I was reminded once again how scary and convenient the internet was when after searching ‘Saejima Rinko piano’, I immediately found recordings of her performances from past piano competitions. The videos looked like they belonged to the parents of other competitors, and it seemed they had uploaded these recordings without her permission. Still, just as Hanazono-sensei said, it seemed Rinko was pretty much like a celebrity, and dozens of the recordings of her performances had tens of thousands of views.
Then again, maybe about a third of all the comments I read made a pass at Rinko’s appearance, and some were honestly just plain disgusting to read. Man, there were some real nasty people on the internet.
That aside, I put on my headphones and closed my eyes to better focus on listening to the performance.
She was playing Aeolian Harp, from Chopin’s Études. Her two hands crafted a soft, whispering melody with a beautiful arpeggio that flowed uninterrupted from start to finish; I found myself sighing in content as the piece came to a quiet end. She had already surprised me with the intensity she had in performing my arrangement of Carmina Burana, but even that was nothing compared to the impression Aeolian Harp had left on me.
I clicked on the thumbnail of a different video showing another of Rinko’s performances. And then another, and another, listening to each of them one after the other.
It had been a wonderful experience hearing each of them, but when I finally took off my headphones, I realized my hair was damp with sweat. I tried to stand up from my chair but found I didn’t have the strength to.
Listening to all of her performances had left me drained.
I hadn’t noticed even once how much the pieces had been affecting me; I was completely absorbed, listening in rapture. It was like a narcotic for my ears.
But that just served to feed my curiosity, making me want to learn even more why she hadn’t chosen a path that was more music-focused.
Or maybe I was simply underestimating how harsh the music world really was, where a performance of that level wasn’t good enough to be considered professional.
*
Two days later, I had another chance to meet Rinko at the music room after school, and I asked her then.
“Why did you choose this high school? Wouldn’t it have been better to go to a specialized music school, especially if you wanted to go pro?”
But Rinko answered me with an annoyed grumble.
“…And this is exactly why I didn’t want to be the accompanist. I don’t want anyone prying into my business. I should have known I needed to have played even worse to avoid standing out.”
She had… intentionally played badly?
“Wouldn’t that be impossible?”
I couldn’t help but ask.
“…What do you mean?” Rinko asked, blinking in surprise.
“I just think it’s impossible to intentionally play badly. I mean, I also play a few instruments, and… Wait, actually, it’s rude of me to just assume that… Err, what I mean is, uh…”
I couldn’t find the right words to say and began stumbling all over what I wanted to say.
“…Well, after a certain level, you’re just not able to play badly, right? Like your muscle memory is so ingrained that even if you make a conscious effort to do something wrong, your body doesn’t listen.”
I stopped myself partway through what I was saying; I was scared I would accidentally say something really embarrassing or even completely wrong, so I shut my mouth and hesitantly peeked at Rinko’s face.
There was a strange expression plastered on her face.
It was a little hard to describe, but, to use an analogy, it was the kind of face someone would make if they found an important photo they thought they’d lost underneath the toilet rug they’d been stepping all over on a regular basis.
Rinko sighed in resignation before sitting down on the bench stool.
“I had you pegged as an ordinary sex offender kind of person, but I’m going to have to change my opinion of you.”
“Thanks, I guess? But how is it now?”
Her first impression was probably deep in the minus, so surely it got better just now.
“You’re now an extraordinary sex offender.”
“It hasn’t changed at all! In fact, it got worse!”
“I don’t think there are many sex offenders out there that also understand music like you do, Murase-kun. You should be happier about that.”
“I’d be happier if you listened to anything I said…”
“If people call Beethoven a musical savant, you would be a musical savage. Isn’t that quite the nice title?”
“It’d be nice if you could find other similarities between us than just that!”
“Like how both of you cannot and will not ever experience a lifelong, happy marriage?”
“Can we just move on already!”
Rinko suddenly stood from the bench and walked about three meters away.
“I said move on, not move away! Cut it out already! People outside will think I’m actually trying to assault you or something if they hear me shouting weird things!”
