Bonus Short Stories
Scene #16: Something Lost
Why was Haruhiro walking around with his head down? That was a long story—or not.
Actually, he had dropped his phone.
He got out of school, headed home, and played with his phone. He remembered that much clearly. After that, he headed out. He went to a bookstore, wandered around the park, dropped by a convenience store, and took a stroll down the tree-lined road on the embankment. During that stretch, he was sure he had checked his phone a number of times, but he had no distinct memory of it.
It’ll be getting dark soon, he thought, and was about to head home. He tried to check the time on his phone, but it wasn’t there. He’d dropped it, or left it behind somewhere.
First he went around to the bookstore, the public washroom, the convenience store, and anywhere else indoors where it might be. He tried asking the staff if anyone had found a lost phone, too. He found nothing. So he followed the path he must have taken, and was looking for any phones on the ground.
It may just be gone, he started to think. But lost objects had a way of turning up just as you gave up on them. If he lost his smartphone, it was going to be all kinds of trouble.
I’d better look harder, he thought, leaning forward and looking down as he walked over Tsukimi Bridge.
Then he ran into something.
“Ow!” cried a girl’s voice.
“Urgh!” yelped Haruhiro.
When he looked up, a long-haired girl in a school uniform was holding her head.
“S-S-Sorry! Hold on... Huh?”
“...Huh?” She looked at him, blinking. The head-on-head collision they had gotten into must have hurt. Her eyes were all teary. “Iima... Haruhiro-kun?”
“Um... Kakimiya Merii-san?”
There was no doubt about it. It was unmistakable, in fact. This was his classmate, Kakimiya Merii. Her looks were so distinctive that she couldn’t possibly be anyone else.
“Wait, why are you using my full name?” Haruhiro asked.
“Well... I make a point of committing my classmates’ names to memory.”
“Everyone’s?” Haruhiro asked, and Kakimiya nodded.
“Everyone’s,” she confirmed. “So, it just slipped out.”
“I... see.”
“Iima Haruhiro,” Kakimiya addressed him by his full name again. Then she hurriedly corrected herself. “Iima-kun... what are you doing here?”
“Ohh, I’m, well... What was it? Right. I just remembered. I lost my phone.”
“Huh?” Kakimiya’s eyes suddenly went wide, surprising him, too.
“...Huh? What? What’s up?”
“Me, too,” she said. “I lost my phone, and I’m looking for it. What a coincidence.”
“Y-Yeah. It sucks, huh? Losing your phone. ...Are you okay?”
“Are you, Iima-kun?”
“Uh, sure, I’m fine... or maybe not so much. I mean, I was looking for it...”
When he was talking to Kakimiya, he felt off kilter for some reason. He couldn’t look at her face.
Does a guy like me have any right to look at her? he wondered.
Because of that, he was looking to the side, and there he saw a phone sitting on top of the railing.
Not his. But just maybe, he thought, picking it up, and showing it to Kakimiya. “Um, Kakimiya-san, is this it...?”
“That’s mine!” Kakimiya, probably without intending to, snatched the phone away from him. When she did, their hands touched, and Kakimiya immediately said, “I’m sorry!”
“...Nah.”
“This phone is really important to me. I’m so glad you found it.”
“Yeah. I’m happy for you. But what was it doing here?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Oh, but when I came through here, I saw the moon. Look.”
Kakimiya brought up an image on her phone to show him. It was apparently a photo she had taken from this spot. It was evening, and he felt like he might be able to vaguely make out something small floating in the dark sky.
“It didn’t turn out very well,” she apologized. “It looked so big, but it’s so small on the camera.”
As the situation had necessitated, Kakimiya was now standing shoulder-to-should with him. He felt awkward, so he gently moved away from her.
“Yeah,” he said. “That happens.”
“I even used the... zoom? I used that function, but it still didn’t get all that big. It’s really disappointing.”
Kakimiya’s shoulders slumped and she let out a sigh. He started to feel bad for her, and he wanted to be encouraging, but it was too great a burden for him.
“Well, I’m off,” he tried to leave, but...
“Iima-kun!” she called after him.
“...Wh-What?”
“Thank you. For finding it.”
“Nah, it was just sort of there. It’s no big deal.”
“Your phone is next,” she said.
“Next?”
“Need to find it.”
“...Yeah.”
Well, yeah, of course he did. He intended to look. But he didn’t want to say, It’s fine, I’ll look for it on my own. Kakimiya may have just been saying that to encourage him.
“Well, then...”
He started walking, and Kakimiya followed. It seemed she intended to look for it with him.
“Uh, I’m fine, you know?” he tried saying, but Kakimiya just nodded. He wasn’t getting through to her. He didn’t know what to do. He hoped he’d find his phone before that drove him crazy.
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