Now that I’d finally gotten over the shock, I could appreciate the lyrics and music I was hearing. It was an up-tempo R&B number. The song was unfamiliar yet pleasant in my ears, and I had to admit it was pretty good. That might have been thanks to the absurdly good guitarist, but Haruhi was, well—how do I put this? Maybe I was too used to hearing her yelling all the time, but I had to admit she had an excellent singing voice.
The rest of the audience, too, seemed to have shaken off its petrifaction and were now genuinely drawn toward the stage.
When I thought to look around, I realized many more seats had filled up. My eye soon fell on one audience member in particular, who walked toward me wearing what looked like the civilian clothes of a knight of Denmark.
“Hi there,” he said, coming in close to speak into my ear, perhaps concerned his voice would be lost in the loud music. “What exactly is going on here?”
It was Koizumi.
How the hell should I know? I shouted back to him in my head, glancing at his costume. You’re in a festival getup too, eh?
“Changing clothes seemed like it would be a bit of a bother, so I came in my stage outfit.”
And what’re you doing here?
Koizumi looked over to Haruhi onstage pleasantly, then flicked his bangs.
“Oh, I just heard some rumors.”
So it’s a rumor already, eh?
“Oh, yes. She’s wearing that outfit, after all, so it would be stranger if there weren’t rumors. People do talk.”
Evidently, news that North High’s prize weirdo, Haruhi Suzumiya, was up to something again was already spreading like wildfire. I didn’t care if she added another incident to her reputation, but for once, I didn’t want myself or the SOS Brigade getting added to the report.
“But still, she’s quite good, Suzumiya is. Nagato too, of course.”
Koizumi smiled and closed his eyes as if enjoying the music. I turned my gaze back to the stage and tried to read something, anything, from Haruhi’s form.
My opinion of the singing and performance was much the same as Koizumi’s, save for the strange fact that the lead singer was reading her performance from sheet music on the music stand.
But all that aside, something nagged at me, something I couldn’t put my finger on. What could this ticklish sensation be? I wondered.
The next song was a slow-moving ballad, as if to throw the previous up-tempo song into contrast. I found myself moved by the music and lyrics. It had been some time since a piece of music had pierced my heart like that. As proof that I wasn’t the only one who felt that way, the audience was quiet, without so much as a single throat-clearing, and when the song ended, the auditorium fell totally silent.
The room was on its way to being a full house when Haruhi finally spoke into the mic.
“Uh, hello, everybody…”
Haruhi’s expression was rigid.
“Here’s where we should introduce the band, but the truth is…” She pointed to Nagato. “Nagato and I aren’t members. We’re just stand-ins. Due to various circumstances, the real vocalist and guitarist couldn’t be onstage. Oh, and they’re the same person—the real band is just a trio.”
The audience listened carefully.
Haruhi moved away from the center of the stage and walked over to the bassist, thrusting the mic at the girl. The girl shied away, whispering something to Haruhi, then finally squeaked out her own name.
Haruhi next walked over to the drum set and got the drummer to introduce herself, then returned to center stage.
“These two and the leader who’s not here are the real members. So… sorry. I really don’t have any confidence that I’m much of a stand-in. We only had an hour to rehearse before performing, so this is a little off the cuff.”
The bunny ears on Haruhi’s head flicked as she moved.
“How about this—if you want to hear the songs with the real vocals and guitar, bring a tape or minidisc over later and we’ll dub you a copy for free. Is that okay?”
The bassist nodded awkwardly in response to Haruhi’s question.
“Okay, it’s decided.”
Haruhi smiled for the first time since taking the stage. She must have been nervous—or nervous by her standards, anyway—but it seemed the curse was finally broken, and while her smile wasn’t as bright as the one she always showed us in the clubroom, it was still a good fifty watts.
After smiling briefly to the still-expressionless Nagato, Haruhi shouted as though to blow out the speaker cones.
“This is the last song!”
I heard the rest of the story from Haruhi later.
“I was handing out movie flyers at the front gate when I ran out, and I was going to head back to the clubroom for more,” she said.
“But then there was some kind of argument going on by the shoe lockers between the members of that band and the festival organizers from the student council. I wondered what was up, so I got closer.”
As a bunny?
“Who cares what I was wearing? Anyway, from what I gathered, the band wasn’t going to be allowed to go onstage.”
The shoe lockers are hardly the place for a discussion like that.
“It was because the band leader, who played guitar and sang, had suddenly come down with a fever on the day of the festival. Tonsillitis, I guess. Her voice was mostly gone, and she looked like she could barely stand.”
Rotten luck.
“I know. Worse, she’d sprained her wrist after getting dizzy and tripping at home. There was no way she could get on that stage.”
So why bother coming to school?
“Yeah, she was determined to do it even if it killed her. But the student council people just wanted to get her to the hospital right away, and she wound up getting carried off like an alien bound for Area Fifty-One. Push came to shove, and they wound up by the shoe lockers.”
