Ryuuji tilted his head slightly at the word “normal” that Taiga kept repeating. Then he thought about it. In April, he had been so happy about being in the same class as Kushieda Minori. Everyone around him still confused him for a delinquent. What would have happened if he met Taiga then?
“I wonder if you would have still put a love letter for Kitamura in my bag…”
“Who knows? I might have.”
“Then you would have snuck into my house… That’s the kind of girl you are. Well, it doesn’t matter. You would have come to my house, settled things, and then gone home like a normal person—right. If you had a normal family, you wouldn’t come by my place all the time. For starters, you wouldn’t even be able to sneak in because you would have parents to stop you. If that happened, I might have never gotten to know you. You might not have gotten to know me, either.”
You might not have ended up liking me—of course he couldn’t say that out loud. Ryuuji still thought it as he used his knees to bring up the top plank of the counter that had come loose.
“But I think things would have been better if I’d just been normal…” Taiga grumbled as though she were speaking to herself. She still had her back turned toward Ryuuji.
“Oh, right!” She was excited now, as though she had suddenly thought of a joke. “I did want something—I wanted to love someone like normal!”
“Huh…?”
BAM! The plank he had been holding fell.
He fixed his positioning in a fluster, but he couldn’t regain the breath that had flown out of him. What did she just blurt out? Love? Love?! That basically means…
Basically, she means me?!
Ryuuji hesitantly brought up his face to look at Taiga. His neck was stiff, and he was shaking to an embarrassing degree. Taiga, what are you trying to start? What kind of expression did she have on her face when she made that explosive declaration?
“I’d be normal and grow up in a normal house and grow up to be a nice, normal girl and meet someone like normal and get to know them like normal and then we’d have normal…I just wanted to fall in love with someone like normal! I wanted to like someone and have someone like me and for the two of us to just be together. We’d just be together and—” Taiga continued. “…We’d just be happy as long as we were together or something like that. That’s the love I want.”
Taiga didn’t seem like she was pretending to like someone specific. Her face was contorted painfully, as though her stomach hurt. That expression doesn’t really match what you’re saying, he wanted to quip back.
Why did she have such a glum look on her face when she was spending time with Takasu Ryuuji, the very person she couldn’t help but like? Her eyes seemed clouded over and dull; she seemed to be gasping with her open mouth, and her eyebrows knit together as though she were in pain.
Huh? The moment he thought that, the counter’s top plank snagged on a small nail and made a terrible noise. He dropped it, straining his eyes to see Taiga’s face better and suddenly was standing as straight as a rod. A feeling rose up in his chest, like something was oddly out of place. It hung over him like a dark shadow.
The thought came to him automatically, “Things are going well with your mom, right?”
He thought about whether she was tending to her wounds, alone and lost in her own thoughts.
“Why’re you asking that?”
Grasping at the air, he clumsily stretched out his hand. What? She pushed his hand to the side easily, looking gloomy. He didn’t mind. It wasn’t like he’d know what to do if he touched her.
He just really did want to ask her about it. Even though her dad was the way he was, even though she was spending time with Ryuuji, and even though she just had her fill of happily spending time with her mother, why did she look like that—why was she making that face?
She looked as though she had lost everything. She looked even worse than when he first met her.
“Everything’s going great,” she said. “Swimmingly, in fact.”
“Really?”
“No matter what I say, we’re still a broken family. Even if it’s not much, right now, our relationship is a lot better than what’s going on with your family.”
“It’s not like I’m having a fight with Yasuko or anything.”
Oh really? Taiga lifted her eyebrows. “That’s fine in that case.”
She started walking away on her own.
“Hey, where are you going?! What’re you going to do about the printout?!”
“I’m going home now. I don’t care about that thing.”
Taiga didn’t even turn around as she left the room in long strides. The door slammed shut, leaving Ryuuji behind once more. She had batted away the hand he stretched out to her, and he was all alone. It felt the same as when the snow fell out from under his feet in his dream.
Regardless of that, he couldn’t recklessly follow after Taiga.
The good kid Takasu Ryuuji-kun needed to fix the windowsill until it was perfect and to tell the bachelorette (age 30) waiting in the staff room that Taiga ran away.
He went back to the classroom, finished getting ready to go home, and got his bag. After that, Ryuuji opened the staff room door. He wasn’t to blame in the first place for Taiga running home before him, but it still weighed on him slightly.
Sorry to intrude, he grumbled, lowering his head a bit as he stepped in. It was well past the time to go home, and the teachers were at their desks writing things or talking with each other. He could hear a commotion of several voices behind the partition for interviewing, even from the distance where he was.
He tried to call out to Koigakubo Yuri, who held a red pen in one of her hands and seemed to be grading a quiz.
“Ms. Koigakubo, please help convince her, too!”
A male teacher, who was the class year supervisor, poked out of the interview space and got to her first. Ryuuji swallowed his words and shied away.
“Kawashima won’t listen to a word we say.”
“But I told you that I have to turn you down. I told you earlier, too.”
Oh. Ryuuji’s eyes opened wide in spite of himself. He wasn’t thinking, I’ll destroy this staff room with my evil eye beams! School coup d’état accomplished! I’m in charge starting today! He wasn’t planning anything like that at all.
“Oh…”
Ami had appeared behind the class year supervisor and another teacher, and he was just surprised by her appearance. Ami also saw Ryuuji’s face, and her lips parted slightly, but she didn’t exclaim, “Oh, Takasu-kun! ♥” or say anything in her usual sweet tone.
“Well, we need to respect what Kawashima-san wants… Oh, Takasu-kun! Where’s Aisaka-san?!”
“Uh, umm, she ran off.”
“What?! Why?!”
“I couldn’t convince her no matter what I said… I’m sorry. I’m going home.”
“Then can I go home, too? I’m heading home.”
“Uhhh, wait a sec, both of you!”
The bachelorette teacher looked at Ryuuji, then at Ami, and then at the teachers, who seemed to still want to say something to Ami. She looked flustered. She stood up with her pen still in her hand.
“Um, uh, just wait right there for a bit, Takasu-kun! Kawashima-san, uh—”
Ms. Koigakubo, another voice chimed in. It seemed the bachelorette (age 30) was incredibly popular that day.
“Uh, sorry, wait a sec. Huh? What is it?!”
“There’s a course content seller here.”
“Oh, right! Please wait… Th-this is bad, uhh.”
She twirled the pen in her right hand as she opened and closed her mouth. As the bachelorette (age 30) searched for words, Ryuuji could see Ami glancing at the teachers from the corner of her eyes.
“Oh, Kawashima!”
“Kawashima-san just ran away!”
Ami dashed towards the staff room door in front of her. The moment the teachers looked in that direction, Ryuuji went for the back door.
“Wait right there!” the bachelorette (age 30) yelled after him.
They met in the hallway, and assuming that the teachers wouldn’t go so far as to run after them, Ryuuji and Ami took the stairs down one step at a time. They ran to the shoe lockers as though they were racing each other. Feeling like they were partners in crime, Ryuuji tried to pick up and hand a shoe Ami dropped back to her. The first thing she said to him—and he was pretty sure this was the first time they had talked since the school trip—was, “What’s wrong with you?! You’re so annoying! Will you do me a favor and stop following me?!”
“What?! I wasn’t trying to follow you!”
“Actually, give that back to me! What were you planning on doing with my shoe?! You sicko!”
If he hadn’t gotten annoyed about that, he wouldn’t have been human. Ryuuji was overtaken by mostly subconscious anger as his head went white for a moment, and he threw Ami’s shoe with all his might somewhere.
Fly like the wind.