“But that’s pretty much all true, isn’t it? You were the one who let out a strange yell, Murase-kun, so it makes sense I’d run away. There’s no changing that fact.”
I mean, it was sort of true. But still, I didn’t want random people to misunderstand. Okay, let’s calm down here, and get back to… Wait, what were we talking about again?
“Murase-kun, you…”
Rinko returned to sit on the bench and muttered something in a low voice.
“You’ve never experienced a live piano concert, have you? At least one that used a grand, anyway. That’s probably why you think I can play the piano well, since that was your first time hearing a grand piano in person or something. Anyway, allow me to clarify once and for all: my piano skills are not special.”
“…Huh?”
“What part of that did you not understand? Oh, I know, I’ll put it in a way a sexual deviant like you can understand: it’s like when a virgin freezes up during their first time.”
“I didn’t understand that at all!”
“Oh? So you’re saying because you’re a virgin, you don’t know if you’ll freeze up or not?”
“No, I didn’t say anything like that at all. Actually, can you stop making everything sexual? Rather, I understood what you said the first time just fine! I mean, sure, I’ve never been to a classical-type of concert or anything, but…”
I paused, trying to find the right words to use, but I couldn’t think of any clever say of saying what I wanted to say. She was right, after all — this was the first time I’d heard something like that.
“I mean, what I wanna say is, I think you’re special. Like, I’d happily give you money to see you perform.”
Rinko was quiet, only giving an intense glare, so I kept talking in a hurry.
“Uh, like paying money to hear you perform, I mean, play your music. On the piano. Not uh, anything suggestive or sexual.”
“Yes, I know,” Rinko answered, though she still sounded disgusted, “but the fact that you mentioned it anyway, before I said anything, means you really are thinking of some perverted things.”
“Ugh…”
I dug myself into the hole this time, and trying to add more would probably just make things worse. The best thing to do was to stay quiet and just accept any criticism that came my way.
“You really need to stop with the sexual harassment, especially when we’re in the middle of a serious conversation.”
“You’re the last person I want to hear that from!”
But alas, I could not stay silent!
“Anyway, you just need to know that you have the wrong idea about me.”
Rinko stood from the bench stool as she spoke.
“I’m not at a level where I could just go pro. And that’s without considering the people who are much better than me.”
I sat unmoving, lost in thought; even after she had left the room, I continued thinking, eyes fixed on the enormous grand piano and staring at the distorted face that peered back at me from the reflection of the unblemished dark surface.
Was it really a misunderstanding on my part? Was I really overestimating her because I didn’t know better?
I posed such questions to the me on the other side of the warped, black mirror.
No, that isn’t right, the me on the other side seemed to answer.
I couldn’t call myself an expert on classical music, but I also couldn’t lie about what my ears heard — or what my heart felt. And if anyone heard what I heard, or felt what I felt, but still called Rinko’s performance ‘nothing special’, I would sooner believe there was mayonnaise between their ears than a brain.
Ah, if only I could hear more…
*
As a content creator, it only took a little fame to start making connections.
This was no different for me as MusaOtoko, and I was connected to a number of people within the industry through social media. I’ve never met any of them in real life nor did I know how they looked, but we did get along well through shared musical interests and backgrounds.
Among them was Gureko-san, a college student attending music school that also uploaded arrangements of classical pieces. I figured it was possibly they were pretty familiar with the classical music world, so I contacted them through SNS.
“Have you ever heard of Saejima Rinko? I heard some things about competitions and how she did really well in the middle school brackets.”
It didn’t take long to get a reply.
“I know about her. She took competitions like a storm, and she even traveled to far-off regional events, taking first place every time. A lot of people really hated her for it.”
Was that something to be hated for though? And even if they described her as a storm, it couldn’t have meant she was violent, so it was probably more like she came in and legitimately won the prize through pure skill. That had to mean the others were just jealous, right? Did she give up her dream of becoming a pro pianist because she had become disillusioned with how the classical music world really was?
“So what brought her up?” Gureko-san sent another message.
For a moment, I considered revealing the truth: that we attended the same high school. Well, if we were having this conversation in real life, I probably would have accidentaly blurted it out, but I was able to hold back because we were just talking through text. I really needed to be more careful about not revealing personal information with people over the internet.
