Toradora! Vol. 7 Page 11

The one who came up to him, making him automatically want to draw back in desperation, was Maya. Nanako and Ami wore faint, sly smirks as they hung behind Maya, who was also smiling, and seemed to be most spitefully enjoying what was happening. As she came closer and closer, he felt like he could see “Maruo” written in her right eye and “Tiger” in her left, and on her forehead. Frankly, he considered the invitation from the trio of beautiful girls from 2-C a slight—no—a huge pain.

  He replied without thinking. “Uh, well…sorry, I’ve got something I need to do.”

  That was a lie.

  “What?! Really?! We can wait for whatever it is!”

  “No no, I need to go to the post office.”

  “Then we’ll go with you! And then we can go to lunch!”

  “I need to grab some packages at Taiga’s place to take over there. If you’d be willing to invite Taiga, too, then it’d be okay.”

  Like it’d ever be okay?! said her right eye. Read the mood! said her left. Maya spoke to him eloquently with just her eyes, but she closed her mouth and retreated without being able to do anything. She pushed up her nicely-dyed, pretty, long hair as she said, “I got it. But next time, you definitely need to talk with me, okay? The two of us are bound by fate in a way that no one else knows. We’re badgers in the same hole…”

  She dropped a whispered secret right into Ryuuji’s ear. He felt that since he hadn’t immediately addressed Maya’s misunderstanding, it would probably bring a storm of troubles on him in the not-too-distant future. On that day, though, he didn’t have the energy to deal with it.

  Well, see ya! He waved a hand at the beautiful trio hurriedly and had Taiga take her bag. She was dumbfounded as he pushed her so that they could escape into the hallway.

  They headed down the stairs together toward the exit side by side and Taiga glanced up at Ryuuji’s face.

  “What’s with you lying like that? Actually, what’s with that valley girl acting like she knows Kitamura-kun? What’s she trying to make you do? Oh, pretend that didn’t happen. We’ll redo this. I wonder what that f-friendly Kihara-san is up to.”

  “Who knows? It doesn’t matter, so let’s go to the post office. If we go, then it won’t be a lie.”

  Taiga narrowed her eyes for a moment as though she really was annoyed, but it seemed like she couldn’t find a way to refuse Ryuuji’s pushing while still being a “good girl.”

  “Mergh…” she groaned in a low voice, like a cow. She gave up and started heading home with Ryuuji.

  “Were…you thinking of taking these all by yourself?”

  “I was, why? I did it last year. I had one cart in each hand.”

  Rattle rattle, creak creak. The wheels of the grating cart transferred the holes and dimples from the asphalt to his hands. Taiga and Ryuuji each had one and pushed as they walked. It felt as though they were competing to see who would fold under the weight of the packages first.

  Even normally, walking from the corner of the street they lived on to the post office would take more than fifteen minutes. Partway through, there was a harsh upward slope, a twisty and windy sudden downward slope called the “serpent hill” that was really tight, and then there was a promenade. Incidentally, on that day, the northern wind was blowing cold and strong enough to make their throats grow numb. It was so cold that he couldn’t fully open his eyes.

  He couldn’t have even guessed he would have been in these straits, carrying so many packages over that road. He wavered between being glad he offered to help and considering whether he offered too quickly. No matter how he felt and how close he was to whining, Taiga was also absorbed in pulling a cart a little ahead of him that was just as loaded up as his. Below her coat, the hem of her long dress moved in the wind and the heels of her boots rang out.

  When Ryuuji had changed and gone to her condo, Taiga had already snugly, though clumsily, tied the heavy packages down onto the cart with packing string. The pile of packages was heavy and large but wrapped in pretty paper.

  “So, what is this? What are these packages?”

  “I’m going to be sending them out. See, we’re here. Careful of the stairs, up we go—”

  Heave ho! They pulled the heavy carts towards the entrance of the post office they had finally made their way to. They clumsily crab-walked up the three flights of stairs. Far from being a barrier-free world, the door wasn’t even automatic, and Taiga could only rudely push it open with her butt while going backwards and holding her cart. Ryuuji had been praying they would get there, so he didn’t have the right to tell her off. It really had been an arduous journey.

