Ignoring Sakura Tokiwa’s wishes, Aya half-dragged her out to a bench in the courtyard. There was no way she was having this conversation in front of the entire classroom, already sensitive enough as it was.
A brick path curved east-west along the inside of the school building, and inside that curve, grass and trees grew thick — though by mid-autumn, they’d started shedding their leaves. A handful of benches dotted the lawn, several occupied by cozy couples. Fortunately, one was free.
Sakura sat down primly, cutely, on the bench; Aya stood in front of her, arms crossed.
“—I don’t think we’ve ever met before. Why me, of all people?”
Aya asked, still unable to shake her confusion, and Sakura smiled.
“That’s, well — I’ve seen you around school a lot.”
“Oh?”
Aya wasn’t exactly someone who stood out with attention-grabbing behavior, nor did she have particularly striking looks. She’d acknowledge, and others would too, that her features were reasonably well put together, but she was nowhere near the kind of dramatic beauty — like Sakura’s or Yuki’s — that got scouted for magazine modeling. What exactly had caught her eye?
“I saw you being kind to your classmates, looking like you enjoyed school, and before I knew it, I found myself drawn to you. And I’d heard, um, that you’re into women… so I thought maybe I had a chance, but I couldn’t quite build up the confidence.”
Aya narrowed her eyes slightly, studying Sakura’s face closely.
“And then, right around then, I heard the rumor about you and Kayano-senpai.”
“…Ah, that. That’s a baseless rumor.”
Though “baseless” might not be entirely fair, she decided to set the details aside.
“I know. But it made me realize there was no guarantee such a wonderful senpai wouldn’t end up belonging to someone else forever. So I decided to work up the courage.”
Sakura stared back at Aya, looking tense. Aya nodded slightly, then asked:
*
“—So, what’s the real reason? What’s your actual goal?”
*
Something in her expression shifted, her temperature dropping ever so slightly.
The carefully constructed tension in her expression stiffened even further, her cheeks twitching for a moment. Then Sakura’s eyes darted around, betraying her unease, and she put on a hurt expression. “Eh?”
But Aya, smiling faintly, narrowed her eyes and looked Sakura dead-on.
“I don’t recall ever being visibly kind to classmates in a way that’d be obvious from a distance. And the hallway’s just somewhere you pass through, so I’ve got no memory of you seeing me enjoying myself there. At school I’m usually in the classroom, on my phone, yawning… where exactly did you fall for me?”
“Silence is golden. You went with silver instead,” Aya continued coolly, and Sakura shook her head in a panic.
“I-I’m not lying. I really do like that about you, senpai…”
“I can tell, actually. You don’t like me at all, do you?”
Truthfully, Aya hadn’t brought this up with full confidence going in — it had been a probe. But the flicker of expression when she’d hit the nerve directly confirmed the hypothesis for her.
“Why would you say something so cruel…”
Sakura, brows still drooping, kept pressing, so Aya threw out one more point as a finishing blow.
“The real giveaway was the timing of your confession. Who confesses right in front of a classroom, door left wide open? I’d guess putting on that show was the whole point. Some kind of dare, maybe? Am I wrong?”
“Why won’t you believe me? I really do—”
Sensing that her words weren’t reaching Aya’s heart, Sakura trailed off, closing her mouth, looking hurt.
Aya, careful not to hand her any more ammunition, chose to stay silent and hold her gaze, expression flat.
For a while, Sakura searched for words, still looking hurt. But catching, from a sidelong glance, the sheer resolve in Aya’s expression, she smiled sadly. Seeing that Aya’s expression still hadn’t changed, she soon let the tension drain out of her shoulders entirely. A thin, thin sigh slipped out.
A few more seconds of silence passed, and Sakura wiped every trace of expression from her face, looking at Aya plainly.
Only then did Aya feel like she was finally seeing her true face.
Sakura narrowed her eyes with something like resentment, let out a blatant sigh, and spat out, thoroughly done with the whole thing:
“Ugh, guess I drew a dud. Total waste of time.”
Arms crossed, Sakura spat this out, and Aya’s face twisted.
