YUUKEI YESTERDAY I

The piercing sound of the alarm woke me up.
    I craned a hand to the side, searching for the source of the noise, before grabbing my cell phone by the cord.
    Then I shut off the alarm, checked the time, and with a heavy sigh, closed my eyes once more.

    …Hang on. This is weird. Like, really, really weird.

    According to the clock, I had slept for eleven whole hours today.
    So why am I so deathly tired? This is such a rip-off. This high-school teenager, at the peak of her flowering, has just given up the entirety of her late night—a costly loss indeed—and yet the relief this had granted her body was downright paltry.

    What could have gone wrong? Am I not as flowery as I’ve led myself to believe? Maybe there wasn’t much I did while awake besides play online games, but the price I had paid for this sleep was dear, too dear.

    A sense of malaise settled over my body, sending frantic danger signals: “Stop! Think it over! If you don’t sleep some more, you’re gonna die!”
    My brain, upon receiving this distress call, sprang into action, considering all methods available to avoid getting up out of the futon.

    For example, Plan A: Fake Sickness.

    Right now, I live alone with my grandmother. If I just told her something like “Ooh, I’m not feeling too well today…,” it’d be a cinch to take the day off from school.
    Tricking my grandmother wouldn’t win me any brownie points, no, but there wasn’t much to be done about it. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

    But this strategy possessed some critical flaws.
    If I went too far with complaining about feeling sick, my grandmother might whisk me away to the hospital.
    I’d be subject to examination, maybe even admitted…and just thinking about the concept made my heart plunge into my stomach.
    Lying in some hospital room, no video games, nothing to help pass the time at all? Not gonna happen.
    Besides, people are way too edgy about this sort of thing anyway. An “illness” like the one I have is hardly any matter of life and death. But some people just go nuts over anything.
    My dead grandfather, in particular. He was always on pins and needles about my illness, going through all these hoops and going way overboard for my sake—enough so to make the high school I was admitted to this year treat me like some kind of tumor.
    …Of course, from other people’s perspectives, I suppose my habit of suddenly fainting right away in the middle of class is a tad irritating. That, and embarrassing to me.
    “You know, if you think about all of that, things are probably best right now as they are.”

    —It’s been six or so months since I started living under that credo. That might be one of the reasons why I have yet to make any kind of decent friends.

    Be that as it may, Plan A was a nonstarter.

    Contemplating the issue and reaching this conclusion took approximately two minutes. Factoring in the Law of Real Time Versus Relative Time Experienced While In Bed, this speed had to be worthy of praise.

    Plan B: I Actually Have Off School Today.

    If I told my grandmother that today was an optional day or something…But then I remembered that she asked me, “Did you need a bento lunch tomorrow?” last night and I replied, “Yeah! Couldja make up some fried eggs?”

    …I am so stupid! Why fried eggs, of all things?! I didn’t need any bento—I should have requested a sleep-time extension ticket. Not that that exists or anything.

    As if to defy this thought, the inviting smell of eggs cooking over a burner wafted into the room. Chef Grandma must have been cooking my bento right now, giving everything she could to fulfill my request.

    “Nnnngh,” I muttered, full of guilt over expending all this effort to come up with an excuse to goof off. Could I possibly be any less considerate of my poor old grandmother?

    Rolling over, I burrowed my way back underneath the covers and pushed the reset button on my mind

    .…How can my grandmother even do that, anyway? The way she always wakes up at the crack of dawn, day in and day out, no alarm required? The only answer I had was that she had some kind of precision stopwatch installed in her body. My grandma’s a cyborg…

    —As my brain stumbled its way from one inane thought to the next, I heard the creaking and whining of someone climbing up the stairs. The creaking was straight out of horror movies, the kindyou only hear in old wooden houses, and it probably—no, definitely meant that I was about to be forced out of the futon.
    I tugged the sheets tighter over my body, making one final, noble struggle.
    Ughh…I’m out of time…Plan C…Plan C…Plan—
    “You gonna be in there all day or what?! Hurry up and get dressed before you wind up late!”
    “Ergh…yeah…”

    Mission failed.
    Blazing sunlight poured through the opened curtains. GAME OVER flashed in red lettering across my mind.

A balmy late-autumn morning.
    The haze-laden dog days of summer were behind us. Most of the fall was too, making my surroundings on the journey to school seem positively wintry by now. You could notice the extra layers beginning to appear on the bodies of other students. A few couples passed by in sweaters as they got friendly with each other.

    —I flashed obvious glares of animosity at these students, shutting out their asinine conversations with my headphones as I silently plodded toward school. I, Takane Enomoto, was in an extremely bad mood.
    Although maybe this isn’t even worth noting. To me, this is the default.
    Since I had grown accustomed to staying up late, I was generally tired and crabby throughout the prenoon hours, from the moment I opened my eyes in the morning.
    Perhaps due to that, my facial expression had grown into one of plain and apparent malice. People asked me if I was angry over something all the time.
    And that, of course, would only make me crabbier. It was a seriously vicious cycle.

    I wouldn’t mind more of a carefree life, giggling mindlessly at things and engaging in wacky teenage hijinks and so forth, but I never thought for a moment I could become that sort of girl, and I didn’t want to anyway.

