It was Sunday afternoon, and I’d given Kurumi a brief report on Nanaougi’s actions over lunch. I was assuming she’d shown the receipt to that teacher in an attempt to block our attack. Given how she’d cleaned up the Heads on Pikes display, this was no surprise.
“Hngg… But what does it all mean?!” Kurumi said as she chewed over the information in the seat across from me. She’d made club sandwiches for lunch. Careful not to let anything fall out, she munched away, scowling. “Didn’t she promise to impress us with some big incident this summer?! Yet there’s no sign of her pulling anything off. What’s her angle?”
“I am not a mind reader.”
In hindsight, her cleaning up the mannequin heads was a baffling choice. She already knew we were behind the attacks and that she planned to help us. Why go to the trouble of erasing the graffiti and collecting the heads? It wasn’t adding up.
For all her claims of wanting to join up, everything she’d actually done had been to hinder us.
“Hmm… Maybe she’s actually planning to rat us out,” Kurumi suggested.
“I dunno. That doesn’t seem very likely, but…”
If she wanted to snitch, she could have just shown the school that photo. She didn’t really have any motive to erase the graffiti or to show them the receipt. Was she scared that I would leak the recording I’d made as leverage, and trying to earn the faculty’s trust just in case?
No, that didn’t make sense. That recording wasn’t much of a threat at all. Even if we could prove she’d asked to join us, Nanaougi could say she’d just been playing along. No one would hold it against her. It was practically worthless. Nanaougi was bright enough to work that out, so I found it hard to believe the recording was motivating anything she did.
And in that case, the only thing I could think of was…
“Maybe Nanaougi knows we’re planning something big and is afraid it will ruin her chances of joining us, so she’s trying to stop us ahead of time,” said Kurumi.
“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.”
Let me break it down: If she ran interference and stopped us from attacking, that would lower the bar for her and make it harder for us to refuse her. To that end, she was trying to block our moves without revealing our identities.
…Could that really be it? It made sense, but I couldn’t say for sure if it was really true.
Given her personality—extremely confident and overbearing—I found it hard to believe she’d do something like that to earn points with the faculty. It made more sense for her to try to win on her own power, without using any underhanded tactics.
As it was, our attacks were working, but this business with Nanaougi was making it hard for us to celebrate.
We silently stuffed our faces with Kurumi’s sandwiches.
“That reminds me,” Kurumi said. “Which teacher was with Nanaougi in the student guidance office? That might be a vital clue.”
“True. Uh, hold on, who was it again?”
I tried to remember. She’d been distinctive enough, and I soon recalled her name.
“I’m pretty sure it was Kanae Ookuma. The short lady who teaches second-year world history.”
“Ookuma… Oh, I might know her.”
Most people did.
Ookuma was super tiny, under one hundred fifty centimeters tall. She could pass for a little kid but was always in a suit. A big gesticulator, her long brown hair was always whipping all over the place. She really stood out in the faculty lineup.
“Is she Nanaougi’s homeroom teacher?” Kurumi asked.
“Nope. I don’t think she’s ever been a homeroom teacher. She was only hired this year. I think I heard she’s only twenty-three.”
“So she’s brand spanking new. Hrm… No clue what to make of that.”
The more I thought about it, the weirder it got. She wasn’t the student counselor, the head teacher for our year, or Nanaougi’s homeroom teacher. But why would she go to the guidance office with anyone else?
Ookuma and Nanaougi had no connection I could see. If memory served, Ookuma didn’t teach any of the better classes. Not only was she not Nanaougi’s homeroom teacher, she didn’t even teach any of her classes. Given that Nanaougi was not in any clubs or on any committees, that ruled out Ookuma being her adviser, too.
Crap. I can’t see any point of contact.
It was always possible they knew each other outside of school. Maybe they were relatives or neighbors or… But I’d never heard any rumors like that. I was totally lost.
My brain was overheating, so I drank some orange juice to cool down—and that jogged my memory.
“Wait, when Nanaougi was cleaning up the mannequin heads, she told Ookuma she wanted to talk with her later.”
“Then Nanaougi definitely knows her.”
“Well… This was just after the attack, so it’s hard to say for sure.”
Perhaps at the time she’d planned to discuss our activities with her.
Argh! I’m not getting anywhere. That only deepens the mystery!
For a while, Kurumi and I became sandwich-eating automatons.
“I feel like we’re overthinking things,” Kurumi said at last. “Maybe she just hit up the first teacher she saw.”
“Could be.”
But it was hard to imagine Nanaougi doing anything by chance.
Our beliefs and actions hadn’t changed—but maybe we should lie low for a bit.
As I thought this, I had no idea just how soon my next meeting with Nanaougi would be.