Chapter 5 – Snow Day

1

By the time Eita lifted his head from the English textbook, his room was dark.

It was Friday, January 12th, the day before the National Center Test for University Admissions.

Eita had gone to school that morning and spent all day studying in his assigned room. When it was time to go home, he dropped the room key off in the staff room and went straight home, taking no detours. As soon as he got home, he changed into casual clothes and sat down at his desk. Such was the entirety of his day.

He had primarily focused on brushing up on his English that day. The Japanese and Japanese history questions worked out surprisingly in his favor, and as long as he got lucky with the question trends, he felt he could rely on getting a high score on those subjects. But he had been struggling with English down to the very basics.

He had never liked the attitude of the guy that taught English in his old high school, and it ended up always being his least favorite subject. He could go through past exam questions time and time again, but his scores showed no signs of improvement. At best, he would get around 50%. Since English was the subject that would likely make the difference in a liberal arts academy, he figured he was really kneecapping himself with his bad English grades.

He closed his workbook, setting it on the desk. He stood up to reach for his light switch, but instead of flicking it on, he instead changed into a tracksuit. He suddenly felt like a run would be good for his mood. Studying for so long had made his shoulders stiff, and he didn’t want to start hating studying by forcing far too much of it.

After performing a series of warmup stretches, Eita exited his room.

As he put his shoes on in the entryway, someone walked up behind him.

“Will you be back in time for dinner?” It was his mother, coming to see him off.

“Just taking a short jog.”

“Watch out for cars, okay?”

“I’m not in grade school any more, Mom.”

“But it’s supposed to snow tonight.”

“Okay,” Eita replied with a sigh, opening the front door.

Just breathing assaulted the back of Eita’s throat with cold winter air. He glanced up, and despite the fact that it was only 5 PM, there was no sun to be seen, so the sky was already turning black.

Eita made his way to Prefectural Route 32, taking a few more warmup stretches just in case before starting his jog.

He started towards Kamakura Central Park, the place where Haruto had attempted to get over his fear of dogs. Heading straight there would force him into a purely uphill climb, so he instead opted for a zig-zag route across the town.

He occasionally got blasted with frigid gusts of wind. He wasn’t sure if it was solely due to the difference of his body temperature, but every breath seemed to chill him to the core.

As he ran, his breathing got heavier, but he started wheezing a lot heavier than usual for the amount of exercise. For a moment, he wondered if the cold air was depriving him of getting the right amount of oxygen, but that excuse only covered up the obvious reality for a brief moment.

The real reason was the deep, simmering frustration that he couldn’t get rid of.

He tried a second one-inning competition with Haruto. But unlike the first time, his only goal was to win.

He’d been preparing for it. He had gone running for the last two weeks. He had checked his form in the mirror every day.

He had gotten to the point of even feeling a little confident. The runs had been improving his general mobility.

He had even remembered to put more work in his lower body, significantly improving the speed of his pitches. Haruto swung late several times in a row during the competition. It felt great. But then, he hit a spectacular home run anyway.

Eita only went running to try and deal with the latent frustration. He was already out of breath, and facing a steep uphill incline, but all he wanted to do was overcome. So he kept running, pushing himself even faster than usual.

He went about halfway around the park grounds before turning around and retracing his steps. He hadn’t passed many runners, but that was likely due to the forecasted snow.

By the time he was back on Prefectural Route 32, intense feelings of both fatigue and accomplishment were coursing through his system. Every day, he felt like his body was getting more responsive.

As apartment complex lights became visible in the distance, Eita stopped running, figuring he would walk as a cool down on the way home. Immediately, sweat started pouring from his forehead, and he had to be careful to wipe himself off as he slowly moved forward.

But amidst the many headlights and streetlights, a very out-of-place rotating red light cut into his field of vision.

There was a police car in the parking lot of the 24-hour supermarket. Eita figured someone got caught shoplifting, and his curiosity turned him into a rubbernecker as he walked by. But then, among the several strange figures, he spotted someone he recognized.

“…Komiya?”

The last thing he had expected was to find someone he knew, so he ended up blurting out her name in pure shock.

The girl looking down as she was being escorted by a female police officer was undoubtedly Komiya Ena. She seemed down in the dumps, not to mention frightened, which was a stark contrast to everything he’d seen from her before.

“I’m telling you, that girl was-!”