    Even the delusions my mind conjured up about the ridiculous things I could become in the future annoyed me. Thus, I walked to school, just as peeved as any other day of my life.

    My only salvation is that it’s a fairly short way to school, one that doesn’t require a bus or train to speed up.

    That saves me from depleting my strength on the trip to school, and it also lets me sleep until the very last minute.
    Thanks to that, I had leisurely pulled myself out of bed while the rest of the student body were struggling to catch their train connections. I was on track to reach the school gates a good fifteen minutes before homeroom.

    Once I reached the road leading straight to my school, I spotted a sudden increase in the number of students wearing the same uniform I had on.
    My walking pace instinctively accelerated, and my eyes grew more menacing than ever.

    Removing my headphones just before the front gate, I rolled my coat up and placed it in my backpack.
    I really liked these headphones. They were a birthday gift from my grandmother. They had kind of a cute design, and the sound quality was nice. I say “nice” just because the earbuds I borrowed from my classmates seemed kind of tinny by comparison; it’s not like these were meant for rich audiophiles or anything.

    But now that I was used to them, they had become my inseparable partner in life.

    Giving a polite bow to the square-jawed gym teacher standing in front of the gate, I went inside to find the school grounds brimming with activity. All over, students were preparing for the school festival coming up in a week’s time.
    The spread-out path between the gate and the front entrance, several dozen meters in width, was dotted here and there with the booths allotted to each class for their festival activities.
    I spotted several posters taped over some of them, from warnings like WET PAINT! DO NOT TOUCH!! to requests like WE NEED CARDBOARD! IF YOU HAVE ANY, CONTACT THE 2-A CLASS PRESIDENT!

    Looking around, I spotted students everywhere—one who must have been working since dawn, what with all the paint spatters on his clothing; one who was already dressed up like some kind of movie monster; a girl whining about how “the guys in class never do anything for us”; the classic “rah rah, this school festival is sooo important, we gotta do our best!” kind of woman. It was all the splendors of boundless youth, writ large before my eyes.

    —But to someone like me, the classic “You spent all week making snide remarks about me, and now all of a sudden you’re acting like my friend? What’s with that?” kind of woman, all this festival prep was nothing but one giant obstacle on the way to class.

    The carnival atmosphere of the festival prep outside had revved up the noise and energy inside school as well. Some of the students had even stayed overnight, fooling around with each other in the most despicable ways until dawn. It was deplorable.
    And once all of this was over, the only thing the festival left behind was an unfathomable amount of garbage.
    What is with this pointless show? It’s so stupid. Brainless.
    And come to think of it, the printout handed out to Year 1, class B yesterday, the class I’m (ostensibly) part of, mentioned that they’d be doing perhaps the most hackneyed festival booth of them all—the “maid café” route.
    This kind of booth was something that I—who hardly attended my officially assigned class at all, much less the festival-planning conferences—was wholly unrelated to, a fact that I relished.
    If I let myself get caught up in some crazy whim and actually dressed up as a maid, it’d be a blemish I’d never be able to wipe away for the rest of my life. Who could even do something like that to themselves?
    As I dwelled upon this nasty state of business, I glared hard enough at a dopey-faced boy blocking the way ahead, standing between the legs of a giant dinosaur model, to make him scurry aside as I headed for the front door.

    Pushing a handle whose PUSH engraving had long disintegrated from overuse, I set foot inside the building, noticing that the heater was making the indoor temperature remarkably pleasant.
    Removing my outside shoes, I turned an eye toward my shoe locker in order to fetch my indoor slippers. The wooden shelves were pretty ancient.
    I had heard that the school building itself had a fair amount of history to it, a prestigious place of higher learning that birthed a wide variety of politicians, celebrities, and other famous people.
    But, to be frank, most of the students would sooner talk about how much they hoped the school building would receive a sorely needed renovation before they boasted about its illustrious past.
    During the typhoon that passed by this summer, our beloved alma mater had its gymnasium roof poked full of holes, the floor around the drinking fountain collapse within itself, and a whole variety of other pitiful disasters happen to it.
    The most serious issue, though, came when the entire building’s air conditioner blew itself up on the hottest summer day of the year. It was enough to make the majority of students eagerly hope for a school transfer.
    Still, thanks to the bare minimum of repairs the school shelled out for during summer break, the HVAC system was back online. A portion of the student body, hoping to use the breakdown as a tool to earn themselves an extended summer vacation, were forced to reluctantly trudge back to school for the second semester.

    Changing into my slippers atop the wooden grating by the front entrance, I briskly made my way down the hall.
    This was the one moment in school life that always grieved me the most. Right where everyone turned left from the corridor with the shoe lockers, happily chattering amongst each other as they went upstairs to their normal classrooms, I alone turned right, heading for the labs and other subjectspecific classrooms—in particular, a room with a distinctly chemical odor to it.
    Yes. That’s right. The “normal classroom” I reported to every day, thanks to the efforts of my assigned proctor, was the science storage room.
    Due to the rapid influx of new students into the local neighborhood over the past few years, all the nonspecialized classrooms had already been assigned to groups of students, which meant that there were no classrooms left for the “special” classes to use.
    In terms of equipment, any room would do as long as it had desks and a teacher’s chair, but I still wished they gave at least a little more thought to my situation. I mean, I’m spending the majority of my three years as a high schooler, a teenager in full flower, inside a room that always faintly smelled of formaldehyde.
    The thought would be enough to make anyone mope a bit, but since there were only two students (counting myself) assigned to this “classroom,” it was a joy to spend time there in terms of serene quietude. Considering my illness, and considering how much of a persona non grata I’d be if I went back to a normal classroom at this point, I found it difficult to complain about this state of affairs.

