My Childhood Friend And The Gift (Part 1)

According to my childhood friend: “The thing about surprises is—since I want the gift to end up as nice a memory as it possibly can, I do them because I want to startle you even a little, so it leaves an impression. There’s maybe a bit of that to it.”

Or so she says.

My childhood friend had once botched a surprise for my birthday, and back then I’d gone and said to her:

“Surprises—the thing you hand over in the end is the same either way, so is there even any point in doing them?”

That was the answer she gave me. For the record, the very next year she got her revenge on the surprise front and pulled one off in fine style. But the friends and family around her lodged complaints that it was “bad for the heart,” so from then on she was made to promise to hold back on surprises and pranks as much as she could.

And that childhood friend of mine, one Sakura Ayuri… what was she up to just now?

◆◆◆

The “Cheering On Senior Hiiragi” Society, that one-song performance by Ayu and Senior Hotaru, drew to a close, applause washing over them as the curtain came down.

The whole thing looked like something out of a choral competition, and remembering it was really just the culture festival’s student-presentation slot made it a touch surreal.

“…And now, please wait a little while, until the next act—the light music club—finishes setting up.”

If that song had been, for Senior Hotaru, an offering to Senior Hiiragi… then for Ayu, whoever else it might have been meant for, the person she was aiming it at first and foremost had to be the three of us. Put that way, I couldn’t work out what to even say first. Hina especially had her head down where I couldn’t see her face, a handkerchief already out; she was probably teary-eyed.

“…So how was it? Ginko.”

In the end it was Sumire who broke the silence among the three of us. Grateful as I was for that, being singled out by name to answer left me a little stuck.

“…Honestly, I might still be a little confused.”
“Confused?”

It wasn’t me covering for embarrassment or anything; it was the truth. I mean, with a normal friend, having a song that heartfelt sung for your sake, you’d be moved and that would be that.

But I knew Ayu was a reincarnator, and I knew that song was, to her, a precious… a precious memory from a past life. Which meant that I, the one person who knew her secret, couldn’t take it at face value. Even after hearing the reason she’d voiced up there onstage, a “but why?” kept running ahead of me; moved as I was by the song itself, I couldn’t simply take it as it stood.

I wanted to ask, no matter what. The true feelings she could show to no one but me. The ones behind why she’d gone this far, breaking the two rules she’d always kept for herself: never singing in front of people, and never letting even a sliver of her past life show.

“Sorry—something’s come up. There’s somewhere I need to go.”
“Huh? But the light music club’s up next…”
“…Off you go, then. I’ll get the live show on video for you~.”
“…Thanks. I’m off.”

Ayu probably wanted me to stay and listen to Senior Hotaru’s group perform… but for me, this was something I had to put first. Leaving the rest to the two of them, I got up from my seat before the next curtain rose.

◆◆◆

I slipped out of the gym and headed back to the school building. Most of the students must have been packed into the gym, because the halls were noticeably emptier than when we’d first gone in, and I made my way alone through what few people were left.

— Chatter, chatter.

“…”

There’s a saying that what happens twice will happen a third time… though over how long a stretch that’s supposed to hold, I couldn’t tell you. The first time was Golden Week, my first year of middle school. The second, three years later, at the summer festival right as the break began. And the third… now, about two and a half months on from that festival. The gaps were all over the place, enough to make me feel there might yet be not just a fourth time but a fifth someday.

“…”

Still, this being the third time, and the search narrowed to a school whose layout I mostly had down, I had a fair idea where to head. Unlike the first two times, I moved at an unhurried pace, crossing the building, quieter now than it had been before noon, and climbed the stairs of the special-classroom wing.

◆◆◆

“…~♩”

(…There she is.)

Softening my footsteps, taking the stairs one slow step at a time, I reached the landing just below the rooftop. And there she sat, the person I’d come for, humming away in what looked, from the outside, like a perfectly good mood. In a way, it felt like a replay of that first day.

“Ayu.”
“~♪… Hm? …Oh, Gin. So you came after all.”
“Mind if I sit next to you?”
“Sure, go ahead.”

When I came up and stood beside her, she spread a handkerchief on the floor, as if to say sit here. No point being shy about it, so I dropped down right where she’d offered.

“…”
“…”

I’d come because there was something I wanted to ask, and yet now that I was face to face with her, I couldn’t figure out how to begin. Off in the gym, some distance away, the live show seemed to have started; I could faintly make out the sound of cheering.

“…You figured out I’d be here pretty easily. Didn’t you think I’d be in the wings of the stage?”
“…Knowing you, after pulling something that let all that emotion burst out like that… I just figured you’d be off alone in a spot like this again. That’s all.”
“…Heheh. You’ve got me completely read by now, huh.”

No matter what, this girl couldn’t seem to sit easy even when she was the one at the center of it all; lately I’d come to see that when she couldn’t keep her own feelings in check, being alone like this was exactly what she wanted. The proof sat right in front of me, off in this oddly out-of-the-way spot, listening to the distant sound all on her own. But saying so out loud felt like crossing a line, friend or not, so once again I swallowed the words rising up and kept them down.

“…Isn’t there something you wanted to ask me? You came all this way, even breaking a promise.”
“A promise?”
“I told you to be absolutely sure to watch the light music club’s live show, didn’t I?”
“That was you deciding that all on your own…”
“You sent back an ‘OK’ sticker.”
“…Well, I can just watch the video Hina took later. You never said ‘watch it live.’”
“…You’ve always got an answer for everything.”
“Sorry, sorry.”

The usual banter. Leave it here, and we’d slip right back into the everyday as if nothing had happened… and Ayu was surely playing it this way because that was exactly what she wanted. But then breaking her promise would have been for nothing. So…

“…Ayu, why did you sing that song, in that place?”

I decided to step into her heart.

