Summary:
Yamato doesn't know why he's following Suzuka, but he knows he needs to get answers. He tracks down the address given and runs into Suzuka's older sister. He explains that he is a friend who is somewhat worried about her. Suzuka's sister is surprised he followed her, but agrees to show him where Suzuka is. Along the way, he explains about his confession and she teases him trying to ascertain his intentions. To his surprise, she leads him to a graveyard, where Suzuka is kneeling at a particular tombstone. The sister explains that Tsuda was one year above Suzuka, was the #1 sprinter, was a rocket starter, and he was killed on the way to the Nationals competition about two years ago. She also remarks that Yamato looks very similar to him. Suzuka evidently comes back to pray over his grave when she can. Yamato asks the sister not to mention he was there. After he leaves (without being seen), the sister talks to Suzuka and encourages her to go out with her friends, not to
come back so much. During the ride back, Yamato begins to think he was just a replacement for Tsuda in Suzuka's mind. The next day, he skips out on track team practice. Meanwhile, Suzuka thinks on her sister's words and thinks back to how she met Tsuda and about the events back then. We get a flashback - at the time she was teased by Tsuda, which only inspired her to do better. He encouraged her to be less rigid, she told him that he should take practice more seriously, and they argued about everything. In the end, his teasing got her past prelims, and Souichi took the much-mentioned picture of them. One day later though, after Tsuda's last day of practice before Nationals, he confessed to Suzuka. She didn't know how to take it, so he told her to think about her feelings until he got back. She had made up her mind about it, when she heard he died and she never could tell her feelings to him. Back in the present, Miki tries to convince Yamato to go to the competition, but Yamato says he won't because its meaningless to him anymore. That night, Suzuka comes by to berate him for not going. Yamato says she wanted him to quit and that he was just some substitute for Tsuda. In response, she slaps him and runs off. The team heads to the tournament, and Suzuka seems upset that Yamato won't come.

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Yow. The revelation about Tsuda was kind of a shocker to me. I really didn't expect the guy to be dead. Now a lot of Suzuka's reactions make sense to me. I can't even imagine that kind of situation - I only have one situation in my past that remotely resembles that, and in my case, the person didn't die.

We can see now why Suzuka didn't react well to Yamato's confession, and why she doesn't expose her feelings to anyone. It must be hard to try to understand your feelings for another and then, once you resolve them in your own mind and heart, to find out that you'll never be able to tell the person about them. The flashback was interesting, and unlike some readers, I don't think that Tsuda's confession was unreasonable: I've teased women I've been interested in (god, I hope they never read this), but in the end, I didn't intend for the teasing to be serious; sometimes it was just to inspire them to do what they needed to do or push them to bigger and better things.

To be fair though, Yamato's reaction is also understandable. He seems to remind everyone of Tsuda, he looks like Tsuda, he uses the rocket start like Tsuda, and he runs like Tsude. Even their personalities seem similar, although there are differences. It's easy to see why he'd think Suzuka was using him as an emotional crutch/replacement. Therein lies the tragic conundrum of the anime from this point on: how does Suzuka know her emotions about Yamato are really because of Yamato or because of Tsuda - can she seperate the two in her mind? How does Yamato know which is true? I can't think of a way to resolve this without pinpointing their differences in Suzuka's mind. In a way, I could see this anime ending sadly because she cannot resolve that issue in her mind. I doubt the anime would go that way, but it would be a bittersweet ending.

Suzuka's sister seemed interested in the idea that Suzuka went to the amusement park with Yamato, and how he confessed to her. I guess that's suppossed to be the big sister's concern for her. I wonder if we'll see her in the future in this anime.

In the end, some sort of resolution on Tsuda will have to be reached by Suzuka, and Yamato will have to decide if he trusts that resolution. Otherwise, any relationship will be on unsteady ground.

Competition time next episode! Will Yamato run? (if you think the answer is "no", you need to get your head examined)