Published at 1st of September 2019 7:47 pm

Chapter 30-39

This chapter is updated by NovelFree.ml



* 30 *

So that was another day of doing nothing still.

When I returned to the apartment and opened the door, the smell of a tasty dinner like only my sister could make… is what I hoped for, but instead I was just told “I’m hungry, make something.” She again added “Right now.”

I’m really not much of a cooking person, so I just warmed up some apple pie from the fridge and scooped some vanilla ice cream.

She looked at the apple pie and asked “What about veggies?” “Got none,” I told her, and after some thought, she said “That’s no good.”

She probably meant to say “Are you stupid or what?”, but being a freeloader in my care, she must have decided to hold back for once.

After drinking some coffee after the meal, she stared right at me. Her eyes told me “I want to talk, but I don’t want to start.”

So I started. “What’s up?”

“Don’t you have a girlfriend, big brother?” What a thing to ask out of the blue, I thought. “Nope. Unfortunately.”

“…Sorry to push it, but have you never had a girlfriend?” I had an ideal one in my first life, I wanted to tell her. “Yeah. Never.”

“Why?”

Why, she asks… That’s got to be the worst way to talk to someone loveless.

In my second life, I couldn’t help finding it odd how everyone else was able to find love one after another.

The first time I thought nothing of it, just having my ideal girl right there next to me, but now I was like, how dare everyone find someone perfect for them?

Yes, in my eyes, people with lovers are much more of an oddity than those without them.

Honestly, sometimes I kinda want to say “Is that really gonna be alright?” Not that anyone wants to hear this, but it seems to me that two people hitting it off for their whole lives would be a really rare occurrence.

Suppose there are lots of such a people who that happens to frequently. Aren’t they hollow, in a sense?

The way your values get shaped over the course of your life, it’s like painting a picture. That picture gets filled with what makes you you, so everyone’s is different.

So if you and someone else’s pictures match up perfectly, that’s gotta mean you’re just both blank canvases.

Or else you’re so unimaginative, you just painted the most boring pictures ever.

I’m not convincing anybody of anything from where I stand, of course. Just an idle complaint, I suppose.

I’m just a fussy, bored, lonely self-analyticist who never thinks of anybody but himself.

Right, where were we… My sister asked me “Why?”

Well, the number one reason was that I couldn’t possibly consider anyone but Tsugumi as my girlfriend now. But it wouldn’t do any good to tell her that, of course.

“Not sure there’s a good reason why,” I said.

“So you haven’t even had a crush on any girls or anything?” I shook my head.

“You can’t think of a single one?” “I guess not.”

“Then… I dunno, an agreeable girl, at least?”

An agreeable girl, huh.

That did bring something to mind.

Though I’m sure it wouldn’t be what my sister was expecting to hear.

* 31 *

This part of the story goes back to when I was at my most miserable: high school.

Without exaggeration, I had not a single friend in high school the second time around.

But it’s not that all my classmates hated me. The problem was my idiotic pride.

You’re probably gonna laugh, but I thought friends were something that would just flock to me. Had nothing to do with arrogance or kindness, and I didn’t imagine I’d have to talk to them first.

My first life was a bad influence there. I used to be waaay too popular.

Of course, even as the not-sharpest tool in the shed, I eventually did notice that yeah, I wouldn’t make any friends without starting the conversation.

And by the time I realized, I did have half a chance left. I could tell the sorts who hung out in the corner, if I just went and talked to them, would readily accept me as a friend.

But ultimately, I didn’t do that. Why? Good old pride, of course.

It’s the dumbest thing, I’ll agree with you there. But I would’ve rather died than talk to those clowns.

I always thought of myself as a handsome guy. …Well, honest, I’m not really any less convinced of it now.

Never mind for now how true it is, it’s what I think, and it’s helped me a fair bit.

Besides, if nobody’s gonna love me, I gotta love myself, right?

Anyway, point is, I thought a handsome guy like myself starting a conversation with those fools just wasn’t fair.

Naturally, from their point of view, I must’ve seemed like an even bigger fool.

* 32 *

You’d know it if you went through it, but high school without friends is frankly hell.

College, in comparison, it’s not so much of a problem being all alone.

It’s often said that loneliness is something you get used to, and isolation is something you can’t.

Stuff like spending holidays alone you can endure for days no problem, but when there’s people all around you and you’re the only loner… you can’t just numb yourself to that.

