Haruhi spied the diagram Koizumi had written on the whiteboard, suspiciously scrutinizing the path I’d taken through time as though it were a kid she thought she knew.
“No, it’s not. What kind of calculation yielded this curve?” she asked.
“It’s just a scribble,” Koizumi said casually as he stood and used the eraser to clean the board. “I was just killing time. Pay it no mind.”
Shyeah, right.
“Ah,” replied Haruhi mildly, having decided it wasn’t important. She tossed the convenience store bag to me. It landed in my hand with a rustle. There was a package of dried soybeans inside.
Today was Setsubun. And being Setsubun, there had to be bean-scattering—or so Haruhi had been thinking all through lunch, when she’d finally shouted in self-reproach: “I knew I was forgetting something! Setsubun!”
She’d probably realized it after seeing the sushi rolls in Taniguchi’s lunch box. “Aw, c’mon,” Taniguchi had said, bitter disappointment in his voice. “Is this it? No side dishes?”
“Just be happy somebody made you a lunch,” I shot back, though in my heart I could not sympathize with the parent who’d pack a lunch like that; I agreed with the son. They could’ve at least cut the roll up before packing it, so that it wouldn’t catch Haruhi’s eye.
“We can’t just celebrate foreign holidays. Local traditions have a right to get some respect, too. I mean otherwise it’s just a waste! You’re just missing out on the fun! People who lose track of their roots are just gonna wind up going down the wrong path!”
She was one to talk. Did she really think she was heading down the right path? From where I stood, it seemed like she was always just charging the wrong way down some random animal path, I said.
“What’re you talking about? I walk the path of righteousness. I do that which must be done. I bet you forgot it was Setsubun today, Kyon. That’s hard to forgive.”
Even though she herself had also forgotten (or perhaps because of that), as soon as homeroom ended, Haruhi threw herself into preparations. If you can call them that—all she needed were beans and sushi rolls. She went to get them herself. Since I had been lucky enough to get a lecture from Mr. Okabe under the pretenses of academic counseling, and Koizumi had cleaning duty, she brought Nagato and Asahina along to help her carry things, and after school the three of them set off on their merry way. They had just now returned, which brought us to the present moment.
As far as the sushi rolls went, we could just eat those while facing the proper direction, but beans had to be thrown at something.
“So where do you propose to do the scattering?” I asked, opening the package and popping a bean into my mouth. It would’ve gone well with some tea. “It’ll be a pain to clean up if we do it in the clubroom, not to mention a waste.”
“We can do it anywhere,” said Haruhi, eyes blazing. “Oh yeah, what about tossing them from the top floor hallway’s windows down into the courtyard? That way the birds can just eat the beans and we won’t have to do any cleaning up.” She then added, “We’ve already got our good-fortune girls, so we’ve gotta do this up right.” Apparently, no Setsubun is truly complete without good-fortune girls who dress up like shrine maidens and hand out good-luck charms.
The target of the SOS Brigade chief’s Type-1a-supernova-strength gaze was Asahina, who was assiduously reading the text printed on the bag of beans, and Nagato, who had already seated herself at the table, absorbed in a detective novel with a disturbing-sounding title.
Ah, indeed.
If you were to hold a school-wide good-fortune-girl contest, the likely winner as well as the special judge’s prize awardee were both sitting right here, and even setting that aside, they were perfectly suited to this sort of evil-spirit banishment, given that Asahina could pretend, and Nagato would actually do the banishing.
Haruhi tolerated no complaint as she dragged Asahina up to a hallway on the top floor of the school, the rest of us trailing behind them, whereupon we complied with the order to begin scattering—the three girls doing the actual scattering, with Koizumi and me in charge of keeping their bean scoops, and there was no question that for once Haruhi’s direction was resulting in a good outcome for everyone involved.