    Proceeding down the hall, I checked around me to ensure no one was near, then let out a long, dramatic sigh.
    I passed by the art room, the music room, the home-ec room, before reaching the SCIENCE STORAGE plate on the right side of a broad, left-curving corridor leading to the club-activity rooms.
    —Below the plate was a faded green sliding door I was all too familiar with.

    I may have my complaints, but there was something oddly soothing about a classroom with only a few people inside.
    My teacher was undoubtedly going to be late as always, and my sole classmate was the epitome of easygoing, spending the whole day drawing those pictures of his.
    I opened the door, contemplating a quick nap before my teacher showed up, only to have a sight thrust before me that instantly dissipated any sleepiness I still had.

    “Good morn…Aaaaggghhh!!”
    “Huh? Oh, hey, Takane. Morning!”

    There stood my sole classmate, Haruka Kokonose, not a single speck of malice lurking behind his broad smile.
    His skin was a sickly pale of white, his bearing unfussy and unpretentious. His sole hobby was drawing, as was his sole talent. That kind of background (along with the name) seems remarkably womanly, but he was just a regular guy.
    Except there was nothing “regular” about him right now.

    —No matter which way you sliced it…he had nothing on apart from his boxers.

    “W…wha…?!”
    I was rendered speechless at this otherworldly turn of affairs so early in the morning. I tried to focus my eyes on something else, but he briskly walked straight toward me, as near-naked as before.
    “Hey, uh, I can explain this…Earlier, over on the school grounds, there was this cat, right? And it kinda made a beeline for me, so I figured I’d pet it, but…like, it kept trying to dodge me and stuff, right? So then I lost my balance and fell into the fountain, so—”
    “That’s fine, that’s fine!! I don’t care why, okay?! Just…just put some clothes on!!”
    My fervent shouting stopped Haruka in his tracks as he attempted to tell the tale behind his nudist habits, an “oh, woe is me” expression on his face. He tilted his head quizzically at me.
    “Aw, come on. They aren’t even dry yet. You see?”
    He pointed at the school uniform drying in front of the heater, gesturing as if I was the one at fault here. He couldn’t have been more than fifty centimeters away from me.

    I reared back, unable to cope with this bizarre state of affairs, and tried my best to speak up for myself as my body banged against the sliding door I just closed.