“Finally showing your true colors. Should I say ‘nice to meet you’ now?”
“Go ahead. …Senpai, you’d probably be better off just accepting people’s affection at face value, you know?”
“I’m not in the mood to take advice from a con artist.”
Aya shot back, hands shoved in her blazer pockets, and Sakura, unable to counter, pouted and propped her chin on her knee, looking bored. Another sigh slipped out.
“I heard you were into women, but here I am, an adorable underclassman confessing to you, and you don’t even waver?”
Sakura said this with an arrogant, confident smile, hand on her own chest.
“I’m into women, sure, but that doesn’t mean I’m automatically into you. That’s about orientation, not you specifically.”
“But most of the boys in my class like me, you know? Because I’m cute.”
“They like your face and your body, not you.”
“What are you even saying? That’s the same thing.”
“Go look up the dictionary again.”
“I looked up ‘love’ and got ‘lust.’”
“Burn that dictionary.”
Apparently, Tokiwa Sakura was a cheeky underclassman with full confidence in her looks and zero hesitation about wielding them as a weapon. She’d said she’d “drawn a dud” a moment ago, but honestly, that line belonged to Aya. So much for a decent lunch break.
“—So? Why’d you do this?”
Aya crossed her arms, demanding an answer, but Sakura just smiled vaguely and got up leisurely.
“Ah, I’ve got nothing left to say to you, senpai. Let’s call it here. Goodbye.”
“Hey, no way, at least give me an explanation. What kind of mystery drama skips the reveal? …Ugh, that’s a really disgusted face. Could you even show your classmates a face like that?”
The moment Aya called her back, Sakura turned to her with a look of pure disgust, wordless.
“Can’t we just leave it? You got to dream, for a moment, that you might date an adorable, lovable underclassman like me. I got a shot at the lottery. Fair trade.”
“You can dream all you want in bed. That’s not a fair trade at all. At minimum, I want an explanation.”
“Then I’ll demand a juice. Fruit-flavored. That’ll make it fair.”
“Are you even listening to me?”
Still, setting aside all her rude behavior for a moment, as the senpai who’d dragged her out to the courtyard against her will in the middle of mid-autumn, Aya figured she could afford a little accommodation.
Feeling pathetic about it, Aya went back into the school building and, using her rarely-touched part-time earnings, bought cocoa and apple juice from a vending machine. Hurrying back, she found Sakura, surprisingly, sitting there obediently waiting. Feeling the gain-loss effect keenly, Aya held out the apple juice with a “here.”
Sakura, silently, stared intently at the warm cocoa in Aya’s other hand.
Aya quietly hid it behind her back. She’d bought that one for herself.
“You said fruit-flavored, didn’t you?”
“Cacao’s a fruit. Didn’t you know that?”
“No… cacao is… —ugh, fine! I lose. Here!”
Aya pushed the cocoa into Sakura’s hands and dropped heavily onto the bench. Crossing her legs, half out of spite, she twisted the cap off her apple juice bottle and downed it in one go.
“So? Why the pointless fake confession?”
“I don’t really want to say. Do I have to?”
“After putting me through all that? Fine, but I’m the type to spread nasty rumors about people, you know.”
“Wow, your personality’s the worst.”
“You’re really not one to talk.”
“Guess we really are a good match, huh? Want to date for real?”
“In real life, negative times negative doesn’t equal positive.”
“Negative, huh. I can work with that,” Sakura said, laughing, shrugging, twisting the cap off the cocoa she’d been handed, blowing on the rising steam with an “phew” before taking a sip.
“It’s warm,” she murmured innocently, and the sight was cute enough to match her looks, which just made it worse — if only her personality matched too.
“Kayano-senpai’s kind of a celebrity, right?”
Sakura started talking suddenly. For a moment, Aya, not understanding where this was going, stared at her blankly, but soon realized this was the confession of her actual motive and nodded. “Well, I guess so.”
