Chapter 6: There Is No Second First Kiss

Kameyama-kun never came back.
What came back instead was a different Kameyama-kun.
“Hamori-san, are you feeling sick?”
Kameyama-kun was standing right in front of me.
Talking to me.
But he wasn’t Kameyama-kun.
I stood there in a daze, unable to accept what was happening.
There was no way I could answer him.
The future had probably changed.
Maybe I had ended up on a different world line.
Maybe Kameyama-kun had.
I didn’t know.
But one thing was certain.
He was on a different world line from me now.
What did I do wrong?
For the entire past year, I hadn’t spoken to Kameyama-kun.
He had never noticed me following him either.
All I did was watch from a distance.
I had given him my novel before that day, exactly like I was supposed to.
He had looked confused, but he had accepted it.
Even for me, handing over a novel I had written a year earlier was embarrassing enough that I almost couldn’t bring myself to do it.
But I did.
Because I wanted to see him again.
Because I thought I had to recreate that day if I ever wanted to meet him again.
Kameyama-kun looked at me with concern.
It was the same expression I remembered.
The face of the person who had given me the best first kiss of my life.
He looked almost identical.
But he was someone else.
I’ll say it again.
He was not that Kameyama-kun.
I didn’t want him making that expression.
I didn’t want him peering into my face like that.
It felt like the face in my memories was going to be overwritten.
He was the same person.
But he was different.
The Kameyama-kun I knew would never throw my novel into the trash.
That was the decisive difference.
It made me sick.
“Do you know what those papers you just threw away were...?”
“Huh? I didn’t really check. They had a bunch of text on them, though.”
For a second, Kameyama-kun looked confused about why I was asking.
Then he walked toward the trash can.
He picked up the stack of papers and flipped through them.
“This is... a novel?”
Maybe he had only thrown it away because he hadn’t checked what it was.
Clinging to that tiny bit of hope, I asked:
“Do you remember who gave it to you?”
“Not really. No idea. It was just in there when I noticed it.”
He didn’t remember me handing it to him the other day.
The boy standing in front of me now was not the Kameyama-kun I had given the novel to.
“Hey, hurry up. Let’s go home.”
One of his friends came in through the classroom door.
Tamura Kaito.
After stalking Kameyama-kun for a year, I knew his entire social circle.
“Give me a second.”
Urged on by his friend, Kameyama-kun started looking for his career-preference form again.
“Kameyama-kun, let me read that.”
I pointed at the novel in his hand.
“You’re interested?”
“I’m in the literature club.”
“Oh.”
The stack of papers was probably getting in the way while he searched.
As if glad to have somewhere to put it, he handed it to me and went back to checking his desk and locker.
Kameyama-kun was terrible at keeping things organized.
His paints and other art supplies were always neatly arranged, but everything else was a complete mess.
That was one of the cute things about him.
“...Where did you go?”
I whispered to myself.
The Kameyama-kun I loved was gone.
Who was this person?
When had he stopped being the Kameyama-kun I knew?
There were three Kameyama-kuns in my mind.
One: the Kameyama-kun I kissed in this classroom.
Two: the Kameyama-kun I spent an entire year stalking.
Three: the Kameyama-kun who had forgotten about my novel.
Number one and number two should have been the same person, just at different points in time.
But number three was different.
He was some mysterious Kameyama-kun who had appeared out of nowhere in place of the one who failed to return.
“Come on, Kameyama, you’re taking forever.”
“Sorry, sorry. Took me a while.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Kameyama-kun find what he was looking for and leave the classroom with his friend.
I was left alone in the silent room.
I looked down at the stack of papers in my hands.
The historical novel I had written a year ago.
It felt nostalgic.
There were some embarrassing parts, but even now, it was still genuinely interesting.
I could feel the passion in it.
Maybe that passion had affected Kameyama-kun too.
Come to think of it, I never really got to hear his full thoughts on it.
I wondered what he had actually thought.
He had drawn pictures for it, but I felt like all he ever said was that the battle scenes were good.
I wanted to hear more.
I don’t know anymore.
What did I do wrong?
How did things end up like this?
Was I never going to see him again?
Where did he go?
“Ugh...”
The tears came.
If this was how things were going to turn out, I should have talked to him starting a year ago.
I should have kissed him again the second he came back.
A second first kiss.
Even if everything that happened in that classroom disappeared, I would still remember it.
Maybe that would have been enough.
Would it really?
I didn’t know.
At the very least, the person I had fallen in love with was third-year Kameyama-kun.
The Kameyama-kun who had respected me even if it meant throwing everything away.
The Kameyama-kun who taught me that my feelings didn’t need society’s approval.
The Kameyama-kun who shared my first kiss.
So talking to the second-year Kameyama-kun who knew none of that felt wrong.
Completely wrong.
My choice hadn’t been a mistake.
But if that was true...
what was I supposed to have done?
I did nothing.
