Heart-Pounding Cultural Festival (3)
The student council room.
"So. What did you make of them today?"
Ueno asked it while working a Rubik's Cube. Every twist he gave the thing snapped an entire face into a single matching color.
Lily, the vice president, answered without looking up, cross-checking the executive committee's attendance sheet name by name for anyone marked absent.
"They seemed quite close."
"Did they?"
He gave the cube a few more careless turns, and this time three faces came out uniform. Ueno let out a short breath of a laugh and stilled his hands.
"The athletic clubs' great hope, their rising ace—and she turns out to belong to the Light Music Club. Of all things."
"Is that strange?"
"Strange to me. Not to the vice president, I take it?"
"What if Sakuraba and the boy beside her are lovers?"
"That's how it looked to you?"
"Hmm..."
"Ah, my mistake. A vice president who has never once in her life tasted a man could hardly be expected to recognize that particular couple-sweetness—gahk!"
Lily kicked his chair out from under him without a flicker of mercy.
"Oh! Sorry. My hand slipped."
She looked down at Ueno sprawled on the floor and smiled, thin and cold.
"Yeek!"
His ribs had met the wheeled base of the chair. Clutching his side, he writhed.
"H-hand? You kicked me with your foot—!"
"Hm? My foot didn't slip."
"A-as expected of the vice president..."
Pressing at the throbbing spot, Ueno caught the desk and hauled himself back up, inch by grudging inch. He clearly wanted to strike his usual pose of empty swagger, but the cold sweat on him left very little room for poise.
"Anyway, back to the point. If the two of them are dating, there's nothing strange about them being in the same club, is there?"
Just as Lily said—if they were a couple.
Ueno brushed the dust from his clothes and dropped back into the chair.
"You mentioned you'd spoken with Sakuraba before."
"Yes. Briefly, right before Inter-High."
Calling it a conversation was generous. They had traded a light word of encouragement—do your best at Inter-High—and that was all.
"Sakuraba Sakuya. What kind of girl did she seem like to you?"
"Full of energy, the way athletes are...?"
"And?"
"I couldn't say. Beyond that, I really don't..."
"Hmm."
Ueno propped his chin on his hand and brooded. Watching him, Lily sighed.
"Why are you so interested in Sakuraba to begin with? Athletic girls your type?"
"Jealous? Relax. My number one will always be the vice president. Cool of me, wasn't it?"
"Bullshit. Say it from the floor."
"...Well, strictly speaking, it's the Seventh Light Music Club that interests me. The lineup is absurd, isn't it?"
"If that's what you mean..."
The band's members were ridiculously impressive for no good reason. On that point, Lily had no objection.
"Arisugawa Iris, Honjo Rena, Sakuraba Sakuya, Mori Yuuya, Asakura Fuyuko, and even Katsuragi Ayane..."
Every last one of them a girl.
No—if it had been only girls, he likely wouldn't have cared at all. Not unless someone had been treating them unfairly. The reason Ueno had taken an interest was purely the one boy standing boldly in their midst: Shin Tae-il.
"A harem...?"
Ueno lifted the Seventh Light Music Club roster to the light until the page went translucent, and tilted his head.
"Don't tell me the world we live in is actually somebody's romantic-comedy light novel."
"What a charming joke."
"Well, either way suits me. Honestly, this one looks like he'll be entertaining."
"Entertaining? In what way?"
"He's the oddball who dragged this entire lineup in."
An athletic genius, Sakuraba Sakuya. An artistic genius, Honjo Rena. And then Katsuragi Ayane of the Disciplinary Committee, and Arisugawa Iris of a noble house. At a glance, not one of them seemed to have anything to do with music. But you never knew. Turn them over from every angle, and some fatal, invisible thread might be tying them together.
"Truth is, just learning that Sakuraba doesn't see things the way those old hardliners in the athletic clubs do would already be a huge gain for us. Wouldn't it?"
"You're taking this very seriously."
"Haha. Power in your school years is either violence, or the influence a single person carries."
At a school run as cleanly as Yuuma, domination by force and the spreading of influence through it were useless. What mattered, in the end, was personal influence—the kind that moved people. To mend the school's broken balance, the discrimination unfolding in the quiet, and the gaps between one student and the next, the student council needed a presence like a star, something that would not lose to the athletic clubs.
"And we don't have enough influence, do we."
"And this boy does?"
"If he does, all the better. Even if he doesn't, if we can use him to draw talents like Sakuraba and Arisugawa into the student council, that's the best outcome there is."
Ueno stretched both legs up onto the desk and set a toy pipe between his teeth.
