LOST DAYS · 1

Indian summer.

I swung a pen around my fingers idly as I stared listlessly at the afternoon schoolyard from my window-side seat. The faint colors of fall had begun to deepen, their shadows looming closer, turning the leaves on the deciduous trees across the front lawn into a dazzling shade of red.

Autumn is always the most colorful season of the year, and for that, I like it most of all.

The clear blue sky was marked here and there with fluffy, cotton candy–like white clouds, while the soft rays of sun peeking through no longer boasted their summer strength…

Where did summer go this year, anyway? It’s like it was gone in the blink of an eye.

Every year, the question of exactly when summer ends has captivated me.

Some people consider it over in mid-August, at the end of the Obon holiday. Others hold out until the month comes to a close, to officially declare it a thing of the past. Still others, especially my age, peg it to whenever summer vacation ends, while others simply take a vague “whenever it gets colder” view of things. There are people who even tie it to when the cicadas stop screeching from their sentry posts in the trees.

Considering all these points people use to mark the end of summer, it seems sensible that everyone has their own definition of what summer really is in the first place.

I brooded on this: Even if some career politician stepped up to the podium and stated, “Summer hereby ends at this hour of that day in this month,” it’d still depend on the weather, on local customs. It’d never go anywhere. Nobody would listen to that blowhard. I know for sure I wouldn’t.

So what does summer actually mean to me, then? I didn’t get much of a chance to go out during this one, either. Something about the season just never seems to click with me.

It’d be nice if I could go out and have a little more fun next summer, though. Maybe to the seashore or something. With friends.

Or camping would be nice, too. I don’t like the feel of bugs buzzing around me, but if we all whipped up some curry and rice around the fire, I bet it’d taste really special.

If I could just really bust loose and take in everything summer’s got to offer…maybe that’d help me find it. My own “summer.”

Next year, huh…? Kinda far away.

…Ah well. Let’s just not think about it.

I mean, come on. I’ve got other stuff I gotta think about anyway. Besides, it’s already three in the afternoon…

Wait. Three?

…Huhhh?! Three p.m. already?! Oh crap—what am I gonna do? Sixth period’s about to end! Ugh. I haven’t gotten anywhere with this…! All right. All right. Just calm down, and…

“So did you draw some enemies for us yet? Something that’ll feel really good to mow down?!”

“Uh…”

The quiet science storage room was suddenly rattled by a blunt voice. Rattled was the right term for it—it was pretty loud. What was the deal with that? We were supposed to be in the middle of class, too.

As I pondered this, I turned to the teacher’s desk to find my homeroom instructor, Mr. Tateyama, slumped over it, snoring with all his might. About what I’d figured, really.

But considering our class consisted of exactly two students, that meant only one thing: There was just a single outlet left for her whining and carrying on.

Resigning myself to my fate, I turned toward the voice. The girl sitting beside me, her black hair done up in pigtails, returned my gaze with a mischievous smile.

Her somewhat almond-shaped eyes were accompanied by some fairly dark circles along the bottom. I could faintly hear rock music spilling out of the headphones around her neck.

Takane Enomoto. My one and only classmate.

I called her my “classmate,” but the nitty-gritty behind that was actually a little complex. Technically, I was supposed to be in the Class E homeroom, and Takane should have been in Class B. We shouldn’t have attended any of the same classes at all. But here we were, our desks pushed together—all because we both had a certain “illness,” and because this was “special education.”

Takane had a rare disease that apparently caused her to fall asleep instantly, without warning. Whatever it was, it was serious enough to get her reassigned to this class. Not that she ever really mentioned it, and not that I ever bothered asking her about it point-blank, so that was pretty much all I knew.

But with a face as mischievous as Takane’s, I knew what came next. That face emerged only when she found a weak point—some soft piece of exposed flesh she could stab at.

I knew because I had a fairly decent idea of what my weak point was. Takane, perhaps sensing the panic unfolding within my head, prodded me for an answer.

