It was a day off, in the evening.
Since that night, I had found it hard to stay in my room. The walls of the six-mat room drew closer every day. The voice saying cringe had stuck itself to the stains on the ceiling and wouldn't peel off. So on days off, I had started walking around outside for no reason.
The rainy-season sky had been gray all day that day too, and from evening, rain began to fall in scattered drops. I didn't have an umbrella.
The little neighborhood park where I always went to think. Sitting on an empty bench, I took out my phone. My fingers opened the dashboard on their own. It was a motion I had repeated every night for three years. Last night's chapter had—as expected, one PV. Only that one at 12:02 a.m. was lit there today, too.
Little by little, the rain grew heavier. I just stared blankly at the screen as it got wet. I didn't even feel like going home.
—Just then.
A shadow fell across my rain-wet screen.
Before I knew it, an expensive umbrella was being held out over my head.
I looked up at the umbrella's owner and doubted my own eyes.
Koyomi Kisaragi.
The school's Ice Princess.
Her silver hair was neatly tucked beneath the umbrella so the rain wouldn't touch it. Over her white dress she wore a fine, thin cardigan. Even in the rain, with everything darkening toward gray, her posture was as straight as a line drawn with a ruler.
Why at this hour? Why in a place like this? Why hold an umbrella over someone like me?
The Ice Princess, alone, in a park in the rain. No attendant, no car in sight. And on top of that, holding an umbrella over my head. No matter how I looked at it, it didn't add up.
The questions piled up into a traffic jam and wouldn't turn into words. Getting rained on, I just looked up at her, dumbfounded.
"You will catch a cold."
Kisaragi said it quietly. A flat, sub-zero voice. The voice I had heard on the rare occasions she opened her mouth at school, the one that went with the formal "I" she uses there. A clear, transparent tone with no emotion in it.
I think I was gaping up at her like an idiot, mouth hanging open.
"Akizuki, was it not? From my class."
That she remembered me was the bigger shock. Someone like me, practically air, and someone like her—there shouldn't have been any point of contact for her to remember. She knew my name. That alone was enough to make my head stop working properly.
"Ah... Kisaragi. Hi. But I'm, uh, I'm fine, so."
I hurried to stand and nearly dropped my phone.
The wet screen turned toward her.
What it showed was the dashboard of the web novel site Story Tree. The ridiculous single-digit PVs of my serial—A Star in the Mud—shining brightly. Zero, and one, and two. Three years' worth of a miserable report card.
Crap, I thought.
I'd be laughed at as cringe again. The snickering in the connecting corridor came back to life deep in my ears. Now even that heiress had seen something this pathetic. On reflex, I tried to hide the screen.
But my hand stopped.
Kisaragi was looking at the screen.
"Peering at it" didn't cover it. She tilted the hand holding the umbrella slightly, paying no mind to the rain soaking the shoulder of her cardigan, and leaned forward, staring intently at one spot on my phone. As if the whole world were there.
Those sub-zero eyes—were wavering.
It was an expression you would never see at school. The Ice Princess who let no one near was breathing unevenly in front of my cheap phone. As if she had finally come across someone she had wanted to meet for a very long time.
That couldn't be. I was just a bottom-tier nobody. People might laugh at me, but there was no reason anywhere for anyone to look at me like this.
"...Fuyuno Yui."
I thought I'd misheard.
My pen name, the name I had never told anyone—her lips had clearly shaped it.
"How do you know that?"
My heart was pounding like an alarm bell.
Fuyuno Yui. Apart from me, there shouldn't have been a single person in the world who knew that name. All the screen showed was the title of the work and those single-digit numbers. The pen name wasn't displayed anywhere. It was a name I had never told anyone at school, not even Yuna.
So how? Of all people, why the Ice Princess?
Kisaragi didn't answer. She looked like she didn't have room to.
The ice that was supposed to be flawless and peerless was cracking before my eyes. Her breathing grew shallow and fast. A faint color that wasn't the rain spread across her porcelain cheeks.
She was holding the umbrella over me, while one of her own shoulders was getting soaked. She didn't even seem to notice, just kept staring at my screen.
It was only then that I noticed.
In the arm opposite the umbrella, she was holding something close, as if it were precious.
A thick bundle, wrapped twice, three times over in plastic to keep out the rain. A leather cover glinted briefly under the streetlight. Several volumes of what looked like journals. They must have mattered a great deal, because she was shielding them from the rain more than her own body. As if she feared a single drop dampening what was inside more than getting wet herself.
What could matter that much? I still didn't know anything.
"Kisaragi, what's that..."
My question stopped halfway.
Because Kisaragi's fingers were trembling. Those slender fingertips gripping the umbrella's handle, shaking in small tremors.
Trembling fingers, like those of someone who had at last reached something they had been searching for for a long time.
And then, in a voice that was almost a breath, she said,
"...I found you."
Beyond the sound of the rain, that one phrase alone reached my ears clearly.
Found. Found what? Surely not—me?
Before I could ask, a single trail of something other than rain fell from Kisaragi's eyes and ran down her white cheek.