Anyone who had tried cooking would know that making most food yourself was much cheaper.
That was why I had learned to cook in my former life.
The cooking I had started to save money eventually reached the point where I thought, “Why bother eating out when what I make tastes better?”
As a result, I did not eat out much.
Unless I was meeting Yoshihiro or Ryota, that was.
In other words, coming to a Western-style restaurant alone, like I had today, was practically a first for me.
“Here’s your hamburger steak.”
With that, the girl from the theater set a hamburger steak and a salad on my table.
As soon as she returned to the counter, I cut into the hamburger steak and took a bite.
The meat practically melted in my mouth. Maybe food tasted better when someone else was paying.
A little while earlier, the girl from the theater—the murderer of my ham sandwich—had told me the name of an old Western-style restaurant nearby and hurried off.
She had added that she would make it up to me if I came, but I had been too dumbfounded at the time.
From the look of things, she had run off because her part-time shift was about to start.
Then why had she watched the movie until that late? Tsk, tsk.
When I really did show up, she took my order while insisting that she was paying.
That was how I ended up with a hamburger steak and salad.
I wanted a chocolate parfait too, but shaking her down that much on our first meeting would have weighed on my conscience, so I held back.
Bzzz—
My phone vibrated while I was eating my steak.
When I checked it, I had a message from Saito.
[Saito]
You’re coming tomorrow, right?
I tilted my head.
Why was he suddenly asking that?
I was fifteen now, old enough to start high school.
But that would not happen until April, when the school year began. It was February now, so I was still a middle school student.
And not one on break, either. I still had school to attend.
I had only come to the apartment I had rented because it was the weekend. Once the weekday came, I had to return to the family home.
On the surface, Saito’s text was perfectly natural.
Keeping track of an underage child’s schedule was one of a parent’s responsibilities.
Assuming Saito was a normal parent, that was.
The relationship between Saito and me was not normal.
If it had been, a fifteen-year-old living independently would have made no sense from the start.
That was why I had never once received a text like this from Saito.
This was, yes.
It was like a friend you never heard from suddenly asking you out for a meal.
Usually, that meant they wanted something.
It probably was not money. Ours was the kind of relationship where, if he asked to borrow some, I would lend it to him.
Was he looking to complain?
Saito was not the sort of person who went out of his way to grab someone and unload his troubles on them.
The mystery only deepened.
A few thoughts abruptly surfaced, but I shoved them all back down.
I would find out tomorrow when I saw him. There was no reason to give myself a headache over it now.
Maybe it was nothing.
For all I knew, he had simply gotten sentimental and sent the message.
Saito would be thirty-three soon, too.
He was at the age when the female hormones really started kicking in, so it was not that strange for him to suddenly pull something like this.
I put my phone away, smacked my lips, and looked toward the counter.
I was hungry, but someone sat down in front of me before I could do anything about it.
It was the girl from the theater.
She spoke first.
“Don’t tell me you’re still hungry.”
“Growing boys are all like this. Weren’t you working?”
“It’s slow, so the owner told me to take a minute and chat. I’m Yukimura Mai.”
“I’m Hiiragi Touji.”
When someone told you her name, it was basic courtesy to introduce yourself in return.
Yukimura looked me over at my answer, then opened her mouth.
“You’re in high school, right?”
“Starting this year.”
“What? Then we’re in the same grade.”
Yukimura immediately dropped the formalities.
I still found it strange when someone suddenly started speaking casually to me, but that was mostly because I had been an adult in my former life.
If I had lived through a normal school life, acting the way Yukimura did would probably have been standard.
So if I did not want people to think I was strange, the sensible thing would have been to quietly follow the lead of kids my age.
But as I had said, I did not care much about how other people saw me.
I would do what felt comfortable to me.
“If you’re hungry, order more. I told you, didn’t I? Eat as much as you want.”
“I’d feel bad taking any more from you.”
“You’re the first kid I’ve met who turns down food when I’m offering to buy.”
Yukimura stretched.
After watching movies all day and then coming to work, she must have been tired.
Once she had worked the stiffness out of her body, she propped her chin on one hand and asked me,
“I haven’t seen you around here before. Did you move in recently?”
“Are you some kind of super-normie who knows everyone around here?”
“Not really, but if someone as obsessed with movies as you lived nearby, I figured I would have run into him at least once.”
I had watched movies all day only because <Fish, Sky Lanterns, and Ramune> had made me angry.
So even if I had already lived in the neighborhood, I probably would never have had a reason to run into Yukimura.
Still, a conversation needed a certain amount of flow.
I understood what Yukimura was getting at, so I simply nodded.
“I moved here recently.”
“I knew it. Do you like movies?”
Did I like movies?
I was not sure.