“Hey, y’know, I’m pretty sure you said you’d draw up the enemy graphics today, right? How’s that coming along? Don’t tell me you haven’t drawn anything, now.”

I took my eyes away from her impish gaze and stared at the drawing paper in my hands. It contained none of the “enemies” she requested, nor any other evidence that I had even touched a pencil to it yet.

And why would it? I had no memory of drawing anything in the first place. If there was some artwork down there, I would’ve been the most surprised of all.

“Ummmm…Well, not too much yet, I guess. Ha-ha…”

I tried flipping the paper over as I gave that wishy-washy reply. I was late by a country mile. Takane craned her neck over, gave the paper a good once-over, then snorted at me.

“Pft. So ‘not too much’ means absolutely nothing in your vocabulary, huh? I’ll keep that in mind for the future.”

There was something theatrical about the act, almost. She sat back down in her seat and yawned like a sleepy grizzly bear, the word “restraint” clearly absent from her own.

“This is so ridiculous,” she muttered.

Her act of dominance was as practiced as it was devastating to my psyche. I had no confidence in myself to start with, but even if I did, I think it would’ve just been blown to smithereens.

Not even that was the full brunt of her abuse, however. I could only wish she’d leave it at that, but, of course, I figured this girl wasn’t having any of it. She’d probably say something to me again shortly. Nah, no “probably” about it. She totally would. Had Takane ever ended it with just one withering observation like that? No. Never.

I tensed up, expecting the inevitable. Unsurprisingly, she soon had another question:

“Hey, could you remind me who it was who was all like, ‘Oooh, I’d kinda like to run a shooting gallery’ just a bit ago?”

“That was…uh, me, right?”

“Sure was! And now there’s only a week until the school festival. Are we still on the same page here?”

“Y-yeah…but…”

“Okay, so why are you just staring out the window instead of working? What are you, stupid?”

The twin-pronged tongue-lashing still wasn’t as sharply honed as what she was truly capable of. I really wished she’d stop throwing around words like “stupid” and “dumbass” all the time. It wasn’t nice, using them on people. You’d think she’d be more aware of that, being a girl and everything. I mean, if that becomes a habit of hers, what’s gonna happen when it’s time for her to get married?

…A shame I was incapable of saying this to her face. Instead, I merely groaned a little in reply. It was nothing Takane was willing to forgive.

“So, Haruka, you got anything to say in your defense?”

“…I was just spacing out a little. I’m sorry.”

One week left until our first school festival. This was starting to look bleak.

Our school’s festival had a fair amount of history to it. Around the local area, apparently, it was a pretty well-known event. Or so I was told. The school sunk a lot of effort into it each year, too. I was a bit surprised when they held this peppy kind of “Stand Up and Help Your School Festival” assembly on the day the construction for the festival began.

All this was in part because last year, the school managed to host a rock concert headlined by the kind of band you or I actually had a decent chance of knowing. It was a riot, I heard. Takane was a fan of theirs, even, and she paid for her own concert ticket as a nonstudent at the time. Whether that motivated her to join our school or not, I couldn’t say.

And now we were halfway done with the festival construction period. Each class had their fourth, fifth, and sixth periods free to use for whatever they liked during these two weeks, so once lunch was over, the halls came alive with students prepping food stalls or other structures. The final week before the festival saw a lot of courses either cease entirely or put in only a token effort, freeing most classes to devote their entire school day to festival work.

Most normal classes, anyway.

Since ours was placed in somewhat different circumstances, it was up to us as individuals whether we joined things like the festival or the school track meet. That was out of consideration for our health issues, of course, but as students, we weren’t exactly the most eager of participants in school events anyway. There was no way we’d proactively try to join in this event, either. It barely even registered in Takane’s mind at first, and when she said “I really don’t want to run a stall,” I figured that was the end of it right there.

The expectation from me, at least, was that it’d be business as usual in our class—that we didn’t have to worry about prepping for any kind of festival at all. That was the initial plan, at least. I figured our main concerns would be what order we’d visit all the stalls in, or how many servings I’d allow myself from each of the food sellers.

