Episode 9

“Ran — have you ever kissed anyone?”
“What’s gotten into you?!”

Ran closed the distance between us at an impossible speed and stared into my face.

I could have done without that expression of absolute shock. I understood why it was surprising — me, of all people, someone with zero interest in romantic talk, suddenly bringing this up — but still.

My head was full of something I didn’t want to think about.

“Mei — have you fallen for someone?”
“Of course not.”

That kind of thing didn’t apply to me.
I had no room for it.
Someone with no room for it — so why had she kissed me?
What absolute nonsense……

It was an accident. I would tell myself that.
Every time I remembered it my lips tingled with warmth and my breath caught. I still couldn’t understand why Fujishiro had suddenly done that.

She’d probably read too many shoujo manga and decided to use someone as disposable as me like a doll.

That thought made anger rise in me, and I found my teeth clenched without realising it.

Since then, I hadn’t been in contact with Fujishiro.

She’d sent message after message of apologies, but if she was going to apologise, she shouldn’t have done something strange in the first place.

Lately at school I’d been arranging my life so she didn’t enter my field of vision as much as possible.

It hadn’t been entirely unpleasant — but her actions made no sense to me, and there was a nauseating, unsettled feeling sitting somewhere around my solar plexus.

Today it was raining, and even my mood felt waterlogged.

The sports festival was coming up, and my classmates were buzzing with energy — but I alone felt like ice that wouldn’t melt no matter how much warmth surrounded it.

I couldn’t blend into the heat of the classroom.
That was why I always failed at everything.

School had become another place where I couldn’t breathe, and the moment homeroom ended I headed straight for home.

But the instant I opened the front door, my whole body tensed — and I regretted having come back early.

“I’m home……”
“Welcome back.”

My mother’s voice was a shade lower than usual. I made my way to my room as quickly as I could without making it look obvious.

As expected, the moment I was in my room, the sound of something breaking drifted up from the living room.

My mother’s mood had been worse than usual since yesterday.
She’d come home after a long absence, and this was what I came back to. But at least, for now, her anger wasn’t directed at me. That was something.

My mother was always pointing her anger at something.

The workplace, some man or other — she lived in a constant state of dissatisfaction. And she seemed most dissatisfied of all with me.

My father had disappeared from our lives before I was old enough to have clear memories.

My mother worked hard to raise me into a proper person. But I was the one who failed to meet her expectations. No special abilities, no standout skills. Just an ordinary, unremarkable person.

Perhaps that was what she couldn’t forgive in me. Or perhaps it was because I resembled my father.
She began to find fault with me constantly.

She berated me time and time again — saying, “if you’d taken after me, you’d have been a better child.”

By the time I was in middle school, I resembled my father more than ever, and I think that was when she started projecting her resentment of him onto me, taking it out on me every day.

There were times when the injustice of it made anger rise in me too.

But my mother was all the family I had.
If she weren’t here, I wouldn’t exist in this world at all.

For that matter — was there any need for me to exist in the first place……?

If I had never been born, perhaps neither she nor I would have had to suffer……?

Thinking calmly about it, I was beginning to lose any sense of why I existed — so I forced my thoughts to a stop. Even when I stopped thinking, my chest felt as though stones had been packed into it, and my breathing grew shallow.

Autumn was deepening, and the harshest cold was on its way. The room should have been warm, but my body kept getting colder.

It’s suffocating…….

This house was such an uncomfortable place.
And yet there was nowhere else to go back to, and nowhere else to go.

The emptiness of that gradually turned to anger.

When had my sadness started converting to anger this easily?

My mother had apparently left for work.

I didn’t know how to release anger with nowhere to put it. I brought my fist down on the desk, again and again.

Sadness and suffocation and anger all mixed together until my head felt like it might split.

When things get to be too much, come here.

Why, at a time like this, was it that person’s words that surfaced……

I drifted outside without quite deciding to.

The rain was coming down hard, soaking into me, and as my body lost sensation from the cold it somehow felt good.

I wanted the rain to wash away the darkness inside me.

It couldn’t be washed away — that darkness had roots deep in the core of me and wasn’t going anywhere.

On a day like this, walking in my uniform without an umbrella, I drew looks from all kinds of people. But eventually even those stopped bothering me, and I walked on at a slow, aimless pace.

I was heading somewhere specific, though.

What was I expecting?
Was I a complete fool?

I thought that, and still my feet carried me to a familiar place.

I was a fool — but apparently there were bigger fools in the world.

