Maybe things would pick up if we gossiped about the other members of the club? But there wasn’t really any reason to talk about that.
In the end, we naturally gravitated towards talking to the person who was next to us. My two classmates were friends, so they were happy to chat amongst themselves, and Senpai and I…well, I didn’t know whether we were close enough for that, but it wasn’t as though I couldn’t talk to her.
“Do you go out to places like this a lot, Sayaka-chan?” She was glancing around the place, her inexperience painfully obvious.
“Not alone, no. And I don’t really go out that much in the first place.”
“Hmm…so what do you do on your days off?”
“Hard to say. They always seem to end before I know it.” Since I had started reading books on the train to and from school, I didn’t have much left to read on weekends.
I picked at my fries, and she ate one too, as if following suit. Then, she wiped her fingers on the paper. She must have been a stickler for cleanliness, since she always immediately wiped her fingers as soon as they got dirty.
“You’re not taking extracurricular lessons or anything, Sayaka-chan?”
“I used to take a lot of them, but I’m just doing ikebana right now…”
“So you’re working with flowers. Do you change into a kimono for that?”
“No, not every time.” The first flower arrangement of the year was probably the only time we wore kimono.
“Aww, really?” She seemed disappointed as she put her lips to her straw. I didn’t know why she would be, though.
“So then, Sayaka-chan, are you…”
She kept asking me all kinds of things about myself. It felt like I was being interrogated. I thought of several things I wanted to ask her too, but she never gave me a chance.
Come to think of it, this might be the most we’d ever talked in one sitting. Until now, we had only seen each other at club, said hello to each other, and had a few passing conversations.
“Are you doing okay on time, Saeki-san?”
My classmate considerately checked in with me. I took a glance at the restaurant’s clock and answered, “I’m fine for now.”
“Oh, that’s right,” Senpai said, as if our exchange had just reminded her. “You go home by train, don’t you, Sayaka-chan? That’s so grown up.”
“You think so?” Senpai certainly didn’t look much like an adult, with the way she was grinning. “Once you get used to it, it’s just tedious. You usually have to stand in the middle of a big crowd.”
“I think that you saying it’s tedious is what makes it so grown up.”
Is it? I almost tilted my head at her. Even kids think tons of things are tedious—I certainly used to, at least.
“Sometimes you seem so grown up, Sayaka-chan.”
“Do I really?”
“If you were the same age as me, I bet I could have relied on you even more.”
“Ha ha ha…” I laughed lightly, humoring her joke. But Senpai wasn’t really laughing.
“I wish we could had been in the same year…” she lamented, in a delicate voice that seemed to disappear into nothing.
I wondered what she would have called me if we really had been in the same grade.
Though she acted casual, she was still a real third year. Her grade would retire from choir club before summer vacation. Just like the other clubs, it was tradition for third years to leave early, since they couldn’t participate in any future competitions.
I would only see her in the music room for one more month. At the time, at least, my only thought was that the music room would feel a lot bigger once she was gone.
As time went on, Senpai flooded me with more questions. Perhaps she was only quizzing me so much because we didn’t have anything else to talk about. We didn’t know much about each other to begin with, so we had to change that if we were going to have any deeper conversations.
Senpai was the last to stand up, observing how we cleaned up after ourselves before doing the same.
As I watched her imitate us, Senpai noticed my gaze and pouted slightly. “What?”
“No, it’s nothing.”
I headed for the exit, smiling slightly.
I hadn’t gotten to ask Senpai about herself at all, in the end. But I had seen her cuter side in action.
“A closing party?”
Halfway through July, the president called me over just as we were about to finish our club activities. She wanted to talk about celebrating the third years’ retirement by planning a closing party. I didn’t remember the past year’s third years having one when they retired. It didn’t seem to be tradition or anything like that.
“What did you want to do for it, exactly?”
“Oh, I figured we’d just go out to eat and then do karaoke.”
“Karaoke…” Because we were the choir club, I supposed. Even though I knew the word, I still felt a little cautious.
“I think we’d be out too late if we go after school, so I was planning on having everyone get together Saturday or Sunday. But you’ve got a long way to go by train, right, Saeki? What would you prefer?”
“Hmm…”
I hesitated a little. It was the third years’ retirement party, not ours, after all. It didn’t seem like the president was going to force me to go, either. “You can let me know tomorrow,” she told me as she walked away, I wondered what to do as I picked up my bag.
“I’d be so happy if you came, Sayaka-chan.”
“Wah!” I wasn’t quite as shocked as when it had happened last time, but Senpai had appeared out of nowhere again.
“Won’t you come out and have fun with us?”
“…Senpai, don’t tell me…”