Toradora! Vol. 9 Page 4

  One of the girls grumbled, “Kill it!” in a low voice…for the hundredth time. Feeling a little fed up with it all, Ryuuji poked at his chicken stew with his chopsticks.

  “Aren’t they going a little heavy on the brutality? Shouldn’t it be like, something that’s more appropriate for lunch? Don’t they have something more pleasant like a funny story that’s better for a girl’s voice?”

  “The story might be kind of too complex to do in short broadcasts. Anyway, they wrote this for the girls.”

  “I don’t think they’re listening—or anyone else for that matter.”

  Ryuuji and Kitamura’s eyes nonchalantly went around the classroom. It seemed there wasn’t a single person lending an ear to the earnest performance flowing from the speakers. Ryuuji and Kitamura were probably listening to it most seriously. Incidentally, Noto and Haruta had gone to the school store and were in the middle of a bloody battle to buy bread, so they probably wouldn’t be coming back for a while.

  Kitamura’s handsome face had a slight wickedness to it as he murmured in a low voice, “I knew it. We should have just had me on the radio forever. Well, we did feel like we were running out of material.”

  “Actually, your show wasn’t that popular either… Well, I can’t actually tell you that.”

  But you just told me that! Oh, you heard me? The two oafs kept up their easygoing exchange.

  “No no no no no no no! You don’t neeeeeeed to!”

  A high-pitched girl’s voice interrupted them from by the window. It was Kihara Maya who had raised her voice. Kashii Nanako clung to Maya’s arm, her face frozen. Unusually, Ami wasn’t with them. Instead, the two of them were faced by Taiga, who stood there imposingly.

  “Why are you so adamant? You’re not the one who asked about it.”

  “All I asked was whether you were feeling better! No one asked for a show and tell about your gash!”

  “But seeing it is the best way to show you. A puncture wound is worth a thousand words.”

  She was probably trying to say A picture is worth a thousand words. She really is Minori’s friend…

  “No matter what happens, Aisaka really is Kushieda’s friend, isn’t she?”

  It seemed a similar thought occurred to Kitamura. Incidentally, Minori wasn’t anywhere in the classroom.

  I-It’s…i-it’s, no! You don’t need to! Ahh! Maya wailed and pushed Taiga away. Even Nanako seemed repelled by the idea.

  “I’m bad with these kinds of things. Plus, it’s lunch, so please just stop! Right, I’ll give you a meatball! Okay?”

  She thrust out a plastic fork with the meatball offering. Taiga opened her mouth wide and accepted it. Nanako and Maya looked at each other and sighed in relief.

  “But this doesn’t change anything! Now, feast on this with your very own eyes!”

  Ahhh! The two beauties were cornered by Taiga, who pulled the bandage on her forehead off to show them her still healing wound. Ryuuji tilted his head. This was elementary school-level bullying.

  “Stop, Tiger!”

  “No, go for it, Tiger!”

  A group of boys with their lunches spread out nearby were jeering. When Taiga turned around and bared her teeth at them, though, they ran away at full speed.

  “Seriously,” said Ryuuji, “what does she think she’s doing…”

  “Well, at least she seems healthy.” To Ryuuji’s exasperation, Kitamura just kept eating. He practically looked like he was in a commercial for seaweed lunch boxes. “What a relief. She’s healthy and smiling again because of how brave you were, Takasu.”

  “…”

  Ryuuji stared at his friend. Kitamura noticed his gaze.

  “Well, of course I get it. If she asks me what happened, I’ll tell her I saved her. That’s what you want, right?”

  “…”

  “Hey, what’s going on? Why’re you looking at me like that?”

  He was thinking that the reason Kitamura hadn’t asked about anything must be because he already knew. He couldn’t actually say it out loud, so he just thought it.

  Immediately after the incident, out of nowhere and without any explanation, Ryuuji had asked Kitamura to “say that you saved Taiga,” but Kitamura hadn’t tried to ask why. He just said, It’s not your fault, and did as he was told.

