CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 2
A frozen December eighteenth came to an end, and another day began.
December nineteenth.
Starting today, classes would be shortened for the remainder of the year. This should have happened earlier, but our principal was angry about losing to our local rival in the national mock exam, so he forced the change while preaching about improving academic performance. That part of history hadn’t changed.
The only changes were to my surroundings, North High, and anything SOS Brigade–related, huh? I continued on my trek to school, still caught up in somebody’s arbitrary scheme, and arrived to find that class 1-5 had more absentees today. Taniguchi’s temperature must have finally hit 104 degrees, since he was nowhere to be seen.
And once again Asakura, not Haruhi, was sitting in the seat behind mine.
“Good morning. Are you awake today? I hope you are.”
“More or less.”
I grimaced as I set my bag on my desk. Asakura rested her chin in her hands.
“But opening your eyes doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re awake. You have to recognize what your eyes see before you can begin to understand. How about it? Do you have a grasp on your current circumstances?”
“Asakura.”
I gave Asakura’s pretty face a hard look.
“Either you really don’t remember, or you’re just playing dumb, so let’s make this clear. Have you ever wanted to kill me?”
Asakura’s face clouded in response. She was giving me that look you would give to sick people.
“… It seems that you aren’t awake yet. I have some advice for you. You should check yourself into a hospital soon. Before it’s too late.”
She proceeded to shut her mouth and ignore me as she began chatting with the girl who sat next to her.
I turned back to the front of the classroom, crossed my arms, and glared at the air.
How does this example sound?
Let’s pretend that there was this very unfortunate person. Unfortunate in every possible way, subjective or objective, to the point where an enlightened Siddhartha in his later years would be forced to look away from this embodiment of misfortune, unlucky to the core. One day he (or she would work, but I’m lazy so he will do) fell asleep, as he always did in the midst of misfortune, and woke up the next day to find that the world had completely changed. A world so wonderful that calling it a utopia wouldn’t be enough to do it justice. A world where the misfortune in his life had been swept away, and his body and soul were now filled to the brim with joy. He would no longer suffer any further misfortune. In one night, some unknown person had sprung him from hell to heaven.
Naturally, he had no say in the matter. He had been brought here by a stranger whose identity he couldn’t possibly guess. He couldn’t even manage a guess at the motive. It was likely that nobody knew the answer.
So now, should he be happy about his current situation? The changes to the world had eliminated his misfortune. However, there were subtle differences from his former world, and the cause of the change remained a mystery.
Should he be grateful to the unknown benefactor, after evaluating the situation to determine if he was now happy?
I shouldn’t have to tell you that I’m not the person in the example. This story’s on a completely different level.
Ah… I must say that I used a poor example. I hadn’t felt extremely unfortunate before yesterday, and I certainly didn’t feel very fortunate right now.
However, if you ignore the scope of the matter, that example more or less covered my current situation. My nerves had been on a roller-coaster ride for the better part of this year, courtesy of the bizarre happenings associated with Haruhi, but that would no longer be a concern for me, apparently.
However—
Haruhi wasn’t here, Koizumi wasn’t here, Nagato and Asahina were ordinary humans, and the SOS Brigade had vanished without a trace. No aliens, time travel, or ESP. Forget about talking cats. This is an exceedingly ordinary world.
So?
Which one was a better fit for me? Which one would please me more?
Was I happy right now?
After school, I headed to the literary club room out of habit. If you do the same thing every day long enough, your body will move by itself, a typical example of automatic behavior. The same as how you unconsciously wash yourself in a certain order in the shower, like clockwork.
Whenever class ended I would head for the SOS Brigade and drink Asahina’s tea while playing a game with Koizumi and listening to Haruhi’s incoherent babbling. Habits are hard to break, even the bad ones, or especially the bad ones, I suppose.
But the mood was a little different today.
“What do I do with this?”
I was looking at the blank application form as I walked. Nagato probably gave this to me yesterday as an invitation to join the literary club. But I don’t know why she would invite me. Because there weren’t any other members and the club was in danger of getting cut? Still, it was gutsy of her to ask me to join her club after I came out of nowhere and practically assaulted her. I guess that Nagato is still an oddball in this messed-up world.
“Wah.”
I was on my way to the clubhouse when I passed by the Asahina/Tsuruya combo again. It pained me to see the lovely upperclassman jump and cling to Tsuruya the second she saw me, so I quickly bowed and left in a hurry. I can’t wait to return to drinking Asahina’s delicious tea on a daily basis.
