Loss 2: Asagumo Chihaya and the Goose Chase

Loss 2: Asagumo Chihaya and the Goose Chase

Loss 2:

Asagumo Chihaya and the Goose Chase

T WO DAYS AFTER THROWING OUR LOTS IN WITH Asagumo Chihaya, she messaged us both to meet up. As soon as possible.

The rendezvous point: the Kalmia mall at Toyohashi Station, near the north side. I hurried into the station from the outdoor deck. At a glance, I was the first to arrive, so I positioned myself in front of Kalmia while I caught my breath.

The clock just hit half past two. Shoppers thronged in and out. Others waiting for their own people stood with me.

I turned my gaze away from them and to the ground. “What am I doing?” I muttered to myself.

I wasn’t in this to expose Yakishio and all of her dark secrets. Something just didn’t sit right with me about putting her on trial, so I involved myself. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that none of this was my business.

Before I knew it, someone had come up next to me. I stole a peek to find that it was a girl in a sailor uniform. She had thick-rimmed glasses, and her hair was done in two loose braids. Also, she was going to town on a basket of takoyaki. This girl had too many descriptors.

“Wait, Yanami-san, is that you?!” I blurted.

She flashed me a smirk. “Took ya long enough.” She pinched the frame around where the glasses part should have been and pushed them up, all smug-like.

“Those don’t even have lenses.”

“They’re for show. Make me look smarter, don’t they?”

They didn’t, but I nodded anyway. “I have a few questions,” I said. “I’ll summarize them: What’s with the look?”

“Duh, it’s a disguise. So they don’t notice us. It’s actually just my old junior high uniform, but I totally still pull it off, eh?”

“I mean, it’s only a year old, so—” I stopped. There were…aspects of the role she was definitely struggling to “fit into,” shall we say.

“What? What’d you get all quiet for?” She popped a takoyaki into her mouth.

“Nothing. You do you.”

The crew was all here and ready to go, except for the brains of the entire operation who was nowhere to be seen. Yanami called her phone but got no answer.

“I’m surprised you’re even here,” Yanami said, typing out a DM on LINE. “Thought this sorta thing’d be your kryptonite.”

“What do you mean ‘this sorta thing’?”

“ This . The whole ‘is Lemon-chan cheating’ investigation. Would you have done it if it were me asking?”

Probably not, but my sensible side told me not to say that out loud. “What about you? Why are you bothering?”

Yanami stopped typing. “Did you see the way Lemon-chan looked at him when they were together?”

I nodded. It came to me clear as day. The smile she wore, “beaming” didn’t do it justice. It was like a bud on the verge of blossoming, and all its feelings with it.

I could read between the lines. Even the densest brick of a man on the planet—even Ayano had to see what everyone else saw.

The uncomfortable thing was the notion that he did see it, and he was going along with her anyway. That Yakishio knew that he knew and didn’t care.

“You don’t look at a guy who’s taken like that. You just don’t,” Yanami said. She made a toothy grin that very much reminded me of Yakishio. “Friends help friends, and they call each other out too. Whatever happens, Lemon-chan’s gonna need us.”

***

Asagumo-san finally got back to us some time later. She’d spotted them, and we were to regroup at the south side square.

Stands and vendors bordered the wide, open space. There seemed to be some kind of local farmer’s market going on.

“Nukumizu-kun, you gotta try this. Even the bones are good.”

Yanami had somehow already gotten her hands on some salt-grilled sweetfish.

I did my best to ignore the crunching and scanned the crowd for Asagumo-san. It didn’t take long to find a short girl creeping around the back of the vendors. I opened my mouth to call out to her but quickly closed it again.

She was wearing a light orange one-piece dress and a classy wide-brimmed hat—the sort fancy actresses sometimes wore. Plastered on her forehead was a cold patch. Beneath that she had on a pair of mirrored sunglasses. Each element inconspicuous enough on its own, but together the ensemble looked positively insane. It made associating with her in public exceptionally difficult.

Yanami bit off the sweetfish’s head. “So you know that girl, huh?”

“So do you now.”

What a girl to lose to. Yakishio had it rough.

Finally noticing us, Asagumo-san pattered over.

“Um…hello,” I said, not knowing how else to react.

Asagumo-san made a coy smirk and unpeeled the cold patch. “Didn’t recognize me in this disguise, did you? It’s me. Asagumo.”

Wow, no way, I’m Nukumizu.

She reapplied the patch, implying that was the disguise.

“Is Lemon-chan here?” Yanami asked from a safe distance.

