The newsletter wasn’t going to be sold; it was going to be given away, and furthermore I had no interest in dying for this particular cause—but I had a feeling that if I missed the deadline, whatever punishment Haruhi dreamed up would make me wish I were dead. I knew that it was all part of his act, but did that president really have to go this far? Ditto, Koizumi—this was no time for his self-satisfied smile.
“For my part,” whispered Koizumi, right on cue, “I am extremely satisfied. So long as Suzumiya’s attention is turned toward ordinary activities, I can stay away from Closed Space.”
That might be good for him. But what about me? I really didn’t want to get tangled up in intrigues with the student council. I understood that the president was just playing a part, but Haruhi didn’t know that, and there was no telling what she’d resort to. If our newsletter didn’t live up to the president’s standards, I knew for a fact Haruhi wouldn’t just turn over the clubroom to him. I definitely didn’t want to wind up on the receiving end of a siege, being starved out of our castle, I told Koizumi.
He chuckled. “You’re overthinking things. What we need to focus on now is finishing the publication. The rest will fall into place. If it doesn’t”—a cunning expression flashed across his smiling face—“we’ll simply put a different scenario into play. Starvation tactics, eh? That might do nicely.”
Tsuruya had compared the student council president to the general Sima Yi; I wondered whom she’d compare Koizumi to. Maybe the warlord Kanbei Kuroda?
I was starting to feel like the lord of Takamatsu Castle after its water supply had been cut off, and I prayed that Koizumi didn’t indulge his taste for school intrigues too much.
It turned out that I wasn’t able to finish my manuscript that day. After being interrupted by the president, I didn’t write another word.
Fortunately, once Haruhi finished checking the pieces that had been finished, she rushed out of the room. Had she hit upon another outside source for material, or had she just gone off to deliver more “motivation”?
She returned just as the chime signaling the end of the school day rang; at the same moment, Nagato closed her book. Koizumi had made steady progress, and Asahina had put forth admirable effort. I grabbed my bag and stood.
Surprisingly, Haruhi didn’t suggest I take the laptop home and continue working on it. She might have merely forgotten to be angry, but in any case, I was grateful for it.
We all left school together, and as the chilly wind came down from the mountain, it nonetheless felt like a breath of spring air, and as I made my way home, I wondered idly what would happen if a new student appeared, wanting to join the literature club. Would they be automatically drafted into the SOS Brigade?
I continued my autobiographical story the next day, after classes were over.
Let’s see, how far had I gotten? Ah, that’s right—we’d just bought the movie tickets.
We’ll pick up from there.
Having successfully entered the theater, Miyokichi and I proceeded to seats in the middle of the theater, which was hardly what you’d call spacious. It was mostly empty, with only a scattering of other moviegoers; perhaps attendance was poor.
As for what kind of film it was—turned out it was a gory splatter-fest horror flick. To be honest, it’s not really my favorite genre, but on that particular day I couldn’t very well not go along with her wishes. Still, it didn’t really suit her demure appearance. She must have really wanted to see this film.
During the film, she became a genuine cinema fan, eyes riveted to the screen, but she occasionally flinched and turned away in response to the startling moments you see in every horror film. Once she even grabbed my arm, which calmed me down—I don’t know why.
Other than that, though, she drank the film in, every bit as focused on it as I’m sure the director would have hoped. If you want to know my impressions of the film, all I can say is that it seemed like a pretty standard B-movie. I didn’t feel particularly disappointed by it, nor particularly enriched. I didn’t have any memory of reading any advance reviews either. There must’ve been hardly any publicity.
I wondered why she’d picked this film.
When I asked, she answered, “It has my favorite actor in it,” a little embarrassed.
The curtain lowered before the end credits had finished scrolling, and we left the theater.
It was afternoon. Were we going to get lunch somewhere? Was it time to go home? My musing was interrupted by her reserved, quiet voice.
“There’s a shop I’d like to go to, if you don’t mind. Is it all right?”
I looked to see that she was holding her city guidebook open; one of the page’s corners was circled with a red pen. It was a shop that we could walk to from where we were.
I thought about it for a second. “Of course, it’s fine,” I answered, and we walked along the route described by the simple map. She walked diagonally behind me, quiet as ever. We must have had some sort of conversation, but I don’t remember what it was.
After walking for a while, we came to our destination—a cozy little café. It was stylish outside and in, the kind of place it would take enormous guts for a guy to enter on his own, lest he feel deeply out of place. I couldn’t help but stop short in front of the café, but Miyokichi’s worried look was all it took to get me to push open the door like I belonged there.
As I expected, nearly all of the customers within the café were female. It was quite pleasant. There were a handful of couples, which somehow came as a relief.
The waitress led us to our table with a friendly smile, brought us ice water with a friendly smile, and even took our order with a friendly smile.
After taking thirty seconds or so to scrutinize the menu, I ordered some Neapolitan ice cream and an iced coffee, and Miyokichi got the house special cake set. She seemed to have known what she was going to order ahead of time, and from the ten varieties of cake samples the waitress brought over, she chose the Mont Blanc without any hesitation.
