The morning's lessons were finally over, and lunchtime was upon us. No matter how much I thought and thought in fourth period, I was no closer to a solution. I tried to signal to Mashiro or catch her attention now and then, but nothing got a decent response. When she noticed, she told me over LIME not to look at her because it was "embarrassing OwO".
Fine, but in that case I would've preferred if she stopped staring at me too. Eventually, I decided I had to ramp things up another notch if I was going to get anywhere. I shot her another LIME message.
AKI: Doing anything at lunchtime?
Mashiro: Not really. I was just gonna get a rice ball from the school store.
Meaning she wasn't planning to eat with anyone. This was good news. All I needed now was to get her to eat with me alone, and we could have a nice, fruitful discussion.
"Hey, Mashiro. Wanna go buy lunch together? Then we can eat somewhere together."
"Eating in pairs is so tiring. You should go eat by yourself."
Why?
I'd totally run out of the only idea I had.
Was she trying to attack me mentally now? Strip me of my morale or something? Whatever it was, I still needed to eat, and so I went to the store while leaving Mashiro behind.
There was a trick to getting to the store as quickly as possible, and that was to avoid the busiest routes. Technically, it was the long way round, but actually it was faster because you avoided the crowds.
"Curry bread." I indicated to the server with a single finger that I only wanted one; it was the most efficient way to secure my lunch.
Bread in hand, I went to eat in the cafeteria, taking my usual empty spot at
the counter in the corner. This whole process was the quickest way to go to the store, buy the bread, and eat it. You can have my guarantee on that. I opened up the packet and was just on my way to take the first bite when—
"Is this seat taken? Ah, who cares?! It's mine now!"
I looked to my side to find that a wild Iroha had appeared next to me. "Don't worry, Senpai! I know you hate it when you look like a loser who
has no friends, so I'm here to sit next to you! Now everyone will think you're a total chick magnet!"
"How'd you even know I was here? You a sniffer dog or something?"
"Aww, c'mon! I know you're secretly happy to see me! You're just too shy to admit it!"
"Stop that."
Iroha refused, continuing to poke my cheek and grin at me. I sighed.
"I saw you in the corridor, so I followed you! I know you've been eating
alone for, like, ever, but it's fine now! Why? 'Cause I'm here!"
"Have you ever considered I might prefer eating by myself? It's way more
efficient. You don't have to bother socializing with other people, and can focus completely on eating your lunch in the quickest possible time."
"Thanks for the lecture, Professor Know-It-All."
As if my day couldn't get any more annoying, here was the Queen of Trouble herself. Even without her attitude, she attracted the attention of other students just by sitting next to me.
"Kohinata-san's eating with a guy!"
"Huh? Who is that? Does he even go here?"
I could hear their jealous whisperings as plain as day. If they really
wanted to take my place, I'd be more than happy to give it to them.
"People are starin', y'know," I said.
"What, 'cause you're already s'posed to have a girlfriend? That doesn't
mean you can't have regular female friends."
"People will talk, which is bad. You wanna get into Honeyplace Works
too, right?"
There was more to my agreement with Mashiro's dad than just acting as
her fake boyfriend. The main thing he wanted me to do was to keep other boys with less pure intentions away from her. In his eyes, that wouldn't work if I had a girlfriend already, so if he even caught a whiff of any such rumor, he'd be out with his pipe and deerstalker hat in no time.
"Don't worry, Senpai. It's not like they know who you are, anyway." With that, Iroha opened up her lunchbox.
I was about to ask why she couldn't just eat in her classroom if she had a packed lunch, but I understood when I spotted a familiar juice box. That pure tomato juice was a brand supplied solely for our school store, using tomatoes grown in Chiba prefecture.
Anyway, tomatoes aside, it was clear she had no intention of leaving now. She wasn't even reacting to the stares we were getting.
"You just gotta act like it's no big deal! It's when you start getting all nervous and twitchy that people ask questions."
"Is that how it works?"
"Yes, siree! Lighten up! Knowing you, it might be ages till you get to eat lunch with a cute girl like me again. Oh, want some omelet? I'll even feed ya!"
"No." Another sigh.
"Hey, grumpy guts! You know every time you sigh you breathe out a bit of happiness, right? Though I guess you didn't have much to start with, since no one even wanted to eat with you!"
"It's actually carbon dioxide you breathe out, not happiness."
"Oh, wow," Iroha replied, not sounding at all wowed.
Instead, she focused on gulping down her food as if she couldn't care
less.