So then how did I bear with this miserable situation? In yet another thoroughly lame way.

There was one girl in class who was similarly isolated, named Hiiragi. She didn’t have a friend to her name either.

She looked like she was always thinking “I don’t hope for anything from this world anymore,” reluctantly pushing through high school. That was Hiiragi.

I’d say she was on the short side, with eyes that hurt easily. She was always looking down, and when she had to look people in the eye, she practically glared.

And with her frail, no-confidence voice, she often talked in a halting manner. “I, uh, think that’s, fine. …N-No, that won’t be… a problem.”

It seemed she made a careful effort to pick the most average, unprovocative words as she spoke, but it made people see her as a bother.

Myself, I spoke bluntly so I wouldn’t have to talk as much. At a glance, we were polar opposites in that sense, but it came from the same roots.

Hiiragi went to the same middle school as me, and just like me, she wasn’t totally alone then. She followed the same pattern of being separated from her friends in the transition to high school.

When I was ignored in the classroom, I felt it severely. And those were the times when I looked over to Hiiragi.

Hiiragi, my only company. Seeing her alone in the corner of the class was a huge comfort for me. At least I’m not the only one, I could think - that was such a relief.

No, that’s not quite right. If you want to know the truth, it’s also thanks to Hiiragi being there that I convinced myself that I wasn’t at rock bottom in the class.

“I’ve got it real bad, but hey, better than her,” I thought to keep myself stable. What a deplorable thing to do.

However… This could just be my own deluded impression, but I think she was doing the very same thing with me.

In situations that made us more strongly aware of our isolation, like class activities and event preparations, Hiiragi and I would happen to make eye contact.

No doubt Hiiragi was looking upon me as the one person even lower than her.

Or at least I felt certain that when she looked at me, she was reassured with the thought of “Ah, he’s isolated too.”

So in that sense, I might dare to say we “hit it off.” In a very twisted definition of it. We were scapegoats for each other.

I looked down on her thinking “She’s in a similar place, but as a

woman she must have it worse”; she looked down on me thinking “He’s in a similar place, but I’m still better in academics”… that was the situation.

It may be my persecution complex talking, but you’d know with just one look at those eyes. They were judging eyes. I’d know, because mine are the same.

In my first year, before I was accustomed to being alone, I’d scurry off at lunch to the library to waste time studying.

And actually, Hiiragi often did too. We came to see each other there frequently. Not like we talked or even greeted each other, but we acknowledged each other’s existence.

Once every few months I would be struck with terrible depression, upon which I’d go to the infirmary (though not physically sick) and take my afternoon classes off.

Well, about a third of the times I did that, Hiiragi was there at the same time. It was awkward - seemed like we’d decided to skip class together.

But there was a lot of overlap between the classes we each wanted to take a break from, so it wasn’t unreasonable.

Furthermore, my relationship with Hiiragi got closer in second year. Our homeroom teacher arranged for a change in seating; students could choose to either draw lots, or pick for themselves.

However, those who freely chose their seats were restricted from sitting in the very back row.

Naturally, then, the people who ended up in the back row were people who didn’t really care where they sat. And for friendless people, any seat in the corner will do.

So Hiiragi and I always ended up sitting together. It might have been almost ten times, adding up second and third year.

People started to see us as a pair, and I heartlessly thought “Whoa, don’t put me with her.”

Though what I would say was that sitting next to her put me at ease.

For example, in classical literature or English classes, you often have to read with a partner, right?

That was usually agonizing for me, but when Hiiragi was my partner, I wasn’t so nervous.

When partnered with others, I’d worry about my voice squeaking, or my attitude being too blunt, or if they were upset about being paired with me, and all that nonsense.

But with Hiiragi, I could just think “Geez, she’s so unsociable” - talk about the pot calling the kettle black.

At the root of all things which soothe us is a sense of reassurance, the feeling that it “won’t hurt me.”

In that sense, Hiiragi was soothing for me like no other.

* 33 *

When it comes to this stuff, you might be thinking I’m some jerk who’s way too self-conscious about his assumptions.

And I say this with full recognition of that: I believe Hiiragi and I lived by leaning on each other’s shoulders.

By our third year, while we didn’t make much of a show of it, we started picking the same committees and duties.

Even when our seats changed, we tried to sit as close as possible. There was an implicit agreement that when times were tough, we would “use” each other.