  Kitamura knew Ryuuji had liked Minori, but that Ryuuji’s heart was broken on Christmas Eve and that Taiga was acting strangely on New Year’s. At some point in spring, Taiga had confessed to him, and then he had gotten help settling his own unrequited love. At that point, Kitamura had had a weirdly healthy relationship with Taiga, neither of them attempting to cross the lines of friendship.

  In other words, Kitamura must have known for a while that Taiga liked Takasu Ryuuji. That was what Ryuuji thought.

  “Stop it! I won’t give anything up, no matter how passionately you look at me!”

  Of course, the only ones in the whole world who could have known what happened in the minutes that Ryuuji spent pulling Taiga up from the cliff were Taiga and Ryuuji—or rather, maybe just Ryuuji.

  “You kind of have double lids…like they look super crisp…”

  “What’re you talking about? I swear I haven’t gotten any surgery.”

  Even more terrifying—maybe it wasn’t just Kitamura who knew. There was a possibility Ryuuji was the only dim-witted idiot without a clue. Ami might have known, too. I hate you because you’re an idiot—the knife-like words she’d stabbed him with could have been about him making Taiga help him with his own unrequited love while he was unaware of Taiga’s own feelings. Ami might have been pointing out his own foolishness.

  And then there was Minori. The reason why she was so firm about not accepting his feelings might have been because of Taiga, too.

  At any rate, the only thing he knew for sure was just that he was most definitely an idiot. If Taiga hadn’t been so clumsy, he might be oblivious even now. He might have just accepted everything Taiga had done for him, thinking, It’s because she’s actually a really nice person!

  But if he was going to go through with pretending nothing had happened, that wasn’t much different, either.

  “Stop that, Aisaka! You’ll get it infected!” Kitamura finally spoke up as the class rep. It seemed he had finally gotten riled up once the girls started screaming.

  Taiga glanced over their way while chasing Maya and Nanako around. With a gutsy smile, she took big strides toward them. “Look! It’s already all healed up!”

  “Whoa…!”

  “Ahh!”

  She stripped the bandage right off.

  Ryuuji saw Taiga’s wound close up. The cut was just a few centimeters long and nestled in the middle of a yellowing, healing bruise that had a five-centimeter radius. Though the wound had closed up, it was still covered with raw-looking hardened blood.

  “Why’re you showing us that while we’re eating?!” Of course, any normal person would be surprised seeing that. Ryuuji automatically felt the urge to bonk her head.

  “Oh…but, you’re right. It’s mostly healed over!” Though Kitamura had also been taken aback like Ryuuji, he put up his thumb, a giant smile coming over his face.

  “Right!” Taiga happily cocked her head to the side and returned the thumbs up.

  Why?

  Why was it that she would strangle him, hit him, and trip him, but give Kitamura a smile and a thumbs up? If she liked him, why didn’t she act… No, no, no. Why did he want her to act any differently when he’d already decided to forget about it?

  Maybe things really would have been better off if he were still oblivious. If he didn’t know anything, he wouldn’t have just thought something so lame. He would have smiled dryly, just thinking, She really does like Kitamura.

  “I got away with just this cut because of you, Kitamura-kun. Thanks for saving me!”

  “Oh, no no no…no, no.”

  Kitamura waved his hand vigorously in front of his face and veeery slowly turned his eyes to look at Ryuuji’s face.
Ryuuji pretended not to notice.

  Taiga didn’t even notice the odd expressions on the two boy’s faces. “Why are you here, Kitamura-kun?”

  “Huh?! Am I not allowed to be here?!”

  “No, I didn’t mean it like that. Earlier, Minorin ran off saying she needed to go get the athletic field for her club or something. She was saying she wouldn’t lose to the soccer club or whatever. Aren’t you a captain, too, Kitamura-kun?”

  Oh, that’s what you meant… Kitamura righted himself and pushed up his askew glasses. “Actually, the girls’ and boys’ softball teams merged the other day, and Kushieda officially became their captain. So, I resigned from my post. I’m still a member, but there were some things I really couldn’t do while being student council president.”

  Oh, really? Really. Taiga and Kitamura grinned as they exchanged words. Ryuuji pretended not to notice as he ate bamboo shoots he’d boiled in a soup base.

