My Childhood Friend And The Love Letter (Part 1)

According to my childhood friend: “The trouble with a letter is that, once someone’s received it, it sticks around as a physical object whether they meant to keep it or not — so there’s always the chance a third party ends up seeing it, and that’s a real bother, don’t you think?”

Or so she says.

Back in elementary school, my childhood friend used to grumble exactly that while writing back to letters from her good friends, mostly Hina and Senior Hotaru. And honestly, a paper letter does have that side to it. Take the famous warlord Takeda Shingen. A letter he once wrote making excuses to a loved one over some infidelity got dug up, and people online still have a grand old time joking about it.

In my childhood friend’s case, though… at least with Hina and Senior Hotaru, the two she traded the most letters with, there was no way they’d ever go putting them on display for others to see. But the flip side was, they’d probably held onto them, and might dig them out to reread later… which was exactly why, I figured, she couldn’t afford to write anything careless.

And so, what was she up to now, this childhood friend of mine whose reply-letters had somewhere along the way turned into little comedy columns about her daily life, one Sakura Ayuri?

“Good morning!”
“Mornin’—”
“Yes, good morning.”

We greeted the teacher standing at the school gate and passed through. Same as ever, another day of school; this is the very calling of a student.

“Phew— it was freezing out there again today, huh.”
“You’ve bundled up into a total snowman and you’re still cold?”
“I’m a snowman because it’s cold, obviously. If anything, Gin, are you seriously fine like that?”
“Cold, sure, but it’s mind over matter.”
“Girls these days, honestly…”

You’re a girl yourself, you know. Though I suppose she means on the inside.

Anyway, it was full winter now. All sorts of things had happened, but to think that just a few months ago we’d been getting by in light clothes… the cold made the passage of time hit all the harder.

“Ah, morning, Sumire!”
“Mornin’.”
“…Ah, morning, you two.”

When we stepped inside, Sumire was there in the entrance hall. She was normally in the classroom by now, so it felt like spotting something rare.

“Fancy running into you here, Sumire. If I pulled a gacha right now I bet I’d hit something good.”
“I just had this feeling something interesting might happen today… so I took my time coming in.”
“Something interesting, huh…”

The early bird gets the worm… or not, I guess, seeing as she’d actually come in later than usual.

Following Sumire’s lead, Ayu and I swapped into our indoor shoes. My warmed-up feet met the chilled outside air and the cold floor, and my body temperature dropped from the ground up, making me shiver a little.

“…”
“Hm? Ayu, something wrong?”
“Eh, n-nothing at all!?”
“No, that’s blatantly the face of someone with something going on.”

Time to head to the classroom, all three of us, or so I thought. But when I turned around, Ayu still had her shoe-locker door hanging open and hadn’t even changed into her indoor shoes. The instant I called her on it, she very plainly hid something behind her back. As ever, I genuinely couldn’t tell whether this childhood friend of mine was brilliant or hopeless at keeping secrets.

“Did you just hide something?”
“Nothin’~?”

Nothing hidden, she claimed. And yet the moment I stepped closer, Ayu backed off by exactly that much; every time I inched in, she edged away the same distance.

“Come on, hand over whatever you’ve got behind your back.”
“W-well, it’s got nothing to do with you what I hide, Gin.”
“I’ll decide that once I’ve seen it.”

Something had probably been dropped into Ayu’s shoe locker. Given how desperately she was trying to hide it, it had to be something she didn’t want seen. The kind of thing that gets slipped into a shoe locker, that Ayu wouldn’t want anyone to see… wait, thumbtacks? Was she getting bullied somewhere I didn’t know about?

“…”
“G-Giiin, your cute little face is going to waste here, y’know~ You’re scaring me~”

I pressed in step by step, backing Ayu right to the edge of the flooring. Even she didn’t want to walk out onto the dirt in nothing but her socks, so the gap between us kept closing.

