Some of the students walking toward the front gate seemed happy or excited; others looked tired or annoyed. But none of them looked at all unusual.
Ruri was one of the students in the crowd, perfectly composed. There were no powerful emotions coursing through her; her mind was like the surface of a placid lake.
Yesterday, the library committee’s books had all been burned to ashes.
Ruri had put a great deal of effort into gathering them up over the last three weeks. And most of them had belonged to her grandfather—books she had grown up admiring and reading. They were special to her. She was sad that they were gone, of course.
But that wasn’t the main thing on her mind.
Yesterday, the committee chairman had sent a group message telling everyone that the used book sale was officially canceled. That knowledge cast a deep shadow over her thoughts.
She’d been looking forward to it.
It wasn’t that she’d expected anything to come of it. There wasn’t a concrete objective she’d been working toward. But as she devoted herself to gathering books, she’d started to think of the sale’s success as a worthwhile goal in itself.
Ruri had always been uncomfortable in groups. In middle school, she’d kept her communication with her classmates to the bare minimum, mostly for assignments and the like. But after entering high school, she’d found herself on the library committee, working closely with a boy from her class. Then she’d started collaborating with the whole group, giving their project everything she had. That was all new for her.
It had been a kind of adventure.
She’d thrown herself at a new, totally unfamiliar challenge. She’d risked interacting with others. She’d grown closer to a stranger, and she’d overcome her fears. Maybe the average person wouldn’t think she was doing anything unusual—those things came naturally to most people, it seemed. But for Ruri, it had been an adventure, one she’d wanted to face head on and triumph over, like the protagonists from her favorite stories.
But reality wasn’t a children’s book. Adventures don’t always end in success and glory; sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you fail for no good reason. Her family’s books had burned to ashes, and the used book sale wasn’t even going to happen.
Ruri found herself remembering something her new friend Naomi had told her earlier in the week: “I know I’m just a minor character.”
She understood exactly what he meant.
Ruri didn’t think of herself as a minor character in someone else’s story, but she clearly wasn’t a protagonist, either. She didn’t have any magic ability to counteract this disaster, and no one was going to swoop in to fix things for her. No hero was coming. This was the real world, after all.
It was obvious, really. There was nothing worth whining about. The grown-ups of the world had learned these lessons long ago; they were just facts of life.
Ruri’s heart was calm. It was calm because she understood, now, that she wasn’t in a story.
She was just another ordinary person.
“Hey, Ichigyou-san…”
Someone called to Ruri at the shoe lockers by the entrance. She recognized the voice at once—she’d heard it a lot lately. Ruri turned to Naomi, but at the sight of his face, she couldn’t suppress a small frown. It was first thing in the morning, but Naomi appeared completely exhausted. There were deep bags under his half-opened eyes, and his whole face drooped.
At first, she wondered if he’d pulled an all-nighter, but this level of fatigue suggested something else. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days—but he’d seemed perfectly fine yesterday. There was something more to it.
Naomi offered Ruri a weak smile, then tottered off toward the library, beckoning her to follow.
There was a single cardboard box sitting on top of the checkout desk. At Naomi’s urging, Ruri opened it uncertainly.
Her eyes went wide.
The box was full of old books. She knew some of them. She recognized some of them. There were forty or so, clearly books from her grandfather’s collection. But that wasn’t possible.
“Turns out there was one box that got stashed somewhere else. I found it yesterday,” Naomi explained with a smile.
Still doubting her own eyes, Ruri picked up one of the books. As she held it in her hand, she finally believed it was real. It had the weathered feel of an old book; its pages were yellowed, and it even had a few familiar bumps and scrapes.
The still waters of her heart...rippled. Her chest felt oddly hot.
Some of them had survived. They hadn’t all burned to ash. It lit a new fire in Ruri’s heart.
If we have these, maybe…
“There’s less than fifty in there,” Naomi said, “but that’s enough to hold a book sale, right?”
Her eyes still fixed on the box, Ruri nodded firmly.
They could do this. They’d lost almost all their stock, so it was back to being a small event, but that didn’t matter. They could have the book sale after all.
She felt genuine joy bubbling up inside her.
That was when she noticed it. Her eyes settled on one particular book inside the box, familiar to her, like the others. She picked it up, a strange electric tingle running through her body.
It was an old novel with an attractive cover, but its corners were rounded and worn, and there was a big stain on it, too. It was the book Naomi had told her he was interested in, the one with the library card mounted on the inside of the back cover.
It had burned to ashes yesterday.
Ruri’s thoughts spun through her mind in a confused jumble. It didn’t make any sense—this book had been destroyed. She’d seen a charred fragment of its cover. Had her eyes played tricks on her? How could it be here if it had burned up in the fire?
Or had Naomi somehow found a different copy of this book last night? That didn’t seem too realistic. There were more than forty books in this box; he couldn’t possibly have bought them all in one night and made them look convincingly used. And he couldn’t possibly have known about some of these familiar little dings. It would have required actual magic.
Uncertainly, she looked over in search of answers. She met his eyes.
Katagaki Naomi beamed at her.
“Thank goodness some of them were all right.”
In that moment, Ruri understood, somehow. The truth of it jumped directly into her mind, bypassing conscious thought or logic.
It was him. He had done something to make this happen. She had no idea what; there was no plausible explanation. But there was no doubt in her mind.
Ruri opened her mouth to speak; she had so many questions. But before she could get a single word out, Naomi’s head swung toward her. He pitched forward limply, his forehead hitting her shoulder.
Startled, Ruri just barely managed to grab hold of him and ease his fall to the ground.
She looked at his face. She’d never seen it this close before. Naomi was breathing softly and regularly in his sleep. His slack face suggested that he was utterly exhausted. What on earth had he been doing to wear himself out like this? Well, that was the one question she knew the answer to.