    “Ah…okay, okay! All right! It doesn’t matter if it’s wet or not! Just put that stuff on! I’ll go find a jersey for you, so just put on everything else!!”
    “Really? Well, okaaay…but, uhmm…hang on, where’s my shirt? Shirt, shirt…”
    “You’re stepping on it, Haruka! Look down!…Ugh, just give it to me!”
    With all the speed of an elderly tortoise, Haruka began to clothe himself, apparently incapable of grasping the full import behind this “half-nude in front of a girl” situation.
    But I was in no shape to stand there and take it all in.
    Grabbing the shirt Haruka picked up, I closed my eyes, trying to avoid the sight of him as I all but forced him to put it on.
    “Whoa! Hey, I’m fine, I can put it on myself! Hey, that’s the wrong sleeve…!”
    “Aghh! Quit moving around! Don’t point yourself this way!!”
    No matter how you looked at it, this was not how normal people interacted with each other. Why do I have to force my only classmate to put his clothes back on, in school, first thing in the morning?
    If this guy hadn’t been the only other person in my class, I’d have no regrets turning him over to the police.
    But if someone happened to see us right now, it’d be an utter disaster.
    Who knows what kind of crazy shoujo manga-style misunderstandings this might lead to…? As I pondered over this, the absolute worst situation I envisioned came to life.
    “Hey-yo! Time to get started with homeroom…uh?”
    The leisurely voice chimed in as the door suddenly rattled open. On the other side stood our proctor, Kenjirou Tateyama, the teacher in charge of science classes at this school.
    Tateyama’s dumbfounded face likely provided a nice accompaniment to mine as his attendance record fell down to the floor.
    “Oh…uh…So, Mr. Tateyama, this isn’t what it…”
    “Oh, mornin’, Mr. Tateyama!”
    In stark contrast to the way I was frozen in place, the nearly bare Haruka greeted our proctor with a broad smile.
    From an impartial perspective, I imagine there was only one interpretation for this. Here was this meek, naive male student, and here was this evil-looking girl attempting to rip all the clothes off him.
    I imagine the moment lasted for only an instant, but the silence that followed felt like an eternity to me. Mr. Tateyama, apparently coming to some sort of internal conclusion in his mind, said, “Oh… sorry if I, uh, intruded…” and attempted to make his way back to the hallway.
    “Ahhhhh!! No! No, teacher! He was…he was going around without any clothes on, so I-I-I was just trying to help him get dressed!!”
    Mr. Tateyama, his face conflicted as he tried to leave the classroom, suddenly stopped.
    “Huh? Oh. Uh…okay, I get it. I just thought, you know, you guys couldn’t restrain yourselves any longer or something…”
    With a visible sigh of relief, our teacher flashed a smile at us as he picked the attendance ledger up off the floor.
    “Could you stop acting like we’re trying to go at each other all the time like that, sir? I mean, if we were, that’d be really bad news, wouldn’t it?! You were trying to run away from us right now!”
    “Yeahhh, well, you know, if something freaky’s going on, it’s always easiest if you pretend you were oblivious to it, right? You know what I mean…I just want you guys to grow and mature in as free an environment as I can give you, so…”
    “Ugh, come on! That’s totally awful, Mr. Tateyama! Can you at least help me get some clothes on this freak? I’m gonna call the administrator!”
    Mr. Tateyama scratched his head in distracted reluctance, but the moment I mentioned the administrator, he whispered, “Okay,” and with suddenly lightning-fast reflexes, he began to clothe Haruka.
    As far as grown-ups go, you couldn’t ask for much worse of a role model.
    For a fleeting moment, I reflected about how, in his own way, Mr. Tateyama has given me a master class in what to avoid becoming when I’m older.
    “Ergh…This is still all wet and clammy, sir…”
    Haruka, once again decent thanks to Mr. Tateyama’s nimble fingers, sounded utterly disgusted as he settled into his seat.
    I sat down as well, but the moment my rear end touched the chair, I felt a sudden influx of extreme fatigue.
    Who knows how many hit points I’ve already had to expend thanks to this idiot next to me?
    Somehow I doubted I’d be smiling much for the rest of the day…
    The teacher’s desk was directly across from and slightly above the two student stations, neatly arranged next to each other. Mr. Tateyama settled into the high-backed folding chair behind his desk as he opened his attendance record.
“All right, Haruka, all right. I’ll go find you a jersey later on…Uh, so anyway, good morning. Guess you’re both in attendance, so…check, and check. Gotta say, I’m glad you guys haven’t gotten bored of showing up here every day.”
    “That’s…not really something a teacher should be saying, sir.”
    With a heavy thud, Mr. Tateyama placed his head on the desk. “Well, I’m the teacher, aren’t I?” he whimpered. “So there you go, okay?”
    There must be some kind of chronic staff shortage if someone like this guy is allowed to be with students.
    It honestly gives me pause when I think about the future of this country.
    “Oh, yeah, so homeroom this morning…Uh, what was it…? I’m pretty sure I made a note of it… unless I didn’t…”
    “Just tell us, sir!”
    I was already irritated at the morning’s events, but just looking at my teacher was enough to make the negative emotions within me swell to bursting. Watching him doodle in small circles in his ledger with a red pen reminded me of a bored grade-schooler staring into space during math class.
    “Hang on, hang on…uh…Oh! That’s right. We gotta come up with some kinda booth for the school festival soon, or else. What’re you guys gonna do?”
    “Whaa?! Didn’t you say, like, ‘Oh, who says you had to do anything?’ the last time we asked about that, Mr. Tateyama?! We haven’t thought about anything! We never even talked about it since then!”
    I bolted out of my chair, pushing it back as I did, but Mr. Tateyama just stared at me with his zombielike eyes, unwilling to drum up the energy to stand himself
    “Well, yeahhhh, but…You know, last week, the administrator asked me what kind of booth my class was working on and stuff, so. I hadn’t thought about anything, of course, so I just said to him ‘Oh, we’re working on a special surprise that’ll knock your socks off, so watch out!’”
    “Geez, Mr. Tateyama, how much do you want to suck up to the administrator, anyway?! Don’t say we’ll ‘knock their socks off’! What’re we gonna do?! There’s only a week left…!”
    I slumped back into my chair and covered my face with my hands. Next to me, I heard Haruka say,
    “Oooh, I’d kinda like to run a shooting gallery”—a silly idea he tossed out without any consideration of supplies or budgets. It only served to fan the flames of despair within me.
    Honestly, I didn’t care one bit about this teacher. But if this “special surprise” we were allegedly working on (not that we had any plans yet) wound up being advertised as such in the flyers passed around school, we were completely screwed.
    Once that happened, all that awaited us was despair, darkness, and my final fall into the abyss of destruction…
    “Errrggghh…!”
    I couldn’t help but groan out loud as I contemplated a future too nauseating to imagine. If I had any sort of capable classmates, maybe this sort of adverse challenge would’ve pushed all of us to passionate creativity, but having this drenched dunderhead next to me and one of the most despicably lazy teachers in the universe in front of us, we were distinctly lacking in war power.
    Surely there was some kind of attack plan I could work on by myself…or so I thought. But thanks to my day-and-night gaming habit, or perhaps because I still hadn’t fully woken up, my brain wasn’t performing up to the standard I was hoping for.
    I rubbed my head, trying to come to grips with the cruel reality thrust upon me and the utterly hopeless hand I had to offer in response, when I noticed Mr. Tateyama staring awkwardly at me.
    “Uh…well, let’s just calm down, okay? You’re not gonna die or anything. We’re free to use this classroom any way we want, more or less, and I’ll be happy to help you guys out however I can. So could you just try to come up with something for me?”
    Whatever confidence remained was crushed when our teacher (if I could even will myself to call him “teacher” any longer) added “I’ll be happy to help you” to his feeble stab at a pep rally.
    I wasn’t remotely naive enough to have any faith in that.

