Hatano arrived home to find the laptop still open, its screen glowing faintly in the dark room.
She looked at it for a moment, then sat down at the desk without taking her coat off. On the screen, her protagonist — the forward who had been compared to and overlooked for the length of the story — was still there, waiting. She had kept striving without acknowledgement, and now she was going into a match against a stronger school, the one that would decide everything.
A keystroke, and a flood of ideas that had been circling in her head began finding their way onto the screen. She hadn’t written in a while, and her fingers were stiff from the cold air she’d been walking through, but she wanted the answer she’d found to exist somewhere outside herself, and so she typed.
The ending should be something everyone wants. Not the correct ending in some literary sense, but what she held as a writer’s conviction. When asked why she wrote, the answers would vary, but at the bottom of all of them was this: to be a landmark for someone who is afraid and hesitating. So this story too would close in a way that satisfied, in a way that gave its characters what they were looking for. And the everyone she meant included the characters themselves, the protagonist herself. What had this untalented striker been looking for, that she had kept going through all of it?
At the end of the match: a crisis. The ace, thoroughly scouted and marked, was unable to move freely. One goal down, time running out. Everyone had almost given up, when the pass came to the protagonist — overlooked, lightly marked, no one’s first thought. The footwork she had drilled in case exactly this moment came, the turn that made an impossible pass just barely connect. The dribbling that would have been caught in earlier days, kept ahead of by methodical repetition. The techniques she had watched the ace use, memorised from being beside her all these years, used now to get past the defence. And the anxiety of coming face to face with the keeper in the goal mouth, worn smooth by everything she’d accumulated, until it was no longer anxiety at all.
The unnamed forward, who had existed in the ace’s shadow and been expected to do nothing, drove the decisive goal home.
A moment of silence, and then the sound of the court erupting. Teammates’ voices hitting her. She stood there for a while unable to look at reality head-on, and then became aware that her heart was not full. She had believed something was waiting for her on the other side of all this effort, had kept going because she believed it, but the thing she had expected was not here.
She turned back toward her own half, faint deflation mixed with the elation around her.
Then a child’s voice reached her from the front row of the spectators.
Nice shot!
A child, eyes bright with what they’d just seen, parent beside them. Looking at that face, the protagonist saw her younger self, and her childhood friend, and understood in the same moment what she had been hungry for.
Not jubilation. Not shared celebration. Just this: a voice acknowledging her, one player, as someone worth praising. An egotist’s desire, perhaps. But that was more or less right for a striker, she thought, and looked with her old partner at the goal they had been aiming at together.
A keystroke, and the file saved. Hatano stood. The face of one girl, burned into the back of her mind, stayed there as she closed the laptop. She picked up the small silver thing from the shelf. Then she went to the front door.
The striker had been hungry for recognition. What, then, was the painter hungry for? The girl who had been compared to rare talent since childhood, and had put down her brush — what did she want? Hatano sorted the thoughts that were coming together and the words she needed to give them, and stepped out into the night before the last train could leave without her.
In the corner of an izakaya noisy with people heading home and younger voices, the Literary Appreciation Club was holding its weekly drinks — slightly smaller tonight, the setup more last-minute than usual. Shinomiya sipped at a non-alcoholic mojito in small increments.
The aftermath of the call with her mother, and then the separation from Hatano. The mojito found its way into both wounds at once. Her eyes were still faintly red, and she kept them lowered rather than risk anyone noticing, and sat listening to the conversations around her without joining any of them. The person she had most wanted to see her in the world, she had pushed away. She couldn’t summon the desire to draw anyone else’s attention; but being alone was desolate, and sitting among people felt better than nothing.
Even Iizuka’s elaborate entrepreneurial theories and Sasaki’s dry non-engagement at the other end of the table felt, tonight, almost comforting.
But sitting in an izakaya with a drink in her hand, Shinomiya couldn’t stop thinking about Hatano. She kept glancing at the entrance, carrying the same hope she’d had the night Hatano had appeared out of nowhere. She had pushed her away with her own hands. She had no right to hope. But she wanted her there anyway, selfishly and helplessly. She tried to drown the tightness in her chest with another sip of mojito; the freshness hit her stomach and the feeling in her chest came back sharper. She called her name silently in her head, the way saying you’re hot doesn’t make you cooler. Nothing was satisfied.
