Toradora! Vol. 9 Read online

  “Huh? You can’t know that’ll happen.”

  “Like I said, you don’t know what’ll happen… After I graduate, I’ll join the workforce right away and make enough income for both of us to eat. I’ll save up, and then, later, I might be able to go to college. That, or I’ll find a place that’ll give me enough scholarships to—”

  “You can’t do that!”

  For once, Yasuko stuck her face right up to him and loudly shot him down.

  “Ryuu-chan, you’re going to study as much as you can and go straight to the best school there is! If they give you scholarships that means you’re the best they have, right? You can’t do that! You need to jump into a place that’s filled with tons of A-students so you can study up! Unlike me, you’re smart, so you need to get the best education you can, and stretch yourself as much as you can, and have the beeeeeest life you can. ☆ That’s why you can’t work hard at anything that isn’t studying! Look, there’s that thing people say, right… My teachers used to say it a lot when I was going to school. What was it again, um… If you rub…the family jewels…they’ll glow…or something?”

  “If you polish a gem, it’ll glitter?”

  “That’s it! Ryuu-chan, next year you go into the smart class and study your brains out and go to study hall and prep school for the entrance exams and then take the tests. Whoo! ☆ I wonder what kind of path you’ll go down? I’m looking forward to it! Maybe medical school? Or maybe you’ll be a vet? A pharmacist or a dentist? A scientist would be great, too! It would be great if you studied the latest advances or became a lawyer or maybe you’re suited for something else! Right! How about you go overseas? I’d be so lonely! But I think I could be patient for you!”

  “…”

  He couldn’t say anything anymore. The son was speechless as he looked back at his mother, who was seeing rose-colored dreams of the future. She brought her Kyoto-style pickled fish to her mouth and nibbled on it. She liked it when it was slightly singed.

  How idiotic.

  She was going on about him being a doctor? What was she saying? Apologize to the whole country’s medical exam test takers and their parents, why don’t you?

  As he mixed his natto in irritation, Ryuuji finally thought of a way to make his mother see the real world. He skillfully wrapped the strings of natto around his chopsticks and cut it off, then rudely walked on his hands and knees to the dresser in the corner of the room. He opened a drawer, took out a bankbook, and thrust it in front of Yasuko.

  “Hm? Hm! We actually have a lot tucked away! Eh heh!”

  He felt like falling over but desperately pushed through.

  “Does it look like we have a lot to you? Half of this is going to go to spring term class fees. Plus monthly rent, heat and electricity, and living expenses, and then you need clothes and makeup since you work in hospitality, and we can’t skimp on that. No matter how much we cut, we can barely save anything each month. At this rate, where would the money come from for me to go to med school?”

  “Uhhh?”

  “Don’t go ‘Uhhh!’ Ugh, I really need to get a part-time job. If I can at least bring in fifty thousand yen in a month…”

  “You can’t! You can’t work!”

  Yasuko threw up her hand. The strings of the natto dangled in the air from her chopsticks, and Ryuuji, flustered, tried to reel it in.

  “If you work, you wouldn’t be able to study! Plus, there’s no meaning to living a life eating cold meals separately from your kid every day! That wouldn’t be a good life at all! You can’t say stuff like that!”

  “It’s because you keep talking about me going to college that we have to talk about this!”

  He almost felt like the last two years had been wasted. If he had worked with the same intensity that Minori had, then he might have saved up enough by now. He might have made enough that they wouldn’t have to have this painful argument.

  “It’ll be fine! It’ll turn out okay!”

  Yasuko flashed him a peace sign and smiled. That face normally always made Ryuuji go silent. If Yasuko, the adult, said it, it felt as though things really would turn out fine—but Takasu Ryuuji was seventeen, nearing eighteen. He could finally see the truth.

  There were things that even your parents could do nothing about. You couldn’t believe your parents when they said, “It’ll be fine.” Yasuko had probably been doing everything she could to make sure Ryuuji never had a single worry.

