← The Studious Boy and the Secret Account Girl
Volume 3
Chapter 27: After School on a Certain Day in the Rainy Season - Part 1
Chapter 3
Chapter 27: After School on a Certain Day in the Rainy Season - Part 1
“Tsutomu-kun, I’m closing the shop today.”
It was Friday after school—right after the chime announcing the end of the last class of the week rang out—that Tsutomu laid eyes on that message.
Normally this was the hour when students, shrugging off the teachers trying to hold them back, would come alive and surge toward the weekend. Today alone, though, a heavy, oppressive air hung over every last corner of the school.
In that classroom, he pulled his smartphone from his pocket and tapped it. He’d noticed the notification during class.
On the screen was a note announcing that work was called off for the day—sent by the owner of the shop where Tsutomu worked his part-time job.
—Well, I suppose it couldn’t be helped.
He sighed lightly, tucked the phone away, and straightened his glasses.
Maybe it was his imagination, but his head had started to ache with a tight, squeezing sort of pain.
He turned his gaze to the window—it was absolutely bucketing down out there.
And not just ordinary rain. This was chaos of the “an inch ahead is pitch black” variety.
Beyond the curtain of water, he stared for a while at the sky buried under black clouds, then let out one more long breath.
As one of the students about to make the trip home, he couldn’t help sinking into a dismal mood.
★
With the first-semester midterms behind them, the calendar had turned to June.
In Japan, this season sliding toward summer means rain, rain, and more rain.
The so-called rainy season—and today was no exception. Humidity included, the discomfort index was off the charts.
On top of that, an out-of-season typhoon born over the Pacific was pushing north, kicking up the seasonal rain front and yada yada yada.
In any case, heavy rain was in the forecast, and Twitter had been drowning in the topic since morning.
“I don’t wanna work, forsooth.”
“Days like this, they should just cancel work.”
“Rain, snow, plague outbreak—Japan never changes, huh.”
“Today… I don’t think I can make it home.”
“Isn’t that just every day ↑”
Class over, the students turned their uniformly gloomy eyes toward the window.
Nobody slept at school. They had to go home. They wanted to go home. And yet…
If the forecast was right, the weather was only going to fall apart further from here.
“Ugh, this is unbearable.”
“You’re telling me.”
The one sighing as he clapped Tsutomu on the shoulder was one of his few friends: Amakusa Shiro.
A sweet-faced playboy with dyed-brown hair—and, incidentally, the man running the whole operation around the notebook Tsutomu produced, known around class as the “Gariben Notebook.”
Warm, well connected, forever wearing a flippant grin—rare for a man like him, a shadow had fallen over his face.
No wonder, Tsutomu thought. He was probably wearing much the same expression.
“A perfectly good weekend, and it has to be this weather. Can’t do aaanything.”
“Why not hole up at home and study?”
“Ahh-ahh-ahhh, I don’t wanna hear anything that correct~”
Shiro clapped both hands over his ears and squirmed around theatrically.
Putting it mildly, it was grating, so Tsutomu looked away.
The climate was depressing enough as it was; he had no desire to let extra junk into his field of vision.
“You working today too, Tsutomu-san?”
“Nah. Day off.”
When he showed Shiro the message from the shop owner, Shiro nodded. “Figures.”
Going up against the rainy-season-plus-typhoon one-two punch, the odds of customers showing up even if the shop opened were slim.
It would burn overhead for nothing, and beyond the customers, the other staff would have a nightmare of a commute shuttling between shop and home.
For someone on the employed side of things, a boss quick to make the call and shut down was a blessing.
“Dawdling around here won’t get us anywhere. Let’s head out before the trains stop.”
“Sounds like the way to go.”
Tsutomu’s responses had an odd detachment to them, as though none of it were his problem.
“Guys who live right around the corner have it easy, huh.”
Shiro shrugged; Tsutomu nodded without a word.
For students commuting from a distance, securing a way to get home was a matter of grave importance.
Judging from the current sky and the clouds’ movements to come (not that anyone had said they’d be moving), there was a good chance the trains would be suspended.
Come the weekend, his classmates usually marinated in that sense of freedom and took the long way home—yet today, of all days, most seemed to be beating a hasty retreat.
“Later, Tsutomu. See you next week.”
“Yeah. See ya.”
He watched his friend’s back as Shiro flapped a breezy hand and left the classroom, then cracked his neck with a dull pop-pop.
Shiro had it right: Tsutomu rented a one-room apartment a stone’s throw from school and lived on his own.
Having your base near school made all sorts of things convenient. Since starting high school, he’d felt that keenly. It was something to be grateful for.
