Naturally, I couldn’t risk making a scene about it. Doing so would only make the two of them more conscious of each other, which would fan the flames of their romance, and I couldn’t have that. I would never permit someone as cold and unfeeling as him to steal Miki-chan’s passionate heart. So I waited until he was busy chatting with another guy on the track team and then made my move.
“Did you know my prince got a bell from someone?” I asked, putting an arm around Kyou’s shoulders without warning as we walked through Okinawa Peace Memorial Park. He flinched, and his heart rate spiked.
“Jeez, you scared me! You mean Zuka? I hadn’t heard about it, but I’m not surprised, I guess.”
“From Miki-chan.”
At this, his pulse skyrocketed full-throttle, like someone had just set off a bomb.
“Just kidding. But it could happen, you know.”
“Oh. Yeah. Gotcha. Cool.”
To this day, Kyou had never outright admitted his feelings for her, but my superpower made it crystal clear regardless. I liked how hard his heart pumped for her.
“Wh-what about you, Sensei? Are you gonna give a bell to anyone?”
I was only his “sensei” when it came to guitar, but the nickname amused me, so I had made it permanent.
“Maybe. Did you bring a bell?”
“Uh…no…”
“As your sensei, I hereby command you to buy a bell and give it to Miki-chan during the field trip.”
Again, his pulse quickened and strengthened. He must have envisioned himself confessing to her. But if his imagination alone was enough to make his heart pound at full speed, then what would happen during the actual confession? Would he pass out? Even then, I still wanted him to try.
Knowing Miki-chan, once our third year of high school rolled around, she would start seriously dedicating herself to her studies. She had the tendency to hyper-focus on whatever was right in front of her, which meant she was able to shut out distractions when necessary. This, however, was a double-edged sword. Kyou needed to give her a token of his affection while he still had time.
“Don’t worry. With Miki-chan, you just gotta go for it. It’ll work out.”
It really was just that easy, too. Unlike me, she was a warmhearted person who responded well to passionate emotions. Of course, if Kyou was the kind of guy who would force his feelings on her with no regard for her own, then make no mistake, I would sink him in the Pacific Ocean. But Kyou was the type who was quick to back down, so he needed a fair amount of firm pushing to get him going, like so.
“Miki-chan! Come quick! It’s Kyou!” I called to her in a loud voice.
Kyou fixed me with a dead-eyed stare as she jogged over.
“What’s going on? What about Kyou?” she asked.
“He has a c…question for you about classical studies. Anyway, I gotta go.”
Shooting Kyou a threatening wink, I left them alone together.
I was willing to startle people on purpose whenever necessary to achieve my goals. When their heart rate spiked, their composure wavered, and sometimes humans were better off without the icy hand of rationality holding them back. In Kyou’s case, he needed to fly by the seat of his pants if he wanted to get anywhere at all.
So I walked up to the group of girls Miki-chan had stepped away from, said something loony, and added myself to the fray.
It was my beloved Miki-chan who first came up with the nickname Looney.
Growing up with this superpower, I quickly learned how to fluster people. I wanted to be the sort of person who left an impact on others—it gave me a token amount of self-esteem. And after persistently making people’s hearts pound for long enough, I suddenly ended up with a new name one day: Looney, as in lunatic. Ironically, I wore this name like a badge of honor. At the same time, I didn’t want people finding out about the real me.
“Looney” had its uses, after all. Certain people were allowed to get away with things others couldn’t, depending on their personality. So if people thought I was crazy, then no matter what I did to them, they would simply shrug it off. And I wanted to take full advantage of the role I was given to play.
“It’s time for everybody to confess those mushy feelings!”
“Pipe down, Kuroda!”
Night one at the hotel, during dinner. As the teacher shouted at me, I surveyed the heart rates of everyone in the room. At the word confess, some stayed the same, but others beat a little faster. Naturally, I focused my attention on all the fastest ones. Had they already made their move, or were they waiting for the perfect timing? Some were probably scared stiff simply at the thought of it, like Kyou, but if you asked me—eh, forget it.
