The morning’s lessons were long over. On the laptop screen, from a peculiar angle, we saw a scene of three girls, Oginome Ringo and her friends, eating lunch together. One of the three was the girl who had mistaken me for a pervert on the train this morning.
The benches were neatly arranged in the park-like courtyard. The penguins wandered around the girls’ feet, as though trying to surround Oginome Ringo. At the moment, Oginome Ringo was eating a sandwich and playing on her phone.
“Ohmygod so like, he was so cool! He was all, ‘If I made you feel uncomfortable, then I should apologize. I’m sorry.’ Right, Ringo?”
The long-haired girl’s impression of my brother was actually pretty good. I started feeling vaguely embarrassed, and noisily slurped milk from a carton. Kanba faced away, nibbling nonchalantly on some anpan, as if totally used to people saying things like that about him.
“Man, I wish I could’ve seen that!” replied a lively-looking girl with a short haircut. “That sounds like something else!” She shut her eyes, lightly touching her cheeks, sounding deeply moved.
“He really was cool.”
“So, what about that first suspicious guy?” asked Short Hair.
“Mm, that kid who was with him? He was pretty much nothing,” said Long Hair, instantly dismissive.
Kanba snorted laughter. Penguin No. 2, meanwhile, seemed wholly focused on the bento on the girl’s lap.
“Ah, hang on, what is camera No. 1 capturing?!” I looked at the screen just in time to see a clear view up Oginome Ringo’s skirt. I sputtered, “Pay attention to them, would you?! I swear, you’re all terrible!”
I puffed out my cheeks, grousing at both my brother and the penguin. Just as I thought, Penguin No. 1 really did resemble Kanba.
“Which one?” Kanba looked to the screen, intrigued, focusing on the image from No. 1’s camera with deep interest. “Oho.”
“I think that guy’s uniform was from Gaiennishi High,” one of the girls said.
“No way, that’s so close!”
“Seriously. Makes you wonder how we’ve let such a handsome guy escape out from under our noses all this time.”
The whole time, Oginome Ringo only took quiet bites of her sandwich, staring at the screen of her phone, not participating in the conversation. Was she talking to someone? Looking something up? Reminiscing over photos?
“Ringo? What’s up?” called Long Hair, suddenly noticing how silent Oginome Ringo had been.
“It’s nothing,” said Oginome Ringo, shaking her head, her face popping up from the screen.
“Now then, I was gonna eat that octopus sausage! Huh? Where is it? Did I eat it already?”
In reality, Penguin No. 2, standing at her feet, had eaten her octopus sausage, but there was nothing I could do about that.
“I’m going to head home a little early today,” Oginome Ringo said suddenly, and both the cameras focused on her at once. She quickly cleaned up her sandwich wrapper, grabbed her bag, and stood up.
“Ringo?” The remaining two seemed dumbfounded.
Kanba and I hurriedly cleaned up the odds and ends we had spread around the rooftop like a picnic, so that we could follow her.
The penguins sluggishly followed Oginome Ringo, as per Kanba’s instructions. The camera atop the more rambunctious No. 1 was now somewhat more lopsided than before, as though the tape had come slightly loose.
Oginome Ringo headed straight for Shinjuku Gyouenmae Station and boarded the train. We boarded the train as well, taking a seat a short distance away from her.
“Oginome Ringo’s house was in East Kouenji, wasn’t it?” Kanba asked quietly, holding a paper.
“She’s going the opposite way from home, then.”
I glanced at Oginome Ringo to see the penguins hanging around her. No. 1 seemed particularly interested in try to squeeze its head between her thighs again, but as though Oginome Ringo uncannily sensed this, she tilted her head and shifted in her seat.
“She’s got something,” said Kanba, making a strange face.
Obviously: we were only following her around like this because she had something. Though she did not appear to possess anything unusual.
“Kanba, what exactly is this Penguindrum, anyway?” I asked, as I watched No. 2 roll off of its seat.
“How should I know? Doesn’t seem like 1 or 2 know either, and that Penguin Hat never said what it was. I couldn’t even start to guess,” he replied brusquely.
“I wonder if it’s even something that we can actually take.”
“Well, it’s gotta have some kind of form, if we were told to find it and bring it back with us, right?”
“I guess all we can do is look for it, just like the hat said.”
“It was for Himari.” For once, as if we were both operating on the wavelength that twins supposedly always shared, my voice joined with Kanba’s. However, unlike the unease that lingered somewhere within me, I saw determination stark on Kanba’s face, reflected in the dark window beyond the benches.
In a teeny, tiny voice, Oginome Ringo muttered to herself. “A man’s heart is through his stomach. Your underwear is your everyday weapon.”
When we arrived in Ikebukuro, Oginome Ringo entered a book shop inside a large building, and flipped through the magazines with a serious expression.