Bubble, bubble. A little foam of bubbles puffed from the stem.
"Truly fascinating. Let us look forward to our Eve Festival, shall we, Vice President?"
"Ah. Yes."
Lily regarded him the way one regards something of no importance whatsoever. In the end, all of it amounted to this: as student council president, he simply wanted a capable successor brought into the council.
Class 1-7, back from the executive committee meeting, was pure chaos.
The attraction they had originally planned was a cafe. The orthodox choice. The class president's family ran a bakery, so supplies would be easy to come by, and that had been cited as the main reason for the pick. There had been attempts at a twist—a Chinese-style cafe, a maid cafe, something-or-other else—but the girls, with Sakuya at their head, had shut every one of them down.
Sakuya leaned to Tae-il's ear wearing the face of someone fishing for praise, winked, and whispered, sticky-sweet.
"I'll show you my maid outfit at the recording session. Nice, right?"
"I have no idea how I'm supposed to react to that..."
"I'm going to make it really sexy, though?"
"My lady."
"Ahaha!"
Tae-il's face had gone full dramatic manga panel in an instant, and Sakuya clutched her stomach and laughed.
"Do not do that. Ever."
There would be an engineer in the studio. He warned her again, and then again, that if she tried it he would personally scold her for it.
"Heh. You want me all to yourself, don't you? I knew it, Tae-il. You're secretly greedy."
"No, this is before we even get to greed... Forget it."
There are few things more futile than trying to persuade Sakuya once she has decided to tease someone. Tae-il gave up, resolving simply to stop talking.
"Aww, why? Keep talking me out of it, Tae-il."
"Don't want to."
"What, are you sulking?"
"..."
He ignored her as she leaned in, blinking with every ounce of prettiness she could muster, and checked the schedule on his phone. Tight. One week in all to prepare for the Cultural Festival. The festival itself would run three days, Eve Festival and Finale included—a full thirty percent of a month, spent on this. A ten-day spectacle, at the very least...
He wanted to throw himself into practice, but once the members' schedules entered the picture, that was not going to be simple. Everyone was busy to begin with. Each of them had to take part in whatever attraction their own class was putting on. Sakuya, in particular, officially belonged to no club but the Light Music Club, yet she was so well liked that she had to show her face everywhere; ten bodies would not have been enough. So this is why breakout characters are such a headache...
Even setting Sakuya aside, Ayane had no spare time during the festival prep either, not while she was on the Disciplinary Committee. At least we got permission to go on stage. That's something. The other three were, comparatively, the ones with room to breathe.
During a break, while they were sharing the black-tea drink Rena liked from the school store, she said,
"I can finish my part within two days."
"Really?"
"Yeah. Our class is doing a play, apparently. Dress up a few set pieces, build them, and my work's done."
"You're not acting?"
"The script they handed me doesn't have a single line."
"What role did you get?"
"The sun."
"..."
Tae-il held his tongue. For a moment he was busy doubting his own hearing, certain he must have misheard.
The sun?
Carefully, he lowered his eyes. From somewhere below the height of his chest, Rena glared up at him, her face a little red, as if embarrassed.
"C-come watch and I'll kill you, got it?"
"..."
In a world where one second felt like an hour, Tae-il considered it. She says that, but if I actually don't go, she'll be even angrier, won't she?
And so a new line etched itself into his schedule: go see Rena's class play.
"Sakuya, you going to watch Rena's play?"
"Obviously."
Sakuya, who had been sprawled with her head pillowed shamelessly on his thigh and pouring on the charm, nodded.
"Our Rena definitely landed a cute role, right?"
"Um... cute, yeah. It'll be cute."
"What? Did you already hear from Rena what part she got? No fair!"
"I found out against my will. Anyway, okay."
One more companion joined the schedule.
Next was Iris.
True to a college-prep class, Iris's class had planned something modest in scale and thoroughly practical.
"A traditional kimono experience?"
"Yeah! You know, like when you go somewhere like Asakusa in Taito, and they let you try a kimono on."
"Places like that exist? I've never been, so I had no idea."
"Are you actually from Tokyo?"
"If we're splitting hairs, I'm from Kanagawa..."
Iris frowned. Tae-il read the air and did not bother mentioning that he was Korean.
"Anyway! We've got a ridiculous amount of them piled up at my house."
"Kimonos?"
"Yeah. Some get sent over as samples from here and there, and the family's big, so we keep spares stacked up too."
There was practically a warehouse for them, Iris said, shaking her head.
