The girl’s eyes shifted from Edamoto-san to me, walking next to her.
“Hey,” Edamoto-san called, raising her hand lightly. The girl nodded slightly, then turned away and kept walking. I could tell from the way her lips moved as her friends looked to her that she was making some
excuse.
It seemed like a strange reaction for someone who was presumably a friend or acquaintance.
“Weird.”
Edamoto-san gave a troubled smile as the girl walked away. Then she lowered her hand and faced forward again, as though nothing had happened. Even when I peered at her face, she showed no signs of feeling down in the dumps.
She was cheerful and open, just like always. That was how I saw Edamoto-san.
I found myself curious about the awkward encounter, and her cheerfulness in spite of it.
I wasn’t so uninterested in Edamoto-san that I could completely ignore such a thing.
But it seemed to run deep. I had a hunch that taking a step into Edamoto-san’s business would end up being a very large leap.
Should I ask her or should I not? As I walked, I hesitated a bit.
“Was that an acquaintance of yours?”
“No.”
She shook her head at first. But then, after a short pause, she nodded instead.
“Yeah, she is—an acquaintance.”
Her mouth stayed open for a moment, and then she added another correction.
“A friend.”
After this upward revision, the only sound for a while was our footsteps.
“Or at least, she was.”
She made one last addition. Her relationship with this girl seemed to be quite complicated at present.
“It looks like she doesn’t want to be friends anymore. I mean, we haven’t talked at all.”
Though her tone insisted that it wasn’t a big deal, I found that even more intriguing than her usual dramatic invitations. It was like reverse psychology, though surely not intentional.
Curiosity and thirst for knowledge. Clearly, I had a weakness for anything that appealed to those parts of me.
Thinking about it, it might’ve even been curiosity about the mystery of my first meeting with Edamoto-san that was motivating me to do things like this.
I needed to get to my next lecture, and I was pretty much heading in the wrong direction.
“………”
But I didn’t stop walking. It were as though my feet had other ideas about where I wanted to go.
In spite of the intense heat beating down on us, the light sweat forming on my back was accompanied by something like chills.
I’d never skipped out on a lesson before.
I was tense to the point that my fingertips seemed to go slightly numb.
I stopped and changed direction.
“Huh? Did you remember something you had to do?”
Edamoto-san stopped on the spot, seemingly hesitant about whether to follow me.
So I invited her, “Come with me.”
As I moved my head, the strong cries of cicadas flew into my ears from the other side of the day. Edamoto-san paused for a moment and then lit up in a smile. “Cool, cool, cool,” she announced, running back to my side in a flash.
“Don’t you have a lecture?”
“Not anymore.”
I had erased it from my plans, for better or worse. Even though I was skipping, I felt strangely positive about it.
In contrast, I remembered the tepid feeling of the day when I said I wanted to quit swimming.
I had run away with a sense of guilt that time, but now my heart was feeling completely the opposite.
Perhaps this feeling had prompted me to recall those memories clearly, when they’d been vague for so many years.
“Wait, not anymore…? Uhh, I feel kinda bad… Are you sure?”
“It’ll be fine if I take just one day off.”
After all, my friend who attended lectures so sporadically last year had survived into her second year without a hitch.
In the past, I was always hyper-vigilant of making even a single mistake. But even though I had piled up many failures until now, I was still alive, and even smiling.
That was why I knew it was fine—why I kept going forward.
And so, I led the way behind the lecture building. It was the smoking area that tended to smell, where trees had been planted as though to enclose it.
The very place where I first met Edamoto-san.
I glanced at the bench, positioned such that it seemed to carry the burden of the wall’s shadow and then looked at Edamoto-san.
“Wow, this takes me back.”
Edamoto-san jokingly stood by the wall, where she’d been when we first met. “Something like this, right?” Then, though she wasn’t crying, she rubbed her eyes.
“Was that girl from earlier related to why you were crying that day?”
Edamoto-san’s eyes went wide.
“Sayaka-senpai, are you psychic?”
I remembered Koito-san’s flustered face when she expressed similar doubts during our last meetup, and smiled a little.
“Anyone could guess as much.”
I sat down on the bench, leaned my back against it, and breathed out a little sigh.
The hard sensation that I felt on my back through my clothes and the fragrance of the trees reminded me of the student council building.
“Go on.” I patted the bench next to me. Edamoto-san cradled her bag as she sat.
“I was happy you let me have this place back then… No, that’s not quite right. I was embarrassed.”
Edamoto-san closed her eyes and let the edge of her mouth slacken slightly, as if reminiscing.
“Once I was alone, I didn’t want anyone to see me crying, but I ended up wondering why I felt that way. I don’t think crying is really such a bad thing.”
I remembered Edamoto-san’s face when we had reunited in the lecture room. Her nose was red, but she wasn’t crying anymore.
“Why, then?”
I was curious. Edamoto-san answered right away.
“I think it’s probably because I don’t want to show people my weak side.”
“Your weak side?”
I thought over the words she had chosen.
“I felt like if I seemed weak, people wouldn’t like me.”
Her face had a shadow over it as she smiled, filled with loneliness.
She has a point, I thought at first. If someone is weak, cries easily, and can’t live without relying on others… I might think poorly of that kind of person.
But people cry when they’re happy, too. It has nothing to do with how strong or weak they are.
So I didn’t know for sure whether crying meant exposing your weakness.
I sank into silence for a bit, but there was still sound all around us.
The cicadas were loud. The cicadas were crying—so that they could live.
With voices stronger than anyone.
The first one of us to speak was Edamoto-san.
“It’s a little hot, isn’t it?”
“A little?”
My hair, absorbing the sun all this time, complained that it was more than a little hot. The sunlight seemed to be creeping closer, spreading even into the shade.
“I chose this spot on a whim, but would you rather talk somewhere else?”
“No, here is fine.”
Edamoto-san’s eyes crinkled up, showing her happiness.
“Besides, we’re alone and all.”