The next day, the two of them headed to a pottery workshop studio in the outskirts of the city.
“Alright, thank you both for joining today’s experience. This time it’s pottery on an electric wheel — which is, well, a bit tricky for beginners, so I’ll be stepping in here and there to help, but I hope you’ll both have fun with it.”
A young woman in an apron greeted them, and Aya and Yuki gave a small round of applause and a bow. “Thanks for having us.” “Please look after us.” — a weekday afternoon, playing hooky, with no other customers around.
The facility looked fairly newly built.
“Pottery” carried an image of traditional craft, and Yuki had pictured a warm, old-fashioned wooden Japanese space. But in reality, the floor was neat tiling, and the equipment was carefully maintained. In that kind of space, five clean electric wheels for the experience sat in a row, facing a single instructor’s wheel across from them.
The instructor sat in her own chair and began preparing a demonstration. Glancing around, Aya murmured, “Cleaner than I expected,” and Yuki hurriedly scolded her with a “hey!”
But the instructor just laughed, amused. “Right?”
“There’s a separate room for the pieces made to sell, and that one only gets the minimum cleaning needed to not interfere with the work. Want to see it after, if you’re curious? Some kind of research thing?”
“Just idle curiosity. But if it’s disgustingly filthy, I might want a peek.”
“Ha, sure, no problem. — Nice, you two talk easy. Students? Playing hooky?”
The instructor asked this, touching the clay with wet hands, and Yuki answered.
“Um, yes — a little embarrassing to admit, but playing hooky.”
“Nothing to be embarrassed about. If class is only something you can take while you’re a student, then skipping class to soak in that special feeling is also a privilege only students get. Alright, let’s get started!”
At the woman’s clap, Aya and Yuki said “please look after us” in unison.
For the next few minutes, following simple instructions, the two of them worked the clay on the electric wheel. It turned out to be surprisingly difficult — if the rotation was too slow, or hand strength and position unsteady, the shape collapsed in an instant. The thin, elegant vessels you’d see in a shop turned out to be extremely hard to make.
Once the initial guidance wrapped up and their movements started looking somewhat competent, the woman watched with a fond smile and fell into quiet observation. The two of them worked their clay-slicked hands earnestly to keep the shapes in order.
“Come to think of it, you said you’re students — why come do pottery, of all things?”
The woman asked this out of curiosity. “‘Of all things,’” Aya laughed wryly.
Yuki tried to answer, but honestly, she’d just been invited to go out the night before, figured it’d make for good stress relief, and gone along with Aya’s plan.
That it turned out to be a pottery experience once they actually arrived was a surprise even to her.
“Honestly, I didn’t know either. Why pottery?”
Yuki looked at Aya, who wet her lips and, gazing happily at the clay, answered.
“Never experienced pottery before. Figured it was worth knowing.”
“Nice, healthy intellectual curiosity. My grandpa used to say your eagerness to learn scales with your promotion potential. Though he stayed a lifer at the same rank forever.”
Yuki, unsure how to react, put on a polite social smile, while Aya and the woman laughed together — “cautionary tale!” “Right, he really had zero interest in anything!” What impressive social skill. Yuki had always thought of herself as the one with more friends, but she’d realized something these past weeks.
Aya was probably just skilled at opening her heart to others, and getting others to open theirs. Which was why she could close the distance with all kinds of people. It’s just that among them, few got close enough to earn the specific title of “friend” — some just came from an inability to leave a worry unaddressed, or sitting close by, or how things happened to unfold.
The more time spent by her side, the more that affection for her probably deepened.
Distracted for a moment, looking elsewhere, Yuki’s clay collapsed all at once. “Ah!” she cried, uselessly, the shape twisted beyond repair, and she looked to the woman for help.
But the woman, showing not a hint of alarm, said breezily, “here, let me borrow that a sec,” approached with practiced hands, kneaded the clay back into shape, and reset it, restoring it just as it had been.
The speed of it left Yuki’s mouth hanging open. Her eyes, sparkling, looked at the woman.
“A pro…!”
“Ha ha, don’t flatter me too much. Well, you can redo it as many times as you want, so fail all you like.”
