3
This morning he and Kaede had taken twenty minutes to reach Fujisawa Station, but now he made it in five.
He ran up to the Enoden Fujisawa Station, panting heavily, and saw a Kamakura-bound train on the platform. He ran his train pass through the gate and jumped on the nearest car even as the departure bells rang.
The doors closed on his heels.
The train slowly pulled out and rolled slowly down the tracks before stopping at the next station, Ishigami. A few people got out, and it rolled leisurely away.
If he wasn’t in such a hurry, this speed would never have bothered him. Normally, the way these retro cars rattled along the coast town roads was a lovely seasoning on a commute that could easily have been a dull routine.
Right now, he just wanted to be at school already, and it was driving him nuts. But by the time they reached the next station, his panic had subsided.
The laughter of the tourists, the lived-in vibe of the locals, and the relaxed pace of the train itself all helped. Sakuta realized he was the one out of line.
Feeling like all those things were telling him to chill out, Sakuta plunked himself down on an empty seat.
Fretting would do him no good now. He couldn’t make the train go faster. The best thing he could do for Kaede now was to get a grip.
There was no guarantee their father could get away, so Sakuta might well be the only person there for her.
He wiped the sweat from his brow and caught his breath again. He inhaled all the way and slowly let it out. He repeated that until the urgency that had lent wings to his feet died away.
The train kept rolling another fifteen minutes and dropped Sakuta at Shichirigahama exactly when the timetable said it would.
Minegahara was a short walk from the station, and he took it at a brisk pace, then headed to the visitors’ entrance. For the simple reason that it was closer to the nurse’s office than the normal student entrance.
He grabbed a pair of visitor slippers and just ditched his shoes there before stepping inside. The exams were still ongoing, and there was an eerie hush in the halls. He could tell there were plenty of people around, yet none of them were making noise. Like the chilly winter air, their stifled stress pricked his skin.
Shaking that off, he took big strides down the hall, slippers flapping.
The teacher who’d called him was waiting outside the door. He saw Sakuta coming and looked grave.
“That was quick, Azusagawa.”
“I ran,” he said, as if that was the natural thing to do. “Is she…?”
“She’s resting inside, but…”
He glanced at the door, keeping his words terse. Nothing specific about her condition. And the look on his face showed he was rattled.
“It’s a lot to handle, I know,” Sakuta said, bowing his head.
“No, you warned us in advance. Wish we could have done more.”
“Thanks for letting me know.”
And with that, he opened the door, trying not to make too much noise.
The nurse was sitting at the desk inside, her back to him. She spun her seat as Sakuta closed the door.
Their eyes met, he bowed, and she pointed silently at the partitioned-off bed. Kaede was resting there.
Sakuta slipped through the curtains and sat down on the stool by the bed.
No part of Kaede was visible here. Just a heap of covers.
“Kaede,” he said, and the heap twitched. Looked like she wasn’t asleep. “I’m here. Care to pop your face out?”
“……”
No answer. Didn’t even move.
“Any pain?”
“……”
Still no response.
She’d probably been like this for a while before he came. Which explained his teacher’s consternation and why the nurse was just watching over her at a respectful distance. Being with anyone was hard for Kaede right now.
“They said you got sick during lunch.”
“……”
“It wasn’t the lunch I made, was it? If so, sorry.”
He’d figured she still wouldn’t answer.
But a raspy whisper emerged from the pile of covers.
“…It was really good.”
“So good it threw you off your game?”
“…No.”
A bit more emotion behind that.
“……I left early, so…”
“Mm.”
“I got here before the crowds.”
“Okay.”
“But there were already two students in the classroom.”
“Third place is a solid result. Bronze medal.”
Kaede didn’t laugh.
“At first, I was too scared to go in, but when I did, nobody looked at me. So I made it to my seat.”
“Leaving early was the right choice, then.”
“Mm. Lots more people came in, but everyone was focused on last-minute reviewing. Nobody cared about me.”
“Everyone’s stressing about the test.”
Pass or fail. A fork in their paths. Messing this up meant no clear road ahead, a future shrouded in darkness. A critical juncture for anyone their age.
“When the bell rang, they explained the rules. The first test was English, and it went really well.”
Her tone was brightening a little.
“Great.”
“One of the things Nodoka taught me was on it, and I thought, ‘Yes!’”
“Toyohama’s really gunning for that idol-with-a-higher-education thing.”
