My Childhood Friend's Relative

According to a certain senior of mine, “You know, honestly I’m not much for meeting relatives—so many of them are a hassle… On that front, though, even Ayu’s relative was a sweet kid, and cute too…” …apparently.

When I heard that, I…

Ayu’s relative, huh… I wonder if they sing well, or are a total airhead—just like Ayu.

…is what I ended up thinking.

◇◇◇

“Haah… haah…”

I ran and ran and ran without stopping. Sure, I might barrel straight into Ayu; sure, I might stand out and get spotted. Those possibilities did cross my mind, and still I couldn’t make myself stop.

Before I’d worked up the nerve to tail her, I’d struck a cool pose and told myself, “Even if I’m the only one who thinks of us as best friends, even if it’s all one-sided, that’s fine.” But that was a lie. She’d turned me down when I asked her to hang out, then cut my call dead without a word. That was all it amounted to, and yet my head swarmed with every kind of thought, and my chest felt ready to tear itself apart.

“Haah…! …Ngh…”

Even so, my stamina wasn’t bottomless. In an unfamiliar town’s warren of houses I kept hitting dead ends, and more than once I doubled back past corners I’d already passed.

“Haah… haah… where… am I…”

Before I knew it, I’d come out somewhere near the very edge of the residential area, the kind of outskirts where a lone candy store and a stand of woods were the only things that stood out.

Out front of the candy store, a girl about my age who looked like a local was picking at some sweets and thumbing at her phone.

…Guess I’ll ask one more time. Nothing to lose.

She looked about my age too, so if she’d caught sight of Ayu, maybe it had stuck with her. I steadied my breathing and stepped up to her.

“Um… excuse me.”
“Hm? …What?”

Was she in a bad mood? She knit her brow and shot back at me, wary, as though bracing against some shady character. Even so, clutching at straws, I held up the photo of Ayu.

“Um, I’m looking for the girl in this photo…”
“…You! Don’t tell me—!”
“Huh? …?!”

The instant she saw the photo, her eyes flew wide, and she grabbed my shoulders and closed right in. I’d pegged her for someone merely in a foul mood, not someone who’d blow up like this, and the shock knocked me onto the defensive.

“You?! You’re the one who did something to Ayu! What did you do to Ayu?!”
“H-hey, wai—!”
“What did you do?!”
“Why you—! Let go!!”

I shook off the girl who’d grabbed at me out of nowhere, but even then she kept glaring, hostility pouring off her. What in the world was her problem? If anyone here had earned the right to fly off the handle, it was me.

“What’s your problem, out of nowhere? I’m just looking for a friend—”
“…I’m Hamanaka Yuuka. Ayu’s relative, and… um, how do I put it… her partner!”
“Partner… partner???”

The heck is this girl going on about all of a sudden…

Or so I first thought, but come to think of it, I had heard about this from Ayu before. I had a memory of her, about the year she’d stayed at her relatives’ place for a long stretch, saying something like, “I did all kinds of stuff with my relative and we got even closer than before.” I was pretty sure Ayu had called her… “Yuu,” or something. This girl? …No, but even so, I don’t think even Ayu ever said anything about a “partner.”

So this was “Yuu,” a.k.a. Yuuka, still furious to the core. Ayu’s change had come in slow degrees, and no more than a tiny handful of us, me and Hina and a couple of others, had even noticed the shift in how she carried herself. Yet this girl seemed genuinely shaken by how much Ayu had changed.

“I’ve never seen Ayu like that… She’s always cheerful and bright, and okay, sometimes a little dumb, but she does everything she can to be there for people, to lift them up—and for that girl to be so… so—!”

“—!”

This time I met Yuuka’s grab head-on. From the way she talked, she probably knew where Ayu had gone, and that meant I couldn’t afford to back down.

“You’re one of Ayu’s friends from back home, aren’t you?! You did something, didn’t you?! You know something, don’t you?!”
“…I don’t know!”
“Then why would you come chasing all the way out here after Ayu?! Depending on your answer, I won’t let you off—!”
“It’s because I don’t know that I came all this way!”
“—!”

I grabbed her shoulders right back and shouted, half venting my own frustration onto her.

That’s right.

At the end of the day, as far as I knew, no one understood why Ayu had turned the way she had. Unless Ayu confided in someone herself, probably no one ever would.