  “But still, I’m so relieved you’re back at school safe and sound, Aisaka. Why did you have to miss a whole week of school though? Everyone was super worried.”

  “Heh heh heh. A little something came up.”

  Taiga cast a glance at Ryuuji. What she probably wanted to tell him was that telling everyone else she had been skipping school was useless. Her eyes held their shared secret as the edges of her mouth twisted up. I know, Ryuuji replied with his eyes as he drank his half-finished, tepid oolong tea.

  I wish I could take all the secrets and stuff I have to hide and gulp them down like my tea, he thought, so I can just lock them away in my stomach…

  “Takasu, Yuri-chan is asking for you!” A classmate called out to him.

  “Yeah!”

  Ryuuji didn’t close the top to his bento box but gestured at his seat with his chin to Taiga.

  “You didn’t bring lunch, right? I haven’t touched most of it, so you can eat it. I haven’t really got an appetite today.”

  “Huh? But…” Taiga looked down at his lunch, seeming troubled.

  Kitamura smiled like an old lady and said, “Just have it.”

  “I don’t have chopsticks… I don’t wanna use yours. Give me disposable ones.”

  “Pretend that disposable chopsticks don’t exist in this world. Instead, I want you to know that there are rainforests being destroyed.”

  “Ugh, shuddup…! After a week without you, it’s like your annoyingness is just surrounding me.”

  “If you don’t want to use them as is, then just wash them.”

  Eco-jerk, Taiga yelled, and he left the classroom without even turning around. As he walked, he thought. Would other people think it’s weird that I gave the lunch I’d been eating to a girl? Guess it is weird… Yeah, it would be weird.

  But, he thought, if things really hadn’t changed, he would probably still have done something like that. If he didn’t give it to her, she might have even stolen it.

  In that case, he ought to do now just like he would have done before. If he was going to insist that nothing had changed, he had to convince himself of that through his own actions.

  ***

  There was a sprinkling of other students in the teachers’ room during lunch break. There were some eagerly holding textbooks in one hand while going through school questions, and several girls had made camp and spread out their lunches around a young, popular male teacher. Up ahead, someone waited for Ryuuji at the edge of the second-year teachers’ island.

  “Why haven’t you turned it in? It’s very, very important…”

  The bachelorette (age 30), aka Koigakubo Yuri, nursed a lunch of stewed vegetables and soba noodles from delivery. The plastic wrap still on the bowl was clouded white on the inside, and her noodles were probably growing progressively soggier in that instant, Ryuuji imagined.

  “Everyone else turned them in like they were supposed to… It’s so unlike you to forget something, Takasu-kun…” Koigakubo Yuji’s gaze went uneasily to the soba noodles that were growing more waterlogged by the second. As though remembering what she was doing, her gaze went back to Ryuuji’s face, but then she took another glance at it.

  “Please eat… I’m listening. Your noodles aren’t going to be good for much longer.”

  “Huh! No, no, it’s fine. You haven’t eaten yet either, right, Takasu-kun? I can’t go slurping down these noodles. That wouldn’t be right as a teacher.”

  “I’ve already finished lunch, so please eat. It’s actually making me worry now.”

  “I-Is it? Sorry. I didn’t have much time, and there were a lot of things I needed to finish, so many things.”

  The single teacher skillfully used a hair clip to put her curled hair in a half-updo, pulled off the plastic, and broke her chopsticks apart as she watched Ryuuji. However, just as she reeled in the noodles with a chuckle, she stopped.

  “Um…look, there was that thing that happened during the school trip, right? When Aisaka-san went missing.”

  “Yeah…”

  She poked at the cloud ear mushroom she had fished from the bottom of the bowl and said, “So I was thinking that maybe you were so worried, Takasu-kun, maybe even too worried about Aisaka-san, and that it might have had an effect on you—that it might have messed with…the cogs in your head.”

  The cogs in your head—he’d never thought the day would have come when his homeroom teacher would say that to him. Ryuuji was at a loss for words, and an uneasy silence settled between the two of them. As though evading the awkwardness, Koigakubo Yuri stuck a mushroom into her mouth.