This time, I knocked and heard a soft reply. Only then did I open the door.
In the clubroom, Nagato’s gaze swept across my facial epidermis before returning to the book before her. The act of pushing up her glasses almost looked like a greeting to me.
“Was it okay for me to come back?”
Her small head bobbed up and down. But her eyes remained focused on the open book and she never looked up.
I dropped my bag and began looking around for something to do, but the desolate room didn’t provide much to work with, so I was left to stare at the bookshelves.
They were packed with books of all sizes. There were more hardcover books than paperbacks. I’d have to guess that this Nagato was also a fan of thick books.
Silence.
I should have been used to sitting in silence with Nagato, but under the circumstances it was agonizing. I had to say something or I’d have a meltdown.
“Are these books all yours?”
Her response came immediately.
“Some were here before I joined.”
Nagato showed me the cover of the hardback in her hands.
“I borrowed this one. From the public library.”
There was a bar code sticker to show that it belonged to the city. The laminated cover reflected the fluorescent light and for a second Nagato’s glasses were sparkling.
That was the end of the conversation as Nagato returned to quietly reading her thick book and I was left feeling out of place.
The silence was unbearably suffocating. I grasped for a random topic of conversation and blurted out the first thing that came to mind.
“Do you ever write your own stories?”
A three-quarter beat passed.
“I only read.”
Her eyes, hidden behind the lenses of her glasses, darted toward the computer for a moment, an action I didn’t miss. I see. That would explain what she was doing before I was allowed to use the computer. I became very interested in reading a story written by Nagato. What would she write? Science fiction, I suppose. She wouldn’t write romance, would she?
“…”
It’d always been difficult to start a conversation with Nagato. I could see that it wasn’t any different with this Nagato.
I turned back to scanning the bookshelves in silence.
My eyes happened to stop at the spine of a certain book.
The title looked familiar. It was the first book of the long foreign sci-fi series that Nagato lent to me when the SOS Brigade was first established, the book with a scary amount of words. Now that I think about it, Nagato was still wearing glasses when she said, “I’ll lend you this,” and forced the book on me without waiting for my response. It took two weeks to read the whole thing. Feels like it was years ago. Too much has happened.
Enticed by that curiously fond memory, I drew the hardcover from the shelf. I had no intention of reading while standing when I wasn’t in a bookstore, so I just flipped through the pages and was about to put the book back when a small rectangular piece of paper fell by my feet.
“What?”
I picked it up. It was a bookmark with an illustration of a flower. The kind bookstores put in your bag without asking—bookmark?
It felt like the world was spinning around me. Yes… Back then… I opened this book in my room… And found something just like this bookmark… Then I took off on my bike… I could recite that phrase from memory.
Seven PM. Waiting in the park in front of Kouyou Park Station.
I held my breath as I turned the bookmark over with a trembling hand—and saw a message.
“PROGRAM EXECUTE CONDITION—ASSEMBLE THE KEYS. FINAL DEADLINE—TWO DAYS”
The bookmark that fell from the hardcover book had a message in Times New Roman print, just like the last one.
I quickly spun around and took three steps toward the table where Nagato sat. I stared into her widening black pupils.
“Were you the one who wrote this?”
Nagato tilted her head as she gazed at the back of the bookmark I was holding out. She then turned to me with a puzzled look on her face.
“It resembles my handwriting. But… I don’t recognize it. I don’t remember writing this.”
“… I see. Thought so. Yeah, it’s okay. I’d be more worried if you did know what this was. I was just a little curious. Yeah, don’t mind me…”
I wasn’t paying much attention as I made my excuses.
Nagato.
You did leave a message behind. I’ve never been happier to see such a cut-and-dried message. Was it safe to assume that this was a present from the Nagato I was familiar with? That this was a hint for dealing with the current situation? I mean, why else would she leave this note here?
Program. Condition. Keys. Deadline. Two days.
… Two days?
Today was the nineteenth. Was I supposed to count two days from now or two days from yesterday, when the world went crazy? Worst-case scenario, the deadline would be the twentieth, tomorrow.
The moment of joyous surprise was wearing off like lava slowly cooling. All I knew was that there was a program, and I would have to assemble the keys to execute it. But what were the keys? Where would I find them? How many were there? Where did I go to trade them all in for a prize?