“They’re on the opposite side of the plaza,” Asagumo-san answered. “It seems they’re touring the vendors in order. We can safely wait for them here.”

She scurried off to hide in the shade of one of them. We went after her. She then pulled out that phone-like device with the antenna, removed her sunglasses, and studied the meters on it.

“Hey, how did you figure out they’d be here, anyway?” I asked. That thing wasn’t a people-radar, was it?

“I collated and analyzed a statistically significant amount of data.” She puffed out her tiny chest proudly. “And it just so happens my calculations were correct.”

Yanami cocked her head. “How do you calculate something like that?”

“Devices help, but they come with a certain margin of error that I merely minimized through sheer volume and analysis,” Asagumo-san expounded. “Through trial-and-error, I’ve managed to understand and account for the tracker’s inaccuracies.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. “Did you say ‘tracker’?”

“I’m using a GPS, yes.”

Lord help us.

Yanami took another few paces back. “Is that, um, legal?”

“Quiet,” Asagumo-san hissed. “They’re here.”

Yanami and I exchanged looks, then peeked out from behind the vendor.

The plaza was positively packed. From our vantage point, we had a good view straight down the middle, with the vendors lining either side.

“On the right. At the gelato place,” she whispered.

I squinted until I could kind of make out a man and a woman among the crowd. The man was tall, handsome, and had glasses. The woman’s tawny skin said enough. That was Ayano and Yakishio, all right.

Ayano wore a sophisticated, white button-up. Yakishio was in her uniform. We might as well have been staring into a soap opera.

They continued their rounds, gelato cones in hand. They smiled and laughed at each other in such an intimate way that any random person would have assumed they were on a date.

Yanami hummed. “Ayano-kun. Handsome guy. Tall too. Lemon-chan’s not too bad herself. They look good together.”

“Yanami-san!” I hissed.

Her hand zipped up to her mouth. “Sorry, Asagumo-san! It just slipped out.”

“No offense taken,” Asagumo-san said. “I agree with you. I always have.” A self-derisive smirk snuck onto her lips. “Imagine my surprise when he actually agreed to go out with me. I thought I didn’t have a chance.” Her voice fell to barely a whisper. “I got lucky.”

We didn’t say anything. Couldn’t. So we kept our eyes on our targets.

They stopped at one vendor after another, pointing, laughing, smiling. Yakishio shone like the sun.

I thought about what Yanami had said before.

You don’t look at a guy who’s taken like that. You just don’t.

This couldn’t have been easy for Asagumo-san. So I told her, “Hey, I think that’s enough for today.”

“They’re moving on,” she spoke over me.

I turned back to them. Yakishio was pulling Ayano by the arm over to another vendor that sold what looked like Western desserts. Self-serve, with baked goods out in the open for shoppers to grab and buy as they pleased. They were still working on their gelato. Ayano took a basket with his free hand. Yakishio tossed something in. They argued a bit—Ayano shook his head, grinning, and lifted the basket up out of reach. Yakishio jumped up and dunked in what she had anyway.

This went on for some time. Eventually, they blended back into the crowd, but Asagumo-san was still, her eyes fixed on nothing.

“Hey, are you okay?” I asked.

She pulled the cold patch off her forehead and spun around. “I’m fine,” she said quietly. “Just gonna go touch up my makeup a little.”

Yanami and I watched her head back into the station then let out a sigh.

“She’s not doing so good,” I said.

“No, she isn’t. However sensitive you think girls are, Nukumizu-kun, double it.”

Sugar and spice, I thought. Maybe sugar and lipids in Yanami-san’s case.

Yanami put a hand on my shoulder and shook her head. “That comment earlier. About them looking good together? That was too much. Love is a complicated thing, and you need to be more careful.”

“Are you actually trying to put that on me right now?”

“Sure am. Do something about it.”

Why did I bother?

“Sure, whatever,” I said. “Shouldn’t you be going after her?”

“Me? Nah, dude, you go.”

“She literally mentioned makeup. That means she’s going to the bathroom. What am I gonna do, sneak in?”

“So you want me to chase her into the toilet ?” Yanami argued. “Just wait for her outside. It’ll be fine.”

“Will it?”

“Look, times like this, what’s important is just knowing someone cared enough to show up. Which, might I add,”—she frowned at me—“is the kind of support I wish I had from a certain someone.” An incredibly fair point. Emotional labor was not my strong suit.

“Plus, I’m…not sure I really have any business talking to her right now.”

True enough. The “they look good together” comment was a bit fresh.

“All right,” I said. “I’m still not entirely convinced, but I’ll go.”

