Oumei High has a courtyard. It’s located between the main schoolhouse and the gym and serves as a nice little gathering space for the students. There are some benches and tables set up so that people can eat lunch out there, and since the buildings that flank it keep it nice and shaded, it’s cool even during the heat of summer. Whoever designed the place did their homework. I’d never actually bothered going out there before and was surprised to find how pleasant it was.
I was lurking in a corner of that courtyard, hidden behind a convenient pillar. As for why I was forgoing food and sleep in spite of my hearty appetite for both, well...there was really only one reason.
“I’m sorry, Yuu-chan—you’re definitely mad at me, aren’t you? I lost track of time and spent way too long talking with our teacher, I know...”
“Huh? Ah, no I’m not! You didn’t do anything wrong, Hikari-chan! I’m mad about something totally different!”
“And in a manner of speaking, I made you wait for me the whole week I wasn’t at school...”
“Th-That wasn’t your fault! You had some sorta unavoidable circumstances to deal with, right?!”
“No, I was just playing hooky.”
“Whaaat?!”
“Gotcha! I was just kidding, Yuu-chan.” She chuckled and stuck out her tongue in a teasing sort of way.
It was her: Ayase Hikari. Normally behaving like that would be unspeakably obnoxious, but somehow, she had a way of making you want to let it slide. That might’ve just been my own bias talking, though.
In spite of it being her first day back after a long break, Ayase seemed to be in top form. The way she was joking around and giggling was perfectly natural, and watching her casually mess with Yuuta made it easy to see just how deep their friendship ran.
They chatted peacefully as they sat down at one of the tables, opened up the lunch boxes Yuuta had been so proud of, and started to eat. If Yuuta’s info was correct, Ayase had made them herself. In other words, they were the same as the relatively plain but scrumptious-looking lunches that Kaito ate every day... Ah, dammit, now I’m even hungrier than ever.
I was a lot more concerned about them—or rather, about Ayase—than I was about the state of my stomach, though. Had she returned to her normal, everyday life without any issues after what I did to her? Was she experiencing any aftereffects? I didn’t have any real right to worry about her, considering my involvement, but I did anyway.
C’mon, Yuuta! Question her! Ask her if she’s still feeling sick, or something along those lines! Yuuta was the only person in a position to actually question her about it, so I placed all my hopes in her and tried to beam my instructions to her via telepathy. Which didn’t work, of course, ’cause telepathy’s not real.
“Are you still feeling sick, Hikari-chan?”
Hoooooly crap, it worked?! She actually asked! I mean, it was a natural question to ask in the first place. If an honor student like Ayase goes missing for the better part of a week, it’s easy to conclude she must’ve been sick. Wasn’t surprising at all that Yuuta would be thinking along those lines.
“I’m fine!” Ayase replied. “I wasn’t sick to begin with. That’s not why I missed school.”
“It’s not?”
“Yeah, but...I don’t actually know why I did. I know that I had a reason, but I’m not sure what it was.”
“Was it all that stuff with Mikura-san?” Yuuta asked after a moment of timid hesitation.
“I mean, that was part of it, I think...”
“Mikura” was one of Ayase’s classmates whose jealousy ended up driving her to subject Ayase to some low-key bullying. It didn’t make any sense for that alone to cause her to cut class, though, and by the look of things Ayase herself was aware of that fact. If she didn’t remember why she’d ended up cutting school, that meant the real reason was about me—or rather, about a certain creepy old pervert. Point is, it had to do with the memories I erased.
“Guess that means it worked,” I mumbled to myself. “Probably.”
“Kunugi-kun? What are you doing?”
“Aughwhaaa?!” Somebody tapped me on the shoulder from behind, and I shrieked. I was so focused on eavesdropping on Ayase’s conversation, I completely failed to notice that somebody was approaching me in the meantime.
“Huh?! It feels like someone’s watching us!” Yuuta jumped up to scan her surroundings, and I hastily withdrew all the way behind the pillar. Then I turned to look at the girl who’d decided to talk to me.