Until yesterday morning, anyway, I had no plans at all of being suddenly forced into constructing a rickety stall out of plywood and finding some kind of cheap dish I could sell at a huge markup.

“Well, I guess I can’t blame only you for this,” Takane reluctantly offered. “It’s really our teacher’s fault, you know? Coming up with all this outta nowhere.”

She whipped her finger at Mr. Tateyama, still sprawled out over his desk.

Something in me wanted to say, “I know it’s called a pointer finger, but you don’t have to point that hard at him,” but I shut it down with a wry smile.

That’s because, by and large, I agreed with Takane. The reason we had to come up with something on such short notice mostly had to do with a little bit of sucking up Mr. Tateyama did the other day.

“Ugh! Why do we have to put up with Mr. Tateyama trying to earn a bunch of brownie points for himself? Just because he wants to impress the administrator doesn’t mean he had to say, ‘Ooh, we’re gonna knock your socks off!’ Talk about raising the bar for no good reason. Like, if we haven’t done anything to prep at all, don’t go around acting like we’re the supreme gods of the universe!!”

Takane rattled her desk to emphasize her high-decibel rant. I felt the need to pacify her.

“Well, I dunno, I’m kind of looking forward to it. Besides, it’s sorta fun, working on it like this.”

The pouty expression on Takane’s face softened a bit. “Well…whatever,” she said, slumping over her own desk. “You’re the ones doing all the hard work.”

All the other classes were nearing the climax of their festival-display efforts. To be frank, starting this late in the game was insane. We were beyond short on time. Thinking about it rationally, there was no way we could knock anyone’s socks off. I wasn’t sure we could even cobble together the bare minimum for a display.

But just like Takane put it, if we were gonna do something, we didn’t want to half-ass it. It had to be the most exciting thing on school grounds. I couldn’t help but agree with her. I even caught myself saying “Of course.”

Amid all the competition we were going to have display-wise, I didn’t want something that looked like it was put together with thumbtacks and duct tape. If we were in this, we were going all the way.

Still, though…

“Still, though…Takane…”

“What?”

“Well, I mean…Creating a whole shooting game in the space of a week? That sounds kind of impossible.”

Takane had just spent half a minute complaining about the hurdles Mr. Tateyama put up for us. But the one she put up—the “most exciting thing” one—was higher than anything our teacher had.

He was probably sleeping off the all-nighter he just pulled, if I had to guess. Which seemed logical enough. No way we’d make the deadline otherwise. After all, Mr. Tateyama had to program a complete shooting game, start to finish, in the course of a single week.

Even from my willfully ignorant “how hard could it be” perspective, this didn’t seem like an easy job. It was his fault for sucking up to his boss, pretty much, but I still felt kind of bad for him.

Takane, meanwhile, couldn’t have cared less.

“What’re you talking about? It was Mr. Tateyama who put us in this mess, remember? And you wanted to do the shooting gallery, right? It’s not like either of you guys are do-it-yourselfers, so making a video game’s just about all we got.”

Then she glared at me, like a dog trying to figure out why its master was dangling a set of keys in front of it.

I had to admit: She was right. I did say that. But we had no experience creating the kind of props a shooting gallery required, and in terms of personnel and budget, we were working with almost nothing.

A video game, on the other hand, seemed within our grasp. If we had some graphics and a programmer, it sounded possible, at least. Assuming we could stop time for a few months.

“But…look, if you’ve got time to whine about this crap, start drawing! The clock’s ticking!”

Takane clapped her hands a couple times to hurry me along. I hastily recalibrated the grip on my pen. Right. We really didn’t have time at all. After all, I had a quota of twenty enemy characters that’d appear in the game, and so far I had drawn exactly zero.

Two hours since one o’clock, and I still hadn’t done anything except stare at my drawing paper. If I couldn’t even draw one character, twenty before the end of the day was nothing but a pipe dream.

But…I just couldn’t.

I couldn’t draw.

