“Bwuh…?” I got that far before looking up.
I was greeted by the familiar sight of my fellow students filing into the classroom before the morning homeroom period started. If this had been a usual morning, Haruhi would’ve been sitting behind me either gazing out the window or poking me in the back with a mechanical pencil, but this morning she was craning her neck to peer over my shoulder, her eyes following the letters of the manuscript I held in my hands, her expression at once thoughtful and troubled.
To be fair, my own expression wasn’t all that different from hers.
Both of our expressions were thanks to what was written there. It was a little heavy to be reading first thing in the morning.
It was true that the paper Nagato had drawn said, “Fantasy horror.”
I moved my eyes from Nagato’s writing and regarded Haruhi’s profile.
“Hey, Haruhi, I’m not exactly an expert on either fantasy or horror, but is this what fantasy horror looks like these days?”
“Beats me.” Haruhi put her hand to her chin, cocking her head just like an editor agonizing over how to judge a piece of work in front of her. “I guess there’s some fantasy there, but there’s definitely no horror. But… hmm. It does seem very Yuki-like. Maybe Yuki finds this kind of thing scary.”
Anything that would scare Nagato surely would utterly terrify me. I didn’t want to ever experience anything like that—not even in a story.
“Hey, by the way,” I said, looking at Haruhi’s confused face as a new thought occurred to me. “If you didn’t know what ‘fantasy horror’ was, why did you write it down on one of the lots? You’ve got to think before you pick genres like that.”
“I did think! A little.” Haruhi took the manuscript sheet out of my hands. “I added fantasy to it because I thought horror by itself wouldn’t be much fun. The genres I wrote down were the result of serious deliberation. Mystery, fairy tale, love story—once you’ve done those, you’ve gotta go with horror.”
She’d skipped science fiction entirely. And anyway, I seriously doubted she’d spent more than three seconds picking out those genres. I bet she’d just written them down in whatever random order they’d occurred to her, I said.
Haruhi smiled slightly. “I just wanted to mismatch the writing projects as much as I could. Yuki’d probably be great at science fiction, but that wouldn’t be any fun, would it?”
I twitched involuntarily, but an invisible hand calmed my hammering chest. Whether or not it would actually be “fiction,” it would be the easiest thing in the world for Nagato to write something about space. I mean, she was a space alien. For a moment I wondered if Haruhi had realized that, but then I remembered—even Haruhi could see that Nagato’s bookshelves overflowed with SF, so it wasn’t much of a stretch to assume that science fiction was a specialty of hers.
No, wait a sec. If that were true, then there’d be a similar setup for the mystery genre, I said.
“That’s right. I really hoped either you or Mikuru would do the mystery. I wanted to see what kind of crazy thing you’d come up with. But with science fiction, you can pretty much get away with any kind of absurdity—so while it pained me to do it, I had to cross it off the list.”
I wanted to tell her that was just her prejudice talking, but no amount of complaining about the lottery was going to reset time. The order with which I’d been burdened—writing a love story—wasn’t going to be rescinded, and I didn’t feel much more capable of writing mystery, fairy tale, or fantasy horror stories—not that I’m saying I preferred the love story, mind you. But at least with science fiction, I could’ve used some of my experiences as a foundation. Although I probably had no business informing editor in chief Haruhi about my true-life experiences.
Haruhi flipped through Nagato’s fantasy horror short story. “At least Koizumi got the mystery. If we don’t get at least one readable story, we won’t be able to put out a newsletter. If all we do is show off how eccentric we are, the readers will head for the hills.”
She was already thinking about turning the literature club newsletter into a periodical. This was supposed to be an emergency measure to stop the student council president’s evil plot. That was probably something I had to remind her about. The SOS Brigade was not part and parcel with the literature club; it was just a parasite, I told her.
“I know that much. I can’t think of a single thing I need you to tell me about the school. I am the brigade chief, and you are just a member.” Haruhi glanced at me. “Anyway, that doesn’t matter. There’s more to Yuki’s story. Read the second page.”
I dropped my gaze to the sheet of copier paper that remained in my hand and began reading the printed characters there, which were so neat I wondered if they were Nagato’s handwriting.