She was the kind of girl who openly said this sort of thing, even though she wanted to go to the highly competitive Waseda University. Proudly, she’d drop non sequiturs like, “By the way, our problem is that there are no villains anywhere.”

She continued her explanation. "Nobody is to blame. Not Mizuguchi from the basketball team, or me, or you, Satou—none of us is to blame. For some reason, all sorts of things seem to be heading in a bad direction. It’s strange.”

“The only strange thing is your mind.”

“Don’t say such a cold thing to a girl who just got out of the emergency room. By the way, Satou, did you notice that even though none of it’s our fault, a lot of casually painful things happen all around us? It’s because a huge organization is planning a terrible conspiracy against us.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“It’s true. A little bird told me.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She was the kind of girl who liked to pretend she was crazy. Despite that—and because she was beautiful—I liked her.

A few days before graduation, she even let me do her once.

It moved me deeply to think that the payoff for having kept on her good side over two whole years was that one single act. It was randomly exciting, yet it was also sad. In the end, I was able to do it just that once.

I felt like I should have done it a few more times. But then, I also felt that it might have been better for me not to have done it even that one time. I wondered which would have been right.

Ahhh…

At a trendy cafe in Shibuya, I asked her, “Well, what do you think?” It was the first time I’d seen her in several years.

The previous Sunday, without any warning whatsoever, I had gotten a phone call. “Let’s get together,” she’d said.

I left the house without worrying about it.

We were to meet in front of the Moai Statue. It was a bit touristy, but as we were from another town, there wasn’t any real problem. As soon as we greeted each other, the girl said, “I called your family home, Satou, to try and get your current contact information, but your mom mistook me for a salesman and was suspicious of me.”

“Oh yeah, that happens a lot. Those solicitors pretend to be a classmate when they’re trying to collect a register of names…” It was kind of depressing that after not seeing each other for several years, this was our first discussion.

My memories hadn’t deceived me: She really was cute, after all. And so, I was a bit nervous. In addition, I suffered from the fear of eye contact and agoraphobia—neuroses peculiar to hikikomori. Even after entering the cafe, I couldn’t stop sweating.