It wasn’t that I was bad at drawing. I thought I did a pretty good job, actually, when it came to landscapes and things. But trying to come up with characters—or anything, really, that matched the “enemy” keyword I was working with—seemed to create a mental block.

All this self-targeted moaning and groaning drove an exasperated Takane to prod at me again.

“What, can’t you even draw one bad guy?”

“I guess I can’t, really. I don’t play games like these very much, so it’s kinda hard to picture what these enemies should look like.”

I tried to be honest with her, but Takane replied with a light sigh and a finger pointed straight at me.

“Look, it doesn’t matter what they look like. Just as long as it looks like it’d be fun to blow them away, anything’s fine. Games are all about relieving stress anyway, so the idea here’s to design characters to help with that. You get me?”

I didn’t get what was fun about blowing anyone away, but even a nongamer like me could see the logic in Takane’s explanation. Mr. Tateyama said she was some kind of whiz at 3-D shooters, and now I could believe it.

But I had no experience with shooting games, much less blowing things away. I had no way of figuring out what kind of foes would look ripe for filling with bullets.

“Hmm…So, like, what kind of enemies usually appear in these sorts of games?”

“Well, for example…in terms of some of the more popular shooters, I dunno…like, zombies?”

Zombies.

The mere word was enough to make me shudder. It made me recall this zombie-laden panic-horror film I saw on TV a while ago. Man, that’d been scary. All these villagers, helpless against the mob of undead that crawled out of their graves and formed giant hordes…and then…

“Uh, I-I’m sorry, Takane, but…something besides that would be nice…”

“Huh? What’s the big deal with zombies? You got a problem with them?”

“Not a problem, but…I mean, z-zombies don’t exist in real life, so it’s just kinda hard to imagine what they look like…and stuff.”

Takane raised an eyebrow at my pained attempt at self-defense, but not for long. Soon, she looked up, suddenly realizing something, and pointed a finger at me again.

“Well, why don’t you base them on animals and things? I mean, the monsters in video games are usually inspired by parts of animals and stuff.”

“Monster animals…? Hmm. Maybe I could do that.”

The concept reminded me of the anime on TV in the afternoons, the one with that kid and the monsters that flew out of the capsules he tossed around. I liked how the smaller ones would transform into bigger ones, or sometimes they’d combine together to form more complex monsters. I remembered being enamored by the show as a kid. In fact, didn’t I draw basically nothing but the creatures from that anime back then? Yeah. I came up with a few original beasts of my own, too.

…This could work. If she didn’t mind creatures like that being the enemies in this game, I could come up with some ideas. In fact, maybe twenty in a single afternoon wasn’t such a dream after all.

“Yeah…Thanks, Takane. I think I can make something out of this!”

I put my fist in the air. Takane snorted approvingly in response.

“Well, get to it! Can’t have any kinks ruin our festival, y’know.”

Our plan for the school festival was to create a sort of competitive shooting game. Instead of trying to reach a certain point total, challengers would try to amass a higher score than the class champion, i.e. Takane.

The reason we opted for these rules was because we had only one prize to give away—a single taxidermy specimen of a fish that Mr. Tateyama spent our entire festival budget on. With that in mind, if even a single challenger won, that would be the end of our event right there. It’d turn into an awkwardly gloomy school festival real quick if that ever happened.

This meant that we couldn’t afford to give away our prize until the very end of the festival. But if we set the requirements too high, the potential for customer complaints unnerved me.

That’s where Takane’s “competitive” idea came from. As she put it, “If a cute girl like me is their opponent, nobody’s gonna whine about losing that much.” From a social aspect, she had a point, I supposed. That still meant it’d be all over if she lost, but Takane was so confident in her skills that, as long as she didn’t go easy on anyone, she’d never lose. So she claimed, anyway.

So, really, the atmosphere around the class right then was, more or less, “We could spend all day counting the things we’re freaking out about, but it’s not gonna help get them done.”

