Chapter 5.8
“I told you—I’m fine!” I say through an exasperated little laugh.
Her eyes narrow.
“I’m…” I try to think of something better to add but can only come up with “I’m not sick.” Wow. Super helpful, Sakuragi.
Hina-chan studies me for another second.
Nods.
“Okay.”
A beat.
“Good.”
Her arms tighten across her chest.
“Then what the hell was that?”
I jump at the sudden sharpness, and before I know it, my hands are up in a placating position.
“I’m so sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to be in there for that long.”
“Toji?”
“And I should have seen your friends off,” I try next. “That was really rude of me.”
“Toji?!”
“And I’m sorry for—”
“Toji!”
“Huh? What?”
“It wasn’t any one thing, okay? You’ve just been, like, really weird all day!”
“…‘Weird’?”
“Rude, Toji. You’ve been really rude all day.”
“What? When was I rude?”
Hina-chan’s eyes narrow slightly.
“You really wanna do this?” she asks.
“I really do.”
She starts counting on her fingers.
“You forgot both my friends’ names, you walked out on everyone twice, AND—lest we forget—you were a huge jerk to Miu-tan!”
“…Kurokawa-san? But… I already apologized for that. To her.”
“Oh, don’t even try,” she says. “I can smell your bullshit from the next town over.”
“Okay, you’re right, that wasn’t a sincere apology. But I’m still not really convinced I did anything wrong, so—”
“You were rude to her during our conversation!”
“I wasn’t rude! If anything, she was rude to me by asking me all those weird questions!”
“It’s called ‘talking’, Toji. It’s how you get to know people. Do you know how Miu-tan and I met?”
“By… talking?”
“Yes. We were both friends with Morita-san, and it led to us becoming friends, too. By talking to each other.”
“Yeah, but that’s…”
“It’s what?”
“You’re, like,… both girls! Do you want me to go around making friends with a bunch of girls?”
That one trips her up for a moment.
“Well… okay, there would be a line,” she says. “Especially with my friends. But there’s a line in the other direction too, and you definitely crossed it tonight!”
“Well… I’m sorry. I just… don’t really like her.”
“And that’s fine,” Hina-chan says. “You don’t have to like all of my friends. But you also can’t just be rude to everyone you don’t like—we’re not in kindergarten anymore, you know?”
“I get that. She just… really gets under my skin. I don’t even know why you’re friends with her in the first place.”
She’s silent for a second, collects herself, then sighs.
“She’s… more complicated than she seems. I know how she can come off sometimes, but you just don’t know her like I do.”
“I don’t really want to know her like you do.”
“Toji!”
“I’m just saying!”
Hina-chan gives me a look.
“I understand you wanting to stick up for your friends,” I say. “And if she—not you, not Mom, her—ever asked me to really, truly apologize, then I… I would think about it, at least. But she didn’t seem too upset to me, so for now, I kinda feel like the best thing we can do is move on.”
Hina-chan thinks for a moment. It’s tense, but she doesn’t look quite as angry as she had.
“…Okay,” she says eventually.
And…
Wait.
“‘Okay’?” I ask.
“Okay.”
…
Huh.
That might have been a little too easy?
“Okay… cool,” I say, trying to remember the beginning of the conversation. “So did we want to talk about—”
“I still think you should take her up on her offer.”
Her…
I stare at her.
“‘Offer’? What offer?”
“To be friends.”
“What? She didn’t say that.”
“She did! Told me to give you her Line details and everything.”
“That…”
Oh, come on.
“No. No! She was just joking. She wasn’t being serious about that.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Hina-chan!”
“Again: I know how she can come off sometimes! But at the end of the day, she’s just a girl, okay? Just like me or Morita-san.”
‘Or Fujimura,’ my brain adds, and—nope,not now. Girlfriend still talking.
“That wasn’t her being ‘shy’,” I say, guessing at what I missed and arguing with it anyways. “That was… I don’t even know what the fuck that was.”
“Exactly.”
I stop.
“You don’t know what it was,” she says through an impish grin. “But who knows her better, me or you?”
I narrow my eyes.
She raises her eyebrows.
“…You.”
“I’m sorry, who again?” she cups her hand to her ear like an old-timey ear trumpet.
It’s nice to see the playfulness returning a bit, but it still feels like I’m losing somehow.
“You!” I say louder.
She glances towards Mom’s room, then turns back to grin at me.
“Exactly,” she says.
As she pulls out her phone.
And starts typing.
Oh.
Oh, no.
“Hina-chan?”
Tap tap tap.
“Hina-chan?!”
“Aaand…”
“Hina-chan!”
One final tap.
“There. Sent.”
My phone buzzes in my pocket.
I glance down at it.
“You have got to be fucking kidding me.”
When I look back up at her, she’s smiling sweetly.
“Nope.”
I pull out my phone.
Sure enough.
A new Line contact.
‘Kurokawa Miu’.
Of course.
I look back up at Hina-chan.
“So you’re telling me to… what? Be her friend? Like, for real?”
“Oh, I’m not telling you to do anything,” she says. “I’m simply passing along her information as she requested. And if you wanted to, say, reach out to her and smooth things over, then that would make me very happy. But ultimately it’s your choice.”
“…Right. Yay for free will.”
“Exactly.”
I run my hand down my face.
“On the other hand,” she continues, “if you two try to murder each other and you get blood all over me, that would also be a choice, and I’d be very upset because I love you both and clothes are expensive.”
I look back down at my phone screen. Stare at Kurokawa-san’s name.
“No blood…” I say. “Right.”
I sound as dazed as I feel.
Am I… dreaming? Hallucinating?
This can’t be happening.
“Plus,” Hina-chan says, waggling her phone in her hand. “You’ve always got one eye on your phone anyways. Might as well make use of it, right?”
That gets my attention.
I glance up.
Meet Hina-chan’s eyes.
She raises an eyebrow in challenge.
“…You noticed, huh?” I ask.
She cocks her head in a pitying look.
“Yeeeah,” she says. “You’re not as subtle as you think you are.”
“You sound like Mizuno-kun,” I grumble.
She smirks.
“Let’s have a chat about Fujimura-kun, shall we?”