Yuki said “thank you” and turned back to the clay, then, suddenly curious, looked up.
“Speaking of which, I always get the image from TV of throwing away failed clay…”
“Ah, that. Well, that’s not entirely wrong either. If you knead it back too many times it gets too hard, or takes on too much water, and if trash gets mixed in, that’s a lost cause.”
Not minding her clay-wet hands, the woman crossed her arms, and Yuki looked at her own clay with some apprehension.
Meaning, you couldn’t just redo it endlessly? She braced herself for that realization. “So then it can’t be used anymore,” she said, tightening her resolve, but “nope?” the woman denied this with a blank look.
“If it’s short on water, just add water. Too much, dry it out. If too much trash gets mixed in it can’t be used for anything you’d sell, but it can be repurposed endlessly for practice. Lately I hear there’s even techniques to clean it up and reuse it somehow. It’s just that continuing as-is is useless — properly adjust it, and it’s almost always reusable. So don’t worry about it, you’re fine.”
This time it was Yuki’s turn to look blank.
She stared silently at the clay in her hands, taking a few seconds to properly chew on the meaning of those words. Not that it gave her license to break it carelessly for no reason — but even so, something in her shoulders felt lighter.
“…Yes. Thank you.”
Yuki wet her hands to smooth the clay’s slip, then cupped her hands around it to shape it.
Getting it into the form she wanted required applying force to deform it. But mess up the balance, and it was ruined in an instant. Sometimes the shape collapsed; sometimes it just wouldn’t deform the way she intended.
Sometimes that became its own charm; other times, someone found it displeasing enough to want to remake it entirely.
Was this just because she was an amateur, or would even a master face the same struggle? Shaping the clay into exactly the form pictured in her head turned out to be enormously difficult, one failure after another. Yuki, who’d wanted a simple teacup, ended up with something shaped more like a flat plate in no time, and found it funny.
Glancing over at Aya — her first ever bit of cheating in life.
Aya, who handled most things skillfully, seemed to be struggling this time too. Looking at the finished, elegant plate she’d made, she groaned, troubled, arms crossed, then got wet clay on her sleeve where the apron didn’t cover it and let out a garbled “ah—” The woman burst out laughing. Aya laughed wryly. Drawn along, Yuki nearly laughed with a hand over her mouth too, and felt, little by little, the weight lift off her shoulders.
Then she faced the clay again.
Nothing came out the way she wanted. She made mistake after mistake. Sometimes frustration flared — why?
Each time, she started over. — As long as it was within what she could manage here, it wasn’t a problem, but even so, repeating it too much meant swapping out the clay occasionally. Apologetic each time, but the woman, saying “well, I’m getting paid for it,” breezily swapped out the clay, watching with evident enjoyment as Aya and Yuki produced piece after piece.
—Yesterday, after everything they’d talked about. Why had she suddenly been brought somewhere like this today?
Aya had given a plausible-sounding line earlier, about wanting to gain some insight. At first, Yuki had believed it. But redoing the shape over and over, a different answer had gradually started to surface.
Sneaking glances at Aya, she noticed Yuki’s gaze and looked over. Waving lightly, she asked, “how’s it going?” Yuki answered “great,” and Aya smiled faintly.
That smile was so beautiful that Yuki found herself lost in it for a moment, feeling heat rise in her chest.
Gradually — as if spreading — that heat climbed to her face. Something was changing in Yuki’s body.
Thinking back, meeting Mizuki Aya had to rank among the worst possible first impressions. From Aya’s side, surely the worst possible second impression too; from Yuki’s, the worst possible encounter. After all, she’d been caught red-handed browsing adult goods.
Just recently, being seen masturbating by her own sister had felt like rock bottom, but by Yuki’s own standards, getting caught buying that kind of item by a classmate was much the same category of disaster.
Honestly, after an encounter like that, seeing her again had been terrifying.
But Aya had kept her promise not to reveal it, understood the accumulated stress Yuki carried, helped her find ways to release it, and stayed close through her anguish. Putting the feelings this stirred into words felt frightening, but it was clear — Aya occupied a place in Yuki’s life set apart from everyone else. And that was still true now.
Someone meddlesome, someone others might even find annoying.
