And even so, Haruhi’s work was not done. Having decided to make the newsletter’s cover into something worthwhile, she hoofed it over to the art club to ask who their best artist was, then strong-armed a piece out of that person—then, having decided that a newsletter filled with nothing but text wouldn’t be interesting enough, went over to the manga club and ordered some illustrations. It seemed pretty presumptuous of her, but sadly I didn’t want to be any more empathetic with the inconveniences of the others than I already was, so I left Taniguchi and Kunikida in the classroom and made my way back to the clubroom.
Haruhi was not there. She was running all over the school on the aforementioned errands, and while that should’ve made it easy for me to relax, the act of staring at a screen saver was far from being relaxing.
“Hmm. Mmm…”
Asahina was sitting at the table, wearing (for once) her school uniform, as well as a dire expression.
At this point, she hadn’t yet completed her picture-bookish illustrations, so all I could see was her leaning her head over the table as she frantically moved her pencil over the paper. I had no choice but to make my own tea.
Next to her, Nagato was maintaining her usual appearance. She was like a posed doll, sitting there with a hardback book open in front of her, giving off the sense of having completed her task.
“…”
Perhaps having decided that, having turned in three short stories, her duty was finished, Nagato had returned to her usual self. The invisible aura that had emanated from her during the meeting with the student council was like a lie.
Speaking of lies, I can honestly confess that I’d be lying if I claimed not to have been worried about Nagato. There were a million questions I wanted to ask her—what had she been feeling that had led her to write such strange stories? Did she think nothing of showing them to Haruhi? What did they mean, anyway? Would she mind writing some annotations? But I couldn’t very well ask these questions in front of Asahina and Koizumi.
I’d just have to seize the opportunity the next time we were alone.
I took my eyes off of the book-reading literature club member, who’d returned to her normal expressionless mode. There were two computers running on the table; Nagato’s machine had been set aside and closed as tightly as its master’s lips.
I wanted to do the same thing, if I could. The guilt of wasting the planet’s precious and limited resources assaulted me, and I wanted to turn the laptop’s switch to the “off” position immediately. Leaving it on would only waste more energy, and while I was turning things off, I wanted to turn off my own brain as well and go into a deep sleep.
As such thoughts ran through my head, I sighed. Koizumi spoke up.
“You need not overthink things so much. Just write things how they are.”
Easy for him to say, since he could just write stuff that was already in his head. I had to think of everything from scratch. Maybe he should just tell me his own romantic experiences, I said. I’d write him a lovely tale with him as the protagonist.
“I’ll pass on that, thanks.” Koizumi paused his touch-typing and regarded me with an inquisitive smile. Then, in a small voice: “You really have nothing? Have you never been captive to feelings of love, or even gone out with a girl? If nothing like that has happened this first year at this school—or nothing you can write about, I suppose I should say—what about before that? In middle school?”
I looked up at the ceiling and pondered my own memories. Koizumi’s voice got even quieter.
“Do you remember what I told you at the baseball game?”
He was always talking about all kinds of stuff, I said, so I couldn’t be bothered to remember every detail of every line he’d spoken.
“I should think you’d remember me telling you that you were batting fourth in the order because Haruhi wished it so.”
I suspiciously looked at Koizumi’s gentle smile. This again, eh?
“Yes, this again. It is no coincidence that you were the one to draw ‘love story.’ ”
I’d been plenty suspicious about the randomness of lotteries for a while now. I knew full well that you didn’t have to be a master of sleight-of-hand to make them turn out the way you wanted.
I glanced at Nagato, who did not particularly seem to be eavesdropping. Asahina had her hands full with her new best friends, Mssrs. Pencil and Eraser.
“In other words, Suzumiya wants to know about your past romantic history. That’s why you got the love story genre. The fact that the assignment wasn’t a ‘memoir of your romantic experience’ is proof that Suzumiya herself is a bit hesitant.”
I didn’t think there was a hesitant thing about her, I said. She always came barging straight in to whatever she did, without any restraint or even so much as a “Hi, how are you.”
Koizumi smiled thinly. “I am speaking of her heart. Despite her exterior, Suzumiya is well aware of where that fine line is drawn. It may be an unconscious sense, which would make it all the more impressive for its keenness. In reality, she has never once done anything that would trample on any one of our hearts. Certainly not to me, anyway. On the other hand, I’ve only briefly been allowed to enter Suzumiya’s psyche.”