Weather this foul meant even an umbrella wouldn’t spare him a thorough soaking—but getting home itself would be no problem.
So long as he made it there, getting wet was nothing: a bath and a change of clothes would fix that. He had groceries stocked, so dinner would work itself out. Bath, dinner—living alone, it was all his call.
—What’s Tachibana up to, I wonder?
The thought drifted through his mind. He didn’t say it out loud.
Tachibana.
Tachibana Matsurika.
A girl his age, in his class.
The most beautiful girl in the school, champion of the Miss Contest held at last year’s school festival.
And a girl with a hidden face as well: “RIKA,” the lewd selfie secret account Tsutomu followed.
After any number of twists and turns, she had asked him just recently to “be friends,” and he had nodded—so theirs was that sort of relationship, too.
They had already exchanged social media IDs.
A little over 160 centimeters tall. Weight: top secret.
Lustrous, straight black hair that reached her waist. From that silky, glossy mane you could tell her daily hair care had never missed a day.
Large, dark eyes; a nose with a clean, straight bridge; small lips glistening a soft pink.
The features gathered within a head small for her body were laid out with divine precision.
The chest of her thin summer uniform swelled generously from within, then drew in at a cinched waist and carried on down toward her lower half. The beauty of those curves could be summed up in one word: perfect.
Her rear sat high, and the white legs stretching from a short skirt hemmed to the very brink of dress-code violation were slender yet carried a healthy fullness that was hard to tear your eyes from.
She was the living embodiment of a beauty and eroticism that had taken an adolescent boy’s ideals and fantasies and driven them to their absolute limit. A degree of polish no real human being should have.
The girl called Tachibana Matsurika did not stop there. On top of her perfect looks, she was a superb athlete with a first-rate brain.
Her people skills were excellent too, and she stood at the center of the classroom as one of its key figures. You could call her something like a sun shining over this class and not be far wrong.
That said… she was also a girl of many romances; the devotion from the boys ran hot, but judging from the exchange the other day, she seemed to draw no small measure of complicated feelings from her own sex as well.
Even back when she’d tried to get Tsutomu to teach her, she’d been careful about who was watching—which suggested she was putting in no end of thankless effort to keep that charismatic image aloft.
Lately, the moment Tsutomu let his guard down, his eyes went chasing after her. He never once questioned it.
Every other boy was much the same. It wasn’t as if Tsutomu were anything special.
Matsurika was, by any account, an eye-catching girl. She pulled at male attention with particular force.
It had always been that way, and nothing had changed now.
—Friends… huh.
At the wrap party for the first-semester midterms, she had told him to his face: “I want to be friends.” His answer, of course, had been YES.
A few days had passed since he and Matsurika officially (?) became friends. If asked whether anything had changed since then—nothing much had.
She still shone dazzlingly at the center of the classroom, but Tsutomu hadn’t taken any real steps toward her.
After the whole affair over the “Gariben Notebook”—one of the items linking the two of them—his classmates treated Tsutomu like a dangerous individual. Or so it felt.
He had never been especially close with the classroom crowd to begin with, and he felt no need to suck up to them or play along, so Tsutomu remained, as ever, all but a confirmed loner. Shiro was about the only exception.
“What even are friends supposed to be?”
He had once put that question to Shiro, leaving Matsurika’s name out of it. Shiro saw through him in a heartbeat.
His flippant friend, wearing a grating heh-heh-heh grin, had said,
“You and Tachibana-san don’t exactly give off a friends vibe, y’know.”
“Is that so?”
“Yeah. I mean, she’s got a mountain of friends, but you don’t come across as one of that crowd, do you?”
Shiro’s private view—warm as ever, and razor-sharp about the subtleties of human relationships—rang thoroughly true.
But that only raised a new question. Namely:
“Then what exactly is it between me and Tachibana?”
No point dodging when he’d already been found out. He wanted to hear it straight.
“Tsutomu-san, why’re you asking me that?”
For once, a wry smile crossed Shiro’s face.
“What do you mean?”
“Your relationship is yours and hers to decide. That’s how it works, right?”
It was unassailable logic. He couldn’t muster a single word against it.
Ever since, Tsutomu had kept on thinking.
The answer—he still didn’t have one.
—Had Tachibana… already headed home?
He scanned the classroom, now all but emptied of people, but couldn’t catch sight of the one he was looking for.
She was a girl who stood out, for better or for worse. Mistaking her, or overlooking her, was impossible.
Tachibana Matsurika was not in the classroom. That much was certain.
It felt a little like relief, and a little like disappointment. Tsutomu fumbled with a complicated emotion he had never once felt before.