At first, the students down in the courtyard had scattered like cockroaches fleeing insecticide, but soon groups of guys started to return to collect the beans that Asahina and Nagato had tossed down, milling about to and fro as they pursued the precious items. They were all of one mind in moving to dodge the shotgun blasts that resulted from Haruhi’s overenthusiastic throwing.
“Oh, shoot,” said Haruhi with genuine regret. “I should’ve had Mikuru dress like a shrine maiden—we could’ve made some money that way. Even a hundred yen a pop would’ve gotten us quite a bit, don’t you think?”
If she’d dressed up like that and walked around the school, I had no doubt that Asahina would’ve become even more popular than she already was. But if only to keep my worries from multiplying any further, it was best to restrict her costumes to clubroom only.
“Um, g-good luck! In th-there! Good luck… in!”
I watched Asahina’s eager bean-tossing and Nagato’s completely silent rendition of the same, the vision of them performing the ritual while wearing shrine maiden outfits very clear in my mind.
“Five hundred yen a pop,” I said gravely.
Incidentally, they were only shouting “Good luck in.” As to why—
“Ever since I read The Red Demon Who Cried, I’ve always thought that if I ever did see a real demon, I’d want to be nice to it. I just bawled my eyes out when I read that story. The second I saw his sign, I totally would’ve gone right over to the Red Demon’s house for tea and snacks.” She was totally on the demons’ side as she looked at me gravely. “Got that? If you ever run into the Blue Demon, you better be nice to him. Shutting the demons outside is prohibited! The SOS Brigade’s doors are open to all, even non-humans!”
Although I had the premonition that if this half-baked inclusiveness continued, we’d soon end up with so much “luck” that eventually something would pop like an invisible balloon, I had to agree with Haruhi on the matter of the Blue Demon.
That might’ve been because as an impressionable kid, I’d cried over the story myself, or perhaps it was because in addition to scattering beans, Nagato was wearing a cheap demon mask on the side of her head. Nagato had been listening as she read the fairy tale Haruhi had mentioned, and had for some reason taken an interest in the paper demon mask, picking it up quietly and scanning it, laser-like, before putting it on her head.
I wondered if Haruhi’s phrase “even non-humans” had somehow touched her heart.
After Asahina and Nagato’s free bean-throwing performance ended, we all returned to the clubroom to wolf down our ehomaki. We looked up this year’s lucky direction on the Internet, and Haruhi passed out the food.
“You can’t say a word until you’re done eating, got it? Okay, everybody stand up. Now, face that way, and—let’s eat!”
The strange scene—all five of us lined up and facing the same direction, our mouths full as we silently ate chilled sushi rolls—continued for several minutes. Haruhi and Nagato finished first, roughly simultaneously, while Asahina held hers daintily in both hands like a small woodland creature. I fervently prayed that we wouldn’t be having the same thing for dinner tonight.
The remaining beans were emptied into a bowl and ended up mostly in Haruhi’s and my stomachs, along with some tea that Asahina kindly brewed, giving me a new appreciation for how full a person could wind up on Setsubun.
Surely this would return Haruhi’s spirits to normal, but for some reason, the next day she was still subdued. As I said before, the fact that remembering Setsubun had improved her mood so thoroughly proved that she wasn’t seriously melancholy, but that only made me more worried about this subtle shift. It seemed I was the only one who’d noticed the change in Haruhi. It would’ve been one thing if minor characters like Taniguchi or Kuniki
da hadn’t noticed, but apparently even the self-proclaimed Haruhi expert Koizumi hadn’t detected it.
It was just weird.
While I couldn’t get the thought out of my head, I also couldn’t very well constantly pay attention to Haruhi’s movements—because something more obviously strange had happened.
And unlike Haruhi’s shift in mood, this one was a thing you could see with your own two eyes.
I’d just told Koizumi that I didn’t anticipate there being any further time-travel episodes for a while, and I stuck to that. I wanted to avoid anything involving going back in time and changing things there. That isn’t the kind of thing you should do over and over again—and definitely not when you don’t know why you’re doing it.
