Third period one day was physics.
Since it meant switching classrooms, students filed out in a loose trickle, textbooks and pencil cases in hand. The room wasn’t far, so plenty of people took their time getting ready.
Yuki, as usual, chatted idly with the friends who’d gathered around her, pencil case in hand, and was about to gather her textbook and notebook to head out when the timing happened to line up—
—with Aya’s group, Takagi and Morishita included, laughing together as they left the room. Without really meaning to, Yuki’s eyes followed them, and Endo, who was about to head out with her, noticed and spoke up.
“What are you looking at?”
Yuki reflexively looked away, turning toward Endo to cover it, but not quickly enough — Endo traced her gaze and spotted Aya’s group’s retreating backs. “Mizuki and Takagi?” And Morishita, Watanabe.
Yuki hid her unease behind a smile and covered with something plausible.
“Just thinking we should probably start moving.”
“Ah, right. Let’s go.”
As Yuki and Endo started moving, Shinozaki and the usual mixed group — Iida, Okabe — trailed after a little behind. They chatted happily among themselves back there, though Yuki couldn’t quite make out what about.
It was a group that had somehow gathered mostly from the more socially influential kids in the class, without everyone in it necessarily being especially close — an oddly comfortable arrangement. The lack of overinvolvement suited Yuki just fine, though she sometimes thought it was a strange kind of friend group to belong to.
“Come to think of it, how’d Mizuki’s tournament go this year?”
Endo said this out of nowhere.
“Huh?”
Yuki was startled that Aya’s name had come up so suddenly, but what really confused her was the word “tournament.” She let out a genuinely baffled sound, having no idea what was being discussed. A little embarrassed, she covered her mouth, and Endo, in turn, tilted her head, not understanding Yuki’s confusion either.
But Shinozaki, walking behind them, apparently caught the meaning and spoke up, exasperated.
“You’re serious right now? Endo?”
Yuki and Endo turned around reflexively; Shinozaki wore an expression somewhere between exasperated and stunned. Okabe, the sturdily built baseball player beside him, and Iida, the girl with glasses, wore similar looks.
“What, what’s going on?”
Endo frowned, not understanding, and Yuki felt the same.
“…Sorry, I don’t even know what ‘tournament’ means here… A club thing? Did Mizuki-san join a club — oh, wait. Actually, I think she did say something like that.”
Answering her own question before Shinozaki could, Yuki left him sighing.
“You two really have zero interest in your classmates, huh. …Ah, right, you were both in a different class last year.”
Apparently Shinozaki had been in the same class as Aya last year too. Was that how he knew?
Setting that question aside, he closed his eyes for a moment, holding a faint mixture of sympathy and admiration, then opened them and glanced off into space as he answered Yuki’s earlier question.
“She used to be in track. Went all the way to nationals in first year, took third in the heptathlon. There was even a banner hung up at school last year — but yeah, guess nobody cares.”
Yuki lost both her expression and her words, staring wide-eyed at Shinozaki. But even with him in her line of sight, her mind wasn’t processing the information. She wasn’t seeing anything at all.
Third in the nation. Ex-track club. Yuki, who had thought she’d known some hidden side of Aya that none of her classmates knew, quietly chewed on the words, mortified.
“I knew that already. We were talking about how she’s doing this year.”
“That’s what I said, ‘ex-track club.’ She quit.”
Endo frowned, puzzled. “Why?” She clearly couldn’t grasp it.
Of course she couldn’t. Taking third in the nation in an individual event was nothing short of exceptional. So why had she ended up going straight home after school these days to work at the family business instead?
With both their eyes on him, Shinozaki looked off at Aya’s group, now far ahead, and said quietly:
“Knee injury. They said full recovery would take a year.”
The movie plans were set that night.
Nine p.m. The early-autumn night sky was bright and clear, and the area near the outskirts at that hour had the kind of quiet, sparsely populated feel that gave it a sense of privilege and specialness. The two of them took the train out to a station a little further than either of their nearest ones, and headed to the movie theater attached to a large shopping complex nearby.
Passing through the automatic doors and stepping onto the neatly cleaned black carpet, the smell of salt, butter, and popcorn hit them. Only a scattering of night-and-movie enthusiasts were around; the place wasn’t crowded. Near the concession stand, a large monitor rapidly cycled through trailers for movies currently playing.