“She was in a competition video I was watching. I liked how she played, and I was wondering if you knew anything about her.”
That was the message I sent back; it wasn’t a lie, but I felt a bit guilty for not revealing the entire truth.
“Come to think of it, I haven’t heard anything about her in a while. She might’ve quit.”
Gureko-san answered.
“Actually, I do remember hearing she’d missed first a few times. Maybe she went through a slump? And then ended up quitting? I’ve felt something like that myself a few times before. It’s actually kinda a pain-in-the-ass dealing with everything on that side, and a lot of the times it just makes you wanna quit.”
A pain-in-the-ass, huh…
Hm, that made sense; I could see it being annoying to deal with. I mean, the whole thing is basically just gathering a ton of people — people that have devoted their lives to playing the piano — and then judging them based on obscure, illogical standards, right? Playing with the weight of the hopes and expectations of teachers and adults wound around every finger was bound to become too exhausting, even if it were for something like a one-phrase piece.
I thanked Gureko-san for their help and ended the conversation before leaving my phone facedown as I stared at the ceiling from atop my bed.
That girl had taken many victories home from that pain-in-the-ass world…
All of those first-place victories she’d collected had gathered up, growing like a fragile tree that reached for an empty sky, until one day, something gave way, and the tree fell over, revealing rot from within — or something like that.
Honestly speaking, it was a waste.
It was a waste for her to leave her talents to rot; if she really didn’t want it, then I’d happily take it. If I had that kind of talent, I might’ve actually been able to cross over the five-thousand view count without having to resort to something like cross-dressing.
I picked up my phone again and opened a bookmark I’d saved of a video of Saejima Rinko at a competition. The uploader hadn’t included any other information, so I didn’t know if this was one of the competitions where Rinko hadn’t placed first. Still, this was back when she was still a middle schooler; it was hard to believe there were other kids of the same age that could perform at a similar level. Then again, Gureko-san said Rinko had been in competitions all over Japan, so it was possible that Rinko eventually met others that played at a higher level.
But…
It was dumb to rank music in the first place – at least, I thought so. Rather, for me, and apparently for many others too, there were only two kinds of music: the music that you wanted to listen again and the music you didn’t want to listen to again. It was as simple as that.
I got up off the bed and onto my feet, walking over to sit myself down in front of my computer and opening a browser. I found a recommended video link to start with and resumed my search for more of Rinko’s performances.
Among what I found tonight, my favorite had to be of Schubert’s Piano Sonata No. 21.
Until today, I’d never paid much attention to Schubert’s pieces; as a kid, I’d heard a bit of his Unfinished Symphony but didn’t understand its appeal, nor did I care for his more well-known works like Heidenröslein and Erlkönig when I’d heard them in music class.
And yet Rinko’s performance of Piano Sonata No. 21 strongly affected me.
It was a sad piece, one written by a gentle young man that had fallen ill. Though he never lost his smile, the young man’s heart crumbled more and more with each passing heartbeat as he quietly endured the pain that returned from time to time. And yet, Schubert’s Piano Sonata No. 21 wasn’t fit to be a competition piece; it lacked parts that would demonstrate its performer’s technical skills, yet it was plainly difficult to perform, and more importantly, it was a long piece — the first movement alone took twenty minutes to play. I couldn’t help but wonder why Rinko had chosen this piece for the competition.
In a related video, another girl in the same competition performed Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 8, and going by the video’s description, it seemed she had taken first place with it.
…Which meant Rinko and her Schubert piece had lost.
Yet, no matter how many times I listened to and compared the two performances, I couldn’t figure out why Rinko had lost; to me, Rinko’s performance was at least a hundred times better. Was it because she chose a piece that wasn’t suitable for a competition for middle schoolers? Or maybe it was because her performance had been too passionate – and therefore exhausting – to follow? Both of those should have been merits though.
That thought suddenly reminded me of the sheet music still in my bag, which I quickly fished out.
It was the sheet music for the next choral piece Hanazono-sensei was forcing on me – one that Schubert composed.