In my former life, I had gone to the movies whenever I had money, but that had been a kind of study.
Watching every film that had won an Academy Award had been part of it too.
Still, I did not dislike them.
At this point, could I not say that I liked them?
“I like them well enough.”
“Really?”
Yukimura’s voice brightened.
As expected, she seemed to want to talk movies with me.
It was not that Yukimura had any particular interest in me.
People were just like that. After quietly taking in a work, they met someone like themselves and became desperate to talk about it.
Yukimura just happened to be in that state.
How did I know?
This was why everyone needed a mirror held up to them once in a while.
So that was what I had looked like back then.
I finally understood why Yoshihiro had always looked at me so strangely.
At my answer, Yukimura began to lament.
“I can’t believe <Fish, Sky Lanterns, and Ramune> is one of the better films that have come out lately. The Japanese film industry is dead.”
If that sounded like she had suddenly floored the gas pedal, she had.
When someone had been bottling up impressions for a long time, that was what happened once they finally started pouring them out.
Thanks to that, I learned exactly how Yoshihiro must have felt nine years ago.
Yoshihiro. How did you endure it?
When I nodded at appropriate intervals, Yukimura poured out a flood of words.
“It was interesting that Ito Rei could do thriller acting, but that was all it was. Interesting. It was not actually good.
“Ito Rei only wants to play pitiful women with tragic pasts. That’s all she knows how to do.
“And honestly, I’m not even sure she’s good at that. Is Ito Rei really good at playing someone pitiful? Something about her acting never lands for me.
“Maybe her past was not actually that tragic, unlike what she keeps going around saying? If we’re being blunt, Ito Rei abandoned her child and ran away.”
Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.
That came out of nowhere. It genuinely startled me.
In Yukimura’s defense, that was just part of her thought process.
She was blurting out whatever came to mind to organize what she had felt after watching the movie.
Even the parts that sounded like personal attacks were part of it.
To analyze a movie, you had to analyze the actors’ performances.
And to analyze Rei’s performance as the lead, you had no choice but to drag reality into it.
The problem was that Rei could only play roles that resembled her own personality.
In other words, all of this was part of analyzing the movie.
It was, however, the kind of way of speaking that was made to be misunderstood.
When had I stopped talking like that?
Had it been after I met Yoshihiro?
Damn it.
Yoshihiro.
You again?
“What about you, Hiiragi?”
“The editing didn’t sit right with me.”
“Exactly. How many years has the director been directing now, and yet the way one cut connects to the next is like something from a novice director—”
Revved up again, Yukimura launched back into the movie.
I had only said a few things, but once she confirmed that we had noticed the same problems, Yukimura got completely fired up and kept talking without pause.
Once someone got wound up like that, they went on for at least three hours.
I knew from experience, so you could trust me.
“In the end, I think direction is everything. There’s no such thing as a bad premise. There’s only bad direction.”
“I agree.”
“People have this habit of calling actors who can do a wide variety of roles top-tier, but I don’t agree. Even if someone can only do one kind of performance, they should be able to move people deeply. That’s what makes them top-tier.”
“Exactly.”
After rattling off all sorts of other things and unleashing everything she had built up over more than a decade, Yukimura finally gulped down a glass of water.
At that rate, she was going to give herself indigestion.
Yukimura let out an excited breath and spoke.
“That’s the first time I’ve ever talked about movies with anyone.”
“It showed.”
“I feel a little embarrassed, since I did all the talking. You probably have a lot you want to say too, Hiiragi.”
Based on her appearance alone, I had expected a winter wind to blow every time she opened her mouth.
But once we actually talked, she could not have been more like a warm spring breeze.
I was reminded again that judging people by appearance alone was foolish.
Yukimura continued.
“My favorite movie is <Mirage Festival>. I still rewatch it regularly. The long-take festival scene is just so beautiful— Ah. <Mirage Festival> is famous, so you know it too, Hiiragi. What movie do you like best?”
At heart, I was a hardcore nerd above all else, so I had to answer from a nerd’s perspective.
What was the quickest way to judge someone’s nerd cred?
Ask them which work they had enjoyed the “most.”
The instant they gave an underwhelming answer, they were disqualified as one of us.
That was common sense.
“…”
“…”
A winter wind blew.
No one had opened a window, yet the chill of mid-February passed between Yukimura and me.
My favorite movie?
Of course I had one.
Only, the movie I had loved most no longer existed in this world.
It was not just the major corporations that had changed.
Countless works that had once existed in the world had been replaced by things I did not know.
I met Yukimura’s eyes.
So it really was possible to guess someone’s personality from her appearance.
Yukimura’s gaze was now as icy as the personality I had pegged her for at first glance.
Please stop staring at me.
This is embarrassing.
Thank you.