Because We're Friends
Carl Bernstein walked the long corridor with his face set hard. I did the right thing. Yes. Of course he had.
He had gone pale the moment he checked the piece in Queensman. And with good reason. He had been openly sabotaging them so a freshman side could never take shape—and then, immediately, an article about founding a first-year rugby team appears in the magazine?
Is this a coincidence?
As if in answer to his own scheme, the story had gone up in real time. It felt like sitting down to chess against an opponent he could not see. Stung by that nameless displeasure, he had come running without delay and stated his refusal. Fortunately, the justification was solid enough.
The value of rugby lies in unity.
They would do as they always had, and field a combined first- and second-year team. If the younger boys truly insisted on a contest, he would consider a friendly—not a qualifier. Who could object after he had gone that far? He was certain he had handled it well. And yet—
"Haah."
Carl let out a long breath. A question still sat in him, unresolved.
They're covering the first-year team?
Unless someone was pulling the strings, who would pitch a story like that? And the oddities were hardly one or two. Giving the thing away free, and only at the Royal School, was strange enough; read the contents, and whoever had written them knew every last circumstance through and through.
Wait.
A possibility surfaced. Could one of the new boys be running the magazine?
It isn't entirely impossible.
Carl Bernstein himself had published a magazine. Nothing said a first-year could not.
Who?
Once the thought stretched out, it refused to stop. Tennessee Grosvenor? For a ducal house, running a single magazine would be nothing at all. And now that he thought of it, the first customer through the door of the Queensman shop had been Tennessee.
Surely not.
A counter-question rose at once. Why would Tennessee, of all people, publish a magazine? More than that, he would need his family's backing. A ducal house notorious for its conservatism, permitting a men's magazine?
That doesn't hold.
Then the name that remained...
P—Park Jihoon?
By all accounts, the boy had considerable experience in business. He had run a company alone, without his family's help. Someone like that could manage a magazine without much trouble.
That doesn't hold either.
One look at Queensman and the grasp of aristocratic culture was plain. The knowledge and the eye for art, in particular, were beyond comparison.
Hire a staff and that much could be solved, but...
The trouble was that money alone did not make a good stable of writers easy to assemble. Carl himself had struggled plenty just to build his present lineup.
And that? A boy with not a single tie in Britain managed it?
Carl's reasoning was perfectly ordinary. The problem was that Queensman had been made in a thoroughly extraordinary way. Who could even imagine that Park Jihoon had written every one of those manuscripts alone?
In any case—
Now that my magazine is out, I can't let Queensman keep drawing eyes.
Right. For whose benefit would he lock horns with the first-years? Walking the long corridor, he slowly closed his hand into a fist.
After school.
New posts kept climbing onto the board even as we read.
"It's a proper uproar."
Peter clicked his tongue, disappointed, then turned his chair slowly toward me.
"I thought the strategy was just about to land."
"Which part?"
"The second-years kept blocking us so we couldn't even form a team. The moment it looked like we were finally hitting back, they turned and ran. Completely took the air out of it."
I let out a short laugh, and Peter's eyes went round.
"Weren't we supposed to be promoting the Guccio collaboration? We'd stacked the story and the justification so carefully, and the whole thing got flipped."
He sounded more worried about my work than I was. I was grateful, but—
"It isn't over yet."
"It isn't?"
He stared straight at me.
"Don't tell me... you saw even this coming?"
Saw it coming was a grand way to put it. They were never going to take the hit lying down. I had assumed they would thrash around somehow, and I had prepared, roughly, for that. The confidence on my face must have reached him.
"This is why worrying about Park Jihoon is a waste of time..."
Peter let the grumble out, pleased in spite of himself.
The next day, I showered early and left my room. My destination was the room at the very end of the dormitory. The building was large; that must have been why.
Farther than I thought.
I had been walking briskly for some time. Was this it? I was glancing around when the door opened with a click, and the one who stepped out was Tennessee.
"......!"
He looked badly startled. Of course he did. You open your door and someone is planted square in the corridor—not quite a scream, but the sort of moment that earns at least a short gasp. Even so, he managed nothing more than a blink. Unwilling to look undone, he put his expression away at once.
"Why are you standing in front of someone else's door?"
"I came to see you."
"Then knock. Why are you just standing there?"
"I was about to, and you came out."
The answers fit, click for click. Naturally. They were true.