“You don’t really have to be friends with me, but please be there when I need someone,” that sort of thing. Ah, but I’m romanticizing it far too much…

It’s probably closer to “Hey, you’re a loner too, right? As fellow miserables, I guess we should keep company.”

“Welp, at least this person won’t ditch me and run” - our relationship had that warped sort of trust.

We eventually developed - not affection, certainly, but a deep kind of sympathy for each other, I think.

If we hadn’t, then surely we wouldn’t have stayed together to keep ourselves from being all alone.

And isolation wasn’t the only common point between Hiiragi and I. Even the quality of our isolation bore a resemblance.

…What I think is, the reason we couldn’t get accustomed to the classroom was because we had both thoughts of “somewhere that wasn’t here.”

It came to mind that there was “a place much better than here” somewhere, and it became a huge hindrance since we were stuck “here.”

I was constantly thinking about the happy days of my first life. As such, my view of the world was duller than usual, and I had little attachment to the “here and now.”

And I wondered if Hiiragi might be thinking something similar - why else would she be so isolated?

I’m sure people who got to see her smile were pretty rare, but I was one of the few. After three and a half years, we were able to be just a little frank with each other.

And so just once, by chance, I was able to bear witness to her smile.

What a shame, I thought. If she wore that smile all the time, I bet it wouldn’t be hard for her to become the center of attention in class. That’s the kind of charm her smile had. When I first saw it, no joke, I was shocked. All like “Wait, you’re THAT cute?!”, you know.

* 34 *

The day I got to see Hiiragi’s smile was in the winter of my third year of high school, the day we had our graduation rehearsal. Which means, yes, that for the three whole years leading up to her, I never once saw a smile out of her.

Graduation… Well, I’d be hesitant to say it was an emotional event for me.

There could be nothing sad about leaving that school behind, and yet I wasn’t outrageously happy either. I just kinda thought “Man, what an awful three years.”

I had so little attachment to the school I went to that I almost

wondered if I was really a student there.

I kept thinking about it, and I didn’t even feel like going to the rehearsal anymore.

While everyone headed for the gym, I slipped out of the line and went to the music preparation room.

Its door was always wide open. In my third year, I spent a lot of lunch breaks there.

I waited there for the rehearsal to be over. If someone who hardly seemed to exist didn’t show up to it, absolutely no one would notice, surely.

Of course, by now I didn’t care what anyone thought of me. It was almost graduation, after all.

The music preparation room was dark even in the afternoon. If you closed the door, it took a while for your eyes to adjust.

That’s part of the reason I liked the place. I also loved how the instruments, once in the forefront, were now rotting in decay here. Lots of “instruments we won’t use anymore, but it’d be a waste to throw them away.”

Sitting in an upright chair, resting on my elbows on the cover of a keyboard, I stared into space.

It took nearly five minutes to notice Hiiragi in the corner of my vision.

When Hiiragi and I met eyes, I can’t really remember who smiled first. We always had sour looks, but for some reason we couldn’t keep from smiling there.

I guess we were relieved to learn there was someone else who didn’t feel a thing as graduation was coming up, and found it humorous that we both sought escape from it.

The ruins of something lost - that’s the image Hiiragi’s smile planted in my head.

Like there had once been this madly wonderful thing, and while it was now totally destroyed, she treasured a part of its ruins - kinda like that.

Of course, once we exchanged smiles, we quickly looked away and went to doing our own things.

I struggled to play a dust-coated classic guitar with no first string, and she played a sunbaked electronic organ with the volume set low.

I wasn’t surprised to see Hiiragi playing like a natural.

There was a second-hand CD shop nearby which I’d often visit after school, not being in any clubs. And as I stood there with a CD in hand staring at a cover, Hiiragi would be standing behind me doing the same - silly, but that kept happening.

Since there was so little space between the shelves in that place, it made sense our paths would tangle. But we never said a word to each other about it.

I watched Hiiragi play the organ. I couldn’t see her face, but even just from her back, I’d say she was slightly more at peace than in the classroom.

I had to admit, things were getting a little warm between us. You would probably think it natural that after all this, we’d be friends. But as I’ve said before, to the very end, Hiiragi and I never had a single personal conversation.

Why did we always stay at such a distance?, I thought. At least for my part, I could probably just explain it as a lack of trust.

However, I wasn’t distrusting of Hiiragi. What I couldn’t put my trust in was, as ever, people’s affections.

Because I’d been separated from Tsugumi, who I loved and vice versa so much in my first life. That ruined everything.