    If we came up with some lame plan for the festival despite the “special surprise” ad copy, I knew that’d result in rumors. Bad ones. I’d probably be unable to function for my remaining two years as a student here.
    I doubt the thought even occurred in Haruka’s mind, of course, but to me, this was nothing short of a crisis.
    I was already persona non grata around school to some extent. Doing anything that’d make me stick out any further was something I had to avoid at all costs.
    But I realized that Mr. Tateyama’s offer to use this classroom as we wished opened up the slight possibility of a great breakthrough—some way out of this mess.
    This room had grown to seem all but normal to the three of us, but for the casual visitor, it was packed with rare and unusual curios. If we put up displays touting “Experiment X” or whatever with the scientific stuff lying around, that’d no doubt get people excited.
    “Well, gee, I hope we can come up with something interesting…Oh, but what about our budget? Each class gets a budget for their festival activities, right, Mr. Tateyama? How much can we get?”
    The moment I asked the question, Mr. Tateyama’s face froze—I could almost hear him nervously swallow—and he turned his eyes toward the equipment shelf behind us.
    “Huh? What’re you looking at—”
    The gaze didn’t escape my attention. I turned toward where I thought his eyes were pointed, only to find a bizarre, eerie-looking, yet oddly familiar fish specimen lying among the scientific equipment and bottles of chemicals.
    It was a rare ocean specimen, one I had noticed Mr. Tateyama staring at as he glossed through an educational-materials website, muttering, “This specimen’s so cool…but, ooh, it’s pretty expensive…” to himself.
    “Hmm? Hey, what’s that? Didn’t you say that specimen was too expensive, Mr. Tateyama?”
    It was relatively chilly in the classroom, but I could see a small forest of sweat beads form upon Mr. Tateyama’s forehead. He was unable to look me in the eye as I whipped out my trademark glare. He drooped downward silently, like a criminal in a detective manga just confronted with some kind of incontrovertible evidence, all but ready to reveal his motives and methods to the entire room
    “Mr. Tateyama, did…did you use up our festival budget?!”
    “It…it’s all that thing’s fault…!”
    He then went into an impassioned, unconvincingly acted defense of his crimes, which can be summarized as follows: Just as the budgets assigned to each class were being calculated, the rare specimen (i.e. “that thing”) went on sale for 40 percent off. If he was expecting us to understand his motives, he did so in vain.
    …That isn’t even a real motive in the first place.
    Watching him defend himself, as if he were the victim and the fish specimen was the real culprit, my emotions sped far beyond anger and revolution, eventually settling into something resembling sympathy.

    “So, like, what’re we gonna do? I mean…I still like the idea of a shooting gallery, but…”
    As our teacher shifted gears to explain how charming and attractive the fish specimen was, and as I thought over how to best confront the administrator about this, Haruka parroted his shooting-gallery request once again, doggedly sticking to the only idea he was capable of conceiving.
    “…If we do that, we’d need to have a lot of prizes to give out. It’d be a huge pain to prep. How could we pull that off with just the three of us? Plus, thanks to our stupid teacher, we don’t even have any money to work with.”
    “Hmmm…I dunno, I thought it was a good idea, is all. I checked out what all the other classes were working on, and I don’t think any of them were working on a shooting gallery, so…”

    Haruka’s tone was matter-of-fact, but it honestly seemed like a surprise to me. If no one else had a shooting gallery in the works, their budgets had to have something to do with it. With all the renovation issues the school’s had to deal with, it’s hard to imagine the administration gave enough of a budget to any class for a presentation that required fancy prizes to pull off.
    But an even more pressing issue was Haruka here. Haruka, who usually just sat there glassy-eyed, making it impossible to guess what he was thinking, apparently was interested enough in the school festival that he knew what all of the other classes’ presentations were going to be.
    “…Huh. You must be looking forward to the festival an awful lot.”
    “Kind of,” he replied, a little embarrassed. He didn’t act that way at all back when he was in his skivvies in front of me. His standards for feeling shame must diverge a bit from the average person.
    “That’s kind of surprising. I mean, like, when we thought we weren’t gonna do anything, you kept your mouth shut, so…”
    “Yeah, but, you know, I’m not very strong, and it’d be a big deal if I suddenly collapsed or something. Prepping a booth looked really hard when I was looking at all of them, so I thought, you know…oh, well, right?”
    Haruka flashed a fleeting smile as he spoke.

    I wasn’t up on the details, but I knew that Haruka’s “illness” was something far more dark and serious than anything I had.
    Something so severe, in fact, that if he had some kind of attack or whatever, it could easily lead to death. That kind of thing.
    Mr. Tateyama told me about that long after I joined this school, but thanks to Haruka’s easygoing, simpleminded approach to life, it just didn’t seem real, somehow.
    Haruka, for his part, seemed aware of it, as if he’d had some bad times in the past.
    Perhaps this entire experience of going to school and interacting with other people had been a trial for him, in a lot of ways. And I just didn’t notice it.

