Episode 34
On the way home, I ended up walking alongside Fujishiro for some reason.
Ran and Hinata-chan wanted to keep shopping and stayed at the mall. Yudzuki said she had cram school and split off too.
Maybe I should have stayed with Ran, but I was tired today, so I decided to go home.
Fujishiro had been silent for a while now, saying nothing.
She’d been off all day, somehow, completely different from how she usually is with me, and it was throwing off my rhythm.
“Morishita, want to come over?”
“Eh, oh, yeah…”
The sudden question startled me, and somehow I ended up going to her place anyway.
When we got there she went straight to studying without a word, and since I hadn’t brought my own things, I decided to read manga instead.
Watching her back from the bed, she looked a little lonely.
Why had I started caring about her this much.
The old me would have just read manga without paying her any attention.
I set the manga down on the bed and sat quietly beside her. Even so, she wouldn’t look my way.
I should have felt at ease, being with someone who had no interest in me and didn’t interfere, but right now her indifference was making me angry.
“What’s wrong today, Fujishiro?”
“What? I’m normal.”
“You’re clearly irritated. Did I do something?”
“…Why did you do that?”
“Do what?”
“The rematch with Yudzuki. I was about to challenge her again. You got in the way. Were you trying to make fun of me, show off that you could beat Yudzuki when I couldn’t?”
I’m not quite sure why she’d interpret it that way, but apparently my actions had felt like a bad thing to her.
I knew I should think about that properly, but right now I wanted to clear up my own question first.
“Why do you want to beat Yudzuki so badly?”
“That’s my problem. It has nothing to do with you.”
I turned my face away, pointedly.
I’d thought it since we first met. Fujishiro really is a pain to deal with. And yet I can’t leave her alone. I should have my hands full with my own life, and here I am getting involved with her anyway.
Maybe I’m more foolish than Fujishiro is.
“If you’d had that rematch, would you have won? Have you ever beaten Yudzuki at that game?”
“No, but I wouldn’t know unless I tried.”
“That’s the foolish part of you, Fujishiro.”
“I’m not foolish.”
“You’re extremely foolish.”
“Stop saying foolish, foolish, it’s annoying!”
Fujishiro clenched her fists and started thumping them against my shoulder, again and again.
It didn’t hurt at all, but when I looked at Fujishiro’s face, I found myself at a loss for words.
Her face was bright red, and she looked as if she was about to burst into tears.
“You don’t know how I feel, Morishita. Always being compared to someone, always being the one in second place.”
“Yeah. I don’t know.”
“Don’t call me foolish when you don’t even know me.”
Fujishiro’s violence wouldn’t stop, so I tried to hold her back, and we ended up tangled together, and I found myself on my back on the floor.
She ended up straddling me.
Her face was bright red from crying.
I reached up gently to her cheek and caught a cold tear.
“I beat Yudzuki.”
“I know that without being told.”
“So that means we haven’t lost to Yudzuki.”
“What?”
A moment ago she’d been crying and raging, and now her eyes had gone wide with confusion.
I don’t understand myself either.
I’m not someone who says things like this.
Not the kind of person who says something this foolish.
I pulled Fujishiro, who was still leaning over me, tightly towards me.
I don’t understand Fujishiro at all.
I don’t understand her relationship with Hinata-chan and Yudzuki.
I don’t know what the right answer is here.
But rather than make a face that pained, you should just tell someone help me.
If you can’t say it, then you shouldn’t choose a path that causes you such pain.
Sometimes running away is important too.
But Fujishiro’s foolish, so she charges in without thinking, gets hurt, and even though she never shows it on the outside, she always looks as if she’s quietly crying out it hurts, it’s hard.
I rubbed her back, clumsily, over and over.
“I haven’t lost, so don’t make that face. In front of everyone, just keep being the usual lying Fujishiro right to the end. Here, you can make all the strange faces you want.”
“I don’t think calling me a ‘liar’ and ‘strange faces’ were necessary.”
“It’s the truth.”
When she said that, Fujishiro’s hand gripped my shirt tightly.
“Morishita really is foolish.”
“I know.”
“Don’t go playing the good person on your own terms.”
“Fujishiro’s personality is rubbing off on me.”
“Don’t blame other people right away…”
Her grip on my shirt tightened further than before. Her whole body was shaking too, and something in me seemed to soften, like a protective instinct rising.
“Next time, let’s go tell Yudzuki you want a rematch.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Because today ended in a draw.”
“That’s not an answer to my question.”
Our conversation just doesn’t flow at all.
I’m fed up with my own clumsy choice of words. There must have been a better way to say all of this, I thought.
If something’s hard, you should just say it’s hard.
It’s fine to run away.
You should lean on me more.
But I don’t think any of that would have gotten anything more than a ‘Yeah’ out of her, no matter how I said it.
She’s the kind of person who pretends to be perfect despite being incomplete, who keeps doing things that wear herself down to the bone.
“I’ll study.”
“Okay.”
She pushed firmly against my shoulder and sat up.
Fujishiro’s hair, which she’d taken the trouble to curl and make pretty, had come undone, so I reached out gently and fixed it for her.
At that, a smile settled onto her face.
“Cute, right?”
“Sure, sure.”
“Even if it’s a lie, just say I’m cute there.”
“I think it suits you.”
“I want cute.”
“You’re a pain.”
Fujishiro always wants words of affirmation right away.
She’s a spoiled, demanding young lady.
“Morishita, say I’m cute.”
“Why should I?”
“I did my hair and makeup and everything because I wanted you to think I was cute.”
“You don’t have to go to that much trouble on your own.”
Fujishiro was already cute enough just as she was.
It’s so easy to feel it in my heart, I thought, and yet so difficult to say it out loud.
After that Fujishiro stayed in a sulky mood while she studied, but being there with her wasn’t an uncomfortable feeling at all.