2.1 (2/2)

“If you want, we could go home together,” Riko-chan-san said.

I didn’t have any reason to decline, so I waited for her to get changed, and then we went home together.

“Okada-kun, are you around the same age as me?” she asked.

“No, I’m a year younger. I’m in my second year of high school,” I said.

“Wow! I see. You know, surprisingly enough, everyone is older than me here. I was the youngest. So I’m happy that you joined us! … Actually, being fully in charge of the cooking is tough, so everyone quits right away. I was a little worried, so I called out to you.”

I see; it seemed that this work could indeed be considered harsh.

“But, well… I think I’ll continue,” I said. “Probably.”

Riko-chan-san looked surprised. “Huh, it’s rare for people to say that. Is there some kind of reason? Like wanting to save up some money and buy your girlfriend a present?”

“… Well, I have my reasons.”

“And a girlfriend?”

“Do I look like I have one?”

“I guess it’s hard to say,” Riko-chan-san said, laughing.

At night, I arrived home exhausted, and it seemed that my parents had already withdrawn to their bedroom. Dinner had been wrapped and left on the table. I didn’t have much of an appet.i.te, so I put it in the fridge, quickly took a shower and decided to go to my own bedroom.

As I climbed the stairs and went out into the corridor, I saw that the door to my sister Meiko’s room was open. That was unusual. Meiko’s room had been left in the exact same state it had been in when she died. I’d thought that it was best to throw her things out and turn her room into a storage room or something, but with that said, I’d never had the heart to say that to my parents. Of course, n.o.body normally entered the room.

I went inside and turned the light on. It was probably my mother who had been in here. The room’s closet had been left open. At the very least, my father wasn’t the type of person to do something sentimental like this. Cardboard boxes were piled up inside the closet, containing my older sister’s possessions.

Looking at these things would only bring sadness. Even as I thought this, I looked inside the cardboard boxes. The box on the very top was filled with textbooks. Since Meiko had attended a different high school from me, the textbook lineup was quite different from mine. I picked up the j.a.panese language textbook and flicked through it.

There was a page with a red line drawn on it.

It was a poem, ‘Spring Day Rhapsody,’ by Nakahara Chuuya.

When the one you love dies,

you must commit suicide.

There was a red underline beneath the first verse.

… The fact that a red underline had been drawn here probably meant that my sister had a special interest in this book. But with that said, I couldn’t understand poems at all. Actually, was there a single person in this world who could understand them? At the very least, I’d never met such a person in my life. I thought it was quite surprising that my older sister was the kind of person who understood poems. While she was alive, if I had to say, Meiko was… at least, up until her boyfriend died, a lively character; by no means did she give off the impression of being a girl who was interested in literature.

I recalled Meiko’s boyfriend.

He was kind of an over-the-top, well-spoken sportsman, a type of person I didn’t get along with.

How much had Meiko loved him?

Still, it was quite a dark poem. Dark enough to make me wonder whether it was alright to put it in a textbook.

When the one you love dies, you must commit suicide.

There’s no way that’s true, I retorted lightly in my mind.

“Do they really make omelet rice dishes with heart-marks on them?”

Mamizu was very interested to hear stories about my part-time job.

“Actually, I’m the one who makes most of them,” I said.

Finding something very funny about this, Mamizu clutched her stomach and laughed. “Ah, stop it, my stomach hurts!”

“It’s quite interesting. They’re dedicated to the maid uniforms, too,” I said, showing Mamizu a photo I’d taken on my phone.

“This person… who is she?”

“Ah, that’s Riko-chan-san. I said I wanted to take a photo of the uniform, and she agreed to be my model. She’s a senior, one year older than me.”

For some reason, Mamizu suddenly made a disinterested noise and glared at me with a bored look on her face. I was bewildered, having no idea as to the reason for her abrupt bad mood. Seeming angry, she opened her mouth to speak.

“I want to go bungee-jumping,” she said in a stabbing, knife-like tone.

“… No, no, no, no.”

“I want to, I want to, I want to, I want to!” Mamizu said, as if throwing a tantrum.

“I definitely won’t do it,” I told her.

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