Whether or not my pathetic wish was heard, well—it wound up coming true anyway.
This time, it wasn’t me who traveled through time. I didn’t take a single step outside of my own present moment. And yet I still wound up getting sucked into another temporal disturbance.
The person in question appeared in the Literature Club’s mop closet.
CHAPTER ONE
It happened one evening, a few days after Setsubun.
When I got to the clubroom and opened the door, all that greeted me was the chilly air and an empty room. Asahina wasn’t there to greet me, nor was Nagato sitting silently at the corner of the table—and Haruhi was nowhere to be seen. Today was her day to talk to the guidance counselor, so right about now she was in the office with Mr. Okabe, freaking him out with her crazy ambitions. If someone had asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, I had the feeling she would’ve said something crazy like “dictator” or “galactic president” with a completely straight face. And lest that actually happen, I fervently hoped that Mr. Okabe would put forth the effort to gently guide her onto a more reasonable path. Her personality was such that more forceful persuasion would cause her to be even less flexible than elements in the chromium group.
I put my bag on the table and turned on the electric space heater to warm up the chilly, lonely room. It took a while for the ancient heater to start radiating heat.
The only other sources of warmth would’ve been the steam coming off Asahina’s kettle and the hot tea she brewed with it. I thought about how much I wanted to have some as I grabbed the nearest folding chair, when—
Clunk.
“What was that?”
It had come from the corner of the room. I reflexively looked in the direction of the sound, but the only thing there was the same tall steel object with which every classroom was furnished—namely, a broom closet. So far as I could trust my ears, the sound had come from within it.
I’d just convinced myself that it had just been the random shifting of a mop or broom, when—
Clunk.
The noise was softer this time.
“Cut it out,” I murmured to myself.
Have you ever felt anything like this? Say your family’s out, and you come home to an empty house, and even though you should be the only one there, you can’t help feeling that you’re not alone. You feel like there’s some kind of movement behind the curtains, like someone is hiding there, and you want to pull them back to check, but you’re scared of what you might find if you actually do, so you leave them alone—and it almost always turns out to be your imagination.
I was sure this was my imagination too. If it had happened when I was home alone instead of in the clubroom, I probably would’ve been too freaked out to open the door, but I was at school, and the sun hadn’t even gone down yet. There was hardly anything to be nervous about.
I casually walked over to the broom closet, and with no particular expectations, I opened the door—and was immediately struck dumb.
“… Huh?”
Brooms, mops, and dustpans weren’t the only things in the closet. I was so surprised that the shock forced itself out of my mouth, becoming a question. “… What the hell are you doing in there?”
The person to whom the obvious question was directed answered.
“Oh… Kyon.” It was Asahina. An expression of relief flickered across her face. “So you waited for me? Oh, thank goodness. I was starting to worry about what I was going to do, but now I can relax. So, um… what should I do?”
“Wha?”
“Huh?” She looked up at me, blinking in surprise. “Umm… This is the right time, today, right? I’m certain you said this was the place…”
As the girl who’d apparently happily shut herself in a janitorial closet looked up at me uncertainly, a terrible premonition welled up within me, like smoke pouring from a factory smokestack in a growth economy.
“Asahina…”
What was going on here? Was she playing hide-and-seek in the broom closet? Surely not. Couldn’t be.
The smoke of unease was beginning to well up in my chest, when—
Knock knock.
There came a knock on the clubroom door; both Asahina and I looked in its direction, startled. Just as I was about to open my mouth to ask a question—
“Oh—wait—no, don’t—!”
Asahina grabbed my uniform’s necktie, and I was pulled forward. She drew me farther into the broom closet, then reached out her hand and closed the steel door behind me.
What the hell was going on? What was all of this?
“Shhh, Kyon—be quiet. Don’t make a sound.”
Thanks to a sliver of light, I could just barely make out Asahina putting her index finger to her lips. Even if she hadn’t said anything, I would’ve been speechless. I mean—just thinking about it.