"Besides, I'd be doing a lot less sighing if you weren't around."
"Oh, wow." Iroha took out her phone and began texting with the agility
that only high school girls possessed. She showed me what she'd written. "Carbon dioxide bad! Sighing gets rid of it. I make you sigh. Therefore, I'm keeping your CO2 levels nice and low! If I keep getting on your nerves, who knows how efficient your lungs could get!"
"I'd only waste all that extra breath arguing with you anyway."
Oops. I sighed again.
The real drain on my happiness was having to talk to her. Somehow, Iroha
was capable of making even the most mundane of conversations exhausting. If only talking to her came with some sort of benefit.
Wait a minute.
Iroha was a girl. A high schooler at that, right at the peak of puberty. Maybe she could help me figure out what the heck was going on in Mashiro's
brain. She was the only one who knew about Mashiro's confession too. At least it was nice of her not to tease me about it. I guess even Iroha was capable of a basic level of decency.
Welp, here goes nothing.
"Listen, Iroha, I know this isn't really your area of expertise, but I wanted to ask you about girls and their...fragile emotions."
"Um, hello?! I'm plenty fragile!"
"Sure, I guess."
I mean, she did react pretty strongly to that.
"You know you can't just say whatever you want, just 'cause I'm your
sister, right?"
"If you get to treat me however you like, I get to say whatever I like.
That's called being fair."
"Ooh, you're gonna regret gettin' on my bad side! D'you know how rare it
is to have a girl as cute as me willing to put up with you? You're lucky I don't have a boyfriend, otherwise I'd be spending all my time with him instead!"
"Sure. So can I start?"
"You weren't kidding? ...Okay, fine. Go ahead," Iroha said with a pout. "It's about Mashiro."
Iroha's eyebrow twitched.
"Y'know, about the...message she sent me. The one you saw."
"...Right. Figures."
"I've been thinking for ages about how to reply..."
I started to explain in brief. About how coldly Mashiro had been treating
me in person, but how sickly-sweet her LIME messages were. If her feelings were genuine, I wanted to give her a proper answer, but I really felt I should do it in person. If only she'd let me...
"I've never been in a situation like this, and I have no idea what I'm s'posed to do." I laid everything bare to Iroha, much as I hated to admit how much a simple confession tripped me up.
Why did I choose to talk about this with Iroha, I wondered. Maybe it was because she already saw Mashiro's confession, and that made things easier. Maybe...
"Iroha, I'm... Uh, Iroha?"
Only then did I realize she'd been totally quiet for a while. I looked to myside. Her cheeks were blown up like a puffer fish, and there was a disgruntled gleam in her eyes.
Image Here
"I-Iroha?"
What was she doing? Iroha was the type of girl whose emotions changed every split second, and it was always pretty clear how she was feeling by the look on her face. But I'd never seen this look before.
A nasty thought crossed my mind that I could probably burst her cheeks with a needle, but needless to say I didn't act on it. Confused as I was by her reaction, there was one thing I could say for sure.
She wasn't happy.
"S-So you're really worried about Mashiro-senpai's c-confession."
"Of course I am; no one's ever confessed to me before."
"Right... Right."
"Wh-What's the big deal?"
"No one's ever confessed to you b-before. No one's ever said they loved
you like that."
"Yeah, like I said. How come you're getting so upset?"
"Okay, I get it now. Girls like Mashiro-senpai, who are all prim and
proper and cute and need protecting and stuff... They're the only ones you count as actual girls!"
"What? I never said that. Wait, where are you going?!"
Iroha leaped out of her seat and turned to face me huffily.
"I hope you never meet another girl who can actually hold her own ever
again! Then you'll appreciate what you're missing!" She stuck her tongue out at me before stomping away.
"H-Hey! You left your lunchbox!"
"Whatever! You can wash it and give it back to me later!" "What?! Why should I wash it?!"
Forcing her chores on me was something that was a little too
unreasonable, even for Iroha. I never even had any of her lunch. I thought she must've been joking, but she didn't even respond to my question. She just left the cafeteria behind.
I could hear hushed voices begin to stir around me.
"Kohinata-san stormed out!"
"That guy must've rejected her. How mean!"
I couldn't make out any of the other voices, but they were probably
spewing similar nonsense. Not that their words had any effect on my life. I was more concerned by the fact that I somehow managed to tick Iroha off. At
least if I knew why, I could apologize, but I was totally clueless.
"I just don't get it."
In the end, she hadn't even given me any advice on what to do about
Mashiro. Instead, my problems had only increased. My life was just getting worse and worse.