    “Yeah, fair enough. But you wanna do something, right?”
    “…I think I do, yeah. But, you know, I don’t wanna put a bunch of stuff on you, Takane…” Haruka still acted bashful as he spoke to me. I didn’t quite follow why this was making him act all fluttery like that.
    “…Well, I know our teacher doesn’t really give a crap either way, but you don’t have to put up with that, Haruka. Just try and do something, okay? If you screw it up, you can worry about it then.”
    “Sure, yeah, but I can’t do anything all by myself…I haven’t really done anything like this, either…I dunno if I can really do it, you know?”
    Watching Haruka hem and haw to himself as he rolled an eraser around his desktop made me unreasonably angry somehow. I slammed both palms against my desk table.
    “—Ugghhh!! Stop acting all wishy-washy like that!! You wanna run a shooting gallery, right? Well, great! Let’s do it! I’ll help you set it up! All right?!”
    I fully exercised my latent talent for glaring as I shouted at Haruka. “All right…” he whispered, a look of abject fear on his face.
    It wasn’t enough to placate me. Turning back toward Mr. Tateyama, I continued my tirade.
    “Mr. Tateyama, please, go withdraw some money for us! We’re gonna give out that specimen as a prize, too, okay? Okay?!”
    “Whaaa?! Wait, we…We don’t have to go that far! How much do you think that cost—”
    “…Administrator.
    “Right! Roger that! Let’s go with that idea! Boy, this is starting to get exciting, huh?”
    Mr. Tateyama threw together the most elated, refreshed face he could muster. Even Haruka stared coldly at him, finally keying in to just how despicable our proctor really was.

    —Looking at the clock, over half an hour had passed since homeroom began. We were already well into the first period of class.
    In this school, classes were more or less shunted aside for the week before the school festival. Instead, the planning committee for each class took over, guiding the students as they prepped their festival presentations.
    First period was held in the homeroom for every class, but after that, the students were likely sent off to the classrooms where their festival prep work awaited them.
    The original idea was that Haruka and I would generally engage in self-study type stuff during this time, but since we were now tasked with coming up with a killer idea, we had to get to work. And fast.

    “Still, I dunno…Target shooting and all…How should we, like, get started?”
I knew I had just all but overwhelmed Haruka into the choice a moment ago, but really, how much could the two of us do to set up a shooting gallery in a week’s time?
    We’d need to buy some prizes, for one, as well as build a stand to display all of them. That, and the cork pop-guns. The more we thought about it, the more the tasks piled up before us.
    We’d need to use the art room and shop room to build the bigger props, but I figured that the classes who had planned a bit earlier than we did had already filled up all the available time slots.
    “Uhm…If you think we can’t do it, maybe we could do something else instead?”
    “No! Forget it! It’s only impossible if we think it is! You’re the one who wanted to go through with it. Think of something!”
    Haruka flinched again before crossing his arms together and nodding in agreement, eyes closed.
    It was his idea…at first, anyway. But I was a driven girl, my mind racing with the thought of showing everyone else that we weren’t like them, not like the others. Not all bubbly and ditzy and airheaded.

    If we were gonna go through with this, I didn’t want to do it half-cocked. My days and weeks of online gaming had forged in me a sense of high ambition, and now—for this, of all things—that ambition was starting to blaze.

    “One thing’s for sure, though—we can’t really build any kind of big, fancy stand or anything. You aren’t good at do-it-yourself stuff or anything, are you, Mr. Tateyama?”
    “Nope! Never tried any of it!”
    “—Yeah, I figured. Which means that you and I will have to do it ourselves, Haruka…”
    “Whoa, whoa, hang on a sec! Okay, I’ll admit I’m no handyman or anything, but, you know, I’m pretty good at programming and stuff!”
    Mr. Tateyama pointed a thumb at himself, flashing that asinine “I’m really great at this one thing you’d never understand!” aura you see a lot from otaku nerds.
    “Huh. Yeah, wow, neato. So, anyway, you’ll just get in the way, so why don’t you go code a dating simulator or—”
    Dealing with him was starting to exasperate me. I was just trying to humor him, but somewhere along the line, I had inadvertently said what I was thinking out loud.

    We were wholly incapable of fabricating anything large or elaborate.
    The only prize we had to offer was a rare fish specimen.
    Our goal: to create the most exciting shooting gallery that mankind ever saw.

