A Certain Emotion (4)
There were a few reasons I was set on going back to school.
The first was that staying holed up here any longer seemed bound to complicate things in any number of ways. The police were already stationed around the orphanage, and reporters who had caught the scent were starting to loiter nearby. The police I could live with, but leaving those reporters to their own devices left a bad taste in my mouth. My thinking was that if we went out and about, at least some of that attention might be scattered elsewhere.
That said, if we truly wandered off to just anywhere, that would tangle up our movements in its own way.
The second reason... this was something I had already turned over in my mind any number of times: I didn't want the magical girls' lives derailed any further because of me. All right, they were already derailed as thoroughly as they could be, but I had no intention of letting them tangle up worse from here. The government might even come along offering, in the name of our convenience, to count every missed class day as attended—but if anything, that would only snarl the situation further. At the very least, showing that we had the will to attend school seemed the better option—or so I concluded, after stretching my brief deliberations out as far as they would go.
Fortunately, my uniform was still there.
The other girls' uniforms—
"Um..."
By the time I had finished changing, the orphanage caregiver was peeking her face into our room. A flicker of surprise had risen to her expression. As it turned out, a package had arrived in front of the orphanage. Inside were school uniforms—the uniforms of the other magical girls staying in our room.
"They really do seem to be going out of their way for us," Dalia said, taking a uniform in hand with a somewhat conflicted look.
The uniforms were brand new. And apparently in the name of fairness, my own was in there too. I didn't exactly feel grateful, but I put it away in my closet all the same.
Come to think of it, once we started staying here, they would have arrived at the possibility soon enough. The police had been posted around this area the whole time, so they would know the magical girls hadn't gone home. And since they couldn't know what we were thinking, they seemed to be trying to soothe us by, quite literally, covering every base at once.
I stared for a moment at the girls, all dressed in their uniforms.
"What? Is something wrong?" Hayun asked, a touch hesitantly. To be honest, it did feel a bit looser than her old uniform. The previous one had fit her body perfectly, but this batch seemed to have been sized by eye, since no one could be sure of the exact measurements.
But that didn't mean it looked strange.
"Nothing. It's just... it's been a while since I've seen you like this," I answered honestly.
We had attended school together for so long that, in truth, the stretch of time I hadn't seen Hayun in her uniform wasn't all that long. And yet, somehow, that was how it felt. Maybe time spent struggling simply stretches on longer.
That went double for the other magical girls, Hayun aside. We had hardly ever crossed paths at school before. Thinking back, even though we'd gotten quite friendly in our magical girl outfits, I could barely recall ever seeing them hang out together at school.
"Whew." Rose heaved a deep sigh. "Our attendance record... that won't be a problem, right?"
"How could it not be a problem?" Dalia shot back, as if the question were absurd.
"Still, I don't think it's anything like expulsion or suspension..."
"...We've skipped out mid-class a few times before, so that much should be fine," Delphinium added primly to Dalia's remark. But even as she said it, her expression wasn't one of complete conviction.
As for Jua, her face had gone deathly pale, as if only now was the worry about school catching up to her. Every last bit of it had happened because of me, so I couldn't bring myself to offer a word of comfort. If things between us were still awkward, like in the early days after we ran away, I might at least have been spared the guilt. But knowing how strangely Jua had been clinging to me lately, the guilt hit that much harder.
"Well then, shall we go?" At my words, the girls nodded.
I had decided to put off worrying about how we'd get to school, but when we stepped outside the orphanage, a police van was already waiting. Seeing the word POLICE plastered across its side in letters big as a barn door made me feel strange. It wasn't as if we were being hauled off in custody.
"...There's no need to worry, miss." The words came after I had been staring fixedly at the driver's face. I let out a long sigh.
"Jieun."
I was hesitating a little about climbing into the van when I heard my name called from behind. I turned to find Jihye looking straight at me. She pulled me into a tight embrace. "Have a good day at school," she whispered softly.
"...Yeah," I whispered back into her ear.
The moment Jihye let go, the warmth that had been seeping into me just moments before plummeted, and my mood turned sour all over again. In the end, I heaved a sigh and climbed into the van.
It looked like this would be our commute for as long as we stayed here. I had no desire to share a packed train or bus with reporters squeezing in alongside us. And if anyone tried to abduct us, well—we could always tear the van apart. I could only hope the police would do a decent job of protecting Jihye on her way to her own school.
The atmosphere shifted the moment we set foot on school grounds.
If I had to sum up the looks that used to be aimed at me in a single word, I would have said envy. Hayun was a popular girl. Even if that popularity carried the air of watching a celebrity—the kind where people tallied up all sorts of conditions before daring to approach her—the looks of admiration she drew were simply unavoidable. An only daughter born into a wealthy family, and a magical girl under the Federation's protection. It would be stranger if people so pleased with themselves didn't envy her.
