Not long after the train started moving, they got off at the nearest station, walked a bit, and turned into a sunless back alley. There stood a neat little sign reading “Sagara Books.” Sakura let out a “wow.”
“There’s a secondhand bookshop in a place like this? I’ve been around here a few times and never knew.”
“Not what you’d call a great location, but with the kind of customers we get, it works out.”
“Oh, so students from our school use it too?”
She said it with such surprise that Aya tilted her head and looked at her.
“No? I can’t remember seeing any of our students. It’s far from school.”
“But look, isn’t that our uniform?”
Following Sakura’s finger, Aya saw that there, indeed, was the same uniform the two of them wore.
A girl with strikingly neat, straight black hair. She was peering into the entrance with a slightly suspicious air, taking her phone out and putting it away again, looking troubled. They were still too far from the entrance to make out her features, but something in her manner looked familiar, and Aya, thinking “no way,” quickened her pace toward the figure. Sure enough — it was Kayano Yuki.
“Kayano.”
At Aya’s call, Yuki flinched, shoulders jumping, and turned around, round-eyed.
Seeing Aya’s face, she looked briefly relieved — then noticed Sakura walking beside her and went blank. “Huh?” she said, foolishly. Sakura, meanwhile, having run into the last person she’d expected to see, stared with her mouth half open, saying “why—”
Now. There was nothing improper about either relationship, and Aya had nothing to hide from either of them, but each came with a slightly complicated backstory that wasn’t easy to share with just anyone.
She needed to explain carefully — but since both of them were now looking at her at once, demanding a quick explanation, Aya put a hand on her hip, turned away with a troubled look, and quietly scratched the back of her neck.
“Let’s go inside first.”
They climbed the outside staircase attached to the bookshop’s back door up to the second floor, which was the Mizuki home.
Aya unlocked the empty house with practiced ease and ushered them in with a “welcome.” Yuki and Sakura exchanged slightly nervous looks, then slipped inside, quietly.
“Excuse me.”
Their voices overlapped in perfect unison, echoing through the tidy space.
For what was effectively one person living alone, the place was a wastefully large 3LDK. The interior was a modern blend of Japanese and Western styles built around wood tones, and thorough cleaning had left it looking neat overall. “Wow,” Yuki said, gazing around the Mizuki home for the first time with a sigh of admiration, and Sakura remarked, “You keep it cleaner than I expected.”
“Only because there’s nobody to make a mess. Oh, do you want my room or the living room?”
Aya stopped and asked, and once again the two of them fell silent and traded glances. After deferring to each other with their eyes, they said “your room” in unison. Better chemistry than expected — good. Aya opened the nearest door, tossed her bag inside, and gestured them in.
“I’ll get the tea ready. Make yourselves comfortable — sit on the bed if you like.”
With that, Aya headed off toward the living room, leaving Yuki and Sakura to step into the room in an awkward atmosphere.
Aya’s private room was a bit stark. For a girl her age, you could call it dry and bare. A neat bed with regularly changed sheets, a computer desk with a small chair.
Beyond that, a potted plant and a rug, and finally a closet and bookshelf. That was about it.
Sunset slanted through the lace curtains, dyeing the rug red.
“Bare,” Sakura muttered without meaning to, and Yuki agreed with a “right?”
“I was half expecting to see some track gear — oh!”
Yuki cut herself off, hurriedly covering her mouth, wondering if she should’ve brought up track. But Sakura, understanding the consideration behind it, set her bag on the floor, sat on the bed, and reassured her.
“It’s fine, I already know she quit the club, and why.”
“Oh, you do… um, you’re a first-year, right?”
“Tokiwa Sakura, Class 1-B. Nice to meet you — you’re Kayano-senpai, right?”
Of course, Sakura knew who Yuki was without needing to check. Yuki, known unilaterally, felt a little itchy about it, but nodded with a “nice to meet you” and sat on the bed a person’s width away. An awkward silence descended between them. From the living room came the sound of a kettle going on the stove; both turned resentful looks toward the sound, noticed each other doing it, and laughed.
“Who leaves two people who’ve just met, ‘friends of a friend,’ alone like this?”