    It was a gamble, but maybe, just maybe, it was something we could fabricate within a week.
    Before I knew what I was doing, my chair clattered backward as I stood up.
    “Whoa, whoa, whoa! T-Takane, just wait a sec! Look, I’m sorry about all this, okay? So let’s settle this peacefully! Violence isn’t gonna solve anything, all right?! There’s got to be some way to do this…!”
    Mr. Tateyama, surprised at this abrupt motion on my part, held his hands in front of him, whimpering his response like an evil RPG minion doomed to die for story purposes.
    As for Haruka next to me…I don’t know if he had fallen sleep as he attempted to at least pretend to think things over or if all of this had pushed his gentle psyche over the edge, but he had fallen to the floor, taking the loudly clattering chair with him.
    “I have an idea, Mr. Tateyama! I think we might be able to pull off the shooting gallery!”
    “Uh? Oh. Yeah, that. But that’s gonna be a huge pain to get together, right? I mean, like I told you earlier, I’ve never even successfully put a bookshelf together, so…”
    “No, no, I’m not relying on you at all for anything on that. But, like, you said you can program, right? Right, Mr. Tateyama…?”
    I smirked at my teacher. He blanched in response, plainly aware of where this conversation was going.
    “What…what’s with you, Takane?”
    There was still a bit of spittle on Haruka’s face as he spoke to me from behind the chair he was sitting behind. I decided not to bring it up.
    “Hee-hee-hee…I was just saying that we might be able to do this shooting gallery after all. You’re good at drawing, right…?”
    “Eeeep…!”
    I tried to smile as broadly as I could, but Haruka looked absolutely terrified, as if I was attempting to blackmail him. Why does every male (well, both of them) in this room have to be so pitiful?

    But, really, it didn’t matter how pitiful they were right now.
    …After all, they just had to do as I told them, and everything would be fine.

    “H-hang on, Takane…This ‘shooting gallery’ you’re thinking of…”
    Judging by his facial expression, Mr. Tateyama had likely already figured out what I was thinking.
    It was understandable, given that his share of the work to make this “shooting gallery” happen was nothing short of massive.
    “Hee-hee-hee…You guessed it. We don’t need a table saw or anything to make a shooting gallery game, right? Haruka could draw the characters and backgrounds, and if we went with that, one prize would be all we need.”
    Once I finished, Mr. Tateyama’s shoulders dropped, as if he was saying “Ahh, I knew it…” with his entire body.
    A single person creating a video game all by himself would be a fairly massive amount of work.
    But Mr. Tateyama had been lazing around, doing his own thing in the classroom for long enough. Considering that, he owed us that much labor by now, if not more.
    “Huh…? We’re gonna make a game? Starting now?!”
    Even the normally placid Haruka seemed startled, a surprise given how hard it was to get him to react to anything. Unlike Mr. Tateyama, though, there was a palpable measure of excitement behind the response.
    “Well, yeah! You can draw all of the graphics for the game, right? That’d be pretty exciting for you, I bet.”
    Haruka energetically nodded in response. His unbelievably bright expression, something unlike anything he usually wore, gave him a distinctly different impression than usual.
    “Well, I know it’s gonna be kinda tough, but hang in there, okay? Like, I’m sure Mr. Tateyama will figure something out in the end, so…”
    “Whaa?! Why’s it gotta be me?! Do you have any idea how much it takes to code a whole—”
    “Administr…”
    “I’ll give it everything I’ve got! It’s gonna be the best gallery you ever saw!!”
    Mr. Tateyama gave us a thumbs-up, his face one of pure, unadorned affirmation.
    This “administrator” magic word was proving surprisingly useful.
    There was no doubt that I’d be relying on it for the rest of my high-school career.
    “But let me ask you something. What did you mean by ‘one prize would be all we need’? There’s no way we can predict how many people will beat the game, you know…And if we made the game so hard that nobody could beat it, that’d turn off people even more, wouldn’t it?”
    “Oh, you don’t have to worry about that. Just have it so you’re trying to score points instead of finishing the whole game. Also, make it two-player only, okay?”
    “Sure, that wouldn’t be any problem, but…you aren’t talking about…”
    “Exactly! I’ll complete against anyone who shows up, and we’ll play for the highest score. Playing against a girl like me, you aren’t gonna get any complaints about the game’s difficulty then, right?”
    The blood had returned to Mr. Tateyama’s face. Now his expression was one of sheer exasperation, the exact same face I had given to him a moment ago. I reveled in it for a second.
    “You’re gonna play against everyone, Takane? But if you lose even once, we’re gonna have to give up our prize, aren’t we?”
    “Yeah, assuming that ever happens. Who said I was ever gonna lose? I’ll just lose on purpose right toward the end of the school festival, and we’ll be the talk of the whole school. I’ll make sure that it works out that way.”

