WANDERING SHADOW

The smart sound of the ball hitting the gym floor echoed along with shrill cries, bouncing off the ceiling and washing over me.

I was dressed in slightly dirty gym clothes, my hands folded lazily behind my head and my feet stretched out in front of me. I was totally relaxed, and if you wanted to know what I was doing in that totally relaxed state, the simple answer was that I was spectating. After all, I had nothing else to do that day, but simply having nothing to do does not get you out of school; thus I found myself looking down at the scene unfolding below me.

I was sitting on the catwalk that runs along both sides of the gymnasium, a narrow walkway with handrails. I imagine just about every gym has them. I’m not exactly sure what they’re for, but at the time there was no doubt that they’d been provided for people like me to observe the competitions below. And I wasn’t the only one lazing around up there either.

Taniguchi was doing the same thing, right next to me.

“Damn, our girls are pretty good,” he offered, not sounding particularly impressed, despite his words.

“Yeah,” I replied vaguely, following the white volleyball as it moved around the court. The ball, falling parabolically down after being grandly served by the opposition, got tossed vertically up in a perfect set.

As I watched the ball come down, a gym clothes–clad girl came running up from well behind the attack line, jumped, and brought her raised hand down with amazing force, converting potential energy into kinetic energy, which was transferred onto the poor ball, which in turn split two opposing blocks and landed in the corner of their court. It was a perfect counterattack, and the volleyball club member who was acting as an umpire blew her whistle.

More cheers echoed through the gym.

Taniguchi must have been really bored. “Hey, Kyon, want to bet on which side’s going to win?” he asked unenthusiastically.

It was a good idea, but without a handicap, it might not be a blowout, but it wasn’t going to be an even match either.

Before Taniguchi could open his mouth again, I replied, “Class Five’s gonna win. No doubt about it.”

Taniguchi clucked his tongue. I gave him a sidelong look and continued.

“After all, she’s on the team.”

The girl landed beautifully, right next to the net, and turned around, revealing a daring smile. She wasn’t looking up at me, and it was a different smile than the self-satisfied one she used in the clubroom. To the teammates who gathered around her excitedly, it wordlessly said, “This is just too easy!”

It was a one-set match to 15 points.

Just as I predicted, our class—Class 5, year 1—won by double the opponent’s score. The ace attacker who was the source of most of their points mingled among her teammates, who were busily high-fiving one another. She, meanwhile, raised her fist and lightly punched the open palms of her team.

As she exited the court’s sidelines, she finally noticed us crammed in the catwalk. She stopped and looked up for just a moment, and then I was released from her usual dagger-like gaze.

No matter what she did, she excelled at it, and if it were a contest of any sort, she hated to lose—even going so far as to score nearly all the points in this volleyball game. She—ah, there’s no point in being mysterious anymore, obviously it’s Haruhi Suzumiya—took a sports drink passed to her by a classmate-turned-teammate and drank it dry.

As I’m sure you’ve already guessed, there was a tournament on.

It was early March, and with final exams having ended, a school would enter preparations for its next break, and our particular public high school was no exception. As far as the school schedule went, we’d just be waiting for the term to end, but at some point, somebody had gotten the brilliant idea to find something else to do with that time, and as a result, around this time every year the school would hold an intramural sports tournament.

I’m sure the idea was to let us unwind after we’d curdled our brains with exam studying, but if this was their idea of unwinding, I’d rather they just extend the vacation.

Incidentally, soccer was on the boys’ menu, while girls would be playing volleyball. I was on Class 1-5’s B team, which had lost to our old enemies, Class 1-9, in the first round of the tournament. I didn’t consider them enemies just because Koizumi was in that class—it was because 1-9 was on the special math and science course, and as a matter of course was filled with brainiac types, and if we couldn’t at least beat them at soccer, we’d be humiliated in front of the other classes. And having lost, we were indeed thus humiliated.

So it was that we’d had nothing better to do than to head over to the gym to watch the girls in their gym uniforms.

“Still, Suzumiya is really amazing,” said Kunikida calmly from a few feet away. The girls’ volleyball team had gotten through to the third round, thanks to Haruhi’s significant efforts, and we’d been watching since the middle of the second. “Why doesn’t she join one of the sports clubs? Talent like hers isn’t exactly common.”