Toradora! Vol. 8 Page 18

  “Ryuuji…”

  Taiga’s hand touched his face. Clack. Her gloveless hand felt the goggles. She might have mistaken them for glasses.

  “Oh…Kitamura-kun?”

  Taiga was mistaken.

  He didn’t mind. Or rather, this wasn’t the time for him to correct her. He just needed to keep crawling up.

  “I thought you were Ryuuji… In times like these, the one who comes to save me…is always Ryuuji… Sorry… I’m sorry…”

  The voice he heard was strangely bright. But there was something unfocused about it, like she was talking in her sleep. Taiga wasn’t completely conscious. Her voice was fluttery, high-pitched, and more absent than usual.

  She continued to whisper into Ryuuji’s ear.

  “Kitamura-kun, you know…you didn’t really help much…”

  His foot slipped wildly. Ryuuji screamed in the back of his throat. If Taiga hadn’t been holding on to him, he would have lost his balance, and they would have both fallen.

  “Sorry, but you’re not really doing that great as the Patron Saint of Broken Hearts… The thing I asked for didn’t come true at all… My feelings for Ryuuji just won’t go away… I wanted to become stronger…but it didn’t work…”

  Ryuuji grabbed Taiga’s clothes as she began to slip. He ground his teeth even harder, held her as firmly as he could, and looked up.

  He could see Kitamura. Kitamura was looking at him and yelling something. It was just a bit further.

  “I just like Ryuuji, no matter what I do… I want things to work out for him with Minorin… It’s so hard. It’s just so hard, everything is so hard… I can’t…”

  “…”

  “I’m no good, right…? I wanted to do my best, being alone… I kept saying that I’d get through it, but it was all talk… In the end…all I could do was wait to be saved… I’m weak, weak…weak… I hate it…”

  Tears fell from Taiga’s still closed eyes. Then her hands relaxed. Suddenly the weight of her whole body was on his arm. Ryuuji desperately directed all his strength into his right arm. He pulled Taiga’s torso with all of his strength, but his foot slipped, and he lost his balance.

  They would fall—they were falling—

  “Huh?!”

  There was a sturdy hand being offered right before his eyes. Adults wearing matching gaudy fluorescent outfits came down one after another, and in the blink of an eye, lightly lifted Ryuuji and Taiga along with them. It was the people from the ski resort, or maybe the police.

  “Are you okay?! You’re not hurt?!”

  “I’m not! But Taiga! There’s blood, here…”

  He didn’t care what they were or who they were. Ryuuji wailed desperately at someone who handed him a blanket. We got it, the adults in the fluorescent clothes answered with nods and ran off carrying Taiga.

  He couldn’t even sit. He just fell onto the snow and gasped. His vision was painted over white—it was the blizzard. The blizzard has penetrated all the way into his head.

  He realized that Minori had rushed over to his side. Kitamura, too. Finally, he knew what it was that they couldn’t tell him. He also knew how stupid he had been.

  The knot that held everything together had been undone. It had been pulled too hard, and the string was tearing.

  “Kitamura… I need a favor.”

  Ryuuji rested his head on the borrowed shoulder of his worried friend. “Could you say that you were the one who went down to save Taiga just now? If Taiga asks, tell her you didn’t hear anything. Taiga was unconscious the entire time. She didn’t say anything. Please tell her that…please!”

  Kitamura supported Ryuuji’s jacket-clad back. “I didn’t say anything because Aisaka asked me to keep it a secret, but—”

  Through the goggles, he couldn’t see Kitamura’s expression.

  “During the new year, I happened to run into Aisaka. She seemed really depressed and seriously asked me…if she could pay respects to me as the Patron Saint of Broken Hearts. Does it have anything to do with that?”

  Ryuuji didn’t answer. He couldn’t answer. If he opened his mouth, he didn’t know what kind of sound he would make.

  “So it does… Right. So, that happened on Christmas Eve, and then New Year’s happened. I see…”

  No one was at fault. It’s not your fault. Kitamura’s words were blown away in the blizzard.

  ***

  In the end, Taiga was mostly uninjured. God had definitely given her a sturdy body suitable for a klutz.

  When they sat down for dinner, the teachers recounted that she just had a small graze on her temple. Apparently, she just wanted to die from embarrassment at causing such a fuss.

  Ryuuji heard relieved voices from all over the place, but some tactless individual raised their hand and asked, “Does that mean we can see her tomorrow?”

  However, the bachelorette’s (age 30) response was surprising.

  “Well, Aisaka-san will spend the night in the hospital, and then tomorrow, her mother will pick her up. So, she’s going home ahead of us. It’d be hard for her to travel by bus again like that.”

