Chapter 21: Blank Spaces in the Prodigy’s Canvas (II)

I forgot how noisy the world could be when you're walking beside someone who still belongs to it.

Tsurugi-san walked with quiet familiarity, her pace just slightly ahead of mine, like she always had something she was rushing toward. The light hit her hair in a way that reminded me of summer textbooks and crowded classrooms—of before.

Before the umbrella.

Before the sketchbook.

Before golden hair and sharp blue eyes started occupying the bench across my stall.

As we reached Hanadokeisen street, there was a small ramen stall tucked beneath mid-rise office buildings. The burly male cook handed us laminated menus, but neither of us looked. We already knew what we wanted. Years of our loud and close interaction brought us into practiced routines.

“The spiciest you’ve got,” Tsurugi-san ordered. “Double.”

"Volcano bowls?" the cook confirmed.

"Yes, with extra grounded chili peppers please!"

I hesitated, my tongue coating itself with saliva defensively.

“Are you trying to burn the feelings out of your mouth?” I joked.

“I came here to suffer,” she said with a smirk. “Might as well make it physical.”

The air around us became heavy with the scent of broth, spice, and something faintly nostalgic—like summers lost, or childhoods that slipped by too quickly.

Tsurugi-san chose the stool farthest from the entrance, softly tapping the one beside her with a familiar thud.

I sat complacently.

For a moment, neither of us spoke.

Steam coiled in the air like ghosts of unspoken things.

“Do you still hate spicy food?” she asked suddenly.

“I don’t hate it. I just don’t think pain should be a flavor.”

She smirked, “Still dramatic.”

“You’re the one who used to dunk wasabi on mochi to impress me.”

“Correction,” she said, resting her chin on her hand, “I used to do that because I thought being reckless made me interesting.”

I looked at her sideways. “And?”

“It made me weird instead.”

“Still true.”

She smiled at that, a soft, honest thing.

After ten or more minutes, the bowls came down in front of us, violently red with a film of fire-colored oil on top. Tsurugi-san grabbed her chopsticks immediately.

And I just looked at the ramen as if it was something radioactive.

“One sip,” she said, “it won’t kill you.”

“That’s what people say before it kills you.”

But I took a sip. And then another.

And slowly, my tongue began to regret every choice I had ever made in life.

“Goodness,” I muttered, face twisting, “this is lava.”

Seeing my distress, she broke down in a loud chuckle, far from the controlled, composed laugh of the class representative I had known last semester.

It was the laugh of the girl who used to steal my pens in cram school, hit me with history books in the head at the public library, the devil that dared me to eat natto for the first time, and who cried during fireworks at a summer festival and blamed it on the wind.

The steam rose in curls between us, and she was diving straight on the broth unhinged.

“Do you remember last year? Summer break of our first year classes?”

“…Sort of. Why?”

She smiled a little, not looking at me. “That was the last time we ever really talked and hung out like this.”

That tone of hers reminded me of myself when I narrated my story to the therapists—a soft sadness that people speak with when they’re recounting things they can’t take back.

The memories surfaced, far earlier from what she just mentioned, and it was back on the first time we met.

It was the time I was reviewing for Shonan High School's entrance exam when I was graduating middle school. I was baking pancakes in a crowded alley with a reviewer slapped in the face. I thought Tsurugi-san was just another customer back then. Distracted by numbers and dates in history, I overcooked her order.

We just laughed it off and she immediately noticed the reviewer I am holding, and it was the exact same thing she possessed too.

We're both aiming for Shonan.

And so we started reviewing together at the public library nearby. Day and night, laughing and complaining about the amount of subjects and our grievances into the terrifying slope into adulthood.

For months, she was the only face I am seeing, and we became comrades facing our own challenges together.

For me, it was more than enough.

The results of the entrance exam went all according to plan, and we celebrated together by treating her a cup noodle at the same library we used to review in.

We shared a promise—to graduate together. We both had that childish ambition of getting into the same university without even thinking about the harsh journey in between.