Salve Regina.
It was a four-part choir piece that was performed in praise of the Virgin Mary. As usual, a piano was the accompaniment… Oh, it was played in the key of B-flat major, just like Piano Sonata No. 21; actually, because of the molto moderato in the sonata’s first movement, I should be able to use its gentle motifs in the accompanient to Salve Regina.
I picked out a few notes on the sequencer before letting it play. What came out sounded so beautiful that I found myself trembling; I felt I could call myself a genius, but I knew the real genius was the composer — Piano Sonata No. 21 had been a masterpiece, but Salve Regina was no less of one. I gave a silent prayer in apology to the esteemed Franz Schubert; I would listen more attentively to his pieces from now on.
In the end, I spent the entire night writing the accompaniment, printing the finished score before I made my way to school while fighting off my drowsiness.
*
Rinko’s reaction upon reading the accompaniment score was terrifying; she suddenly brought both hands down, slamming her fingers into different keys. The cacophony of dissonant notes rang across the music room whose only occupants were us, and it sounded as though every mug in the world had shattered at once.
“…D minor, 11th on A,” I said timidly.
“I’m not quizzing you on chords,” Rinko curtly replied.
“…Uhh, okay, but why are you so angry?”
“Does it look like I’m angry?”
“No, but…”
Rinko wore her usual expression, though something about her seemed a little heated; it wasn’t like her words were different from how venomous they usually were, and her demeanor appeared the same as usual.
But… I could tell she was angry.
“I’m actually not angry at all but,” Rinko said, pouting her lips, “I do think it’d be better if you just dropped dead.”
“So you are angry…”
“Actually, I hope you die of heart failure on a clear morning in November, after spending your last moments all alone in the corner of an old nursing home. And despite having lived to be four times as old as Schubert, you’ll finally realize how lonely your life was having wasted it all to churn out some basic minor key chords on your sequencer.”
It was such an oddly specific condemnation that I couldn’t figure out how to respond, though if I remembered right, Schubert had passed away at the age of thirty-one. Seeing my lack of response, Rinko continued.
“So? What were you even thinking, using Schubert’s Piano Sonata No. 21 as the accompaniment?”
“Oh, you noticed? I should’ve expected as much.”
“Of course I would. That was a piece I struggled with for countless hours.”
“I would assume so. It’s a piece you played at a competition, after all.”
Rinko raised her eyebrows.
“You knew I played it at a competition? But how?”
“I watched a video of it, that someone had uploaded to the internet.”
Rinko let out a deliberate sigh, one that seemed to sweep across the keyboard.
“It’d be better if it could all just disappear…”
At first I thought she was talking about the video, but it was possible she meant more than that; I felt a chill run down my spine.
“No, but it’s because of the video that I learned just how amazing of a composer Schubert was. I never knew he’d written such beautiful pieces, and I have you to thank for showing me.”
“I didn’t play that piece for you, you know. And I wasn’t the one who uploaded the video you watched, either.”
“I mean, both of those are true, but…”
“Then, how about I play Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 12 or maybe Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 2 for you?”
Both of those pieces were funeral marches in their third movements. I could almost cry from how thankful I felt.
In any case, it seemed I’d long pushed her far out of her comfort zone, so it didn’t matter how much more uncomfortable I could make her; I pushed further and began asking direct questions.
“So why did you quit playing the piano? You were playing it so well.”
She blinked once before slowly closing her eyelids as she simutaneously brought down the fallboard.
“But I didn’t quit.”
She slowly opened her eyes, staring at her hands as she answered.
“Oh, right,” I thought over her answer before I continued, “What I meant was, why did you stop playing seriously? Like going to competitions.”
“Do you really think competitions are that important? No, besides that, what gives you, a complete stranger, the right to lecture me about my choices like you’re my parent?”
Her eyes and words were full of pain, and it seemed to me that her parents had also once questioned her decisions in the same way. It made sense that they would, but I couldn’t do anything but hang my head in response.
A complete stranger, she called me…
She made a sound argument, and I couldn’t agree more. I always thought ranking music was pointless and meaningless, so by extension, competition results also shouldn’t mean anything.