“Hey, no talking behind her back.”
“It’s fine, I’ll say it to her face when she’s back. It’s not talking behind her back, it’s badmouthing.”
“…You feel different from when you came to our classroom the other day, you know?”
“Oh, I was putting on an act. This is the real me.”
Sakura put a hand on her chest and grinned boldly. Yuki, sounding curious, said “oh?” and looked eager to hear how that had come about. Come to think of it, neither of them had yet asked how the other knew Aya.
They eyed each other, probing. Eventually, Sakura was the one to break the ice.
“Um. Are you and Mizuki-senpai — like that, Kayano-senpai?”
At the blunt question, Yuki let out a startled, oversized “huh?!”
According to Aya, the rumor about them dating was a misunderstanding.
But from the way Yuki spoke about visiting Aya’s home for the first time, and from Aya’s lack of surprise at seeing her, Sakura could tell she’d probably visited the bookshop itself several times. It was hard to see them as just friends; more likely they shared some kind of secret.
But after a brief flicker of hesitation crossing her face, what Yuki said was a denial.
“No. The rumor really is a misunderstanding. I came today because I happened to have an errand in this area, so I thought I’d drop by — if she was there, I’d say hi, and if she wasn’t, I’d just stop by the used book section this time. That’s why I was standing out there. So it’s not that kind of relationship.”
Sakura studied Yuki for a while, looking like she wanted to say something as she gave this explanation.
“…‘This time, the used book section’? Meaning you usually go to the adult side?”
The question stemmed from surprise that a brilliant girl like Kayano Yuki would frequent a place like that just to see Aya — but Yuki misread it as a piercing “so you’re a closet pervert who’s always in the adult corner, aren’t you?” and broke into a cold sweat.
Her eyes darted around pitifully as she repeated meaningless words like “no” and “um.” If they weren’t dating, there’d be no need to hide it this frantically, Sakura thought — then a hypothesis crossed her mind, and she frowned, eyes narrowing as she pressed the point.
“Wait, are you actually buying adult goods there?”
She asked it half-jokingly, with a half-smile, but the answer was a blush visible even in the dim room. Yuki went red right up to her ears and fell silent.
A response more eloquent than any excuse; Sakura could only manage a dazed “wow.”
“P-please… don’t tell anyone. Keep it secret.”
“No, I mean — I’m not into that kind of gossip, so I won’t. But, wow, seriously? Kayano-senpai?”
The Kayano Yuki Sakura had known of was academically brilliant, pleasant to everyone, nearly enemyless — someone for whom the word “accomplished in both looks and brains” had practically been invented, one of life’s clear winners.
Which was exactly why she’d never imagined their lives intersecting like this, and certainly never imagined Yuki having a hobby like this. But now that she thought about it, it made sense. No matter how well someone did in school, they were still a girl her age, and of course she’d have that kind of curiosity.
Still. The way it had come out was so goofy that shock hit before acceptance.
“I’ve been jealous of such a klutz, huh.”
“You’re pretty foulmouthed yourself,” said Yuki, whose cheeks still hadn’t cooled, shooting her a flat look.
Fanning her face, Yuki suddenly caught on something in Sakura’s phrasing.
“…‘Jealous’?”
She repeated the unsettling word, and Sakura clamped her mouth shut and went silent.
She was in no position to talk about anyone else. Sakura covered her slipped mouth demurely with a hand, asserting her silence — but then, poisoned by her strange new acquaintances, the absent-minded Yuki and the meddlesome Aya, her tightly sealed lips loosened, and she confessed the whole thing lightly, as if it barely mattered.
*
Once Sakura had summarized how she’d ended up here, Yuki, cheeks fully cooled, crossed her arms with a solemn face and thought it over. Watching this from above, Sakura thought, coolly, what a pair of do-gooders she and Aya were. She herself wouldn’t have lent an ear to a cheeky underclassman’s life troubles.
“That’s… rough,” Yuki eventually murmured. Sakura couldn’t help a wry laugh, and Yuki hurriedly waved her hands.
“No, sorry, I sound like it’s someone else’s problem, but — yeah, I understand how you feel. You know, with family, since you’ve let your guard down so much, every single word reaches you all the way in.”