“For you, Itsuki-kun, I will.”

When she gave me that single embrace before she left, I never knew that it was the warmth I longed for after my parents.

It became enough of a motivation to get over the hump.

At the arrival of spring, we sat in that empty classroom at Shonan High School with the golden light pouring in through the blinds, like the world paused for just the two of us.

She was the only one who sat beside me when everyone else avoided the “weird, quiet kid”. We still hit the books back then, and hung out in the library often.

I should've realized that the only constant in this world is change.

A coin flip between good and harm.

And the latter hit us.

Tsurugi-san rose up in the class ranks.

She became the top student of the class and elected as our student representative. She had one obligation after another until her time was sliced into pieces and scheduled like a bureaucrat’s.

And I? I passed the government self-supporting program and I was awarded the dango stall at the park and disappeared too.

The afternoons and nights we once shared became rare, and our library hangouts turned into a memory I visited more than the place itself. The space between us widened. The last time we bumped into each other was as she said, that summer break last year.

She didn’t say goodbye after that. I never asked why. It was already obvious given from our standpoints.

“Being a class rep really stole time away from me,” she said. “I had no idea how much until I stopped being one.”

I glanced up to her mid-sip.

“You were always busy. It wasn’t like we stopped talking on purpose.”

"We both have to live through it. I had to be responsible for school, and you had to survive life. I'm just kind of guilty because I haven't checked up on you for a long time."

I didn’t disagree. That’s exactly what happened. Our threads splintered when responsibility and survival took the wheel.

“You know,” she continued, voice low, “I always watched you from across the room, even when we didn’t talk.”

“…That sounds creepy.”

She took a bite on the sliced meat.

“So, how close are you two?”

I stared into my bowl.

“She sits on a bench across my stall. I gave her an umbrella once. That’s all.”

“That’s a funny way of saying you care about her.”

I didn’t respond. Because if I said no, I’d be lying. And if I said yes, I’d feel like I was betraying someone. I had to play my cards well.

“We're not close. I don't really know why she chose to sit there, of all places.”

The thought of my unanswered questions resurfaced. While Kousaka-san admitted her motivations for choosing that seat, it never explained the routine that went on for months.

And on the other hand, I'm glad that Tsurugi-san didn't press further.

I wouldn't have answered her anyway.

“But you don’t tell her to leave,” as she stirred the broth.

“…No.”

She let out a long sigh, not in frustration, but in something more complicated. Acceptance, maybe. Or resignation.

“I wasn’t angry, you know. When she humiliated me.”

I paused. That brought the air back down.

It was the first time she mentioned it.

The sports festival preparations. I remembered watching it happen.

Tsurugi-san made the classroom home to the transferee Kousaka-san. From the start of second year, she tried to be kind and approachable.

When the sports festival arrived after summer break, she asked Kousaka-san to participate. And when the porcupine tried to walk out, Tsurugi-san made the mistake of grabbing her wrist.

“You don’t graduate Shonan like that,” she had said. "I just wanted us to unite and leave no-one behind."

And Kousaka-san…without a second thought, had humiliated her publicly. Insults about her flawed leading style, inadequate speeches and toxic optimism spilled out right in front of her.

She even bluntly asked Tsurugi-san to step down. She made it clear that no matter how many times Tsurugi-san offered her friendship, Kousaka-san prefers to have her back alone.

She crushed her confidence. I saw her helplessness and I just watched it unfold from a distance.

The result? Tsurugi-san stepped down and no one volunteered to be class rep after that. Because who would want to get wrecked by a French delinquent?

"I don't hold grudges that easily. I held her wrist. She didn’t like that.”

“You were just trying to make her listen. And that wasn't the right response to someone offering kindness.”

Tsurugi-san didn’t answer right away. Instead, she looked away and clenched her hands on the edge of the table, as if mustering her courage to say something.

“Do you regret…not staying close?”

That was a question I hadn’t expected.

“To whom?”

“...Me.”

I blinked, caught in the spotlight.