But surely, there were people saved by that meddling too.
Still students, everyone was bound to take a wrong turn in various directions more than once. Precisely because you could become anything, you’d become nothing yet, and kept searching for the path forever. Or maybe you’d step, alone, into a swamp you couldn’t escape by yourself. Maybe some people, having lost their way, just stood there, frozen, stuck.
Most of it came down to matters of the heart. Which was exactly why someone who faced your heart and pushed your back forward deserved to be treasured more than anything.
She felt, now, like she could finally put it into words clearly.
—I love Aya. What I feel for her is romantic love.
Realizing this, Yuki felt a heat almost enough to make her wonder if the heating settings had gotten set wrong. Then, a beat late, she registered that her own face must be bright red. Not wanting anyone to see, she kept up a facade of quietly focusing on her work and stole a glance at Aya.
Biting her lip to hold back the smile threatening to loosen her cheeks.
“Alright, I’ll send it once it’s fired. Look forward to it.”
Waving back to the woman who saw them off with those words, Aya and Yuki left the building.
Firing to delivery would apparently take about two months.
“That was fun. First time doing it, but I learned a lot.”
Yuki narrowed her eyes against the dazzling evening sun and said this in a completely relaxed, spent voice.
She hadn’t meant to spend that long on the piece, but by the time she noticed, the sun had already started sinking. The far side of the sky burned a searing orange, drifting clouds glowing red-hot like heated iron. Looking up, dazzled, she saw a navy sky dotted with vermilion clouds and white stars, looking down on them.
They walked side by side along the narrow, one-lane road’s guardrail-lined sidewalk, faintly tinged orange now.
“So that’s what it’s like, huh. I figured an electric wheel would be a much bolder, faster kind of device.”
“Apparently electric ones make it easier to get a clean shape, in exchange for being harder to use. Guess each style has its own strength.”
Yuki shared this bit of trivia she’d just looked up online, and Aya smirked, hand on her chin. “Might be worth trying hand-building next time.” Noticing a faint smear of clay on Aya’s navy hoodie, Yuki burst out laughing despite herself, agreeing, “true.”
“…Thanks for inviting me. That was a really good way to blow off steam.”
Yuki said this thanks, glancing sideways at Aya squinting against the sunset. Aya laughed.
“Next time, rely on me before you get to the crying part.”
Her face turning red now for reasons entirely unrelated to the sunset, Yuki pursed her lips and fell silent.
She was grateful to her, but separately, having the reality of how little composure she’d had that night thrown back at her was embarrassing. Sleep really did matter.
“Hey.”
Yuki suddenly brought this up, and Aya answered, “yeah?”
“Pottery clay, you can reuse it over and over, huh.”
Yuki said it with a smile that saw right through Aya’s intention, and this time it was Aya’s turn to look bashfully sheepish, her half-smiling gaze wandering. She drew breath a few times as if to toss out some offhand joke, but what eventually came out of her mouth was her own genuine theory instead.
“Young people get compared to blank canvases a lot, I think.”
Yuki murmured, “a symbol of possibility,” catching the intent of the metaphor, and Aya nodded, narrowing her eyes at the distant sunset.
“Our future, still young as we are, isn’t decided yet, and we can paint anything on it. This period, rich in time, possibility, and capacity to absorb things, gets compared to a canvas about to become something. That metaphor — accounting for the fact that a color, once applied, can’t be erased, and you can only paint new paint over it — feels pretty true to reality.”
A little embarrassed, Aya put her own ideal into words, letting the mood carry her along.
“But I wanted life to be something you could redo more freely, without so much weight attached.”
Feeling there was a lot to learn from those words, Yuki took a deep breath.
“We’re still nothing yet. But flip that around, and it means we can still become anything. And that continues even after graduating school, or maybe — right up to the very end, the final firing that is cremation — we might be able to redo it, over and over, no matter how many times.”
Aya said this, but Yuki thought there were irreversible changes in life too.
Sakura was a good example. Her parents had married and had her, and after her father’s business failed, her mother had taken the brunt of it and come to prioritize stability above all else. If someone supporting a household like that ever wanted to pursue a new path — the family they carried would surely weigh them down.
Thinking this, Yuki immediately caught her own mistake.