“Show me.”
“I-I no wanna~”
“It’s not something weird, is it?”
“No proglem~”
“Why the broken talk all of a sudden, Ayuri…”
“I-I mean, this is kinda scary…”
“Opening.”
“Whoa?!”

The instant Ayu’s attention turned to Sumire, I reached past her front and around to her back. Bundled into her winter layers like a little snowman, Ayu was warm and honestly pretty nice to hold, but now wasn’t the time for that. Still in that pose, I snatched away the thing she’d hidden behind her.

“…What’s this, an envelope?”
“…”
“This was in your shoe locker?”
“…Mm.”

…Huh. I’d been so sure it was thumbtacks or trash or a doodle on her indoor shoes, some textbook fiction-grade bullying. Turns out I’d worried over nothing.

“So why’d you hide it?”
“Well, I mean… an envelope somebody slips you like this, careful not to let anyone see — it’s bound to be nothing good…”
“…Fair, actually.”

Right, now that she mentioned it, there was that angle to consider.

Something a bit old-fashioned, maybe. A chain letter promising misfortune. A threat letter from some hardcore Senior-Hotaru superfan (do those even exist?). A plain old “we’ve got dirt on you” blackmail note aimed at Ayu (though I couldn’t imagine anyone but me holding any). Or, failing that, a challenge to a duel. Either way, it had to be nothing good.

“Hmm… should we just chuck it?”
“Ehh, but I’m curious what’s inside…”
“Fair enough.”

Toss it or not, that mysterious envelope suddenly dumped into Ayu’s shoe locker had the two of us fretting away first thing in the morning.

Just then Sumire, who’d been watching us from the side, spoke up.

“…Um, y-you two…? Aren’t you forgetting the single most classic option for a situation like this?”
“Classic?”
“Was there one?”
“Ugh… c-come on, you know, that thing… it starts with ‘L’…”
“L, L… … Lar*ae Moth…”
“What’s that?”
“A caterpillar card from a card game.”
“You want that?”
“Nope…”
“Then let’s chuck it…”
“There’s no way that’s it, right?!”

Well, obviously. What “classic situation” even involves a caterpillar card getting shoved into your shoe locker? That’s just mild bullying at that point.

“C-come on… it’s that… starts with ‘L’… the kind of thing most people are happy to get…”
“Happy to get… ‘Laah’—”
“Can we step away from card games, please?”
“…Yeah, what could it be…”

What could it be, though? Not a clue. As we sat there stumped, the look Sumire was giving us gradually curdled into an exasperated “are these two for real” stare. Ayu I could understand, but being lumped in with her was frankly an insult.

“Gin, you got it?”
“Not a clue either.”
“Ayuri I could see, but even you, Ginko…?”
“That’s kind of harsh, isn’t it?”
“I mean, it is Ayu…”

Ah, whatever. Chain letter, blackmail note, or card, somehow all the wind had gone out of me anyway.

While we dawdled in the entrance hall, time kept ticking and more students kept filing past. Any further debate could happen in the classroom.

“Well, whatever. Come on, hurry it up, you two.”
“Right you are, Gin.”
“Eh, wa— wait a second…?! Is that it for the whole envelope business?!”
“We can just deal with it once we’re in the classroom, no?”
“Right.”

Worst case, if it turned out to be some creepy letter, we could just consult Hina or Senior Hotaru and it’d sort itself out; no point in only the three of us hashing it over.

With that, Ayu and I set off toward the classroom. But apparently our conduct didn’t sit right with her; Sumire seemed determined to keep working the envelope even as we walked.

“Look, it starts with ‘L’… you’re happy to get one… no, more like it makes your heart flutter… and it ends with ‘r’…”
“Hmm…”
“What could it be…”
“…It’s a LOVE LETTER!? L, O, V, E — LET! TER!!”
“…A love letter?”

Hm. A love letter, that’s… right, that thing. Where someone writes out a confession of love, or calls you out somewhere to confess in person… the thing Hina and Senior Hotaru were forever getting.

…That… for Ayu? …????

◆◆◆

“…So, this is the love letter in question, huh~”
“We still haven’t looked inside, so who knows.”