“You’re okay with just the cake set?” I think I asked. “You won’t be hungry?”
“No, I’ll be fine.” She straightened and put her hands on her knees, face a bit nervous. “I’m not a big eater.”
It was a strange answer. She suddenly looked down, perhaps because I was gazing intently at her. I hurried to explain myself, only getting her to smile again after some effort. Now that I think about it, the embarrassing things I said are enough to make me break into a sweat. Stuff like how I thought she was perfectly lovely as she was, and… uh, yeah, I think that’s all I’m going to write about that. But the truth was Miyokichi was a pretty girl—pretty enough that probably half of the boys in her class had crushes on her.
Once the food arrived, she took about thirty minutes to finish her Darjeeling tea and Mont Blanc cake. I finished first, and I had enough time left over that I’d been able to drink the water into which the ice of my iced coffee had melted.
I was getting pretty bored, but she didn’t seem to have noticed, and I talked about random things with her, nodding or shaking my head as appropriate. Now that I think about it, I probably didn’t have to make so much of an effort, but I was just a bundle of consideration back then. And I was pretty nervous too.
I would’ve been happy to pay the café tab. But she would have none of it, and she insisted on paying her own share. “I was the one who asked you out today,” she said.
Having settled the bill, we walked back out into the sunlight. Where would she want to go after seeing a horror film and eating at a cute café? Or would it be time to go home?
She was quiet for a while as we walked. Then, finally—
“There is one last place I’d like to go.”
She explained, in her small voice, that she wanted to come to my home.
So it was that I brought her back to my house, where my little sister seemed to be waiting for us, and the three of us all played games together.
“Whew.”
I w
rote that much, then my fingers stopped.
Only Koizumi and Nagato were in the clubroom with me. Haruhi was running around like usual, and Asahina had gone to the art club for the final check on her illustrations.
I had scrolled through the entirety of the text I’d written when I saw Koizumi’s face seep into the corner of my vision.
“Did you write through to the end? Already?”
“Hard to say…,” I answered, but truth be told I felt like I could end it here. When I thought about it, what was the point in being so diligent about it? For the literature club’s sake, and by extension for Nagato’s sake—to that extent, I could see being enthusiastic, but really this was to help the SOS Brigade stay in the room and to keep Haruhi from getting bored. Koizumi was pulling the strings behind the scenes, and the president was just a guy abusing his power as Koizumi’s puppet. When you got right down to it, this was one big roundabout scam.
Still, I felt like I wanted to avoid the second-stage confrontation with the student council that Koizumi was anticipating so much. Nagato was at the center of this, after all. I wanted her to be able to enjoy as peaceful a school life as possible. I wanted to believe I wasn’t the only one whose heart was put at ease by seeing Nagato quietly reading her book in the corner.
“I guess this’ll do.” I gave Koizumi a nod. “I want to get your opinion before I show it to Haruhi. Read it, willya?”
“I’ll be more than happy to.”
I glanced at Koizumi’s deeply interested face, then manipulated the trackpad.
The laptops in the room were networked to the desktop machine, which acted as a server. With a little bit of clicking, the printer in the corner started up and began to spit out printed pages.
Some minutes later.
Koizumi, having finished reading, smiled and offered the following comment: “I thought I was the one doing a mystery.”
So he’d noticed, eh?
“What’re you talking about?” I feigned ignorance. “I didn’t try to write a mystery.”
Koizumi’s smile widened. “And there’s another problem. Where’s the love story in this?”
In that case, what did he think I’d written, I asked him.
“This is just bragging. ‘I went on a date with a cute girl.’ That’s all.”
That’s what you’d normally think, yes. However, Koizumi had noticed something else, I was pretty sure. Where were his suspicions roused, I wondered?
“From the very beginning. It’s rather obvious. It would be harder not to notice it.”
Koizumi put the manuscript’s pages in order, then took out a ballpoint pen and wrote marks on a few of the sheets. They were asterisks—the very asterisks you may have noticed in the manuscript yourself. He wrote those.
“You’re a very considerate writer. You included a series of clues, after all. Even the most oblivious reader would have an inkling by the fourth asterisk.”
I clucked my tongue, still pretending to not know what he was talking about, and glanced sideways. Seeing Nagato’s unmoving figure there made me feel at ease. The sight of her did me good, but Koizumi’s words were trying to corner me.
“But as it is, there’s no punch line, no climax. Why not add a line or two? Just to show all your cards, so to speak. I doubt it would take much time.”
Maybe I did need to add something.
I wasn’t thrilled about following any advice from Koizumi, but I got the feeling that he was worth listening to this one time. Psychoanalyzing Haruhi was his specialty, after all.
But, wait a second—why should I have to worry about Haruhi’s reaction? She was the one who’d gone and suggested a “love story,” but I was the one who had to actually write the thing—the same was true for Asahina and Nagato. If we were assigning fault, it belonged with the person who’d forcibly occupied the editor in chief’s seat: Haruhi.
