Time with Anne
“El! Over here, over here!”
Standing in front of the café and waving her hand toward me was a small girl—Anne. Spotting her, I quickened my pace a little and headed her way.
“Have you been waiting long?”
“Nope. I just finished work and got here myself. Come on! Let’s go inside already!”
The moment I arrived, Anne grabbed my hand and pulled me straight into the shop.
It was a café we had already visited together several times.
“Shall we order drinks first? What do you want, Anne?”
“Hmm… I’ll have a strawberry smoothie!”
Yuri or Celian would always order something with a long, bizarre name whenever they came to a café, but Anne preferred simple drinks like this. In that regard, our tastes often overlapped.
“One strawberry smoothie and one blueberry smoothie, please.”
The instant I heard her answer, I pulled out my wallet and paid for both her drink and mine.
“You’re treating me, El?”
“I’m the one learning today, so think of it as tuition.”
“Eheheh.”
Whether she was happy about getting a free drink or just found the idea of teaching me funny, Anne grinned without the slightest attempt to hide it. For a noble, it was a thoroughly undignified laugh—but that, too, was pure Anne.
“Your drinks are ready.”
We stood chatting at the counter for only a short while before the two smoothies appeared. Each of us took a cup and began looking around the café for a seat.
We quickly found an empty space. This particular café had semi-private rooms separated by partitions, so you could settle in without worrying too much about other people’s eyes.
Of course, there had been no real need to choose a café outside the academy as a study spot. For me, though, it had been the only option. After all, the last two days I had ended up studying in the dorm room and then simply falling asleep there. Coming outside the academy was my way of cutting that possibility off at the root.
Once we stepped into the little room, the thin walls and curtains muted the noise quite a bit. It wasn’t completely silent, but since we would be talking while we studied anyway, not having to worry about bothering anyone else was a welcome relief.
“All right, shall we get started?”
“Yeah! Leave it to me! I reviewed everything properly!”
Anne and I sat facing each other across the table.
I pulled the textbook and notebook for today’s session out of my bag. Anne did the same, opening her own textbook and notebook. Seeing that she had actually taken a fair amount of notes—for Anne, at least—made me think her claim about reviewing might actually be true.
“Page 154, right?”
“Yep!”
I flipped to the page, and with Anne looking thoroughly confident, today’s tutoring session began.
“Okay, look here. It talks about the reason the Kingdom of Dilis fell, right?”
I pointed to a section of the textbook with my finger as I explained.
“Ah, right. It did! I forgot.”
Anne answered while staring at the spot my finger indicated.
“Ugh, I definitely memorized this… I even wrote it down in my notebook, but I still forgot…”
She flipped through her notes, found the relevant page, then clapped both hands on top of her head and berated herself.
“But since you pointed it out, El, I’m sure I’ll remember it next time!”
She declared this with full confidence, then added in a voice so small it was almost inaudible:
“Probably…?”
I had held a little hope since it was a memorization subject, but of course Anne was still Anne. At first she had seemed to explain things decently, tossing out various facts, but soon the details started getting tangled until the situation became unsalvageable and I had no choice but to step in.
Honestly, I had half-expected this from the moment Anne offered to teach me. Even if I had missed a week of classes, Anne’s written grades were nowhere near good enough to tutor anyone. It wasn’t that she was unintelligent—she simply lacked both interest in studying and any real technique for it—so her scores were always easier to count from the bottom of the ranking.
“All right, then the opposite question: which kingdom swallowed Dilis and expanded its power?”
I tossed her another question, but all that came out of her was a pained groan instead of an answer.
“Uuuuugh…”
Head bowed, both hands clutching her hair, Anne groaned and fretted for a long while before finally peeking up at me with a cautious glance. When our eyes met, she spoke again in a tiny voice.
“Hint?”
This was the tenth question I had asked, and she had already taken more than ten hints. Giving her one now would make it roughly the sixteenth.
Still, the fact that she was asking for a hint rather than the answer itself, and trying to recall it on her own, was endearing.
“One of the kingdoms that still exists on the continent.”
Armed with the hint, Anne began muttering the names of every surviving kingdom one by one, deep in thought.
She is actually thinking, right? Not just picking one at random?
“The Kingdom of Silan…?”
After a long stretch of deliberation, the name of a kingdom slipped from her lips in a small voice. She looked up at my mouth, waiting for confirmation, clearly unsure whether she was right.
“…Correct.”
“Yes!”
Anne clenched the hand that had been clutching her head into a triumphant fist. Once again there was nothing noble about the gesture, but it was thoroughly Anne-like.
I picked up the cup I had set aside and sucked on the straw, only to find nothing coming up. Glancing down, I saw the bottom of the cup completely empty—I had finished it without noticing. Anne’s drink, by contrast, was still half full.
Apparently, once I had switched into teaching mode and started talking more, my smoothie had run dry first.
“Wait here a second. I’m going to grab another drink. Want anything to eat or drink?”
Tuition, dorm fees, and academy meal costs were the real burdens; the occasional small luxury like this was well within my means.
“Hm? No, this is enough for me.”
Anne lifted her half-finished strawberry smoothie, took a sip through the straw, and declined. Leaving her behind, I headed back to the counter. While I was briefly deciding what to order this time, a familiar voice called out to me.
“Elicia?”
I turned toward the sound of my name and immediately recognized the familiar pair of glasses.
“Class President?”
She had a proper name—Lena—but I had grown far too used to calling her Class President. We had definitely planned to study together tomorrow, so running into her here was unexpected.
“I thought I heard Elicia and Anne’s voices, and sure enough, here you are.”
“Yeah. We decided to study together here…”
“How’s it going?”
“Ahaha…”
I couldn’t quite bring myself to lie, so I let out an awkward laugh instead.
“Well, I think I can guess the situation. All right. The original plan was tomorrow, but as Class President I can’t just let this slide.”
In the end I returned to the study room carrying my newly ordered drink, with the Class President in tow.
“Dilis Silan Dilis Silan Dilis Silan… Huh?”
To her credit, Anne had apparently been diligently memorizing everything I had taught her while I was gone. She was still muttering the names when the sound of the curtain opening made her look up, and she spotted me walking in with the Class President.
Anne clearly hadn’t expected to see her here either; her eyes went round for a moment.
“Class President!”
“Hello.”
Waving a hand in greeting, Lena picked up an empty chair, set it at the side of the table where she could see both of us at once, and sat down.
“I ran into her out front by chance. So Elicia was the one teaching you instead?”
“I can’t believe El has such a loose tongue!”
All I had done was laugh awkwardly. Of course that alone had been enough to let her guess, but the real problem was Anne’s past track record that made such a guess possible in the first place. So I maintained that none of this was my fault.
“Anyway, small talk later. Let’s see how far you’ve gotten.”
With that, the Class President flipped through the textbook we had left open and examined the pages.
“You haven’t even covered that many pages yet.”
Since I hadn’t learned the material myself, the only way to teach Anne—who had forgotten everything—was to work through the progress together while explaining. Naturally that took longer than simply being taught, or even studying alone.
Not that I was blaming Anne. Teaching her had actually helped me lock the material into my own head more effectively, so she had been useful in her own way.
“All right. Shall we start right away?”
Lena rolled her sleeves all the way up to her elbows, burning with motivation. In front of that display of enthusiasm, Anne somehow looked a little shaky. It was a thoroughly unfamiliar sight, given her usual self.
Come to think of it, because of her poor written grades Anne was occasionally forced to stay behind in the classroom for extra study. Every time that happened, the Class President would stay as well to help the remaining students.
…Just what did she do to make even the fearless Anne tremble like that?