I waited until after school, but Ura still never came to school that day.
Not only was he absent, but no one could get in touch with him. That wasn’t surprising on the face of it, since he’d never had many friends to begin with, and Ibusuki was the only one in his class who knew his number; however, after becoming his class’s representative, he had actually exchanged his contact info with his classmates. Nonetheless, no matter how much they tried to contact him, he never responded. Apparently, he didn’t even read their texts.
He did respond to me, albeit his response was quite curt.
“What was up today, Ura?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? You didn’t feel well?”
“It’s not that.”
“Okay, then why weren’t you at school?”
“It’s none of your business.”
“Fine. Then what about tomorrow? You’re coming tomorrow, right?”
“No. I’m not going tomorrow, the day after that, or the day after that.”
“Why not? What are you going to do about the school festival?”
“I don’t care.”
“You don’t care?”
“I don’t care about any of it anymore.”
“But you’re the class representative, right? You worked so hard on it up until now.”
“I don’t care.”
That’s about how our texts went. After that, no matter what else I sent, he just responded with “I don’t care.” Ura apparently responded to Kana’s texts as well, but, like mine, he wouldn’t talk about the important matters, and he just kept saying “I don’t care.”
“Well, I’m stumped... I wonder what happened to him,” I said. Kana and I were talking after school in the empty classroom where we normally eat lunch together.
“What happened to Ura, I wonder?”
“It was all so sudden...”
“I know. When he stayed late to give everyone directions during preparations for the festival, he was so upbeat.” Kana had a troubled look on his face.
It really was so sudden. He was fine until yesterday. Even though he was uncharacteristically enthusiastic about the festival, today he’s skipped school and has that attitude...
“My best guess is that something happened yesterday.”
“Yeah...and it probably happened yesterday after school.”
Something happened. Something that made Ura stop caring. As we were deep in thought, a girl entered the empty classroom.
“Um, Kanao-kun...” It was a girl from Kana’s class. “I’m sorry, but can you come here? They’re fighting about the materials and the job assignments for the festival...”
“What? Okay, yeah, I’ll go now,” Kana replied, and the girl went back to her classroom. “Oh man...”
“Go, Kana.”
“Momo...”
“They need their class rep, right?” The school festival is three days away, and every class is finalizing their preparations. If a class rep were to be absent at a time like this, it would throw the class into chaos.
“But this isn’t the time for something like that...” Kana’s face was twisted with anguish.
It was understandable. On the one hand, he’d only been absent one day, we’d been able to get in contact with him, and we knew that he wasn’t sick or injured. It probably wasn’t something to get too worried about. Still, we couldn’t help remembering the time in middle school when Ura stopped coming to class. The current situation gave me a bad feeling, one that was filling up my chest.
Be that as it may, I told Kana, “Leave Ura to me,” in the most upbeat way I could, even though I had no basis for saying so.
“...Will your class be okay?”
“I’m not my class’s representative or anything like that. Besides, for better or for worse, my class won’t be doing anything special. We’re also almost done preparing, anyway.”
“I see... Well, sorry to do this, but I’ll take you up on your offer. Tell me as soon as you find anything out.”
“Yeah, I’ll keep you posted.”
Kana left the room and went to his class to finalize the preparations for the school festival. No matter the class, if their representative were to go missing, it would surely have an effect on the chain of command. Ura’s class was the same way, of course: their representative had suddenly gone AWOL, so there was no telling just how much confusion would arise.
“...What are you doing, Ura?” I said to myself.
♡
The first place I headed to was Ura’s classroom.
“Hey, isn’t this tablecloth too small?”
“No, it’s the right size. You’re supposed to use two together, remember?”
“Who went shopping the other day? There aren’t enough materials for the decorations.”
“Urano was in charge of materials, text him.”
“I keep texting him, but he won’t answer.”
“Hey, were we going to use these clothes or not?”
“We’re still discussing it! Urano said that we were going to talk about it again after school...”
It was just as I’d expected; the entire class was in a total state of disarray. Most of the students had stayed after school and were swamped with preparations for the festival. Despite being first years, the students in Ura’s class were putting considerable effort into their attraction—in other words, the amount of work they had to do was comparatively larger than ours. With only three days left, they were at the point where they needed to make final adjustments to a lot of their preparations. It was simply inevitable that things would fall into chaos were the class representative who led the chain of command to be absent without contacting anyone.
“...Listen, I asked Mai to do that, so go talk to her! Oh... I’m going to make a call about that, so hold on a minute! Those decorations are... Um, what did Urano say about them again...?”
I found Ibusuki in the midst of the confusion with her classmates gathered around her, awaiting her instructions. With Ura gone, it seemed like the responsibility had fallen onto her shoulders as the class’s other representative.
“Phew...”
“Ibusuki.” After Ibusuki had finished giving instructions, I entered the classroom and called out to her.
“Oh...Momota...”
“Looks like you have your hands full.”
“...Do you know about Urano?”
“I heard about him from Kana.”
“I see... Yeah, I’m getting totally overwhelmed here.” She let out a deep sigh with a tired look. “I’m really happy that Urano worked so hard to think up a lot of stuff as the class representative, but...he’s still bad at giving directions. He’d just say stuff like ‘It’s faster if I do it myself’ and take on a lot of work himself.”
I kind of figured that’s what happened. He said that he’d gotten a little used to the class, but it looks like it really was just a little. If a guy who’d closed off his heart could simply open up to a bunch of people he’s never talked to before in a few weeks’ time, there wouldn’t have been a problem.
I can actually understand Ura’s thought process, though. If communicating instructions to people is so stressful, it really would be faster to just do it yourself.
“Urano took the initiative with a lot of the annoying stuff, and we were pretty spoiled by him... Now we’re really feeling the repercussions of that. Everyone’s in a huge panic just because he isn’t here...”
“It looks that way...”
“...It’s lame, right?” Ibusuki said with a dark expression on her face. “I’m a class representative just like him, but I was just piggybacking off Urano. It was so easy for me; for every random idea I came up with, Urano would decide whether it was feasible and figure out realistic steps to take... That’s why I can’t do anything without him here.”
I couldn’t stand to see the pained look on her face, so I pushed back. “That’s not true, right? Just now, I saw how you were doing your best to organize everyone.”
“...”
“It does look like Ura was playing a major role, but I think you were too, Ibusuki. Besides, the reason he was able to work so hard was because you approached him and bridged the gap between him and your classmates.”
“...Thank you.” Ibusuki gave a listless smile, and it looked like my words were only a small comfort to her.
“...By the way, Ibusuki, I’m sorry, but I need you to come with me for a bit. I have something to talk to you about,” I whispered so no one around us would hear, and then I took Ibusuki outside the classroom. I didn’t want the other people in the class to know what I was about to say. I was reluctant to take away their only representative when they were already really busy with preparing for the festival, but right now I needed to talk to her.
After we moved to a stairwell with nobody around, I said, “The truth is, I talked to Ura,” and her eyes went wide.