  They had finally made it into the small post office.

  “Huh?! What’s with this line?!”

  “Whoa…looks like everyone’s dead tired…”

  People young and old, male and female, filled the office in its confusion. It might have been because the end of the year was coming, or because it was the season for gifts, or maybe because it was right in the middle of when offices took their lunch breaks, but the small area was filled with people to the point it was suffocating. In the worst-case scenario, it was the type of rush hour where someone might catch a cold.

  However, no one was in line at the single delivery window. Oh, that’s not bad. Ryuuji approached it but was held back by the staff. They were told to take a number from the machine, and when he ripped one off, the digital numbers told them that they were the seventh in line. Why did they need to wait so long just to prepare stuff for delivery?

  “Ahh, we got here at a bad time. I guess we can only sit down on the sofas and wait… There isn’t even a place to sit.”

  “Oh well. You wait and watch the stuff over here for a while. I don’t have packing slips, so I’m going to fill them out while we have time.”

  All right, Ryuuji thought. He pushed the two carts to the wall and leaned his stiffening back against it as he watched Taiga’s long skirt flutter when she turned around. He thought he might re-tie the strings on the packages while he was waiting and reached out to the hard knots.

  “…”

  Without thinking, he stopped.

  What is this? he accidentally said out loud.

  He hadn’t meant to look. He had seen it anyway. He saw it on the giant boxes wrapped in very Christmas-y wrapping paper that were even beautifully tied with bows. He had seen it already had a packing slip on it.

  The destination was for a high-class district in Tokyo’s heart. The addressee was Aisaka Rikuro-sama. It couldn’t be, he thought. He found another box that looked similar. This time, he had a firm purpose when he checked it. On it was written the same address and the addressee Aisaka Yuu-sama.

  “Hey, could you put this on the biggest one at the bottom…what?”

  “What is this… Why are you sending these to them?”

  He didn’t have the right to complain. He wasn’t in the place to. He knew that, but he couldn’t just silently stand by. He couldn’t not question it. He was so shaken that he almost felt dizzy, but in front of his eyes, Taiga didn’t change her expression by a beat.

  “I could have sent it from the department store, but I wanted to put a card in it and things from other stores, so I decided to send it myself. I bought a zip-up knitted jacket for playing golf at the department store. I got them in matching gray and pink from a brand that I think they’d like. I also got Mariage Frères black tea and an earthenware cup that seemed good for beer, and then—”

  “That’s not—”

  His voice stuck in his throat and he coughed. He tried again.

  “That’s not it! Is this for your old man and your stepmom? Christmas presents? Are you serious?! Are you out of your mind?! You’re not thinking of trying to make up again, are you?!”

  “If it weren’t Christmas, I would have beat you up for looking. But I’m a good girl, so I’ll forgive you. These are just presents I’m sending home to my parents, and I’m serious and in my right mind. Is that all?”

  “Why are you doing this?!”
>
  “Because it’s Christmas. And it’s my parents. You know what, this is supposed to be a secret, but I got presents for you and Ya-chan, too. That’s right. That other day on Sunday, I said I’d be studying at home, but I really went around the department store, and—”

  “That’s not what we’re talking about!”

  At Ryuuji’s voice, Taiga stopped for a moment. It didn’t seem like she had suddenly been overpowered by his loud voice. Ryuuji was still shaken, but before his eyes, Taiga actually rather quietly and calmly narrowed her eyes. Her breathing was quiet and, as though she were trying to teach him how to have a reasonable conversation, her voice was low.

  “I really do understand what you’re trying to say. But right now, I don’t want to listen to that. That’s why I didn’t want you to come.”

  This time, Ryuuji was silent, and it also wasn’t because he had been overpowered, either.

