There was, Yukio
decided for himself, a certain perverted satisfaction in watching
Himekaizen descending to hell while he was doing
the watching from the
outside.
He never told
Kyoko. Even lovers held secrets from each other. Total honesty hurt
more than it provided. In her case doubly so since her best friend,
and his, both were stuck in that hellhole. She’d be angry with him
for being so callous about what Kuri had to live through, and she’d
be aghast he held the same attitude towards Urufu’s fate.
Thing was, Yukio
couldn’t care any longer. No matter what atrocities the madman
playing at being principal threw after their best friends, it didn’t
even come close to what they inflicted on each other.
This was the
reversal
of his and Kyoko’s drawn out shyness from last summer, one that
bordered on idiocy. One that kept then from becoming a couple for a
full two months during which they each knew their feelings were
mutual, and still none of them made a move.
In Urufu’s and
Kuri’s case it was a shared love they both decided to destroy, and
in doing so they kept hurting each other and those closest to them.
In the end Yukio grew sick of watching the horror show.
He’d been on
the verge of cutting contact with his best friend when suddenly the
lunatic five from Sweden arrived and made everything interesting
again. Ai’s big brother Jun who chased after skirt a continent
away, and the love chain trio. The chased after skirt was here as
well, and despite being a bubbly ball of never ending happy energy
Jenny-sempai
was by a wide margin the most sane of the bunch.
Secretly Yukio
doubted if the honorific ‘sempai’ should be applied to the
insane, but they were fun to watch, and something in how they talked
and reacted made Yukio suspect that each of them would easily have
made it into a prestigious university had they been Tokyoites.
The cut-off was
four point three for my year, Urufu had once told him. A high school
where the weakest admitted student averaged above four on a scale
from one to five was scary. With perfect grades when he graduated,
Urufu had merely been one of almost half a dozen in his class, and
classes were apparently smaller in Sweden than in Japan.
Scariest of all,
while Yukio could accept that Urufu’s English was better than
Jeniferu-chan’s, despite her being from the US, that both
Jenny-sempai and Alexander-sempai matched her was beyond the pale.
English was still a foreign language in Sweden, just as it was in
Japan.
At the moment he
tested his own English out.
“Surprisingly
good for a Japanese,” Rika-sempai commented, as she had done
several times before. Not only to him, but to just about every junior
I the club.
“I had a good
teacher,” Yukio said and turned to Alexander-sempai to continue the
conversation Rika-sempai had just interrupted.
“It was fun,
and very cool,” Alexander-sempai said, but Yukio felt the graduate
had his attention fixed on the girl he was infatuated with.
Why
don’t you just move on. She rejected you.
But Yukio suspected it wasn’t all that easy.
They stood
waiting for the water bus to arrive and take most of the club and the
lunatic five to the beach out in the Tokyo bay. With finals looming
closer this was probably the last chance they had to spend time
together for two weeks.
“So,” Yukio
started, “hot springs in this weather made sense after all?”
Alexander-sempai
nodded, and from the corner of his eye Yukio saw Rika-sempai do the
same.
Most of the other
students hung around the ice cream parlour a bit away; hardly
surprising as it was Kuri’s treat. For once she made them company,
which meant the entire place was packed with body guards and Vogue
employees.
They’d have a
shoot at the beach, and for that reason Vogue paid for everyone’s
fares. Kuri must have forced the issue one way or another.
“Sorry?”
Yukio said when he realised he hadn’t listened to Rika-sempai’s
question.
“Those two, who
are they?”
Yukio looked at
Kuri and Ryu holding hands surrounded by people from Vogue, but he
knew the question wasn’t about Ryu. “Kuri and Nao. They’re
models and students at Himekaizen,” Yukio said.
“I think I’ve
seen them before.”
They’re
plastered to the walls all over Tokyo. Of course you’ve seen them.
“They’re kind of famous here,” he said instead. At
least that was true for Kuri. She was the foreign teenage femme
fatale, which made her a lot more interesting than the well behaved
Takado Nao. Cute was the last thing Kuri tried to be.
“Funny,”
Alexander-sempai said, “she’s got a professional make up. I could
have sworn they didn’t know how to do Europeans here.”
We can’t.
She had to teach them if what she told me last year is true.
“And she
actually looks good in that school uniform. That tall she really
should look like a scare crow,” Rika-sempai unhelpfully added.
Yukio looked at
Kuri again. He didn’t know fashion at all, but in his eyes Kuri had
always looked a little like a scarecrow. He set his eyes on Kyoko
from the very start after all.
He let his eyes
wander across the pier. By the rails Jun-sempai and Jenny-sempai
looked very much like the cute couple they were. Almost by their
side, but not close enough to be a disturbance, Ai-chan kept her
distance from Ryu while keeping an eye on her older brother.
An occasional
gust of wind mitigated the oppressive heat, and Yukio followed a
small piece of paper as it danced all the way to where Emma-sempai
stood with her ice-cream in her hand and for once seemed to have
forgotten all about Alexander-sempai. A
second year club member from Irishima High made an insincere attempt
to hit on her, but she just laughed him away in a way that told Yukio
she didn’t mind being friends with the younger student.
You
lunatic five, you’re just another side of Urufu. Have you come here
to change us a little, to make us more like Urufu himself?
Yukio didn’t know from where the question came, but he committed it
to memory anyway. It could come in handy later.
