2

The next day, during lunch break, I was scrolling through my phone to see if I could find some kind of rental storage space. If Kisaki decided that she was just going to come for summer vacation and then leave, we’d have to temporarily hide Kokoro’s stuff, but there was no way all of that was going to fit inside my room. Unfortunately, rental storage was quite expensive.

Will she be able to afford it? I might have to help her out with the money...

“Rental storage spaces? Do you have so much otaku junk in that room of yours that you don’t know where to put it anymore?”

“Wha—?!” I yelped with surprise.

The voice belonged to none other than my classmate, Ai, who had just come back from the restroom.

“N-No, that’s not i—”

“Come on, chill. I know how hard it is. My closet is so full of costumes that I need to regularly sell off the older ones,” he said.

“You have that many costumes?” I asked him.

It was then that I noticed a familiar face walking past us. It was Kokoro, accompanied by some of her friends. Our eyes met. She then said something to the girls and walked toward us.

“Ichigaya! Oh... and Aisaki! I saw your post on Twitter! Your new IMS cosplay was totally adorable!” she said.

I remembered her talking about how she wanted to become cosplay-friends with Ai. After addressing him, Kokoro looked around nervously, making sure that nobody had heard her talk about something so clearly otaku-related.

“Oh, you saw that? Thanks!” Ai replied.

Am I missing something here?

“Are you two connected on Twitter?” I asked them.

“I looked through your follow list and found Aisaki from there,” Kokoro explained.

“I see...”

When did she even do that?

“The other cosplayers with you were super cute too!” Kokoro said, turning her attention back to Ai.

“Not as cute as me though, right? Do you cosplay IMS too?” he asked her.

“I have some costumes, but I’ve never, like, worn them at an event...”

Look at these two, chatting about cosplaying in broad daylight. I guess Nishina doesn’t have anyone else to talk to about this though. I’m glad she met Ai.

“I have a lot of other pictures that didn’t end up on Twitter! I took some good ones with a couple other cosplayers...” Ai, full of enthusiasm, handed his phone to Kokoro.

“Wow! Is this Adore Lane? It’s so awww! And this is FG0! All the costumes are so convincing! It’s incredible! And who’s this handsome Marene?! Is it a crossplaying girl?”

“Nope! He’s actually a guy friend of mine. Stunning, isn’t he?”

“A-A guy?!” Kokoro asked, shocked. “A guy this handsome is actually cosplaying? O-Oh...”

I could hear the excitement mounting in her voice as their conversation continued.

“But handsome cosplayers are usually kinda slutty, aren’t they? I mean, I don’t know about this guy, but... I’ve just heard that they usually are... from a friend, y’know...” Kokoro said, as if she was trying to convince herself.

She was obviously talking about Bambi, the narcissistic cosplayer who had so insistently tried to persuade her to go home with him. Judging from her enthusiasm though, she still hadn’t quite abandoned all hope when it came to male cosplayers.

“Yeah, I’ve heard that too, but I’ve never met anyone like that myself. He’s the opposite,” Ai said, pointing at the man that had caught Kokoro’s attention. “The dude’s dating the girl cosplaying Marsha, and you should see how much they love each other. So sweet.”

“R-Really?!” Kokoro asked, even more excited.

A cosplaying couple? That... exists?

“Whoa. A handsome cosplaying guy dating a beautiful cosplaying girl...”

“I know, right? They look like they have a lot of fun cosplaying together and taking pictures and stuff like that.”

“No way! That must be awesome!”

Kokoro’s eyes were sparkling, and I couldn’t blame her. Being an attractive otaku and dating another attractive otaku seemed like too much luck for one person.

“I’m slightly jealous... So there are male cosplayers who are actually good people too!” Kokoro said. Her dreams of dating a cosplayer were now completely reignited.

What about the Bambi incident? Did she forget about that in the last thirty seconds?

“I-I wonder how couples like these get together... Do they meet at cosplaying events, then become friends before they start dating?”