I snuck a peek out of a corner of my eye.
From where I stood, I could see Rinko’s delicate fingers resting on the closed key lid.
It would be such a waste of talent otherwise, and that thought was why I was meddling. Those with wings were meant to fly, and, as one of the lowly humans crawling around in the dirt – one of those that looked to the sky with longing – wasn’t it natural for me to feel that way?
Rinko continued, her voice almost a whisper.
“And I said this yesterday, Murase-kun; the only reason why you think I’m skilled is because you don’t know anything about the piano. I’m not special. My only talent is being able to move my fingers well enough to make fewer mistakes than others. But that’s not good enough. The best I could do was winning competitions at the prefectural level.”
Rinko wasn’t looking at me; her head was bowed, and she stared towards the foot that rested on the soft pedal as she spoke. I wanted to shake my head in denial of her words, but there was no point if she didn’t see it.
“I was always told the same things. That my performance is unrefined and lacks elegance. That the colors of my tone are all muddied and how it’s covered in unwanted noise. How my sounds are dull and lifeless… And I think they’re right.”
“…The colors of your tone?”
I couldn’t help but speak up when I heard her say that.
“You mean like the piano’s tone? But… isn’t that dependent on the piano itself? Why is a pianist being judged for that? I mean, in the first place, you just hit the keys and then sound comes out, right? What does it mean to be covered in unwanted noise?”
Rinko finally looked up, but when she turned to face me, I felt myself shivering in discomfort: the forced smile she wore was all too thin and fragile.
She slowly stood and turned again, whispering as she stared out the window, toward the empty sky.
“It doesn’t really matter. All I have to do is play the right sounds. Being an accompanist is more than good enough for me. What more do you want from me?”
She slowly made her way out of the room; like yesterday, I sat unmoving, with my head planted on a desk near the piano as I mulled over her words.
What more did I want from her, she asked?
Wasn’t it obvious? I wanted her to play the piano more. I wanted to hear her play more.
She said she hadn’t quit, but what I should’ve asked was “Why haven’t you quit?” It was obvious to me that she was still practicing regularly at home, especially since her skills hadn’t degraded compared to how she was in the videos. So what I wanted to know was why did she continue to train herself for competitions when she wasn’t going to participate?
I stood from my seat and weakly reached out to touch the side of the grand piano. From the other side of its polished, black surface, I saw a reflection of my thin, wretched figure.
I already knew the answer: because her heart was still in it.
About fifteen minutes later, Hanazono-sensei entered the music room, and I asked her that same question.
That is, does a piano’s tone change depending on who played it?
“Oh? What a surprise. So despite using quite a lot of classical music as reference, you’re telling me MusaO doesn’t actually know a lot about the piano?”
“Yeah, uhh… you see, I was just copying and using stuff I thought sounded cool.”
Also, it was convenient that copyright infringement didn’t usually apply to classical pieces. In the first place, it’s not like I ever had any sort of formal music training; I was just a self-taught amateur.
“I mean, I’ve only ever played on electric keyboards, up until high school anyway. And it’s not like the sound changes, no matter how you hit the keys, right? Is it different with a real piano?”
“It’s no different with an electric keyboard. It can change depending on how you play, see?”
Hanazono-sensei’s answer surprised me.
She brought over the electric keyboard over from the prep room and began to play. She played an excerpt from a sonata by Scarlatti with gentle, bouncing grace before playing the same sample with sharper, more rigid motions.
“You see?” she said, turning to look at me, “Sounds completely different, right?”
“…I mean, I guess?” I said, unconvinced and thinking, “But the only thing that changed was how you pressed the keys though, right? It doesn’t matter how hard or soft you press down on the keys when the same sound will come out.”
“But there was a difference in the harshness, right? Wouldn’t that mean the tone of the piano had changed?”
I crossed my arms as I thought about what she’d said.
“Not… necessarily? You could even argue that difference was just the volume and layering.”
“Which means there was a difference in how it sounded, no? And isn’t that what music is all about?”