“This moment right here might be my favorite part of going to the movies.”
Yuki, dressed slightly more fashionably than usual, said this with a smile. Aya put a hand on her hip, laughing wryly.
“Not the credits or something?”
“Well, that depends on how good the movie was, doesn’t it.”
“Fair. — We didn’t reserve seats, right? The ticket machines are over there.”
As Aya started toward what looked like the ticket machines, Yuki called out, “ah—”
“Those only take cards. Students use the ones over there.”
They wound through the belt-partition maze to the ticket counter. A female staff member bowed politely to greet them, and Yuki named the film they were after.
“Um, is the Anpanman movie still playing?”
She confirmed this a little bashfully, and the staff member smiled, charmed, nodding “yes, it’s currently showing” without even needing to check. Yuki had already confirmed the showtime beforehand — this was just to be sure.
“Just to confirm, that’ll be two students?”
“Ah, yes!”
“You’ll need to show student ID for that — and today there’s a slightly discounted pair rate available, would you like that instead?”
She gestured to the laminated price sheet on the counter, explaining politely.
Aya and Yuki glanced at each other, silently exchanging a “what do we do?” look. No one was in line behind them, but it seemed rude to take too long, so Aya asked directly.
“Does the pair rate require being a couple?”
The staff member, who up to that point had been answering smoothly, suddenly looked a little uncertain, her eyes wandering.
“Um — sorry, let me just double check. Um, I believe—”
She started checking some materials behind the counter.
Realizing, belatedly, that she’d probably just been trying to get them the cheapest option within whatever leeway she had, Aya and Yuki blurted out the lie in unison.
“Ah, we’re a couple.”
The blatant lie landed in perfect unison, and the two of them found it funny. The staff member, realizing they’d noticed her consideration, smiled apologetically. “Thank you.”
Inside the theater room, trailers for movies neither of them knew were playing on the big screen.
Swaying somewhere between drowsy darkness and wakeful excitement, Aya scanned the room and confirmed, as she’d already noted when picking seats, that there wasn’t a single other customer. Yuki’s eyes lit up, delighted.
“It really is a private screening.”
“Weekday night kids’ movie. Suburban theater too. Guess this is just how it goes.”
They sat side by side in the two center seats of the back row, each fitting a drink into their respective cupholder.
“Saved four hundred yen with the pair discount — enough for a drink on the way home. Not bad.”
Watching the trailer for a movie she didn’t recognize, Aya mentioned the saved money, figuring it was fine to enjoy a small perk given the private-screening situation. Yuki looked at her.
“Apparently they do this every Thursday. Invite me if there’s ever a movie you want to see.”
“—Well, don’t get your hopes up, since I’m not really the type to want to see movies much. But I’m free most of the time, so I’ll invite you if something comes up.”
At Aya’s promise, Yuki stared at her for a while, looking like she wanted to say something.
When Aya tilted her head, asking what was up, Yuki smiled to cover it, turned back to the screen, and leaned back in her seat. She closed her eyes for a few seconds, as if drifting off, and then, as though continuing some idle chatter, spoke without looking at Aya.
“Hey, darling.”
In the end, they never did find out whether the pair discount actually required a couple or not.
Assuming they were, at least nominally, a couple until they left the theater, Aya played along lightly.
“Yes, honey?”
“You used to be in track.”
Aya turned a sharp look on Yuki’s profile.
She wondered, briefly, whether Yuki had already known — though it wasn’t strange if she had, given the banner with her name on it that had hung at the school last year. What surprised her more was that Yuki, who hadn’t known until just recently, had learned it now and chosen to bring it up here.
“I don’t think you were hiding it — but sorry for asking without permission.”
“No, well. You’re right, I wasn’t hiding it, so there’s no need to apologize.”
“I heard about the injury too. I figured that part, you might not want people to know. Sorry, I never knew any of this, and I never noticed.”
Aya studied Yuki’s profile, worn down by guilt and complicated conflict, then turned her gaze back to the screen.
If she already knew this much, there was nothing left to hide, and no reason to try.
Aya put a hand on her own right knee, through the black cargo pants, and thought back to last year’s pain.
“No wonder you didn’t notice — the surgeon was good. I got back to a pretty decent state, it’s not like I can’t move at all. No issues in daily life, I even take gym class.”