She might be styled like a razzle-dazzle blond, but she was actually really smart.
“Second-period Japanese had stuff about similar-looking kanji that Mai taught me, so I knew exactly which ones to use.”
“That’s my Mai, all right.”
“And third-period math had factorization problems like you showed me.”
“And you solved them?”
“I did.”
“Well, you worked hard to learn that.”
They hadn’t had that much time between the decision to apply and the exam itself. Barely a month. But Kaede had crammed all the studying she could into that space, staying up so late she fell asleep at her desk any number of times.
“You, Mai, and Nodoka all made it so the morning tests went well.”
“Good.”
“I was doing so well…”
Her voice grew choked with tears. Half of it went through her nose, and her voice broke.
“And the lunch was great. I thought I could get through the afternoon, too.”
She clenched her teeth, her voice shaking.
“Mm-hmm.”
“But then…then…”
“……Mm.”
“I’m a mess. I can’t do anything!”
Her voice echoed in the silence of the nurse’s office.
“You totally can. You got all the morning tests right.”
“…There was a girl with the same uniform.”
“……”
“I went to the bathroom, and in the hall…our eyes met.”
“Same uniform” must have meant the uniform from Kaede’s junior high. The place she’d only just managed to start attending, if only in the nurse’s office. They were both from the same school but had been taking exams in different rooms because Kaede had chosen an off day to turn in her application. She hadn’t come with the rest of the students from her school. And as a result, she’d been seated away from the others.
“The moment I thought she was looking at me, I got scared. Felt sick. My hands, legs, stomach, everything hurt. The bruises showed up. I couldn’t move. I had to go back and take the test, but…”
She was sniffling, her body quivering.
“I wanted to work hard. Go back to the classroom and sit like everyone else. I knew I had to, but my chest got all tight…and I was too scared. I’d been fine a moment before, but the fear just wouldn’t go away.”
She was crying in the darkness beneath the covers, shaking.
“Kaede, you worked very hard.”
“I didn’t!”
She was crying even harder now.
“You did. That’s why it hurts so bad.”
“!”
The entire pile jumped at that, but then she whispered “I didn’t” again. Barely voiced. “I didn’t work hard. I couldn’t do anything.”
She just kept looping that thought.
“I’m a mess. I can’t work hard. I wanted to, but I just… I can’t.”
“You worked crazy hard. Trust me, I was there.”
He meant every word of that. Frankly, he thought she’d worked a bit too hard. But nothing he said was getting through.
“The other Kaede worked much harder!”
This was almost a shriek, and it shook the room. That was enough to get the nurse to poke her head through the curtains. “Don’t worry,” Sakuta said. She nodded and went back to her desk.
“……”
“……”
Their respective silences hung in the air.
He hadn’t noticed the whir of the heater before, but now it seemed deafening.
He looked for words, but nothing seemed right.
“The other Kaede worked much harder!”
There weren’t many words that could match the strength of the sorrow behind that.
Kaede spoke first.
“All this is because she was there.”
“The work you’ve done is yours, Kaede.”
That much was true.
“Mai and Nodoka are only nice to me because they know how hard the other Kaede worked.”
Still sobbing, still buried in blankets, Kaede kept on wailing.
“She gave me everything. She gave me all these lovely people. But I can’t…I can’t do anything.”
Her heart was sinking deeper and deeper into a mire of sadness.
“Everyone helped me study. Mai, Nodoka, you…and I can’t give you anything back. I can’t give her anything back.”
And that sadness kept her crying.
“Nobody’s expecting anything back.”
That hadn’t been why they’d supported her. Frankly, Sakuta had never once been convinced Kaede even should go to Minegahara. It was hardly the only right choice she had.
He wanted something more important. Something more fundamental.
Sakuta wanted Kaede to be happy. To live a happy life. That’s all. A life of perfectly decent days spent laughing about nothing. That was the kind of happy he aspired to.
“But I know better!”
He couldn’t seem to convince Kaede of this. This idea of giving back was all that mattered to her, and since he cared about her, he’d helped her do things her way.
“I know she was better than me,” Kaede whispered. “I should have stayed her.”
As the meaning of that sank in, a wave of shock and panic washed over him. And he knew that feeling was caused by his own frustrations.
“Listen, Kaede…,” he began, a hint of irritation seeping into his voice. Not with her. With the fact that she was in a position to be talking like this at all.
“You liked the other Kaede better!”
“!”