A girl, equally soaked through, came splashing through the puddles toward me at a run.

“Morishita……?”
“You’re an idiot, Fujishiro.”

I reached quietly for her throat.
That throat — so thin, so cold — was already like something dead even without my hands around it.

I closed both hands around it and squeezed, and Fujishiro’s throat tightened, and she swallowed, and I felt her throat move against my palms.

Fujishiro was alive.

It was the most obvious thing in the world — and yet I found myself struck by it. By the fact that she was alive.

“I want to read manga.”
“Ha. You’re so unhinged, Morishita. You’re going to say that while strangling me?”
“You’re the more unhinged one — you’re enjoying being strangled.”
“Maybe so.”

Fujishiro took my hands gently in hers. I couldn’t feel any warmth from her — and yet somehow she felt warm.

She led me by the hand all the way to her apartment.

We stood in the entryway together, dripping, water falling in drops onto the floor.

“Wait a moment.”

She came back with a large towel. I slipped off my soaking socks quietly and stepped inside.

I was looking down when the towel landed softly on my head, and Fujishiro began trying to dry my hair. I resisted — and she moved to my tie instead, loosening it.

Water dripped steadily onto the hallway floor.

Fujishiro undid my buttons without hesitation.
One, two, three — down she went, until my uniform hung open at the front. My bare skin and underclothes were exposed to her easily. The fabric that had been plastered to both arms was peeled away.

The hook of my skirt was undone, and it fell to the floor.

The only thing left covering me was my flimsy underwear, and my head was full of nothing but what is happening — though the one who looked more genuinely puzzled was probably Fujishiro.

“Morishita — what happened to you……?”
“Shut up, don’t touch it.”

Her ice-cold hand made contact with my abdomen. That was where my mother had hit me yesterday. The memory surfaced, and anger came with it.

Fujishiro hadn’t done anything wrong, and I was taking it out on her.
That made me feel like I was doing the same thing my mother did — the mother I hated with everything I had — and the thought made me sick of myself.

“I’m sorry for touching you without asking.”
“Fujishiro…… you’ll catch a cold.”

I reached for Fujishiro’s tie, and she didn’t resist at all. I did to her the same things she’d done to me.
As I undid her tie and buttons, pale pink fabric with a floral pattern came into view.

Fujishiro wears rather bold, pretty underwear…….

The clean curve of her was almost too perfect to be real. I undid the hook of her skirt and it fell, revealing the same pattern below.

When I hooked a finger around the bra strap at her shoulder, that was finally when I was stopped.

“Morishita, you’re terrible.”
“I could say the same about you.”
“So we’re both awful, then.”

Fujishiro pulled me by the hand with an air of amusement, and we stepped over the soaking uniforms pooled on the floor and headed for the bathroom.

As if it were the most natural thing in the world, we shed the rest in front of each other and sank into the bath together.

The hot water prickled at my skin and then began, slowly, to warm me through.

Fujishiro’s light chestnut hair was wet, its sheen deepened by the water, something lush and quietly striking about the way she looked.

In a moment like this, she really did seem like the kind of person anyone would fall for.

Why am I in the bath with Fujishiro.
It was far too late to be asking, and I didn’t really want to think about it — but the warmth of the bath was pleasant.

I kept my eyes averted from her as much as possible and spoke.

“Why were you at the park, Fujishiro?”
“I didn’t know when you’d come, so I’ve been waiting there every day.”
“I told you to message me before going to the park. I said I’d come to you.”
“You were ignoring all my messages.”
“That’s true.”
“I’m sorry. I did something strange, and that’s on me.”
“……I’ve stopped thinking about it, so it’s fine.”

It wasn’t entirely true that I’d stopped — but it didn’t matter.

Today, I was glad Fujishiro had been at that shrine.

“Why didn’t you have an umbrella?”
“I thought if my body got cold enough, maybe I’d be able to die.”
“That again?”
“It’s all I think about.”
“I see.”

But somehow I understood, in a vague way, how she felt — which meant I couldn’t bring myself to tell her she was wrong.

I pulled my knees up and made myself as small as possible. Fujishiro said I’ll get out first and washed herself and climbed out.

I stayed in the bath for a while after she was gone.

Warm.

A warmth that feels like it’s been a long time coming.
Feeling a chill run down my spine, feeling irritated, feeling happy, feeling warm.

Fujishiro is a strange person.

When I stood up to get out, more water than before fell in drops from my body.

I rinsed off and stepped out of the bath.