Got it.
Plot twist—I’d make him run into the first girl he ever loved on the steps of the Diet Building and then have a box of strawberry mochi fall out of the sky and kill her.
Tohko leaned on the table, chin in her hand, grinning.
At first glance, she seemed like a low-key beauty, but when she was waiting for food, she became a full-blown pig and acted like a total brat. Her black eyes flashed with expectation.
“Mmm, I just love handwritten stories. Ōgai and Soseki have a finely crafted flavor when you read them in books, but amateurs have their own charming naiveté. Especially when it’s handwritten. I feel as if I’m dipping my hands into a gurgling stream to take a drink. It’s like biting into a freshly picked tomato or cucumber or something! Even the little tastes of grit just blow my mind!”
So I write like tomatoes and cucumbers…
I wondered what she would do if I told her that two years ago I was that mysterious girl who won a prize for new authors and became a best seller.
But of course nothing would actually make me say that.
“Only two minutes left! One last push! You can do it!”
Tohko cheered me on. She angled her slender neck to peer up at me eagerly.
I got you now, Tohko. Things aren’t gonna go as smoothly as you think.
Just then we heard a voice.
“Hellooo, is anybody in? Ack!”
The moment the door opened, we heard a thud and someone fell into the room.
A girl was splayed out on the floor, her skirt flipped up in her fall, exposing her bear-print underwear for all to see. It occurred to me that my little sister had the exact same pair of underwear, but she was only just starting elementary school.
The girl picked herself up, groaning noisily. But as she reached out a hand, she brushed against one of the towers of books, which immediately collapsed on top of her, and she dove to the ground again.
“Waugh!”
Bang!
“Muh… mah nothe (my nose)… mah nothe (my nose)…”
The girl was twitching slightly, her hands pressed to her nose. Tohko rushed over to her.
“Don’t look, Konoha!”
She quickly fixed the girl’s skirt to hide her underwear, but I’d already seen it. Besides, I wasn’t such a perv that I would get aroused by bear-print underwear.
“Are you all right?”
Tohko put an arm around the girl and helped her up. As soon as she was on her feet, the girl crumpled back down into a little ball and turned a bright, undignified red.
“Y-yeth, thankth. I fall down a lot. I’m really good at falling down in empty rooms. Don’t worry, I’m used to it.”
I wouldn’t call that being “good” at something.
“Um, my name is Chia Takeda. I’m a first-year student in the second class. I came to see the book club for a super important request.”
She was a small, chubby girl with a cloud of hair that fell to the tops of her shoulders. She was sort of reminiscent of a miniature dachshund or a toy poodle. Something like that.
Could she be a prospective new member? Had the leaflets Tohko made me hand out actually paid off? If so, that was great. If we got a junior member, I could foist Tohko’s snack duty off on her.
As soon as I had latched on to this faint hope, Takeda clasped her hands together and beseeched us in a voice packed with resolve, “Please grant me my love!”
My mouth fell open.
“Uh, you know we’re the book club, right?”
Takeda turned to me and nodded firmly. “I do! I saw your mailbox!”
“Our mailbox…?” I had no clue what she was talking about.
“There’s a mailbox tucked under a tree in a back corner of the schoolyard. It looks like it’s hiding! A sign on it says ‘We will grant you your love. Interested parties, please send us a letter. By, the Book Club’ and it was definitely like a thud! or a zzzap! or anyway, like a sign from heaven. I figured I didn’t have time to write a letter, so I ran straight here.”
Despite my astonishment, I suddenly understood what had happened. “Tohko!”
No one but her would do something so outrageous.
Tohko laid a hand on Takeda’s shoulder and smiled at her. “It’s a good thing you came. I’m the club president, Tohko Amano. You just leave everything to us.”
I stood up behind her and shouted, “Hold on! Are you including me in that ‘us’?”
“Yes, I am. The entire book club is going to do everything they can to support little Chia in her romance.”
“Gosh, I really appreciate it!”
“Are you kidding me? Urgggh.”
“In exchange, we have one condition,” Tohko informed her gently, clamping a hand over my mouth. “Once your love has been achieved, we want you to turn in a full love report, thoroughly detailing how it all happened.”
“Oh no, really? A report? I’m pretty awful at writing.”
“That’s fine. All you have to do is write down the things that happened and how you felt, exactly the way you experienced it. As long as you try your very best, the honest words of someone who doesn’t usually write can inspire the heart and the appetite so much more than works that rely on technical mastery. Write down your every thought proudly and give us a delectable story—I mean, report. Oh, and you can’t use a computer! You have to write it by hand on clean paper. Promise?”
Tohko linked her slender finger with Takeda’s, sealing an exuberant pinky-promise.
So that was her goal all along.
Unsatisfied with having only the snacks that I wrote for her, Tohko was so food-obsessed that she had masterminded the idea to set up a relationship advice box and extort steamy reports from the people who came for help.
If all she had done was think it up, that would have been fine. But putting it so brazenly into practice required a particularly Tohko-esque reason.
This is why you have to watch your back around book girls.
Their minds are full of literature without any concept of reality, so if you take your eyes off them, there’s no telling what mischief they’ll get into. They’ll drag other people into their schemes without even a twinge of regret.
“Okay! I’ll try real hard and write lots of reports!”
I just couldn’t believe how submissive Takeda’s personality was (though if it weren’t, she never would have come to this questionable club after seeing that shady mailbox). Her eyes sparkled as she gazed up at Tohko. I could just imagine her thinking, She’s so amazing and trustworthy!
Puffing up her flat-as-a-table A-cup (give or take) chest importantly, Tohko said, “Heh-heh. You just put your mind at ease. We’ve studied romance novels old and new, the world over. We’re love experts, but also masters of the written word. We’ll write the best love letter the world has ever seen for you, Chia. Konoha here can handle it.”
“What?!”
Fed up with Tohko’s unflagging hunger for fine dining, I had been playing dumb this whole time, but that got me.
“I’ll have Konoha think up something good. He’s our top guy; one of his letters will shoot an arrow straight through the heart of your beloved, Chia.”
“I didn’t agree to this, Tohko! I’ve never written a love letter.”
Tohko covered my mouth for this last part, so I’m sure all Takeda heard were muffled cries.
“Konoha is our love letter specialist. He’s written hundreds of them, and he thinks you’ll be impressed. Konoha is a champ. He made it to the final round of the Adatara Literature of Love competition.”
What kind of no-name competition is that? It sounds like something even locals wouldn’t have heard of.
“Oh wow, that’s amazing! It’s so exciting that such a great writer is going to write my letters for me!”
Hey, I’m not a writer!
Well, I mean, I guess I was a writer… and I was a best seller… But still! Now I’m just an ordinary high school student, just Tohko’s snack-maker, and there’s no way I could write love letters for someone else.
While I was lost in thought, the conversation wrapped up without me.
“Thank you, Konoha!”
“Sure thing. It’ll be a cinch, right, Konoha?”
And so I pretended to be a girl—again—and wrote the love letters.
✦ ✦ ✦
Addendum
After Takeda left, Tohko let out a little sob as she ate the improv story I had written for her.
“Oh, grooooss! A box of strawberry mochi fell on his first love and killed her! Blech, blech! This tastes weird! It’s like miso soup with jelly beans in it! Blech! Ppth! Soooo gross!”