“Wh-What’s up, Kiryu-san?”
“I feel like I should be asking you that! All I did was talk to you...” I was obviously freaking out, and Kiryu didn’t look very happy about it. “I saw you clutching at this pillar and was worried your raging hormones might’ve been making you act out again.”
“What sorta person do you take me for?!”
“I understand now, though. It was even worse than I thought. I never took you for a kidnapper.”
“A kidnapper?!” I’d been demoted from pillar-molesting pervert to child-snatcher in her mind! Not really, of course—judging by how she smiled at my reaction, she was definitely just teasing me. If she’d seen me creeping around like that just a couple weeks back, she would’ve probably flung a couple biting insults at me and not even bothered to talk to me at all.
“So, why are you spying on Hikari-san?” she asked.
“‘Hikari-san’? You know her?”
“I do, yes. She’s Ayase-kun’s sister and her grade’s class representative, after all. I’ve spoken with her a number of times in passing.” Hikari had earned the right to be the class representative by getting the top score on her entrance exam, and Kiryu had done the same the year before. It wasn’t totally implausible for that shared experience to lead to the two of them touching base with each other.
“Exactly—she’s Kaito’s sister, and speaking as her older brother’s best friend, it’s only natural for me to worry if she’s doing okay after she skipped school without explanation.”
“In other words, you’re being a snoop.”
“You could say that.” In the sense that she was a notable figure and I was part of the riffraff, “snooping” expressed the distance between the two of us pretty perfectly. Like I was the paparazzi or something.
“From what I understand, yesterday was her first day back at school,” continued Kiryu.
“Pretty rare for you to have info on one of your kouhais, isn’t it?”
“Ayase-kun and Kotou-san told me, that’s all.”
I paused, shocked. “Kaito did? But he didn’t say anything to me at all!”
“Why would you be jealous about that? It’s your own fault for being absent on the day she came back.” Harsh, but fair! It would be sorta weird to contact a guy who’s at home sick to tell him that your sister’s back at school after being out for a week. Can’t exactly post it on social media either—you’d get chewed out for spreading private info online.
“In any case,” Kiryu sighed, “you’ve certainly bounced back quickly. Considering how bad you looked yesterday, I almost can’t believe it.”
“They say that boys in puberty change so quickly, you might not even recognize ’em if you go a couple days without seeing ’em!”
“It hasn’t even been a full day since I saw you, and that’s not even remotely the same thing regardless.” She was back to half-glaring at me. I felt a bead of sweat drip down my brow.
“W-Well, the point is that there’s more to me than meets the eye. Anyway, I’ve actually got more important things to be doing right now, so—”
“‘More important things’?” She grabbed me by the shoulders. H-Holy crap, why’s she being so intense all of a sudden?! “You do not have ‘more important things.’ Do you have any idea how worried I was after you ran out yesterday? You left your phone behind, so I couldn’t even call you!”
“Err, I mean, you see—”
“The president and I were chatting over snacks after you left, and we were both worried that you might’ve been so shocked by, well, you-know-what that you might’ve tried to kill yourself!”
“Yeah, okay, sorry about... ‘Over snacks’?! Sounds like you were pretty calm after all!”
“They say that good things come to those who wait, don’t they?” Welp, didn’t think that expression would end up turning against me today! Dunno if it really applies in this context, but I can’t argue against it either. Curse this girl and her smarty-pants wiles! “Anyway, the truth is that the president stopped me from going after you. She said that it was too dangerous to go running around in the dark, so we should leave it to her people.”
“Makes sense, I guess.”
“And thanks to that, I ended up having to deal with her all night long...”
“Hot!” An image jumped into my mind: Kiryu and Renge, lying on a king-sized bed, limbs entwined in a beguilingly seductive manner. Feels like the sort of scene that girls would be into more than guys, though, especially if we had Kiryu crossdress for it...
“You’re thinking about something weird, aren’t you?” She pinched my cheek (with her nails!) and the bedroom scene dissolved into mental mist.