  It’ll be fine, it’ll turn out okay, I’m your mom so just leave it to me. As long as you’ve got me, everything will be fine…

  Just because you haven’t got a dad doesn’t mean that you’re any less well off than the other kids. Your mom’s a super mom! Mom’s forever young and always cute! Also, what have we got here?! Mom has a special psychic power! So, if anyone tries to grab you, I’ll be right there to save you, Ryuu-chan. If you’re in an accident, I can make it like it never happened. Money grows on trees. You don’t have to worry about a single little thing. Just leave it all to Mom.

  We’ll be happy forever.

  “I don’t think it’ll turn out fine…”

  The gentle fairy tales of his childhood were over. Ryuuji believed that.

  “It will be! I’ll do something about it! So Ryuu-chan, don’t worry about money. ☆”

  Yasuko nodded broadly. But Ryuuji wasn’t a kid who would fall for that anymore.

  Yasuko went to work. Unable to write anything for his future aspirations printout, Ryuuji ended up doing the laundry and his homework instead. He was bored, but didn’t feel in the mood to watch TV, so he lackadaisically caught up on his English studies. With his natural-born attention to detail, he wrote up the spellings for his English vocabulary, but then his mechanical pencil paused.

  Where was he headed, earnestly studying like this? He didn’t have a place he wanted to go, and he didn’t have the ability to get to the place he was supposed to go, anyway—he stopped himself from going any further. If he took one wrong step, he might tumble into an unbelievably despairing world.

  When he looked outside the window, Taiga’s bedroom light was still on. He could see an even stronger light on inside, which could have been her desk light.

  Taiga might be studying…or she might be reading a manga or a magazine. She might have been on the internet and coarsely slurping down cup ramen. Ryuuji put his hand to the cold window and stared for a while. However, in the end, he couldn’t see Taiga beyond the curtain. He didn’t have any reason to, so he couldn’t call her either. He had just wanted to check whether he could see her.

  Taiga was heading in the direction of not being able to tell him her feelings. She had turned her back to Ryuuji and decided to move forward by sealing them away. In that case, Taiga would end up growing more and more distant until he lost sight of her. Even if things remained unchanged, even if she humored Ryuuji, Taiga was leaving him behind.

  Ryuuji, who was left behind with nowhere to go, had no one—not even Taiga—to take responsibility for him.

  Tired, he tossed away the pencil.

  Chapter 3

  Huh. Taiga blinked slowly, twice.

  “A cake shop? You mean Ya-chan?”

  Ryuuji nodded in response.

  “Yeah. From Monday to Friday, from ten to four. She’s getting nine hundred yen an hour.”

  “But Ya-chan always sleeps till noon, doesn’t she? She doesn’t even get home until four or five in the morning. What’s up with that?”

  “I tried stopping her, of course, but she decided to just do it and started working last week.”

  “Really…?”

  Taiga’s eyes were filled with ambiguous blame, but Ryuuji really had tried to stop Yasuko as soon as he heard she was doing it. It was just that he couldn’t force her to stop when she was working while he was at school.

  It was after school now, and they were in the interview room that was also commonly referred to as the “lecture room.” Ryuuji and Taiga were waiting for their teacher to make an appeara
nce.

  Ryuuji sat at the desk that was installed in the center of the room so that four seated people could look at each other, and Taiga was standing in the doorway. In order to keep Ryuuji completely out of her vision, she rudely sat down on the windowsill, letting her feet swing under her.

  The sealed-off air of the four-and-a-half-tatami room felt strangely quiet. Even the voices of the clubs out on the grounds faintly echoed the moment their conversation cut off. The silence brought increasing pressure with it.

  “It’s just that, that—”

  Rata tat tat tat. Ryuuji hit the desk with his fingertips as though playing an unplayable piano.

  “She said that it’s on the same street as her job right now. She said they were advertising for a part-time job, and she was saying she might be able to bring home the leftover cake, too, or something…”

  “You really just can’t shut up.”

  “What?”

  “That tap tap tap tap thing you’re doing.”

  Taiga leaned her weight on the window frame as she unskillfully jerked around the fingers on both her hands. Ryuuji got what she was trying to say and laid his hands on top of each other on the desk.

