Episode 19 — Petrichor

One week since the shopping mall. The rainy season hasn’t lifted. Kanzaki-san hasn’t appeared in the music room.

I turn it over and over. Would it be all right to reach toward her again? A week of silence, of not showing her face in the music room — doesn’t that mean something? Doesn’t that say something clear?

Maybe it was pure conceit to think I was special to Kanzaki-san. Maybe “I love your words” and all those suggestive little gestures were just teasing. Maybe now that she doesn’t have to come to the music room anymore, she can concentrate on piano without distraction, and she’s relieved. Better off without me.

I’ve been cycling through those thoughts, over and over.

But that’s just running away, in the end. A logic I’ve invented to protect a small, brittle pride.

In the classroom where the teacher’s voice only sharpens the silence around it, I listen to the rain against the window. I stare at the grey world outside. The monochrome is deeply familiar — and yet the me of a little while ago hadn’t even recognised it as monochrome.

But now it’s different.

Because I’ve come to know Kanzaki-san. Because I’ve seared her sound behind my retinas. That alone — the loss of that alone — is enough to leave me this hollow.

Lonely enough that I keep pouring everything I feel for the heroine, everything I feel for Kanzaki-san, into the novel.

But I know that words can’t reach the ideal. I know, painfully, that words can’t stand in for sound.

I knew all along that I’d arrive at this conclusion.

Because — someone who asks the very person who embodies her ideal to “play piano for me” purely for the sake of her own ideal — that person is selfish, and wilful, and arrogant.

And so it follows that someone as self-centred as me was never going to be able to bear a world without Kanzaki-san.

As if to affirm that conclusion I’d finally arrived at — the sharp sound of the chime rang out.

Next was homeroom, and there were just a few minutes before the teacher arrived. And right now, Kanzaki-san was certainly still in her classroom. Going there now was far more reliable than the risk of missing each other after school, or waiting in the music room.

By the time that thought had crossed my mind, I was already on my feet. I flew out of the classroom into the brief, noisy interval, and made straight for the advanced-track floor, one storey up.

I ran down the corridor at a speed that would have earned a telling-off from any teacher I passed, took the stairs, crossed the landing, took the next flight.

I arrived at the advanced-track floor with an ease that made me wonder, with belated regret, why I hadn’t done this sooner.

The corridor was sparsely populated. There were three advanced-track classes, and I didn’t know which one Kanzaki-san was in.

My eyes must have gone completely strange. I looked through the window of the nearest classroom — and among all those students, my gaze was pulled to Kanzaki-san with startling speed, as if by gravity, irresistible and absolute. Kanzaki-san was sitting, by some coincidence, in the very same spot as me — last seat by the window — wearing a pensive expression, watching the June rain. Even that scene was beautiful as a painting, and I drifted helplessly toward it.

The classroom, just before homeroom, gradually settling into quiet. Into that quiet, a sudden foreign element — me — and the murmur of those around us. But my ears weren’t waiting for any of that undifferentiated noise. Only one kind of beauty. The footsteps approaching it alone made my heart pound, close to bursting, as I wrung out the words and released them into the air.

“Kanzaki-san—!”

At my voice, Kanzaki-san turned — and her eyes went wide. The violet-indigo jewels trembled, filling with light.

“Ogawa-san…”

That bell-clear voice grazing my eardrums was enough to make my heart tremble with joy. My whole field of vision filled with Kanzaki-san’s pale, translucent beauty, the lustre of her. That alone made the world’s colours vivid again.

Dazzled by that long-missed radiance, unable to find the next word — the door rattled open. The homeroom teacher, almost certainly. In response, students who had been standing began returning to their seats.

The time left to us wasn’t much.

“I’ll be waiting. In the music room. Until you come.”

I said only that, looking straight into Kanzaki-san’s eyes, and turned to go.

In that instant — something cool and soft arrived in my hand. Feeling in that touch an almost desperate familiarity, I turned back.

“This Sunday — come to the concert hall in front of the station.”

With those words, something hard pressed into my palm. A ticket — produced from somewhere, somehow.

I nodded, too stunned to speak. And then Kanzaki-san, slowly, told me:

“I’m doing my best for you. I will keep doing my best. So — wait for me until that day.”

That voice. Those words. Clearer than anything I have ever written. More beautiful than anything I have ever put into words.