Yuki stole a glance at Aya’s knee, then pressed her lips together, her eyes darting restlessly.
Noticing from her profile and silence that she’d swallowed some words, Aya spoke up brightly, to make it easier for her to say whatever it was.
“If there’s something you want to ask, go ahead. I won’t answer what I don’t want to, so don’t worry about it.”
Yuki hesitated a little, then gently voiced the words she’d been holding back.
“Are you not going back to track?”
Aya didn’t know what intention lay behind that question.
But the answer to it already existed within her, so without needing to think it over, she conveyed the decision she’d reached only after repeatedly questioning herself, a decision she no longer regretted.
“Not going back. I’m done with track.”
Aya said it plainly, without any particular weight, and Yuki’s brows drooped, her eyes lowering.
Her expression was clearly asking why, so Aya answered before she could even ask.
“Full functional recovery, including rehab, is a year minimum. Two, at the outside. That’s too long a gap. Third in the nation — the two second-years who were ahead of me will be even further ahead by the time I could come back. So, honestly, good timing. I’d always figured I’d need to know my limits eventually. Guess this was as good a time as any.”
Aya said this with a smile, her voice carefully light. Whether or not it was bravado was probably something only she herself could know. But it clearly didn’t seem like something she believed from the bottom of her heart, and Yuki forced out an apology.
“I’m sorry.”
Aya frowned, laughing wryly.
“What’s with you all of a sudden? Sorry for what?”
Yuki, hand on her own knee, looking down, opened and closed her mouth several times, self-loathing eating at her, breathing out empty air before finally mixing in the poison of her own feelings and letting it out.
“Without even knowing what you’d been through — I was complaining about how privileged my situation was.”
Aya, too stunned to respond, crossed her arms and stayed quiet, letting out a small sigh she made sure Yuki couldn’t hear. What Mahiru had said back at the pool bar a few days ago had hit a little closer to home than she’d wanted to admit.
But it wasn’t entirely accurate either — Aya had genuinely tried to keep her own circumstances and Yuki’s completely separate in her mind.
Which was exactly why she was so thrown to hear Yuki, of all people, start saying something like this.
Aya let the silence carry some weight before speaking gently.
“—Do you think it’s wrong for someone who scraped their knee falling down to cry in front of someone who broke a bone?”
At Aya’s question, Yuki looked up, close to tears, and thought through her answer.
But having pictured the scene, she must have concluded the answer was no. “No, that’s not…” she started to murmur, then fell silent, realizing how that connected right back to her own apology just now.
Yuki’s face showed the conflict of someone who couldn’t quite forgive herself and yet also couldn’t keep beating herself up. Just then, the theater lights dimmed. The screen rose sharply out of the darkness.
Sensing the film was about to start, Aya said this:
“I don’t think ‘someone else has it worse, so deal with it’ is ever really a valid argument. Sure, being considerate of the other person’s situation is part of how people should treat each other — but whatever situation I’m in doesn’t make your pain disappear. Everyone’s threshold and tolerance for pain is completely different, so comparing them doesn’t really mean anything.”
Yuki lowered her eyes and fell silent. A faint hesitation lingered behind them.
“I think it’s fine to complain to a friend whose parents just divorced over an affair about how your toast was cut too thick this morning. Obviously, there’s context and timing and the other person’s state of mind to consider — but at least for me, I’ve been saved plenty of times by dumb friends who talked to me about stuff like that.”
Aya put on a deliberately carefree voice, laughing it off breezily, almost like Mahiru would.
“I’m fine. So don’t worry, go ahead and lean on me.”
At that, Yuki covered her face with both hands, ashamed of herself, and groaned out an apology.
“…Sorry for making you deal with me too.”
“I just told you not to worry about it. Not listening, are you?”
Aya laughed wryly despite herself, and Yuki, seeming to recover some energy, looked up and patted her own cheeks a few times. After one more sigh, fully back to normal, she said “thanks.”
After the theater went dark, a few more trailers played, followed by a short clip on movie theater etiquette.
Even though there was no one else around, the two of them faced the screen and kept their voices down anyway.
“Last time I watched Anpanman was preschool. Is Uncle Jam still throwing bread at people?”
