2.
The next day, I went to school earlier than usual.
The school I go to, Shinyo Academy, has that something a lot of other schools don’t. Every student has an ID card, and every time we go in or out of the building, we have to slide it through a gate checker, like one of those ticket readers at the train station. They call it the Campus Advanced Information Administration System (or CAIAS, for short). Supposedly it helps the staff keep track of the exact number of students that attend, since the student population has started to decline as of late.
But in actuality, it doesn’t really change anything. Despite the grand design, this year, there have already been several students who have run away from home, or worse, simply vanished. The system they’re so proud of is really powerless when it comes to stopping students from doing whatever they like once they’re off school grounds. It’s what free will is all about.
Anyway, our school is up in the mountains, so we have to walk up long, steep, green roads just to get there. On this particular morning, there was hardly anybody out on the road. The sports teams had long since started morning practice, but the rest of the student body had not yet started to arrive.
“Yoohoo! Keiji!!” came a cheerful girl’s voice from behind.
I turned around to find a girl from my class, Kamikishiro Naoko, walking towards me.
This girl had a habit of over-pronouncing people’s names, like she was sight-reading a word in some other language. Plus, she was always chirpy.
“Now, now. Why so gloomy on such a beautiful morning?” she said, running to catch up, and thumping me hard on the back.
Both Kamikishiro and I were breaking the school rules against dating. You could say that it gave us a certain connection; a certain ease to our interaction. A sort of sympathy that we couldn’t expect to get from friends of the same gender. We always joked around together, but today I was hardly in the mood.
“You’re early,” I said curtly. “Not going for your usual dramatic entrance?”
Kamikishiro was almost compulsively late and she always insisted that it was due to low blood pressure. If a teacher tried to chew her out for it, she would apologize dramatically—and quite flirtatiously, I might add, which generally left the male teachers flustered, but always seemed to do the trick, getting her off the hook. A powerful technique, indeed.
“Yeah, well, had some stuff to take care of today. But spill already! How was your date yesterday?”
“F-forget about it.”
“You have a fight or something?” she asked, peering closely at my face with interest. She had a tendency to express her emotions a bit too obviously. She was very pretty, but had an open, loud laugh. This seemed to make some people think badly of her, no matter how good a person she was at heart.
“A fight? I wish we could have,” I sighed.
“Wait, what? That sounds serious!”
“Whatever.”
Another student passed us on a bicycle, so we fell quiet.
As always, there was a committee member posted at the gates, like a train station guard, making sure the cards went through the gate check smoothly.
“Oh, Takeda-senpai, you’re early,” said today’s guard, Niitoki Kei. She was the discipline committee president. Despite the ominous title, she was a tiny, cute girl with a childish face.
“D-ditto,” I said, waving. We’d been on the health board together last year as well, so we had seen each other regularly for two years.
“Mornin’, Kei!” said Kamikishiro. Although they were friends already, Niitoki had ignored Kamikishiro’s dates on several occasions, and this had brought them even closer together.
“My, my, are you two together now?” Niitoki said, eyes wide.
“That’s scary, coming from you,” Kamikishiro laughed.
“I didn’t mean it that way, really. Even if it were true, my lips are sealed.”
“Trying to earn a favor, eh? Looks expensive.”
“It is,” the committee president laughed.
If she knew that Kamikishiro had both a second and first year student in her saddle, I doubt she could have been so blasé about it. She was pretty serious, and she would probably get so angry that steam would shoot out of her ears.
We put our cards through the gate check and went inside.
“Senpai, don’t forget the meeting today!” she said as I waved in acknowledgement.
Kamikishiro giggled. “She’s so cute.”
“Who?”
“Kei. You know she’s got a crush on you, right? Puppy love…”
“You’re one to talk.”
Every relationship she had ended up like a war zone. I’m amazed she could still joke about it.
“So what was it? Fuji-chan dump you?” Who knows why Kamikishiro always called Touka by a different reading of the kanji in her name, but here she was doing it again.
“She stood me up.”
“I can see why you got chest pains, then! Ah ha ha!!”
I suspected that she, too, stood up many a man.
“What are girls thinking when they do that?” I asked. “It sure as hell isn’t about their boyfriend.”
“That’s not an easy thing to answer. Hmm… It all depends, really. I know that it’s not always because they don’t want to see you, though. You know, stuff just sort of comes up.”
“So what if they stand you up and dress like a man?”
“Hunh? What are you talking about?! What’s that supposed to mean?” Kamikishiro’s eyes widened.
Understandably. I didn’t know the answer either.
“Never mind. Must have been seeing things.”
“I don’t really get it…but you’ve got a lot of time on your hands, so you really ought to start taking love more seriously, ya hear?” she said in a sing-song voice.
“What?” I replied, scowling, and she burst into song.
Life is brief, young maiden, fall in love;
before the crimson bloom fades from your lips,
before the tides of passion cool within your hips,
for those of you who know no tomorrow.
“You’re in a good mood. You in love again?”
“Kinda. Tee hee hee.”
“For crying out loud, how many is this now?”
Before we hit the halls, we smoothly shifted to a more standoffish attitude. We weren’t going out, but it was never a good idea to start any rumors.
I let my feet carry me to Touka’s class.
Once there, it wasn’t like I could actually talk to her, so I wasn’t exactly sure why I was going—I just couldn’t seem to help myself.
Touka’s room was year two, class C, and it was still empty.
Feeling suddenly tired, I flopped down on a chair inside.
Once again, the cloaked figure’s words ran through my mind: Do you think to do nothing when you see a fellow human crying?!
I paused for a moment.
Was that really Touka?
A twin brother, perhaps…?
No, she’d never mentioned one before.
I heard someone coming, so I quickly got up and left the room.
I stood as inconspicuously as I could in the covered passage, a few yards away from the room, and kept watch. The more I watched, the more pathetic I felt.
(Aw, hell…)
Touka was about the twentieth student to arrive.
She was the same as always. There was no sign of any strange hat.
But for some reason, she had an enormous Spalding bag in addition to her usual school bag. The sort that people generally keep sneakers or gym clothes in.
Then she noticed me.
She shot me a quizzical, innocent glance.
I found myself grinning and nodding.
She smiled softly and nodded back.
Nothing different than usual.
She didn’t seem at all bothered about having stood me up either.
So as not to get noticed, we hardly ever spoke to each other at school. But words weren’t necessary. We had worked out our own sort of sign language that only the two of us knew.
So I made one of those signs, putting my index finger up. This sign meant back of the garden after school.
She made the same gesture, showing consent.
Yeah, it was just like nothing had happened.
Feeling like I was surrounded by a heavy smoke cloud, I drifted back to my own classroom.
Kamikishiro wasn’t there yet. Probably still ‘taking care of stuff.’ Same as me.