Yuki was, undeniably, exceptional. Her looks fell squarely into the “remarkably well put together” category. Not just that — her physical abilities were above average too. Academically, needless to say, she was the top of the year, an outlier even by the school’s entire history, having pulled off a perfect score across every subject. She wasn’t quite famous enough that literally everyone knew her, but anyone reasonably plugged into the school’s social scene would at least know her name.
“She’s especially popular with the boys — apparently a few first-years have already confessed to her too.”
“Huh, I didn’t know that. But it tracks.”
“And then, this morning, a rumor started going around that Kayano-senpai supposedly got a girlfriend.”
Aya had thought Sakura’s arrival was suspiciously well-timed — so this was where it connected. Aya fell silent, expression complicated.
“From what I heard, the partner is another girl, and apparently that same girl also used to date another woman before. And then, a little after that, word got out that the dating rumor had been a misunderstanding. Though that version’s picked up its own embellishments too — like, they broke up because the other girl wasn’t good enough for her, that sort of thing.”
“They’re basically crop pests. Not exactly aiming to wipe them out entirely.”
“Guess giving up is important in life. In modern Japan, you can’t stop people’s mouths.”
Sakura laughed a little, tinged with self-mockery, and raised a finger, twirling it beside her face.
“Right. Rumors just spread. Round and round, whether the people involved want them to or not.”
“…What are you getting at?”
“Kayano-senpai, this huge celebrity everyone at school knows, got a girlfriend. Another girl, no less. Turns out it was a misunderstanding — but what if there’s actually more to it? What if her partner was the one who dumped her, decided she wasn’t worth it? And into that gap — I step in!”
As Aya narrowed her eyes, suspicious, Sakura wore a loud, gleefully wicked smile.
“‘The girl who turned down the great Kayano Yuki chose Tokiwa Sakura instead!’ That’s the rumor that would spread.”
Sakura turned eyes toward Aya, spinning with something close to madness.
“Everyone’s eyes on me would turn to envy! My pride and my need for validation, both fully satisfied. My spot in the social order would shoot right up, and I’d become popular overnight!”
Watching Sakura, hand on her chest, passionately delivering this monologue, Aya listened, stunned, into blank silence. Speechless for a while, mouth half-open, she took in the mid-autumn air. Finally coming back to herself, she blinked repeatedly, still unable to shake her surprise, and nodded slowly, digesting it. What a woman.
“…You really are rotten to the core. I’m almost impressed.”
“I’m honored by the compliment. Want to reconsider your options after all?”
“No way. I’m not on board with the idea of using Kayano as a stepping stone.”
Still — there was something almost admirable about the sheer audacity of it.
Her method wasn’t exactly praiseworthy — using a relationship for purposes other than romantic feelings would understandably upset people, and her motives deserved to be called impure. But everyone carried some desire to be recognized by others, and there was maybe, just maybe, something worth learning from someone willing to put in this much effort to become someone worth recognizing.
At Aya’s exasperated remark, Sakura offered a cool, dismissive comeback.
“A stepping stone, please. We’d just be dating. Whatever other rumors spread around us are just other people’s mouths running on their own. Can’t exactly plug those, you know.”
Watching Sakura’s confident smile as she said this, a thought suddenly crossed Aya’s mind.
“…Hey, sorry if this offends you, but — you’re not the one who started the rumor, right, Tokiwa?”
Aya asked this hesitantly but decisively, and the first reaction that came back was pure disbelief.
“Huh? You think I’d do something that petty?”
“Maybe reflect on your own behavior from a few seconds ago. Your ambition’s the only big thing about you here.”
“If I were going to spread a fake rumor, I’d go with something like ‘Tokiwa Sakura got scouted by an idol agency.’ No one could verify it either way.”
Put that way, she had a point. Sakura clearly had tried to exploit the rumor for her own benefit, but the rumor itself was far too roundabout to be interpreted as her own scheme.
“Guess I underestimated how petty you actually are. Sorry. My mistake.”
Aya delivered this apology thick with sarcasm, and Sakura shot her a dissatisfied half-lidded look.
“…I don’t know where the rumor came from. I just hitched a ride on it. But I’ll apologize for how I went about it — it was in bad taste. Sorry. I was actually planning to pull it off without you catching on.”
