As I walked toward school mulling all of this over, I spotted an unfamiliar figure in a school uniform─a Kamikazari uniform. Well, speak of the devil (or at least, the middle schooler).
No way, could the next wave of the invasion be starting already? I was immediately on my guard, but the boy greeted me amiably.
“Top of the morning, Mayumi Dojima.”
I recognized that voice.
“It’s me. Here,” he swept his bangs back from his forehead─yes, it was Fudatsuki.
Seeing him in a school uniform after only having seen him in a suit or a tuxedo was weird, to say the least, but I recognized one thing about him for sure─that reassuring smile, which is to say, that swindler’s smile.
Come to think of it, we were in almost exactly the same spot where I’d picked up the million yen─which couldn’t be a coincidence.
He’d been lying in wait for me.
…And not only that, he knew my name even though I’d never told it to him.
“Don’t worry. I haven’t come here for revenge─the damage you and your associates did to me was far greater than you might imagine. We’ll be good boys and girls until things cool off─please tell that to Sakiguchi.”
“O-Okay…”
Dressed in his school uniform, he looked more like the boy he was─but I couldn’t let my guard down. He wasn’t the type to actually behave well just because he said he was going to be a good boy.
And once those doubts set in, the part about not coming for revenge and the damage being so severe started to sound suspicious, too. But even if it was true, he and his associates might already be laying the groundwork for a comeback.
“S-So… Why’re you here?” I asked timidly. I figured this might be my only chance to drop the formal language.
“To deliver a love letter. Not from me, of course. From one of our bunny girls.”
Ohhhhh, that bunny girl.
She sure was pushy─first the phone number, now a love letter.
“I won’t tell her you’re a girl, so please, give her a call─she worked hard for me at the casino. And by the way, she was the one in the kuroko outfit last night.”
Interesting… She must have been busy, with two jobs to keep on top of.
Anyway, he didn’t have to keep my gender a secret. I’d rather he told her, actually. My life is complicated enough already.
But when the student council president himself handed me the letter with a heart drawn across the flap, I felt like I had to take it.
Crap, now what do I do…
“Oh, and not just Sakiguchi─please give my regards to the pretty girl who lectured me on aesthetics as well. Consider this a flirtatious reply. I don’t intend to exact revenge, but tell her I’d love to go around again someday.”
I had a feeling his “flirtatious reply” might be the real reason he was here─it sent a shiver down my spine, like the proverbial dagger hidden behind a smile, but it also suggested that whatever he knew about my real identity or the existence of the Pretty Boy Detective Club, he hadn’t yet figured out who Sotoin was.
Which made sense, since he was still in fifth grade.
If Fudatsuki investigated Yubiwa Academy for the purposes of an inter-school turf war, Sotoin’s name wouldn’t come up─so despite the weirdness of the student council president of Kamikazari Middle flirting with a fifth-grade boy in drag, I breathed a sigh of relief.
“Speaking of which,” I asked. “I never did get your full name─I’ll pass on your messages, so do you mind telling me?”
“Lai. Lai Fudatsuki. That’s L-a-i, not L-i-e. Please, don’t hesitate to call on me if you ever have a problem, and don’t think twice about the division between our schools─I’m always ready to consult, especially if it’s about money.”
“O-Okay. Consult, huh.”
“Take off those colored glasses, and you may find I’m not such a bad guy after all. Anyhow, it’s up to you,” he said, and turned on his heel.
I didn’t have a reason to stop him, and if he was leaving then I guess we didn’t have anything else to discuss, but still, I felt like I had some lingering questions, so I reflexively called out, “W-Wait,” and chased after him.
I didn’t know what I’d say when I caught up to him─but fortunately, I never did.
Because when I followed him around the corner, I stopped short─it was a long, straight road without any side streets to turn down, yet he was nowhere to be seen.
“…Okay, okay.”
Had I seriously fallen into the same trap again? He was a real one-trick pony.
I took off my (non-colored) glasses and scanned my surroundings to see if I could spot Fudatsuki in an invisibility suit─but…
“Huh?”
No matter how hard I looked, nothing changed─I scoured the scene in every direction, but Fudatsuki failed to appear.
Like a scam─like the air itself.
Lai Fudatsuki had vanished completely.
“…”
What is essential is invisible to the eye.
What if the “essential” thing Fudatsuki was referring to when he so shamelessly quoted Saint-Exupéry wasn’t his transparently obvious invisible cards, but his ultimate trump card? Apparently, he’d managed to bring the show to a close without revealing his strongest suit, even to me.
If so, then this hadn’t even amounted to a preliminary skirmish─and it made sense that he wasn’t thinking about revenge: he didn’t think he’d lost.
The showdown between beauty and fraud, between a boyish spirit and a playful one.
The real struggle between the detective club and the maestro─was yet to come.
And yet, I still wasn’t at all sure whether a person like me, who couldn’t even see her own self clearly, could bear witness to that battle─I can only wrap things up by saying, it’s opaque to me.
✦ ✦ ✦
The saying that things go well about a fifth of the time is by no means limited to gambling, but is supposed to be the most fitting ratio for anything a person might get absorbed in. Succeeding twenty percent of the time gives you just about the perfect sense of achievement, doesn’t it? If you came out on top ninety percent of the time, I think you’d eventually get bored and wouldn’t want to keep on going. Perhaps you could say that a certain randomness is needed to keep things from becoming routine. I suppose it’s like this: Even if we all need a little excitement in our day-to-day lives, life would be pretty trying if every day were exciting, and so having an eventful day every one out of five or so makes for the best balance. Probability theory is fairly absolute, and it would be silly to expect any change on that front, but that’s precisely why the pleasure of achieving something with a low probability is itself so absolute. That human beings gravitate toward things with a low probability of success rather than a high one suggests that we’re not necessarily controlled by the simple desire to succeed; instead, it seems to me we seek out challenges with a low probability of success, which is to say a high level of difficulty, because overcoming them tends to bring greater joy. But if you think about it, this means that people blessed with fabulous luck, for whom success comes four out of five times and all of life is smooth sailing─that is, for whom life is impossibly good─must also find life impossibly boring. I’m pretty sure that’s not the case, but I do suspect that those people wish that now and then something wouldn’t go their way. After all, I believe there’s something in all of us that wants to go up against ridiculous odds, fail, and say, “Well, there you go.”
And so this has been the second story in the Pretty Boy series. What a name for a series. These events take place just after the previous volume, Pretty Boy Detective Club: The Dark Star that Shines for You Alone. Unlike most of the characters in the other novels I’ve written, the members of this club are actually capable of acting as a group, which makes writing this series something of a fresh experience for me. So there you have it, volume two of the Pretty Boy series: The Swindler, the Vanishing Man, and the Pretty Boys.
Kinako, who did the cover for volume one, has been kind enough to do the art for this one as well, giving us a very beautiful picture of Michiru the Epicure and Nagahiro the Orator. Thank you very much, Kinako. This book is my second for Kodansha’s new Taiga imprint, and volume three should be on its way before long. I hope you’ll read that one too.
NISIOISIN