“Takagi’s covering for you at work,” he says smoothly, displaying his phone.

“Leave it to me!” Takagi flashes a breezy thumbs-up in the video. “Buy me a meal, though.”

“Every single friggin’ one of you…,” I mutter sourly.

Asking Tsukasa was a mistake. I was planning to skip school today and spend the weekend—Friday, Saturday, and Sunday—in Hida. I went to Tsukasa yesterday and begged him for help, telling him that something had come up and I absolutely had to go see a friend, asking him to not ask questions and just let me use him as an excuse while I was gone.

“I came because I was worried about you,” Tsukasa says without a hint of penitence. “I couldn’t just leave you alone, could I? What are you gonna do if it turns out to be a badger game?”

“A badger what?”

What’s he talking about? My eyebrows knit, and Okudera-senpai, who’s sitting on Tsukasa’s opposite side, leans in.

“You’re going to see a friend you met online, aren’t you, Taki?”

“Huh? No, the online thing was just an excuse, and, uh…” Yesterday, Tsukasa was really persistent about asking who I was visiting, so I vagued things up and told him it was somebody I’d met on a social networking site.

Tsukasa gravely informs Okudera-senpai, “Frankly, I suspect it’s a dating site.”

I nearly do a spit take.

“It is not!”

“You’ve seemed really off lately, you know.” Looking concerned, Tsukasa extends a box of Pocky to me. “We’ll hang back and watch from a distance.”

“What am I, a grade-schooler?!” I demand, lashing out.

Okudera-senpai watches me knowingly. She’s absolutely got the wrong idea about this, too.

This is gonna be one rough trip, I think dismally.

“Approaching Nagoya,” a lazy voice announces over the train’s loudspeaker.

The exchanges with Mitsuha started out of the blue one day and ended just as suddenly. No matter how much thought I gave it, I couldn’t figure out why. After several weeks, it got harder to shake the suspicion they might just have been a string of extremely vivid dreams.

I’ve got proof, though. I can’t believe that the journal entries Mitsuha left on my phone came out of my own head. That date with Okudera-senpai could never have happened if I’d been myself. I’m convinced Mitsuha’s a real girl. Her body heat, her pulse, the way she breathes, her voice, the red light dawning over her closed eyes, the vibrant sounds in her ears—I felt all of that myself. Experiencing her life was so intense, it convinced me, If she isn’t alive, then nothing is. Mitsuha is real.

Because of that, the abrupt way it ended is making me oddly uneasy. Something might have happened to her. Maybe she came down with a fever. Maybe there was some sort of accident. Even if I’m overthinking things, at the very least, she’s bound to be worried about the situation, too. That’s why I decided to go see her in person. But…