About 15 feet away from Ena, another patrol car was parked, and a voice was shouting from beside it. A middle-aged man whose red face betrayed his likely drunkenness was pointing at Ena and generally making a lot of noise as two male police officers were trying to talk him down.

The more the man yelled, the more Ena shrunk away in fear.

Eita couldn’t very well just leave her there.

“You okay?” he asked, walking up to Ena.

In response, Ena flinched again. As she looked up, anxiety warped her expression. But when she realized who was speaking, her face slackened in relief as she called out his name. “Izumi-senpai…”

After Eita explained they were schoolmates, the female police officer gave him a general breakdown of the situation before asking, “Could you take her home?”

He wasn’t exactly in the position to refuse.

And so Eita ended up pushing a moped down Prefectural Route 32 towards Fujisawa, since Ena lived in the Kataseyama area. Ena was trailing a good 10 feet behind him.

“…”

“…”

They hadn’t spoken a single word to each other. Ena would typically start a huge flurry of conversation, but she still had a bit of a black cloud over her.

“Have you calmed down a bit?” Eita called back, tired of the silence. His glimpse at Ena showed that she still had her head down. “This is what’s gonna happen when you take random pictures without permission.”

That was what the whole police matter had come down to. Apparently, the man had started yelling so loud the staff in the supermarket had called the police in a panic.

Just as Eita figured he wouldn’t get a reply-

“…He wasn’t even in any pictures,” Ena replied sulkily. She was finally perking up a bit, though her voice was still awfully quiet.

“Then you should’ve led with that. Especially before the police got called.”

“But he just grabbed my arm and started yelling at me like, ‘What do you think you’re taking pictures of?!’ and then started screeching about all sorts of stuff… How was I supposed to stay calm…”

Eita glanced in the moped rearview, seeing that Ena was halfway to tears, her lips pouted out. The feisty girl he knew was nowhere to be seen.

“This is basically all your fault anyway, Izumi-senpai!”

“How does that work…” Eita didn’t see where he fit in.

“This is all ‘cause you wouldn’t let me enter your photo in the contest!”

She was being ridiculous, but Eita could tell that she was mostly just feeling desperate. Besides, if a little lashing out was what it’d take to get her cooled off, he could handle it.

“Why’re you so attached to this photography club anyway, Komiya?”

That thought had always bugged him ever since meeting her. Eita had never really found something he desperately wanted to protect at all costs, so he felt a bit of a disconnect with her.

“It’s the only place I can even talk about photography… It might just be some club to everyone else, but to me… it’s the place I had been searching for forever. My middle school didn’t even have a photography club… I tried to put one together, but could never have enough members. Someone in a major club like baseball would never understand.”

She was right about that, to the point that Eita didn’t bother responding. He hadn’t even joined the Fukuoka baseball team anyway.

“But then, in high school, there was a photography club… I finally had a place where I could talk about photography. Even if the only other members were two guys who only ever took pictures of trains… even then, it was everything I had ever wanted. And now, they just want me to let that go, and think I’ll be okay with it?!”

Eita stopped, turning around to find Ena glaring up at him, her eyes welling with tears. She didn’t look away, either… She kept watching him with that constant, earnest gaze he had gotten used to.

“I gotcha. I guess it’s fine.”

“No, you don’t understand anything about how I feel, and that’s not fine at all!”

“That’s… not what I meant. I mean that it’s fine for you to use my picture in your contest.”

“…Huh?” Ena took a second to respond, which was unusual for her. Confusion clouded her expression.

“But look, you can’t blame me if it doesn’t win any awards.” With that, Eita kept pushing the moped forward. He was too embarrassed to do anything else.

Suddenly, something heavy landed on his back. Ena’s arms wrapped around his neck.

“Thank you, Senpai!” She gripped him tight, and made no indication of letting go.

“Hey, look, I get it, so stop! That’s dangerous!”

It was like she didn’t understand he was trying to push a moped. He somehow managed to regain his balance and keep from falling over.

Just then, he thought he saw a flash of a person on the other side of the road. He tried to get a better look, but a car blocked his view.

As the taillights flashed by, he glimpsed a person who looked like they were running away to escape something. They were wearing a coat with a skirt under it that looked like it came from a girl’s school uniform. And whoever she was, she wasn’t very tall. But that was all he could make out before she dashed away behind a corner block and he lost sight of her.

A specific name popped into Eita’s head.

Natsume Mio.

Something about the way she looked from behind was similar.