But at the same time, Hayun's personality made her perfect trophy material. She couldn't turn people down, and she couldn't bring herself to say a harsh word to anyone—there was no helping it. I hated seeing her treated that way, and so I lived my life thoroughly blocking the kids around her. The jealousy aimed at Hayun had transferred onto me—someone with no backing of my own who still got to be close with her. Being Hayun's friend meant only a handful of kids a year dared bully me openly, but it also made making friends of my own an awkward business.
Not that it mattered much. I... was content being close with Hayun alone.
...Huh.
"..."
"Jieun?" I had stopped dead in the middle of the path, sunk deep in thought, and Hayun tilted her head as she looked back at me.
Looking at her, I paused to consider. Could it be that I, too, had treated Hayun as a kind of trophy? That I had simply enjoyed the view of being friends with a magical girl—
—No, thinking it over again, that didn't seem right either. I had been jealous of her, and my becoming a combatant was what started all of this—but even so, the way I liked Hayun was never as a 'trophy.'
Without another word, I walked over and stood beside her. For some reason, Hayun's face flushed faintly and she dropped her gaze.
Why? This was baffling in its own right. This was the girl who bathed with me in the same place, who brazenly wrapped her arms around me from behind while I slept. Just yesterday she had confidently hugged my back even with Jihye in my arms. ...Okay, putting it that way makes the whole thing sound stranger than it is. Either way, her pulling this only now was beyond me.
Rose brushed past us on her way into the school, flashing me a grin. Something about it felt like teasing over the mood between me and Hayun, and it made my chest tighten with irritation. Dalia and Delphinium, for whatever reason, hurried on ahead with red faces too.
"I-I'm just..." Jua began, starting to move ahead of us, when she suddenly seemed to make up her mind about something—her face hardened with resolve—and she stopped, falling in beside me instead, walking shoulder to shoulder. The already strange atmosphere grew stranger still. I could feel the gazes of the kids around us converging on our group. And those looks were not the envy and jealousy I was used to.
Bewilderment. Somehow, the bewilderment I felt walking in the middle of it all was, for some reason, being felt in much the same way by the students of this school.
In the end, without exchanging another word, we walked the whole way to our classroom. For the record, whatever on earth Jua had been thinking, she tried to follow us into our classroom, then bolted back outside in a start. ...Or maybe it wasn't that she had been thinking anything—maybe it was that she wasn't thinking at all.
There was no way I could focus on class.
My desk wasn't buried in dust, at least—apparently whoever cleaned the classroom hadn't skipped my spot. The problem was that the opening pages of the textbooks I'd left in my desk were far too clean. We had gone off on our journey before the semester had properly found its stride. A brief, sobering wave of clarity washed over me. This term's grades were, in all likelihood, doomed. Come to think of it, the midterms were already as good as lost.
It was already late April. Midterms were right around the corner. Even if I started studying now, how many questions could I really answer, having lost an entire semester? That was the kind of thing money could smooth over, but watching my footing shake was still a bitter pill. A childish thought flickered through me—maybe I should have just held out and stayed away until midterms were over—before I glanced over at Hayun.
"..." She looked every bit as flustered as I felt. Well, no matter how close to genius her mind might be, she couldn't solve problems with no information to draw on. However large a storage drive's capacity, if nothing has been saved to it, there's nothing to see when you look inside. It had to be worse for the third-years. ...Maybe skipping the whole year outright, the way they'd suggested, really would have been kinder.
But ready or not, class went on. The teacher who entered glanced warily at Hayun and me, once each, then—perhaps deciding it was best not to poke the hornet's nest—began the lesson. The classroom had a slightly unsettled air, but the class proceeded normally all the same.
I listened as hard as I could. Perhaps because the material connected somewhat with what I'd learned the year before, it wasn't completely failing to sink in. Thank goodness I had studied hard back then. Hayun seemed to be the same; the longer the class went on, the more the sparkle gradually returned to her eyes.
Well, whatever. Whether we had wanted to come back or not, we were back at school. In that case, all that was left was to give it our best. There was no reason to think otherwise, was there? That, at least, was how I had always lived.
But Hayun's mind, it seemed, was on something a little different.
"Want to step out for a bit?" I suggested to Hayun at lunchtime. It wasn't only an invitation to go eat, of course. Since morning there had been kids sneaking glances at us, sizing up when to wedge themselves in, and both Hayun and I found it a little uncomfortable. Whenever I made that kind of suggestion at lunch, Hayun always accepted readily, and today was much the same.
But the mood was a little off. There had been that moment on the way to school when Hayun had flushed and avoided my eyes, and she was doing it again now. And I found myself disliking the sight, somehow—though it was hard to say exactly why.
