“Rei...”
I woke up with a start as her name spilled from my lips. The setting sun shone through the window, bathing the hot and stuffy room in its orange glow. Surprisingly, it was a room I knew well—apparently I’d made it back to my apartment in the end, in spite of everything. I’d also neglected to turn on the air conditioner, which would explain the “hot and stuffy” part. I was drenched with sweat, and the cries of the cicadas outside didn’t help at all. They might be a classic poetic symbol for summertime, but they also make it even harder to ignore the heat.
I hadn’t bothered to change clothes, or even take my shoes off. By all appearances, I’d collapsed in my entryway and fallen asleep then and there. But on the bright side, at least I hadn’t passed out in a pile of garbage like a drunkard. Besides, my apartment was one of those absurdly tiny studios, so the boundary between the entryway and the actual room wasn’t well defined to begin with.
I tried to push myself upright, but it didn’t work. My arms had the structural integrity of a pair of overcooked noodles and collapsed under me after only a couple painful seconds of ineffectual effort.
“That was a dream...right?” It’d been ages since the last time I’d dreamed, and it was beyond clear, beyond vivid. It was about people beloved to me and places I missed dearly... Part of me wished it really had all just been a dream, even though the rest of me knew I didn’t have the right to think like that.
Even if it was just a dream, and even if I knew it would inevitably reach the same nightmarish ending as ever, I was just so happy to see them again...and so disgusted with myself for thinking that way, I wanted to just kill myself and get it over with.
Ding-dong!
Suddenly, my doorbell rang. I had a visitor, which was certainly a rarity. My apartment building was so old and dingy that even the newspaper salesmen walked right on past it, and I didn’t have any deliveries scheduled either. Myourenji and her family were providing me the funding I needed to live there, and they sent some of their staff over to check up on me every once in a while, but those people never bothered with the doorbell—they just walked right in. Wish they’d be a bit more considerate about that, actually.
“Kunugi-kun? Are you in?” somebody called out from the other side of the door. I knew I’d heard her voice before, but I couldn’t quite tell who it was. I was in a daze. Hard to say whether it was because I was in a bad enough physical state that I couldn’t even sit up or because I’d just woken up from an incredibly lifelike dream, but in any case, her voice sounded fuzzy and distant—like I was underwater.
“I’m coming in, okay?” I heard the door crack open. It would have been more surprising if I’d had the presence of mind to lock it, considering the state I was in. “Kunugi-kun?!”
“Kiryu...?” Shockingly enough, my classmate Kiryu Kyouka stepped inside. Kiryu was an absolutely by-the-book honor student-type heroine with long, black hair and a bad case of resting bitch face (she’s also a loner, surprise surprise). She’s got huge boobs and a black belt in Aikido too, but I have yet to conclusively determine if those traits count as part of the archetype or not.
Why would someone like her come over to the place of an extra like me? I dimly pondered the situation as she freaked out and started trying to help me sit up. Letting a girl literally pick me up was just a step too far for my manly pride, though, so I mustered up what very little strength I had left and stood up on my own. My spaghetti arms actually somehow managed to push me off the ground this time. I guess you can push yourself to some pretty incredible extremes when your pride’s on the line.
“Thanks... I’m fine, though, really.”
“You are obviously not fine,” she retorted.
“I was, umm, just practicing. Making sure I’d be ready if anyone ever set a bear trap in my entryway while I was out and about, yeah.”
“I’m even less convinced that you’re fine than I was before! Literally no one would be reassured by that story.” Oooof! Her merciless retort scored a critical hit directly to my heart. She had a real talent for those—it’s not easy to pack the “are you completely insane” nuance in on the fly like that. Incidentally, the optimal response would’ve been, “Of course they wouldn’t! Nobody likes to think about the ever-present bear trap threat,” but I wasn’t in an optimal state of mind, to say the least.
“Anyway, why’re you here, Kiryu? You’re number one on my list of people I never expected to show up in this sort of situation.”
“Why would you even have a list like that...? And don’t get the wrong idea. I only came here because our teacher asked me to.” She pulled a bundle of handouts and worksheets from her bag. Upon closer inspection, she was still wearing her uniform. I was starting to put the pieces together: it seemed I’d staggered my way home the night before, passed out on the spot, and slept all the way until school was out the next day.
“You really don’t look well, Kunugi-kun... You can’t possibly be all right. Here, let me help you. You should be lying down. In bed.”
“Mom...?”
“Wrong. I can only imagine how hard your mother had it raising you, really...” She mumbled to herself as she helped me stay upright. Come to think of it, she did claim that we were childhood friends back in the day. My immediate reaction, of course, was why me? Wouldn’t it make more sense for her to be childhood friends with my favorite protagonist, Kaito-kun? That would go down as one of humanity’s greatest unsolved mysteries, surely. Were you even paying attention when you wrote that part of the backstory, God?
“There you go...” she muttered, helping me into bed.
“Ugh... Thanks, I really needed that.”
“I-I wasn’t doing it for you, for the record! I did it for the workout.”
“What am I, a dumbbell?”
“You’d be better off if you were. Dumbbells are useful.”
“Can’t argue with that.” My “bed” was just a futon laid out on the floor, but as I flopped onto it, I came to the immediate realization that even that most modest form of bedding was worlds apart from sleeping on the ground. Kiryu sat down nearby to watch over me, her knees folded up to her chest. She was wearing a skirt, of course, so I could just baaarely catch a glimpse of...nothing, actually. Dang, she’s good at this!
“I’m a bit surprised by how sparsely you’ve decorated this place,” she commented. “I’ve always thought that boys who live on their own tend to be more cluttered.”
“I’m not exactly materialistic.”
“Hmmm,” she replied with a perfunctory grunt, ogling my room. I wasn’t sure why she was looking that closely, actually. You could tell at a glance that I didn’t have much stuff, and she wasn’t going to uncover any deep, dark secrets by nosing around.