Yamaa Tomohisa X Aragaki Yui

A friend indeed

Chapter 1: Memory

 

The first time they met, he was wearing this very bold colour shirt with prints on it. His hair, in her still vivid memory, was light brown. Even his eyebrows were in the shade of golden.

 

She was told by the casting manager that they would be playing high school not-so-sweethearts. Being paired with a rising teen idol? Sure, she was very excited. She had also learned that the leading girl role wasn’t hers, but she didn’t mind that. It’s going to be a good portfolio starring in the same production with Abe Hiroshi anyway.

 

In that production there were so many costars her age to talk to but she was too shy to strike a conversation. They seemed to act so much better than her. Some other extras gave her looks expressing their disapprove at the director’s choice of casting her. She tried to smile at them but it must had come out as being a snob, she thought to herself miserably.

 

Or maybe she should try the main student casts instead.

 

The pretty leading girl Masami was nice but she seemed to be very busy. Yui hardly ever caught her in the waiting room since she’d always be snatched by her manager to other shows. Then there’s another girl whose personality didn’t really click with her. They’d always fall into silence after a couple exchanges about weather.

 

Then there’s the boys. Something Yui absolutely had no idea they were about.

 

Akiyoshi Nakao played something between a loser and a joker in the group and also the funniest in real life. Yui liked listening to him telling jokes. He was the easiest to be around. The other boy, Koike Teppei, spoke Kansai-ben sometimes. He made Yui more comfortable as a fellow Tokyo’s outsider. He also seemed to be talking a lot with the last boy. The leading boy. The boyfriend.

 

The last boy. He was a mystery to her.

 

He came to the set with such messy hair, his eyes crossed with sleepiness. Yui noticed his wrinkled shirts and pants a lot more times she should have. He would be gradually waking up as the make up was applied and hair was being taken care of. And then the world suddenly turned brighter, he would smile and laugh with Koike. Then Yui thought, whoa, this person was surprisingly cheerful.

 

They never talked much, as Yui wasn’t the kind of person who has the courage to go up and say hi to someone new. He was not different. The way he awkwardly tried to remember extras’ names reminded her of herself. But he was very mature, even to her who was only three years younger, he seemed like a veteran in show business.

 

Yui finally found herself looking up to him. And Yui finally found herself look at him.

 

On one of the early days in shooting, all the main casts gathered around a medium sized hole not too far from the one used in the drama. They were going to plant a cherry blossom tree together as a good omen. Mr.Abe was the one holding the tiny sakura tree. Everyone else was asked to put the soil in the hole after that. Yui threw in a fistful of cold, damp soil one after another, she patted the mound instinctively then immediately flinched as she felt something under her hand.

 

“Are you going to bury my hand too?”

 

He mysteriously said so with a quiet laugh. His shining round eyes stared at her with a flick of light in them.  A big dimple on his right cheek carved in, and a pair of smaller dimples beamed themselves proudly at Yui. She was seventeen, he was barely twenty, and she could hear her heart making strange noise loudly in her imagination.

 

She brushed it off as a ridiculous reaction from a girl with little experience in interacting with the opposite gender.

 

The sakura was planted and watered. Everything should all be well after that but then came the workshop.

 

Yui found out early in the acting workshop sessions that three out of the six main cast members did attend the same high school in real lives. To tell the truth, she was a bit worried about whether she could mix into their already established dynamic.

 

But her role was the Girlfriend. Of him. What else could she do but try to get to know the actor playing the boyfriend better. She had a lot of scenes coming up where she needed to put an arm around him and whatnot. Okay, an arm around his shoulder wasn’t a big deal. Acting is your job! - she told herself. Until it became a big deal years later. Yui couldn’t in a million years imagine that anyway.

 

She tried to approach him, to get more comfortable with him for the sake of acting. It was a revelation to find that, like her, he seemed to has a problem with approaching new people too. She pondered as she quietly observed him struggled trying to hold a conversation. It made her laugh, in a good way.

 

He made her feel okay about herself.

 

She planned to be stealthily observing, but then he suddenly turned around. Their eyes met. Yui feel like digging a deep hole that could the center of the Earth right there and then to hide herself. She was ready to apologise for an eavesdropping accusation.

 

He just began to smile, that smile turned into a good-natured full laugh and it induced the person watching it. They ended up laughing at each other at nothing at all.

 

At that moment Yui knew, she would treasure this laugh for a very, very long time.