Yuki said this with the tone of someone speaking from experience.
Sakura from just a little while ago might have bared her fangs and snapped, as she had at Aya. But given her conversation with Aya earlier, and the slight shift in her state of mind, she picked it up.
“Do you have something like that too, Kayano-senpai?”
Possibly a bit rude, but that’s how unexpected it was. She’d figured someone as blessed as Yuki would have her own share of worries, but she hadn’t expected sympathy that was genuine empathy rather than pity. Yuki, hearing this, lowered her brows into a smile and, using a sigh as momentum, began to speak.
“…A little. Just a little, okay? My family’s been doctors for generations. Everyone unconsciously assumes I’ll become a doctor. I’ve never once said it myself, but they say things like they’re looking forward to seeing what kind of doctor I’ll be… They’re my precious family, and I understand the feelings behind it, which is exactly why denying it is so scary. I can’t stand the thought of disappointing them.”
The sun sank gradually; shadows stretched, and darkness fell. In the dimming room, with the sunset reflected in her eyes, Yuki, in contrast, let out a shadowed, self-mocking smile. Sakura turned her face away, as if fleeing the brightness, and let out a small breath tinged with self-loathing.
“—Ah, sorry! Now I’m the one venting! Forget it, forget it!”
Yuki hurriedly put a bright face back on, but Sakura, figuring two people in similar situations needn’t hold back around each other, didn’t take the bait and looked up at the ceiling, lamenting:
“Everyone’s carrying something, huh.”
At that, Yuki let the brightness drain out of her face again and closed her eyes.
“Yeah. But — most people are too busy with their own stuff.”
“Right? That person’s the strange one, poking her nose into everyone’s business.”
Sakura laughed openly as she said it, and Yuki found it a little funny too. “True,” she agreed.
Aya herself had plenty of feelings of her own after quitting track, and yet she’d somehow found room to worry about others this much. As Yuki recalled it, marveling —
Click. The room light came on.
“Sorry to keep you waiting.”
They both looked at the entrance, where Aya stood holding a tray with paper cups and bagged sweets.
“Too slow!”
“That took a while — did something happen?”
Their personalities showed clearly in their welcomes, and Aya took them with a half-laugh, set the tray down on the wobbly bed, picked up one steaming paper cup, and looked at Sakura.
“I got some snacks together too, so it took a bit longer. Tokiwa… that difference in reactions just now is exactly the difference in popularity between you and Kayano.”
“Good thing Kayano-senpai’s here. At least we didn’t have to call an ambulance.”
“P-play nice. Nice. Okay?”
Aya spat out a snide remark and Sakura clenched a fist; Yuki, at a loss, tried to calm them down.
Sipping the warm tea from the paper cup, Aya drew the curtains, and with a breath said, “So?”
“What were you two talking about? You seemed to be having fun without me.”
“Yes, we were. Which is why I’m not having fun now.”
“You’ve got some nerve, you know that? After crying that hard earlier.”
Aya countered by dropping the earlier embarrassing display in front of Yuki, and Sakura, hit by the off-script move, said “hey—!”, flushed red, and glared. Yuki, who’d been slightly put out at the conversation moving on without her, peeked mischievously into Sakura’s face with a “hoh?” Hit by a wave attack from two spiteful seniors, Sakura pouted, sulked, and turned away.
Yuki watched her with amusement, then answered Aya’s earlier question.
“We were talking about Tokiwa-chan. About how — like with anything — the ‘necessity’ of being the one who does it is a tough question.”
Yuki explained this, savoring the warm tea with narrowed eyes. Aya shifted her paper cup into a crossed-arm hold, swirling it, and said “ah, that.”
“Well, true. It gets hard once you start thinking about it. If you push it far enough, there aren’t many things in this world where it ‘absolutely has to be this particular person.’ Even the supermarket I rely on — the staff differ between day and night, but there’s no big difference, and yet if nobody was there, I’d be in real trouble. Not that I’d belittle any particular job, but realistically, there are jobs with a high degree of replaceability.”