No matter how much we got along, they could someday leave me. So I was scared to even try getting deeply involved with anyone. The friendlier the person, the more I feared their betrayal. Thus, I stayed just far enough away from Hiiragi.

It’s as stupid as saying you’ll never get married because you don’t want to get divorced.

But I wouldn’t change my mind. A relationship where we weren’t too attached, just mutually looked down on each other from a distance, seemed best for me.

I remember that afterward, we were both scolded by a teacher for skipping the rehearsal.

“Think you can do whatever you like with graduation coming?” and so on, “How are you going to make it in college?” and so forth.

I listened in silence with my head low, embarrassing myself with the thought that the teacher might mistakenly believe there was a romantic thing between Hiiragi and I. Hiiragi looked the same way.

It was a stupid, stupid time, high school.

At graduation the next day, Hiiragi and I left the classroom right after the greetings. We were the only ones to leave that early, and as the only two in the hall, we naturally made eye contact.

I felt I saw her mouth the words “See you.”

That’s about it for my memories of Hiiragi.

And how it wasn’t necessarily that I’d never found any girl “agreeable.”

* 35 *

“Then… I dunno, an agreeable girl, at least?” Ultimately, I didn’t answer my sister’s question.

This explanation may not suffice, but… when it comes to certain subjective thoughts, they lose their perceived magic when you tell them to someone else. I didn’t want that.

If I wanted to keep that magic alive, I’d have to choose my words very carefully, tell the story very prudently so as not to get anything wrong.

But at the time, I didn’t have the will or energy for that, so I just kept my mouth shut.

And besides that, talking about Hiiragi would mean touching upon my awful high school days, so I wasn’t exactly enthused anyway.

My sister and I finished dinner and sat on the bed together, reading our books from the library.

It was awkward to be so close together, but admittedly it was the best place to read in the apartment.

She’d pulled the plug on the TV, so all I heard was occasional page flips and the heater running.

Luckily, the other tenants here made as little noise as I did. It was a blessing for someone as oversensitive as me.

I was reading a book on doppelgangers.

It said that they have the following characteristics.

-They don’t talk to anyone around them.

-They appear in similar places as to the original.

-If the original meets the doppelganger, they will die, and the doppelganger will become the original.

As you can tell from a little bit of thinking, these all applied not to Tokiwa, but to me.

I had no friends and rarely talked to anyone.

We went to the same university, so we appeared in similar places. If one of us had to die, it’d be him (because I’d kill him).

And he appeared in every way like me from my first life.

Given this, was he the original and I the doppelganger?

I looked up from the book and noticed my sister peeking at me. She was curious about what I was reading. It wasn’t really in my character to read, after all.

I asked her, “What are you reading?”

“…You wouldn’t know if I told you,” she said.

It sounded bitter, but it was the truth. I looked at the cover, and it was by some author I’d never heard of.

Still, I wondered, what was the deal with those questions earlier? About having girlfriends and crushes…

Thinking about it, it was kind of miraculous she would ask me of all people that kind of thing.

Second-time sister was absolutely not a girl who cared about her brother’s love life. In fact, she would purposefully avoid that stuff.

“What was with those questions, anyway?”, I asked, my eyes still on my book.

Instead of answering, she asked me, “Big brother, do you have any friends?”, turning toward me and pulling her legs down.

“Besides the “friend you made last month on festival day” or whatever. Any other friends, like the kind you could invite over?”

It was a painful question to hear. Please just don’t go there, I thought.

And the way she phrased it, she seemed to know that what I told her about my “close friend” was a story riddled with lies. Man, I felt so defeated.

“No friends I could invite over,” I replied, but dared to say in such a way as to imply I had any other friends.

And of course, my sister pushed further on the point I wanted to be asked about least. “Then do you have friends which you just can’t invite over?”

Now I had to reply honestly. “No, no friends. I’m ashamed to say not a single one. …And the guy I got to know at the festival was a lie too. God, I should have just said that from the start.”

I expected my sister to make fun of me. To shower me with scathing comments like “You think you’re going to make it in society?” and “And you know why you don’t have any friends?”

But the words out of her mouth showed no such scorn or abuse.

“Huh. So the same as me, then.”

And with that, she returned to her book.

To an extent, I could have anticipated that my sister had no friends, but it was very surprising that she would reveal it to me so openly. I was bewildered. I tried to think of some kind of reply to that. Because it was definitely odd that my second-time sister would tell me such a thing.

