Chapter 5

Now that I was a second-year, I had underclassmen to think about. “You have to listen to me, Hirano!” “No, I really don’t.” My name is Taiga Hirano, and I found myself the confidant of Miyano, a younger guy on the Disciplinary Committee. From his irrepressible energy at that moment, you would never have guessed that there had been a time when he’d been pretty cheerless. “And you could stand to tell me at least a little of what happens between you and your roommate!” “Also no.” This was how it always seemed to go with us. But me, I let my mind wander back to when we’d just met. After school one day in early April, not long after classes had started, the Disciplinary Committee had its first meeting. Two people were picked from each class to be members, and the new kids’ unmistakable nerves put tension in the air. It felt like my shirt wasn’t fitting me right. The committee members were all introducing themselves to start the year off. “My name is Yoshikazu Miyano,” one of the new kids was saying. “I look forward to being on the committee with you this year.” Yoshikazu? Not sure I recognize that name. I glanced down at the list of members, and there he was: Yoshikazu Miyano. First-year. Look at that. The characters for his name were appealing; they had meanings like palace field and beautiful. But the name itself, Yoshikazu Miyano, sounded elaborate and formal. I kept my eyes on him as he sat down, still looking nervous. He happened to glance in my direction at that exact moment, but our eyes didn’t meet—because he was busy looking at my head. He wasn’t the only one. Other students had been stealing glances my way during the introductions, too. This guy smells like an overachiever, I thought. From the way he bowed his head as he greeted us to the way he talked, everything about his behavior and attitude was impeccable. He didn’t seem like the type who would see eye to eye with a rough-looking guy like me. Hanzawa, sitting beside me, saw the stares, too. “Look who’s the center of attention,” he whispered with a grin. Everyone wanted to know why a member of the Disciplinary Committee had gold hair. It didn’t help that they each had a copy of a handout detailing the criteria used when the committee did inspections. All the first-years were curious, but most of them hid it better than Miyano. Hanzawa’s grin only got wider as he said, “He looks like the kind who loves his work.” He was right. Miyano turned out to be a very good worker. He was serious about his time at school; his conduct irreproachable. True, he always looked like he wanted to say something about my hair, and that wasn’t something I could brush aside by just acting more upperclassman-y. If he was a little intimidated by me, let him be. I figured I would just keep an eye on him from a distance. Whatever he thought of me, I learned very quickly that Miyano would tackle whatever job he was given. Hanzawa saw it too, and he was excellent at putting him to good use. In fact, Hanzawa was so skilled at helping people who felt out of place to be more comfortable that he was the dorm leader this year. With Hanzawa’s encouragement, Miyano learned to stop bailing out of conversations. Gradually, Miyano went from reticent to willing to talk, and it felt like his walls were starting to come down, at least with Hanzawa. It was right about then that a turning point came in the form of some guys beating up a fellow student on school grounds. By sheer chance, Miyano had been near the scene, and he came to me for help. I was surprised that he turned to me and not the more-approachable Hanzawa. Maybe my rough appearance made him think I would be better in a fight. I wasn’t able to help immediately; by the time I got there, all I found was an injured Sasaki—and that really surprised me. I asked him about it, but it turned out he wasn’t particularly close to either Miyano or the student who’d been getting beaten up. He’d just jumped in to help. That left me at a bit of a loss. “I thought you said you didn’t like fighting, ’cause you’re not any good at it,” I said, showing him the grateful text message Miyano had sent me. “Ugh… I must look like a total dork,” Sasaki said. “Oh, please,” I replied. What about jumping into a fight to help someone was dorky? Although I didn’t say it, I was also grateful to him for helping to keep an underclassman safe. I hadn’t thought Sasaki would do something like that. I felt like I was witnessing a moment of dizzying change. The feeling passed quickly, because ever since the incident, Miyano’s behavior had changed visibly. He was a lot more tight-lipped, and each time he saw me, his expression darkened. He would look at me like he wished he could say something, then after a moment’s hesitation, swallow the words again. That wasn’t new, as far as things usually went. It was just part of his personality—you could call it seriousness, if you were feeling generous; inflexibility if you weren’t. But today, it struck me as something I shouldn’t just ignore. Call it an upperclassman’s intuition. (Even if I hadn’t been an upperclassman for very long.) It was taking us days to crack the case, and at first I thought Miyano was on edge because it felt like the attackers could be anyone. But even after we figured out who’d done it—just before summer break—he kept acting funny. If anything, he seemed stranger than before. I conferred with Hanzawa, and we agreed that he was in high school now, and it would be better to just keep an eye on him and see how he was doing rather than trying to force him to talk about some passing mood. It didn’t seem to be working for us, though, so shortly after the start of second term, I asked Miyano to talk to me in the Disciplinary Committee room. “I get the feeling there’s something you’d like to say to me,” I said. Miyano had looked all out of sorts from the moment we’d sat down. I thought maybe he was still feeling frazzled from the all-too-short summer break, but I also heard him murmuring about “what’s with this situation” or something. “Uh… Umm…” “You can tell me. I promise I won’t get angry. Really, I mean it.” People told me I was downright frightening when I was asking questions one-on-one, so I was trying to be careful, but Miyano still looked like he thought I was going to kill him. His voice cracked a little as he said, “R-really? I can tell you…?” “Yeah. Go ahead.” I could see him screwing up his courage. Then he said, “Hirano, I’m, uh, moe for you.” I couldn’t quite process that. “Moe?” “See, uh, I’m into BL… Like, romance manga. You just seem like you jumped right out of the pages of one of my books, and I can’t help getting excited when I see you…” “What?” Romance? What was he talking about? I mean, I’d known he was into manga, but… “Take that attack behind the school last term. There’s stuff like that in my manga all the time. Well, not so much recently, but it used to happen a lot.” “Really,” I said. I didn’t quite follow, but I decided to nod along. “I always used to think it was a stock thing in those kinds of stories, something I could enjoy seeing my favorite artists use. Like the fateful meeting with the guy who comes to rescue the victim or how your heart pounds when two guys are in love and one of them gets in trouble and the other one shows up just in time to rescue him. I realize now that I always enjoyed them because I knew how they would turn out.”