It was true it might weigh them down. But just as much as the mother had supported the family, now, in turn, it was the family’s turn to support her, should she ever want to start over. Or maybe that day would come, someday.
“‘No matter how many times.’”
“Yeah.”
“I see. So, clay — pottery, huh.”
Yuki received the message clearly meant for her, but felt pathetic, frustrated with herself for being unable to promise to actually act on it. Seeing Yuki’s dejected face, Aya smiled and continued.
“This isn’t meant to push you toward anything. But I realized something recently.”
Something about how she said it, drawing it out, put Yuki on guard. “Something you realized?” she prompted.
“Just because someone’s inconvenient for you doesn’t necessarily make them an ‘enemy.’”
Yuki’s eyes went wide, and the same person came to mind in both their heads.
“Ah,” she murmured, unable to help it. “I see,” Yuki continued, breaking apart the vague, fixed impression that had built up in her own mind, and reconstructing it. Sakura — Tokiwa Sakura — had kept defending her mother, the obstacle to her own dream, precisely because she understood her feelings.
Yuki, in contrast, had unconsciously come to see her own family as something to fear. No. That was wrong. Her sister had noticed her pushing too hard, and despite surely being busy herself, had told her to rest for Yuki’s sake, even smoothing things over with everyone else. Her mother, hearing that report, had felt ashamed at not having noticed herself, and done what she could. Her father, her uncle, her aunt — surely, they were all on her side too.
Precisely because they cared about her, they sometimes became “inconvenient.”
Realizing something she should have understood back in elementary school, only now, Yuki’s eyes welled up despite herself.
Without her quite noticing, things had drifted toward the assumption of medical school, and toward “you’ll need to study if you’re going.” But not once had they forced her to do something she truly hated, and they’d always, always been on her side.
Yuki bit her lip to hold back tears and nodded, “yeah, you’re right.” After a few heated breaths, she slapped both her cheeks sharply, as if to shake off the tears. Aya’s startled eyes turned to her.
Yuki stopped walking on the spot. Aya, tilting her head, stopped too, following her lead.
“I’ve had a friend do this much for me — and I’m still scared.”
At that, Aya, without blame or exasperation, laughed.
“People don’t change that fast.”
“But if I keep standing still, I’ll be an adult before I know it. Right?”
Repeating back the words Aya had once said to her, Aya found herself at a loss for an answer, falling silent.
“I want to change. But I’m scared — hopelessly scared, self-conscious, and on top of that, I’m bad at communicating, I don’t watch people properly so I misread things and jump to conclusions and hurt myself over nothing, and I cause trouble for all kinds of people, and I’m still scared anyway. Hopelessly stupid.”
Mid-autumn evenings are short-lived. Before she knew it, the sky had already started fading into a faint purple.
For a few seconds, they looked at each other’s faces, faintly shadowed. Yuki, having spoken as if struggling for breath, took a deep breath, filling her lungs, and shouted, as if steeling herself:
“But!”
At the corners of her eyes, overwhelmed emotion had formed into tears.
“I’ll do my best. — I want you to tell me to do my best.”
Aya returned a blank, round-eyed look, and Yuki, blushing all the way to her ears, held her breath.
Is that all? — laughing it off lightly might have been the right move. It might have eased her mind faster that way. But Aya couldn’t laugh it off.
Yuki had spent all this time afraid. Unable to cross the line in front of her that would ease everything once crossed, unable even to try, smoldering the whole time. But now, at last, she was trying to take that first step forward. A mere verbal promise to do her best — but something she’d kept avoiding until now.
Aya took the words in fully, and let a smile rise to her face.
Grasping Yuki’s shoulder facing her, she looked straight into her eyes and said:
“Do your best.”
Yuki bit her lip, holding back tears. But when one finally spilled from the corner of her eye, she nodded, crying and laughing at once, as if giving up the fight.
“Yeah.”
*
People love people. Not only in romance, but in friendship and affection too.
And love is a feeling strong enough to want to support someone — but also one that, seeing that person heading in a harmful direction, makes you want to speak up.
Some mothers worry over a daughter about to step into the fashion industry; some parents, without meaning to, narrow their child’s options, wanting to pave an easier road for them.
