Heart-Pounding Cultural Festival (12)
The art room.
By now the place was as good as Tales Tale's hideout, and even in the thick of the Cultural Festival it kept a fair distance from the noise and clutter that defined the rest of the school. It had not, however, lost its liveliness.
The door opened. Kiriko stood caught on the border between clamor and quiet, hair soaked through despite the sharp chill—she must have run the whole way—and held out a tiered lunch box.
"Delivery complete."
"Thanks. Good work, Kiriko. Need a little spending money on the side?"
"You would be giving it to me?"
"Hey, hey. Look at this one. Name a single time I didn't."
"Hmm..."
For the record, she never actually had.
Kiriko shot a dubious glare at Iris, who was wearing an amiable smile, and let her eyes travel past her. She could feel it—the pitying looks Tae-il and a few of the others had turned on her.
Ah. So that's about how it went.
True to a first-rate attendant, her read on a room was viciously quick. She pressed her palms together, bowed her head like a monk, and offered her thanks.
"In that case, if the young lady would hand over her wallet, I shall withdraw a conscientious amount—"
"Get out."
Bang! With that flat order of eviction, Iris shut the art room door.
The back of her head prickled. She turned, and smiled as brightly as she could manage, as if nothing at all had happened.
"Hey, food's here! Let's eat! Rena-chan, you're starving, right? I put in a special request—tons of fried tofu!"
"This."
"Yeah. Exactly this."
A tacit agreement on the subject of Iris's character passed between the members.
Izumi stared, blank.
They're just like our band...
A band that slicked its way past anything with a little bluff. In that respect, and in plenty of others, they really were a lot like BARD.
"C-come on, let's eat! I'm getting hungry too! Ahaha!"
Iris, pricked by her own conscience, scurried back through the group to get the box open.
"Ta-da!"
She lifted the lid of a stack a full ten tiers high and opened them one by one, and gasps of admiration popped out from every side. Izumi was no exception. Faced with a dazzlingly lavish lunch—the likes of which she had not eaten even on tour—she could only marvel.
"You eat like this every day...?"
"No?"
Iris set the lid down as she denied it. Today's box was unusually extravagant for one reason alone: they had a live show.
Tae-il smiled, wry.
"Though, truthfully, even on an ordinary day it's quite lavish..."
"Is it?"
Iris tilted her head, mumbling around her chopsticks. Beside her, Sakuya—whose stomach had been growling for some time—wiped her mouth and smacked her lips.
"Ahaha! So what! Thanks to Iris, I can't even be satisfied with school-store bread anymore!"
"Is that a compliment...?"
"Iris, you know I love you a lot, right?"
"That is an awfully materialistic kind of love..."
At Sakuya's reaction, Iris laughed as if seeing her anew. Well, there was nothing wrong with it. These days Sakuya wiped the tiered box clean every single time, and the household staff had grown rather fond of her for it.
They spread a blanket on the floor, sat in a circle, and started in on the meal. At first, with an unfamiliar guest in the form of Izumi among them, everyone kept stealing glances at one another. The one who opened fire was Rena.
"Shin, get me some of that fried tofu over there."
"One sec."
Tae-il picked the fried tofu out of the side dish right in front of him and carried it over. He was about to set it on the small plate before her when—
"Hm?"
The plate quietly drew away from the chopsticks.
"Rena?"
He looked at her, puzzled, and she pointed with one finger at her own small mouth, opened in an ah.
"A-aah...?"
She snuck a glance at his face, then closed her eyes as well.
"Haha."
Tae-il smiled, thin and brief. Her porcelain cheeks had flushed pink; she was embarrassed herself, it seemed. Left with no choice, he slipped the fried tofu from his chopsticks into her mouth.
"Is it that good?"
"Mm."
Rena, cutely working the fried tofu around in her mouth, smiled with soft satisfaction. The joy was bigger than the embarrassment.
Seeing this, Ayane belatedly took up her chopsticks.
"Sh-Shin-chan! Want to try a meatball over here too? Aaah~."
"I can eat on my own..."
"Shin-chan, you're so dense!"
"Heh."
Rena laughed long and hard at Ayane's failure.
"Grrk...!"
Ayane ground her teeth and chomped, alone, into the meat she had failed to feed him. Tae-il, gauging the room, picked up a shrimp.
"Want this...?"
"Yeah!"
He held out the shrimp he had peeled himself, and Ayane beamed and leaned in.
"Not fair...!"
"Mmf—owahi—hahaha!"
"So annoying! What's this gloomy girl even saying!"
"Ayane. Chew it all the way through before you talk."
"Hmph!"
