Self-Introduction
And with that, the teacher's dull explanation of whatever it was finally came to an end. Please look after one another from here on out, she said. A heartfelt welcome to Starlight Elementary. Nothing but the usual stock phrases.
I cracked a huge yawn and gave silent thanks that the boring speech was over. Then my eyes fell on the textbooks heaped in front of me, and I sank into a serious dilemma. I wasn't actually expected to haul every one of these around, was I?
Fortunately, it never came to that. The teacher explained the rest on her own.
"You can keep your textbooks in the lockers at the back! Every locker already has a name on it, so nobody's going to mix them up!"
A row of lockers stood along the rear of the classroom. Ah, that brought the old days back. The lockers had been tiny then, which only made sense—there'd been a full forty of us. Now there were barely half as many kids, and perhaps that was why these lockers were generously large.
Large enough that this little body of mine could have climbed all the way inside. Shut the door after you, and the thing was big enough to put a person in mind of the perfect crime.
"Everyone, please put your textbooks away! And don't forget to write your names!"
The teacher said it while clapping her hands. I gathered up about a third of the stack and headed for the lockers. They were too heavy to carry all at once. Nearly twenty volumes—I'd have to make three or four trips.
"I'll open the locker for you, Hana!"
"Thanks, Yumi."
Somewhere along the way I'd already grown close to the desk mate beside me, and the two of us moved the books together. Our lockers sat right next to each other, so we kept opening one another's doors. There was plenty of room inside, and a shelf dividing the space made it easy to stack books above and below. Whatever they'd built the things from, the metal itself was smooth as glass, as if it had been made only yesterday. Money really did show. Even the lockers of a wealthy school dripped with class. In my day I was fairly sure we'd used the rusty kind, and I still remembered grinning like a fool and using them happily enough, convinced they were perfectly fine.
I stacked the books neatly from the very back. The locker was so big that even after I'd put them all in, there was room to spare. Well, of course. A locker spacious enough for a whole person wasn't going to fill up just because you shoved a few books inside. That would have been the strange part.
While I was putting the books away, Yumi stayed planted right beside me, staring. The look made me a little uncomfortable. Any ordinary person would have been embarrassed under a stare that direct, and I wasn't even a celebrity. I turned to her.
"Yumi, why are you looking at me like that?"
Yumi sniffed the air as if she were catching a scent.
"Hana, do you wear some kind of nice perfume?"
"Perfume?"
"Yeah. When I'm next to you, there's this really good smell. Like being in a forest full of trees? It feels like breathing clear, fresh air."
Ah. So that was it. Early on, Hana and Bora had each mentioned it once—that a pleasant fragrance came off my body, like the smell of standing deep in a great natural forest. Explaining the whole thing would have been far too complicated, so I kept it simple.
"It's not perfume. I was just born this way. You know about hunters, right? Think of it as that kind of ability."
"Ohh. That really is a special ability! It smells so good I don't even want to leave your side!"
Fortunately, this world had hunters, and mana, and abilities of that sort were nothing unusual. If I'd been born into a world without powers, I would probably already have been dragged onto every broadcast under the sun—and for all I knew, sold off to some shadowy secret laboratory, tied down and experimented on day after day.
Once the textbooks were more or less sorted, I sat back down. But something about the mood felt wrong.
Don't tell me...!
"All right, everyone. Since it's the first day, why don't we start with self-introductions? We'll begin with you, friends. Please introduce yourselves in front of the class."
No way...
An alarm bell went off in my head, shrieking. I fell into agonized thought over what I was supposed to say. Could I just introduce myself roughly and be done with it? The teacher would probably have something to say about that.
Time flew, and the kids up front had already finished. I'd watched them do it, so I was somewhat prepared. All I had to do was follow along.
"Next friend?"
The teacher clapped and looked straight at me. I swallowed and walked to the front. It felt as if every child's eyes were fixed on me. The kid just before me hadn't drawn much notice at all—so why were they staring so hard the moment I stepped up?
