Episode 11 — Siren and Earphones

I trace through memory and write down sensation after sensation.

The temperature of a small palm held in mine, its softness. The feeling of being filled entirely with what Kanzaki-san gives me, the classroom noise growing distant.

A skirt against my knees. A weight so light it seems to contradict the enormity of what it brought. A sweet scent. A voice released from too-close a distance.

“I love your words. So I wanted to be close to them”.

Putting it into text only makes the misreading more likely to accelerate. I discipline myself by writing out the protagonist’s internal monologue instead.

I transcribe today’s too-dense day into the story, as I always do. So much happened that the word count came out longer than usual — normally around two thousand characters, but today’s episode easily exceeded three thousand.

Even that fact felt like a symbol of how much Kanzaki-san had brought me, and of my own tendency to justify everything through writing.

Self-reproach and the satisfaction of having written it through tangled together, and today again I posted the update. Then, to fill the time before any response came, I showered, dried my hair, and returned to the screen. I woke it from sleep and refreshed — and today again, the red light was lit. I opened it to find more comments than yesterday.

“The heroine girl coming on so strong is adorable.”
“The distance between them has closed so much — this is so precious.”

Comments that only helped the misreading along. And below them, as always, Otonashi-san’s comment:

“Thank you for the update as always. The protagonist seemed to be telling herself it was just a misreading — but I think she’d be allowed to misread a little more”.

A riddle of a message, left there like that.

◇◇◇

At lunchtime: in reality, there is no rooftop, no stairwell landing — none of those conveniently escapist refuges that exist only in fiction. Back at my own seat, last by the window, I block out the noise with wired earphones, plugging my ears against the commotion. Headphone jacks disappeared from the world long ago, so it’s a plain black Type-C pair from the hundred-yen shop.

Wireless still unnerves me, somehow. Those tiny paired lumps — I feel like I’d drop them, lose them, at the slightest opportunity. And they cost far more than I could ever justify spending on myself to begin with.

I dress that particular cowardice up as aesthetic principle, as preference, as commitment — and indulge in a small private satisfaction about it. I connect it to my general attitude of shutting out the people around me, and trick myself into believing I’m someone with consistent convictions.

Then I notice I’m tricking myself, and use that noticing to feel like I have some kind of objective self-awareness — and find the whole exercise pathetic, and laugh at myself for it. Laughing at myself, I hit play on my usual playlist.

The voice of a band — reasonably well-known within certain subcultural circles — begins to shout in my ears. In time with it, I tear the bread wrapper open with slightly more aggression than necessary and bring it to my mouth.

Ready-made bread tastes like fuel. Chewing that block of energy, I thought idly: maybe my taste in music is partly a response to the unfulfilled longing for piano. A kind of rebellion. And then I felt, again and with full force, how completely Kanzaki-san’s piano cuts straight through a complex like that — no obstacle, no detour, direct.

The male vocalist in my ear kept shouting, unrepentant.

So I didn’t notice. Didn’t register what was happening until a shadow fell over me, until pale skin and white hands crossed my line of sight.

I looked up and Kanzaki-san was there. I hurried to swallow the bread, pull the earphones out.

The noise of the classroom hit my eardrums — and yet all five senses went straight to Kanzaki-san.

“Wh — what’s wrong?”
“I came.”
“Right…”

My thin reply didn’t move a muscle in Kanzaki-san’s expression. Her usual blankness, a slightly floating quality about her, and she tilted her head.

“Was that all right?”
“Of course it was — but why?”
“I thought we could have lunch together.”

In a voice clear as a bell, she said it — and sat down without hesitation in the conveniently empty seat across from me. The owner was probably in the canteen somewhere, but even if they came back this instant, they’d happily give up their seat for Kanzaki-san. I would too. That’s the kind of person Kanzaki-san was. Someone special, beyond an ordinary person’s reach, who draws a certain reverence.

That this person would come to me — I was no closer to explaining the mystery.

“Of course. Though I’m nearly finished.”

I held up the bread, now reduced to barely more than a mouthful.

Kanzaki-san replied in her cool, even voice:

“That’s fine. It’s just — after school I can’t be with you as long. That’s all.”

Her usual enigmatic register. No warmth in the words themselves — and yet.

Something like loneliness — or something related to it — seemed woven through them. The gaze turned on me, the beam from those violet-indigo eyes, carried a quality of reaching, of needing something to hold.

I took hold of that thread and drew it toward me, and nodded.

I don’t want to drop it, I thought. I don’t want to lose it.

I put the wired earphones away in my bag.