I couldn’t blame her. It had been ages since we’d taken different paths home. But with the end of summer vacation, we could no longer live together. It was weirdly unnerving.
We hadn’t had a falling out. The old café was simply open for business again, so Kurumi was no longer house-sitting. For that reason, we had both gone back to living in our own houses.
“I handled it so well when you were packing up and leaving. Somehow, little moments like this are even worse. The sudden realization that I’ve lost you just hit me, and… Augh, I’m gonna cry!”
“I can see the tears in your eyes. Think you’ll make it?”
“If I say I won’t, will you fix things?” She smiled sadly, her voice trembling.
I wiped her tears and smiled back. “Call me if you get the chance to live alone again. I’ll grab my things and come right over.”
“Not just for the night! You have to move in.”
“I know, I know. I will. It’ll be just you and me. But for now, you’ll have to make do.”
“For now…? Eww… Hngg… Okay, fine. Fair enough. But I’m holding you to that promise.”
She got her little finger around mine and sealed the deal.
Our eyes met. She had on that alluring look she’d often give me just before we went to bed. The mood seemed right, and I was considering giving her a kiss when—
“Oh, Ren! I’m taking line three, too! The train’s just coming in, we’d better go!”
—Nanaougi burst in between us, completely shattering the mood. Kurumi was aghast.
“…Tch, Nana, this is why I can’t stand you.”
“Huh? What? Yikes, Kurumi, you look ready to kill!”
“Nana, get ready. You’re in for some payback—and I don’t mean the kind we’re getting on the school.” Kurumi stalked off toward her train, visibly fuming.
“What put a bee in her bonnet?” asked Nanaougi. “Oh well. Doesn’t matter. The train’s here! Come on, Ren.”
“…Yeah, sure.”
Would Kurumi be mad at me later? Was this kosher?
We took the stairs down to line three. Nanaougi was right; the train had already arrived. We waited for a few people to get off, then stepped inside together. There were a few empty seats, but we elected to stand by the doors.
“Today was fun,” she said. “Things are getting lively.” Nanaougi was leaning against the door, watching the landscape speed by.
“True. It feels like so long ago that it was just me and Kurumi.”
“Do you wish you could go back?”
“…Part of me does.”
She laughed at that and offered a shallow apology. Then she turned back toward the window. “I can’t wait to see what we pull off next.”
“……”
I took a good look at her profile. Despite her tone, her eyes weren’t smiling at all.
Maybe now I could ask. She’d joined the cause, and it was just the two of us here.
Making it sound off the cuff, I tossed the ball to her.
“Wanna start by taking the student council down a notch?”
The air froze. The train was picking up speed, but I felt as though there was a bubble around us where time had stopped.
After a beat, Nanaougi turned toward me, looking surprised. She blinked a few times, then offered a resigned smile. “Ren, how much do you actually know?”
…Good question. I had a hunch, but not much to back it up. That was why I’d made that pass. When I kept staring at her in silence, Nanaougi looked amused.
“Good. Excellent. I might really be falling for you, Ren.”
“……”
“Fine, since you’re being such a badass, I’ll loosen my lips a little.”
But what she said next was completely unrelated.
“I’m well aware I was born talented in every way that matters. But there’s one thing for which I have no knack whatsoever. You know what that is?” She phrased it like a question, but didn’t pause at all. “Alcohol.”
“No knack…for alcohol?”
“Exactly. None at all.”
Did she mean she was bad at mixing cocktails?
But then Nanaougi explained, and I saw it was something much more basic.
“I have no tolerance for booze at all. I was born that way. They did a patch test, and my arm turned bright red. It runs in the family; my parents and grandparents are all lightweights.”
So this was a physical issue. I’d read somewhere that alcohol tolerance wasn’t something you could build up with practice, so arguably, how well a person could handle their liquor was a “talent.”
But what was she trying to tell me with this?
“Alcohol is poison—the easiest one in the world to get your hands on. It induces nausea and drowsiness, and it makes it hard to pass even the simplest test problems. That’s what it does to me, at least.”
“……”
“You remember those loud girls at the graveyard? They’re on the Saigou High Student Council now, but before that, we were all at the same cram school. In the same advanced class. We were all shooting for the same high school—one affiliated with a famous college, and we all went to the same test venue.”
Oh, okay. I see where this is going. So that’s what this is about.
“They envied me. You can guess the rest, right, Ren?”
Nanaougi turned toward me, eyes filled with quiet fury.
“I need payback. For dragging me down into this pigpen of a school.”