Ayane latched onto Tae-il, demanding another bite. Rena sat on his opposite side, shut out of the closeness Ayane could claim just by being beside him, and she thrust her lips out a mile all over again.
"Ugh, seriously...!"
Iris, who had been quietly watching the two of them wage their little war of nerves, spoke up as if the thought had just struck her.
"Oh, right. Shin Tae-il, when are we doing rehearsal?"
"Rehearsal? We'll probably have to head over the moment we finish eating. Our slot is last, but we're all first-years, so it feels a little awkward to take our time..."
Tae-il checked the time. Eat lunch, sprint over, knock out a short rehearsal, and the Eve Festival they had been waiting on would begin.
"Fifteen minutes per act is definite, right?"
"They said less is fine, too."
All it meant was that fifteen minutes was the longest you could spend on stage.
"Okay. So each team can roughly get through about three songs?"
"Yeah. So we're only doing exactly three, too."
"Three songs?"
Sakuya, who had already polished off an entire tier by herself, gulped down the mouthful she had been holding. Licking the sauce from her fingers, she held them up one by one, thumb to middle finger.
"Autumn Love Song, Sunshower, and what's the last one? Another BARD arrangement?"
"Uh..."
Tae-il trailed off and stole a glance at Iris, the one who shared the secret. She met his eyes and nodded—a gesture of permission. The time had come. He could go ahead and tell them everything.
"There's a song Iris and I decided to do. Just the two of us."
"What!?"
At the news that the two of them had a stage of their own, Ayane's discontent came out at once.
"How could you! So unfair, just Shin-chan and Iris...!"
"Hear, hear! Hear, hear!"
Leaving out the bass—a four-string guitar—she might have stomached. But Tae-il trying to shut out the guitarist too was galling enough that Sakuya quietly threw in with Ayane.
"S-sorry..."
Caught off guard by the unexpected revolt, he apologized on the spot.
"If I'd said we should prepare a full three songs, I was afraid it'd just burden you for no reason."
His crestfallen face looked genuinely sorry, and Sakuya quietly lowered her arm and went back to eating in silence.
"Yeah. Must've been rough, Shin."
"Pat, pat."
Not about to miss the opening, Rena and Izumi patted his shoulders side by side and comforted him. Iris, finding the whole thing too funny, spent the entire time grinning and watching. Thrown by a turn that poked at her guilt, Ayane floundered.
"E-even so...!"
"I'm really sorry. Covering songs that already exist is fine, but I wanted to win with a song that's ours."
A golden chance to make Tales Tale known to the world. And a stage on which to brand the name of Arisugawa Iris—a vocalist without equal—into people's heads.
For Iris's sake, too.
The star of this stage had to be Tales Tale, and it had to be Iris, their vocalist. Having sworn it to himself, Tae-il soothed Ayane.
"Instead, let's play as much as we want tomorrow."
"Tomorrow...?"
"It's not every day we get a cultural festival. It'd be a waste to practice ourselves half to death and never actually enjoy it."
Tae-il knew. Youth never came around a second time. He alone was the sole exception.
"Let's play tomorrow until we've had our fill. We couldn't even go to the summer festival, because I was in the hospital."
A guilty twinge. Izumi, the very culprit who had landed Tae-il in the hospital, quietly shrank into her shoulders.
"W-well. If it's like that..."
Ayane fidgeted with her index finger and smiled, shy.
"Is everyone free tomorrow?"
He asked it outright of the members who had been listening while pretending they weren't. Not a date for two. The instant they were sure it was all of Tales Tale going out together, they traded looks.
"I'm always free. Whether I'm in the classroom or not doesn't matter anyway."
"Same for me. If anything, I don't want to be in the classroom, because of Minato."
"I'm on the executive committee with Tae-il, so."
Iris, Rena, and then Sakuya each made a point, in turn, of announcing that they had time to spare. Tomorrow was a group outing. No exceptions.
Tae-il nodded, then looked at Izumi, who had been quietly picking at her lunch by herself.
"Will you be coming tomorrow as well, Izumi?"
"No."
She set her chopsticks down and shook her head. Every break, Izumi shut herself up in her lodgings the way Basara did. If she suddenly wandered around two days running with no warning, the agency would certainly find it suspicious. BARD might be a traditional band, nothing like an ordinary idol group, but a scandal still landed with fatal weight on a female artist. The Japanese entertainment industry had always been like that—setting the patriarchal part aside, oddly strict with women and comparatively lax with men. This tour's success had given BARD more of a voice, but the agency would still, without a doubt, stir up fresh trouble.
Drawing on her seniors' experience, Izumi was of the school that believed suspicion you could avoid was suspicion you should avoid. And so, to dodge it, she had decided to leave a comfortable gap of about a day.
