Chapter Text

When you’ve got a lot on your mind, the worst thing that can happen is for your friends to bail on you for lunch.

It was a Wednesday, and usually Kibe, Kuri, and I would grab a bite before afternoon classes, but the two of them had gotten behind on a paper due in the afternoon, so they’d decided to work through lunch to try to get it done. I could’ve hung out with them, but what was I going to do? I’d finished that paper already; I’d busted my ass the night before working on it. They were being irresponsible, and I told them so.

But after sitting down for five minutes all by myself with just a bowl of ramen for company, I realized I wasn’t really mad at them. Hell, I was still a lot like them. It’s just that when big stuff hits you, it makes your stupidity with the small stuff stand out.

Grandma Sayuri was dying, and Mizuhara didn’t have the heart to tell her we weren’t together.

That’s what made me mad. You can go write a paper. That’s easy. Just stop playing games on your phone or don’t go cruising for chicks on a Tuesday night (who does that?). What are you supposed to do when you don’t want family to die thinking you’ll be unhappy?

It’d been bothering me since Saturday night, and I sure as hell didn’t know what I could do about it, so I sat there, in the cafeteria, sucking down noodles and trying to figure things out. Maybe I should talk to Mizuhara again? I’d considered it, but I couldn’t see the conversation going any differently than the first time. She seemed cool and assured of herself, but if her grandma had to die, she wanted her to die happy. Someone like Mizuhara could have anyone she wanted, though, and her grandma wouldn’t worry that Mizuhara would be alone. That’s what I thought, but Mizuhara didn’t seem to see it that way. There was no changing her mind, even though I thought it would be awful to let Grandma Sayuri to pass while believing such a lie.

Maybe it was fate, then, or some god playing a cruel trick, because not more than three tables away from me sat Mizuhara. She was alone, too. Where were her friends? What was she eating? It wasn’t a bowl. The cafeteria did have a popular pasta plate that day, but that wasn’t the point. Some strange force had put her right in front of me. I would’ve had to look straight down at my food to avoid looking at her, so I glanced in her direction, wondering if her worries showed on her face.

Of course, Mizuhara had her disguise, and she was good at hiding things. She was dressed as “Ichinose,” with a dark, oversized cardigan meant to downplay her figure. Her braids and glasses were the opposite of conventionally attractive. To the untrained eye, she wasn’t worth paying attention to, and the only guys who would hit on her would have to be desperate—or sense that she was an easy target. If she could hide her true self that well, she would have no trouble concealing any concerns about her grandma.

Still, I couldn’t help but watch her. Did she like pasta, or was it something she got only when she was down? Was she eating slowly because there was a lot on her mind? She had a book open, too. Was she behind on her studies? Or was she reading only to take her mind off everything?

I must not have been very subtle. Mizuhara looked up at one point and twitched when she saw me looking back at her. She glared at me, as if to say, What are you looking at? I tried to ignore her, but what was I supposed to do? She was right there. I could hear her fork clinking against her plate. It would’ve been better if I just went to sit somewhere else, but I didn’t think of that. I’m not that smart, okay?

My phone vibrated, and I thought that was a relief, a distraction. It wasn’t.

“You need to stop,” the message read.

It was Mizuhara. I looked up and she was still typing on her phone.

“What if someone you know sees you? What are they going to think if you keep staring at Ichinose? To them, you have a fashionable ‘girlfriend,’ but now you’re checking out this kind of girl? What’s wrong with you?”

I couldn’t have been more embarrassed. Mizuhara was mad at me. My lack of impulse control was threatening to expose her.

I wrote an apology, but that wasn’t enough for her. I looked back to see if she was all right with that, but she was watching me, too, and she sighed in frustration, picked up her things, and left her seat. Great. She was already dealing with her grandma, and now I was taking away from her lunch. What a fucking asshole I was.

That’s what I thought until Mizuhara laid her lunch tray down at the seat in front of me, pulled out the chair, and sat down.

“Uh, what are you doing?” I asked.

“I should be the one asking that,” she said as she fixed her napkin to continue eating. “But if you can’t help staring, at least it’s not so conspicuous if we’re already eating together.”

“Is that really all right?”

“Of course it is. We know each other, don’t we?” She held up her phone, which was open to our messages. “We’re in the same LINE group. It’s just friendly to have lunch together, isn’t it?”

I couldn’t argue with that. Still, I was surprised she was so nonchalant about it.

“So?” she asked, locking me in place with her cool stare. “Why do you keep looking at me? Don’t tell me you have a thing for girls in braids and glasses.”

