“I-I’m sorry! I didn’t see a thing, honest! Really!” she shouted, running away, having gotten the entirely wrong idea.
“…”
Nagato silently regarded us.
“So, you’re not going to do as your editor in chief says? C’mon, hand it over!” Haruhi smiled wildly.
I held up my hands to defend myself as Haruhi manhandled me, a plea going out from my heart.
Help me, Koizumi. You’re my only hope. Get back here, now!
The single sheet of paper folded up inside my blazer read as follows:
Incidentally, Miyoko Yoshimura, also known as “Miyokichi,” was my sister’s best friend and classmate. At the time, she was a fourth grader in elementary school, and she was ten years old.
Last year, as well as now, Miyokichi was so mature-looking that it was hard to imagine she was my little sister’s classmate. She was tall enough to make you doubt her claim not to be a big eater, and as far as her bearing and overall impression went, she seemed more grown-up than someone like Asahina. Thanks to that most un-elementary-school-student-like appearance, neither the box office attendant nor the ticket collector gave her a second look.
And even if they had noticed, it was doubtful they would have stopped her every time. After all, they’d sell you tickets at the student discount price without even checking for your student ID.
The film had been rated PG-12. In other words, children under twelve had to be accompanied by a guardian. I was fine, since I’d already turned fifteen.
The problem was Miyokichi. She knew perfectly well, however, that nobody would guess that she was younger than twelve.
But she couldn’t bring herself to go alone. Her parents were fairly strict, and they wouldn’t understand a Splatterhouse B-movie—even asking them for permission to go was just begging for a lecture, she later told me.
The only friend she could really invite to go with her was my sister, who looked every inch the elementary-school student she was. The film was only going to play through the end of March. If Miyokichi didn’t hurry, she’d lose her chance.
So she thought about it. Was there anyone she could go with, to whom the theater would sell tickets?
There was me.
I’ve always gotten along pretty well with little kids, if I do say so myself. Most of my cousins were younger than me, so I’d probably picked up the knack of playing with them after being made to watch them whenever we got together in the countryside.
Of course, dealing with my sister’s friends when they came over was a common occurrence. Miyokichi was one of those friends, so she knew me well.
I was the older brother of a friend she played with often, and during the vacation I was unlikely to be busy. That was how I came to be within the circle of friends of a fourth grader.
She also considered this: if she were going to a movie, she might as well go somewhere else a kid would also have a hard time getting into. Thus she picked that café. The waitress had been very pleasant. It was too fancy for a typical elementary school student to enter on her own, and even my middle-school-age self was a little nervous to go in. If someone had spotted Miyokichi and me in there, I’m sure they would’ve had a hard time imagining us as anything other than brother and sister.
Miyoko Yoshimura—Miyokichi—is now a fifth grader, soon to be sixth. Give her five or so more years, and she’d be a rival for Asahina.
That is, if she ever catches Haruhi’s attention somehow.
Now then, the epilogue.
The newsletter was finished on time. It was printed on sheets of copier paper, stapled into booklets with a giant business-grade stapler, and the content—minus any personal bias I may have here—was pretty solid.
One particularly excellent section was the adventure story that Tsuruya wrote. The crazy piece—“Tough Luck! The Tragedy of Boy N”—had every single person who read it rolling on the floor in laughter. I myself had tears rolling down my face. It had been a long time since I was so surprised to read something so entertaining. The only one who kept a straight face while reading it was Nagato, but Tsuruya’s lively slapstick comedy was so hilarious that I can easily imagine Nagato having a private chuckle, once she was alone in her own room.
I’d suspected before, but the notion came to me anew: was Tsuruya actually a genius?
As far as the other SOS Brigade affiliates went, Taniguchi wrote an impressively boring slice-of-life essay, and Kunikida produced study columns filled with trivia. Between that and the rest of the material Haruhi’d been dashing around the school to collect (including things like the four-panel comic that someone in the manga club drew for us), the final product was almost too thick for a literature club newsletter. It took quite a bit of effort to staple each individual issue together, and the two hundred issues we printed flew away without us having to run around at all. I guessed that all the running around Haruhi had done had worked as accidental advertising for the project.
As for Haruhi, she wrote material too, just as she’d promised. In addition to a haughty “Letter from the Editor,” she wrote a short essay.
“Save the World by Overloading it with Fun, I: A Memo on the Path to the Future” was the title, and her thesis was filled with charts and symbols that, according to Haruhi, were the result of her thoughts on how to ensure the brigade continued indefinitely into the future. As for me, I found it totally incomprehensible. But there was still an order to the chaos, I felt, like Haruhi’s mind had somehow overflowed directly onto the page.
But when Asahina read it, she was so stunned she looked as though she might fall over.
“That’s… I can’t… so this is how…”
Her shock was so total that I was afraid her pupils were going to fall right out of her widely opened eyes, but when I asked her why she was so surprised—
“I can’t tell you; the details are classified.”
—she said.