“Thanks.”

I left the square and made for the nearest bathrooms for lack of a better idea, until I stumbled on an orange one-piece, hat-wearing girl stopped at a random store. She was eyeing a leather book jacket, hands behind her back.

“Asagumo-san,” I called out. “Hey, are you, uh, okay?”

“Nukumizu-san,” she replied without looking my way. She reached for the book jacket but pulled away at the last minute. “It’s nice, isn’t it? Do you think he’d like it?”

“I’d say so, yeah. Good eye.”

“I thought so. Mitsuki-san does love his books,” she muttered. “He wants to work with them in the future, you know.”

“Really?”

I’d had no idea. Wasn’t even clear to me what kind of book jobs were out there. Almost surreal how I was learning about a guy I barely knew from a girl I knew even less.

“He says being an author is more of a dream than a career plan. So he wants to go to Tokyo and study literature from an academic perspective. Maybe get into publishing. Anything, so long as it’s to do with books,” she went on to no one in particular. “I was surprised when he first told me. I’d never met anyone who shared my dream before.”

“Right,” was all I managed to say.

“Although personally, I’d like to be a librarian. Granted, it won’t be any less competitive.” She finally picked up the book jacket and felt the leather. “My calculations were correct.”

“Huh?”

“I saw them,” she said. “With my own eyes.”

“Oh. Right.”

I didn’t consider GPS tracking a “calculation,” per se.

“He doesn’t like sweet things. I suppose it’s possible he was getting them for me.”

I nodded at mach speed. “Yup. Yeah, that’s very possible. He’s a nice guy.”

“Yes, he is. He’ll stomach gelato if you ask. Talk with you if you ask. He’ll enjoy himself and smile like it too.” Asagumo-san rambled like she was arguing with herself. She replaced the book jacket. “Has he ever…?”

The rest of her words were swallowed by the low drone of the station.

“We never got gelato,” she said, louder. I stammered a bit, unsure how to respond. “We’ve never gone out to get dessert together. I never asked, because I knew he didn’t like them.” She grabbed the brim of her hat and pulled it down. “So it just…stung a little. Seeing them do it.”

“Well, maybe he got a flavor that’s not sweet,” I suggested. “They do savory crêpes and stuff sometimes, right?”

“Savory? What kind could he have possibly been eating?”

“Maybe it was tuna mayo.”

Asagumo-san’s eyes went wide. “You think that whole cone was tuna and mayonnaise?!”

“Hey, it’s a popular onigiri flavor.”

I was totally BS’ing, but she laughed anyway. “That’s one way to give yourself an upset stomach. I should look into light salads for him just in case.” She looked down. “I’m jealous of Yakishio-san. She’s so honest and unapologetic about herself and what she wants. I’m always so preoccupied with not being a burden.”

“Eh, be a burden.”

She looked back up in shock. “Won’t he stop liking me?”

“Couldn’t tell you. I don’t know him that well. But he’s probably not so shallow that he’d kick you to the curb for wanting to get ice cream.”

I put up with a whole lot worse from a girl I wasn’t even dating. That had to speak to something.

“You’re actually very nice, Nukumizu-san,” she said. “I had you all wrong.”

Her and everyone else in school, apparently.

Asagumo-san peered up at me, studying me with those big, round eyes. “What?” I asked.

“Just wondering what the type of girl you’d fall for is like.” She giggled. “I’d like to meet her one day.”

“We’ll see.”

I liked girls well enough, but actually dating one, well—that was difficult to imagine right about now. Asagumo-san had herself a relationship and was up to her ears in problems. Yanami had none and still shouldered a completely different set of baggage.

It felt like the more people I met and the more I got roped into their circumstances, the less realistic genuine romance became.

“We should head back,” I said. “Yanami-san’s waiting.”

“Of course. I’m composed again.” She smiled. But not long enough to be relieved, because she jolted almost a second later. “Nukumizu-san! Hide!” She grabbed my hand.

“Huh? Why? What’s happening?”

“There’s no time! Hurry!”

With surprising strength, she yanked me all the way into a clothing store and into one of the changing rooms.

“What are we doing?!” I blurted.

“Hush! Mitsuki-san will hear you.”

Had he snuck up on us? But then why were we hiding in the first place? I didn’t see what was so wrong about us being “caught.” Worst case, it looked like we were out shopping…alone. Together.

“Wait, crap, this might be bad,” I whispered.

“Which is exactly why we hid!”

The rim of her hat jabbed me straight in the face.

“That kinda hurts.”

“I’m sorry, but there’s not exactly much room in here.”