  After school the day before, Taiga had happened to run into Yasuko in front of her condo as she was going home, and found out Yasuko had taken on an afternoon job.

  “But I wonder why Ya-chan’s gotten another job.”

  “It’s because I talked to her about how I might not be able to go to college since we don’t have money. The day after I said that, she said she’d do something about it and went and found a job.”

  “So it’s your college fund… Being a ‘mom’ is so hard.”

  “I probably got called here because I didn’t turn in my future aspirations printout because of all the stuff going on, but why’re you stuck here?”

  “I didn’t turn it in either. I’m pretty sure we’re here for the same reason.”

  “Why’d you not turn it in? Is it because you don’t wanna talk to your parents about it?”

  “No, that’s not even close to it. It was just such a bother that I forgot to do it.”

  Taiga, still sitting on the counter, twisted so she could breathe on the windowpane. She used her fingertip to draw a heart in the spot that fogged up.

  “Uh…”

  Though she was scribbling nonchalantly, Ryuuji had a legitimate reaction to her doodle. His shoulders pointedly shuddered. What was Taiga trying to tell him? The heart was an expression of L-O-V-E, and the object of Taiga’s affection was—

  “Look, Ryuuji…”

  “Y-yeah…”

  “Praying mantis.”

  “I see…!”

  He wanted to slump face down on the desk. The thing he thought was a heart was actually a praying mantis’s head. She had drawn in the eyes, its feelers, its body, its sickles, and given it legs, and then she had written its name above it—“PRAYING MANTIS!” In that case, that probably really was a praying mantis. It wasn’t a heart or her L-O-V-E or anything else.

  “Do you even know how to write the Japanese characters for praying mantis?”

  “You write the character for ‘bug’ and ‘wealthy’ and give them little swipes at the top… Then you write ‘bug’ again and the character from the name ‘Ichiro’…”

  “The character from the name ‘Ichiro?’ For a bug? Doesn’t that sound kind of off?”

  Ryuuji raised his head and sighed. This idiot—Taiga hadn’t been trying to tell him her feelings at all.

  “Actually, you’re completely confused about how a praying mantis is supposed to look in the first place. Praying mantis’ bodies don’t look like that. They’re divided up into their neck, their chest, and their long abdomen. They’ve got wings, too. Have you seen one before?”

  “I have. I saw one crossing the street at a crosswalk the other day. Minorin poked it around with her umbrella tip, and it ran away.”

  “The other day? Was that really a praying mantis? The way you drew it with that body, it just looks like a person with a really long torso. Bugs are supposed to be, like, more divided up.”

  Ryuuji stood up and stepped over to where Taiga was sitting on the windowsill and put his foot up halfway on it. He then stretched himself out and started scribbling and correcting the praying mantis drawing Taiga had made from top to bottom.

  “Hey! My praying mantis!”

  “Don’t make it a big deal.”

  The line of the abdomen Ryuuji’s finger traced turned to water droplets and dripped down the cold window. Haah. He breathed out on it and drew over the doodle with a strangely realistic praying mantis. No one could underestimate a former elementary school boy. He definitely hadn’t made Yasuko cry by collecting a bag full of butterflies to show off and forgetting them in the corner of a room.

  “And their wings look like this, and their abdomens are like suuu-per long.”

  “Ick! What is that thing?! That’s wrong! That just looks weird! They definitely don’t look like that!”

  Ryuuji leaned his shoulder over to guard off Taiga’s pale hand, which tried to fidget with the praying mantis he had drawn from the side.

  “I’m telling you this is how they look. And then, right here from its abdomen, it’s got a hairy larva like schloooop.”

  “Wh-what?! What’s that line supposed to be?! Why has it got a line coming out of it from there?!”

  “That’s right, they’re super gross! When you put a larva in the water, it goes like thi—whoa!”

  “Ahh!”

  Clatter! A loud sound erupted as the plank Ryuuji had put too much weight on came off the sill. The moment he had gotten a little too into trying to creep her out about the larva, he had put another foot on the board, and the corner had sprung up and jammed into his shin.