“These are the fundamentals of time-plane theory. In my time… um… this is the first thing people like me learn. But who originated it, and when, has always been a mystery… and now, to find out that it was Suzumiya all along…”
She was then rendered speechless. I, likewise, was speechless, as the following notion appeared in my mind:
Haruhi would surely keep at least one copy of the newsletter to bring home with her. It was entirely possible that the bespectacled little boy would have a chance to see it. Haruhi was his tutor, after all. While Asahina and I had ensured a variety of conditions for the boy’s future, there were surely more to come. Was Haruhi the ultimate trigger? Even if she wasn’t, there seemed to be many composite elements in play. The number of questions I had for Asahina the Elder increased by one.
Having fully distributed the newsletter the same day it was completed, Haruhi made a point of going to the student council room to inform them. That she was practically radiating pride from her body goes without saying.
The president didn’t so much as twitch an eyebrow at Haruhi’s victorious entry. His glasses shone as he spoke. “A promise is a promise. We’ll approve the continued existence of the literature club. However, concerning this ‘SOS Brigade’ of yours, it is none of our concern. Do not forget that there is quite some time left in my term,” he said in a transparent ploy to get one last parting shot in, before turning his back on us.
Haruhi took it as an admission of defeat, and she returned to the clubroom in high spirits, dancing a victory dance with Asahina as Nagato looked on indifferently. So it goes.
In any case, that was the end of that particular madness. All that was left was to wait for spring.
At this rate, so long as nothing happened, we would each of us move on to the next grade. If I had to guess at the next likely point where Haruhi would get up to something, it would be spring break.
Strangely, the year had felt both long and short. It’s a secret, but I’m putting a circle on a day in April this year. It’s the same day as last year’s school entrance ceremony.
Even if everybody forgot, even if Haruhi herself forgot, it’s the anniversary of a day I’ll always remember.
I’m confident that so long as I live, I’ll never forget the day I met Haruhi.
So long as I don’t lose my memory, that is.
WANDERING SHADOW
The smart sound of the ball hitting the gym floor echoed along with shrill cries, bouncing off the ceiling and washing over me.
I was dressed in slightly dirty gym clothes, my hands folded lazily behind my head and my feet stretched out in front of me. I was totally relaxed, and if you wanted to know what I was doing in that totally relaxed state, the simple answer was that I was spectating. After all, I had nothing else to do that day, but simply having nothing to do does not get you out of school; thus I found myself looking down at the scene unfolding below me.
I was sitting on the catwalk that runs along both sides of the gymnasium, a narrow walkway with handrails. I imagine just about every gym has them. I’m not exactly sure what they’re for, but at the time there was no doubt that they’d been provided for people like me to observe the competitions below. And I wasn’t the only one lazing around up there either.
Taniguchi was doing the same thing, right next to me.
“Damn, our girls are pretty good,” he offered, not sounding particularly impressed, despite his words.
“Yeah,” I replied vaguely, following the white volleyball as it moved around the court. The ball, falling parabolically down after being grandly served by the opposition, got tossed vertically up in a perfect set.
As I watched the ball come down, a gym clothes–clad girl came running up from well behind the attack line, jumped, and brought her raised hand down with amazing force, converting potential energy into kinetic energy, which was transferred onto the poor ball, which in turn split two opposing blocks and landed in the corner of their court. It was a perfect counterattack, and the volleyball club member who was acting as an umpire blew her whistle.
More cheers echoed through the gym.
Taniguchi must have been really bored. “Hey, Kyon, want to bet on which side’s going to win?” he asked unenthusiastically.
It was a good idea, but without a handicap, it might not be a blowout, but it wasn’t going to be an even match either.
Before Taniguchi could open his mouth again, I replied, “Class Five’s gonna win. No doubt about it.”
Taniguchi clucked his tongue. I gave him a sidelong look and continued.
“After all, she’s on the team.”
The girl landed beautifully, right next to the net, and turned around, revealing a daring smile. She wasn’t looking up at me, and it was a different smile than the self-satisfied one she used in the clubroom. To the teammates who gathered around her excitedly, it wordlessly said, “This is just too easy!”
It was a one-set match to 15 points.
Just as I predicted, our class—Class 5, year 1—won by double the opponent’s score. The ace attacker who was the source of most of their points mingled among her teammates, who were busily high-fiving one another. She, meanwhile, raised her fist and lightly punched the open palms of her team.
As she exited the court’s sidelines, she finally noticed us crammed in the catwalk. She stopped and looked up for just a moment, and then I was released from her usual dagger-like gaze.
No matter what she did, she excelled at it, and if it were a contest of any sort, she hated to lose—even going so far as to score nearly all the points in this volleyball game. She—ah, there’s no point in being mysterious anymore, obviously it’s Haruhi Suzumiya—took a sports drink passed to her by a classmate-turned-teammate and drank it dry.
As I’m sure you’ve already guessed, there was a tournament on.
It was early March, and with final exams having ended, a school would enter preparations for its next break, and our particular public high school was no exception. As far as the school schedule went, we’d just be waiting for the term to end, but at some point, somebody had gotten the brilliant idea to find something else to do with that time, and as a result, around this time every year the school would hold an intramural sports tournament.
