And so, spurred on by curiosity─or rather, by the momentum of a spur-of-the-moment decision─I arrived in the headquarters of the Pretty Boy Detective Club, which is to say, the art room. But once I found myself surrounded by those four school celebrities, I withered completely.
I have the unfortunate habit of going hot and cold a little too easily─although, the net enclosing me included one obscure, or at least unfamiliar, figure.
President?
This nobody?
For all I knew he was older than me, so I probably shouldn’t have been calling him “this nobody,” but I found it extremely strange that these four students─Michiru Fukuroi, Nagahiro Sakiguchi, Hyota Ashikaga, and Sosaku Yubiwa─who even I, ignorant as I am of school gossip, couldn’t avoid knowing about, were presided over by an obscure character whose name didn’t ring the slightest bell.
I’d heard it for the first time just now.
Manabu Sotoin.
He was leaning back arrogantly on the sofa right in front of me, legs crossed… Some nerve he had, to act so self-important around this crowd.
You’d think he (as another guy) would wither all the more in the presence of his high-performing companions… Or was I just ignorant, was this Sotoin a somebody too?
Well, for the moment, if I was to judge impartially in my current cooled-off condition, apart from his arrogant attitude─going by looks alone, in other words─I’d have to say the other four had nothing on him. Pretty Boy Detective Club was an apt name indeed, egotistical though it may have been.
Hurry up and get old and fat already.
“What’s this? I sense I’m being cursed,” Sotoin said, peering around him. His powers of deduction may have been extremely questionable, but his intuition seemed sharp. Not that intuition could do much to “help” me─
“Well, it’s not worth worrying about. Being cursed is the fate of the beautiful. Anyhow, young Dojima, tell us the details of your case. Whatever were you searching for?”
I hesitated.
I’d been planning to put him on the spot, to get him back for being such a complete nuisance, but the situation now was totally different from what it’d been on the roof. The wave I’d been riding up there wasn’t going to carry me through.
Sotoin aside, I had no grudge against the other four─well, Fukuroi had been rude to me from the moment we met, but taking out my feelings on Yubiwa in particular was a horrible idea.
I might end up getting taken out myself, and not in the good sense.
Then again, even though the five of them were surrounding me, the student council president Sakiguchi was the only one I could really say was properly paying attention to me. Sotoin was still laying back arrogantly on the sofa, like he was having a meeting with the chandelier instead of me; the terrifying Yubiwa, while physically present, was obviously only there out of obligation, and was in fact facing in the opposite direction from me, like he thought looking at the wall would be more fruitful than looking at me.
Fukuroi at least did me the favor of looking at me, but clearly out of irritation. His “us guys were having a great time and then a girl had to come and ruin it” attitude was no joke─I wanted to tell him I wasn’t even there of my own choosing, and anyway, he should have outgrown that attitude along with his elementary school uniform. As for Mr. Bare-Legs, he’d at least dismounted from the table, but apparently he was incapable of sitting in a normal position, or else he just wanted to show off his alluring legs, because now he was upside down on the sofa dangling them over the back.
I felt like I was at some kind of high-pressure job interview.
“…”
To hide my nervousness, I reached for the teacup sitting on the table─at Sakiguchi’s suggestion, Fukuroi had included me when he made tea for the rest of the group a few minutes earlier.
Never thought I’d see the petrifying bossman pouring tea… Though, he did do it with a practiced hand.
In any case, it would be impolite not to drink the tea I’d been served.
Sakiguchi had complimented him earlier on his tea-making skills, but I figured that was mere civility, so I shouldn’t expect too much. Anyway, all black tea basically tastes the same.
Still, I decided to go along with the flattery game in hopes of putting Fukuroi in a better mood, and took a sip of the hot tea─
“Ptooey!”
It was so delicious that I spit it out the instant it entered my mouth.
That’s what you do when something goes down the wrong pipe, but it hadn’t even gotten that far─I’d reflexively ejected it the second it touched my tongue. I was acting like they’d tried to poison me, but even with poison I wouldn’t have reacted so blatantly.
“Hey, what’s the problem? Does it taste that different from the sludge you usually drink?” Fukuroi asked, calmly wiping the table with a rag.
That was quite the way to put it, but actually he was right─if this was tea, then the stuff I normally drank must be tea-colored mud.
Having a guy clean up my spit-out mess was mortifying… But after that, I was able to calm down a little. Maybe it was the detoxifying effect of black tea.
The Pretty Boy Detective Club.
I had vaguely wondered what kind of person would go to such an overtly sketchy-sounding organization for help, and now I had an answer─who would’ve believed that the president himself went out to recruit clients?
This was no time to be spitting out tea.
Having stumbled haplessly into their net, the urgent question now was this: How do I get myself out of this art room in one piece?