And there’s a kind of meddling friendship that steps in against both.
To Kayano Yuki, family had always been both a precious presence and people who unconsciously pushed choices onto her that she wanted to refuse. But — without ever showing any sign of refusal herself, she shouldn’t have slapped that label on them. However close the relationship, some things don’t get across unless you actually say what you’re thinking.
By the time the sun had fully set, Yuki stood before her front door, pressing a hand to her pounding chest, taking repeated deep breaths. Then, steeling herself, she opened the door.
“I’m home.”
Her parents came rushing noisily from the living room, faces pale, peering at her.
Startled, but relieved to see Yuki safe and sound, they let out breaths and said “welcome home” as if nothing had happened. So Yuki, smiling, said “I’m home” back, added a theatrical “I’m exhausted!” and stretched her back. The two of them smiled happily, and so Yuki felt happy too.
Setting her heels down in the entryway, she remembered the comfort of the air in this house. She realized she’d been holding her shoulders tense this whole time. Her mother peered at her face and asked:
“Did you eat dinner already?”
“Ah, no. I figured I’d eat at home. Oh, is there nothing ready?”
“Not at all, it’s already made. Let’s have dinner in a bit.”
Yuki said “okay!” to her parents treating her exactly as usual, and climbed the stairs lightly into her own room. She tossed her bag onto the bed, then immediately left the room again.
She knocked on her sister’s door and got an “oh” in response.
After a moment, her sister peeked out, smiling. “Welcome back.”
“I’m home. Sorry for the trouble.”
“Forgot what you’re even talking about.”
Her sister said this, patting Yuki’s head, and Yuki, fighting back sudden tears, steadied herself. Her heart gave an unpleasant lurch. A sensation like her head going foggy from lack of oxygen. She swallowed down a feeling like her blood running cold. Her sister tilted her head, puzzled.
—Do your best. Remembering Aya’s words, Yuki opened her mouth.
“There’s something I want to tell everyone. But I’m scared to just say it out of nowhere, so I came to lay some groundwork first.”
A slightly underhanded move, for someone who’d just been sent off with encouragement to do her best?
Yuki couldn’t help but think so, but her sister, eyes rounding in surprise, then breaking into a scheming grin, made her reconsider that this approach wasn’t so bad after all.
“Say whatever you want. Big sister’s on Yuki’s side.”
“I’m hooome!”
As Aya set a frying pan on the gas stove in the kitchen, that voice came flying in from the entryway.
Eyes going wide, a large man walked into the living room with a light step.
A sturdily built figure in a trench coat — his name, Mizuki Daigo.
Aya’s father. Seeing Aya standing in the kitchen, he grinned goofily; Aya, in turn, widened her eyes.
“—Pop. Welcome back. Rare for you to come home this early.”
At that, Daigo, unable to hold back a grin, took off his coat and hung it on a nearby hanger.
“So get this — the owner of my usual bar just got arrested for tax evasion!”
Aya, who’d just been about to take a sip of water from a cup, spat it out with a “pbbt—”
“Cough— wait, seriously?! What is that, some kind of comedy episode? Hold on, tell me properly.”
As Aya, intrigued, pressed for details, he gave a thumbs up.
“Sure thing. Oh, is dinner about to happen?”
Daigo asked, watching Aya in the kitchen.
“Yeah, why, got a request?”
“If you’re up for it, let’s just order out tonight. Take it easy for once.”
After a moment’s thought, Aya smiled faintly, put the frying pan back, and took off her apron.
“Pizza sounds good.”
Saying this, she headed to the living room table, and Daigo pulled up a pizza place’s website on his phone and set it down where she could see.
“Pick whatever you want, Dad’ll eat whatever’s left over.”
“Okay, you said it. Well, don’t worry, I won’t pick anything too outrageous.”
Aya sat at the table and quickly worked through the site, picking out an amount the two of them could reasonably finish. Daigo hung his coat on the rack, washed his hands, came back, and, after watching the room and Aya’s profile in silence for a moment, said, casually:
“School treating you well?”
Aya, glancing up from her phone just enough to meet his eyes, nodded with a smile.
“Yeah.”