I’m sure the idea was to let us unwind after we’d curdled our brains with exam studying, but if this was their idea of unwinding, I’d rather they just extend the vacation.
Incidentally, soccer was on the boys’ menu, while girls would be playing volleyball. I was on Class 1-5’s B team, which had lost to our old enemies, Class 1-9, in the first round of the tournament. I didn’t consider them enemies just because Koizumi was in that class—it was because 1-9 was on the special math and science course, and as a matter of course was filled with brainiac types, and if we couldn’t at least beat them at soccer, we’d be humiliated in front of the other classes. And having lost, we were indeed thus humiliated.
So it was that we’d had nothing better to do than to head over to the gym to watch the girls in their gym uniforms.
“Still, Suzumiya is really amazing,” said Kunikida calmly from a few feet away. The girls’ volleyball team had gotten through to the third round, thanks to Haruhi’s significant efforts, and we’d been watching since the middle of the second. “Why doesn’t she join one of the sports clubs? Talent like hers isn’t exactly common.”
I agreed wholeheartedly. If Haruhi would just join the track-and-field club, she’d probably be able to qualify for nationals in short-, medium-, and long-distance running. And the same was true for any other sport. She absolutely hated to lose, after all. I never met anyone else so obsessed with being the winner, or being the best.
I looked over to the other court, where there was still a match in progress. “I’m sure she’d tell you she’s got more important things to do than waste her youth on sports.” I was hoping that maybe Asahina or Nagato would be playing, but I didn’t see either of them anywhere in the gym.
“Like the SOS Brigade, eh?” said Taniguchi, chuckling. “Heh, that’s just like her. Hard to imagine her doing anything like a normal student. She’s been that way since middle school. These days her favorite thing to do is get up to incomprehensible games with you, Kyon.”
I wasn’t in the mood to refute him.
There wasn’t much time left in the school year. The school day had been shortened for the tournament, which automatically lessened the amount of time spent in the classroom. We’d move into the spring break, and just about when the cherry blossoms started to bloom, we’d become second-year students. Then there’d be the reshuffling of classes that worried many a student, which would decide what joys and sorrows the following year would contain. I’d grown fond of these two jerks, and it would’ve been nice to have them in my classroom the next year, if nothing else.
As I zoned out, Kunikida sat up, which grabbed my attention.
“Looks like the next match is starting.”
I looked and saw the girls of Class 1-5 scattering onto the court, with Haruhi, their captain, at the center.
I was ready for spring to arrive at any time, but given the school’s position between mountains, the air was still pretty cold. There was an emotional factor that probably added to the feeling of cold—that being the fact that I’d gotten my test results back a few days previous.
The scores weren’t too bad, at least by my standards, but they weren’t enough to satisfy my mom’s hopes, and she’d sent away for pamphlets from cram schools and tutoring centers, leaving them where I’d find them—it was so bad that my stomach hurt. She just wanted me to get into a public university somewhere, and on paper that was my ambition too. Aim high and all that. And plus… how do I put it? There was Haruhi to consider.
The reason my final-exam marks weren’t doing their best impression of low-altitude flying was because Haruhi had become a temporary in-house tutor, helping me do last-minute cramming in the clubroom. A few days before the exams started, she’d scattered textbooks and notes all over the table and said this:
“I won’t let you take makeup exa
ms or extra lessons. I will not allow you to make mistakes that come between you and your SOS Brigade duties!”
When it came to “SOS Brigade duties,” I didn’t complain. Before I could even ask what the hourly wage for brigade duties was, my wallet was already empty—not that it mattered.
In any case, even I had to admit that sitting across from Koizumi and drinking Asahina’s tea in the clubroom beat getting stared at by a teacher while trying to solve new questions or listening to boring lectures, so I did not resist when Haruhi donned an armband that said “Professor” and delivered her teachings.
Professor Haruhi’s method of test taking was extremely simple—she relied on pure speculation to guess which questions would be on the test and studied those heavily. I knew her intuition to be keen indeed, so I was only too happy to go along with her. If I’d asked Nagato, she probably could’ve just recited every question and an example answer to go along with it, whereas Koizumi could’ve employed some intrigue to steal the tests out of the staff room, but I resorted to neither supernatural powers nor covert operations and decided to simply apply myself. To be honest, watching Haruhi the house tutor happily brandish her pointer, even going so far as to wear fake glasses, I had no particular desire to use any other method, since it wouldn’t actually be in my best interests.
There was no question that Haruhi wanted to sit behind me in class again next year. There was no question that she’d occasionally poke me in the back with her mechanical pencil, regardless of whether class was happening or not, saying, “Hey, Kyon, I’ve been thinking—” before excitedly launching into an explanation of whatever it was I’d come to wish she hadn’t been thinking about. And to do that, she’d have to be in the same class as me, which meant we’d have to be aiming for roughly the same level of college, which naturally led to her having an interest in my grades. I mean, I was the SOS Brigade’s exclusive errand boy. It was the same way an army made up of only officers would be useless. It was Haruhi’s job to give orders, and it was my job to carry things around.
The Indignation of Haruhi Suzumiya Page 10
