“I refuse. Seeing those lewd eyes of his brimming with ulterior motives, I feel a threat to my person.” Yukinoshita straightened her collar (though it hadn’t really been out of place) and glared in my direction. I’m not even looking at your overly modest chest. No, really, it’s true, okay? Really, really. I’m seriously not looking. It just happened to be in my field of vision and caught my attention for an instant.
“Relax, Yukinoshita. His rotten eyes and shady character are precisely what give him a good grasp of self-preservation and calculating risk versus return. He’ll never do anything that would get him arrested. You can trust in his mild, low-level creepiness.”
“None of that was complimentary in the slightest,” I protested. “You don’t mean all that, right? It’s not about calculation of risk versus reward or self-preservation. Why can’t you just tell her that I have common sense?”
“A low-level creep… I see…”
“She’s not even listening, and she’s convinced!”
Perhaps Ms. Hiratsuka’s persuasion had borne fruit, or perhaps my low-level creepiness had won her trust. Either way, Yukinoshita communicated her decision in a very undesirable manner. “Well, if it’s a request from a teacher, I can’t just refuse… I will comply.” She acquiesced as if the idea was really unpleasant.
The teacher smiled in satisfaction. “I see! Then I’ll let you take it from here,” she said, excusing herself briskly.
Then there was me, left behind, standing there.
Frankly, I would have been much more at ease if she had left me all alone. My usual solitary environment calms my soul. The tick, tick, tick sound of the second hand of the clock seemed awfully slow and excessively loud.
Come on, come on, is this for real? Suddenly a rom-com development? This is making me royally anxious here. I’m not complaining about this situation as a premise, though.
Unintentionally, some bittersweet memories from my middle-school days came back to me.
It was after school, and two students were alone together in a classroom. A gentle breeze rippled the curtains, slanted sunlight flowing in, and there was a boy who had worked up his courage to confess his love. Even now I can remember her voice in every detail.
Can’t we just be friends?
Oh man, what a crappy memory. And forget being friends—I’d never even spoken to her after that. In the aftermath, I’d developed an impression that friends are people who don’t even talk to each other. I guess what I’m trying to say is, even if I were to end up alone with a beautiful girl, I’d never be part of a rom-com.
But having endured such advanced training for this very situation, I’m not falling into that trap again. Girls only ever show interest in hot guys (LOL) and normies (LOL), and once they have, they engage in impure relations with said individuals.
In other words, they are my enemies.
I’ve gone to a lot of trouble to avoid ever feeling that way again. The easiest way not to get involved in a rom-com plot is to make girls hate you. Sometimes you must lose the battle to win the war. If you want to protect your pride, you don’t need people to like you!
And that’s why instead of greeting her, I decided to threaten her with a glare. I’ll kill her with my wild-beast eyes! Grrrrr!
Yukinoshita looked at me like I was a piece of garbage. She narrowed her large eyes and let out a cold sigh. And then, in a voice like the murmuring of a clear stream, she spoke to me:
“Don’t just stand there growling like some animal. Sit down.”
“Uh–ah–okay. Sorry.”
Whoa, what was that look in her eyes? Was she a wild beast? She’d definitely killed five people, just like those animals that chomped on Tomoko Matsushima. She even made me reflexively apologize. I didn’t have to go so far as to try to intimidate her. She already considered me an enemy. Terrified to the core, I deposited myself in an empty chair.
Yukinoshita left it at that and, without showing any interest in me at all, had at some point opened her paperback again. I heard the soft slide of a turning page. She had a book cover on it, so I couldn’t see what she was reading but figured it was something literary. Like Salinger or Hemingway or Tolstoy or something. That’s the kind of impression I got from her.
Yukinoshita sat there like a princess, looking very much the top student and also in no way less beautiful than her reputation purported. However, as is usual with people of that race, Yukino Yukinoshita was an individual who lived apart from the crowd. Living up to her name, she was the snow under the snow. No matter how beautiful she was, she was untouchable and unattainable: You could only fantasize about her beauty.
Frankly, it had never occurred to me that I would be able to get close to her through an unfathomable series of events like this. If I bragged to friends about this, they’d be envious for sure. Not that I had any friends to brag to.
So what was I supposed to do with this gorgeous princess before me?
“What?” Perhaps in reaction to all my staring, Yukinoshita furrowed her brows in displeasure and looked up at me.
“Oh, sorry. I was just wondering what’s up here.”
“What?”
“Well, I got dragged here with no real explanation,” I replied.
Instead of clicking her tongue at me, she showed her ill humor by vigorously snapping her paperback shut. She glared at me as if she were looking at an insect, gave a sigh of resignation, and spoke.
“Okay. Then let’s play a game.”
“A game?”
“Yes. A game to guess what club this is. Okay, so what club is this?”
Playing a game alone with a girl…
Now this was coming off as some kind of kinky setup, but Yukinoshita radiated no aura of temptation. She was more like a honed knife, sharp enough that if you lost, it might cost you your life. Where did that rom-com atmosphere go? This is a gambling apocalypse!
The force emanating from her bested me, and I broke into a cold sweat, casting my eyes around the classroom for clues. “There’re no other club members?”
“No.”
Could you still have a club without any members? I had serious doubts about that.
Honestly, there were no hints. No, wait. If you were to look at it from another angle, there were only hints. I’m not bragging or anything, but having been almost entirely devoid of friends since I was little, I’m pretty damn good at games you can play on your own.
I’ve got a fair amount of confidence in my skill with puzzle books, riddles, and things of that nature. I think I could win the All-Japan High School Quiz Championship. Well, okay—I couldn’t gather enough members for a team, so I couldn’t go to the event…but still.
There were a number of clues I’d managed to discern already. Assembling my hypothesis based on that, the answer should have presented itself.
“A literature club?”
“Hmm? How did you come to that?” Yukinoshita replied with mild interest.