A flurry of question marks spun above my head before merging into one giant question mark.
Would executing this program return the world to how it was before?
I began pulling books from the shelf and returning them at a fast pace while checking to see if any other bookmarks might fall out. I worked busily under Nagato’s startled gaze for nada. There weren’t any others.
“This is it, huh?”
Well, if I get greedy and ask for too much, I’ll be weighed down and end up right back where I started. It’s a waste of time and your life gauge to run around using whatever you can find without settling on a destination. I have to start by figuring out the keys. I’m still a fair distance from the summit, but I’m starting to pick up on the correct direction to go.
I opened my lunch box and set it on the table, after asking for permission, and ate my lunch, opening my mind to potential ideas while sitting diagonally across from Nagato. Nagato kept glancing my way, but I was busy operating my chopsticks in a mechanical fashion to carry nourishment to my brain cells.
Once I finished lunch I was about to ask for tea when I remembered that Asahina wasn’t here, leaving me dejected but undeterred from my brainstorming. This was the moment of truth. I couldn’t let this hard-earned hint go to waste. Focus on the key, the key. Key, key…
I must have spent two hours in deep thought.
I was growing disgusted with my lack of brains as I began muttering to myself.
“I have no idea.”
Besides, “key” is a really ambiguous term. I really doubt she’s referring to the kind of key that’s used on locks. She probably means key as in “keyword” or “key person,” but that leaves a lot of area to cover. I wish she’d offered the option to choose from some extra hints regarding what I was looking for. Was it an item or was it a spoken line or was it something you could carry around? I tried to channel what Nagato had been thinking as she wrote on the bookmark, but I could only recall the sight of her reading some complicated book or delivering another helpful but tedious explanation, the Nagato we knew and loved.
I suddenly had an urge to look diagonally across the table, and found that Nagato wasn’t moving, as though she had fallen asleep. And it seemed as though she was still on the same page in her book, though that might have just been my imagination. However, as if to prove that she wasn’t taking an afternoon nap, Nagato’s cheeks flushed in response to my absentminded staring. This version of the literary club member Nagato appeared to be extremely shy or unaccustomed to other people looking at her.
It was rather refreshing to see a familiar-looking girl react in an unfamiliar way. I deliberately continued to observe her.
“…”
Her eyes were focused on the text in the book, but it was obvious that she wasn’t taking in a single word. Nagato’s mouth was slightly open as she breathed without making a sound and the subtle rise and fall of her chest was becoming more pronounced. Her slender cheeks were growing redder by the minute. To be honest, I found this Nagato to be fairly—no, incredibly—cute. For a moment I was almost tempted to just join the literary club and enjoy a world without Haruhi.
But not yet. It was too early for me to give up. I took the bookmark from my pocket and held it tightly while doing my best to avoid bending it. The fact that this piece of paper had been slipped into this world meant that the Nagato with the Santa hat still had business with me. I felt the same way. I hadn’t gotten a chance to try some of Haruhi’s hot pot yet, and I had never had enough time to burn the image of Asahina in a Santa outfit into my eyelids. We’d been busy decorating the clubroom so my game with Koizumi had been cut off at the best part. I probably would have won if we’d kept going, so I’d be missing out on a hundred yen the way things stood.
A westering sun was shining through the window as we approached the time when the sun became a giant orange ball on its way to hide behind the school building.
I was getting tired of sitting still, and I wasn’t going to be able to squeeze any more beneficial output from my head. I stood up and reached for my bag.
“I’m going home for the day.”
“I see.”
Nagato shut the hardcover she was reading or not reading and slipped it into her book bag as she stood up. Had she been waiting for me to say something?
With bag in hand, I turned to the figure that appeared ready to stay frozen in place until I took the first step.
“What?”
“You live by yourself, right?”
“… Yes.”
She was probably wondering how I knew that.
I was going to ask about her family when I noticed her subtly downcast eyelashes. I recalled the room that barely had any furniture. My first visit had been seven months ago when her cosmic psychobabble on an epic scale had given me a jolt in more than one way. The next visit had come on Tanabata three years ago, and Asahina had been with me that time. The second visit actually came before the first one chronologically, so I obviously got skills.
“How about getting a cat? Cats are great. They always act lazy, but you get a feeling that they can understand what you’re saying sometimes. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a talking cat. For real.”
“No pets allowed.”