“She never told even me a thing, and yet you? I don’t know who you are, but don’t make me laug—”
“If you say you’re Ayu’s partner, then I’m… Ayu’s childhood friend and her best friend. That’s plenty, isn’t it?”
“Best friend?! Some best friend, who never got told anything and comes sneaking after her in secret!”
“Isn’t that mutual, though—partner?”
“—! That’s…”

I said it plainly, wanting to shake loose the murk fogging up my chest. Thrown out loud at someone like her, it turned out to be an easy thing to say.

Just because I couldn’t read Ayu’s feelings didn’t mean our friendship and the bond between us had vanished, or that the whole thing had been proven a lie. At least until Ayu told me so herself, that was nothing more than my own arbitrary assumption.

So even if I didn’t know the reason, if she looked sad, I’d plant myself at her side and stay close, forcing my way in a little if I had to. That was what a friend, what a best friend, did, or so I’d come to believe. And if she flatly turned me away even after all that… well, I’d deal with it when the time came.

“Hey. Where’s Ayu? If she’s with someone right now and it settles whatever’s weighing on her, then that’s fine. But if she’s alone…”
“…If she is?”
“Then I’ll drag whatever’s troubling her out of her, by force if I have to. ‘Bottling it up on your own probably won’t get you to a good answer any time soon’… At the very least, that’s what Ayu herself once told me.”
“…”

My childhood friend had said that to me once, some time or other, when I was down over something painful. And now the very person who’d said it was the one trying to shoulder everything alone. So surely I was allowed to push in a little, even to force my way inside.

“…That way. Past the path through the woods over there, there’s a little beach… That’s where Ayu went, alone.”
“…Thanks.”

Ayu was there, off in the direction Yuuka pointed. No more hesitating. Now that I’d talked such a big game, I’d force my way to Ayu’s side and push right on into her heart.

“…Hey!”
“What?”

Yuuka called me back just as I made to head off. When I turned around, the look on her face… she wouldn’t meet my eyes, and I could see the hesitation in them.

“So, see, I ran into Ayu by chance just a little while ago, and she told me… ‘I came to be alone, because I want to think things over.’”
“Yeah.”
“The reason I was hanging around here was so I could come running the second Ayu needed me if anything happened… and to casually head off any other locals who wandered by, so they wouldn’t go down to the beach.”
“I see.”
“And on top of that, she told me this, too… ‘If there’s a girl looking for me… I want you to play dumb and say you don’t know.’”
“…Huh.”

Had my tail been blown after all? And here I’d thought my disguise was flawless. Well, none of that mattered now. I’d already steeled myself; from here on, all that was left was to do what I’d decided I had to do.

“Which means I just went and betrayed my partner. So if, after all this, you can’t do a single thing for her… I really won’t forgive you.”
“…Well, I’ll do what I can.”

Turning my back on Yuuka, I started down the wooded path she’d pointed out. All that was left was to face the childhood friend who’d been jerking us all around this whole time. I wouldn’t be satisfied without at least landing one good chop on her head.

◇◇◇

“…”

I pressed on in silence through the rustle of the trees. There were no forks to speak of, and Yuuka had said nothing about the way there, so I figured all I could do was follow the path where it led.

So Ayu came out to look at the sea? By herself? …Why?

Questions kept welling up without end as I went. The further I walked, the more the sound of waves swelled over the rustle of the trees, and between the trunks the sea flickered in and out of view, little by little.

“~♪”

And there, threaded through the sound of the waves… I thought I caught a familiar singing voice woven in.

…What is this song?

Ayu’s singing had always held a strange power. Whenever she sang, looking so happy, everyone around her would grow just as happy too.

But this time was different. As I drew nearer and the song came clearer, the emotion riding on that voice sharpened too.

Somehow… it’s like my chest is being squeezed tight… a lonely feeling?

The lyrics were from a song I’d never heard before, yet the words were the kind that cheer someone on, that hold out hope for the future.

And even so, listening to that voice left me lonely… as though I were aching for someone who’d drifted far, far away. That was the kind of voice it was.

…

Advancing step by step, I passed through the last of the trees, and at the far end of the view that opened up before me stood the childhood friend I’d been searching for all this time. Ayu.

“…~♫”

— Glance.

…She means, just shut up and listen?

