Chapter 4: Sea Otter No. 8: Please Have Mercy.
....
The moment they stepped outside, Yanami Anna released his arm.
She shifted her bag to the other hand and adjusted her walking position — close enough to signal familiarity, far enough to avoid anything a camera could turn into a headline. Her right hand brushed a strand of blue hair away from the corner of her mouth with the practiced ease of someone who had performed this particular adjustment many times before.
"You didn't have to switch modes quite that fast," Kihara observed.
"My childhood friend is currently the most talked-about tokusatsu lead actor in the country." She said it with the resigned practicality of someone who had long since made peace with an inconvenient situation.
"If some paparazzi gets a candid shot they can frame as romantic, I'm not just dealing with the girls at school — his more dedicated fan following would have me dismantled before lunch."
She let the practicality sit for a beat, then her eyes went sideways and her mouth curved into the specific smile she made when she was about to say something that required deniability. She formed her thumb and index finger into a figure-eight and pointed it at him.
"Or~ maybe a certain someone just misses having a cute girl on his arm and is fishing for me to come back?"
"Kihara-kun is unexpectedly lecherous ☆~"
He took out his phone with the expression of someone consulting a to-do list. "Right. I should post on X. Announce that I'm dating a girl called Yanami Anna."
"No no no no no — please have mercy — I'm begging you—!!" She pressed her palms together and bowed, the apology entirely sincere. "Please, I will do anything, just not that."
If that post went live, she could stop budgeting for school attendance. There were no contingencies for that scenario.
By informal survey, approximately half the girls at Gensokyo High School had identified Kihara as their primary romantic aspiration. The only reasons Yanami Anna hadn't been converted from the childhood friend into a problem to be eliminated were her twelve-year head start, the complete absence of any confirmed romantic development between them, and her consistent record of quietly intercepting approaches from older students before they reached him.
She was aware that several girls in her own social circle — her actual friends, the ones she genuinely liked spending time with — had originally cultivated that friendship as a side door toward him. She knew this. She had filed it, managed it, and continued enjoying their company anyway, because the alternative was significantly lonelier.
This was, in summary, the landscape that had led her to develop the fake confession strategy. Not courage. The strategy existed precisely because she didn't have enough of it.
Some day, she told herself. When there was actual ground beneath her feet. Then she would do it for real.
Gensokyo High School was a private institution that had, at some point in its history, decided that both conventional architecture and conventional dress codes were optional. The main entrance was framed by a red torii gate that would have looked appropriate at an actual shrine, flanked by a marble obelisk roughly three meters tall with the school's name carved into it in calligraphy that suggested whoever held the chisel had strong feelings about the letters.
The student body dressed accordingly.
Shrine maidens. Maids. Cat-ear variants. Witch costumes. At least one person in what appeared to be a Zaku suit, walking at a measured pace through the pink cherry blossom petals that drifted down the marble-paved pathway. Another who seemed to be going for Space Marine, to a degree that raised genuine questions about their commute.
Every conceivable aesthetic was represented, executed with varying levels of commitment, coexisting without apparent friction.
"Two months in," Yanami Anna said, watching the parade, "and I'm still not used to it."
She looked down at her own uniform — standard-issue sailor top, grey skirt, nothing remarkable — and felt, briefly, the specific dissatisfaction of someone standing next to a display case full of interesting things while wearing sensible shoes.
"It gets easier," Kihara said.
"Do you think I should do something different with mine?"
He gave her a brief sideways assessment and looked forward again. "As long as it doesn't reach a point where I don't want to walk to school with you, I have no opinion."
"I'm getting advice from my friends today. Decision made."
They walked into the classroom. The conversation that had been running — cosmetics, apparently, and some recent dessert — paused in the way that conversations did when someone who generated a certain ambient effect entered a room.
Yanami Anna waved at everyone with cheerful indifference to the pause.
"Morning~ How was everyone's break~?"
"Anna, come here, we were just talking about the new foundation—"
"Coming!"
She deposited her bag and inserted herself into the cluster with practiced ease.
Kihara, for his part, navigated the concentrated attention of several girls in the room with the equanimity of someone who had learned that the correct response to being looked at was simply to give them nothing to work with. He sat down, produced a stack of papers labeled SCRIPT, and began reading.
The script was, at this point, a known quantity in the classroom's social ecosystem.
Last month, a male student who had taken exception to Kihara's general existence had chosen the script-reading period to approach and attempt an altercation. Kihara had looked up, laid the script flat on the desk, and let the student see two lines.
Thirty minutes later, personnel from the production company had arrived and escorted the male student out. The stated reason was suspected commercial espionage on behalf of a competing firm.
The student had not returned. The official paperwork said voluntary transfer.
Nobody knew exactly what was in the script. The incident had made its point without requiring elaboration. Girls with ambitions in Kihara's direction had developed a policy of not approaching during script time — being flagged and removed by the same mechanism that had processed the last person was not a risk anyone wanted to run.
Yanami Anna noticed the classroom settle into its manageable configuration, exhaled quietly, and returned her attention to her friends.
"I was up until two chasing a drama, and now my skin looks terrible."
"Same — I always get dark circles when I stay up on weekends. And my hair gets weird."
The two of them arrived at the end of this exchange and turned to look at Yanami Anna with the specific attention of people who have arrived at a comparison.
"I'm so jealous of you. Your skin looks like you've been using high-end skincare."
"Your hair too. What conditioner are you using?"
"You're exaggerating."
"I know exactly what it is." One of them adopted the tone of someone delivering a diagnosis. "Anna has a devastatingly attractive and competent childhood friend right there. Just being in proximity to that every day — the aesthetic effect alone would improve anyone's complexion."
"Deep agreement."
Yanami Anna's eyebrow went up. She threw herself at the nearest offender with the energy of a small animal that has been poked one too many times. "You're attributing all my personal effort to him?! Outrageous! Tickle attack! This is what you get—!!"
"Ahahahaha— stop— I'm sorry— I take it back—"
The bell interrupted the chaos. The group dissolved back to their respective seats with the practiced efficiency of people who had done this many times.
In the quiet that followed, Yanami Anna found her eyes drifting to the empty seat beside Kihara.
It had been unoccupied since the commercial-espionage incident. Several girls had applied to change seats and been uniformly refused by the homeroom teacher. The seat had since acquired a mythology of its own — the prevailing theory was that the right to occupy it was contingent on becoming Kihara's actual girlfriend.
This was, she suspected, not official school policy.
It didn't particularly matter. The seat remained empty. She looked at it for a moment, then looked at her own desk, then looked out the window at the cherry blossoms.
After school. Filming schedule clear for once.
Yanami Anna wiped a small amount of unconscious drool from the corner of her mouth and raised her hand with the energy of someone proposing a motion.
"There's a new fast food place that just opened — they're running a buy-one-get-one on burgers. I think we should investigate this personally."
....
Thank you for reading.