"Leave them sitting and they just collect dust. Such a waste. So whenever there's a local festival, we set up a rental stall and lend them out."
They had chosen the same approach for this festival, she told him with a bright little smile: economical, and still enough to satisfy a girl's sense of romance.
"You really do wring every last drop out of the family belongings."
"Ahem!"
Iris drew herself up, chest out, openly pleased with herself.
"The old fossils back home secretly love this sort of thing. It's taking a headache nobody knows what to do with and putting it exactly where it belongs. Doesn't cost a cent, and they go on and on, practically spitting, about the dignity of a noble house, this and that."
"That's impressive..."
Tae-il found himself thinking that the reason she hadn't fallen apart, even in the lean days after she ran away from home, might in fact have been those elders and their nagging.
"So you barely have any class work at all."
"Yeah. Probably just setting up a changing room and a board with the rental fees. That's about it."
"And your family handles the rest?"
"Probably?"
He looked at her with a faintly envious eye. He did not want to work. Where he had neither interest nor curiosity, Tae-il's motivation simply died.
"Well, good. You'll have plenty of time left. Perfect for the two of us to practice alone."
"H-huh? Th-that's how it works out, isn't it...?"
She had been aiming for exactly that and pretended otherwise, hands clasped behind her back, shyly scratching at her cheek.
"S-so, Shin Tae-il. How's your schedule?"
"Busy."
In the old days, no one had paid any mind to a boy content with his own solitude, and he would have had time to spare. These days, thanks to Sakuya, the number of classmates who acted as if they knew him had grown sharply.
"There's the executive committee work I got stuck with because of Sakuya, and slipping out of the class stuff won't be easy either."
"She's nothing but a nuisance... tch."
Iris kicked a pebble along the ground and grumbled under her breath.
"I'll contact you as soon as I'm done. If meeting at school's a pain, want to use the practice room, or my place?"
"I mean, I'm fine with..."
All at once, Iris remembered Kiriko's recent warning that she had been coming home far too late, far too often. Well, Kiriko will smooth it over somehow. She let it pass and nodded.
"Sure. Whenever."
"Thanks."
"Idiot. If anyone should be saying thanks, it's me."
And with that, Tae-il's Cultural Festival schedule was, roughly speaking, untangled.
"Sakuya, which clubs do you actually have to keep dropping in on?"
"Volleyball and swimming, I guess?"
Places that had looked after her a great deal, and where she had more than a few seniors she was close to.
"No problem with you getting up on stage?"
"Of course not."
Sakuya looked up at him and smiled, soft and bright. Tae-il smiled faintly in return and carefully swept aside the bangs shading her eyes.
"Ah, if you kissed me right here, it'd be perfect."
"Dream on."
"Cheapskate. Do I have to go first again?"
"Wai—!"
Startled, Tae-il clapped a hand over Sakuya's mouth and looked around.
His skin prickled. Worse, the air had gone as cold as the inside of a walk-in freezer.
"T-too late...?"
The instant his mutter ended, like a curtain rising on a play, the boy seated in front of them turned his head.
Krrk.
A dreadful sound came out of his neck, and a blank face, sunk cold as a zombie's, fixed itself on Tae-il.
"K-Kise, was it...?"
"..."
The boy called Kise fumbled a black cloak up over his head, an F written across the forehead.
"Oh, that's Bakates."
Seeing Kise in costume, Sakuya murmured it like a greeting to an old friend.
"Sakuya, you know what that is...?"
"Yeah."
Like a contagion, it was not only Kise. The other boys, and even a few of the girls.
Too low to catch clearly, a dreadful mutter under it all, they closed the distance with perfect discipline.
"Basically the KKK. Couple-extermination edition."
"You explain things way too fast...!"
Tae-il hauled Sakuya upright, sprang from his seat, and bolted out of the classroom. Whether he had sensed a threat to his life or not, his reaction time alone was nearly that of a track athlete.
Death to couples...!
Death to couples...!
Death to the one who stole Sakuya's lips...!
And she went first...!
Ropes and hammers in hand, the students of Class 1-7 poured out in a rush to hunt Tae-il down.
"Pfft—hahaha!"
In the classroom, emptied in an instant, Sakuya was left alone, giggling until the tears came.
"Haha... This school is seriously fun."
Sure enough. Coming to Yuuma had not been the wrong choice at all.
Immediately after—
"Oh my? Where did everyone go, Sakuya?"
"They chased after Tae-il."
"??"
Her friend, who had only stepped out to fetch the handouts, stared at the vacant classroom and tilted her head, entirely unable to make sense of it.