“Are you crying?”
Sasaki, sitting next to her, said it with a faintly pained expression, like someone asking an inconvenient question.
“Past tense,” said Shinomiya, touching the corner of her eye.
A silence. Sasaki made the face of someone who was going to click their tongue and didn’t, and then without any comment pushed the plate of chilli prawns sitting nearby over toward Shinomiya. Shinomiya blinked at the unexpected gesture, then thanked her properly.
Sasaki had already turned back to her friends. Shinomiya ate the prawns quietly, mojito in one hand.
Food helped, in a small way. Something approximately like energy began to come back.
“Shinomiya-san, we’re thinking about a second venue tonight — you coming?”
Iizuka, leaning around Sasaki with his usual hopeful expression. Sasaki muttered “you can ignore him” in a low voice to Shinomiya, but that didn’t seem entirely right either. She considered the invitation. Whether or not there was any particular intent behind it wasn’t entirely clear, but it didn’t matter much, because there was one person who occupied all of her thoughts and no room for anything or anyone else. She let her eyes fall slightly.
“…I’m sorry.”
Iizuka immediately smiled and waved it off completely.
“No worries! All good. Come if you feel like it, any time!”
Visibly trying too hard, but genuinely respecting her no regardless. Sasaki watching him with clear irritation, and Shinomiya, beside her, feeling the narrowness of her own perspective up until now with a new and uncomfortable sharpness.
A slightly wider view: Sasaki was here for the men, without much genuine connection to literary pursuits, and had tried to use righteous cause to push out someone she found annoying — but she didn’t pile on when someone was already down, and had just pushed a plate of food in Shinomiya’s direction. Iizuka acted on instinct and sometimes made Hatano look foolish, but he had lines he didn’t cross, and he respected when someone said no.
What, then, did Shinomiya herself bring to any of this?
She had let people use her body for quick comfort, had fed on other people’s jealousy and desire, had nothing to speak of in the way of actual talent, had looks that were inherited and not earned, and refused to listen to the parents who provided that inheritance. Not particularly good at studying, not particularly kind to anyone. Bad at painting, ruled by envy and inadequacy, small in her capacity for others.
Comparing herself, she felt her own smallness more precisely with every line.
She wanted to disappear somewhere.
“Did you have a falling-out with your sister?”
Shindo, sitting across the table, had been watching quietly. He asked it with a glass of whisky in hand, his face flusher than she’d ever seen it — he must have been drinking before he arrived. The mention of Rōkai brought her to mind alongside the memory of how this whole thing had started, and Shinomiya almost tensed. But it wasn’t Rōkai she’d fought with.
“…No.”
“Then it’s Hatano.”
He said it while looking at the leek-and-liver stir fry on the table, as if it were the most natural observation in the world.
Shinomiya stared at him. She hadn’t expected Hatano’s name to come from him. “How did you—” she began, and remembered: he was the one who had called Hatano that night. He was connected to Rōkai too. She braced slightly, wondering if this was another piece of her sister’s arrangement.
“Oi Shindo, are you already drunk?”
“Shut up, I was drinking at home. If you’re going to invite me, invite me earlier.”
Iizuka cut in and was swatted away. Shindo looked back at Shinomiya.
“I ran into Hatano earlier, when me and Shijima were heading to mine. She had the look of someone in the middle of something serious.”
He was watching her in the way people do when they’re checking whether a thing has landed. It had. The pressure in her chest tightened and guilt mixed in with everything else. She had been the one hurt, but she had also been the one to push Hatano away, and that was a fact.
“Looks like I hit the mark. I had the sense something was going on between you two for a while, but you apparently got close enough to have a falling-out.”
“…A falling-out.”
“You don’t have one with someone you don’t care about. I don’t know the details, but you were connected somewhere that mattered. That much seems clear.”
He crossed his legs and finished his whisky in one go, closing his eyes with something like satisfaction.