"Mind if I come in?"
"Ah... no."
It was hardly a conversation, and still he looked more startled than he needed to be. At this hour, with his hair already neatly set, it could not be that the room was too much of a mess.
"Hiding something?"
"What would I be hiding."
"You already came to me with an offer to go into business together. What's left to hide?"
"......"
"You know a fair number of my secrets, too."
The words my secrets seemed to move him.
"Wait one minute."
"Hm?"
"Wait one minute outside the door."
He really was hiding something. From the far side of the door, the sound of hurried movement went on and on. He opened it only after five minutes had well and truly passed.
"Come in."
Tennessee's room was neat at a glance, and not merely tidy. As if flowers had opened in every corner, a pleasant scent rose wherever I turned my head. From one wall came delicate Mozart.
Hm. Everything else felt natural. Only the Mozart had the air of something thrown on in a hurry... but for now, I would pretend not to notice.
"It's nice."
He had a double room to himself, and it certainly looked spacious.
"Sit there."
It was not dressed in luxurious furniture. The white chair he indicated was the sort you might see in an ordinary house. We faced each other without speaking. We had talked about an investment. We had never once had a personal conversation.
"What did you want to say, first thing in the morning?"
Perhaps that was why his tone was stiff. And yet, to me, that tone overlapped with the boy who had spent more than five minutes putting his room in order after telling me to wait a moment. Like Mozart switched on awkwardly, to hide what was inside.
I could not be sure, but the treasures of this room were surely crammed into a wardrobe shut tight, or shoved under the bed. Tennessee only wore the world's most serious face, and pretended otherwise.
Fine. I would play along.
"We talked about the investment last time. There's something I wanted to say about that."
"......!"
"I don't see the limited D-Que, though."
"What?"
"The samples I gave you last time aren't here either."
"......"
He had cleared the room in a panic and hidden even the things I had given him; he could hardly say so outright. He answered with a face gone half pale.
"The room's small. I sent them home."
Put away two packs of cards, and the room becomes wonderfully spacious. I opened my mouth as calmly as I could.
"Anyway, the investment. I thought it over."
"......"
"Strictly speaking, this is part of going into business together, isn't it?"
"So?"
"I realized I don't know you well enough to take your hand outright. Partnerships fall apart even when you know everything. Doing it like this didn't seem right."
"So you're saying we should go on a date?"
Tennessee tossed it off like a joke, as if he had leisure to spare. Pleased with himself, he leaned back in the chair and even crossed his legs.
"Close enough."
"...What?"
"I said it's similar to what you just said."
"So we go out to dinner and see a film?"
Not that.
"I was thinking, if we're going to get closer, we might exercise together."
"Exercise?"
"I've been caught up in rugby lately."
He frowned as if he were allergic to the sport. Even so, he did not seem inclined to go so far as reddening his face at me over it. He cleared the expression and spoke evenly.
"Is this because of the match with the second-years?"
I nodded.
"I heard that was already finished."
"......?"
"Didn't the second-years refuse?"
"What if they take it back?"
Here he let out a small sigh. I had no way of knowing why his face hardened the moment rugby came up. Only this: if I called up the life of Tennessee Grosvenor, it could not have been an easy one. I had heard he lost his mother at two. The death of a duchess had been a considerable affair in Britain.
Which meant that at an age when he still needed his mother's arms, he had likely been hauled from place to place and drilled in etiquette from the very start. Before he was allowed a taste of his own, there would have been a queue of things he was obliged to love. Before a self could even begin, the shape of a man the house desired would have been pressed upon him—all of it crammed into the deepest shelf of the wardrobe in his heart.
What he needed most, I suspected, was a friend. Now, of all times, when the weight of the Grosvenor name kept anyone from drawing easily near. Ducal house or not. A friend shameless enough to walk up and simply speak to him. A friend who treated him, without ceremony, the same as anyone else. Wouldn't the shadow over his face lift, if only a little?
I did feel somewhat sorry to be pushing rugby, of all things—the one he hated.
"If you hate rugby, then at least help with the training."
"......"
"After school I lift with the teacher. I'm dying, so spot me."
"Why would I?"
It must have been an answer he had never once expected. A question mark seemed to rise over his head.
"Don't tell me you offered to invest without even meaning to be friends?"
Before Tennessee could answer, I hurried on.
"Since we're friends anyway, let me ask one more favor."