We had to make a shooting game in one week for the school festival. We had no time and very few people to work with. I thought it was ridiculous to even attempt it, but it was weird, how I felt about it all:

It totally thrilled me.

“Yeah…Let’s make this the best show we can, Takane.”

“Well, duh. That’s the only thing we can do.”

Takane grinned at me. I could feel my own lips doing the same.

“…Oh right,” she continued, clapping her hands suddenly. She’d clearly remembered something or other as she looked down at me. “What should we call this, anyway? You said you’d think about it yesterday.”

Oh. Yeah, I did. I forgot to tell her…I retrieved a file from my bag and handed Takane a single piece of drawing paper from it.

“Huh? What’s that—? Whoa! you drew a logo? Wow, you really can do stuff like this! Um, let’s see…”

I’d spent much of the previous night coming up with a suitable title, but now that I thought about it, Takane would be the first person to actually say it aloud.

How would it sound, coming out of her mouth? It kind of excited me.

Holding the paper straight up, the rock music still leaking out from around her neck, Takane gave it a try.

“…Headphone Actor.”

I suddenly noticed the sound of the second hand on the bedroom wall clock, forcing its way into the silence.

Looking up, I saw that it was one in the morning.

Must’ve nodded off for a bit…

I leaned against my seat’s backrest and stretched my arms up. The chair, a new gift for this school year, creaked in response. Come to think of it, I had grown a little the last time I measured my height, hadn’t I? Not that I need much more of it. Why did my body keep doing that, anyway? It made me stand out too much; I kept running into things…There was nothing at all good about it.

Shifting my weight from the backrest to the seat, I groggily rubbed my eyes, my vision blurring out as I did. My desk, lit up by a small lamp, had a nature encyclopedia taken from the shelf and a piece of drawing paper on it, littered with eraser shavings. In the center of it was Meowtarus, the last enemy I had finished drawing. Number nineteen.

“…Nice. Yeah, this works.”

I really had to hand it to Takane, I suppose.

After all those hours spent hemming and hawing over character design, the simple suggestion to base them off animals was like tapping into the mother lode in my imagination. I figured I did a good job of reflecting the unique traits of each animal I picked for my rogue’s gallery. They all seemed to come alive on my drawing paper, although that was probably just the pride of their creator coming to the surface.

As I worked, the whole process grew more and more fun. I could barely stop my hand from moving, it all went so well. I couldn’t even guess how long it had been since I’d lost myself in drawing. It felt great.

“Well, one more, and that’ll be twenty. Man, Takane’s gonna go nuts once she sees how fast I’m going…”

She didn’t look it, but you could actually excite her pretty easily. I salivated at the thought of what kind of reaction she’d have. Just imagining the look of shock on her face made my cheeks warm up a little. She had yet to give me so much as a compliment, but maybe this portfolio would change her mind a little.

Mulling this over filled me with creative juices despite the late hour. Right. Time to tackle the last guy. My breathing accelerated as I turned to the next page in the encyclopedia.

“…Huh. That’s weird.”

The page had stopped on a cow. I already covered that with “Heiferheave,” number eleven, so that wasn’t going to work. Did I skip a page when I wasn’t paying attention? I turned the page again, but I already used the bear on that one for my “Bear-Rilla” hybrid (number three), so that wasn’t going to work either.

…Hang on.

Struck by an eerie foreboding, I brought the encyclopedia closer and turned to the table of contents, scanning the list of animals running down the page. Dog, hawk, pig, turtle. Dahh! I knew it!

“Aw, man, I already referenced all the animals in here…”

Well, that was careless of me. I still had one monster to make, but I had used up all the animals in this book as a motif. Now what? I had already declared to myself that I was drawing twenty monsters before I stopped. I couldn’t just say “Sorry, can’t do it” now.

What’s more, the final monster was supposed to be the last boss, so to speak. A creature stronger than any of the characters that came before it. I couldn’t approach this the same way as the others.

Ugh. If I had known this was going to happen, I wouldn’t have been so gung-ho about combining characteristics from different animals into each one. I mean, come on—Bear-Rilla? Why didn’t I just stick with one or the other?