How did she propose to perform in that condition?
“By sheer willpower.”
Sounds like something you’d do.
“I mean, they’d practiced so hard for this day. It’s one thing if she were the only one who was going to suffer if it went to waste—but wasting the efforts of your friends too? That’s awful.”
You make it sound like it was your own efforts.
“And the songs too—they weren’t generic cover songs, but originals the group had written and composed themselves. You’ve just got to perform them, right? If the sheet music could talk, it’d say, ‘Play me!’ ”
So that’s when you decided to roll up your sleeves and do something about it.
“Didn’t have any sleeves, but yeah. The student council festival committee is nothing but a bunch of incompetents who do whatever the teachers tell them, so you can’t just let them push you around. But… even I knew there was no way the band leader was going onstage in her condition. So that’s when I said, ‘How about I go onstage instead?’ ”
I can’t believe the bassist and drummer went along with it.
“The singing part was easy. The sick band leader thought about it for a second and then said, ‘Yeah, you might be able to do it.’ She had a tired-looking smile.”
There isn’t a North High student who doesn’t know who Haruhi is, and what kind of girl.
“But then a teacher had to hurry off to the hospital with the band leader, and I started frantically trying to learn the chords from a demo tape and the sheet music. I only had an hour, after all.”
So what about Nagato?
“Yeah, I wish I could’ve played the guitar too, but there just wasn’t enough time. It was all I could do to learn the melody, so I wound up asking Yuki to handle the guitar. Did you know she was such an all-around player?”
As a matter of fact, I do know that—better than you do.
“I crashed her fortune-telling stall, and when I told her the circumstances, she came right away. She just took one look at the sheet music, then played it perfectly! Where do you think she learned guitar?”
Probably right on the spot, as soon as you asked her to.
A couple of days later, on the following Monday—
The school festival, complete with its unscheduled events, had ended. It was the break before fourth period.
Haruhi sat behind me, happily scribbling something down in her notebook. I didn’t particularly want to know what it was, but I knew Haruhi was pleased by the audience the SOS Brigade’s foray into independent filmmaking had managed to reach, and she seemed to be plunging into the planning of the sequel as I agonized over how to banish such notions from her head.
“You’ve got visitors.”
It was Kunikida who’d said so, having returned from the bathroom.
Haruhi looked up and saw Kunikida point to the doorway, thus fulfilling his duties as a messenger boy. He returned to his seat.
Three female students stood outside the open door, poised and mature. One of them had her arm in a sling.
“Haruhi,” I said.
I gestured with my chin toward the door.
“Looks like they have something to say to you. Better go see.”
“Mmm.”
Haruhi seemed strangely hesitant. She stood slowly but did not immediately walk. Finally she wound up saying this:
“Kyon, you come too.”
Before I could protest, she grabbed me by the collar and hauled me with her absurd strength right out of the classroom. The three upperclassmen girls giggled at the sight.
Haruhi forced me to stand right next to her.
“Is your tonsillitis better?” she asked the one girl, whom I was just now meeting for the first time.
“Yes, mostly,” she answered in a voice that was just slightly husky. “Thank you, Suzumiya.”
All three girls bowed deeply in gratitude.
It turned out that practically the whole school (especially the girls) had requested copies of their songs. They said they were now going around to all the classes and distributing minidiscs.
“I can’t believe how many requests there were.”
When I heard the figure, I was surprised myself. There’d been quite a ripple effect indeed if people were going to such lengths to get the original songs instead of the one with Haruhi on vocals and Nagato on guitar.
“And it’s all thanks to you.”
All three girls had the same grateful smile for their helpful younger classmate.
“This means our songs won’t have gone to waste. We really appreciate it. You’re something else, Suzumiya. This was going to be our last memory as members of the pop music club, so I wanted to go onstage if I could, but this was way better than missing out entirely. We just can’t thank you enough.”
It felt a little embarrassing to have three seniors being so grateful, and I wasn’t even the one being thanked. Why do I have to stand here and be embarrassed along with Haruhi?
“We were hoping we could do something for you in return,” said the leader, but Haruhi waved her off.
“Don’t worry about it! It was fun for me to sing, and the songs were good, so it was like getting to do karaoke with a live band for free—you don’t need to thank me, really. I’d feel bad.”
Something about Haruhi’s tone was odd, as though she’d prepared the speech ahead of time—although it was very like her to speak so casually to upperclassmen.
“So really, don’t bother. If you want to thank someone, thank Yuki. I forced her into doing it, after all.”
The girls explained that they’d already been by Nagato’s class.
Evidently, after listening to the girls’ words of gratitude, the stoic Nagato had nodded once, then pointed to this classroom. I had no trouble imagining it.
“Well then,” said the leader. “We’re going to try to have a concert somewhere before graduation, so you should come if you want. With your…”
She looked at me and narrowed her eyes just slightly.
