Chapter 3.5 (2/2)

I ignored them and answered the call.

Mamizu’s face filled the entire screen.

I saw her face and I… laughed.

“I heard that you wanted to see my face?” she said.

There were terrible bags under her bright-red eyes. Her face looked awful, as if she had no intention of concealing the fact that she’d been crying until moments earlier. I’d never seen Mamizu’s face in a terrible state like this.

“What do you think?” Mamizu said proudly for some reason, with a self-satisfied expression.

“No matter what anyone says, you’re the most beautiful person in this world,” I said earnestly. I felt like a spell had been cast on this moment, and words like these would reach her now.

Mamizu laughed. “But your face is amazing as well, Takuya-kun. You’re like a princess.”

Shut up, I thought.

“I’m going, Mamizu.”

With the video call still going, I went out into the corridor. All of the students in the corridor turned to look at me in my full make-up and flashy dress. I couldn’t tell whether the noises they were making were screams or cheers.

It was a custom at our school for the cast to parade from the cla.s.sroom that served as a waiting room to the auditorium where the play would be performed, wearing their costumes.

The students going back and forth stopped to cheer for us.

My cla.s.smates were following me in succession. Standing at the front, I walked boldly down the corridor, one step at a time. I walked while continuing the video call with Mamizu. I intended to bring Mamizu with me.

“You’re amazing, Takuya-kun,” Mamizu said, sounding impressed.

“The real thing starts now,” I said. Well, it wasn’t like I wasn’t nervous.

“Do your best!” Mamizu said.

“Yeah,” I replied briefly, and then I faced forward and continued walking.

I entered the auditorium.

I found Yos.h.i.+e-sensei inside and approached her.

“What are you wearing? Wow, Takuya-kun, you look incredible,” she said as she saw me, half-laughing.

“No, I don’t need to hear that. This is connected with Mamizu right now. A video call,” I said.

“Huh? Why?”

“It doesn’t matter, so can you point my phone at the stage? Mamizu is a member of our cla.s.s, too. I think she wants to see this.” I handed my phone to Yos.h.i.+e-sensei.

Having been told that, she wouldn’t say no. She nodded silently and took my phone. I turned my back to her and headed from the spectator seats to the wing of the stage.

“Kayama, Mamizu is watching,” I said, calling out to Kayama who was waiting with a meek expression on his face.

“I know. You were on the phone with her just now, huh, Okada.”

“Well, yeah… let’s do this properly.”

“Yeah.”

And so our play, Romeo and Juliet, began.

As expected, the audience’s main reaction to our play was laughter. Well, Juliet was being played by me, a guy, so they couldn’t help but laugh. I thought it was fine that way.

But Kayama seemed strange.

Maybe because he was nervous, or maybe because of something else, he’d had no energy after the performance began, despite having enough spirit before the real thing. Is Kayama surprisingly the type who is weaker when it matters? I thought suspiciously. Already desperate by this point, I made my best effort to act as Juliet.

The play approached the final scene, and finally, all that was left was for Romeo and Juliet to die.

First, as Juliet, I drank the so-called ‘potion of false death’ and fell asleep in the middle of the stage as if I were dead.

Kayama, acting as Romeo who had discovered this, shouted the lines that he had practiced dozens of times.

“Oh, Juliet, why have you died?”

But there was something abnormal about Kayama. He seemed to be struggling with the line after that. I had to continue sleeping as if I were dead, but I opened my eyes slightly to check on him.

There was an idiot, right in front of me.

Kayama was crying.

He was bawling.

Kayama, who hadn’t cried even after falling from the second floor of a building, was crying.

He was crying so much that he couldn’t say the next line.

The crowd was stirring in confusion after noticing this. “Hey, what’s the matter?” “He’s crying.” “What is that, it doesn’t look good.” “What’s wrong?” Kayama had sounded so unmotivated during practice, but he was completely absorbed in his lines now.

‘So tomorrow, should I pretend that you’re Watarase Mamizu while I’m acting?’

I remembered Kayama’s words from yesterday.

Quite a long silence pa.s.sed. It was like a broadcasting error.

Hey, hey, what are you going to do, Kayama? I watched Kayama nervously.

His tears hadn’t stopped yet.

Even so, he managed to steady his breathing and say his lines all in one go. “I’ll die as well, Juliet, and follow you.” And then he went to drink the poison.