Hanazono-sensei bore down on me with her words, cornering me with a smug smile on her face.
“When it comes to the grand piano, the differences can be even more profound. It has a much wider dynamic range, and the sounds come from strings in resonance.”
A piano’s dynamic range referred to the intensity of the sounds it could make; for a grand piano, it was possible to produce a fortissimo strong enough to shake heaven and earth but also a pianissimo as gentle as falling snow. The two-hundred-and-some strings within its body produced resonant sounds in groups of three, making rich harmonics that would be impossible for an electric keyboard to reproduce, even if each key were sampled one-by-one.
“But because of the piano’s large size, it’s also easier for noise to distort the sound.”
“But what do you mean by noise? Like making a mistake while playing? I didn’t notice any mistakes when Rinko was playing.”
“See, the thing is, even if you play a piece perfectly, it’s still possible to create noise.”
As she spoke, Hanazono-sensei cut the power to the electric keyboard before pressing a number of keys at random on the now-silent machine. Of course, there was no music, but there were other sounds: thudding, thumping, creaking, scraping…
In other words, she was referring to the literal sounds the keys made.
“Even a motion as basic as pressing down on a key creates unwanted ‘noise’. There’s the sound of your finger making contact with the key, the sound of the key bottoming out and hitting the piano frame, and the friction from the key returning to its natural position as you take your finger away, just to name a few. All of this put together creates the ‘noise’ we’re talking about. At best, the noise muffles and muddles the sound of the strings; at worst, it completely distorts the sound.”
“Oh I see… I’ve never really thought about it. But that’s all noise we can’t avoid making while playing, right? Especially when we’re trying to make stronger sounds.”
“Which is why professional pianists train day and night to minimize the noise they produce as much as possible,” Hanazono-sensei answered with a giggle.
It was because I didn’t even know that much that Rinko made fun of me; I felt thoroughly embarrassed as I thought back on the conversation we’d had.
“At the same time, everyone feels differently about unwanted noise. For example, there are some that say because the sound of the fingers hitting the keys are too loud and add percussive variance to the music, that noise should be minimized as much as possible. However, there are others that claim that very same noise is an important factor in producing a clear, strong forte note, citing renowned pianists such as Richter and Horowitz who hit keys so hard you fear their pianos might just break. Personally, I love that kind of play; I tried imitating their technique while in music college, but it was impossible to produce that kind of explosive sound. Then, when I tried using my elbows, the professor stopped me, and started yelling at me about it… Wait, what were we talking about again?”
“…We were talking about how a piano’s tone could change depending on how you hit the keys.”
How did a woman like this even graduate from music college? Some things in life were just too hard to believe.
*
That night, I was once again scouring the net for more recordings of Rinko playing the piano.
I had settled in bed with my headphones on and my eyes closed, letting ripples of sound carry my consciousness along the darkness. This time there was Chopin and Ravel, and her rendition of their pieces left me just as shaken as I was when I first heard her Schubert.
And that was the most important fact of all.
I raised myself out of bed and took off my headphones. The music abruptly ended, and now all I could hear was the menacing sounds of the exhausts of the many motorbikes coming down the Shuto Expressway.
I looked over at the hand that held my headphones by the band.
She was in a slump, and it was up to me to drag her out of it. I already had a plan in mind; I hadn’t wasted my early teenage years sitting in a dark room and staring at the electronic window of a DTM program for nothing, after all. I could already visualize the outline of the score I needed to write.
I sat myself down in front of my PC and put my headphones back on.
*
Four days later, during a lunch break, Rinko came to my classroom — that is, the classroom of 1-7. Having foregone sleep over the past four days, my brain felt like complete mush. I was so exhausted that as soon as the bell signaling the end of fourth period rang, I dropped my head straight onto the desk and let my exhaustion take over. At least, until someone grabbed hold of my shoulders and shook me with great strength, suddenly rousing me from my sleep. In my dazed consciousness, I flailed around by reflex and nearly fell out of my chair.
“–Huh? Wha..?”
I made a strange noise. I raised a drowsy face to see who had shook me only to come face-to-face with Rinko.