“That’s how it worked for these two. They met at an event, started cosplaying together, and then— Poof!—they were a couple.”

“Did they, like, exchange contacts at that event?” Kokoro asked. The conversation had somehow turned into an interrogation.

“Well, not contacts, exactly... more like business cards. Cosplayers usually take them to events.”

“What?! Business cards for cosplayers?”

“Oh, yeah. They have the cosplayer’s alias, their social network handles, and usually a cosplay pic on them. Look here, this is mine,” Ai said, pulling out a card and handing it to Kokoro.

“Th-Thanks... Wow! It’s adorable!” Kokoro said, looking at the same card that Ai had, in the past, also handed to me.

“If someone takes a pic of me, or if I take a pic of them, we usually exchange cards and follow each other on Twitter!”

“Ohhh!”

“So you want to meet male cosplayers?” Ai asked casually.

Kokoro immediately began to deny it, not wanting Ai to think she was in it just to find a date. “It’s not like I just want to look for a b-boyfriend or anything like that! I-I just thought it’d be cool to cosplay with someone who has such a good-looking costume! Right, their costume looks awesome!”

“Hmm... Maybe you should go to a big event like Summer Comiket. There are loads of good male cosplayers there—”

The bell rang, marking an end to our conversation.

“I see! Thank you so much, Aisaki! I learned a lot!” Kokoro said, scurrying off to return to class.

Once we were back at our desks, Ai turned around to look at me.

“Nishina is looking for an otaku boyfriend, huh?” he said. There wasn’t much use trying to hide it now.

“Yeah... She says that she’ll only date an otaku.”

“Well, you’re as big of an otaku as they come. Aren’t you on her list?”

“Hah, as if! She’ll only date handsome otaku guys. And you know she’s not my type!” I replied.

“Hmm... If being handsome is a condition then that does disqualify you, I guess.”

“Hey! Watch your mouth!” I said to a grinning Ai as the teacher walked in.

Nishina is probably going to start checking out loads of male cosplayers again, isn’t she? She was hanging onto Ai’s every word. I just hope that she’ll be able to look after herself this time. Don’t go and get yourself tricked by another Bambi...

When I got home from school, Kokoro wasn’t in the living room. She’d come home before me, so she must have been in her room. My theory was quickly proven true when she came bounding down the stairs, stopping in the middle to greet me.

“Ah, Ichigaya! Welcome back!”

“Hel—”

“Come to my room!”

“What? Wh-Why?”

“Just hurry up and come!”

What’s wrong? Did she see a bug or something?

There was so much urgency to her tone that I could do nothing but follow her. I knew this was my own house and all, but going into her room still made me nervous.

The second I walked through the door I was met by a pleasant smell that I couldn’t exactly pinpoint—maybe it was perfume, or some kind of shampoo.

“Look!” she said, jabbing a finger at her laptop.

There on the screen was an image of a business card similar to Ai’s, with Kokoro’s cosplaying alias and a picture of her.

“Is this... a cosplayer business card? That was fast...”

She’d only learned about their existence at lunch break, yet she’d somehow designed it before I’d even walked through the door.

“What do you say? Do you think this picture will do?” she asked me. The picture in question was one of her favorite photographs taken of her Yumeno☆Saki cosplay.

“Sure, I guess...”

“Perfect! Then I’ll be using your printer later. Would twenty be enough? And then I have to find an event to attend! That’s the most important part!” she said, taking a seat and starting to tap away at her keyboard. When it came to meeting potential boyfriends, Kokoro had a tendency to act before thinking.

“You sure that you wanna meet more cosplayers? After Bambi?”

“You heard what Aisaki said! It’s just a few rotten apples!”

“And you’re planning to bite into more apples to see if they’re rotten?”

“I know the risks! Now that I’ve seen what the worst of the lot looks like, I’ll be able to filter them out!”

“Will you now?”

“Aisaki said that the larger events have loooads of male cosplayers,” she said, uninterested in my concerns. “So what event do you wanna go to?”

“Me? Why does it matter what event I want to go to?”

