Episode 6 — The Same Height

About an hour after the end of school. As if leaving the last echoes of sound behind. Kanzaki-san rose from the piano, slung her school bag over her shoulder.

“Are you heading home?”
“Heading home.”
“Then I will too.”

I grabbed my own bag in a hurry, fell into step beside her as she walked, and the two of us left the music room. We reached the landing a little further on, and I told her, by way of reminder:

“Wait for me at the front gate, okay?”

Kanzaki-san gave a vague, airy little sound — not quite acknowledgement, not quite dismissal — and disappeared toward the covered walkway. I felt a flicker of doubt, but she had, without fail, waited dutifully at the school gate every time before, so I told myself not to worry.

Standing at the front gate, Kanzaki-san would draw stares and whispers without mercy — my stomach had already started to hurt about it — but being beside her gave me so much more than that could take away. I wasn’t about to give up that place of my own accord.

I went as fast as I could to keep her waiting as little as possible, half-running down the stairs. The distance to the shoebox lockers, which I’d only ever found annoying before, and the whole fact of being in the general stream rather than the advanced track — both of these were now a source of genuine, urgent frustration.

And so: shoes changed, the long way round through the back gate to the front. As my eyes found Kanzaki-san and that soft, pale beauty came into sharp focus — the usual murmur reached my eardrums.

“That’s Kanzaki-san, isn’t it?”
“That pretty and that good at piano. It’s too much.”

Those voices arrived in scattered drops as I walked closer. And by the time I came to a stop in front of Kanzaki-san, they had changed into something else:

“Wait, who’s that with her?”
“She doesn’t exactly match up with Kanzaki-san, does she.”

An unpleasant little gradient. But it didn’t really shock me. Can’t be helped, I thought. Obviously. A rueful, resigned kind of acceptance — though yes, a small sting of discomfort too.

Well. Let them say what they like. I’m probably a better writer than any of them.

With that thought held quietly in reserve, I called out to Kanzaki-san, scattering beauty carelessly around her as usual:

“Sorry for the wait — ready?”

I said it with an unfamiliar smile, and Kanzaki-san nodded silently and fell into step beside me.

And then, without either of us deciding to, we began to walk. At uneven tempos, uneven strides. The murmuring still seemed to drift around us, but I didn’t mind it. My chest was simply full of the fact of Kanzaki-san beside me. Write about this feeling too, I thought — and as if trying to bind the emotion to an image, I glanced sideways at her.

They’re right. The people out there saying things — I understood them. They were entirely correct. The purity of the silver hair catching the wind, the wandering, unfocused gaze and the way it seemed to draw you into its trembling depths, the snow-white skin of the arms and legs below the uniform cuffs. All of it was fundamentally different from me, in every possible way. The only thing we shared was height.

They really are completely different, aren’t they.

The voice I’d just heard — whoever said that — was absolutely right.

The most I can do is serve as a foil, I thought, in mild self-deprecation. And then —

Something soft landed on me without warning. A sweet scent brushed my nose. It took me a long moment to understand that it was the feeling of skin through fabric — that Kanzaki-san had wrapped her arms around mine.

The world around us must have fallen into a sudden flurry of whispers. And yet all I could perceive was an impossible silence, and within it, the clamouring of my own heartbeat.

“W-what’s wrong?”

My flustered question, and Kanzaki-san’s answer, laid gently over it, filling it in:

“Sorry — I nearly tripped.”

As if to contradict those words entirely, she stepped back from me with a composed, unhurried grace — not a trace of flustered about her. And so: back to that close-but-distant, side-by-side distance. It should have felt comfortable. And yet I felt something like reluctance to let it go. Beauty is frightening, I thought.

“Be careful.”
“I’m fine. Because Ogawa-san is here.”

Said without a flicker of self-consciousness. And that alone was enough to make me feel, carelessly, recklessly, that my existence had been given meaning — which frightened me too.

So much more easily than I could ever manage, hammering at a keyboard trying to stack words into place — just by playing melodies on the keys, just by murmuring a few words in passing, she brought all manner of things into being. I felt myself being eroded by the existence of Kanzaki-san. Pulled under.

And the only salvation is simply that she exists. Just that alone.

Kanzaki-san and I were, after all, hopelessly different. The same height, and yet an infinite distance between us. For now, all I could do was transcribe what I was given. All I could do was be a puppet of her beauty.

But one day — I wanted to write something that could give something back to her. To Kanzaki-san.

In the distance, the railway tracks appeared — the ones that would carry Kanzaki-san and me away.