  So she really did understand. If she understood, then why would she do this? He couldn’t organize the questions that overflowed from his throat, and his words wouldn’t come out. Why Taiga, why are you doing this?

  Regardless of how many times she claimed it was because it was Christmas, he couldn’t believe that she would give gifts to a father who had abandoned her and a stepmother who had been the reason for her abandonment. They betrayed and hurt her over and over and, as a natural consequence, left her completely isolated on a daily basis. They practically loathed and hated each other, so why was she being friendly to them just because it was Christmas? Why was she putting on this performance, purposefully feigning a good relationship, and sending them presents? If it were some sort of theatrical version of sarcasm, he might have been able to understand it.

  However, he couldn’t possibly accept “Because it’s Christmas” as a reason. Even Ryuuji felt that he had been betrayed by Taiga’s father. So why was Taiga doing this?

  It seemed that Taiga had decided to table it. She took a small breath and calmly continued with her work. With her small, pale child’s hands, she slapped the packing slips that she had filled out onto the tops of the boxes. He found those slips strange, too.

  The addresses Taiga had written were in beautiful cursive, so he almost couldn’t tell what language they were in at first glance. When he looked really, really closely, the destination was Tokyo, written in English. The sender, however, wasn’t Aisaka Taiga and didn’t contain the address of the street they were on. Instead, there was a name that started with an S written out in English.

  “Santa…Claus…”

  “It’s for volunteer work. Or something like that. It’s our turn. If you’re not upset by it, could you help bring over the packages?”

  The older man at the post office window read back each delivery address in order to confirm they were correct. Several of them were addressed to churches and child welfare services.

  ***

  She said that the all-girls school near her parents’ house that she attended since she was in elementary was Catholic.

  “I didn’t get into the high school, though. I got cut for bad behavior.”

  When Ryuuji heard the name of the school, which was well known widely in the world as the place daughters of rich families went, the hand Ryuuji was using to eat his seven hundred eighty-yen pasta (with a drink, salad, and lunch soup) unintentionally stopped in its tracks. Taiga, who also was eating the same pasta in front of his eyes, continued without noticing his expression.

  “Volunteering was essential to the school, so we had to go around to churches and institutions with the sisters. Then we’d go help with chores and show the—I don’t like to call them this—but we would show the less fortunate kids how to play games. The packages from earlier are things I’m sending to the places I visited back then. They’re all places with kids who can’t live with their parents. I send them toys, candy, books, manga, sports equipment, dictionaries, reference books, encyclopedias, themed stationery… Of course, even a good girl can’t send presents to the whole world, and I don’t want to get caught up in any weird fraud schemes, so I do whatever is within my means for places that I know and trust.”

  “So less fortunate kids come right after your parents. Hmm…”

  He knew that Taiga was looking at him, but he didn’t intend to stay silent. He didn’t want to blame her or stop her from what she was doing, though.

  “Sorry, but I don’t get it. I don’t get what you’re trying to do.”

  There was just something he had to say.

  It was just too unlike the “Aisaka Taiga” he knew. It felt wrong to him—it didn’t feel wrong in a moral sense, but it just didn’t sit right with him, and he couldn’t understand. It seemed like she was purposefully acting weird, and it seemed like an obvious lie, so he couldn’t help but ask what her true intentions were.

  Taiga was stubborn, arrogant, and conceited. She was supposed to be cocky as the terrifying, strongest beast, the Palmtop Tiger. At the same time, she couldn’t lie, didn’t know how to put on an act, and was clumsy to the point of absurdity—that was Aisaka Taiga. When Taiga had told him “I’m going to be a good girl until Christmas,” he believed her, though he didn’t get her reasoning. He thought that it would be a good thing for what it was.

  Honestly, since then Taiga hadn’t gotten into fights with anyone—even Ami—she hadn’t rampaged, and she studied for tests as she earnestly prepared for the party with the others. It had gotten to the point where she gained the trust of those around her, and things seemed to be going well. Ryuuji himself was also no longer at the mercy of Taiga’s unreasonableness, stubbornness, or jeering. He had his share of calm days. Then, when it came to Kitamura, Taiga had gotten close enough to her crush to the point that it made his chest stir in a way he didn’t understand.