Come to think of it, this was actually how Hayun used to carry herself at school. Even before we had grown this close, she had walked along beside me demurely, keeping a slight distance. If I ever linked arms with her, her face would go red, so I assumed it made her somewhat uncomfortable and stopped doing such things except when absolutely necessary. But weren't the us of now different from the us of back then? I know it's an odd way to put it after everything we've been through, but we had been living in the same space this whole time—and we still were.
Hayun already clung to me every single night. She would bury her face against my back or my chest, pin me down with both arms, and wedge her legs between mine so I couldn't so much as twitch—leaving me nowhere to run. And now, of all times, this? Seeing her act this way in front of others sat strangely wrong with me. And I'll say it again: I don't really know why it bothers m—
...
No, fine—to put it bluntly, I simply missed Hayun's physical contact, that was all. And on top of that, watching her still tiptoe around other people's feelings at school just made my blood boil.
We finished eating quickly and made our way around to the back of the school building. It wasn't a spot you could call pretty, even as a lie. Our school walls were quite high, and naturally there was nothing much between the wall and the building. It wasn't that there were no windows on this side, but a few spots had piles of clutter stacked up in front of them, so this stretch had a strangely severed feel, cut off from the rest of the school. A few people had gone out of their way to drag me out to this space before, too. Every one of them got a solid lesson from me for it.
"What's wrong?" I had meant to open with something a little kinder, but my incorrigible temper chose this exact moment to floor the accelerator. "Hm?" See? Even Hayun's thrown off. Sensing the displeasure in my voice, her head snapped up, her face a little flushed.
I stepped close and rested a hand against her forehead. She did seem... warm, but not seriously so. If anything, it was less an illness than the heat of a face flushing from emotion alone. I lowered my hand and asked. "Why have you been keeping your distance all of a sudden, since this morning?"
"D-distance?" Had she really not noticed—that it was unconscious? I took a step toward Hayun. Flustered, she backed up a step. "You're doing it right now." I stepped closer again, and she retreated another. "Keeping this distance between us. Just last night you were sleeping glued to me like that, remember? And now that we're at school, this?"
Right. What bothered me was Hayun suddenly caring about the other kids' gazes, now of all times. I suppose being self-conscious couldn't be helped. Footage of Hayun glued to my side had already aired on TV, after all. Still, there was a world of difference between doing that in front of people who knew us and doing it in front of strangers as some kind of public declaration. But still. So which one was real? The Hayun who clung to me without a care even in front of others, or the Hayun who read the room and drifted away in front of a crowd? I knew this wasn't the time to be sorting that out, but seeing it with my own eyes made it impossible not to care.
"I-I just..." Thud. Hayun's back met the wall. I leaned my face in close to hers, the way we had in front of that abandoned house. "Was that vow you made back then not meant to last? Does it end the moment we leave that place?"
"Wh-what? Jieun?"
"Or was it just a lie?" Hayun shook her head at my words. "Then why?"
Slowly, the further the words went, the lower my mood sank—and the 'reason' surfaced. I hate this school. I had come this far because I didn't want to abandon the small things I had built here, because I didn't want to cause trouble for the orphanage, because I didn't want to hand the magical girls who trailed after me an even bigger problem—but hating it was still hating it. Given my personality I wouldn't run away, but I would probably never come to miss this place as some cherished 'alma mater.' That was why it stung all the more. The single biggest reason I had come to hate it here was the kids who attended—and I couldn't stand watching Hayun keep her distance from me out of concern for them.
"Why do you keep pulling away like that?" My circuit was turning. I didn't need to look to know. It was probably black.
"I-I..." Hayun spoke between ragged breaths. A light sheen of sweat had formed on her face. "I was... afraid you'd start hating me."
"Hating you?" When I tilted my head and echoed the word back, Hayun went on. "Yeah. Yesterday, I mean—every time you were with Jihye, you two were... so close together. I started wondering if my clinging to you was actually bothering you."
I said nothing, just looked at Hayun. Then I planted one hand against the wall beside her face.
I leaned in and said, "And you're the one saying that? You, who even kissed me on the cheek?"
"...I-I'm sorry," Hayun murmured. But somehow, her face looked like it was smiling.
"..."
That smile nagged at me in a strange way, but whatever.
"So it's not that you're worried about those kids, then."
"Those kids?"
"The ones in our class."
"No." On that point, Hayun's denial was firm.
I gave a shrug and stepped back. Hayun let out a long breath, and I felt it wash over me. "Th-then, Jieun." She said it with her hands clasped in front of her chest, watching my reaction. "It's okay if we link arms and walk around like that at school, right?"
"...Have I ever once said I hated that?" When I shot back incredulously, Hayun shook her head quickly. "...Do as you like. Actually, do exactly that. And from now on, stop minding those kids."
The reason I had fought would be gone. So would the reason I... stayed pressed to her side like that. Hayun smiled shyly again. It was a slightly different smile from the one she had shown me that morning.