Chapter 40. A Date? (4/13)

I turned toward where the voice had come from. There was a boy and girl together who appeared to be a couple. The girl was pulling the boy forward into the cafe we were in.

I looked over to Miss Popular and realized she was looking at the girl with a smile. The two of them knew each other… meaning… this was probably the ones we were meeting up with for a double date, right? But why act so surprised to see her here? Wait, her name was Alicia? I honestly hadn’t learned it until now. No, forget that for now. Why was she surprised to see her here when I was informed this was a double date?

Could it be the girl didn’t inform her partner beforehand and was trying to make things look natural to turn it into a spontaneous double date? Do people even do that sort of thing? With my low social IQ, I wasn’t very knowledgeable in this particular area.

It seems Alicia had noticed my questioning gaze.

She signaled to me to just play along and pretend I didn’t know anything through her eyes alone. She’d handle the talking apparently.

Still, asking a man with no social IQ to play along with such a scenario, that was a rather unreasonable thing to ask you know.

“It really feels like it’s been such a long time, Mari,” Alicia responded to the girl who’d approached our table while dragging the boy behind her in tow.

“Oh? Is this your boyfriend? Are the two of you on a date together? While passing by the cafe I saw you two from the window and it looked like you two were really hitting it off. I couldn’t contain my curiosity and had to find out. The Alicia, all alone together with a boy on a Sunday, if the other boys knew their Goddess was taken, they’d all be crying tears of blood you know.”

“Hahaha. Goddess? You’re exaggerating. But yeah, I am together with my sweetheart on a date.” She looked over to me lovingly and placed her hand on top of mine. If I didn’t know she was currently struggling to keep herself together all for the sake of helping her friend out, I might have just thought she was really a maiden in love.

“Oh my!” Mari squealed excitedly when she saw her friend's performance then said, “Hey, me and my boyfriend were just heading out on a Sunday date together as well. Do you want to maybe join up on a double date together with us?”

And thus, that is how I found myself inside this movie theatre watching a horror movie with this scared out of her mind girl hugging my left arm, and a stupid couple I didn’t know to my right.

We’d already gone around to several different spots on this date, I couldn’t even remember anything that happened though. I was so out of my comfort zone, it wasn’t even funny. I was constantly on the lookout to avoid any watchful eyes throughout the course of this double date. So much so that I didn’t have the time to pay attention to anything that was happening. Everywhere they went was filled with large crowds of people and many passersby. The stress was unbearable.

This movie theatre was apparently the last stop on this, unpleasant to the extreme, double date I’d been forced into.

If one asked me whether I enjoyed myself today, the answer was a resounding no. I couldn’t wait to get out of here. I’d been wanting to fall asleep halfway through this horror movie, but I couldn’t thanks to my scaredy-cat partner on this date with me.

Her incessant trembling was constantly transmitted through my left arm stuck in a vice grip between the two mounds on her chest and legs curled up resting on the seat of her chair. No matter how hard I tried to ignore it, I couldn't take a nap.

I looked up to the large screen in front of me and wondered how someone could possibly be frightened to the point of transforming into a rabbit curled up into a ball. There was just a torture room with blood scattered all over the ground from people being dissected and used as lab rats in a bunch of inhumane experiments. Nothing out of the ordinary. Honestly, the screams of despair weren’t even that moving in my opinion. It could have been so much more.

I shook my head and lamented over how pitiful this horror movie truly was. It just didn’t have the tension, the execution was shoddy at best. The atmosphere was extremely lacking and the overall work was crude, it was far too overly reliant on shock value and cheap jump scares. I found horror in a written format to be far superior to this rubbish. What was the writer even thinking when they put this sorry excuse of a movie script together?

But… everyone else in the crowd seemed to be on the edge of their seats for some reason. They were all of the younger generation though, well… my current generation. technically, so I took it with a grain of salt. This sort of thing was still new and fresh to them. They would probably give it fantastical reviews once it was over and praise it to the moon as the scariest thing they’ve ever seen in their lives.

When you didn’t have something truly scary to compare it to, then your bar would be much lower.

Well, at least I learned something good from sitting through this terrible movie. Alicia was quite weak to horror. Whether I could use such a weakness was another matter altogether.

When the movie finally cut to the end credits, the lights went on, people rose from their seats then proceeded toward the exit. Even after the movie was finished and we stood up, Alicia hadn’t let go of my arm. She was still hugging onto it tightly.

“Haha, Alicia, you’re still as bad with horror movies as always. I’ve never understood why you like them so much despite being so bad with them.” Mari suddenly brought up something that had been on my mind. The one who wanted to see this movie the most had been her. She’d gone into it with an excited face full of anticipation only to come out of it in such a disheveled state.

I’d have thought she’d be good with them since she’d been so eager to see it, but my expectations had been completely betrayed.

“Haha… I used to watch them all the time with my little brother. He used to be a big horror fanatic and we’d watch them all the time together when he was younger… but he doesn’t go out to see them with me anymore these days.” Her shoulders drooped down a bit.

“Ah… your little brother. I see. So that was it.” When Alicia’s little brother was brought up I found Mari’s reaction a bit peculiar. It seemed she knew something, but she didn’t say anything further and changed the topic instead as if she were trying to avoid souring the mood.

It seemed I’d gotten another unexpected useful tidbit of information about the popular girl named Alicia. It was apparent something was wrong with that little brother of hers. Something that may have changed him and left his big sister feeling troubled over. Perhaps she was worried about her little brother. That might be a better way to describe it.

Was he her weakness because she was overprotective of him? If it were for her little brother, would she be willing to do anything for him? Somehow I had a feeling that was most likely correct.

Perhaps he’s distanced himself from his big sister because she’s overly protective of him and he finds it suffocating. Or maybe it’s a combination of several different factors. With such a pretty elder sister with grades as good as hers, could it be he’s in a situation where he’s constantly being compared to her? Perhaps he’d caved under the expectations placed upon him for simply being Alicia’s little brother.