Come to think of it, I’d only been there twice myself. “I’m still convinced she’s a girl without any sense of restraint, though,” I finally managed to reply. “Otherwise, she wouldn’t be able to do stuff like kicking the student council door open or hijacking the literature club. Or making me write crap like this, to be honest.”
“And so what if she is? It’s fun in its own way, is it not? The few students of an underdog club, going up against the might of the student council…” Koizumi’s pleasant gaze grew unpleasantly distant for a moment, but he soon regained his smile. “To be honest, I dreamed of having a school life like this. More and more, I acknowledge Suzumiya as a god, and I feel I want to worship her—because she’s made my dream come true.”
More like he was acting in his own play, I said. Dream come true, my ass—he was pulling the strings from behind the scenes. I’d acknowledge his effort, but that was all.
“Ah, but I would never try to manipulate which assignment you drew. Let’s get back to the real subject. To put it simply, Suzumiya wants you to write something about your views on love. And incidentally, I may as well say that I do as well.” Koizumi’s voice got a bit louder. “From what I’ve heard, there was a girl you got along quite well with in middle school. What about writing something about that episode?”
How many times did I have to say it? That wasn’t that kind of story.
I furrowed my brow and massaged my temples, sneaking a look at the faces of the other two occupants of the room.
Asahina was focusing solely on the completion of her illustrated fairy tale, and it didn’t seem like a word of our conversation had reached her ears.
As for Nagato—
She, too, seemed to be wholly concentrating on reading her book, but while I had no way of knowing how sensitive her ears were, I had my doubts as to whether it was possible to speak so quietly that she couldn’t hear.
Anyway, why was I assaulted by this guilty feeling? Why had Kunikida, Nakagawa, and the rest of my middle school classmates all come to this mistaken conclusion? It was a mystery.
“I have no intention of writing that story,” I said flatly. Particularly not for the satisfaction of anyone’s curiosity, and definitely not for this smiley-eyed jerk, and—hey, what was up with that “yes, yes, I know” look in his eye? He had it all wrong, I told him. It’s not because it was some memory from my past that I didn’t want to think about. The whole story really just didn’t matter.
“We shall leave it at that, then,” said Koizumi irritatingly, then he moved on immediately to a new suggestion. “In which case, you’ll need to quickly think of a different memory that you can write about. Surely you must have one. A date you went on with someone, or a time when someone admitted they had a crush on you.”
Like hell I did.
My mouth was half opened in the process of telling him so when I stopped. Koizumi noticed and smiled widely. “Ah, so you do! See, there you are. Both Suzumiya and I look forward to hearing the story. Please do write it.”
I wanted to know who’d made him the assistant editor. Didn’t he need to get back to his novelization of the disappearance of Shamisen? I’d decide what to write on my own, thanks very much, I told him.
“Of course, you will be the one to decide. I’m simply an observer, or an adviser at best. Though at the moment I feel more like Suzumiya’s proxy.”
Koizumi shrugged, ending his conversation with me and turning his attention back to his computer.
I started to think.
Sorry, Koizumi—you’ve gotten the wrong idea again. In his imagination there might be a vision of me in a typical middle school boy-girl relationship, but although I’m not proud of it, no one has ever confessed feelings for me, nor have I to anyone else. My first crush was my older cousin, but she eloped with some worthless guy. I guess it was a little traumatic, but that was a long time ago.
No, indeed—there had been no love confessions, and definitely no dates.
I chuckled as a scene appeared on the insides of my eyelids.
It had been about a year earlier. The middle school graduation ceremony was over, and the scene was from the period just before I’d come to this school. I hadn’t had the slightest inkling that my high school life was going to turn out the way it had, and I was just enjoying my last lazy spring break of middle school.
The tiny episode that had lodged in the cracks of my brain had begun when my little sister had brought the telephone receiver up to my room.
I stared at the ceiling, then sniffed and touched my finger to the laptop’s trackpad.
The screen saver disappeared, replaced by the blank white of the text editor.
I sensed Koizumi grinning irritatingly next to me as I experimentally hit a key.
I was just warming up. If it got boring in the middle, I could easily just delete the whole thing.
Imagining I was panning for gold hidden in the cracks of my memory, I transmitted the sentences down to my fingers that I’d composed in my brain, and I started writing the opening.
It went something like this.
“It was the last bit of the final spring break of middle school, just before I would enter high school…”