Toradora! Vol. 9

  Chapter 1

  Ow.

  Hearing a voice, he strained his ears, but the fierce gusts of snow drowned out the quiet sound. He looked around the world smothered in white, feeling like he might be blown away. Even when he tried looking in the direction the voice had come from, shards of ice danced dizzyingly around him and seemed to slice at his skin. He couldn’t even open his eyes.

  I fell… It hurts.

  He heard the voice again; it sounded incredibly weak. I have to find her faster, he urged himself. But the sub-zero storm blew straight at him, and he took one step backward and then another.

  Nestled in the pure white snow, he saw an even whiter fingertip.

  He saw her slender wrist, her little elbow, her shoulders—then he saw her face, buried in the snow.

  He tried desperately to move forward. He was wholly focused on trying to save her, pushing his snow boots through the drift that they were buried in. He reached out his hand and tried to grab those fingers.

  But…

  I can’t anymore.

  Unable to reach her, unable to make it in time, he began to slip.

  “AHHHHHHH TAIGAAAAAAA!”

  ***

  The moment he cried out, he felt like he had fallen down.

  “Whoa! That…was…a surprise!”

  When he moved his fingers to cover his mouth in shock, he realized they were trembling with a terrible force. The palms of his hands were slick with sweat, and when he touched his lips, he tasted salt.

  It was a dream. Just a little nightmare.

  Takasu Ryuuji continued to tremble intensely. Every muscle in his body was stiff; he couldn’t relax. It almost felt like the back of his school jacket would burst right open, allowing the demon king inside to slither out.

  I’m glad it was a dream, but what—

  “A-are you okay? How about you take a seat again, all right?”

  Ryuuji raised his face at the urging voice, finally regaining a sense of reality. He was in the middle of the classroom, standing as stick-straight as a wooden doll. He faced the teacher’s platform, where the bachelorette (age 30) Koigakubo Yuri stood. His other classmates silently watched his demonic molting from their seats.

  “S…sorry! I guess…I-I was half-asleep…”

  Flustered, Ryuuji sat back down and covered his face, which felt like it was on fire. He was supremely embarrassed.

  The last thing he remembered was putting his head down on his desk after class had ended. He’d closed his eyes, tired of waiting for the homeroom teacher to go through the final motions that would officially end the school day.

  “It’s fine. It’s all right. Yeah, of course. This isn’t your fault.”

  Clasping her fingers together at the V-neck of her sweater, the bachelorette (age 30) seemed strangely calm as she nodded at him. Her voice softened kindly in a way that didn’t suit speaking to a student who had fallen asleep in the middle of homeroom. “Having someone as close as Aisaka-san get lost on the mountain must have been traumatic for you, right?”

  As though echoing their teacher’s kindness, his other classmates didn’t even make fun of Ryuuji for shouting Taiga’s name in his sleep. In his seat at the very front of the classroom, Kitamura Yuusaku turned around, echoing “Right, right…”

  Kushieda Minori turned around from the seat near the hallway. “Right, right…”

  Ryuuji was sure that Haruta and Noto were going “Right, right…” behind him, too. The only one who pretended not to notice was Kawashima Ami, who was looking outside from her window seat.

  “Now that you’re awake, Takasu-kun, remember to bring that printout tomorrow.”

  Ryuuji noticed the printout that had been set on his desk while he was sleeping. It was a future aspirations questionnaire with blank spaces for answers to be filled in.

  “We’ll use your answers in a parent-teacher interview to decide how the classes will be organized next year. I’m just repeating myself for the rest of you, but don’t forget it, everyone. Now, what do you say?”

  Haphazard replies of yuh and aight sounded from all over the classroom while Ryuuji took in a deep, deep breath. He held his head in both his hands and curled his back like a shrimp in distress as he looked at the printout.

  Who cared about his aspirations? Trauma, schrauma.