“…That song?”
“You said all sorts of things up on stage, but… that’s your past-life song, isn’t it? And what’s more, the one you sang in front of me just once, back in middle school.”
“…You remember it well.”
“…That was the first and last time I ever heard you sing with that much feeling poured into it.”

Asking me to forget it would have been the unreasonable thing. If the surprise this time was a happy one, then the one back then counted as the worst sort, the kind that kills the mood.

“…All right, then. Let me tell it in order. All of it.”

◆◆◆

“Over summer break… I think it was when we were having a sleepover at Hotaru’s place. Hotaru looked like she had something she wanted to talk over, so I pried it out of her a little forcibly, and then…”
“…And that’s when she told you about all this.”
“Mm-hm. So don’t go blaming Hotaru, okay? I’m the one who forced it out of her.”

Well, that tracked. I couldn’t picture that senior pushing something Ayu would hate onto her; and even if she had, if I hadn’t heard all this out, I might have kept my distance from her for a while.

“I mean, I really did agonize over it, you know? I don’t much like singing in front of strangers, and doing it at the culture festival, I’d definitely get filmed and all.”
“You’d draw attention whether you liked it or not—and with that senior for a partner, no less.”
“Yeah… but you know, once I heard about the senior Hotaru wanted to repay… about Senior Hiiragi… I just couldn’t help seeing my past-life self in it.”
“…”

Senior Hiiragi. The upperclassman scheduled for major surgery after graduation, to treat a chronic illness.

It made sense. Ayu, whose past-life body had been too frail to let her so much as attend school, was bound to have feelings about it. And on top of that, Senior Hotaru wanted to do the very repaying Ayu’s past self never got to; thinking it over calmly, maybe that alone was reason enough to take this on. But…

“Even so… you didn’t have to sing that particular song, did you? The lyrics and music could’ve been left to that senior…”
“That song—it’s the one a friend wrote for me, before my past-life self had the heart transplant surgery.”
“…”

Ah. So that was it. The overlap with her past life ran that deep. Someone facing major surgery at about the same age Ayu’s past self had faced hers. A friend trying to give the gift of music for a beloved friend’s sake. And Ayu herself, who’d lived through something like it in her own past life, the treasured song she’d been given back then still lodged in her head. Seen from inside her, the whole thing she’d done really did hold together.

“Then… why did you keep it a secret from me?”

Hina and Sumire had plainly known about the performance ahead of time, and more than that, I was fairly sure keeping me in the dark had been deliberate.

“I mean, if I’d said ‘I’m going to sing a past-life song on the culture festival stage!’… you’d absolutely have been against it, right, Gin?”
“It’s not like I’d…”
“No—you totally would.”

That shouldn’t have been true… as long as my mood when she told me hadn’t happened to land on one of my overprotective days… probably.

“And besides…”
“Besides?”
“If I was going to have you—someone who’d already heard it once—hear it again, I wanted you to hear it at its very best, and blow away that negative impression from back then!”
“…Because you love that song?”
“Of course!”

She’d sung the way she had for her friend Hotaru’s sake, for mine, and most of all for her own. That was the whole of it, Ayu said with a smile.

“It was rough, you know. On top of working my part-time job, I borrowed money from Hotaru, and I went and bowed my head to the singing teacher I’d had a falling-out with ages ago to get lessons again.”
“Mm-hm.”
“I had the café regulars sit through my practice, singing in front of a crowd.”
“Mm-hm.”
“I got told my stamina wasn’t up to it, so I did morning runs with Hotaru…”
“Mm-hm.”

Ayu ran through everything that had happened as if she were enjoying it. Which was exactly why Hina, hearing all this, must have feared she’d wind up joining the light music club after all. Because for all her talk of how rough it had been, she looked like she was having the time of her life describing the effort she’d poured into facing music head-on.

“The song was the hardest part! It’s a past-life song, so it only exists in my head, and there’s no way someone like me—who can’t even read music—could compose it… so in the end I had Hotaru and everyone in the light music club help out, and we somehow pulled it off.”
“…Mm-hm.”
“Only… as it took shape, I was surprised there was a similar song in this world, too… well, there are manga over here that are like the ones over there, so it’s not so strange, I guess…”
“If anything, wasn’t that convenient as an excuse? Like, ‘the song I heard way back turned out to be this one’…”
“Right? Only…”

What was the matter? She’d started out recounting all that hard work brightly, full of energy, but bit by bit she was going quiet, as if sinking into herself. And at last she drew her knees up and hung her head.

“Only…?”
“…As I kept facing that song like this… I got to thinking… I wonder if the friend who was writing this song for me, back then, felt this same way…”
“…”
“That they wanted me to hear this song and feel hopeful… that they wanted me to hear it and… hng… be happy…!”
“…”
“So then! …When I think that all these feelings I’m sending out to so many people now… ngh… were all pointed at me, back then… it means the me of back then really was happy, truly…!”
“Ayu…”

I gathered her in against my side, knees still hugged to her chest, the sobs leaking out of her. Come to think of it, this was the first time I’d ever seen Ayu cry over something of her own, or so it struck me as I held her.

“Uh… hic… u-uuh…!”

Ayu hugged me back, clinging, wetting my uniform with her tears, crying her heart out.

And these tears of hers. Were they grief that she could never go back to those past-life days? Joy at realizing she truly had been cherished? The release of having carried the live show all the way to its end? I couldn’t say which they were. Maybe they were all of it at once.

But which one hardly mattered. What I could do was stay beside her like this and show her that someone was right here to take in the Ayu of this very moment. If I could get that much across, then as far as I was concerned, that was enough.

For so many students, this culture festival would live on as a memory. And in its shadow, one reincarnator had, for the first time since being reborn, cried for her own sake. That was something only I would ever come to know.