"Instead, I'll definitely come to the Finale with the members."
"Haha. That's rather a lot of pressure..."
The Finale would not, he thought, differ so greatly from the Eve Festival. Even if it did, the difference would be felt more by the people on stage than by the crowd.
The pressure.
But it was also a pressure they would have to overcome someday, without fail.
"Thank you."
Tae-il bowed his head. However ample a break it might be, from BARD's perspective Tales Tale was little more than a newborn. And still they were willing to give up that precious time to come see the show with their own eyes.
"Sincerely."
He offered his thanks once more.
School bands. Bands that students form at school and enjoy, the light music club among them. The level varies wildly from one to the next—some soar hopelessly past anything you would expect of students, while others barely rise to a school-recital standard. And perhaps because they are bands thrown together by teenagers in the thick of it, their egos run unusually hot, and they fight more often than most. Gaps in skill between members only feed the discord. Even if one of them is exceptional, the live falls apart when the rest cannot cover the barest basics. Play together long enough, besides, and you come face to face with reality whether you want to or not.
The breed called bandmen is, surprisingly, quite good at seeing itself clearly.
And yet. Self-regard runs so strong that refusing to admit it—or simply looking the other way—is an everyday affair in this world.
"They're so fucking good. Shit..."
The leader of Unlogic Band, who had assumed Tales Tale was that kind of band too, ground his teeth and let his frustration burst. The playing was sloppy. But even that sloppiness, examined piece by piece, was plenty decent at a student level. Above all, the vocal. It boasted a skill on an entirely different plane from his own, and he was both vocalist and leader.
"This is cheating..."
Hashimoto flinched at the mutter, a sob tangled up in it. From the smartphone in his hand spilled a jaunty melody that made your shoulders want to jump on their own. The vocal riding it was sweet to an extreme—a clear, refreshing voice, the sort anyone would have dreamed of at least once. She knew who it belonged to. She had seen the TokTik video posted to the class LINE, the one asking whether this wasn't Arisugawa. Hashimoto planted her heels, which wanted to bounce, flat against the floor, and held her breath.
"Haa..."
The leader dropped his head and killed the video. Something in him had buckled. Hashimoto could feel his despair as if it were her own.
"And here I thought some nobody band was just going out there banking on their faces and their popularity..."
It wasn't that at all. He buried his face in both hands.
"Leader..."
"I'm sorry. Because of me, you guys are..."
A terrible imagining seized him. They blow the stage. His band sinks into a joke the other students tell.
"Sorry. I really shouldn't have signed us up..."
Seeing him writhing in self-reproach, the members jolted.
"N-no! It's thanks to you, Leader, that we found the courage to challenge a place like this!"
"That's right! Honestly, when are we ever going to get a chance like this again!"
"Yeah. It's a stage we're standing on someday anyway. Call it taking our licks a little early. Right?"
"Th-that's right! And joining the live wasn't the leader's call alone—we all chose it together!"
The last of the comforts was Hashimoto's.
"...Thanks."
The leader gripped his guitar tight. The band. He had started it purely because he wanted to be popular, but somewhere along the way he had gotten attached to playing guitar and to singing, more than he had expected. He had met good friends, too. He knew that getting to be in a band with good people was outrageous luck, and that was exactly why the guilt sat so heavy. It could become a wound big enough that he would never want to stand on a stage again.
But he got back up. As the youngest had said, going out for the Cultural Festival's Eve Festival had not been his decision alone. It had been something all of them agreed to.
His eyes went to Hashimoto. The girl who had comforted him a moment ago was shivering, small as a hamster, and fussing with her guitar.
"Thanks. And don't get too nervous, Hashimoto. Even if you mess up, I'll figure something out. I'm the leader."
"I-I'm fine!"
At his comfort, Hashimoto sucked a lungful of air and snorted it back out through her nose.
We just have to pull off a stage that's ours. There was no need to measure themselves against anyone else. They had chosen this path solely to enjoy the stage, and to leave a beautiful memory behind. So— even if it turned out to be the last time, let it be a performance with nothing to regret.
The trembling gradually ebbed. Warmth crept back into hands that had gone cold, and shoulders drawn tight with tension loosened.
"L-let's go rehearse—!"
Her voice split. A squeak with her whole soul behind it, from the youngest, who had packed in far too much fighting spirit.
"Pfft—!"
"H-Hashimoto, you—snrk!"
The air, taut with nerves, went slack in an instant, and laughter crowded in from every side.
"D-don't laughhhh!"
The hands of the clock moved. The moment of the Eve Festival, when not a single participant could help but be nervous, came on in long strides.