Just then, I felt a vibration in my pocket. I took my phone out to find a new LIME message from Iroha.
Iroha: Dumbass.
"Why, though?!"
Iroha teased me a lot, but it was very rare for her to insult me so blatantly. Usually, her insults were a little more, uh, creative, I guess. Well, maybe she had a habit of calling me names like "dumbass" when she lost one of our stupid games, but that definitely wasn't what was happening now.
Mashiro, Makigai Namako-sensei, and now Iroha. It was like I was living in some kind of bizarro world.
I continued to stare listlessly at my phone when the PA rang out.
"Second-year Ooboshi Akiteru-kun. Second-year Ooboshi Akiteru-kun. Come to the counseling room immediately."
Ugh. It was Sumire in her Venomous Queen mode. "Hey! The Queen's calling for someone!"
"Oh my God!"
"He's so dead!"
Again, excited voices tittered around me. I could feel a cold sweat breaking out on my back. No, Sumire didn't scare me. I knew how pathetic she really was, after all. What scared me was being summoned by her, right after I left a trail of trouble in my wake. I had no doubt she was just about to add to that trouble.
Murasaki Shikibu-sensei's deadline was one week away. She should have plenty of time if—and it was a big if—everything was going smoothly.
"Damn you, Murasaki Shikibu! I really don't need this!" My headache already well on its way, I trudged over to the counseling office.
***
"Akiteru-sama! I've done all the illustrations a whole week before the deadline!"
"The world really has gone insane!"
Among the students, the counseling office was revered as the Venomous Queen's castle. It was filled with various (replicas of) torture devices that she used as references for her drawings. I walked inside the gloomy room to find Sumire with her forehead plastered to the floor and holding up her tablet PC as an offering.
"Why are you shouting at me?!" she wailed. "I did good for once!"
"Yeah! But why did it hafta be today?! God, I must be having some kind of nightmare or something! I hope I'm having a nightmare!"
At least show me the goddamn pictures! Get up!
"D-Dammit. I thought I was more resilient than this," I grumbled, clutching my chest to try and steady my breathing.
Everything I did was set to a perfect routine for maximum efficiency. I even factored in the certainty of Murasaki Shikibu-sensei missing her deadlines. Of course I didn't mind if, by some miracle which apparently decided to show up today, she actually kept to them, but this was just the next thing in a long line of irregularities that was causing my brain to implode.
"D-Did I actually do bad?" she asked, looking up at me with tears in her eyes.
"No. No, you didn't. I'm sorry for blowing up."
This was all my fault. I never thought I would utter an apology within the four walls of the counseling office either. At least Sumire was still on her hands and knees, so things weren't too different from the norm.
"Thanks for beating the deadline. Now you can take a break until the next job comes up. Just watch some late-night anime or regress into your happy place full of shotas or something..."
I somehow managed to turn around on my trembling legs so that I could leave.
"O-Oh, but Akiteru-sama!" called the sweet voice from behind me. "I wanted to ask you something! You know, as a reward for sticking to the deadline!"
"It's not gonna take too long, is it?"
"I-I think it might, actually."
"Ask me later, then. I'm going home, 'cause I've got a fever." "What? Are you okay?"
"I'll be fine tomorrow if I just go home and chill for a bit. See you." "T-Take care..."
I left Sumire behind and wobbled out of the counseling room.
Mashiro's sweet LIME messages and the sour way she treated me in real
life.
Makigai Namako-sensei's nausea-inducing scenarios.
Iroha's weird mood.
Sumire's miraculously early illustrations.
It was all too much for a single day. I thought so hard about what I'd say
to Mashiro, but I didn't even have an opportunity to talk with her. Not with the way she behaved. All the other crap sure didn't help. I felt like a computer trying to open up twenty different instances of Word because a boomer kept clicking on the icon impatiently.
Akiteru.exe had crashed and needed to reboot. All I could do now was go home, sleep, and hope I woke up feeling better.
Dammit. What a waste of time. Especially when time was what I needed most right now. Time to make sure the 05th Floor Alliance wasn't about to implode right in front of me with everything that was going on. It was nobody's fault, but that didn't mean I was looking forward to tackling it when I barely knew where to start...
***
"Ha ha. Yeah, the girls might be cute, but they're not exactly normal, huh?"
"Ugh. I wish they were."
"C'mon, just focus on their good looks and quit worrying about personality. If all of them were perfect, everyone would hate you, y'know."
"Who the heck is 'everyone'?"