A hot geyser of emotions he could not put in words forced him up off the stool and onto his feet. A vehement storm raging within, a whirl of fire. Before he could breathe any of that out—
“Azusagawa, got a sec?”
He was interrupted by a voice through the curtains. His homeroom teacher.
“……”
The timing was so horrendous he just glared at the man.
“Can it wait?”
The man flinched, but that helped cool Sakuta’s head.
“…No, it’s fine. What is it?”
“The exam ended, and the classroom emptied. Your sister’s things are still there.”
Sakuta looked back at Kaede.
“……”
She still had the covers on.
If they kept talking while this riled up, he felt their emotions would just get in the way. So he looked at his teacher and said, “Fine.”
He turned to Kaede, said, “I’ll be right back,” and left without waiting for an answer.
The teacher took him to room 2-1.
Sakuta’s own classroom. Kaede had been taking her test here.
She hadn’t been at Sakuta’s desk, but it was weird to think of her sitting where he always did.
“Can you take it from here? I’ve got a lot on my plate.”
The man had the grace to look apologetic.
“Yeah. And thanks.”
“Call me if you need anything.”
Sakuta nodded. The teacher nodded back and left the room.
Leaving Sakuta on his own.
He moved past the podium to the window. The fourth seat in that row alone still had a pencil sheet, exam ticket, and backpack.
From this seat, you could see the whole Shichirigahama beach. The sun was on its way westward, and the vibe was now rather forlorn, but the weather had been great that morning, and it must have been a spectacular sight.
“Wonder if she even had it in her to notice.”
He figured she’d probably kept her eyes down until she found her desk. And once seated, she put out her ticket and pencil box and then kept her head down again, making sure she didn’t meet anyone else’s eyes.
That seemed like a real shame.
Shaking his head, Sakuta put her ticket and pencil box in her backpack. As he did, his fingers brushed against a thick notebook.
“Is this…?”
He knew what it was. He’d been the one who bought it, after all. It was the notebook he’d given the other Kaede. It had her name on the cover in hiragana.
The diary she’d spent two years filling.
“She brought it with her?”
It had nothing to do with the exam. Flipping through it wouldn’t give her any last-minute test-taking tips.
But she’d put the other Kaede’s notebook in her bag and brought it with her.
He found himself reaching for it.
Sakuta took it out of the backpack and flipped through it.
It fell open on one page—a page she must have opened to a lot.
It was written in the other Kaede’s handwriting. She always wrote each letter so carefully. You could tell how earnestly she meant each word.
Sakuta’s eyes were drawn to a line on this page.
I want to go to the same school as Sakuta. That’s one of my dreams.
The moment he read that, heat shot through him, rising up behind his nose and burning behind his eyes.
If he hadn’t snapped his head up and held them in, he’d have let tears fall on the page.
“That’s…right.”
He forced the words out, but they still sounded choked with tears.
Part of him had known. Or at least imagined this was why. But seeing it written out like this in her handwriting really hit hard.
Of course. This was why Kaede had been so fixated on coming here.
It was what the other Kaede had wanted.
Kaede knew how hard her other self had worked. While she’d taken a two-year rest, the other Kaede had done her best to live. And this was a dream she’d been unable to make true herself.
She’d said she wanted to apply at Minegahara in the hopes that doing so would pay the other Kaede back for everything she’d done.
She’d spent day after day working hard to pass this test.
And then she’d fallen apart at lunch. Been so down on herself. Said that to him.
“You liked the other Kaede better!”
He took several deep breaths until the rush behind his eyes faded. Then he closed the other Kaede’s notebook and put it in the bag.
He picked up Kaede’s coat and left the classroom.
Down the hall and down the stairs.
He turned toward the nurse’s office but kept going past the door.
This brought him to the main office. There was a pay phone just hanging out in the hall here, and he picked up the receiver.
Dropped in a few ten-yen coins.
“……”
Punched in ten digits.
One of the more recent additions to his mental phone directory.
It rang three times, then she picked up.
“Hello…?”
A girl’s voice, guarded.
“Toyohama? It’s me. Azusagawa.”
“I should have known.”
“I’m literally the only person in the world who uses pay phones.”
“What do you want?”
She got right down to business.
“Got a favor to ask.”
So he did, too.
“……?”
Her breath sounded surprised, but she said nothing.
“You’re the only person I can ask.”
She must have caught something in his tone.
“So what do you need?” she asked.
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