“So there was a real chance I could’ve dated you without knowing, then gotten dumped? That’s pretty pathetic for me.”
“Well, that’s on you for not being able to win me over enough to actually get there before that happened. Maybe look at your own behavior instead of blaming others. That kind of thing doesn’t fly in the real world, you know.”
“Why am I the one getting scolded here?”
Still, Aya had more or less pieced together the whole situation. In the end, she still didn’t know who’d started the rumor, and Sakura had just been trying to exploit it for validation.
Now that that plan had fallen apart too, neither of them had any further business with each other.
“Anyway, as long as you’re not the one who started the rumor, that’s fine. I get why you did what you did. Nothing else I need from you, and if you’re good with it, let’s call it done here.”
“I was trying to end this from the start.”
As Aya tried to wrap things up, Sakura, still shameless, tossed out one more jab and started to rise.
Same attitude to the very end. Aya laughed wryly, then, reconsidering, called out to Sakura as she started to walk away.
“Unsolicited advice, but if you want people to recognize you, try a different approach. Dating someone popular doesn’t make you popular yourself.”
At that blunt truth, Sakura’s pupils contracted sharply.
The lips that had been rattling off quips so freely pressed into a flat line, and the face that had been putting on sarcasm went blank. Eventually, her hand, peeking out from her blazer and cardigan, curled into a small fist, and she clenched her back teeth.
“…That really is unsolicited. Senpai, you seem like the type to lecture sex workers about their life choices.”
Her cheeks flushed faintly with anger.
“I’m not trying to force my opinion on you. I’ll take whatever pushback or complaints you want to throw at me.”
“Then just be quiet.”
Real anger bled into her words, but as someone who’d taken the brunt of this whole scheme, Aya figured she’d earned the right to say at least this much. Watching Sakura pursue such a self-destructive path had, without Aya quite noticing, made her a little angry too.
“But I’m not changing my mind. You — this whole approach doesn’t make anyone happy except maybe you, and even then, I don’t think you’d actually feel satisfied by it deep down. You’d be better off doing this in a healthier way.”
“Look at you, so high and mighty. Must be nice being so noble, senpai.”
“More noble than someone trying to date a person she doesn’t even like just to feed her own need for validation, sure.”
Aya countered with a cool smile, and Sakura bit her lip hard, glaring at Aya with something like resentment. Aya felt, finally, like she was seeing the bottom of her. As expected — this really wasn’t a girl suited to this kind of scheme.
Sakura, breathing hard with barely-contained anger for a while, eventually laughed, as if giving up on holding it back.
“Hah… fine, being low sounds fine to me. Better than staying noble and never being remembered by anyone.”
Spitting that out, Sakura turned her back, as if fleeing from Aya’s rebuttal, and walked away.
Aya swallowed the words rising in her throat and let out a sigh. — Maybe she’d gotten a little too worked up herself. Leaning back against the bench, she let the autumn wind cool her head, trying to reflect.
As Sakura had walked away, her face had shown genuine anguish.
Unease and inner conflict in her eyes. That wasn’t the expression of someone with strong conviction — it was the look of someone who knew, deep down, that her own logic was weak, caught between wanting to change and wanting to keep going anyway. Aya understood that look well.
Because she’d seen exactly that look in the mirror, back when she’d injured her knee.
Sitting on the bench, lost in thought, Aya watched Sakura’s back grow smaller in the distance.
Then, suddenly, Sakura stopped walking. Aya raised an eyebrow, and a moment later, Sakura turned around and marched briskly back. Looking a little awkward, she came up to Aya, quickly pulled out some coins from her pocket — apparently prepared in advance — and pressed them into Aya’s hand.
“Here. For the cocoa.”
“Ah, right.”
At Aya’s noncommittal reply, Sakura finally, truly walked away.
Not quite sure how to categorize this underclassman named Tokiwa Sakura, Aya quietly watched her back, oddly small now, disappear. The coins she’d been given were a little more than the cocoa actually cost.