I couldn’t do anything.
But what else was I supposed to do?
The future might have changed.
“You cry that hard over that novel?”
“H-Huh?! Aah!”
A voice suddenly came from right beside me, and I let out a ridiculous yelp.
It was Kameyama-kun.
For one instant, I hoped it was that Kameyama-kun.
But he didn’t know anything about the novel.
He was Kameyama-kun Number Three, provisional name.
The Kameyama-kun I didn’t know.
The one I had no idea where he had even come from.
“Y-Yeah... It’s seriously... really sad.”
“I see.”
I covered it up.
The truth was, I was crying because I couldn’t see Kameyama-kun anymore.
But there was no way I could tell him that.
He wouldn’t understand.
I didn’t even know how I would explain it.
He looked unsure of what to do.
Yeah.
I kind of understood.
Being around someone who was crying was awkward.
“Sorry. I’m not grown-up enough to just leave a crying girl here by herself.”
As if he had finally made up his mind, he held out a handkerchief.
He knew.
He knew I wasn’t crying because of the novel.
Artists paid close attention to things.
Maybe that made them better at reading people’s expressions and subtle changes in behavior too.
Back then...
had he been able to see through me more than I realized?
“If you want, could you tell me about it? I mean... maybe I could help, at least a little. Talking to someone might make you feel better.”
Kameyama-kun said the words awkwardly, as if he wasn’t used to saying things like that.
He looked a little embarrassed.
Don’t make that face.
Please don’t make exactly the same face you made back then.
Please.
“Stop. Don’t talk to me.”
Every time I spoke with him, it felt like the Kameyama-kun in my memories was being painted over.
The same expressions.
The same voice.
The same smell.
I absolutely could not forget Kameyama-kun.
But I couldn’t see him anymore.
I had no idea how to reach him.
So at the very least, I wanted to hold those memories close.
“Hamori-san.”
“Don’t say my name.”
“Then—”
“Just leave me alone!”
He wasn’t the Kameyama-kun I loved.
He was just someone else who happened to be very similar.
After being rejected, he backed away.
Then he sat at a desk some distance from me.
He took out a sketchbook.
With a pencil in hand, he began drawing while looking at me.
“Why are you drawing?”
“Turns out I can’t comfort a crying girl after all. In the end, this is the only thing I know how to do.”
He lightly waved the pencil.
“I’m not going anywhere, so you don’t move either, Hamori-san.”
“...Do whatever you want.”
I didn’t feel like moving anyway.
The fact that I could no longer see Kameyama-kun had crushed me.
It felt as though gravity itself was pinning my body down.
The soft scratch of pencil against paper echoed through the quiet classroom.
“...Hey.”
I glanced sideways at him while he drew.
No answer.
Right.
When he was drawing, he couldn’t hear anything around him.
He was very close to being Kameyama-kun.
What if I just dated him instead?
What if I let him read my novel...
let him draw for me...
and recreated all the same events from that room?
Wouldn’t he eventually become the same Kameyama-kun?
But if I did that...
then that kiss would really disappear.
It would become something that never happened.
The kiss I could never forget would stay with me for the rest of my life.
But it would be a kiss no one else knew about.
A kiss only I remembered.
I was the only one who remembered.
I was the only one who couldn’t forget.
Why couldn’t I just make it never have happened?
How much easier would it be if I could erase this memory from inside me?
But...
if...
some god suddenly appeared and told me they could erase it...
I probably still wouldn’t choose to.
Part of me wanted to be free of this pain as soon as possible.
But even more than that...
I was glad.
I truly believed that kiss had been the best kiss I could have received.
The whole thing about stopping the collapse of the world had been absurd.
But now, without question, I thought it had been wonderful.
Why did it matter this much to me?
Even I didn’t understand.
No.
It mattered.
That memory was precious.
And I loved Kameyama-kun so much I couldn’t stand it.
Enough to stalk him for an entire year even though I knew I shouldn’t.
I would carry these feelings with me for the rest of my life.
Maybe I would stay single forever.
I didn’t care.
There was no other idiot in the world who would choose me over the collapse of the entire world.
When I thought that, the tears came again and wouldn’t stop.
“Done.”
Kameyama-kun Number Three showed me the picture he had drawn in pencil.
It was my crying face.
He was probably trying to make me laugh by showing me what I looked like when I cried.
Right.
Kameyama-kun was the kind of person who could put everything he had into doing something for someone else.
“I’m sorry... I’m sorry...”
“H-Huh?! Why are you crying again?!”
He went right back to drawing.
And until I finally stopped crying, he kept drawing me.
Every time he finished one, he showed me another picture of my crying face.
This was exactly why I hated Kameyama-kun.
I was starting to fall for him again.

I moved the novel to the side of the desk so my tears wouldn’t get it wet.
That was when I caught sight of something written on the very last page.
What was that?
I checked.
There was a single word written there in pencil.
Wait for me.