I admit, we had a lot of things in common. I couldn't lie that I liked her loud and cheerful personality, and the way she was so serious at times, almost as stoic as me.

We're so close that I trusted her so much, and she was the only person outside of my family that knows my hidden talent. She called them ‘colorful stories without words.’

Tsurugi-san’s presence back then lifted my spirits up when I was on the verge of breaking.

I stopped thinking about dying.

I stopped thinking about who left me.

Because there was someone right there that stayed.

I lifted my gaze to meet her eyes. “I only started aiming for university because of you,” I admitted. “Because we said we’d go together.”

Right now, we're just two people who had once walked side by side, now sitting in the wreckage of the paths we chose instead. I can't say that this is our choice, or destiny played a trick on us, maybe just the consequences of our responsibilities.

“…So I won’t regret it unless you do.” I finished.

She set her chopsticks down.

And then she said it.

“I do.”

She held my gaze, with a steady voice—but her hands trembled slightly.

“I regret not being there. I regret letting the class rep badge become more important than the people around me. More than you.”

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

“I regret,” she continued, her voice barely above a whisper now, “every lunch I ate alone in the office. Every time I looked at you across the classroom and didn’t say hi. Every text I never sent.”

Was I just misreading all of this? I always appreciated her—but I never thought she saw me as someone worth regretting.

I thought I was just a passing presence. I didn’t think I ever mattered that much.

Because back then, spending simple moments with people always sent me spiraling into this dilemma: do people value my presence or just value the novelty and excitement they are experiencing?

Am I, as their companion, the primary focus of their enjoyment? Or am I just secondary to it?

Because I think that Tsurugi-san fell into the latter category. It's just fair because I really thought of her before as someone that will stay for long before we drifted apart.

“I don’t know if this is too late,” she said, voice trembling. “Or if you’ve already given your heart to her. But I need to say it.”

"Huh?" I froze.

Sweat trickled on my temple, my chest aching not from confusion, but from old and unspoken moments breaking loose.

And I couldn’t tell if the shimmer and dampness in her eyes was because of the spicy ramen or something else.

She inhaled, steadying herself.

“I liked you, Itsuki-kun.” she finally said. “Since we came to Shonan. I thought it was just a fleeting feeling when my heart suddenly raced, staring at you at that library, and thought would go away. But it didn’t.”

The words fell like a stone in a still pond.

“And right now…I still do.”

She didn’t blink or flinch.

Her confession wasn’t just a plea. It was a release powered with longing and nostalgia.

Perhaps, regret for what could’ve been, and acceptance for the things that are now.

“I liked you when we studied under the freezing snow and when you brought me those cheap convenience store mochi after every test. I liked you when you looked at the sky during breaks like you were trying to find a color no one had named yet.”

I felt my hand shake slightly. I clenched my chopsticks tighter.

“I liked you,” she said, softer now. “Even when you started looking somewhere else.”

And all I could do—was sit in silence.

Because that was all I had left.

I looked down at my hands. I had no response. I had no room to process.

I felt like I was cheating at something. Like I opened a book halfway through and couldn’t understand the words.

Henri Frederic Amiel was right. Destiny has two ways of crushing us—by refusing our wishes and by fulfilling them.

My wish for Kousaka-san was refused, and it came back to fulfill me in the form of Tsurugi-san’s confession.

And seeing her trying her best to smile…it only made things worse for me.

“You don’t have to say anything. Just…let me say it. Because if I didn’t, I’d regret this too.”

Her fingers tightened around the edge of the ramen bowl, as if holding onto something warmer than words.

My head hung down so low that my red hair started concealing my eyes from sight. My body curled in on itself like a cat trying to make itself as small as possible.

The sick twist of events hurt me more than anyone else could imagine, and I couldn't even spare myself from the tears that threatened to fall.

The broth was red, but my face burned worse.

No, it's not because of the ramen.

Due to shame? Guilt? Pressure? I cannot pinpoint.

Someone was offering me something that I always wished for.

But this time…I didn’t know if I could accept it.