Heart-Pounding Cultural Festival (8)
"Step onstage, and the world changes."
At first she thought he was joking.
"Doesn't matter if it's big or small. Up there is a completely different world from the one we live in day to day."
Tae-il had laid it on thick, saying you might as well call it another world. Inwardly, she had scoffed at the phrasing. She took it for a joke salted with exaggeration, something meant to scare the members who had never stood on a stage.
Tae-il didn't back down. He kept describing the stage as he himself had felt it.
"Everyone's looking at me."
As he said it, he thrust forward the arms he had kept drawn in, then slowly spread them wide to either side.
"Dozens of people. No—hundreds. And maybe that turns into thousands, or tens of thousands."
Numberless gazes poured toward a single point, thick as stars strewn across the sky. At the far end of where those gazes pointed stood you yourself, with nothing to hide behind.
"You've all had to present from the podium in class at least once, right?"
Tae-il asked it with only his head turned back toward the members, grinning as if he were savoring some pleasant memory.
"It's worse than that."
"Ugh..."
Ayane was the only one the explanation actually frightened.
This was Tales Tale, after all. Naturally, there wasn't a single normal person in the band.
Sakuya, if anything, wore a challenging smile.
"Hearing you talk like that just makes me look forward to it more. I may not look it, but I'm used to the spotlight. I'm the type who gets stronger when it counts."
"Same."
Rena meant it. She wasn't afraid of the stage in the slightest. In her prime, interview clips of her had turned up on the regular news as casually as people ate. Step outside without a guardian and the crowds would hound her, just like a celebrity. She had already taken her shot against all that, and the world did not scare her. What she feared, more than the world of the stage itself, was her own mistakes. The fallout that would follow if she slipped was something she didn't dare imagine.
But the moment she actually climbed up onto the stage, even she had to admit it.
Yeah. It really is different.
The eye level was different. Even from the drums, set relatively far back, Rena felt every last gaze as if she were standing there naked. Gazes that sized her up and nothing more. Gazes laced with curiosity, sneering at what some art brat was doing in that spot. Hostile gazes steeped in anger and resentment. Perhaps it was the karma of having shoved the people around her away so hard. Unlike Sakuya and Iris, who had drawn small cheers from the moment they took the stage, Rena was followed by no looking that had any fondness mixed in.
Shin...
The only gaze that looked at her warmly, like the sun, belonged to Tae-il alone.
Thump.
As if arrhythmia had struck her, her pulse suddenly began to race. The sound of her swallowing and the pounding of her heart rang in her ears, using the human body called Honjo Rena as a vacuum tube.
Don't tell me I'm... nervous?
The moment she recognized the shift inside her, her breathing fell apart and grew short on its own. She bit down on her lip. Then her hands and feet began to shake, ignoring every order from her brain. Rena clenched, forcing strength through every limb until they locked. Heat climbed in her.
Gripping her sticks, she watched Tae-il at the edge of the stage, trading notes with a student from the broadcast club. She didn't want to look, and yet her eyes slipped naturally past his shoulder.
She could see them. In the dark, only people's eyes shone, clear and bright. Her mind was bleached pure white. A blank. Unable to think of anything at all, she was simply overwhelmed.
And then, suddenly, the line Tae-il had added at the very end came back to her.
"Do you let the audience overwhelm you, and end it there."
Or—
"Do you turn it around and overwhelm them."
He had said that was the only verdict that divided the people who stepped onto a stage.
Is that really how it is?
Rena fixed her gaze on Tae-il.
"Something wrong, Rena?"
Tae-il, who had been checking something with a hand on the synth, seemed to feel her eyes. He lifted his head and came over.
"It's nothing."
Rena pressed the tip of a stick into her throbbing forehead, kneading at it, and slowly shook her head.
Tae-il blocked her view. Hostile gazes and all, his presence cut her off from the world beyond the stage. The heartbeat that had lost its tempo and been hammering wild as a brawler found its own pace again in an instant.
"You're sure you're okay?"
Worried, Tae-il bent at the waist and studied the color of her face. His thumb traced her cheek. Rena caught it, ever so lightly, and brought it to her lips.
"Rena...?"
He flinched in surprise, and her front teeth grazed his nail. Rena bit down hard. In his wide, startled black eyes, her face was reflected, wearing an impish little smile.
Two, three, five, seven...
She closed her eyes and, for five seconds straight, counted the primes she used to settle herself. Then Rena opened her eyes again.