Aya asked quietly while waiting for the movie to start, and Yuki answered, a little annoyed.
“I’d appreciate it if you said ‘baking,’ please. The throwing part is unavoidable.”
“…Wait, you actually watch a decent amount of Anpanman, Kayano?”
Aya asked, a little surprised, and Yuki, her pale skin lit blue by the screen’s glow, colored faintly and looked away.
“Well, I mean — the movies, at least? I can’t keep up with everything, obviously, but I watch bits during lunch breaks at school and stuff. Honestly, the quality’s really high, so even adults can enjoy it reasonably well.”
“Huh. Not to be rude, but isn’t it a kids’ movie?”
“That’s exactly why it’s good. It’s not about cynicism or complicated, morally ambiguous themes — it’s ‘help someone who’s in trouble,’ ‘fix your mistakes once you realize them,’ ‘resolve things with the minimum necessary force if it comes to that.’ There’s this consistent philosophy running through the whole series from the original creator, Yanase Takashi, and if that resonates with you, you can just accept the show’s themes at face value and cheer it on with a clear conscience.”
Aya, pushed back a little by the sheer intensity of Yuki’s passionate speech, nodded with an “oh…,” feeling the temperature gap between them.
“You’ll see, watching it changes your impression,” Yuki insisted, and Aya, without expecting too much but wanting to keep the conversation smooth, put on a show of anticipation with “well, if you say so.”
It was several dozen minutes later that Aya reached up to cover her mouth and pulled out a handkerchief.
Go get ‘em, Anpanman. Go, Anpanman.
The incident happened the next morning. More precisely, it came to light that morning.
Yawning, still replaying the movie she’d watched with Yuki and the taste of the drink they’d bought with the money saved from the pair discount on the way home, Aya opened the classroom door — and was hit immediately by a wall of curious stares.
She’d arrived right before the bell, so most of the class was already there, and most of them were watching her with eyes full of curiosity and interest. The gossip-loving girls were excitedly whispering something to their friends; the loud boys were grinning. Aya considered herself relatively unlikely to have enemies, but even so, this reaction to simply walking in seemed excessive. She stopped in the doorway, frowning.
“…What is this atmosphere?”
Just as Aya asked this, cutting through the strange quiet, she spotted, at the edge of her vision, someone else looking equally lost.
Yuki. Surrounded by grinning friends, forcing a polite smile, Yuki met Aya’s eyes and her expression shifted to something apologetic yet baffled, her gaze darting away. “Mizuki-san—” So she was involved in this somehow too. What on earth was going on?
Then, as befit someone who’d been a close friend for this long, Takagi, apparently unable to stand it anymore, got up from her seat. She started to wave Aya over, then, reconsidering — anything said in this dead-silent room would carry to everyone anyway — spoke up with an expression mixing barely-hidden skepticism with surprise and celebration.
“Aya, you’re dating Kayano? — Congrats.”
For a moment, Aya’s mind went completely blank. She stared at Takagi, dumbfounded, unable to process the meaning.
Then, chewing on the words bit by bit, she finally understood, her face stiffening, and she raised a strained, awkward smile, trying to voice her utter confusion. She tried to.
“Wha—”
But before she could finish, cheers erupted across the classroom, drowning out her question.
Classmates began congratulating a relationship between Aya and Yuki that didn’t exist, egging them on; the gossip-loving girls pressed in on Yuki with “since when were you two dating, tell me!”; a boy who got along fairly well with Aya said “you could’ve told me!” with an expression somewhere between admiration and jealousy.
Aya didn’t go out of her way to broadcast that she was into women, but she didn’t hide the fact that she’d dated women before either, and she was fine with people who knew sharing that with others. In effect, virtually everyone in the classroom already knew her orientation. Which was probably exactly why nobody thought to question the rumor.
But there wasn’t a shred of truth to any of it.
There was no relationship. And Aya had no memory of doing anything with anyone that might have hinted at one.
What on earth was happening. Struggling to hide her confusion, Aya ignored the noise around her and looked to Yuki, who was also repeating denials to the friends crowding around her.
But her denials were being read as bashful deflection, and none of it was landing.
Why did this happen. Who did this. What was she supposed to do about it now. Taking in the sudden avalanche of problems all at once, thoroughly baffled, Aya let out a small sigh.
“What is going on here.”