  It had been a whole week since the school trip. Even the muscle soreness from his novice attempts to ski were already long gone, and all that remained were the memories. The fun things, the things that hadn’t gone so great, the things he had smiled about, and the things he hadn’t—among those memories, the folder on Aisaka Taiga was especially and unnecessarily large.

  She had fallen off a snowy cliff.

  Ow…

  She had gone missing in a blizzard.

  I fell… It hurts.

  The blood dripping from her forehead. The paleness of her throat as her head tilted limply back.

  Oh…Kitamura-kun?

  And to top it off, she had mistaken Ryuuji, who had gone down the cliff to save her, for Kitamura. In her haze, that girl—Taiga—had told him something she shouldn’t have.

  My feelings for Ryuuji just won’t go away.

  “Agh…”

  Ryuuji didn’t even care about crumpling his printout as he put his head right down on his desk. BAM! The sound he made was pretty loud, but everyone seemed intent on pretending they hadn’t heard it for his sake.

  He inhaled a lungful of the smell of his desk, closed his eyes, and held his breath. Whenever he remembered Taiga’s words, the blizzard rose back up in his head.

  I just like Ryuuji, no matter what I do. That was what Taiga said. She uttered those words as she was being held by none other than Ryuuji himself. She had completely mistaken him for Kitamura, and he couldn’t correct her. After he’d climbed the cliff, the adults had whisked Taiga away to the hospital before they could talk.

  So Ryuuji hadn’t heard her—or, at least, he was pretending he hadn’t. He was pretending that it was Kitamura who went down the cliff to save her, and Taiga hadn’t said anything at all. It was only in his violently wheeling memories that Taiga’s words remained.

  So what was this about his future? He was still caught in the blizzard from a week ago, but they wanted to talk about next year’s classes? They wanted to talk about tomorrow? About the future? His future?

  Without realizing it, Ryuuji’s face contorted like that of a poisoned demon. How was he supposed to think about his future in these circumstances?

  “Um, Takasu-kun, we’re doing the closing bows.” A girl poked him in the back.

  “Oh…”

  Ryuuji quickly raised his face. Everyone else had already long since stood up, and all they needed to do was give their homeroom teacher a bow of farewell at Kitamura’s signal. His classmates pretended not to notice Ryuuji’s chair clatter as he stood up and lowered his head along with them.

  The homeroom teacher stepped down from the teacher’s platform and left the classroom. 2-C was immediately seized with after-school clamor. Laughter and conversations erupted all around.

  Taiga’s small form had yet to return to the midst of that din.

  She’d left Ryuuji behind by himself in the blizzard world. Actually, she might have just run away. She wasn’t at her condo. She hadn’t come back since the school trip. The bachelorette (age 30) had said that Taiga’s mother took her away but that she had gotten sick and was recuperating at a hotel in Tokyo. He didn’t know if that was true or not. Her phone had been out of service the whole time, and he couldn’t get a hold of her.

  Ryuuji scowled even more sullenly. His sanpaku eyes seemed to glare at Taiga’s seat as though he were licking it. The chair appeared to shift slightly in response, but it was probably because so
meone had just run past.

  Taiga might remember everything. She really had said that stuff, and she might remember it had happened, and she might have realized that the person she said it to wasn’t Kitamura but Ryuuji himself, and she might be planning to never come back again. That was how far Ryuuji’s thoughts had gone.

  Even though school was over, Ryuuji couldn’t start walking. He pried his eyes away from the empty seat, but the blizzard inside his mind refused to subside.

  The icy storm from that day was still freezing him in place, even now.

  If he could see the real Taiga safe and sound—if he could only see her face and hear her voice—then he might be able to escape from that blizzard world.

  ***

  “It’s coooooold~! And the line’s not moving an inch~! Phooo~!”

  “But four people just came out together… Ugh, standing still like this is making me even colder!”

  “What time is it? Whoa!”

  His cell phone told him it was already five. After checking that he hadn’t gotten any messages, Ryuuji closed the flip phone and rubbed his gloved hands together so fast he could almost have started a fire with them.