As I stared at the liquid crystal display, Koizumi chuckled. “I doubt you have anything to worry about. If your story’s meaning is something I recognize, then I very much doubt that Suzumiya will fail to do likewise. Now, before you get cross-examined… Ah, whoops—”
Koizumi reached into his blazer’s pocket. There was a faint buzzing sound.
“If you’ll excuse me.” He pulled out his cell phone and took a look at the screen. “I seem to have some minor business to attend to. I’ll be out for just a moment. No, don’t worry—I just have to make a short report. It’s not one of those cases.”
With those words, Koizumi stepped out of the room, smiling all the while. I wondered if he was going to meet up with some girl on the sly. The guy was so sneaky, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out he was somehow managing to live a normal life with none of us the wiser.
Which left only Nagato in the room, still absorbed in her book.
She did not look up. I thought about saying something, but I was still thinking about my own problem—whether or not to add those last couple of superfluous lines.
There in the silence, I closed the file that contained my pseudo-story, and I opened up a new text file. The monitor was filled with a blank white document.
Might as well write something. Like Koizumi said, just a couple of lines to end it.
My fingers clicked on the keys. The addition was short enough not to need any revision, so I just printed it out on the spot.
As I stared at the single page that emerged from the printer, I started to want to just trash the entire story. It was no good. Even given how long ago it had happened, it was too embarrassing.
I folded up that last page and slipped it into the pocket of my blazer.
Then, that moment—
“Taniguchi’s run off somewhere again. I gotta get him to write something tomorrow, even if I have to tie him to the chair. Kyon, that goes for you too. If you don’t finish soon, your editor in chief’s gonna be mad!”
Haruhi had entered the room.
And her eyes alighted upon my manuscript, which Koizumi had left on the table.
My pleas for her to stop were in vain, as Haruhi swiftly snatched up the printout. She sat at her desk and began a leisurely read.
I was split between indignation and resignation as I watched the all-powerful editor in chief’s face.
Haruhi had been grinning at first, but somewhere in the middle, her grin faded into expressionlessness. When she finished reading the last page, her expression changed again.
How strange. It was a rare thing to see Haruhi so stunned.
“This is the end?”
I nodded quietly. Nagato said nothing and continued reading the page to which her book was opened. Asahina was still out. Koizumi had left on some pretense. There was no one here who could give Haruhi any unnecessary information.
And then—
Haruhi set my manuscript on the desk, then faced me again.
And then she smirked. Just like Koizumi.
“Where’s the punch line?”
“What punch line?” I decided to play dumb.
Haruhi smiled beatifically; it was unsettling. “Surely you wouldn’t just end it there. What happened to this Miyokichi girl?”
“I guess she went on to live happily ever after, somewhere.”
“Yeah, right. C’mon, you know, don’t you?”
Haruhi’s hands were on the desk, but then she jumped clear over it, right at me. Before I could react, she grabbed my tie. Her ridiculous power was making it hard to breathe.
“If you want me to let you go, you better start talking. And it better be the truth.”
“What do you mean, the truth? It’s a story! It’s fiction! The ‘I’ in the story isn’t me; it’s the first-person narrator of the story! Same for Miyokichi!”
Haruhi’s smile got closer and closer as her strength constricted my throat. This was bad—I could really suffocate.
“Sure, keep lying,” she said sweetly. “I never for a second believed you could write a totally made-up story. At the very least, you’d have to write something that
you’d heard from somebody you knew. No, my intuition tells me that no matter how you read this, it’s a true story. And it’s your true story.” Haruhi’s eyes shone crazily. “Who’s Miyokichi? What kind of relationship did she have with you?”
My tie constricted my throat more and more, and I finally confessed the truth.
“She sometimes comes over to my house for dinner, then goes home.”
“That’s all? Are you sure you’re not leaving anything out?”
Reflexively, I touched the pocket of my blazer. That was enough for Haruhi.
“Ah-ha! That’s where you’ve been hiding the rest of the manuscript, eh? Give it here.”
She was way too perceptive for her own good. I couldn’t help but be impressed. But before I could say so, Haruhi had resorted to force.
Haruhi thrust her right leg between my thighs and performed a perfect inside-leg trip, sumo-style. Where’d she learn that?
“Whoa,” I yelled.
With Haruhi leaning on me, I fell to the floor. She straddled me like I was a horse, trying to reach into my blazer to get into the inside pocket. I tried to resist.
“Hey, knock it off!”
I looked desperately to Nagato, but when her subtle, near-expressionless gaze met mine, she too seemed to be unsure what to do.
Somewhere along the line, she had opened up her own laptop.
When had that been? She’d been able to hack into and rewrite the computer club’s game program, so peeking into the contents of my laptop would be child’s play for her. Had she seen it?
“…”
Nagato watched Haruhi and me wrestle on the ground, giving assistance to neither of us.
And then—
“I’m back—Wha?!”
Enter Asahina. She sure did have an incredible sense of timing. Stunned, she looked at me on the ground, with Haruhi on top of me and evidently in the midst of some kind of sexual harassment. Who knew what was going through her head?
The Indignation of Haruhi Suzumiya Page 9
