The dam of Aiwa's secrecy has a crack in it, and my curiosity is a relentless flood. A few days after her confession about the pendant, I find my chance. We are assigned as partners to clean the classroom after school, a mundane task that provides the perfect, private setting.
As we are wiping down the windows, the silence stretching between us, I finally ask. "That story you told me," I begin, my voice carefully neutral. "About your first friend. If you do not mind me asking… what happened?"
She stops wiping, her back to me. She is quiet for a long time, and I think maybe I have pushed too hard. But then, she speaks, her voice soft and full of a distant memory.
"I was very young," she says. "About six, I think. We had just moved to Japan for the first time. I did not speak the language well. I was very lonely. I spent most of my time at kindergarten just sitting by myself, watching the other kids play."
She turns to face me, a sad, nostalgic smile on her face. "There was a park next to the kindergarten. One day, I was trying to pet a stray dog. But it was scared, and it started barking at me. Then its friends came, and they were all barking and growling. I was so terrified. I thought they were going to bite me." She hugs her arms, as if feeling the memory of that fear.
"I started crying," she continues. "And then, suddenly, this boy appeared. He could not have been much older than me, maybe seven. He was holding a plastic toy sword. He stood right in front of me, between me and the dogs, and he was yelling."
"Yelling?" I ask, my own memories beginning to stir, blurry and indistinct.
She giggles, a soft, beautiful sound. "He was yelling lines from 'Starlight Paladin.' He was shouting, 'In the name of the Starlight Kingdom, I command you to retreat, you beasts of darkness!' He was so serious, so brave. He was my hero."
The dogs, of course, were probably just confused by the shouting and wandered off. But to a terrified six-year-old girl, it was a miracle. He had saved her.
"He became my only friend," she says, her voice full of a deep warmth. "We would play 'Starlight Paladin' in the park every day after kindergarten. He was always the hero, and I was always the princess he had to rescue. It was the happiest time of my childhood."
She looks down at the pendant, which she has pulled out from under her shirt. "But then, my father's job transferred him again, and we had to move back to Korea. On our last day, I was so sad. I did not want to leave him. I made him a promise."
"What promise?" I whisper, my throat suddenly dry.
A deep blush colors her cheeks. "It is embarrassing," she says. "I was a child. I told him that when we grew up, I would come back and find him, and we would get married."
My brain stops. Completely.
"He got so flustered," she says, laughing at the memory. "He did not know what to say. But just before I left, he ran up to me. He had just gotten this from a gachapon machine." She holds up the pendant. "He pressed it into my hand and said, 'This is a hero's crest. So you will not forget me. It is a promise that a hero will always find his princess.' And then I had to go."
She looks at me, her eyes shining with an earnest, hopeful light. "It is so frustrating, though," she sighs. "It was so long ago. I cannot remember his name. I cannot even remember his face clearly. Just… that he had dark hair, and very serious, kind eyes."
She is looking right at me, at my dark hair and my serious eyes, and she has no idea. She is telling the story of our past to my face, and she does not recognize me at all.