We were supposed to be heading to bed, but he went to the kitchen instead. Eventually, he handed me a mug with a familiar aroma.
Ground coffee.
Kasumi-san said her brother’s coffee was good enough to be sold at a café, but I couldn’t really tell the difference. I tried copying the way he prepared coffee, but since she disparaged it, there must have been something critical I was missing.