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It was late at night as I lay in bed, curled up on my side, alone with my thoughts. I was very familiar with this, and not just because it's my room: There were days not too long ago when I only left it to use the bathroom. Here I was again. It seemed to keep coming back to this.
After all that happened, I thought I was different. I thought I was stronger. I thought I was better. I saved all those girls. I won the game. I saved my first friend.
Except I didn't.
I never found out what happened to those girls I saved. I hadn't thought much to question it, but where did they go? News about girls who'd killed themselves suddenly coming back to life would have been all over the place. I even did some research to see if I could find them but came up with nothing. Was I really saving anyone? Were they echoes or final thoughts that the Accas had somehow captured and bottled up in those eggs, while the real girls were gone for good?
Were they based on real girls, or did they even used to be real girls once, but in the end were no more real or meaningful than characters in a game?
At the end of the game, what was waiting for me? A meeting with myself, of all people, and a visit from one of those...I don't even know what to call them, those things Frill made. She...or maybe it...swept me and all my "strength" and "betterness" aside. I was no more a threat to her than Rika and Momoe were to their tormenters, their murderers of their friends. The other me ended up taking my fall, and even though it wasn't my eye that was lost, my mind still plays tricks on me and I feel pain in that eye sometimes. For all my bravery, I couldn't save myself.
Was that the first time we failed to save an egg girl?
And then...there was Koito.
My eyebrows lowered as I thought about her again. I went through my memories of her when she was alive, of what I went through in her name when she was dead, and of what I thought about her now that she was "back."
Before I went in the game for the last time, I finally found out what I wanted to know about her, and it almost made me give up right then. All along, I'd wanted to know what I could have done to save her, who made her kill herself, why she broke, why she didn't come to me, why, why, WHY...and that wasn't even what really happened.
I sat up, rubbing my eyes, which were sore from lack of sleep. I thought back to when she first came to my room, to my bed. She told me she thought my eyes were something to be proud of and not ashamed of, hugged me, and asked to be best friends. It was so new to be looked at by someone my age and feel like the person looking at me liked what they saw.
Now those memories were stained with bitterness and confusion. Not long after she came to my school, I hid in a locker while classmates who picked on me cornered her, pushed her around, made her take off her clothes. I recorded it and I thought I could gather evidence on what was going on. Now I wonder if she planned to edit Mr. Sawaki's voice into it, or if that wasn't harassment, it was payback. Then, she was up on the roof as part of her plan to blackmail Mr. Sawaki, but then her plan turned against her and she fell. I wanted to know who did that to her, and she really did bring it on herself. I was looking for a snake in the grass, and that snake was her. She wasn't the answer, she was the problem.
So what was her plan for me? Did she ever really want to be my friend? Was I a means to an end? Was I someone she actually liked being around but that just meant she wouldn't try to use me?
So many unanswered questions, so many bad possibilities.
I sighed, then grumbled and rested my elbows on my knees and my face on my palms. I was so tired in so many ways, but I couldn't turn my brain off as it couldn't get out of this bad place.
The hard truth was, and this has been one of the hardest things to swallow: Even if she was hiding something terrible behind that friendly smile of hers, I really might owe her my life. It hurt my heart to even think that my first friend only came to my school, and I only met her at all, because, thanks to her, another man had killed himself and left a family behind. The one I fought to save from suicide had caused a suicide herself, and yet maybe saved me from suicide. I was already friendless, lonely, and had every reason to expect to stay that way, but most of all, I met a version of myself who never met Koito and saw how she ended. Maybe that would have been me, maybe not, but now it's impossible for me to say I wouldn't have killed myself.
It was almost sickening, that someone who'd done the things that she'd done was the reason I was alive. That so wasn't how it was supposed to work. It made me feel kind of...hollow, like a part of me that once held those memories so close just suddenly died or was never really there at all.
But even then, there was so much I didn't know, and now I never would.
Why did she do it? Did someone put her up to it? I've met girls who died in the most terrible mental states, so what if someone had hurt her and that was what made her who she really was? What if she did it less out of wanting to hurt others and more out of "it's just all she knew" or "it was the only way she had to cope with her own problems"?
What was Koito's side of the story?
After another sigh, I got out of bed and started to slowly pace in circles around my room. I didn't know if it would help much, I've tried this on other nights and all it got me is more tired but not more sleepy. Still worth a try. It was uncomfortably quiet, with the only sounds being my footsteps and the occasional car passing by outside, so there was nothing to distract me.
So, why did I go back to Egg World that last time, after Mr. Sawaki told me the truth behind Koito's death? Like I told the other girls, at first, I wanted to bring Koito back and find out the whole story from her. But then, like I told Neiru, I didn't know anymore, but I guess I was grateful to Koito for what she'd done for me. I had some more time to think, especially after learning that the Koito I knew really was gone forever.
Maybe what I really wanted was to finish the job, not for Koito, but for myself and others. Looking back at who I was before all this started, before I met Koito...I really didn't like who I was and meeting a version of myself who never knew friendship made me see how much I'd changed and how I didn't want to go back to that. And there were people who needed me to be strong for them, not just girls in the game, but in real life too.
