Episode 14

The girl beside me gathered her silky hair and tucked it behind one ear, and a clean profile appeared.

Long lashes, a high nose, lips with a shape that left an impression — that profile was put together so well it almost made me jealous.

I couldn’t afford to keep staring at her profile, so I turned my eyes back to my notebook, which had a great deal of empty space in it.

I didn’t know whether my concentration was poor or Fujishiro’s was simply abnormal, but we were supposedly doing the same thing and our notebooks looked like they belonged to completely different species.

My pencil had stopped moving some time ago.
Fujishiro’s pencil kept going.

That made me anxious, so I was pretending to think.

“You’re not concentrating, are you, Morishita.”
“What — “

Fujishiro gently placed her hand against my cheek. Then she pinched it softly and gave a small pull.

I felt irritated.

She touched people’s bodies far too freely.
At school Fujishiro had always seemed cooler than this — my image of her had shifted considerably.

“Don’t just go touching people’s faces.”
“It’s not my fault Morishita’s cheeks are so soft.”
“That’s not a reason.”

I knocked her hand away. Fujishiro looked put out, but I ignored that and leaned over to look at her notebook. A moment ago it had been nearly blank — now nearly half of it was filled with neat, well-ordered writing. Mine wasn’t even a quarter done by comparison.

“Is there something you don’t understand?”
“This part.”

I pointed at a maths problem more or less at random — one I might or might not actually understand. It wasn’t really that I wanted her to teach me; I was bored of studying and wanted something to do.

“What specifically don’t you understand?”

Fujishiro, who had been sitting beside me, leaned over to look at my textbook, and the distance between us suddenly closed. Her profile was very close now, and my eyes didn’t know where to go.

Her hair was naturally brown — light pigmentation, maybe — and her skin very pale. Long lashes curved upward. She was pursing her soft, moist lips while she looked at the problem.

Those cherry-blossom lips looked plump and soft. — Wait, what was I thinking about in the middle of studying.
I needed to concentrate, but having caught a glimpse of her lips, something unpleasant surfaced in my memory.

Right, I actually kissed Fujishiro once…
Kissed, or more like collided…

It didn’t matter now either way, but her answer when I’d asked her why — that had been genuinely strange.

Did anyone actually kiss someone because it made them feel alive?

My head had filled up completely with things unrelated to studying.

“You’re not listening, are you, Morishita.”
“No.”
“You have no motivation at all.”

Fujishiro seemed to give up on me and turned back to her own work, sulking.

Left in front of me were only the difficult problems.

Looking at them, I understood nothing.
But if I didn’t get good marks on the test, my mother would be disappointed in me again. So I had to try — and yet I couldn’t find the energy.

It was past nine o’clock. I was starting to worry about how late I could stay, and kept glancing at the clock.

The longest I’d stayed at Fujishiro’s was until midnight.
I’d also stayed the night once.

But I had never once seen anyone other than Fujishiro in this apartment.

I had a vague feeling that the reason she’d asked me to kill her had something to do with her home life.

I didn’t intend to probe into it or try to know.

She had her own home circumstances, and I had mine. I had no intention of denying them or affirming them.

I was here purely because I wanted to read manga and have someone help me study — I was using Fujishiro for that.

If she got tired of it and told me not to come anymore, I’d just go back to the life I had before, and that would be fine too.

A bottom-of-the-social-ladder high school girl and the brilliant, glamorous, sociable vice president.

— And there I was drifting off topic again, so I made myself start on the problems.

From beside me came the quick, dry scratch of a pencil moving across a notebook.

During exams that sound used to bother me. Hearing it a lot made me anxious — as though I was the only one who didn’t understand anything, piling extra weight on top of the pressure I already felt.

But Fujishiro’s sound was, oddly, comfortable.

Fujishiro never played music while studying, and the room had no television, so we were always two people in silence.

“What time are you going home, Morishita?”

She spoke suddenly and my heart jumped.

“When you want me to go.”
“What does that mean. If I said don’t go, you’d just stay here forever?”
“Obviously not. I’m leaving right now.”
“I was joking. Hey — do you want to eat dinner here?”
“What?”

Since the time she’d made me eat that disastrous meal, Fujishiro had stopped bringing up food. Frankly, having to eat something like that every time would destroy my body, so I was relieved — but now this.

“I don’t want to eat Fujishiro’s cooking.”
“You really go straight for the heart, don’t you.”
“It’s bad that you don’t understand how dangerous it is yourself.”
“See! That! Right there!”

She punched me with her fist, light enough not to hurt. I countered with a punch to her side, equally harmless. At that, Fujishiro smiled — genuinely pleased.

Strange creature…

“Let’s just go to the convenience store. You’re hungry too, right?”
“It’s a waste of money, so no.”
“I’ll pay. Come with me.”
“No.”

At that, Fujishiro sulked thoroughly. She started grumbling and the room grew noisy.

She was such an annoying person.
I kept ignoring her, and eventually Fujishiro pulled out her final card.

“Then I won’t study with you anymore~”

My eyebrow moved.

Honestly — this was the most comfortable place I had.
More than school. More than home.

The ulterior motive of having someone help me study was part of it, but the feeling of not wanting to lose somewhere comfortable to be had grown large too.

“Fine. I’ll come.”
“Good.”

Fujishiro threw on her coat at speed and dragged me outside.