As my mind spiraled down this nonsensical pit of insecurity, I heard a ringtone boom across the room. Turning, I saw my phone blinking from the middle of the bed. I hurried over to pick it up, taking another look at the wall clock. Still one a.m. Who’d be calling now?

I brought the phone to my ear, not bothering to check the number.

“Um, hello?”

“Oh, I figured you’d be awake. Sorry I’m calling so late.”

It was Mr. Tateyama. He didn’t sound too flustered, but there was still a bit of awkwardness to it. I sat down on the bed and stretched my legs a little to get comfortable.

“Oh, no, it’s fine…but is something up?”

“Mm? Well, uh, just something about the school festival.” He sounded evasive. “Something” about the festival? What? Before I could ask, he dove straight into his story. “Hey, so I heard from Takane that you were working late last night on this, too, huh? So…uh, I just thought maybe you were pushing yourself hard again tonight.”

Oh. That sort of thing. I tried to sound as bright as possible in response.

“No, no, there’s nothing hard about it. In fact, it’s so much fun, it feels like my body’s moving by itself.”

It wasn’t a lie, either. That was exactly how I wanted to describe how smoothly things were going. But I also knew that wasn’t the main point of my teacher’s question.

As expected, Mr. Tateyama continued, clearly having trouble finding the right words to frame his topic.

“Well, yeah, but there’s no point destroying your body over this, y’know? If you wanna enjoy the day of the festival at all, it’s important that you rest up when you—”

“…You really don’t have to worry, Mr. Tateyama,” I interrupted before he could finish. Instead of replying, my teacher gave a small sigh.

The silence continued for a moment, making the clock’s second hand seem even louder than usual. The well-regulated rhythm of its click, click, click was a little creepy. I don’t know how or when that got started, but it did.

Speaking of seconds, I managed to calculate it in the back of my mind once. I only had about 30 million seconds left. That made it sound like a long time, one would think, but it’s weird how hard it was to estimate time lengths unless you actually experienced them for yourself.

Ugh. It’s late. I couldn’t keep him on the phone forever. I decided to just tell Mr. Tateyama point-blank what I wanted to say.

“I mean, whether I rest or not, I’ve got one year to go before I die.”

My illness certainly liked sticking to a schedule, at least.

When it killed my mother, it apparently waited until the exact moment the doctors said it would in their diagnosis. And they said “one year,” so I figured, hey, that’s about what I had to look forward to, too. For now, at least, nothing about it made me whine or cry about my fate. I probably had my father to thank for that.

My father was a fairly offbeat kind of guy.

He worked at one research lab or another, and for as long as I knew, he always played life straight and narrow—no lying, no telling jokes, nothing like that. But it was still a huge shock when he came up to me, right around when I was ten, looked at me with a straight face, and said, “You’re probably going to die six years from now.”

We still lived together, the two of us, but my father was so busy with work that we rarely saw much of each other. So a live-in helper handled things like food and hospital trips for me instead.

That was about all I knew about my father, really, but from what I’d heard, my father had begun to turn a little…“odd,” as people said, around the time my mother died.

Thinking over all those various things—sure, I’ll admit it makes it sound like I’ve lived a pretty lonely life. I spent a lot of it by myself, and there’s still a lot I’m totally incapable of.

I had more than my fair share of middle-aged women I’d never met before shed tears and say things like “you poor, poor child,” so I imagined that was probably what most people thought about me.

But really, I didn’t think my life was all that bad.

Lately, especially, there’d been a lot more to enjoy about school. There were things I actually wanted to do now.

Talking about how I had x months to live or whatever…Look, you could die in a car accident tomorrow, for all anyone knew. There was never a guarantee that you’d live out your natural lifespan.

It was just that…something about the sound of “one year to go” really hit home for me. It meant that this upcoming school festival would also serve as my last student festival.