Standing there, my heart pounded. Having everyone's gaze pour over me was a heavy thing. Introducing myself to other people might have been a little harder than I'd thought. Still, I only had to copy what the kids before me had done. I drew a breath and opened my mouth.
"Hi!"
"My name's Hana. Please take care of me from now on!"
The reaction was lukewarm. Had my introduction really been that unimpressive? I stood there twisting my fingers together, and the sudden silence felt a little frightening. Home really had been more comfortable.
I thought I might cry. I couldn't cry in front of little kids, so I tipped my head back and held the tears in. The children hadn't done anything wrong, and yet I had no idea why I felt like crying. No matter how I turned it over, this small body was the problem—a wretched body that welled up with tears whenever it pleased, with no sense of the mood, anytime and anywhere.
Fortunately, the teacher took one look at me and wrapped things up.
"A round of applause for Hana, everyone—let's say we'll look after her!"
Clap, clap, clap.
At least they applauded. They weren't bad kids. I felt as if I'd barely come back from the dead. When I returned to my seat, Yumi welcomed me, and I was glad I'd made one friend today. At the very least, I probably wouldn't have to go eat by myself.
The introductions were over. Maybe because it was the first day, there were no classes. The teacher said we'd worked hard enough and could go home. I tucked my writing supplies into my bag and got ready to leave.
This was how a first day of school ought to taste. Back when I was in university, ditching the first lecture was practically the law of the land. Going or not going made no difference anyway, and if a professor didn't suit you, you simply changed your registration.
Bora was waiting outside. I took her hand and got ready to head home.
Whether it was thanks to an advertising campaign into which they'd poured more than eight million dollars, or simply because people had already tasted Starlight Green Tea, Starlight Coffee sold at a furious pace from the moment it launched. Three dollars was steep for a canned drink, and even so they couldn't stock it fast enough to meet demand.
The premium coffee hadn't even been released yet. Even so, a Starlight Coffee frenzy swept the market. People hoarded it without so much as tasting it, and plenty of operators were already scheming over how they might hitch a ride on it the way they had with Starlight Green Tea. Banning the hoarding of Starlight Green Tea was one thing; there was a physical limit to how much nationwide stockpiling anyone could actually stamp out.
But Starlight Food had found the answer. Simple enough: flood the market with so much product that hoarding became impossible. The coffee beans had already been cultivated in endless quantities, spread from one end of the plains to the other. Domestic demand, then, could be met to a reasonable degree. Put bluntly, even if a single person bought up a hundred boxes, canned coffee would still be left over. The hoarders themselves seemed to realize just how monstrous Starlight Food's supply was, and from a certain point on the stockpiling began to fade.
And so Starlight Coffee flowed into the market without much trouble. The response exploded from the very first day. The moment it hit the shelves, it vanished at a frightening pace. Lines of people waiting to buy it were a common sight, and out on the street you could see passersby with a can of Starlight Coffee clutched tight in one hand.
Of course, it wasn't yet on the level of café drinks. It was only the first day, and proper word of mouth hadn't had time to spread. Even so, it was a perfectly respectable start. The previous Starlight Coffee, to put it bluntly, had died so quietly that not a mouse or a bird would have noticed. Had there even been customers? It was a coffee with a presence so faint you had to wonder, and the taste hadn't been much either. Kim Sehee herself thought that back then, so desperate to look only straight ahead, she had committed a terrible blunder by putting a coffee like that on the market.
But things were different now, and she could steady herself and watch from a more unhurried vantage. All she had to do was wait for word to spread that Starlight Coffee was delicious. Devotees of canned coffee tended to share what they knew. When a good coffee appeared, people cheered and drank it with delight, and if it suited them they passed it on to everyone around them—which soon enough meant rising sales.
Time was on Starlight Food's side.