  The sun had already set, and the cars and trucks traveling along the national highway next to him lit up white, reflecting the light. Now that they were in February, the temperature had dropped below freezing. The moment the dusk wind blew, its intensity and coldness made the high school boys close their mouths for a moment. Spring seemed like it would never come.

  Noto held his headphones, which were playing nothing, in his trembling hands (he didn’t look cute at all). His already tiny eyes squinted even smaller.

  “Saying it doesn’t help, but it’s so cold! I guess the colder it is, the better the ramen tastes, but there’s a limit! I wonder how much longer it’ll take?”

  “I think we’ve gotten more than halfway through the line, but actually—whoa! There’s a huge line behind us now. It’s going all the way over to that light!”

  “Hey, don’t get out of line. Everyone’s out for blood right now. They’ll cut in front of you.”

  Grabbing Haruta’s hood as his friend staggered away from the line, Ryuuji bowed his head slightly to the group of students behind him. They apologized furiously—S-s-s-sorry! Oh, no, it’s my bad. No really—and he and the students went into a loop of bowing their heads back and forth at each other for nearly five seconds.

  The line of people on the national highway sidewalk continued past the next street corner. At the head of that line waited incredibly popular, steaming hot, and toasty ramen and tsukemen, but there were just too many people ahead of the three of them. If the restaurant announced that the broth had run out or something, they might just start to cry.

  The restaurant that Ryuuji, Noto, and Haruta were waiting to enter was a popular chain that had opened a few days ago near their school. Noto and Haruta had invited Ryuuji there—probably because of the whole “Taiga!” incident—and the three of them had made their way over. They knew from word around school that there were ridiculously long lines, but they’d had no idea the wait would be this bad.

  “Actually, sorry, Takasu. I didn’t think it’d be this big of a deal. You’ve got to go shopping for dinner, right? Are you gonna be okay? Will you have enough time?” Noto asked Ryuuji as he shivered. Ryuuji waved his hand, No, no.

  “It’s nice trying out ramen that’s popular enough to have a line like this. It’s not like I could come here alone. We made it this far, so we’ve got to eat before we go home.”

  “Ughh, I don’t wanna go home.”

  Ryuuji and Noto turned to Haruta, who sniffled as he corrected himself, “Well, I wanna eat the ramen, but I don’t wanna go home.”

  “Wait, what’d you do? Did you break a vase or something? Did you rip a hanging scroll?”

  “Did you break your gramps’s bonsai? Did you draw eyebrows on your dog?”

  “My gramps already kicked the bucket a while ago, and I don’t have a dog. It’s more serious than that…like, it makes me sad to say it myself, but I’m an idiot, right…”

  Yeah, we know, Ryuuji and Noto nodded vigorously.

  “And I’ve got super bad grades, right…and I need to talk to my parents about this future aspiration stuff, and that’s really been weighing on me…”

  Ryuuji sighed as he recalled the printout. Haruta and he exchanged looks that cried, I don’t wanna.

  Meanwhile, Noto seemed quite optimistic about it.

  “It’s not like we really have to worry about it until next year’s exam season,” he said. “All they’re using it for right now is to split up the classes, anyway.”

  Noto looked up at Haruta, whose nose was running.

  “Come to think of it,” he said, “are you planning on doing the humanities course? Or are you trying for the science course?”

  “Uh…I’m not even thinking about which course to take… I might not even graduate… Yuri-chan’s been telling me this for a while, but I really might not even graduate at this rate… She even went out of her way to call my place this time. When she told them that, my parents got all down. Well, I guess maybe the humanities course would be better. If I did the science course, I’d get in trouble with all the math eventually. You’re definitely gonna be in the humanities course, right, Noto-chi?”

  Noto nodded. He was a strange specimen whose only natural aptitude was in language.

  “Yeah. So, I’ll get into a literature department somewhere, sneak into a publishing company, edit a music magazine, and eventually become a freelancer! I’m gonna become a review writer. I can’t imagine doing anything else.”