She’d noticed me too. She had plainly turned my way, and still she didn’t stop singing. I quietly took in Ayu’s voice as I closed the last of the distance.

“~… Phew.”
“Ayu.”
“…Gin.”

I’d called out to Ayu the moment she finished singing, but now that I was actually standing right in front of her, I had no idea how to even begin. It seemed to be the same for her. Nothing but the wash of the waves reached my ears.

“…You’re not surprised?”
“…That noise at the ticket gate—that was you, wasn’t it, Gin?”
“Yeah.”
“I knew it. At the time I thought, huh, there’s someone in a hoodie I recognize. And when I looked closer, the hoodie was all baggy on them, and they were about a height I recognized, too… so I figured, well, maybe it’s someone I know.”
“…Right.”
“And then you called me right after, didn’t you? And I thought, yeah, Gin’s about that height, too…”

So I’d dug my own grave every which way. The ticket-gate blunder aside, to think it was the very call I’d gotten cocky enough to place that had outed me… Which reminded me.

“…That reminds me—why did you suddenly hang up on me? You cut me off even when I called back, and thanks to that I got pretty worried, you know.”
“Ahh… well, if you made it all the way here, you’ve probably already met her, but… did you hear from someone where I was?”
“Yuuka… was it? I heard it from her.”
“Figures… See, I wasn’t planning on running into a single person around here. But while I was on the phone with you, I let my guard down.”
“So you bumped into her and hung up in a panic… And cutting me off when I called back?”
“I was in the middle of talking with Yuu… You saw the message I sent afterward, right? It’s marked as read.”
“You mean this—‘Sorry, something urgent came up… I’ll call you back later!’? If anything, that just made me worry more.”
“So that’s how it came across, huh~… Sorry about that?”
“It’s fine… whatever, it’s over now.”

This was almost the usual Ayu. And yet, only moments ago, she’d been singing in that lonely voice, the kind that squeezes your chest tight just to hear it.

“Hey. Why did you follow me? I said I wanted to be alone, didn’t I?”
“That’s… I’m sorry.”
“…Hehe, I’m kidding. Tailing someone in secret isn’t a very nice thing to do, so I teased you a little.”

She bent her brows to make a show of being angry one moment, then broke into a shy, childish grin the next, tickled pink that her little prank had landed.

Really, this was the usual Ayu. Even like this, we could probably slip right back into the same old everyday; I could almost let myself believe it.

“The reason I tailed you, Ayu…”
“…Hm?”

But even if we slipped back into the everyday like this, I’d surely never come to know what was inside Ayu’s heart. If anything, now that I’d trailed her to the very place she’d wanted to be alone, from here on she’d only bury her true feelings deeper.

“Because watching you lately… I got… worried.”
“…I see.”

So I decided to be honest, to throw my own true feelings at her first.

“That’s rare, you coming out and saying something so honestly like that, Gin.”
“…Well, a certain someone keeps everything hidden. And I’m not the only one who’s worried—Hina, and Senior Hotaru too… heck, that Yuuka I ran into earlier grabbed me, a total stranger, demanding to know what had happened.”
“What are you doing, Yuu… But, I see. So I’d worried everyone that much. I really thought I’d been acting like my usual self, though… Everyone really does pay attention, huh.”
“When someone like you suddenly gets all distant, and on top of that is obviously carrying something behind the scenes while trying to hide it—of course it’s going to bug me, whether I like it or not.”
“…What does everyone take me for? Even I’ve got troubles I can’t tell anyone, you know.”

Ayu turned her gaze out to the sea with a wry smile. Had she given up on hiding it, I wondered? Even with me right in front of her, her eyes held that same distant look.

“…Aaah! And here I meant to somehow sort out my feelings today and go back to being the same old bright, cheerful Ayuri… but I’d already worried you so much I’d turned you into a stalker, huh!”
“…Don’t call me a stalker.”
“…Hey, Gin… Do you want to hear what’s been troubling me lately?”

Ayu turned back and gazed steadily into my face, wearing a grown-up, serious expression I could hardly believe belonged to the airheaded, forever happy-go-lucky childhood friend who’d only just started middle school.

“…Yeah.”
“…I see. Then, for now, let’s sit down. I did bring a little picnic sheet along, just in case.”

The wash of the waves, which should have been soothing, grated horribly on my ears for some reason. Just this once.