I laid the third page on my desk and empathized with Haruhi.
Good old Nagato had written something totally incomprehensible. She seemed to have completely ignored the fantasy-horror topic, and this was hardly a story—it was more of a poem, I said.
“It doesn’t seem like just any old poem, though.” Haruhi collected the three pages and put them into her bag. “Hey, Kyon. I don’t think Yuki just wrote this without thinking about it. I think she’s really revealing something about herself here. Don’t you think all that stuff about the ghost and the coffin is a metaphor for something?”
“How the hell should I know?” I said, but the truth was that I felt like on some level I could understand it. I didn’t see how the “I” in the story could be anyone besides Nagato. As for the other characters—the ghost girl, the man, and the sheet girl—I had the sense that the ghost girl and the sheet girl were the same person, and that (I was just guessing here, but…) the man was Koizumi-ish and the girl was Asahina. In any case, she’d probably used the people around her as models for the characters. Haruhi and I hadn’t shown up, but I wasn’t so worried about it that I wished I’d been included.
“Anyway, does it matter?” I looked out the window and down at the tennis courts. “Nagato wrote the story she wanted to write. Trying to read an author’s mind through her work is a pain. That kind of question belongs on modern-literature tests.”
“I guess.” Haruhi also looked out the window. She seemed to be looking up at the clouds, as though willing them to bring unseasonal snow. Eventually she turned back to me and smiled like a blooming spring flower. “We’ll call this okay, then. Yuki’s done. There’s no telling how it’d turn out if I made her rewrite it. Koizumi seems to be making steady progress, and Mikuru’s getting close to finishing her illustrations.” Her smile shifted from brigade chief to editor in chief. “So, what about you? I haven’t even gotten so much as a prologue from you. When will it be done?”
I had been wrong to hope she had forgotten about it.
“Let me just say,” began Haruhi with an unpleasant grin, “that I want a proper story from you. And if it’s not a love story, it’s getting spiked. Spiked! Not a horror story, or a mystery, or a fairy tale. And don’t try to weasel out of it either, because it won’t work.”
I looked around the classroom for some sort of salvation.
The truth was that I hadn’t written so much as a single word. Of course I hadn’t. Why the hell did I have to write a love story, anyway? The question was racing through my body faster than an immune system overreacting to the influenza virus. I’d thought about trying to summon reinforcements in the form of Taniguchi and Kunikida (who themselves had also failed to write anything), but my two supposed friends had been looking over at me for some time, whispering to each other and avoiding my gaze, and just when I was about to cross myself, Catholic-style, in preparation for being crushed along with my friends by Haruhi’s assault, the school bell finally rang.
I was thus able to avoid confronting the advancing burden, but that didn’t mean I had escaped—I had merely bought myself some time.
But seriously, Haruhi—a love story?
I pretended to take the first-period class seriously, sinking deeply into thought, like a ship plunging to the bottom of the Challenger Deep.
So what was I going to write?
After school, I went to the clubroom to escape Haruhi’s manuscript demands.
“What about writing something based on your personal experience?” said Koizumi, his fingers moving swiftly over the keyboard of his laptop. “In other words, why not just get involved in a romance? Then you can simply write what happens and claim it’s fiction. I recommend using first-person perspective. In such a case, it wouldn’t be hard to transform your normal thoughts into prose.”
“Is that your idea of sarcasm?” I shot back, before returning myself to the pressing job of staring at my own laptop’s screen saver.
The clubroom had temporarily become a safe place, since Haruhi was away from her desk.
Even now she was running all over the place as part of her campaign of total war against the student council; she was so cunning that I wanted to add “demon” to the part of her armband that read “editor in chief.”
Her first targets had been her nearby classmates, Taniguchi and Kunikida. No sooner had homeroom period ended than Haruhi had quickly seized the escaping Taniguchi, and with a brief exchange (“I’m going home.” “I won’t let you.”), the battle was joined. Kunikida didn’t even bother trying to escape, and soon she’d forced them into seats and put sheaves of loose-leaf paper in front of them.
“You’re not leaving until you’re done writing.”
Her face was strangely happy, perhaps from the pleasure of having discovered a new outlet for her sadism.
Taniguchi continued to grumble, while Kunikida simply shook his head softly and picked up a pencil. He didn’t seem to be too put out, but Taniguchi complained bitterly about the imposition, as though he’d realized that even minor involvement with Haruhi’s machinations might cause him to someday miss the bus to paradise. I could understand where he was coming from. Unless they wrote the interesting essays that Haruhi demanded, they couldn’t even dream of escape.
“What the hell is ‘an interesting slice-of-life essay’ supposed to be, anyway?” said Taniguchi. “Kyon, listen—slices of your life are way more interesting, anyway. You should be writing this.”
No thanks. I had my own literary problems.
“Suzumiya, isn’t twelve columns a bit too much?” said Kunikida, relaxed. “Surely five would be more reasonable. I’m pretty good at English, math, classics, chemistry, and physics, but I’m crap at Japanese history and civics.”
If he had that many specialties, then his manuscript was the only one I was looking forward to reading. Twelve subject-specific study columns. If they were actually useful, there’d be nothing I’d want to read more.
“I’m going to come back in an hour to check on you,” said Haruhi to the pair, who were the only ones remaining in the classroom. “If you’re not here then… you know what’ll happen, right?”
After dropping that threat, she left the classroom. Our editor in chief was a busy woman.
Nevertheless, I should add that there were people who readily accepted Haruhi’s writing assignments.
One of them, it goes without saying, was Tsuruya. The upperclassman, possibly the only person as formidable as Haruhi, when abstractly asked, “So, will you write something? Anything is fine!” ended up readily giving her assent.
“Sure, when’s the deadline? I’ll definitely have it for you! Ha ha, this’ll be fun!” she answered with a smile. I wondered what she would possibly write.
There was one other—and this was not a single person, but a group. The computer club. Now that their attempt to cheat us with their rigged video game had passed and the clubs were friendly enough that Nagato would occasionally visit them, the computer club had become like a second branch of the SOS Brigade, so our brigade chief had no trouble securing a promise from them to write a “Game-Busting Primer! Reviews of all the latest games!” or something or other. Apparently the whole club, from the president on down, was pretty into the idea. Incidentally, I’d never played a proper computer game, so I had absolutely no interest in this.