My mind was still groggy from the sudden awakening, and it took several seconds of looking around like a bewildered idiot before I finally realized I was still in class — and that several of my classmates were staring at me with naked curiosity.
And just as the fog was lifting from my mind, Rinko suddenly put a hand on my face and used her fingers to forcibly spread my eyelids. Meanwhile, she used her free hand to check my pulse from my wrist. Her actions were so shocking that I almost fell out of my chair again.
“Wh-wh-what are you doing?!”
As I shook my hand and my face free of her hands, Rinko stared at me with a look of displeasure.
“You used to come by the music room every day, but you hadn’t shown up for the past four days. I was worried you might’ve gotten sick.”
“I, uh, well, sorry for worrying you..?”
But rather than worrying about Rinko, it was actually the reactions of my classmates that had me concerned. They were staring at me with a mixture of suspicion and concern, and I could hear curious whispers guessing about what was going on.
“Isn’t that the girl from 1-4?” “Why’s she with Murase?” “Oh, aren’t they the accompanists for music class?” “Woah, they’re alone together after school?!”
“Would I have gotten on that route if I kept visiting the music classroom after school?” “Maybe I should change my elective to music…” “No, don’t, she only acts that way with Murase!”
I didn’t really understand what was happening, but it seemed strange rumors were beginning to spread.
“Well, you see, I just wanted to check up on you. After all, you used to always show up after school just to make lewd jokes. But after these past four days, I realized it was getting lonely without you.”
Rinko’s ridiculous words were like a spark that set off the outrage of my classmates.
“The hell are you doing in the music room, Murase?!” “Someone get the counselor!” “We need the cops!”
“H-hey, wait a minute! I have done nothing of the sort!” I desperately tried to placate them as I glared at Rinko, “And you, stop with those weird lies!”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Rinko said, her face nonchalant, “I meant he would make piano talk, not that he would make lewd jokes. It was an honest mistake.”
“That’s not what it sounded like at all! You were clearly trying to set me up!”
“Really?” she furrowed her eyebrows with disbelief as she asked, “Okay, then try saying ‘lewd piano’ ten times fast.”
“And why would I do that?”
“You wanted to prove I didn’t misspeak, right?”
“Ugh…”
I hadn’t expected her to come at me from this angle, and it seemed I would have to take responsibility for my accusations.
“…Lewd piano, lewd piano, lewd piano, lewd piano, loopeeano, loopy… ah, huh?”
“See? It was easy to misspeak, right?”
“Yeah, but just because you’re correct doesn’t mean..!”
“Hey Murase, you can’t just say things to a girl like that!” “Oh gosh, he really must have been saying lewd things…”
It felt like the rumors had really taken root, so I panicked and grabbed Rinko’s arm to take her out of the classroom.
Once I brought her over to an empty stairwell, I let go her of her hand. “So what’s your real reason for coming find me?” I asked.
“Didn’t I tell you it’s because I was worried? Don’t you trust me? Have I ever lied to you?”
“You have! A bunch of times! In fact, you just lied two minutes ago!”
“That was just a difference of opinion.”
I think it’s a bit more than a difference of opinion when the things you say put me right on the edge of ending my school life, socially speaking.
“Regardless, I really did come because I was worried. Did something happen?”
Now, how should I mention it. It wouldn’t be very exciting to just give the game away, so I put on the smuggest grin I could muster, pressed my fingers against my head, and leaned back before I began to speak.
“Would you believe me if I said I’ve been preparing something that would… take you down?!”
“I believe it. In fact, I would say you’re exactly the type of person to shut yourself in a dark room for four days just to plan such a thing, Murase-kun.”
“But I didn’t shut myself away, I came to school like normal every day! Honestly it’s actually harder to think of a response if you take me so seriously!”
“Well, it might be easier on you if you didn’t act so weird all the time or say things that could be easily misinterpreted.”
That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to tell you, woman! You’re making me want to cry here!
“Erm, well, as I was saying,” I said, continuing after clearing my throat four times, “Could I borrow some of your time after school today?”
Rinko’s reply was to blink in curiosity.
Headcanon TL 
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