I about spat out my drink. That wasn’t the reason! I had a thing for her no matter how she looked! Even with her dressed like that, her eyebrows were perfect, her lips plump, and her boobs… well, there was no hiding those, no matter how hard she tried to look unassuming. But she could’ve dressed like “Ichinose” every day, and I would still be 100% in love with her. Anyone would fall in love with the real Mizuhara.

“I just wondered why you were eating alone,” I said, trying to sound convincing.

She frowned. “Is that all?” she remarked, and she seemed to relax, though in a disappointed way. “My friends are trying to organize something with the student government. I told them a little bit about how Grandma is sick, and they insisted they would take care of it without me. I do have some reading to do, so here I am.” She cut some strands of pasta apart with her knife and took a bite. Only after chewing it all the way through did she add, “What about you?”

I told her about Kibe and Kuri and how they didn’t know how to manage their time. University is for learning things like economics or philosophy, but it’s also about learning to be an adult. I knew I wasn’t a great example, but if Kibe and Kuri were going to go down to the wire with their papers like this, they needed to learn something more important than Keynesian theory.

Mizuhara thought it was understandable, though. “We’re all learning to be adults one day at a time. Let them know you’re worried about them. Maybe offer some help, but in the end, they have to want it. If they’re not ready to be adults that way, let it go.”

She was always thoughtful like that. In many ways, she was a wise old soul in a young woman’s body.

I must’ve let my feelings on that show because Mizuhara looked back at me and sighed.

“Okay, why are you still looking at me like that?” she asked.

“I’m sorry!” I said. “It’s just… I’ve been thinking about you.”

She blinked. “You wanna run that by me again?”

“About you, and your grandma, and how hard it must be, and now you were sitting here alone, and we’re still lying, and I don’t know what to do, and–”

“Relax!” she said. “Take it easy. I’m doing all right, really.” She would feel much worse knowing that her family issues were impacting someone else. “You’ve got your own problems,” she said. “Don’t worry about me so much.”

“My problem is that I’m pathetic,” I told her. “Compared to what you’re going through, it’s nothing.”

Mizuhara didn’t like the sound of that. She shot me an irritated look, and she insisted we change the subject. “You seem to be on top of schoolwork these days,” she observed, considering that my friends were behind. “Are classes going well?”

I was a little confused that she’d want to talk about that, but I tried to go with it. I’d never been the best student, but I was better than average at business stuff. My parents had trained me to take over the family business, after all, and while Grandma would be disappointed with anything short of top marks, I thought I was doing well enough to prove I could handle it when the time came, at least from an academic perspective. I wasn’t so sure about dealing with customers and suppliers, and I knew there was a lot more to running a business than just knowing what paperwork to fill out, how to organize schedules, and so on. Still, if you know business law and regulations, at least the government can’t come in and kick your ass.

She thought that was a smart approach. “A lot of people underestimate the power of the law,” she observed, and it was the same in her major. There had been a lot of cases in the last few decades concerning intellectual property and copyright, and as someone who wanted to be in performing arts, she couldn’t ignore that. Other people in her degree program didn’t see it that way. They wanted to focus on great works of literature or film. They would be cultured, but they would know nothing about how to survive making art in the real world. “I bet it’s the same for your major, isn’t it?” she said, putting her fork down to talk without food getting in the way. “People want to get rich or start an empire and don’t want to deal with the boring details of corporate law.”

I hadn’t looked at it that way, but I thought she was right… and yet I had a hard time saying so. The whole situation was weird. There I’d been, worrying about Mizuhara, and all of the sudden she’d moved to sit across from me, and we were talking about school like what, typical students? Sure, sometimes we made conversation about stuff like that on our dates. We’d talked about her job when when we went on the Ferris wheel at Tokyo Dome City, but this was the first time we’d had such a casual conversation while not on a date or on our balconies.

It was weird–a good weird. Mizuhara seemed relaxed, even amused? It was a side I rarely got to see of her, as she talked about show business and the practical aspects of it, from accountants to agents, from the film crew to the cast. Despite her cool exterior, she showed an unmistakable passion for movie-making. She even got a little angry about some crew members being unappreciated. “You know,” she said, “people pay attention to some really great costumes on popular shows, but even on a regular detective show, that stuff matters! You have to get police uniforms right down to the last decoration. Nobody gives wardrobe real credit for that.”

I looked back at her with a stunned face, and she backed off in embarrassment.

“Sorry, I got carried away…”

“No!” I said. “Don’t be sorry. I like hearing about that.”

She frowned. “You do?”

“It feels like on our dates, I’m always monopolizing your time. You should be able to talk about what you want to now. I’m not a client here.”

Mizuhara considered that seriously. “That’s true…” she said, sounding unconvinced at first, but after thinking about it for a moment, she picked up where she left off. “I really think people don’t appreciate that for props, either, unless it’s for sci-fi or fantasy or period pieces. You know what I mean?”