  But he thought that this—that she was doing something like this—was overdoing it, no matter what the circumstances were. This was too different from Taiga’s regular self. To be frank, he thought it was an obvious sham and beyond the scope of reason.

  Taiga took a spoonful of the somewhat tasteless soup from the lunch set and breathed out a sigh. Normally, whenever Ryuuji was being a busybody and nagging at her, Taiga would have showered him in jeers like, “You yappy dog!” She probably would have double-slapped him and that would have been the end of it, but it seemed that Taiga intended to continue her uncanny act. Putting aside the topic of her parents, she was slow to make her preliminary remarks.

  “It’s because I want to show them that someone’s watching.”

  She pushed up her long hair, which flowed over her turtleneck sweater. She wiped off the parsley on her lips with a paper napkin and started explaining it to him.

  “Christmas is an opportunity for that. Even if you don’t have parents to raise you, even if you don’t believe in a god, even if you don’t believe in Santa, someone is still watching—that’s what I want to tell them. I want to tell them that when Christmas comes, that there really is someone named Santa Claus who sends them piles of toys and candy. I want to show them that there really is someone in the world thinking about them… I want them to believe, they want to believe…that’s…satisfying enough for me. Right. Basically, it’s just for my own satisfaction. That’s it.”

  She might have been mocking herself with her gentle smile. Taiga shrugged her shoulders as she grinned and poked at the bacon in her pasta.

  “Hypocrite. Self-righteous. That’s exactly what I am. I already know. You don’t need to remind me. I’m not doing this for the kids. I’m just satisfying my own desire to do it. I pretend to be a good girl like this for myself, because I want to believe. I want to believe that someone, somewhere is really watching me. For me, that’s Santa.”

  “You were going on and on about Santa earlier… You were serious about that?”

  “It’s silly, right?”

  He couldn’t reply to the look she gave him as she ate her bacon. She was even smiling faintly, and her eyes were lit up bright.

  “I actually,
really love Christmas. The streets, the stores—everything, everywhere is glittering and bright and pretty… Everyone seems to be enjoying themselves. To me, it just feels like happiness is in the air, it’s here and there, and it’s like it’s overflowing, and everything seems whole. I wonder whether I could become part of that, too. If only I could be part of that happy scene—I would do good things and be a good girl. I want to become another happy smile under the lights of the streets during Christmas. And also—”

  What could anyone say to Taiga after seeing her face, after seeing the look that quivered in the back of her half-closed eyes? What could anyone say to her? Taiga’s voice, which was almost a whisper to herself, was so faint and hoarse it was almost swallowed by the noise of the restaurant.

  “And also, I’ve actually really met Santa before. Well, it might have really just been a dream…but I still have the memory. It was when I was really little. My mom and dad were still at home and on the night of Christmas Eve, I was sleeping under the tree in the living room. I think I must have been waiting for Santa. I woke up when it suddenly got cold, and I saw that it had started snowing outside. So I got up, and when I went to the window…there he was. Santa was right outside. I was so surprised. I opened the window for him. Santa came in from the window and drank the milk under the tree, and ate the biscuits, and then gave me a present. Then he said this: If you keep being a good girl, I’ll come again.”

  She traced out the memory in the air, her gaze wavering faintly, but then she pinched her mouth closed like she had come back to her senses. Then, as though making an excuse to Ryuuji, who remained silent, she dropped her eyes to the corner of the table.

  “Well, that was a childish dream. I tried opening the present, but I only remember as far as unwrapping the ribbon. After that… But it was a really happy dream. At least that’s true. That’s the one and only precious memory I have of Christmas. So that’s why I want to be a good girl. Believing in a dream…isn’t that stupid? Isn’t it stupid to pretend because I believe someone’s watching? Do you think I’m weak?”