There had to be some important meaning to it.

She had said it very casually, yet I’m sure it took guts. I mean, she was usually so loath to show her weaknesses.

If I’d just asked her out of the blue “Honoka, do you have any friends?”, she’d normally give some reply like “And what are you planning to do with that information?”

But before I could say anything tactful, she placed her bookmark and crawled under the covers.

She got me off the bed - “I’m sleeping now” - and pulled the sheets over her head.

She looked like she was angry, but she also looked like she was depressed.

About thirty minutes later, when I was sure she was asleep, I went outside and smoked, shivering under a streetlight.

I couldn’t tell the difference between my usual chilly breaths and the smoke.

I thought over my sister’s words.

Perhaps she visited my apartment out of loneliness, I thought. Of course, I didn’t think she was “darling” enough for that to be the case.

But for my first-life sister, it would be a reasonable motive. And they were fundamentally the same person.

Friends, huh.

I took one last puff and put out the cigarette. The smoke hovered indefinitely about two meters in the air.

* 36 *

My memory’s not entirely clear on this, but I had so many friends I was sociable with in my first life that it was unbelievable to me now.

At the very least, I think I was friendly with nearly everyone in my department and clubs. And at the time, I saw each and every one as having their own good qualities.

But now, looking at them from a bit of a distance, they all seemed

like good-for-nothings. Most of them seemed entirely unlikable.

Of course you’d see those whom you have relationships with as good people, and those you don’t as bad people.

Strangely enough, that idea comforted me. Hah. So the first me wasn’t so blessed in everything after all, I thought.

Miserable as it was, I found joy in that.

My first self was convinced all his college friends were great guys. He earnestly thought “I’m so lucky to be surrounded by all these good people in college.”

But from my point of view, they were all lowlifes in one respect or another.

People I used to think of as kind were a big ball of ego. People I used to think of as humble were attention-seekers.

However, I’m just speculating, but I don’t think it was necessarily wrong of me to feel that they were good people in my first life. When your life isn’t going well, you have a negative outlook on everything, so badness will stand out - of course, it was certainly still there. But that’s not the only thing.

I wonder, if you put someone in front of a truly superb person, can they temporarily become better people by unconscious influence? Perhaps when they stood before me in my first life, they were truly good people.

But in front of people like the present me, they’d feel less pressure and revert to trash.

I’m not too sure what point I’m trying to make, but there you go. Perhaps that if you feel someone isn’t a good person, you carry some degree of responsibility for that.

Yet there are those who seem to acquire more and more charm regardless of their relationships… Naturally, I’m thinking of Tsugumi.

The more unattainable something is, the more you want it. I believe that in my second life, I came to love her more than I had the first time.

Yes, it wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration to call it worshipping.

I’m not sure I could say what was most charming about her. I’d consider every little thing that made her up charming, but I was looking with rose-colored glasses.

I could talk about “a smile like flowers blooming,” but it was my head that bloomed when I saw it.

Since my mind was always a flower patch in front of her, I couldn’t possibly compare to say what stood out more.

Even objectively speaking, Tsugumi was beautiful. But if you asked me to explain why “no one else would do” even though there are lots of other such girls, I’d be lost.

Truth is, it’s hard to talk about what charms you in a person. Much easier to talk about somebody you don’t like.

It’s repulsive, but I won’t lie: I copied only the pictures of Tsugumi from my middle school yearbook and carried them around with me all the time.

And I’d look at them and imagine what it’d be like if she were there with me now.

You’d think it’d make me lonelier, but to me the girl in the pictures was someone different from the one that actually existed.

Kind of like a symbol of the happiness from my first life.

This time - THIS time, I wanted a chance to start my life over. That’s what I thought. This time I would do it right.

I returned to the apartment, sank into my bed, closed my eyes, and prayed another night.

Prayed that when I woke up, I’d get my third chance.

* 37 *

Of course, there would be no third loop. It was a once-in-a- lifetime… uh, I mean, a miracle that would only happen once.

So I woke up the next day, and the day after, to repeated dejection.

It had been five days since my sister fled home. By then, she was starting to become a bother.

While she was around, it was a near-daily back and forth between the library and the apartment, and I had to prepare food for us both.

Not to mention I had the desire for alone time about ten times as frequently as the average person.

No offense to her, but I wanted to be alone already.