  Without thinking, Ryuuji dropped his chopsticks.

  Her mother—did that mean her real mother? Was her mother, who didn’t even come when Taiga was suspended, who had never so much as shown up at their school, going to come to this remote ski resort? Even when Taiga was practically uninjured?

  “That’s great, isn’t it, Taka-kun?! Tiger’s gonna be fine~!”

  “Uh, yeah…”

  Haruta’s eyes stopped on Ryuuji’s chest pocket. “Huh? So that hairpin ended up getting back to you, huh, Taka-chan?”

  Ryuuji had stuck it unthinkingly in his pocket when he picked it up from the snow. Haruta whispered in his ear like an idiot, “Actually, is this the Christmas present that you tried to give…that person before? You threw away wrapping paper with trees on it, too, didn’t you? I saw it, but I didn’t understand what it meant until now…”

  “Basically…”

  Ryuuji’s head was still in the middle of a storm. Even as he shrugged his shoulders in affirmation, he wasn’t seeing anything around him at all. There was too much to think about.

  That was why he hadn’t noticed. Sitting just a bit away from them, a certain person had turned herself into a full-body radar unit as she tried to eavesdrop on what Ryuuji had to say. When she heard their conversation, she immediately understood.

  She understood the results of everything she had been doing on purpose and even the things she’d done completely unintentionally.

  Without anyone seeing, she stood up silently and ran from the noisy, boisterous dining room. She jogged out into the freezing hallway and arrived at the unoccupied lounge.

  She collapsed onto the sofa that Ryuuji had been sitting on the night before.

  She clutched her knees and buried her face as tears ran under her hands. She didn’t know why she was sad, but she knew only that she hated her thin, girlish hands. She absolutely hated her hands, which were only good for hiding her face as she cried.

  Alone, Minori covered her face with her hands, shrinking smaller and smaller into a ball as she cried soundlessly for some time.

  The blizzard was supposed to end the next day.

  However, the sound of the wind throwing snow against the windows was fierce. It blew violently enough to freeze their feet, even as it continued to shake the windows.

  Afterword

  So…I have a document where I keep track of important things like my internet IDs and passwords. (I put it in an envelope that says something like, “Important, so keep it safe!”) I made it nearly ten years ago and thought, “This is so important, I’m sure I’ll lose it.” And…I lost it! One day, the envelope that had survived moving twice suddenly vanished from the spot it should have been in.

  I looked for it everywhere but couldn’t find it. I looked for it in my work desk drawers, the closet, the shelves, the dresser, the kitchen, the streets at dawn…in Sakuragicho…even though there�
��s no way it’d be there…

  Wh-what’ll I do now? This is just how I’ve been living my life lately. It’s been nearly thirty years since I was born. I’ve lost flexibility in both my mind and body, so when I have these kinds of sudden accidents, I don’t have the smarts to cope. I have no room for accommodation, I can’t listen to anything, and I’ll never get any taller. I’ll never grow up. I can’t get back what’s been taken from me, either. In other words, I have only one direction left to go in—ruin!

  So, I’ve had a ton of things taken from me. But I’ve also finally gotten to the eighth volume of Toradora! Everyone who has stayed with me so far, thank you so much! I hope you enjoyed it.

  Thanks to everyone’s help, I’ve accumulated several volumes of this series. We’ve gotten a manga version from Zekkyo-sensei, an anime, and…ahh! I want to tell you everything, but there’s something I can’t say yet! There are actually a ton of things going forward!

  That’s right—there’ve been a lot of new developments that I want you to enjoy. I haven’t actually fallen into ruin. I haven’t been stung by a prickly caterpillar. I don’t suddenly have a ton of bumps on my right arm. “Are they hives? Is it from stress? Is it just mental?” I said as I went to the dermatologist. When I showed it to the doctor, they didn’t make an instant diagnosis of, “Oh, it’s caterpillar dermatitis! This is the eleventh case today! That’s from the Japanese browntail moth!” I didn’t go home, look up what the browntail moth looks like when it’s a caterpillar, and faint for a moment, either (don’t do this). It’s also not super itchy, and I definitely didn’t faint again on thinking that if I scratched it, the stingers from the caterpillars would prick me from inside my skin. (If only I didn’t know what they looked like…)

  So, everyone! I’m really grateful that you read Toradora! Volume 8 right up to the very end. I plan to keep working quickly on Toradora! Volume 9. I hope that you enjoy it! Yasu-sensei and Manager-sama, I feel like the next volume will be an ordeal as well, so please don’t fall to ruin as we work hard together!

  —Yuyuko Takemiya

  Thank you for reading!

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