I didn’t think there was any point in volunteering to run this shooting-game thing if there was a chance we couldn’t do it. Now, though, we actually did have a chance.

“So, you know, I really wanna work hard for this festival.”

Mr. Tateyama groaned wearily in response. It wasn’t the kind of thing he could’ve just shrugged off with, “Ooh, that’s rough. Hang in there, kiddo” or whatever. How could he? If I were him, I’d probably have trouble responding to that, too. Sorry to put you in the hot seat like this, I guess.

But Mr. Tateyama never scolded me or said “Just deal with it” or anything. I think I had a good idea why he didn’t, too.

“…Mr. Tateyama, you said you were trying to look all gung ho around the administrator. That was kind of a lie, wasn’t it?”

My teacher didn’t respond. So I continued.

“You had to say that to motivate Takane to take action, didn’t you? And if she wasn’t on board, I would’ve just said ‘Forget about it’ so I wouldn’t rock the boat. You created that whole setup on purpose, didn’t you?”

I’d actually spotted Mr. Tateyama speaking to the school administrator in the hallway once. How would I describe the conversation? It was…grim. Stormy. The administrator was a no-nonsense, results-oriented kind of guy, apparently, and he was spouting off buzzwords like “advancement rate” and “applicant appeal” and so on like a machine gun. Mr. Tateyama had withstood this barrage silently before replying with two or three clearly hostile parting words and storming off.

That whole episode made it hard to imagine Mr. Tateyama bowing his head at the administrator, trying to curry his favor all of a sudden.

Takane liked trashing his good name now and again, but Mr. Tateyama was a nice teacher. He looked out for us. The whole reason I made it into this school was because my father was an old acquaintance of his, and when it came down to it, he was the only grown-up I was able to discuss my problems with.

Whether it was actually true or not, the only thing I could picture was that Mr. Tateyama had deliberately tried to create a situation where Takane and I worked together to join the school festival.

“Besides, it takes a lot of money to make a game,” I said. “Like, a lot more than our budget would’ve allowed even if you didn’t spend it all beforehand. You aren’t blowing a ton of money on this for our sakes, are you?”

Mr. Tateyama laughed. “Hey, I’m not as charitable a guy as you apparently think. Also, I really did try to impress the administrator. He’s got such a stick up his ass about our class, I just couldn’t help myself any longer.”

“Ha-ha-ha…Now, that I can imagine. But Mr. Tateyama, if you’re putting it that way…”

My pressing him for an answer apparently convinced Mr. Tateyama that the jig was up. After a pause, he began to speak.

“Well, yeah, what’d you think it was? There ain’t a teacher out there with at least some kind of expectations for his students…’Course, like it or not, we got only a week to work with. I hope you’re ready to give this the best shot we can, Haruka.”

“…I’ll do what I can!”

“Give it our best shot”—I liked that term. It felt awfully close to “Keep on living,” in my mind. I suppose I knew already that I couldn’t accomplish all that much in a year’s time. There wasn’t any world travel on my schedule, and I was too young to get married anyway.

But moreover, the idea that I could reach some sort of present goal if I just applied myself enough felt like more of a blessing than anything else in my life.

“Right…Whoa, it’s already one, huh? You going to bed now?”

“Um, yeah…I guess I oughta. I was up late last night, too, and I’m startin’ to lose steam pretty fast…”

Then I remembered.

Wait a second. I need an idea for my twentieth character.

I still hadn’t thought up anything useful.

Keeping the phone to my ear, I stood up and looked at my desk. I couldn’t rely on that nature encyclopedia any longer. What else could I find for inspiration…?

“…Oh!”

An idea struck me that made me exclaim aloud. “Whoa,” responded a startled Mr. Tateyama. “I thought you were conking out on me! Something going on?”

Riiiight. Mr. Tateyama might just have it, actually. In fact, he must have. That was part of his job. But I don’t know…Would he get angry at me?

Well, might as well ask.

“Um, could I ask you a favor, maybe?”

“Sure. What is it?”

“Do you have a picture of Takane I could borrow?”