Chapter 2
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IF I HAD TO GIVE my mood a color as I donned my indoor shoes at the elementary school lockers, it would be grey. Mostly because of all the unpleasant people I’d run into that morning. At times like these, you’d usually say that you were feeling blue, but I liked the color blue.
“Oh man, the weirdo’s here!” a voice I did not recognize called from inside.
I gave a theatrical sigh. “You all really must be stupid if you can’t beat a weirdo like me on tests. How fascinating.”
Gratified by the looks of anger on the faces of several of my idiot classmates, I refused to converse with them further. Eventually one of them said something like: “Why’re you such a baby?”
I wanted to praise them for being able to even speak intelligibly, but they left, and so I put on my indoor shoes and went into the building.
Just then…
“Morning, Koyanagi-san.”
A single voice put a halt to my grey-colored shuffling. I turned around to see one of my classmates, and my expression turned dark.
“Oh! Morning, Ogiwara-kun.”
“I just finished reading Tom Sawyer yesterday,” he said. “It was really good.”
“Did you? That’s great. Which scenes did you like?”
“The part about the paint, I guess. I thought Tom was really cool, too.”
“Tom really is appealing. And smart.”
“I liked Huck, too.”
“Homeless Huck, right? Oh, come to think of it, I’m—”
I stopped. Not because I was trying to keep my talk with Granny to myself, but because a boy came running up from behind Ogiwara-kun and crashed into him. I turned my back on the startled Ogiwara, but I doubt he even saw it. The boy who had run into him was a close friend, and had most certainly run into Ogiwara in the name of boyish roughhousing, not bullying. No one would bully Ogiwara-kun, nor would he bully anyone. He had a lot of friends.
I, on the other hand, had no friends in our class and elected to turn my back on this. Other than Ogiwara, everyone else in our class either thought I was clumsy or hated me. Still, I had never once been bullied by them. And so, I decided to make my exit first, upon noticing Ogiwara’s friend. A friendship between boys isn’t something a girl should get in the middle of.
I needed to stop at the library before I could head to the classroom. The library opened first thing in the morning, which was wonderful for me. I much preferred to spend the raucous period before Hitomi-sensei arrived in the quiet library.
When I entered, I was greeted by the unique smell of the books and the kind librarian. I asked the librarian if they had The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which I’d heard about from Granny the day before. The librarian guided me to a bookshelf and left me to seek out the book myself.
“If you’re a lover of books, you’ll want to enjoy the heart-pounding feeling of searching for them,” she said.
I felt the same way.
I quickly found the book in question and picked it up, my fingertips tingling with excitement. I dropped my bag and took a nearby seat.
I’m sure that Ogiwara-kun and I were the only ones in our class who understood the incomparable feeling of opening the first page of a book. It would be wasted on the others.
All alone, I took the first tiny step into the tale of Homeless Huck.
The library was a wonderful place, with its quiet, its lovely smell, and the kind librarian. However, even here, there was one line that one must not cross: losing oneself too deeply in the world of books.
Until the librarian called out, I’d completely forgotten that I was still at school. Just before the morning bell rang, the librarian called my name and, after what seemed like ages, I returned to my own world. I borrowed the book, stuffed it into my bag, and bid farewell for now.
I passed through the hallways, noisier now than when I arrived, and climbed the stairs one by one to my third-floor classroom. Ignoring the boys who ran through the hallways, I stepped inside. No one seemed to take notice of me entering the room. As always, I marched straight to my seat in the very last row. I put down my backpack and sat down.
Kiriyuu-kun, who sat beside me, noticed me and hurriedly shut the notebook on his lap.
“Good morning, Kiriyuu-kun.”
“G-good-good morning, Koyanagi-san.”
He was talking quickly, the way he did when he was upset at being teased. He shoved the closed notebook into his desk.
“What were you drawing?”
“N-nothing!”
He was lying. I always knew when Kiriyuu-kun was lying. He had been drawing a picture. He was always doodling in his notebook. He perhaps thought that he was doing a good job of hiding it, but I was his neighbor—I saw everything.
He was really skilled at drawing, something that I thought he ought to be crowing about to the people around him, but he never did, and the idiot boys ridiculed him again and again for it.
“Kiriyuu-kun, life is like a cavity.”
“Wh-what do you mean?”
“If you don’t like it, you should hurry up and do something about it. If people are making fun of you for drawing, then you should just spit it back in their faces,” I said, putting my backpack onto the shelf behind me and taking my seat once more.
“I-I can’t do that,” Kiriyuu said quietly, not looking my way.
“Not with that weak attitude you can’t,” I said, just as the bell rang.
Hitomi-sensei entered the classroom. Everyone loved Hitomi-sensei—the only time the atmosphere seemed clear and bright was when she was there.
“Good morning!”
“Goood mooorniiing!”
At the direction of Ogiwara, the class representative, we began another boring day of school.