  “Because, look, phoo phoo, you’ve been pretty out of it lately. Plus, you’ve been forgetting things like now. You’re really worrying me as your teacher, Takasu-kun. Especially when it comes to taking care of yourself mentally. I wonder if that’s what you need? That’s sort of what I’ve been thinking.”

  Ryuuji watched her slurp down her noodles. “I’ve had a lot of things going on!”

  The soup sprayed out onto the confusion of class materials on her desk, and stains formed on her free real estate magazines. Ryuuji hated free magazines. He didn’t think they were useful. Those things are basically just advertisements polluting the world, and they waste resources! If you’re just like, Whoa, it’s free, and collect a bunch of things that you don’t even need, of course you’re not going to be able to clean your place anymore! Just throw that stuff away! Actually, just don’t even take it to begin with!

  Ryuuji held down the hand that urged him to dump the magazines into the trash. Don’t rampage, my eco spirit!

  “Yeah, I have a lot to deal with, but isn’t that normal? Plus, the reason why I didn’t turn in my future aspirations survey wasn’t because the cogs in my head were messed up. It’s because my mom and I have different opinions, so I’m still in the middle of working on it!”

  “Oh, really…?”

  “Yes. Real-ly!”

  Unusually for him, Ryuuji pouted defiantly and looked down at the homeroom teacher who had been slurping the soba noodles with eyes like a hawk in the middle of a killing dive. This damn spinster (age 30)! All you do is eat delivery! That’s way too much sodium for your diet! You try to buy expensive, super weird real estate! …wasn’t what he was thinking, though it also wasn’t necessarily far off.

  The day before, he really had talked to Yasuko about his future while eating pork daikon soup. He’d even told her, I need to write and turn in what my future aspirations are because that’s what they’re using to split up the classes next year.

  Yasuko’s answer was, “‘Imma study my hardest!’ That’s all you need to write. ☆” And that was all she’d had time for before she had to hurry off to work. Of course, she was fast asleep when he left for school, and the thick smell of alcohol filling the room was practically enough to get him drunk, too, so he couldn’t talk to her then, either.

  Ryuuji wanted to have a proper talk with Yasuko about the printout before turning it in because of his Oedipal com…or rather, because he was serious. This was about his future, and he wanted to
take it seriously. There was no way he’d let someone blame that on the cogs in his mind!

  “I see, I see.”

  Koigakubo Yuri popped a fish cake in her mouth and waved around her chopsticks.

  “Well, Takasu-kun, you’re a really good student, so there isn’t much for me to worry about, anyway. I have high expectations for you, which is why I’m being so nosy. That’s just how teachers are.”

  “Expectations?”

  She raised her eyebrows slightly, and Ryuuji realized that the homeroom teacher’s eyes were moving as though searching for something in his expression.

  “Please don’t. My family’s poor.”

  He felt like she was going to say something, so he got to his feet before she could, but she just silently placed her chopsticks on the rim of her bowl. She turned a smile to him.

  “Anyway, please bring it in as soon as possible, okay? The only ones in the class who haven’t are you and Aisaka-san, Takasu-kun.”

  “Taiga, too? Then why did you only call me in…”

  “That’s because I only just gave Aisaka-san the printout. You have a lot of things going on, too, but keep that apart from this. Be sure to make time to talk to your mom and to think about it.”

  ***

  Ryuuji excused himself from the staff room. His footsteps towards the classroom were heavy, and his feet felt like they could stop at any moment.

  His homeroom teacher said to keep things separate, but it wasn’t that easy. He couldn’t easily imagine the ever-changing future when he was trying to pretend nothing had changed. On top of that, he fundamentally didn’t see eye to eye with Yasuko. Yasuko wasn’t seriously thinking about the state of the Takasu household’s finances—she just had her head in the clouds. Trying to persuade her of that would be an ordeal in itself. He felt like he was going to faint.

  “Haah…”

  He gently supported his head with his right hand as it swayed to the side.

  He was probably feeling faint because he hadn’t gotten much sleep the past few days. His feet, which should have been heading back to the classroom, instead guided him toward the deserted breezeway. He needed to rest a little more before he could face Kitamura and Taiga, who were probably eating their lunches together. He would most likely add to his pile of lies if he were around them.