  “Ou…chhh…!”

  “Ahhh, that was so scary! Isn’t that like the stupidest way in the world you can hurt yourself?! Whoa, you’re bleeding…”

  He sat down on the counter and rolled up his pants to reveal his scraped leg. Blood really was seeping out of it. It was just a scrape, so it would be fine as long as he just held a tissue down on it for a while.

  “Damn, that larva…! It didn’t get enough revenge back then, and curses me even now.”

  “What do you mean, back then?”

  “When I was a kid, I saw one for the first time in the park swamp, so I threw a praying mantis at it and ran away, but then my leg got stuck in the swamp! I couldn’t even get back the shoe I was wearing, so I ended up having to go home in my bare feet.”

  “Actually, when you say you were a kid…you mean you were in elementary school…so you had one of those cute little backpacks on…”

  He didn’t know what she was imagining, but Taiga’s abdominal muscles twitched, and she started laughing out loud. Aha aha aha. She covered her mouth and gave Ryuuji glances as she said, “With that face.” …Please, just stop.

  “Don’t laugh. Everyone’s been in elementary school at some point in their life!”

  “But your time was special! Aha ha, I wish I could have seen it!”

  Ryuuji, irritated, shifted on his butt away to the edge of the sill. Damn it. Taiga kept laughing and muttered, “A Ryuuji even tinier than me.” She happily clapped her small hands together.

  The time when the person you like was small is special, or whatever, I guess.

  He glanced stealthily at Taiga who was caught up in glee and let his imagination roam. He wondered whether Taiga secretly cherished these moments when Ryuuji talked about the memories of his youth or when they had short, mundane conversations like they were now.

  “Because I can’t help but like Ryuuji.”

  Did she relive these moments by herself, unable to tell anyone, all alone, with a hidden smile she couldn’t let anyone else see? Would she remember these moments again and again, until over the month and years, they would fade from her memory?

  “How long are you gonna keep laughing…?”

  “U
gh, I feel so stupid. It just sort of got me. Ugh! Come to think of it—right!”

  They sat on the same counter but were still far apart. Directly to the side of him, Taiga continued to smile as she clapped her hands together and turned her face to Ryuuji.

  “The ramen place Minorin works at really got me, too! You’ve gone, right? Minori mentioned it!”

  “Yeah…so you went there, too? With who?”

  “By myself. Minorin invited me, and at first I didn’t want to go, but when I sat down at the counter, it was fine. It’s like, ‘What is this? It’s so good!’ That spray of boiling water is kind of a hazard though.”

  “You mean the reincarnation cycle, right?”

  “Their normal ramen topped with garlic is the best! I’ve gone three times now. You’ve only gone once?”

  “Yeah. I just went with Haruta and Noto. The line was super long.”

  “You should go more often! There weren’t a lot of people lined up before six, and Minorin was so sad. She was saying, ‘Takasu-kun and the rest of them only came by once and haven’t come back a single time.’”

  Isn’t that great, Taiga implicitly said by shrugging her shoulders and curling the corners of her mouth up slightly. Isn’t that great Minorin is thinking about you?

  She probably didn’t say that out loud because she’d decided not to intervene unless Ryuuji asked for help. Ryuuji still didn’t respond as he looked back at Taiga’s face.

  He wanted to look at her face—the face of the person who gave Minori the hairpin present Ryuuji hadn’t been able to hand over, who looked for that present when it had fallen on top of the snow, who stepped out onto a cliff, and who went missing in the blizzard.

  He wanted to know what Taiga could have been thinking after she forgot what she told him—It’s because I like Ryuuji—and now that she was still worrying about Minori. Even if he knew that slightly meddlesome kindness was her way of showing goodwill, Ryuuji still wanted to know what could have driven Taiga to do that. If it was hurting her, he wanted her to stop. Don’t do it, he wanted to tell her.

  Taiga didn’t mind Ryuuji’s silence. She twisted her slender body to press her forehead to the windowpane so she could look outside.