    Listening to this, Haruka looked more and more anxious by the moment. I couldn’t blame him.
    No one can predict what would happen in a video game. There was always a non-zero chance of me losing at any time.
    And if I did lose and we had to give up our single prize (Rare Fish Specimen [Extremely Expensive]), that essentially meant the end of our festival booth. A pretty ambitious bet, in other words.
    But I possessed a certain “special ability,” one I hadn’t gotten around to revealing to these guys.
    …Actually, I hoped I’d never have to tell anyone about it, but that ability was what gave me so much confidence that we’d win this bet. Not that I ever want to breathe a word of it to anybody, but—
    “You know, Haruka, she might just do it, too. She’s, like, a celebrity on the net. You know that game they keep showing ads for on TV? The one with the dude blowing away all those zombies?”
    “Oh, yeah, I’ve seen that. One of those online games, right…? I think there was some kinda championship a bit ago…”
    “Right, right. And Takane placed second in the nationals there.”
    Just as I was expanding upon my internal monologue to myself, my teacher, much to my abject surprise, tossed me out of the closet.
    “Ahhhghghhh!! W-w-what’re you talking about?! I-I’m not anything like…”
    The name of the game was Dead Bullet -1989-, an online shooter where you mowed down wave after wave of zombies. It had attracted a vast swath of users since its launch a year or so ago, to the point where it was now one of the leading FPSes in the Japan market. I was kind of a veteran player, having made it to the top ranks approximately four hours after the game launched.
    Thanks to the unique strategic approach I brought to the game, my name was famous enough that I boasted a fan community with several hundred members. But, thanks in part to the rather narrow channels of communication I retained with most people, my teacher was the only person in real life who knew about this. —Until now, that is.
    It was a critical error in judgment. I was looking for someone I could share this game with in the real world, and since Mr. Tateyama demonstrated an ability to discuss even the finer details of Dead Bullet with me, I invited him into my community. Big mistake.

    The thing about Dead Bullet -1989- is that it’s a grotesquely violent title, one with an overwhelmingly male audience—not the kind of thing a teenage girl would flock to over all other forms of entertainment.
    To be honest, it was the sort of game that, if one of the other female students got addicted to it, I’d be hesitant to come near her.
    And now the truth’s been revealed to my sole classmate…
    “Wow, Takane! Second in the whole country? That’s really surprising! Why didn’t you tell me until now? Is it, like, really fun?”
    But Haruka, completely unaware of my internal conflict, gave me a surprisingly favorable reaction, to the point where he acted like he wanted to know more.
    No doubt that’s because he didn’t know what the game was all about. If he knew more about it, there’s no doubt the reaction would be more like “LOOOOOLLLL look at this scary chick playing this freaky horror game…stay away from her!!!!” or something.
    As I winced at Haruka’s meek, questioning eyes, Mr. Tateyama suddenly let out a belly laugh as he revealed yet more horrifying secrets.
    “There, you see, Takane? You were looking for friends to play with, weren’t you? I’m not really all that good at Dead Bullet, so I thought, hey, why not invite Haruka?”
    “Huhh?! W-what’re you talking about?! It’s not like I play it all that much or anything…”
    Which was a lie. Because I did. I fell asleep early due to exhaustion yesterday, but generally, I threw myself into the world of the game from four p.m., when I got home from school, until four a.m. the next morning.

    Mr. Tateyama, still guffawing in front of me, was fully aware.
    “Oh, reeeeally? I figured you’d play it a lot more if you were that into it. I mean, what was your handle? Something like ‘Dancing Flash’—”
    “Agh! Nooooo!! Listen! I’m gonna call the administrator, okay?! I’ll tell him everything! All right?!”
    “Whoa whoa whoa whoa! Hey, don’t joke about that sort of thing! I’m sorry, all right?!”
    Someone watching the two of us jostle our desks around as we screamed at each other would undoubtedly find the whole scene quite hilarious.
    But to us, this was a life-and-death battle.

    The moment Haruka said, “Hey, uh, calm down…” as we glared at each other for several seconds, the school bell rang, as if to put a final end to our stalemate.
    “…Oof. How ’bout we just agree to keep quiet, all right? About everything.”
    “Yes…That sounds like the best thing to me. But don’t get me wrong, Mr. Tateyama. If you leak anything else about me…”
    “And likewise for you, Takane. Breathe anything to the administrator, and you know what’ll happen, right?”
    “…Right. I follow you. I’ll just bottle it up inside me…But I’m not gonna let you divulge anything else about me, okay?”
    As my teacher and I attempted to stare each other into submission, exchanging a conversation that hardly seemed like a healthy educational exchange, the first-period homeroom class came to a close.
    “Right…Well, I guess this is partly my fault, too. Guess I’ll see what kinda stuff I can come up with, huh? …So let’s spend this next period working out the details, all right? Feel free to go to the bathroom if you want.”
    With that, Mr. Tateyama picked up the attendance ledger and left the classroom, index finger scratching his forehead. For just a moment, I could hear the footsteps and excited conversations from passing students from beyond the open door.

    “Boy…You think we can really do this?”
    Haruka made eye contact with me as I threw myself back into my desk chair, utterly drained.
    “…You sure made a lot of promises, Takane, but I dunno…This is kinda really starting to get exciting, huh…? I think we can really do this! I’ll do my best, okay?”
    Watching Haruka give a fist-forward “We can do it!” pose after his little declaration made me suddenly feel like my face was burning a bright red. I could only assume it was out of embarrassment at having my illustrious online career revealed to the world.

    —I let out a light smile.

    Then I realized I had become what I hated the most—one of those “rah rah, this school festival is sooo important, we gotta do our best!” girls. My smile was no doubt borne from the sheer shame of it all, rather than coming from any actual happiness.

    “…Well, at least we won’t be bored.”

    As I muttered it to no one in particular, my mind was already beginning to formulate a schedule of tasks to handle before our boundlessly exciting school festival began.

• Previous: Headphone Actor I
• Title: Kagerou Daze, Vol2_ Headphone Actor
• Next: Headphone Actor II