“People don’t like change. Starting something — a disagreement, a rupture — takes energy. And energy means feeling: not just the four basics of happy, angry, sad, scared, but everything underneath them, the affection and the hostility, the goodwill and the wanting. I’m not a writer and I can’t find the right words, but what I’m saying is: you chose to break something off rather than accept it as it was. That means you had the feeling to do it.”
He reached for a skewer of yakitori, ate it in two bites, chewed.
“Was she angry?”
“She looked worried, to me. She was turning something over — something she cared about enough not to be able to let go of.”
The pressure turned into something close to pain. She wanted to see her. Wanted to apologise and go back to the way things had been. But thinking that Hatano might have acted entirely from Rōkai’s prompting, that there had been nothing of Hatano’s own feeling in any of it — the pain was almost too much to hold.
Another bite of yakitori, a sip of whisky to follow it, and Shindo spoke again.
“…I think the heart has inertia too. It takes energy to stop something in motion, and the same to start something at rest. There was real feeling behind what happened between you, and real feeling was behind the connection you had. Making up is mostly about remembering that second part. The apologies are just what follows.”
He was drunk, and remarkably kind about it.
“If a state this far gone is any use to you, I can help you work out what to say. Tell me what happened.”
He was drunk and considerably more thoughtful than she was.
She considered it. But in the end this wasn’t a fight, it was a reasonable separation, and she didn’t want to push Hatano into acting against her own wishes. If Rōkai had been behind it, then Hatano’s actions hadn’t been her own. The outcome of asking Shindo for help might, in some unlikely way, become a burden to Hatano, and she would rather keep quiet than risk that.
She was about to turn him down when someone else came through the entrance.
“That isn’t our job.”
Shijima. His nose was slightly red from the cold outside. He looked at Shindo, who tilted his glass and observed him with a measuring look. After a moment Shindo gave a thin smile, shrugged, and said “fair enough” — and after that said nothing further on the matter. Shinomiya looked at Shijima, who clearly knew more than he should.
“Shijima-san.”
“I just finished talking with Hatano. Your family history might be making it harder to see things clearly, but the you underneath all that can take in a situation with more flexibility than your sister can, if you let yourself.”
He said this while hanging his coat on the back of a chair and sitting down. That he had just finished talking with Hatano sat with Shinomiya like a small bright pain.
“…You know about my sister too, don’t you.”
“More than you’d think about Rōkai. And more than her about you.”
The words cut cleanly, and she went quiet.
“At the level that matters, Hatano and Rōkai are the same kind of person — not in terms of achievement or talent, but at the root. Neither of them is ruled by other people’s assessments. Both of them know what they’re aiming at. By that measure, I’m the same kind. Which is why I’ve seen many times what envy and inadequacy do to a person’s sight — and I can see it now, in front of me.”
Shinomiya looked at the surface of the mojito in her glass, at her own clouded eyes reflected back.
“Roundabout,” said Shindo.
“We’re supporting roles. Both of us.”
He shrugged at Shindo’s comment with mild amusement, then looked at Shinomiya.
“What you both need is a conversation.”
She sat with those words for a moment.
Her feelings reached for Hatano. Her sense of what was right held her back. Rōkai — the one family member who had stood on her side without conditions, and also the person who, without meaning to, had taken everything from her. How to hold the thought that the person she was falling for might have moved because of Rōkai — she hadn’t been able to find a way. All she had managed, with what remained of her sense of what was right, was not to ask Hatano to act against her own will. And she had followed that instinct.
The mojito in the glass trembled slightly, responding to the faint shake in the hand that held it.
Hatano. No matter what she did, the thought of her wouldn’t leave. She had been the kind of person Shinomiya had thought she hated most in the world — who didn’t give her the particular acknowledgement she’d always run on — and then had come back when things went wrong and pushed through it, and smiled when she worked hard, and seen her more clearly and truly than anyone else had. She loved her, impossibly and entirely, and the thought of Hatano’s eyes and voice and words filling up the place in her that had been empty for so long — she could no longer pretend she didn’t see it for what it was.
She was suspended between instinct and reasoning, between what she wanted and what she thought she should want. At last she found a few words, and brought them out quietly.
“…I’ll think about it a little.”