Summer passed, and the color of autumn deepened. Since the semester had just begun, we didn’t have much work to do in the student council. This year, at least, the student council wasn’t putting on any performances or activities at the cultural festival, so we weren’t chained down by anything.
I couldn’t tell what Nanami Touko thought about that from how she looked on the surface.
It was our first cultural festival of high school. Even the inside of the now-familiar school building gave off a completely different impression now that it was full of decorations and outsiders. When I looked at the lively, handmade decorations, it made me feel as if Christmas had come early. The people advertising performances bustled up and down the halls with many mismatched footfalls.
“Were there always this many students at our school?”
“Right? I wonder where they were all hiding.”
The stream of people was particularly dense, since there were upperclassmen travelling past the first-year classrooms as well. There were even boy-girl pairs of students wandering around, which caught my eye despite myself.
“You look pretty amazed,” Touko remarked, much to my embarrassment. I hadn’t thought I was staring around so obviously.
“Cultural festivals were a much more modest affair in my junior high.”
Back then, we just had a line of lackluster displays planned out in each classroom and an old movie showing in the gym. It was dim, dusty, and humid. As soon as I peeked in and saw what it was like, I immediately left. To be honest, the impression it left on me was mostly just that it was a very boring event. Compared to that, the high school version really did seem like an actual festival.
We passed by students holding stamp cards all over the place. They seemed to pique Touko’s interest, and her eyes followed them. Then her eyes met mine.
“Want to do it, too?”
“Hrmm…”
I did think it might be fun to go around the school with Touko, but Touko seemed indecisive as she walked towards the side of the hallway.
“Oh, it’s Serizawa.”
Looking out the window, she pointed at the corner of the lined-up stalls. The signboards of the stalls set up at the side of the school grounds sported cramped depictions of basketballs, takoyaki, and product names.
“Basketball takoyaki.”
Is it really? I cocked my head to the side. The takoyaki in the serving trays looked normal-sized no matter how I looked at them.
“That’s false advertising.”
There was a boy and a girl in charge of the stall cooking, and they both looked familiar. It was the girl who had confessed and the boy who had been confessed to, I realized. I couldn’t tell if they were trying to hide it from the others around them or not, but they seemed intimate as they talked, and their faces were slightly flushed.
“Is that what they call being young and in love?” Touko asked, pointing at them. I didn’t know how to respond.
“Well, they certainly seem to be having a good time.”
They had confessed their love to each other barely a month into starting high school and were still together. I guess they really were drawn to each other by more than a passing whim, then. So time really wasn’t everything.
We watched them enjoying themselves from afar as we stepped away from the window. After walking for a while, a familiar-sounding hawker called out to us.
“Hey, how about you two nice young ladies?” Manaka stood in front of a classroom, wearing her school uniform and a sign on her shoulders.
“What are you doing?”
“Can’t you tell? I’m trying to get people to come to our program.”
“Aren’t you part of the going-home club?” She didn’t even seem to be advertising a program that was related to the classroom she was standing in front of, either.
“I’m helping out Midori.” Manaka gestured for us to peek into the classroom, where Midori was standing around in an apron looking bored. “It’s a café organized by the English club where you can eat cookies shaped like the ABCs.”
“How quaint…”
“Honestly, other than that, it’s like any other normal café. Oh, and we can handle it if a foreigner comes by, so we’ve written this on the sign so they know they’re in good hands. See?”
She pointed at the sign where the word “Heloo”—misspelled like that—was written out in large letters. That called into question the results of their day-to-day club activities.
“I sure can’t speak it, though.” Manaka grinned and flapped her hand in front of her face.
We decided to go in to show support for our friends.
Midori welcomed us with a smile. “So Manaka finally managed to snag some customers.”
She led us to the window, which she claimed were the deluxe seats. The coffee and cookies we ordered came out immediately. When I smelled the aroma of the coffee as it came to us, I suspected it was the same stuff as what was in the student council room.
“Hey, doesn’t this look kind of like the hiragana character ‘ko’ ?”
There was a conspicuous character from the Japanese writing system mixed among the alphabet cookies.
“Oh, I made that one myself.” Midori peeked at the table and offered an explanation. “It was originally supposed to be a ‘K’ but then it broke. I wonder if the leftover ‘I’ is mixed in there, too. It’s pretty hard, y’know,” she grumbled, pressing her lips together and narrowing her eyes. “I guess I’ll need to practice more if we do another one of these.”
“You’re practicing making cookies…? Shouldn’t you be practicing English instead?”
“That’s not really the kind of club we are, ahaha.” Midori laughed it off lightheartedly. …Then what kind of club was it supposed to be?
“Hey Sayaka, have you got a ‘Y’?” Touko asked, sifting through her cookies with her finger.
“I do, why?”
“Could you lend it to me?”
“Sure…” Responding to Touko’s request, I passed over the Y cookie. Touko took it and placed it in a gap between other letters.
“I did it.”
Touko flaunted her line of cookies. What she had done was spell out “SAYAKA.”
“I had a lot of A’s, so I was curious whether I could spell it.”
“Aha…ha…”
Between the way she was playing like a child, and the fact that she chose to spell out my name of all the possible combinations, I just couldn’t help laughing. “Let me try, too…”
I lined up my cookies. I started out with the T, so Touko probably immediately knew what I was doing. I quickly found the next letter, but my K had been broken.
“Hey, do you have any more K’s?”
“Hrmm…nope.”
“What a shame…”
In the end, all I could do was spell out “TOUIO.”
“Who’s that?”
“…Touio.”
“Like I said, who?!” Touko opened her eyes wide, overreacting dramatically. Then the two of us laughed lightheartedly. It was silly but also quite fun.
After leaving the café, I meandered through the school with Touko again. Touko was already quite popular, so our pace was slowed by all the greetings and conversations that started up as familiar faces passed by. As a result, we ended up slowly walking all around the school, and I started to feel like we might as well have tried to fill out a stamp card. Perhaps we could do it next year.
After that, we were tired from all the walking and decided to take a short break.
“Do you see anywhere we can sit?” I was somewhat reluctant to go to the café again, although there were probably plenty of open tables. Even though we were friends, it wasn’t free.
“Somewhere we could sit… Oh, I know a good place.”
Touko left the school building. I could guess what she had in mind based on the direction she walked.
“I see, you mean that place.” At this point, I could get there without getting lost, but I still stayed silent and let Touko lead me.
Soon, she guided us to the bench behind the student council room. It always felt deserted, but today it felt even more so. There were more insect voices than human to be heard.
“I wanted to take it easy for a bit, so this is perfect.”
Touko leaned up against the back of the bench and stretched. I was already well accustomed to sitting here together with her. Even when we both had bags, we now would sit a little closer. If I stretched out my hand just ever so slightly, I felt like I could reach her.