“Well… maybe that’s true. But if that logic holds, I’d have to swallow my mom’s argument completely — ‘I want you to choose a more stable path.’”
Sakura, back in the conversation, slumped her shoulders. “Yeah,” Aya admitted readily.
If “anyone will do,” then “Sakura could do it” too — but “it doesn’t have to be Sakura” either.
“But, honestly — I think for something like 99% of the jobs Tokiwa-san might choose in the future, it wouldn’t need to be Tokiwa-san.”
Yuki said this with brutal bluntness.
Aya thought it was a somewhat harsh thing to say, but that premise probably needed acknowledging here. Before Aya could say anything, Sakura said “well,” and nodded. The two of them apparently had built a small measure of trust in the short time it took Aya to make tea.
“Once you accept your mom’s argument and have to ‘claim the necessity of being the one,’ I think you’re in a pretty tough spot. It’s easy for me to say since it’s not my problem, but maybe try going more emotional?”
At Yuki’s constructive suggestion, Sakura groaned, understanding it but not quite swallowing it. Yuki raised a finger and laid out her own theory.
“Because if it could be proven that Tokiwa-san specifically needs to become a fashion designer, that would mean the fashion industry is built on key-person dependency.”
A difficult phrase had suddenly appeared. Aya and Sakura exchanged blank looks.
“Key-person… what?”
“Could you not use big words? I can’t keep up.”
“You two are on the same page at times like this, huh?”
Yuki took the double hit with a flat look, then rephrased: “In other words—”
“If it could be proven that Tokiwa-san’s necessity as a fashion designer existed, then logically, the moment she stopped pursuing that path, the industry or some organization within it would collapse.”
“True,” Sakura and Aya said in unison, looking at each other.
“Of course that’s not how it works — though, for some people, there are cases where it does. For instance, famous names — Louis Vuitton or Yves Saint Laurent, both deceased. Looking back at history with what we know now, you could say they needed to become designers. But the industry isn’t built solely from people like that. The clothes that became trends among young people came from people whose names we don’t even know, and even if one of them hadn’t thought of it, someone else might have come up with a similar design a day later. But if none of those people existed at all, the trends would never have been born, and everyone would be wearing a single piece of rags.”
Aya had nearly forgotten, but Yuki really was someone with vast knowledge and superior intellect, and she felt newly impressed. Sakura nodded frequently, listening intently.
“So — I still think there’s no such thing as a ‘necessity’ for Tokiwa-san to become a fashion designer… at least not one that can be proven right now. But I think the current system and history were built by people like Tokiwa-san, who came to it for no reason other than that they thought of it.”
It was advice Aya probably couldn’t have produced with her own brain and mouth.
Having listened seriously, Sakura closed her eyes and nodded, taking it to heart. “Yes.”
“What to do is for you to decide, but that’s what I think.”
Aya, who’d listened quietly, set the half-finished paper cup on the desk and offered praise.
“You might not like being complimented like this, but — you really are smart, Kayano.”
“What, all of a sudden? I’m flattered.”
Yuki, faintly flushed, answered with playful modesty. But Sakura agreed too, with a serious face.
“No, I really think so too. When you lay things out with logic like that, it’s easier to accept.”
“I’m just logical about things, really. But — I’m a little happy about that. Praise me and all you’ll get is a smile, though!”
Yuki grinned bashfully and winked. A beat later, she started to blush, embarrassed — if it was embarrassing, she probably shouldn’t have done it.
“Still,” Aya said, crossing her arms as she changed the subject. “I learned something. It was a concept I hadn’t heard, but you’re right — being dependent on one person in a job isn’t necessarily a good thing. Everyone wants to be needed by society, but in reality, what’s needed is ‘a person who does that work,’ not ‘you.’”
“‘You,’” Sakura murmured. It could refer to Sakura, or Yuki, or someone who wasn’t there. Aya pulled out the chair at the computer desk and sat down, crossing her legs.
“Someone to scan the barcodes of the rice balls and bottles you grabbed at random is necessary, but it rarely changes your life much when that person becomes someone else. Manuals get written, know-how accumulates, equipment gets issued, environments are built, insights get passed down — human labor exists as a part of that constructed system, and once a job meets the required standard, it doesn’t demand anything beyond that. Anything extra gets elevated or consumed as added value or service, not as ‘necessity.’ Isn’t that the idea?”