From the looks of things, neither Miki-chan nor Miyazato-chan had much of a reaction to my declaration. And none of the girls who were close with my prince had a spike in their pulses, either—the ones I knew about, at least. Was this confirmation that he was planning to give it to someone? Now that I thought about it, the average person probably wouldn’t confess their feelings before the trip…
Meanwhile, the jerk in question carried on eating his deep-fried shrimp like he hadn’t even noticed. Then he saw me looking and grinned at me. It pissed me off, though I didn’t let it show.
Ultimately, nothing happened during the first night, as far as I knew. More accurately, the pillow I threw at Miki-chan ended up triggering a massive pillow fight across the entire room, and by the time it came to an end, everyone was so exhausted that we all went straight to bed. As it turned out, the slightest actions could incite wars, bringing needless fatigue to the people. Very educational.
Before I knew it, I was the only one still awake that night.
Every now and then, my brain would spend the night thinking instead of sleeping. This was the reason people often complained about how “spacey” I seemed, and tonight was one of those nights. So I tossed and turned for a while, got up and crawled under the covers with Miki-chan for a while, drank from my bottle of tea for a while… Then eventually I ran out of tea, so I decided to go down to the vending machine on the first floor and buy another. Perhaps it would make a nice change of pace.
They’d assigned five students to each room. Once I checked everyone else’s rhythmic heartbeats, I stepped out into the darkened hall. We were located on the fifth floor; the teachers’ rooms were on the fourth floor, and the boys’ rooms were on the third. As I walked through the darkness to the elevators, I spotted two teachers in the process of trading places for guard duty.
“I can’t sleep, so I’m going to go buy a drink,” I explained honestly, then stepped onto the elevator and pressed the button for the ground floor. Then I let out a breath.
A short while later, the elevator came to a stop; I figured I’d arrived at the first floor, so I started to leave but ended up walking face-first into a wall of muscle.
“Oh, sorry, Looney.”
I looked up to find my prince standing there, dressed in a tracksuit. Then I looked at the indicator for the current floor: 3. Rolling my eyes internally, I took a step back.
“You know this is heading down, right? Aren’t you going up to have your way with the girls?” I asked, half-joking, half-probing.
“No! I’m not! I’m thirsty, so I’m gonna buy a drink. What about you?”
“Well, you see, my dear prince, I was going to go have my way with the boys until you showed up.”
“Seriously, what’s with this ‘my prince’ crap?”
It wasn’t even that funny, and yet he donned a soft smile at the exact moment the elevator doors slid open to reveal the first floor. In the lobby, where the vending machines were located, I could see a group of teachers chatting. Naturally, I recognized all of them. When they saw the two of us walk out together, the adults all got suspicious, and I didn’t want to have to deal with it, so I made the first move.
“We just finished working up a sweat, and now we need to step outside to cool down, if you know what I mean.”
“We bumped into each other in the elevator, that’s all,” my prince clarified, once the teachers started laughing.
I pulled out my wallet and then headed for the vending machines. “Quit messing around and hurry back to your room,” my class advisor called after me.
Newly purchased tea bottle in hand, I turned back to find my prince getting harangued by his club supervisor. Without hesitation, I moved to leave him behind, but then he caught up to me.
“What happened to you buying a drink?”
“Oh, right.”
It wasn’t like him to be so forgetful. That was Miki-chan’s job, not his.
He jogged off and bought a bottle of tea, plus a can of coffee. Evidently, he wasn’t planning on sleeping anytime soon. Meanwhile, the elevator went back up to the fifth floor without me.
“Right, so, about the bell, uh…it’s really nothing,” he said out of nowhere, while I was standing there waiting for him in silence.
I wasn’t expecting him to bring it back up, so I looked at him in mild surprise.