And with that she fell silent with a wistful flutter of her eyes, but then she took a deep breath that sounded like a swallow slicing through the wind before speaking in a weak voice.
“Coming?”
Nagato was staring at my fingernails.
“Where to?” I asked.
My fingernails heard her reply.
“My house.”
After a half rest of silence, I spoke.
“… You’re okay with it?”
What was going on here? I couldn’t tell if she was shy, timid, or pushy. This Nagato seemed to be in an unstable mental state. Or was the mentality of an average girl in her first year of high school supposed to be as irregular as the light curve of Alpha Ceti?
“Yes.”
Nagato began walking as if to escape my gaze. She turned off the lights in the clubroom, opened the door, and disappeared into the hallway.
Naturally, I followed her. Nagato’s room. Room 708 in the fancy condominium. I should take a peek in her guest room. There might be a new hint inside.
If I found another version of me sleeping there, I’d immediately wake him up.
Nagato and I didn’t say a word on the way back from school.
Nagato looked straight ahead in silence as she descended the hill as though a strong, chilly wind were blowing at her back. I was moving my legs in a businesslike fashion as I stared at the back of her head and the hair that had been ruffled by the gusts of wind. There wasn’t anything for me to say to her, and I had a feeling that I shouldn’t ask why she had invited me.
After a prolonged period of walking, Nagato finally came to a stop before the usual fancy apartment. How many times have I been here? I’ve been inside Nagato’s room twice, I’ve been outside Asakura’s room once, and I’ve been to the roof of the building once. At the entrance Nagato inputted the password to unlock the door and walked into the lobby without looking back.
She remained silent as we rode the elevator up. After inserting her key into the door of room 8 on the seventh floor, she opened the door and motioned for me to go inside before she entered.
I stepped in without saying a word. The layout of the room was exactly as I remembered it. A desolate place. The living room had a kotatsu and nothing else. There still weren’t any curtains.
And there’s the guest room. It should be the room beyond that sliding door.
“Mind if I look inside this room?” I asked Nagato as she walked out of the kitchen with a teapot and teacups. Nagato slowly blinked.
“Go ahead.”
“Excuse me for a sec.”
The door slid open as smoothly as if it had wheels.
“…”
There was only tatami flooring to be found.
Well, that makes sense. I can’t keep going back to the past…
I slid the door back in place and held out my open hands for Nagato, watching attentively. My actions must have seemed pointless. However, Nagato didn’t say anything as she set the teacups on the table of the kotatsu, knelt down in a formal posture, and began to pour tea.
I sat down cross-legged across from her. It had been like this the first time I came here. I had downed cup after cup of Nagato’s tea for no real reason before listening to her cosmic monologue. That had been back during a particularly hot transition from spring to summer, a world from the current frigid weather. Even my soul felt colder.
We sat face-to-face in silence as we drank the tea. Nagato’s eyes were focused downward behind her glasses.
It appeared that Nagato was hesitating, as she opened her mouth and then shut it. She would appear to reach a decision and look up at me before looking back down, a motion that she repeated many times, but finally she set her teacup down and spoke in a strangled voice.
“I have met you before.”
And then, almost as an afterthought…
“Outside of school.”
Where?
“Do you remember?”
Remember what?
“What happened at the library.”
As soon as she said those words, I could hear the gears in my brain begin to turn. The memory of the time I had spent with Nagato at the library surfaced. The first stage of that memorable magical mystery tour.
“Back in May.”
Nagato was still looking down.
“You helped me get a library card.”
I froze as I was hit by a mental shock.
… That’s right. Otherwise you would have never budged from the bookshelves. Haruhi was chain-calling me to get our butts down there and I didn’t really have a choice if I wanted to hurry back to the meeting point…
“Hey.”
However, as Nagato continued with her explanation, her description of that incident differed from the one in my memory. According to the soft, faltering voice of this Nagato—
Nagato had set foot in the public library for the first time ever around mid-May but she hadn’t known how to get a library card. The matter would have been settled by asking a librarian, but the few librarians around were all busy. On top of that, she was a reserved, poor speaker who lacked the courage. Then a male high school student who happened to see her loitering around the counter was unable to stand the sorry sight and offered to handle the entire procedure in her stead.
And that was…
“You.”
Nagato turned to meet my eyes for half a second before returning her gaze to the top of the kotatsu.