“I mean, it seems like she’s just standing around and browsing, pretty typical.” My brother and I were standing by a shelf some distance from her, magazines flipped open for show as we pretended to read them, our eyes instead trained on her.
“Don’t let your guard down. She might be giving some kind of secret code signal.”
“Seriously? Just what kind of secret code…” Just as I spoke, the cheery ring of an incoming call came from my phone in my back pocket.
Noticing the sound, Oginome Ringo suddenly looked our way.
“Idiot! Put that thing on silent!” Kanba quietly raged.
“S-sorry, sorry!” I frantically hunched over, looking to see who was calling. It was from our house phone, which meant it was from Himari. “Sorry!” I said again, pitifully, and answered it.
“Onii-chan?” Sure enough, Himari sounded rather displeased. “Where are you right now, and what are you doing?”
“Where? Uhh, we’re at a book store.”
“Is that Himari?” Kanba asked from beside me. I nodded, moving a little way away.
“You two skipped school today, didn’t you?”
“Huh?! How did you know that?” I asked, inadvertently letting the truth slip.
“Tabuki-sensei called because he was worried! You don’t ever do anything like this!”
“Ah.” I scratched my head, a warm smile on my face, as the image of my bespectacled homeroom teacher flashed before my eyes.
“Shoma!”
I turned around at my brother’s voice, to see that Oginome Ringo finished her browsing, and was just about to leave.
“Sorry, Himari. I’ll call you back later! I’m really sorry!” I hung up the phone and quickly followed after Oginome Ringo.
It was unforgivable to make Himari needlessly worried, but this was all for her sake. If we found the Penguindrum, we could return to our normal, peaceful lives.
“We’re doing our best for you,” I muttered to myself, catching up with the penguin that was following Oginome Ringo. From this distance, I probably wouldn’t look quite as suspicious.
Just as she rounded the corner into a certain shop, the penguins’ eyes flashed toward us. They each held up a paper with a drawing of a can of squid.
“A can of squid?” I muttered, slowing down. Where had they even gotten the drawings?
“I think they’re saying we ‘can’t’ go in there?”
Just as Kanba suggested, the next papers the pair whipped out were a “No Entry” symbol. The shop front inside didn’t have such a symbol though, so we kept following the penguins and rounded the corner.
“This is—!” I reflexively gasped, stopping in my tracks. Kanba made a complicated expression and stopped beside me.
The shop front was absurdly cute, drawn with pastel accents, looking for all the world like an amusement park. Wherever you looked, there was enough lace and frills to make your eyes sting. In the middle of the shop, a display of white mannequins, clad in bras and matching panties, spun leisurely around along with a small wooden rocking horse.
There was a poster of a smiling female model in her underwear, and women picking up that same underwear to look at it. Amongst them stood Oginome Ringo.
I gulped thickly. Even if it was my brother, if two men were to enter this shop together, we were sure to be questioned.
“Lingerie store, huh? Wish I had a girl here.” I shuddered as my brother clicked his tongue. Was he saying that he could go into this shop if he had a girl with him?
“W-we absolutely can’t go in there. We can’t!” I paled, once more silently apologizing to Himari from the bottom of my heart.
We watched from a distance as Oginome Ringo wandered around the shop. She flitted between the displays, and then picked up a brassiere. I quickly averted my eyes.
“Don’t tell me that’s the Penguindrum,” Kanba said seriously. “If it is though, then I’ve definitely seen one like that before.” He sounded sincere, and I was too terrified to inquire where he’d seen such a thing.
“Would the Penguindrum be something mass-produced? Something store-bought? Either way, I cannot go in there and buy something like that!”
“I guess not.”
I looked again at Oginome Ringo to see that she placed the brassiere back on the shelf. Then, she moved further into the shop.
“Hey now, going for somethin’ a little more radical? Don’t tell me she’s gettin’ somethin’ with a hole down there.” He furtively began to step into the store, breathing heavily through his nose.
“No way, seriously? Huh? Hole? A hole where?” These increasingly intolerable circumstances were making me dizzy. Even without any open holes, everything here was frilly and sheer.
“Obviously, a hole that connects to the cosmos, idiot.” Kanba said strangely. Or, did he still have it in him to be telling jokes?
“Let’s get out of here. I doubt the Penguindrum is here.” Oginome Ringo really was just looking for underwear, and I was sure she would soon leave the shop again.
“Quit pulling my sleeve. Huh? Where’d she go?”
Suddenly I realized I’d lost sight of her. However, it did not appear that she had come out our way, near the entrance.
“This is because you were saying all that stupid stuff!”
“So this is my fault?! I’m going in! To the back!”
To the back, he said, but this was not a very large store. All that was in the furthest back, with its ornately painted walls, were piles of lingerie and an emergency exit.
Kanba shoved open the emergency door, and we went outside. The sun set, and I felt a slight chill on my skin from the wind.