Of course...there was that other factor. The one I understood the least and worried me the most, the one I felt like only I'd been told about, that the Accas had let me see behind the curtain. The girl who was felt everywhere but never noticed, who had been erased yet was anything but gone.
Frill.
What if she had something to do with Koito? How did she fit into all this? Where was she, how was she doing what she was doing, what was she actually doing, was she the voice in the heads of the depressed who pushed them over the edge, could I have asked other-Ai about her...
I told other-Ai that I made up my mind to be a warrior of Eros. From talking to the other girls, I'd been the best at taking things from Egg World and turning them into weapons, so I thought I had the talent and determination to do it. Not that I knew what being a warrior of Eros meant or what I was supposed to do or how or anything, really. I just knew I'd gotten a glimpse that Frill was out there getting people to kill themselves - no, she was out there killing people, maybe even me in another timeline - and now that I knew that, I wanted to stop her.
Finishing another lap around my room, I leaned forward, and my forehead rested on the side of my bed in tiredness and frustration as I thought about how Frill had somehow taken one of my friends from me when I saw her with Neiru.
Fat load of good I'd done.
It was all so discouraging.
Just going to school anymore had been hard. Every time I saw Koito, I had to make myself look away unless I wanted her to tell me not to be so friendly again. But despite all things that the Koito I knew had done and I didn't know it until after she was gone, I wondered what this one was like. Maybe she was a better person. Or maybe not, but even if she wasn't, I could help her. She changed me for the better, isn't it fair that I could do the same for her? I kept telling myself it would be so, so nice if I could have her back and we could go back to how things were, this time without her schemes.
And Koito was only part of why I've had to make myself keep going to school. All my time in Egg World, other than the one shared dream Rika and I had, was at my school. When I walked around the real school, I remembered what happened at places I went. I remembered lockers painted with messages telling that first girl to kill herself. In gym class, I looked at the support pillars and remembered being whipped through them on the end of a ribbon. Just walking down the halls could bring back memories of when I couldn't walk here; I had to run from Seeno Evils and Haters. And I spent as little time around the pool, much less in it, as possible.
That still wasn't all. When Koito died, I didn't get bullied when I came back to school. I knew it wasn't from sympathy: It was because, after Koito's death, the ones who picked on her were scared they'd be held responsible. Same reason if I killed myself too, only they were even more scared since that would be the second suicide, this time of the friend of the girl who killed herself. They didn't bully me, but it wasn't because they wouldn't have if they could. But since everything changed so Koito never died, the day I went to school after finishing the game, the bullying restarted, or more like it hadn't stopped.
And I wasn't going with it this time. With what I'd gone through in Egg World, regular kids looking to me for an easy target didn't scare me anymore, they weren't even a challenge.
When one of them tried to snatch my phone out of my hand, which she'd done more than once before I first met Koito, I grabbed her wrist before she touched it and sent her on her newly scared way with just a glare and a shake of my head. That wasn't just me protecting myself: That sticker on my phone of the photo of me and the girls has made me very protective of my memories of them, especially after seeing that memories of people and things that are important to me can be all that's left of them.
Later, she tried again, this time with one of my notebooks and with help. After school was over, she came up to me in the classroom and started apologizing to me, but it was just to distract me so another girl could grab my notebook and throw it out the window, where her boyfriend was waiting to catch it. I was out the door and after him like a shot. He didn't get far, and I didn't even have to knock him down or tackle him or anything, I just grabbed my notebook out of his hand while he looked at me like he couldn't believe I was chasing him, let alone catching up to him. When we stopped running, I was just breathing harder compared to him being out of breath, and he asked me, "Since when were you that fast?!" I just told him, "Tell them what just happened," and went back to school to get the rest of my stuff. Those girls saw me with my notebook back. They stayed out of my way.
He must have done what I told him, because it didn't take long for the bullying to stop. I don't know if they found someone else to go after, but I hope not, because like I told myself, I wasn't going to pretend I didn't see anything.
Overnight, from their point of view, I'd changed. I didn't even need to fight them to show them they couldn't hurt me. I couldn't do what I could do in Egg World, but it wasn't a joke that fighting in Egg World did things to me. I wasn't just stronger, faster, and tougher. I had the experience and confidence to use what I'd gotten.
That didn't help me make new friends. Not that I cared at the time: I'd made other, better friends.
But between dealing with my memories of school and feeling like I'd lost touch with so many things...I don't know how many times or ways I can say it, but I was tired of it all. Whatever it was I had, I lost it.
And now, I was tired of not sleeping again, so it was time I did something about it.
I pulled my head back to stand upright again and shuffled out of my room. The hall lights hurt my eyes as I went to the living room where Mom was sitting and reading a book.
Time to ask for her help again.
I let her know I was there by taking a deep breath, and she turned to look at me. "Ai? Hi, dear," she said, smiling at me as she set her book aside. "Is something wrong?"
I nodded. "Mom, I...need to talk to you about something," I answered, sitting next to her.
"What is it?" she asked, reaching to take my hand.
The familiar feeling of my hand in hers was the first bit of comfort I felt tonight and calmed me down enough to say what I needed to say.
"I can't go to this school anymore."