“…”
That particular ellipsis came from both of us. Silence returned to the living room with no furniture as I ran out of things to say. I couldn’t respond to the question of whether I remembered the incident or not, because her memory was oddly different from mine. I had certainly helped her get a library card, but I hadn’t simply happened to pass by, since I was the one who had taken Nagato to the library in the first place. I had chosen the library as a place to kill time after giving up on the hopeless magical mystery patrol. It wasn’t possible for me to have forgotten the sight of Nagato in her uniform following after me in silence, even when my memory was at the level of an infantile sea anemone’s.
“…”
Nagato must have been unsure about how to react to my silence, as she bit her lip despondently, and her slender fingers traced the rim of her teacup. Those fingers appeared to be trembling ever so slightly. Her unease left me feeling disinclined to say anything. In fact, I didn’t.
It would have been simple to say that I remembered. I wouldn’t necessarily be lying. There just happened to be a few discrepancies. And in this situation, those discrepancies were the big problem at hand.
Why were our memories different?
The alien I knew had run off somewhere else. Leaving only a bookmark behind.
Ding-dong—
The perpetual silence was broken by the bell from the intercom. The sudden sound was enough of a surprise to make me jump while seated. Nagato was probably surprised as well. She turned toward the door with a quiver.
The bell rang again. A new visitor, huh? Still, who in the world would visit Nagato’s room? I could see only bill collectors and deliverymen ever showing up.
“…”
Nagato stood up like a spirit who had just broken away from her body and moved to the side of her room without a sound. After pressing a button on the intercom panel, she leaned in to listen to whoever was talking on the other side. And then she turned to me with a look of distress on her face.
She was talking softly into the speaker with phrases like “But…” and “Now’s not…” in what was likely an attempt at refusal.
“Hold on,” she said in a defeated voice as she glided to the entrance and unlocked the door.
“Oh?”
A girl appeared to force the door open with her shoulder as she entered. “Why are you here? That’s odd. Nagato would never invite a boy to her place.”
The figure in a North High uniform held a pot in both hands as she deftly pressed her toes against the bottom edge of the door to remove her shoes.
“Don’t tell me that you forced your way inside.”
And why is she here? I never expected to see your face outside the classroom.
“I’m like a volunteer of sorts. Your presence here would be the bigger surprise.”
The beautiful face that burst into a smile belonged to the class representative who sat behind me.
Ryoko Asakura had come calling.
“I made too much. It was hot and heavy to carry.”
A smiling Asakura set the large pot on top of the kotatsu. This is the smell you’ll find in any convenience store this time of year. The pot contained oden, which had pieces of radish, fish cakes, and boiled eggs stewed in the steamy kelp broth. Had Asakura made it?
“That’s right. Anything that I can easily make in large quantities, I bring to Nagato from time to time. If you leave Nagato alone, she’ll barely eat anything.”
Nagato was in the kitchen grabbing plates and chopsticks. I could hear the clatter of tableware.
“So? Are you going to tell me why you’re here? I’m quite curious.”
I was hard-pressed to come up with an answer. I was here because of Nagato’s invitation, but I didn’t know the reason for the invitation. To talk about what had happened at the library? We could have done that in the clubroom. I had only taken her up on the invite because I was hoping for a clue or something about those keys, but I certainly couldn’t say that out loud. Asakura’ll go back to questioning if I’m okay in the head.
I made something up on the spot.
“Oh, right. I was walking home with Nagato… Yeah, I happen to be considering joining the literary club at the moment. I was walking with her while discussing that very topic. We were approaching this apartment building and our conversation wasn’t finished, so I decided to come upstairs. No force involved.”
“You join the literary club? Sorry, but you really aren’t the type. Do you read books? Or do you write them?”
“I’m wondering if I should read or write. That’s all.”
Once the lid was removed from the pot on top of the kotatsu, a mouthwatering aroma spread through the room. The boiled eggs floating up and down in the broth were an appetizing color.
Asakura, who had knelt down to my diagonal left, was sending peculiar looks at me. If her glances had had any mass, my temple would have been filled with tiny holes. That was how penetrating her stare felt, though I may have been a little self-conscious. The previous Asakura had turned into a homicidal maniac at one point, but I could see hints of confidence and poise behind this Asakura’s biting facade. This oden probably tasted better than anything you could find anywhere else. That only served to put more pressure on me. At the moment I didn’t feel very confident about anything. I was running all over the place, pretty much.
