Prologue
You are the protagonist of your life.
Have you ever heard words like that?
Hard work, grit, friendship. Those things and whatever else you care to name, and there is nothing in this world you cannot do—or so they say, delivering the splendid lines of heroes who have leapt, with equal splendor, over hardship and adversity.
To people like that—to those protagonists—the rest of us, the ones who never became the hero, have something to say.
Go to hell.
I once believed I could become one of them. That I could refuse to give up on my dreams. That I could hold my course no matter what anyone said. That I could live a life in which someone precious told me to hang in there.
A protagonist sits at the top of the food chain. Beneath their feet are the ones who wanted to be protagonists—no, who never could be. The rabble. The extras. The kind of disposable classmates you see in games, the ones who don't even get a name—Classmate A, and other such ordinary nobodies.
Standing before that obvious order of things, why did I ever think I alone would be the exception?
By the time I understood, it was already far too late. As if to prove that regret, no matter how early it arrives, is always late. I had come to find myself utterly, bitterly repulsive.
What am I living for?
When I asked myself that, I no longer had an answer left to give.
I wanted, even for a moment, to forget the ache that felt ready to burst from my chest. Without a word, I wandered through the rain of a dawn downpour, going nowhere in particular. I was carrying an umbrella. I did not open it. I wanted the rain to hurt me—wanted anything that might turn my eyes, even a little, away from the misery inside.
I think I was searching for something. Or perhaps thirsting is the better word. A life made of nothing but failure was no different from a baseball game in the bottom of the ninth, down by ten runs. Laying down a careful sacrifice bunt in a situation like that would mean nothing. I was vaguely hoping for something—something that could close the gap of every failure until now, something that would affirm that I existed. Something that would make everything up to this point make sense.
—As if anything like that could ever exist.
When I came back to myself, there was a girl in front of me.
Even in rain this heavy, she had no umbrella. She stood soaked through, staring in silence at a cat inside a cardboard box.
I thought I was seeing things. At an hour like this, in weather like this, I had not imagined for a second that any other oddball besides me would be out wandering. But the black hair plastered wet against her head, the eyes that held a glint of red, the face with something running down it—rain or tears, I couldn't tell—all of it was unmistakably real.
"…You're completely soaked."
Why did I say it? Before I could even think of a reason, my mouth and my hand moved on their own. But no answer came. She must not have expected anyone to speak to her. As if she only belatedly registered that a reply was required, she slowly turned her head and simply stared at me, dazed and silent.
The eyes that met mine looked so full of sorrow that the contents might spill over at any second. At least, that was how I saw them. I was probably wearing the same eyes myself.
"It's all right," she said at last, slowly. "No one will care what happens to me anyway."
It was a sentence no ordinary person could ever have spoken—a voice and a pair of eyes that were certain no one in the world would spare her a thought. Looking at her, I felt it all over again, sharp and absolute.
Reality really was a miserable bastard, and nothing more.
The falling rain. The solitude spilling over. And in the middle of it, we met.