Aya murmured this like organizing her thoughts aloud, and the other two listened.
Then she put her own takeaway into words.
“When you think about it that way, it’s a bit empty, but also kind of a relief.”
Yuki thought for a moment, then looked persuaded; Sakura tilted her head, curious.
Aya propped her cheek on her hand at the desk and said, narrowing her eyes:
“If there are replacements, that means you can run away when it gets unbearably painful. If anyone can do the job, you can do it too. It means freedom to choose your occupation is guaranteed.”
After listening to Aya’s oddly casual words with steady eyes, Sakura’s gaze drifted off into space.
“…Kids do get compared to blank canvases a lot. Thinking of it that way, maybe it does make things a bit easier. If I wanted, I could paint anything on it.”
A blank canvas. Aya silently repeated Sakura’s words in her mind, then closed her eyes.
It was an apt phrase for young people who would be colored in from here on, becoming someone.
Including the part where colors, once applied, couldn’t be erased. But considering how few people could paint the right picture on the first try, the young people about to become someone must be more like something else, something—
Then Aya’s eyes fell on Yuki’s face. Her expression was so dark, so melancholy, that Aya almost spoke up. Sakura’s line about being able to become anyone must have hit hard for someone who couldn’t choose to become anyone.
Noticing, Aya said to both of them, though her eyes were on Sakura:
“People who are up against ‘necessity’ end up taking the action whether they want to or not. Like a doctor with a patient in front of them, or someone whose family has taken on a huge debt.”
It hardly needed saying whom she meant. The two reacted to her loaded words each in her own way. “But,” Aya continued, turning her face away.
“Life isn’t built from necessity alone. You don’t need snacks to survive, but you eat them because you want to. You watch movies because you want to. You ride home with someone because it’s lonely otherwise — so even if it’s irrational and unnecessary from the standpoint of necessity, choosing it isn’t wrong.”
Aya looked at Sakura and told her plainly what she felt.
“Even if it’s a path that doesn’t have a fallback — if you truly can’t give it up, then I think you should tell your mom properly. That you’re not doing it because it’s necessary, you’re doing it because you want to.”
Aya kicked back the chair with the backs of her knees and stood, downing the remaining half of her now-lukewarm tea in one go. She figured that was everything she needed to tell her. What Sakura chose, how she lived — going any further than that probably wasn’t Aya’s place.
Two steps away from Sakura on the bed. So close, yet out of reach; that distance seemed like the limit allowed an outsider. Before her, Sakura looked down, troubled.
“…I might worry my mom.”
Her brows drooped weakly; she was still thinking of her precious family. A little foulmouthed, a little nasty. But also someone who kept to the lines she drew and saw her obligations through — a person of real loyalty and warmth.
Aya had said everything she meant to say, and going a step further felt like overstepping. So this was a supplement — not as an outsider, but as a friend.
“Then what you need to do is clear. Build enough of a track record while you’re still in school that she can’t worry.”
Sakura’s eyes went wide, black pupils trembling. Reflected in them, Aya stood with a hand in her blazer pocket, tilting her head to look into Sakura’s face with a provocative smile.
“You might not have time to sit around smoldering.”
At those words, Sakura’s wavering eyes pierced straight through Aya’s core, and a faint flame lit deep inside them.
A candle put out a little while ago and left alone might have hardened into a slightly misshapen lump of melted wax. But it could still be lit, and it would surely still light up a path without signposts that she had chosen for herself. Even misshapen, she could walk it again.
Sakura let out a self-deprecating, exasperated laugh, then took a deep breath and turned it into a smile.
“—Honestly, I still can’t sort out what I want to do or what I should do. But. Someday, I want to work out a real answer, and tell my mom.”
Sakura looked straight at Aya, then, at the end of her sentence, at Yuki too. She swallowed, a little bashful, then slowly stood from the bed, straightened the pleats of her skirt, folded her hands in front of her, and bowed politely to both of them.
“So — um, thank you for today.”