I reached my hand out reflexively. “Wait,” I said, standing up and grabbing Romeo’s arm.

Every single person there except for me was dumbfounded.

That was to be expected. Juliet, who was supposed to be asleep, had suddenly woken up and stopped Romeo’s suicide. With that, the two of them wouldn’t pa.s.s by one another. It wasn’t a painful story at all.

“Don’t die, Romeo!” I shouted, standing tall with my eyes wide open. “Because I haven’t died yet!”

At that moment, the auditorium exploded with laughter.

“I was in a state of false death, Romeo. You don’t have to die. Because I’m alive!”

“W-w-w…” Kayama stared at me, looking completely astonished.

“This is ridiculous…” one of our cla.s.smates muttered at the wing of the stage, holding his head.

“Wow, lucky me!” Kayama said.

The audience laughed even more.

I thought that everyone in the cla.s.s would hate me, but surprisingly, there weren’t many who were angry about it. Everyone was sick of the ordinary Romeo and Juliet, and my horrible ad-lib had been well-received in the end, so n.o.body made any complaints. In fact, there were even some who praised me, saying, “That went well!” Either way, it was over already, so n.o.body was going on about it.

The only complaint came from our homeroom teacher, Yos.h.i.+e-sensei.

“Okada-kun, that was a bit…”

Ignoring her scolding, I took my phone from her. The video call was still ongoing, and Mamizu was smiling on the other side of the screen.

“Did you see that?” I asked.

“Yeah. It was the most interesting out of all the Romeo and Juliet performances I’ve seen!”

“Thanks.”

I headed outside the auditorium, still wearing the dress and holding my phone in my hand. I kind of felt like I was holding a miniature Mamizu in the palm of my hand.

It had already become completely dark outside the auditorium. It had become autumn before I knew it, and it was getting darker earlier these days.

“Oi, Juliet!” a voice shouted.

I turned around to see Kayama coming after me. He was still wearing his Romeo outfit and brandis.h.i.+ng his cardboard sword. He threw me something at me, and I caught it. It was a makeup removal sheet.

“Akira-kun, you were amazing too,” Mamizu said, noticing that Kayama was there.

“It was a great performance, wasn’t it?” Kayama said.

Don’t make me laugh, I thought.

“Okada, are you going to the celebration party after this?” Kayama said, sounding like he didn’t care.

“I’m not interested,” I said, wiping my face with the makeup remover.

More importantly, right now… I wanted to see Mamizu as soon as possible. That was how I honestly felt.

“I want to go!” Mamizu said.

“… So that means…”

“Go, Takuya-kun. Give me a proper report on it next time.”

“Look here…”

“You’re today’s hero, Takuya-kun. Ah, heroine, I mean. So, you should go.”

With that, Mamizu suddenly ended the call.

… Could it be that she was trying to be considerate?

If that was true, it wasn’t like her. I didn’t want her to do something like that. I wanted to see her.

“You know, Okada,” Kayama said.

“What?”

“Are you still afraid after all that?”

“What are you trying to say?”

“She likes you, doesn’t she?”

“Shut up.”

In the end, I decided to go to the celebration party that day. At the karaoke after-party, someone sang lyrics meaning something along the lines of, “Youth goes by in the blink of an eye.” Everyone looks like they’re having fun, I thought. Eventually, I decided to find an appropriate time to slip out and go home. When I looked at the time, it was a little past eleven o’clock. I wondered whether I should visit the hospital. But I’d just been scolded by the nurse Okazaki-san yesterday. I wanted Mamizu to rest properly, too. I decided to go to the hospital tomorrow instead.

When I got home, I remembered the snow globe. Now that I thought about it, I’d bought the materials and they were just lying around. I was kind of free, so I decided to try repairing the snow globe that I’d broken while reading the book that I’d received from Makoto-san.

First, I attached the gla.s.s bottle that I’d bought onto the miniature log house with adhesive as a lid. Next, I poured plenty of liquid glue inside the gla.s.s bottle. After that, I put in artificial snow called snow powder. This was what I’d thought to be confetti.

Finally, I closed the lid, flipped the whole thing over, and it was done. It was finished in just ten minutes. It’s so simple to do, I thought, a little surprised.

However, it wasn’t a round crystal ball design like the original; I’d simply reused a gla.s.s bottle, so it was quite a misshapen product.

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