  “Whoa, you’ve been saying that for a while, haven’t you, Noto-chi~? I’d be happy just graduating. If I could get a recommendation, I might try college, but I don’t really care about majoring in anything. I guess if nothing else, I could just help out at my dad’s work.”

  “What do your parents do again, Haruta?”

  “Interiors.”

  Interiors…?

  “My dad’s, like, an artisan. It’s so cool. Plus, I heard they make a killing.”

  He means interior decoration… After figuring out what Haruta was talking about, Ryuuji stared at them both.

  “This is kind of rude, but I like…didn’t expect you both to actually be thinking about the future. I kind of feel like I’ve been left behind.”

  “What? What are you talking about?” Noto breathed white out of his nose and jokingly hit Ryuuji’s shoulders (it wasn’t cute). “You’ve got a good head, Takasu, so you don’t gotta worry about the future. You’re good at math, and you’re in the science course, right? You and Master Kitamura have probably got the national selection in the bag.”

  The high school they went to was unofficially considered a college-bound school. Every student there was expected to go to college. When they became third years, they were divided into three science classes and three literature classes, making six classes in total. Those with the best grades would be put into the national selection track, which was divided into two classes (one for the sciences and one for humanities), limited to twenty-five students each. In the past, students who did well would just go to local public colleges, but there were a lot of people who got into selective private schools now. Kanou Sumire, who went overseas before graduating, had been in the school’s national selection science course.

  “But I’ve heard rumors that the national selection course goes pretty fast,” said Ryuuji. “They apparently cover everything we’re supposed to learn in our third year in one semester, and they just study for exams or something after that. I think I could get in with my grades…but I’m not sure about it. I’m not even sure I want to go to college, so I feel like the spot would be better going to someone else.”

  “What?! You’re not going to college with your grades?! Are you going straight into the workforce?!”

  Noto sounded hysterical, surprising Ryuuji.

  “Well, my family just hasn’t
got any money. It’s not like I want to go to a particular college or do anything specific… I’m not against studying, so I wouldn’t mind being a student for four more years. So I was thinking, why not work and save up money for now and then go to college later?”

  “It’s not like you haven’t got any money. Your mom’s been running her shop forever, hasn’t she?”

  “It’s owned by somebody else. She just works there. And it’s not like she can work there forever… But ever since the high school entrance exams, my mom’s been telling me, ‘Ryuu-chan, you’re going to go to college, so you have to go to a college-bound school. ☆’”

  Crossing his arms together, Noto turned his face up to the dark skies. “Wait, Takasu, your nickname is Ryuu-chan…”

  “Gross, right?”

  As they talked, the line slowly made its way forward without them noticing. Haruta pushed at their backs.

  “Okay, okay, you two, we’re moving forward—forward.”

  “Anyway, I guess I’m not going to be in the same class as you next year, Takasu. I’m going to be with Haruta in the humanities track, so there’s a chance the two of us might be in the same class, but…right, that means we’re going to be separated from Master Kitamura, too.”

  “Take another step forward. It’s cold, so let’s huddle together. Ahh, it’d be such a bummer if I got separated from Noto-chi, too, and left all alone. Let’s stick together like this even if we end up in different classes. I wonder what’ll happen with the girls? Taka-chan, did you ask?”

  “Ask what…?”

  “Kushieda, of course. Is she in the humanities course? She looks like she would be, just judging by her face.”

  “I think she’s probably humanities. Ta—” He tried to answer Haruta’s question as though nothing was up. “Taiga mentioned something about that at some point.”

  It was probably because of the strong wind that blew at him and the chill that seemed to pierce right to his bones that he couldn’t get his mouth to move properly. I see, Haruta quietly murmured next to him. Noto nodded.

  “Then it’s settled, Takasu. You’re going to be in a different class from Miss Kushieda. That must hurt. Actually, how’ve things been with her lately? You haven’t really been talking about her much.”