Chapter 23

“He’s supposed to be blond and handsome, right? I’d like to get a look at him!” the second guy said. Blond? Blond! It all matched up too perfectly… As I was thinking, the line was moving, carrying me away from the two guys with the phone charms. “Hmm… I think maybe you’ve seen him in the mornings,” the first guy said. “Mornings? You mean, like, on television?! Is he an actor?!” “Yeah, no.” If they were talking about the Hirano I was thinking of, then what was this about mornings? Mornings… Greetings… What else happened in the mornings? Sometimes the Disciplinary Committee ran uniform inspections. Was that it? No, that was stretching it. Those inspections didn’t happen very often. But then again… I couldn’t reject an idea just because it seemed too convenient. Anyone who went to our school would have seen this guy Hirano around in the mornings—you couldn’t miss him. He had bleached hair even though he was supposedly one of the people administering the inspections; it would make anyone do a double take. Have Yuki and Miyano given me a case of BL brain? I thought. Suddenly, it was my turn in line. The clerk looked more than used to dealing with customers with a mountain of purchases; they separated the various souvenirs into bags showing the logo of each producer without a word. With that, I was all done with souvenirs. I glanced around the store, wondering idly if Miyano was still frozen with indecision. That was when I noticed the two guys I’d overheard in line had moved to a shelf near the register. “Hey, they sell earrings here. Is he still wearing the ones you got him?” the buddy asked. “Uh-huh,” the athlete replied. I felt a shock: That did it. Hirano… He wore earrings, didn’t he? Was this really right? Should I be taking a naughty little imagining like this seriously? I wasn’t sure, but I found I couldn’t get the idea out of my head, not under my own power. I wanted to talk it over with Yuki, but I needed a cooling-off period before my assumptions solidified into unshakable certainty. It was a scary thought. I stood near the register, pinned in place by this maelstrom of fantasizing and worse, until suddenly Miyano was talking to me. He’d finished paying for his own stuff. “Don’t usually see a furrow on your brow. What’s up?” he asked. So he hadn’t heard anything just now? He certainly didn’t look like it. It was almost outlandish to me. “It’s nothing. I just sort of…feel like you’ve brainwashed me,” I said. He squinted at me but didn’t seem to guess what I’d been thinking about. “I haven’t brainwashed anybody,” he said. “And that’s pretty much how it went. I know it might have been a stretch to get the BL in there, but anyway, that was my experience.” Yuki had been listening to me so raptly that I’d forgotten the time and just blathered on. My coffee was ice-cold. If I stuck around too long, I would tire her out, so I knew I had to make my exit. I was afraid maybe I’d massaged the story a bit too much trying to make it something recognizably BL, and whatever Yuki had been hoping for, I was sure I must have disappointed her. But she looked at me very seriously and said, “No, I think you solved the mystery. I think it’s true.” “You don’t think you just want it to be true?” I asked. “Maybe… But from everything you said, Tasuku, I think it’s the only possible conclusion! Although, I can’t say I don’t want it to be true…” She smiled brightly. I guess I’d succeeded in connecting with the world she loved so much, if only in the smallest way.