That night I worked up the courage to ask “When are you going to get out of here?”, but received a kick and a “You get out, big bro.” Geez, my bad.

But not long after, I got a call. It was from our mother, and of course, it was about my sister.

She irritatedly asked “Did Honoka come by there?”

I hesitated for a second, but before my sister heard, I told her “She’s been here the past five days.”

And so I was instructed to take my sister home. She said to lend her some money to get home if she needed it, and I said okay and hung up.

When I put down the receiver, my sister looked away and pretended she hadn’t been listening.

But about twenty minutes later, she sluggishly stood up. And she started getting her things together, with a look like “I should be going, shouldn’t I?”

I was relieved. She was actually pretty understanding in that respect.

“Do you have enough to get home?”, I asked.

She didn’t reply. Must have been mad, about me telling our mother where she was.

While she didn’t seem to want me around, I went with her as far as the bus terminal.

The snow was really bad, and the road wasn’t well-lit, so I was worried about my sister going alone.

We walked at a very strange distance from each other that I’d be hesitant to call “together.”

As ever, we said nothing to each other as we walked the roads filled with fallen leaves.

My sister seemed very bitter. Well, she’d hated me for so long, it was fine.

Besides, as someone who was planning to kill a man, I couldn’t be worrying about what every single person thought of me.

The bus terminal was wholly decrepit.

The walls and floors were blackening in spots, the lights were yellowed, the cushions were torn open, and drab shutters were pulled down on all the shops.

The few people waiting for the bus were dead silent.

With all the gloom about, it almost felt like everyone here was trudging back home after having run away.

“Dirty place,” my sister quietly said. “Like your apartment.” “Hey, it’s got feeling,” I argued for my apartment.

My sister and I sat on a sofa, about 40 centimeters apart, and drank coffee from a vending machine as we waited.

It was a terrible place. I wondered if a ride on the buses here would take you back decades or what.

I mean, if they really did, I would have gladly gotten on. Any time but now sounded great.

When I was done with my coffee, my sister reached over to grab it, stacked my cup with hers, and went to throw them away.

I watched her briskly walk from behind. She seemed a lot less dependable than my first sister. Like I could just give her a shove and she’d topple over.

She came back and sat beside me again. This time, it was more like 20 centimeters apart.

Suddenly, I felt like I’d done something absolutely terrible to my sister.

Had I even considered that she was a sixteen-year-old girl who ran away from home?

Should I, in fact, have lied to our mother?

She didn’t seem like the kind to run away from home in the first place.

And it might be a huge assumption - but she had come to me, hadn’t she?

Perhaps I should have at least sheltered her until she was satisfied?

I stole a glance at her, and we made eye contact, upon which she grumpily looked away.

I hesitated to take her back to the apartment now, after promising our mother.

So I at least wanted to say something before she went.

But I had no idea what to say. “Be happy” would be a laugh coming from me. And I rather die than have it said to me.

And “Don’t think too hard” wouldn’t mean anything from a fool like me.

I spent the whole time thinking it over.

The time passed in a blink, and my sister stood up to board the bus. I stood up too and followed with her.

There were still bits of snow outside. I was briefly blinded by the headlights of the bus in the dark.

Just as my sister was boarding the bus, I said, loud enough to hear over the engine, “Hey.”

“If you want to run away again, feel free to come over.”

Even this took a lot of courage for me to say.

I was a coward even in front of my family the second time around.

My sister turned around, and for once, opened her eyes wide.

She stood still and looked at me for a second. “I’ll do that,” she smiled, and got on the bus.

The bus left, and I set on my way home, again warming myself with cocoa.

I was all too relieved just to see my sister smile.

* 38 *

My sister seemed to count on my word, as three days later, she visited me again.

As for what she did at my place, she studied, read, and, when she felt like it, went through a laundry list of insults concluded with “You’re hopeless, big brother.”

Then she enjoyed my dinner, occupied my bed, and snoozed away.

The next day, our father came and took my sister home.

I didn’t know how he treated her, but he didn’t show any intent to scold or be nice to her; he just drove her home in silence. Yeah, it looked awkward, alright.

This only made me certain that she’d come right back. As predicted, she was knocking on my door again five days later.

But I didn’t really mind. Having my sister around brought more regularity to my life, and seemed to alleviate the loneliness of living alone.

She seemed to be doing independent studies, so rather than force her to go to high school when she didn’t want to, why not let her read what she likes for a while?

Misanthropy isn’t something easily fixed.