"Yeah. Thanks to you, I just calmed all the way down. Thanks, Shin."
"Huh...?"
"I'm counting on you for the real stage next time, too. That's fine, right?"
"Uh..."
Tae-il trailed off and snuck a glance around. The back of his head prickled—not from the gazes shot up from below the stage, but from the ones his bandmates were sending, sharp and stinging as a blade of wind.
Even so.
"All right. If that's what loosens you up, I'll do the same thing then."
He nodded, letting out a thin sigh.
"Pfft—hehe!"
Rena laughed, bright and unguarded, and softly laid his hand against her cheek.
"Sorry. And thank you."
"..."
He saw the smile. The kind he had only ever glimpsed, and only for a moment, through the original story—the kind that had never once existed in reality. His lips parted before he knew it. There was a brief hesitation. Then Tae-il answered, smiling as brightly as he could, as if to cover the undignified moment from a second ago.
"Don't mention it."
The moment you step onstage, the world changes.
"Whoa..."
The view opened wide. Iris, who had come up first and alone and now stood proudly before the standing mic, looked down past the lip of the stage as if the sight were something new. Everyone was looking at her.
She understood, dimly, the feelings those many-colored gazes held. Admiration, and expectation. What they felt was very much like what she had always received from the elders of her family.
Why?
Unable to make sense of it, she blinked stupidly. While she was distracted by the audience, Tae-il—the last of them to take the stage—came over.
"So. How does it feel, standing on the stage we're about to play, Princess?"
"I still can't really tell..."
Everything felt dazed and unreal. Iris lowered her head and twirled a lock of her hair around her index finger.
"Figured."
As if to say he knew the feeling exactly, Tae-il gave her shoulder a light pat.
"First, switch that mic on."
"O-okay."
She flipped the heavy power switch, and a faint magnetic field tingled at her fingertips along with a low whine.
Ah. Ah. Mic test.
"Waaah!"
She had only brought her mouth to the mic and let out the smallest voice, and yet a small but unmistakable answer rose from below. Her fingertips twitched. She glanced at Tae-il as if she had done something wrong.
"Can you check the volume across the board?"
"Yes, we can."
"Everyone, once I count, play slowly for ten seconds! Oh—and Yuuya-senpai, just give the strings a rough pluck!"
"L-like this...?"
"Yes! Just keep that going for ten seconds!"
Tae-il was talking with a member of the broadcast club, only his fingers resting on the mic.
Ah...
A thick disappointment settled over her at the simple fact that his eyes were turned toward someone else.
Tok.
The moment his finger tapped the mic, playing rose behind her, locked to the beat she heard. Ten seconds. A short span, and yet a stretch of time like an eon. Feeling the air tremble, she clenched her fist without realizing it, ignoring the countless gazes pinned to her face.
"Speaker sound's all right, yeah?"
"Yes. Our engineer says this level is just right. Any higher and it'll start to tear."
"Um, about the acoustic guitar piece I asked about separately..."
"Ah! Teacher Asakura told me. That's fine to do later, after everyone's gone."
"Yes! Thank you!"
At the club member's permission, Tae-il clenched a fist, wearing the look of someone who had pulled it off.
"Then could we check the keyboard now? This one's a little quieter than the other instruments..."
"Of course."
Tae-il moved. A ruby-red gaze followed his figure the way a duckling follows its mother. He pressed the keys and checked the sound, starting from a familiar piano melody and moving through guitar tones and all sorts of other patches. There was no launchpad set aside. Rigging one piece by piece took far too long; even on a school stage, covering someone else's part was outside his domain.
"Nice."
Tae-il raised a hand and flashed an okay. The broadcast club member below the stage nodded and muttered into a phone.
"Today's rehearsal really is nothing. What a letdown."
Sakuya, who had been standing there blankly ever since the sound check, whined as if she were bored and casually played some guitar line or other.
"Kyaaah!"
"Sakuya-nee! Look over here!"
Perhaps because the one playing was Sakuya, there were more than a few people glad to hear even that.
"Haha!"
She winked as if to pay the response back and played with a touch of exaggeration, and the cheers swelled louder still. Too loud. Iris wrinkled her face and turned her back on the audience.
Just then Tae-il, finished with the light sound check, was for some reason walking toward Rena.
"Rena-chan...?"
Her vision went hazy. When she narrowed her eyes, she could see Tae-il bent at the waist, trading a tender few words with Rena. Iris took one step to the side. The two of them, hidden until now behind his back, came into clear view.