I didn’t exactly, but I was happy to listen. It was a part of her I didn’t get to see much—“Ichinose” the… film nerd? With those glasses and her overall look, you could actually see all that fitting the stereotype.

If someone had seen us talking, maybe I wouldn’t have seemed out of place, sitting with her. She might’ve looked like she was even enjoying herself, and maybe someone would mistake us for friends.

Or maybe it didn’t just look that way?

As I listened to Mizuhara talk more about filmmaking, I felt a little hope. If we could talk like that one day, why couldn’t we do that more often? Could we be friends like that? I never would’ve thought so before, but maybe there was a chance. This was something I could never pay for and expect to receive.

Of course, that’s why it had to end quickly. Two girls came up around the table, and one of them slapped her hands down on Mizuhara’s shoulders. “What’s this, Chizuru?” said the one with the ponytail. “You talking to a guy?”

Mizuhara looked as white as a sheet. “Yoko, Yuuki? What are you doing back so soon?”

“That’s the first question out of your mouth?” said the girl with the ponytail. “Looks like we interrupted something juicy—oh!” That was the first time she really looked at me. “It’s you!”

It was me. We’d all gone out drinking for Mizuhara’s birthday. The girl with the ponytail Yoko Shinbo, and their other friend—the one with the glasses and short hair—was Yuuki Kawanaka.

I wasn’t quite sure if Kawanaka and Shinbo had seen something at the party that I should be worried about. I didn’t remember much beyond throwing the drinking game and getting wasted. Mizuhara seemed anxious, but Shinbo didn’t seem concerned with that.

“Chizuru!” she said. “What are you doing? First you’re having lunch with a guy, which I’ve never seen you do unless you were handcuffed to a chair, and second, isn’t he the one who has a hot girlfriend?”

Mizuhara was aghast, frantically trying to explain it wasn’t what it looked like, but Shinbo and Kawanaka weren’t buying it. “I always thought she’d wake up one day,” said Kawanaka. “I didn’t think it would be to steal someone else’s man, but here we are!”

“It’s not like that,” Mizuhara said flatly, with an icy stare. “We’re just acquaintances having lunch.”

That’s right; we were just acquaintances. On campus, that’s all we were. I was an idiot to think otherwise. As long as we had our secrets to protect, Mizuhara would want to maintain a respectful distance. That was for the best, right? We had our own groups of friends anyway. There was no good reason for us to have a relationship at school.

“Come to think of it,” said the other girl, Kawanaka, “you’re with Sasapai and all of those guys, right? You’re a business major?”

Was she talking to me? I didn’t know what that was about, but the other girls seemed to understand. “What are you thinking, Yuuki?” asked Shinbo.

“Well, Sasapai said he couldn’t help us out, but maybe Kazuya can,” said Kawanaka.

Mizuhara’s eyes went wide. “There’s no way!” she cried. “He’s got a lot going on, and he has a prior engagement this weekend. There’s no chance of it.”

Shinbo shot Mizuhara a suspicious look. “Really? You two have been talking a lot if you know that much about his personal life.”

Mizuhara didn’t know what to say to that, so I had to bail her out. I cleared my throat. “Uh, what’s all this about?” I asked.

“It’s simple,” said Shinbo. “We’re doing some volunteer work to help out a local library with a book drive.” That’s what she and Kawanaka had been doing over lunch. They’d been talking with the student government about trying to spread the word, but they’d been shot down right away. That’s why they’d come back so soon for lunch, surprising Mizuhara. Shinbo had asked our group of friends about it already, but all of them had said no. It’d even been in the LINE chat too, but I’d been too busy to read it all the way through, considering everything that was going on with Mizuhara’s grandma.

“What do you say, Kazuya?” asked Kawanaka. “We could really use some help. You could put it on your resume, and it might be practical team management experience, too.”

Though she wouldn’t say a word, Mizuhara looked straight ahead, and her eyes were screaming no. That was the smart choice. If I stuck around, I could be a nuisance to her.

But…

“What would you need me to do?” I asked.

“Uh, maybe we could explain later?” said Shinbo. “Yuuki and I need to grab a quick bite. The four of us can grab dinner somewhere after classes, and we can talk.”

“The four of us?” I echoed. I looked at Mizuhara, but she wouldn’t look back at me. “Mi—ah, Ichinose is involved, too?”

Shinbo grinned. “She is, as a matter of fact. The book drive is all Chizuru’s idea.”

Mizuhara eyed me anxiously, still on full alert, but I was already sure of my decision.

“I’ll do it,” I said. “Just tell me where I need to be.”