“Big brother, you don’t go to college, do you?”, she asked one night. And not in a harsh or ridiculing way.

“…Nah,” I replied.

“I see,” she said with a slight satisfied smile. “Daddy’s going to kill you if he finds out.”

“That’s likely.” “He’ll kill you!”

I scratched my head. After taking a sip of cocoa, she put her cup down and said “I’ll keep it a secret. But in return, I expect you to be more polite to me.”

“…You have my gratitude.”

I lowered my head. “He’ll kill you” was an exaggeration of my sister’s design, but “he’ll beat you” was a certainty.

As far as my sister skipping school went, even my thickheaded parents felt they were responsible, so they didn’t speak much of it. But me not going to college, that would put them in a fiery rage. They had lots of pent-up energy from not scolding my sister.

While I pulled the sheets over my sister, who’d fallen asleep on the bed sideways with a half-finished book in hand, I had a thought.

If I were arrested for Tokiwa’s murder, how would this girl react? Or else, what if I failed in murdering him, gave up on it all, and commit suicide?

I didn’t have any intention of that at the moment, but I couldn’t keep myself from imagining the possibilities.

And objectively speaking, if I were to commit suicide, it could be very persuasive.

At the very least, it seemed easier to think about death than imagine what living would be like from here on.

* 39 *

My first self’s popularity - though granted, it was mine - really was astounding.

Around the end of November, I remembered that there was a girl who persistently followed me around, although we weren’t talking stalking here.

No, not just one - depending on the time, there could be several. I can’t remember what they were like, naturally.

But as usual, it was unbelievable stuff considering my second life. I wish I could have half of that, sheesh.

Why was I only reminded of that then? Well, that’s kind of a funny story.

I was sitting by the window on the second floor of a hamburger place in the city, reading a book, and periodically looking out below. Not that I was really a fan of the hamburgers there, but it was a habit of mine to sit in that window seat.

The reason being because nine times out of ten on the weekend, I’d see Tokiwa walking by in the afternoon.

So it was a good spot to watch for him coming through.

I sipped some hot coffee and gazed at the people below.

It was Saturday, and I saw an alarming amount of couples passing by. There was hardly anyone walking alone who didn’t also appear to be in the middle of work.

Maybe it was because Christmas was approaching, or maybe it was always that way.

Christmas songs were frequently playing in all the shops now. At that particular moment, it was “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town.”

It was the same no matter where you went this time of year. Maybe you could even consider it threatening.

With lights decorating the roadside trees, Christmas was invading the town.

Honestly, it made me unhappy. It felt like a provocation directed at me, lonely and unfestive as I was.

It wasn’t, of course. It was just innocently making happy people happier.

But let’s say you have somebody who’s lost their mother, and every time they turn on the TV or go outside or do anything, they’re told “Mother’s Day is coming up!”

You know that’s gonna hurt. Not saying you should go and cancel Mother’s Day because of it, just saying that hey, those people exist.

The book I was reading was one I checked out from the library at my sister’s suggestion.

Seeing my sister enjoy reading so much got me interested myself, I guess. And since I had so much spare time, I asked “Got any recommendations?”

It’s weird, but even though I went to the library all the time in high school, I never had much interest in books then.

And a reader, no matter what they’re like, will always have a serious answer to that question. Maybe because they get to demonstrate their experience to others.

She recommended me a number of books prefaced with “for beginners.” And one of them - well, you might’ve guessed it already - was “The Catcher in the Rye.”

I struggled with the style of the Japanese translation, and since I was looking around as I read, I found that I wasn’t making it through the pages as quickly as I liked.

I’m no good at remembering foreign names, incidentally. Well, now that I think of it, “Holden Caulfield” isn’t too bad of one.

But when we’re talking “Avdotya Romanovna Raskolnikova,” I’m gonna start foaming at the mouth.

When I was about thirty pages in, I looked outside and saw a familiar face. I sat up and leaned for a closer look.

But no, it wasn’t the man I was looking for, nor a man at all.

I thought I was mistaken at first, as she was acting strangely, had dyed her hair chestnut-brown, and wore clothes that didn’t match my idea of her at all.

Had it not been for my well-trained eyes, I would have overlooked her. Indeed, my eyes and ears became very attentive through stalking.

Though I had no real reason to pursue her, I put away my tray and hurried out of the restaurant.

I made it outside just as Hiiragi turned the corner. Missed her by a hair.

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