“Yuki, didn’t you prepare a bento?”
“Uh… yeah, I was in a bit of a rush this morning…”
At lunchtime, Hiiragi Shuichi and Kawasaki Yuki, guests of sorts, sat at the same long table, but Kawasaki Yuki didn’t seem to have a bento.
To maintain his good-guy image, Hiiragi Shuichi handed his own bento to Kawasaki Yuki, conveniently dodging the so-called “shared lunch” with Aoba Tomoyo.
But thinking it through was one thing. Aoba Tomoyo simply said, “Oh, then should I feed you? Let’s share the bento~” and his clever plan went down the drain.
Hiiragi Shuichi reflected on his mistake. This woman named Aoba Tomoyo clearly didn’t operate according to the same repetitive meshing logic as your typical high schooler.
Against other high schoolers, Hiiragi Shuichi could pull tricks like coaxing a grade-schooler with, “Here, have a candy! It’s sweet, so no more crying, okay?”
But facing Aoba Tomoyo, he felt like he was playing some pretentious horror game that left him completely baffled.
Hiiragi Shuichi concluded that before he got the eraser back, he needed to figure out how to handle this troublesome woman.
As he thought, Aoba Tomoyo happened to pick up a slippery piece of mapo tofu and held it out to Hiiragi Shuichi like a doting mother.
“Open wide, ah~”
Hiiragi Shuichi forced a smile, not daring to refuse, and obediently swallowed the spicy mapo tofu, remembering to praise the food after a performative chew.
This act clearly drew Kawasaki Yuki’s displeasure. She’d been looking forward to tasting Hiiragi Shuichi’s homemade bento, the little bird in her heart already taking flight, but when she turned to see the friction between those two, Aoba Tomoyo even deliberately shot her a look like a cat that got the cream.
Kawasaki Yuki nearly bit her chopsticks clean through.
‘What had happened during that long Golden Week?’
‘Was this the result of my patient waiting, my willing devotion, my never crossing the line, and my careful maintenance of distance?’
When Kawasaki Yuki thought of this, the force of her bite loosened. Rather, she seemed to deflate like a rubber ball, still puffed up on the outside, but her spirit already sagging limp.
‘Shuichi was hiding something from me…’
‘No, no, Shuichi had no obligation to tell me about his own affairs. That didn’t count as hiding…’
Kawasaki Yuki had long felt a certain mystery about Hiiragi Shuichi, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it.
Perhaps it was simply because she was better at describing his back.
But if she had to describe it, it was as if beneath his sunny exterior lurked a kind of stern distance.
The distance between hearts was never about how far she stood from him. After all, that faintly cold aura crept persistently into Kawasaki Yuki’s nose like fine wine whose aroma traveled far despite the depth of the alley.
But now, Kawasaki Yuki seemed to have gotten a decent enough answer.
It was like that reading comprehension question on the Japanese exam that never earned full marks. Students always thought they’d done well and couldn’t have done better, only to regret it when the answer key came out.
‘Maybe I… don’t really understand Shuichi at all…’
Kawasaki Yuki was close to the answer, but she didn’t quite feel the weight of it yet.
It was no different from her usual lag in comprehension.
Meanwhile, on the black sofa across from the three-person table, Aoba Toshie was gracefully swallowing her bento like a kitten eating while watching the three with confusion.
She felt something was off, though this scene itself was already strange to her, because making sense of the relationship between these three was genuinely difficult, seeing as she was a girl who had nothing to do with “girlish hearts.”
Aoba Toshie grew irritated by the noisy scene before her.
She set down her bento box and chopsticks with displeasure, and her icy voice rang out:
“You three, if you want to mess around, why not scram to the garbage dump?”
“There are three categories of trash there. You can each sort yourselves in.”
The air fell silent instantly.
Hiiragi Shuichi, who already knew her temperament, simply thought that she had finally snapped.
He’d been saved by her.
Aoba Tomoyo wore a look that clearly said she honestly couldn’t deal with this.
Kawasaki Yuki, however, was genuinely startled.
Like a spinal reflex, the urge to apologize surged up in her chest.
“S-sorry!”
Thus, the first gust of wind to break the silent air was that apology.
Aoba Tomoyo provocatively challenged Aoba Toshie with keen interest:
“Little Toshie, acting like that, how exactly do you plan to rally student support?”
Unexpectedly, Aoba Toshie’s retort came so fast it made you wonder if she’d even thought about it:
“Left and right, all of them are people lacking a ‘self.'”
“Pens raised for slaughter? Sheep?”
“Who’d want support from a group like that?”
“Being supported by a bunch of idiots, besides proving that the person being supported is also an idiot, what else does it prove?”
“That they’re the idiot among idiots?”
Even Hiiragi Shuichi had never heard Aoba Toshie unleash such aggressive language.
It was another refresh of his impression of her.
However, Hiiragi Shuichi didn’t simply take it as mere attacks.
He heard within it a kind of obsession that belonged to Aoba Toshie.
“‘Self,’ huh…”
Hiiragi Shuichi couldn’t help chewing on the word.
Aoba Tomoyo slapped her palm onto Hiiragi Shuichi’s shoulder, naturally steering the fire toward him:
“Idiot? Hahaha… Shuichi-kun, if someone called you a complete idiot, what would you think?”
Hiiragi Shuichi knew it was all for her amusement, but since he genuinely wanted to ponder the question of “self,” he accepted it gracefully, which happened to fit the image of the perfect boy:
“If it were someone else, I might be a little upset.”
“But if Aoba-san were to say that… I’d believe she has her reasons.”
“Cut the act. How much longer are you going to keep pretending?”
Unexpectedly, Aoba Toshie’s faint, dismissive remark struck Hiiragi Shuichi’s heart in an instant, sending a jolt like an electric current through his body.
Suppressing his quickening breath, Hiiragi Shuichi kept his good-guy face on and asked softly:
“U-um… which Aoba-san are you referring to?”
“If it’s me, forgive my dullness, but I didn’t quite follow.”
“Sigh… you won’t shed tears until you see the coffin.”
Aoba Toshie rose from the sofa, crossing her arms in the same pose as Aoba Tomoyo.
Yet the pressure she exuded wasn’t the arrogance of Aoba Tomoyo. It was more like the natural dominance of someone looking down from above.
“You don’t know my sister’s temperament, but I do.”
“If she weren’t interested in someone, she’d never act like this no matter what.”
“But you, on the surface, look like a mummy, so boring it’s deadly.”
“Why would my sister ever be interested in you?”
“I’d bet my life you’re hiding something, one hundred percent.”
“If you’re a mummy, then just untie your bandages and face the light like an honest person.”
“Hiding and dodging… are you also a retainer?”