Rena smiled and gave his finger a light bite. There was shyness in it, and a look that felt like happiness. Tae-il was flustered. But before long, just as he always did, he forgave her with an expression that said there was nothing to be done about it, affection poured in to the brim. Whatever could possibly be so delightful, the two of them smiled at each other, just the two of them.
Inside her fist, her thumb scraped along her fingers—and with a sharp pop, it jutted free.
Cheep, cheep. Through the window left open, the homey chirping of birds came in. Tae-il opened his eyes, just barely.
"Morning..."
He cleared his cracked voice with a cough and turned his head. The weight and the warmth that had come to occupy his left arm, or his right—something he was used to by now—were nowhere to be felt.
"They've already left for school..."
For Ayane, a member of the morals committee, today was an unusually busy day. Today was the very day of the long-awaited Yuuma High School Cultural Festival. So much so that even Sakuya had agreed to skip the morning workout, telling Tae-il to get plenty of rest.
He sat bolt upright. After months of being put through the wringer by Sakuya, opening his eyes in the morning had grown fairly familiar.
"Shower..."
It was a day with a stage on it. Whatever anyone said, Tae-il was a member of Tales Tale too. He had to look as put-together as he could manage. He gathered underwear and clothes from the closet and headed down the stairs.
A trickle ran from the showerhead. He spaced out, waiting for the cold water to warm.
"Haaahm."
He dumped the water over his head, felt the weight of it, and started wondering whether it was about time he cut his hair. Once he had washed himself clean from head to toe, he slathered his face with the lotion and the skincare Sakuya had left him as a gift.
"Ugh, this feels so weird..."
At the sticky touch against his skin, Tae-il shuddered. He didn't particularly want to put anything on his face, but if he skipped it Sakuya would get angry, so he had no choice. Even while making his displeasure perfectly obvious, he was working the products in with care when something caught at his fingertips.
A beard. Nothing but peach fuzz, but hair had started coming in along his chin.
"Whoa."
Faced with a beard you could barely notice unless you touched it, he felt his age all over again. Idly fiddling with down that was nothing but fuzz, he was suddenly struck by an extremely trivial thought.
"Should I try growing a beard, like Yahiro-hyung...?"
Every man, at least once, looks up to a man who wears a beard well. Tae-il was no exception.
After he got to school, he brought the matter up with Yuuya in the animal husbandry club, which wasn't taking part in the Cultural Festival and was running on its ordinary schedule.
"No."
Yuuya answered flatly. In her hand was a syringe of nutrient solution for a lizard that had recently laid eggs, gone downhill, and wasn't feeding well.
"Absolutely not."
A squirt of pink fluid flicked from the needle's tip, unsettlingly bright.
"Senpai...?"
"Taichi. Answer. Now."
Wearing a severity he had never seen on her before, Yuuya thrust the blunt end of the plunger at him.
"I-I won't grow a beard..."
"Good."
Only after he declared he would not grow one did Yuuya smile, satisfied, and nod. Tae-il muttered, small and full of regret.
"Still, a beard looks cool on a guy..."
"Taichi?"
"I-I won't grow one!"
A beard. Thinking about it again, it was a shame. The feeling was written all over his face.
Hah.
Yuuya, fresh from force-feeding the animal, let out a sigh. Ridiculous. His bare face was cuter. She had no idea why he wanted to grow a beard.
If I see another sign of it, I'll have to talk to the girls...
She thought of the group chat she had recently been invited to. Even after Tae-il had caught them, they had refused to give up, and a chat visible only to the girl members had been made all over again. There had been no helping it. In the Tales Tale chat without him, conversations too raw to ever let him see had gone back and forth more than once.
Even so, lately the messages going back and forth have dropped off sharply...
Was it because, being the one in charge of filming, she always kept a third party's distance? Yuuya could see it. Everyone looked half out of their minds with Cultural Festival preparations. At a time like this, more than anyone, Tae-il—the pillar of the band—had to find his strength.
"Taichi."
"Yes?"
He had grown fairly close to the turtle Toto from feeding it so often, and he had been playing with it. The face he turned on her was one anyone could tell was sulking. Even the pout was cute. Thinking so, Yuuya hid the smile at her lips and cheered him on.
"Do your best at today's live. I'll be right up front, cheering with Teacher Asakura."
Startled by that, Tae-il soon curled the corner of his mouth into a grin.
"Yes. Look forward to it."