Episode 13 — After-School Distraction

Shopping malls have everything and nothing. I’d somehow managed to forget this fundamental truth about the world.

Under ordinary circumstances, that wouldn’t bother me at all. I could wander into a bookshop, drift along the spines, pick up a title that caught my eye, and find some vague, serviceable satisfaction in that.

But right now, ordinary circumstances didn’t apply. Kanzaki-san had, in all likelihood, thrown something aside to be here beside me.

I steal a sideways look at her as we walk. The pale translucent skin, the glitter of those violet-indigo eyes — all of it present as always. But something was different from always too. Kanzaki-san was looking around with undisguised curiosity, taking everything in.

“What is it?”

I asked before I could stop myself. And she said:

“I’ve never hung out with someone after school before — never been to a shopping mall like this either… it’s kind of — exciting.”

She said it with a faint flush rising to her cheeks, and gave a shy little smile. It was an expression that mixed anxiety and excitement in equal measure, and I had an almost overwhelming urge to put my arms around her. I have to protect her, I thought. I hadn’t realised I possessed anything resembling maternal instinct until this moment.

As if deliberately tickling that just-awakened maternal instinct, Kanzaki-san looked up at me and asked:

“Hold my hand?”
“Sure, but…”

I said it, heart on the verge of detonation, moving with suspicious jerkiness, my hand trembling slightly as I inched it toward hers.

Then — as though she’d run out of patience — Kanzaki-san was the one who grabbed mine, hard. The white fingers that had been dancing across the piano keys only moments ago slipped smoothly between mine, winding through them.

She held our joined hands up before her face, as if confirming the connection.

“There. Now I feel safe.”

Kanzaki-san whispered it — and her hand was trembling very slightly. The first time I’d taken her hand, I’d been too overwhelmed by the sheer violence of its beauty — the cool temperature of the palm, the silk-smoothness of the skin — to perceive anything else.

But now I felt more than that. The slight dampness of her palm. The fingers twining with something like desperation. And the fingertips, roughened and hardened.

Even so — I thought her beautiful. The history I felt through those fingertips was dear to me, and if that history was something she experienced as a curse, I wanted to ease it, even a little.

I made a quiet decision, and held that small hand tight.

◇◇◇

Bored students go to the arcade. Following that piece of received wisdom had been the mistake.

“It’s — it’s so loud…”

Whether from playing piano or just natural sensitivity, her ears seemed sharper than most. Kanzaki-san pressed both hands over them. Since we were still holding hands, mine was pulled along and ended up touching her ear.

Even then she didn’t let go — and I was hit all at once by how adorable that was, and by the incidental discovery that her ear was just as smooth as the rest of her. The noise inside my head was louder than any arcade.

This was no time for self-criticism, though. I took Kanzaki-san’s hand and led her away from the worst of the noise, to a corner at the far end of the arcade.

It was the kind of place I would never normally set foot in — wrapped in a glittery, sparkly atmosphere — radiating a kind of cheerful airheadedness quite different from the arcade’s racket.

“What’s this?”

Kanzaki-san, now visibly relieved by the reduction in noise, asked with the guileless curiosity of a small child.

“This is a purikura booth.”
“What do you do in there?”
“You take — nice photos of yourself, sort of.”

I’d never been inside one myself, so I couldn’t vouch for the accuracy of that description. But if novels and manga had it right, I wasn’t far off.

Kanzaki-san listened to my deeply unreliable explanation and stood there staring for a while at the machine — the large cabinet printed with model photos, the curtained entrance — then turned toward me.

“I want to do purikura.”

Eyes shining. And — objectively speaking — she was in no way losing a beauty contest against the models printed on the side of the machine. If anything, she looked more beautiful to me. More than any of them.

I’d thought of her in a generalised way as beautiful before, but having her placed in direct comparison made that fact sharply, clearly visible.

This was no time for standing around staring, though. However impossibly cute Kanzaki-san was — for my own part, a purikura booth was entirely outside my territory. It was the sort of thing loud, frivolous classmates enjoyed. I’d always assumed it had nothing to do with me.

But I couldn’t very well leave Kanzaki-san to go in alone. And more than that — there was something in me, something unusually pure for me, that simply wanted her to enjoy herself.

“…Alright.”

I nodded quietly.

“Yes!”

Kanzaki-san said it softly, and smiled with a faint flush on her cheeks.

She really is too cute.