“… friend.”
But why had there been such demand for the girls’ original recording?
I’d found this out later. You can’t really call it a mystery, but in any case it had been solved by a certain talkative fellow. He does come in handy, I’ll admit.
“Did you notice any discrepancy between the timing of Suzumiya and that of the rhythm section? Or more properly, between the melody Suzumiya was singing, Nagato’s riffs, and the bass and drums?” asked Koizumi.
“It was only noticeable on a subconscious level. All four of them were playing together so well, you’d never guess they were winging it. What’s most surprising is Suzumiya’s ear. Keep in mind she’d only heard the demo tape three times.”
I wanted to be impressed with Nagato’s professional-level playing as well, but the fact is that kind of thing is easy for her.
“Yet it wasn’t perfect. Those were original songs, after all. There’s simply a huge difference between the performers who wrote those songs and practiced them endlessly and Suzumiya, who performed as an emergency stand-in.”
Well, obviously.
“Yes. So between the original bassist and drummer, Suzumiya’s idiosyncratic performance of songs she rushed to learn, and Nagato’s guitar following those idiosyncrasies, there were discrepancies—tiny, but they were there. And as the audience listened, they would feel the tension, if only subconsciously.”
He was being as plausible as he always was. Do you think anything is possible with enough psychobabble?
“It’s what I concluded after my analysis. Moving along, then—when they played the second and third songs, the feeling of tension only increased, and then they reached the final song. And what did Suzumiya do then?”
She’d explained that the real guitarist and vocalist weren’t onstage, that she and Nagato were just stand-ins, and then she introduced the drummer and bassist… right?
“And that was enough. In that instant, the mystery was solved—the reason for the strange tension in everybody’s chest. ‘So that’s where that strange uncertainty came from,’ they thought.”
When he put it that way… it did make a certain sense.
“Suzumiya’s singing and Nagato’s guitar works were by no means bad; far from it, they were well beyond the pop music club’s level, but the audience probably thought about it like this: ‘If they were this good with stand-in vocals and guitar, they must be amazing with the real leader.’ ”
So that explained why there were so many requests for minidisc copies.
“Suzumiya’s singing was excellent, almost perfect. But in not being too perfect, she created the best possible outcome. I must say, I’m impressed.”
He might have been right. Haruhi popping up had certainly turned out well for those three girls.
So what about us?
“To which ‘us’ do you refer?”
I’m talking about the SOS Brigade—you know, the people more involved with Haruhi than anyone else at the school! Do you seriously think there’s something good waiting for us too?
“I suppose we won’t know that until the very end. If we don’t think things went too badly once it’s all over, I’d say you could call that ‘something good.’ ”
The three older girls left just as the bell announcing fourth period began to ring.
Bafflingly, Haruhi returned to her seat with a complex expression on her face, and it stayed there as she daydreamed straight through the period. She disappeared from the classroom as soon as lunch started.
I wolfed down my lunch as I listened to Kunikida and Taniguchi make their excuses (“Yeah, man, there just weren’t any decent chicks at the festival. It’s this school’s crappy location, I’m telling you—it needs to be on flat ground.”), then shoved my lunch box into my school bag and vacated my seat.
For no particular reason, I just felt like taking a walk to digest.
After wandering around for a while, my feet brought me to the courtyard in the middle of the school. I veered off the path that would take me to the clubroom building and walked the patchy, balding lawn in the center. And there, who should I happen across but Haruhi, lying there on the grass.
“Yo,” I said. “What’s up? You’ve been wearing that expression since the last recess.”
“What of it?”
Haruhi had replied quickly, staring at the clouds as though she were talking to the sky. I did likewise—that is, I looked up at the sky, saying nothing.
I wonder how long we stayed that way, quiet. It didn’t feel like more than three minutes, but I don’t have a lot of confidence in my internal clock.
It was Haruhi who finally broke the pointless silence contest. Her tone was somehow stiff, reluctant.
“I just can’t seem to calm down. I wonder why.”
Her tone seemed genuinely puzzled. I felt a sardonic smile coming on.
“How should I know?” I said. Here’s what I really wanted to say to her:
It’s because you’re not used to people thanking you. You’re always doing things that no normal person would look you in the eye and say “thank you” for. You were probably secretly wondering if you were butting in when you offered to help them out. If it’d been you, you would’ve dragged yourself onstage even if your vocal cords were blown out or both your arms broken. The people around you telling you to stop would only have given you more energy, and you’d never have thought to turn to anybody else for help.
So how does it feel to have helped out those girls? Their songs are hits thanks to you arguing with the festival committee people. When they thanked you, they really meant it. It was almost the best thing you could’ve done. So how does it feel, Haruhi? Has this awakened you to the possibilities of good deeds? How about swearing to work only for the good of the world and humanity henceforth?