Between morning homeroom and the gaps between classes, I filled Hina in on the whole entrance-hall affair, and now it was lunch break. The envelope in question sat in the middle of our pushed-together desks, the rest of us clustered around it.

“There’s… nothing written on the envelope~”
“By the feel of it, doesn’t seem like there’s anything but paper inside.”
“What would make you happy if it were inside?”
“If it were a gift card, that’d at least be… not that it feels like that’s in there.”
“Sounds too creepy to actually use, though.”
“Yeah, even if it were, I probably wouldn’t use it.”
“Aren’t you basically saying nothing that comes out of it would make you happy…?”

It was the kind of envelope you couldn’t see through, so holding it up to the lights or the sun told us nothing about the contents; by feel it really did seem like nothing but paper. There was nothing for it but to open the thing.

“Hina, listen — even after all my hints, neither of them landed on ‘love letter’ right to the very end!”
“Ehh~”
“I mean, come on… the hint was ‘starts with L, something most people are happy to get’…”
“Yeah, we don’t exactly have a good impression of love letters.”
“Why…?”

When it comes to love letters, the ones in our circle who actually get them are Hina and Senior Hotaru. I don’t know how the senior a year above us handles it, but Hina, who’s in our year, I’ve watched receive love letters right in front of me.

“Hina’s always been a total boy-magnet, huh.”
“Ah… so you’ve gotten them from boys, then?”
“Weeell~ I guess so~ but the ones sending them were mostly people I barely had anything to do with~”
“When your relationship’s at the ‘resorting to a letter’ level, yeah, it can’t really be helped.”
“Huh…”

Whenever Hina got popular with the boys, she’d rope the other girls in to gently steer the guy toward one of them instead. But once it came down to letters, it was usually a one-sided fondness from the sender’s side alone…

‘Getting liked by someone you barely know, or don’t know at all, is kind of a pain, huh,’ Senior Hotaru had laughed, half-complaining, when Hina once came to her about it. That stuck with me.

“Wasn’t there anyone among them you actually liked?”
“I’m more the chasing type than the chased type, y’know~ …Anyway, right now we’ve got to talk about this thing of Ayu’s~”
“Ah, I forgot.”

Our gazes converged on the pitiful envelope, forgotten even by its own recipient. As ever, no one had laid a finger on it; its contents stayed sealed away.

“Still, whoever sent it has some nerve~ Sending something like this to Ayu, who’s rumored to be bad with boys~”
“Eh… there’s a rumor like that going around behind my back…?”
“You’re this cute and you stood out at the culture festival, and yet there’s still not a single guy’s shadow anywhere near you~”
“What does everyone think school even is…”

So there was a rumor like that going around about Ayu; news to me… and hold on, Hina was just taking the love-letter premise as read, wasn’t she.

“What am I gonna do if it really is a love letter, I honestly don’t want that.”
“That attitude’s exactly why the ‘hates guys’ rumor’s going around, isn’t it.”
“Oh, hush, Gin.”
“You really don’t want it…?”
“Going out with someone only works when there’s a certain amount of mutual understanding, y’know. Being told to date some stranger or someone I don’t even like… right?”
“Which would you rather, this or the card from this morning?”
“Lar*ae Moth.”
“So it ranks below the caterpillar card, huh…”

Well, that’s just the kind of girl she is. She fundamentally lacks that whole “just try dating someone for now, break it off if it doesn’t work out” mindset the world’s so full of. …Which, factoring in her past life, is probably what the world at large would call a nasty case of pent-up v*rginity.

“Well… no point dithering forever… shall I open it?”

She’d apparently resigned herself at last. Radiating a full-body “I really don’t want to” aura, Ayu tipped the envelope over and shook out the contents. Inside, just as expected, was a single letter.

“Let’s see now…”

For now, she turned her back so we couldn’t see, and read the letter inside.

Well now, how would this turn out? The letter’s true meaning wouldn’t come clear until after school the following day.