Unable to take any more of this, I grabbed my bag and stood up.
“Oh, you aren’t going to eat?”
I responded to Asakura’s teasing question with a stony silence as I tiptoed out of the living room.
“Ah.”
I almost collided with Nagato as she exited the kitchen. Nagato was carrying a stack of plates, chopsticks, and a tube of mustard paste.
“I’m leaving. Since I’m probably being a nuisance.”
I bid my farewell and turned to leave when I felt a feather-like tug on my arm.
“…”
Nagato was holding my sleeve between her fingers. A pull with as little force as you’d use to pick up a newly born hamster.
She looked as though she would break down at any moment. Nagato had her head down as her fingertips brushed against my sleeve. Did she not want me to leave? Did she feel that being alone with Asakura would be too suffocating? Though it didn’t really matter once I saw Nagato looking so fragile.
“—Or that was the plan, but I’ll stay and eat. I’m about to starve to death. I won’t make it home if I don’t get something in my stomach right away.”
Her fingers finally let go. I felt a twinge of regret. Under normal circumstances you’d never see Nagato express herself in such a straightforward fashion. A very rare occurrence.
I returned to the living room to find Asakura narrowing her eyes and giving me a knowing look.
My taste buds wanted to scream in joy, but deep down I had no idea what I was eating as I focused on stuffing oden down my throat. Nagato was going at a slow pace: it took her three minutes to nibble through a piece of kelp. Asakura was the only one trying to lighten the mood with conversation, as I was limited to vague responses.
After an hour of this bivouac-at-the-gates-of-hell meal, my shoulders were completely stiff.
Asakura finally stood up.
“Nagato, you should put the leftovers in another container to refrigerate. I’ll come for the pot tomorrow, so have it ready.”
I followed suit. I felt as if the chains had finally been removed from my body. Nagato barely nodded as she walked us to the door with her face down.
I made sure that Asakura was already gone.
“Later then,” I murmured to Nagato in the doorway. “Mind if I go to your clubroom again tomorrow? I don’t really have anywhere else to go after school these days.”
Nagato stared at me before flashing…
… a smile, faint but plain to see.
Dazzling.
As we rode the elevator down, Asakura turned to me with a chuckle.
I sure didn’t hate her. If I had to choose between the two, then sure, I liked her. I mean, there was no reason for me to hate her. She’s saved my life before. Right. How could I possibly hate Yuki Nagato after she saved me from your dagger of death, Asakura?
… But I couldn’t say that out loud. This Asakura was a different Asakura. The same could be said for Nagato. I was the only one on a different page, since they had all turned into ordinary humans. There was no SOS Brigade.
I’m not sure how my beautiful classmate interpreted my silence as she snorted.
“I guess not. I must have been mistaken. You prefer weird girls. Nagato wouldn’t qualify.”
“How would you know my preferences?”
“I happened to overhear Kunikida mention it. That’s how you were in middle school.”
Bastard’s making up crap again. Kunikida has no idea what he’s talking about. Just ignore him.
“Still, if you intend to go out with Nagato, you’d better be serious about it. Or else I won’t allow it. Nagato is more sensitive than she looks.”
Why was Asakura so concerned about Nagato? I might have understood if we had been in the old world, where Asakura was Nagato’s backup. Well, in the end she went postal and had to be eliminated.
“We live in the same building, after all. I can’t bring myself to leave her alone. I always start to worry when I look at her. It makes me feel awfully protective of her, you see?”
Kinda, but not really.
That ended our conversation as Asakura stepped off the elevator at the fifth floor. Room 505, was it?
“I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Asakura flashed a smile at me as the elevator doors shut.
I exited the apartment building. The night air was as cold as an industrial freezer. The biting winds were robbing my body of its warmth and more.
I considered saying hello to the old landlord for a moment before abandoning that idea. The glass window to his office was shuttered, and the lights were off. He had probably gone to bed.
I would love to do the same. Or at least start dreaming. She was probably capable of entering other people’s dreams without even trying.
“You’re always making trouble for me whether you’re around or not, so you could at least show up when it matters. How about listening to one of my wishes for a change…”
As I talked into the night sky, I was given a sudden jolt as I realized the hateful thought going through my mind. I had an urge to smack my head against a hard surface.
“You gotta be kidding me.”
My words formed a white puff that dissipated into the air.
I missed Haruhi.