“Because you’re coming too, duh!”

“Huh?!”

“I can’t go by myself! And hey, if you cosplayed too, maybe you’d meet a cute cosplayer girl or something!”

“That wouldn’t happen even if I were the last male cosplayer on the planet,” I told her, painfully aware of the major problem I would face as a cosplayer—me.

“With some makeup, a wig, and a good costume, I’m sure there’s a character you could pull off!”

“Yeah, like ‘Villager B’ or ‘Store Clerk Who Sells Potions to the Protagonist,’ right? I don’t have the confidence, the skills, or the money to cosplay anyway.”

“Hmm... What about coming as a cameraman then? You could take my pictures! If I’m going to cosplay, I’d like to have pictures of it,” Kokoro suggested.

At least that isn’t as unrealistic as cosplaying myself...

“And if you ask a girl for pictures, maybe she’ll give you her card and you can follow each other on Twitter!”

“A-Aren’t you a bit too optimistic?” I asked skeptically.

“You have to try though, you know, since it ended up like that with Gojo. You want a girlfriend, don’t you?” she asked.

Hearing Mashiro’s name took me by surprise. The cute, kind, sweet girl who was into the same stuff as me... or so I’d thought. She’d just been fooling me. The real Mashiro was the total opposite of how she was on the surface. She was just a foul-mouthed fujoshi obsessed with male voice actors.

Mashiro had told me that she’d only been kind to me because, to her, I was just one more person that could like her. After chatting with her again though, it turned out that she did actually like me to some extent. Even if she wasn’t the ideal girlfriend I’d initially thought she was, I was still happy that she was interested in me, and I wanted to learn more about the real her. I’d even messaged her saying that I wanted to see her again sometime... but she still hadn’t replied. Despite saying that she liked me, she was ignoring me. I was doing my best not to think about her.

“Ichigaya...” Kokoro looked at me with pity in her eyes. I still hadn’t told her about Mashiro’s later confession. All she knew was that I’d basically been dumped by her.

“Actually, something happened...” I explained the whole story. How Mashiro actually liked me; how I was happy about that; how I’d messaged her; how I still hadn’t gotten a reply.

“I-I didn’t know that,” Kokoro said, shocked. “So she isn’t as terrible as we thought? It was just her pride then, I guess? Her tastes really were the standard otaku girl stuff though...”

“That’s it, more or less.”

“I still think that what she said to you that time is kind of unforgivable. And anyway, you’ve still not gotten an answer, right?”

“None.”

“So... what do you think about the whole thing?”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“You’re interested in the real Gojo, and you told her you wanna see her again, but she isn’t replying. Are you gonna give up and forget all about her, or do you wanna try and get with her?”

“I couldn’t forget all about her even if I wanted to.”

“Why don’t you try sending her another message then?”

“Even though she’s ignoring me?”

“If you’re not gonna give up, that’s the only thing you can do! And if you don’t have the courage to do that, you’d better forget about her and look for another girl at a cosplay event.”

I didn’t have the courage to send a second message to a girl after my first one was ignored. On the other hand though, I couldn’t just give up on her.

“Whatever you decide to do, I think you’d better come to the cosplay event with me!”

“Why, though?”

“If getting back with Gojo isn’t that likely, then you have nothing to lose by looking for other opportunities, right? And it’ll probably make you feel better too,” Kokoro said with a smile.

She wants someone to go there with her... but she’s also trying to cheer me up, isn’t she? Turning her down would be too ungrateful. She does have a point. Going and having fun will make me feel better. And, unlikely as it is, if I do make friends with a cute cosplayer, I’d feel even better than that.

“Okay. I’ll be there as your cameraman. You’re fine with that, right?” I asked, just in case she was going to change her mind and insist that I cosplay too.

“Yep! Come on then, let’s get looking for events!”

“Wait! We still have to clean up the house!”

“I-I know!”

My problems hadn’t gone away, but I felt that, somehow, sharing them with Kokoro made them feel much lighter.