Usually a person wouldn’t be able to cram themselves into a broom closet. Even one occupant would exceed its capacity—but now there were two people inside, and not just any two people either. It was Asahina and me. Asahina, whose curves were generous enough to catch even Haruhi’s eye. Obviously, given the circumstances, we wouldn’t be able to avoid being pressed together, so pressed together we were. Even through the school uniform I could feel something soft and warm against the lower part of my chest.
Just as I was becoming lost in the sensation, I heard the sound of the clubroom door opening. Somehow, I didn’t care. Asahina clung to me like someone trying to keep warm in a frigid mountain shack, holding her breath. I didn’t know why, but she was. How was such happiness even possible?
Terrible premonition, my ass. The black smoke in my chest was transforming to crystal-clear ozone, beckoning me to a soothing paradise… No, words are unnecessary. I just wanted the moment to last forever.
But my intoxication was forcibly interrupted by the voice of the person who’d just entered the room.
“Huh? Nobody’s here… but the heater’s on. Oh, that’s Kyon’s bag. Maybe he went to the bathroom.”
I looked down at Asahina, who still gripped my necktie. She looked up at me.
Next, I craned my neck around in an effort to look behind me. The sole source of light in the closet was a thin slit in its door. While humans cannot rotate their heads 180 degrees, I was about to catch a glimpse of the room out of the corner of my eye.
“…!” I was too shocked to voice my surprise.
There was Asahina.
Yes, it was Asahina who warmed her hands in front of the heater, humming to herself before she moved out of my line of sight, then reappeared having taken her maid outfit off its hanger. She then smoothly removed her school uniform’s ribbon, hanging it neatly over the back of a folding chair, then undoing the buttons on her blouse as she began to remove it.
“…!” I continued with another stunned ellipsis.
Asahina laid her newly doffed top on the chair as well, then put her hands to the waist of her skirt—just as other hands touched my face.
“…!”
Holding my face between her two hands, this Asahina forced my head to turn back around and face her. Even in the dark of the closet, I could tell she was blushing furiously. Her lips moved.
“D-o-n-’t l-o-o-k.”
&nb
sp; I didn’t have to do any lip-reading to know what she was trying to say, and realizing too late that I had already seen some untoward things, I hurriedly shut my mouth and reassessed the situation.
There were two Asahinas.
Now wait just a minute. If one of them had been Asahina the Elder, that much I could’ve understood. That sort of thing had happened several times, so her appearing again would hardly have been surprising.
But this was different. A perfectly matched set of identical Asahinas was now separated by a single flimsy steel door—one with her body pressed up against my own, and the other smack in the middle of changing into her maid uniform.
Both of them were the real Asahina. When it came to the ability to read Nagato’s expressions or judge Asahina’s authenticity, I prided myself on having a higher level of skill than anyone else. And if that skill could be trusted, then both of these girls were the genuine article. And two of the same person existing in the same space had to mean—
—time travel.
If I had to guess, it was probably the Asahina squeezed in the broom closet with me who was from a different time, one not far removed from the current time. The two of them were just too similar. Even identical twins would’ve been more different from each other.
But I was only able to consider it for a brief moment. Obviously, instinct precedes rational thought in such situations.
I mean, here in the closet Asahina was clinging to me, her eyes squeezed shut, and out there the sound Asahina’s clothing made as she removed it was stimulating my imagination, and it was only a matter of time before my mind’s defenses were completely overrun. Just as in the summer siege of Osaka Castle after the death of the great general Yukimura Sanada, there was nothing that could be done. It was just as impossible to tell me not to have any reaction in the face of this two-front psychological assault.
I felt lightheaded, as though some strange drug were working its way though my brain. Somebody, do something!
At this rate I was either going to wind up embracing Asahina the Nearer with all my might or jump out of the closet and scare to death the Asahina in the room mid–costume change.
The Intrigues of Haruhi Suzumiya Page 4
