Chihiro Hashima’s Lunch Break

It was a balmy afternoon in mid-July, near the end of the first semester for Chihiro Hashima’s second year of high school. She had gone out for lunch with six or so friends, and afterward, they had invited her to go out and hit the beach sometime during summer break.

“The beach? Isn’t the clam-hunting season over?”

Stunned silence fell upon the group, before everyone burst into laughter.

“Ha-ha-ha! What’re you talking about, Chi-hee?”

“Wow, Chi-hee! You’re probably the only girl in this school who hears the word beach and thinks about collecting clams!”

Chihiro raised an eyebrow. “Well…um, fishing, then? I’ve never gone fishing before…”

“He” was still posing as a younger brother to Itsuki and their mutual companions, but at school, she was just another part of the female student body. That being said, though, this school didn’t have a dress code, and Chihiro had yet to wear a blouse or skirt to her classes. She opted for a casual, loose-fitting short-sleeved shirt and shorts for today.

“You’re, like, the most non-girly girl I know, Chi-hee…”

Chihiro scowled at this appraisal. “Non-girly…? I don’t think so. I’m a really good cook… I make my own lunches and everything.”

“Sure, yeah, that’s pretty impressive. I could never do that. Plus, all the simmered vegetables you do are supergood.”

Her friend took that cue to reach over and pluck a piece of simmered lotus root from Chihiro’s bento box. Her lunches were generally last night’s leftovers with a few extras. Today it was grilled mackerel, chicken with simmered vegetables, a rolled omelette, pickled cucumber and eggplant, and brown rice—a rather colorless meal, but a filling one. At Itsuki’s place, she often prepared chicken, fried rice, paella, and other favorites among girls and the young. But she made dinner at home, too, and her stepfather had a preference for traditional Japanese cuisine, so that was the shape her lunches often took the next day.

“All right, I know you’re a good cook,” her friend said, chewing on the lotus root. “But this stuff doesn’t really scream ‘girliness,’ y’know, Chi-hee? It’s more, like, housewifeyness.”

“Housewifeyness…?!”

This shocked Chihiro. She never deliberately set out to be the typical popular teenage girl, but she didn’t think it was anything like…that. Being called a housewife at high-school age would offend anyone.

“Well,” she timidly countered, “what does girliness even mean anyway?”

“I mean, like, basically, whether you can get guys or not.”

“Wow, that’s pretty blunt…”

The rest of the group nodded.

“But it’s true.” “Yeah, it’s true.” “Pretty much.”

“And you should go to the beach, too, Chi-hee! Not for clam hunting, but I guess you would kind of be fishing for something…”

“Yeah! Fishing for boys!”

“Let’s go out and have ’em hit on us! That’s how a girl needs to spend summer break!”

Chihiro looked around at her friends. “Oh, I dunno…”

“Although, I’m not really into those kinda guys anyway…whether they’re hot or not.”

“Yeah. If you’re gonna hang with someone, it’s gotta be someone real.”

“We’re not going so we can play around with guys who hit on us. We’re going so we can say, like, ‘Ooh, he totally hit on me! ♥’ It’s about testing your attractiveness as a girl and getting experience.”

“Exactly. Seeing whether you’re popular or not. It can really boost your self-esteem, you know?”

Chihiro giggled at the oddly scientific approach her friends took to human relationships. “Hmm… I dunno if I’m that interested, really…”

“Aw, just go to the beach. You can ignore all that stuff if you want.”

“Yeah, yeah. You never get to play around much, Chi-hee. Let’s go have some fun out for a change!”

She gave them a smile. “Yeah. All right, I guess I’ll go.”

“Great! Plus, my folks run an inn, so we can all stay for free.”

“Oh, man, we can stay up all night!”

“Whoa,” a surprised Chihiro interrupted. “You mean we’d sleep over?”

“Of course!” Her friends nodded.

“Wow… I’m not sure…”

“What, is that bad? Are your parents gonna say no?”

“No…but I got chores to do, and I gotta make food for my brother…”

“Oh yeah, doesn’t your bro work for a publisher, Chi-hee?”

“Yeah, um… Yeah.”

She hadn’t expressly stated to her friends that her brother wrote books. Itsuki Hashima wasn’t a pen name, so they’d be able to track down his works with one net search. Not that her brother’s work embarrassed her; it was just that people would think Itsuki was weird, writing little-sister trope fiction even though he had a real-life little sister. “Working for a publisher” wasn’t exactly a lie, either.

“I heard that if you work for a publisher, you have to sleep overnight at the office, like, all the time.”

“…Yeah, I think that’s true.”

As far as the editor Kenjiro Toki told her, that really did come with the territory.

“Wow, that sucks,” her friend said, wincing.

Chihiro earnestly nodded. “Yeah, I think it does. He keeps such an irregular schedule, and when he’s really busy, he hardly has time to sleep at all.”

“Oh, man, that sounds like the workplace from hell.”

“Yeah…”

Piecing together everything Toki and Itsuki told her, Chihiro couldn’t come up with any other conclusion.

“Hey, does your brother have a girlfriend or anything?”

“Um, well, there’s this girl who stops by his apartment all the time, at least…”

“Oh, so why don’t you have her cook for him instead?”

“Hmm… I don’t think she has any more life skills than he does. I cook a lot for her, too.”

Recalling Nayuta made Chihiro smile in embarrassment as her friends looked on with sympathy.

“You sure got it hard, Chi-hee…”

“You’re like a hero or something…”

“Of a tragedy…”

“It—it’s not that bad, guys! I like doing that kind of stuff anyway! But I think staying away overnight ought to be fine.”

Everyone smiled at the semi-frantic Chihiro.

“Really? Sweet!”

“And get a really cute swimsuit for it, too, okay? Not, like, the ones the school gives us.”

“Oh yeah, for sure,” Chihiro replied, a degree more frantic now. She had figured the school swimsuit was good enough.

“But, you know, if your brother works for a publisher, d’you think he gets to hang out with Nayuta Kani and stuff?”

“Huh?!”

The unexpected name-drop made Chihiro flail in her seat. There was no way she could finger Nayuta as the girl who “stops by” her brother’s place.

“Um, hmm, I don’t know. I’ll have to ask.”

“Kani?” one of her friends asked. “Who’s that?”

“You don’t know her? She’s, like, super-popular.”

“Yeah, I read the whole Landscape series! It’s this line of really awesome novels.”

“Yeah, really awesome.”

“Hmm… I didn’t think you guys read fiction.”

“Well, it’s, like, ‘light’ novels or something, so they’re really easy to read, but super-deep, too. It really gets you!”

“I read a couple of VOCALOID novels. Is it kinda like that?”

“Um, yeah, the art, at least. Totally different inside, though. It’s more, like, realistic?”

“Huh. Okay. Lemme borrow one later.”

“Sure.”

“And Nayuta Kani’s still in high school, too, right?”

“She was during her first novel, but I don’t think so now, no. Plus, like, you know they make up that stuff anyway. No way someone in high school can write like that. I bet it’s, like, some middle-aged woman who wrote fancy novels and thought she’d try a different voice as a ‘teen writer.’”

“Yeah, but how can someone in their forties or whatever write like that? She writes like she really understands how teens feel. That’s what makes her such a genius. Whether she’s lying about her backstory or not, she can’t be that much older than us.”

“Mmm, maybe. You know how she sometimes name-drops super-old games and stuff? Like Spelunker. You’d have to be alive when the NES was, like, current to get some of those references.”

…Her friends almost never talked about novels like this. Watching them carry on about Nayuta Kani made Chihiro realize all over again how amazing Kani really was. A bead of cold sweat ran down the side of her head.