Chapter Eighteen: Strained
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Torikawa Sekai
I did not get a chance to speak with Erika, or to ask her about how Kuromura was, when- or if- she had dropped by the other girl's room last Friday.
Most probably, she had not, because Erika was a worse gaming-junkie than I was. After buying herself a new computer game last Friday, she had spent every free time available to complete it. That meant locking herself in for the whole weekend, not switching on her mobile phone, oversleeping her alarm and missing our usual breakfast meetings.
"Kuromura gets tired easily these days, doesn't she?" I asked Erika while stabbing absentmindedly at my portion of fried noodles, trying hard not to remember Haru's betrayal from days ago.
I had shifted my chair over to her desk for lunch period. It was a slowly forming habit, with Kuromura either disappearing off or sleeping at her desk during lunch and being not at all motivated to spend the period at the rooftop clearing anymore.
Erika turned around slowly, with the tips of the disposable chopsticks still held between her lips, to steal a glance at Kuromura.
The girl in question was again using the lunch period to sleep. Her face was burrowed deep within the walls of her arms while her thick spectacles lay folded at the top left corner of her table.
"Well," Erika began to speak after swallowing her last mouthful. "That's the fourth time I've seen her asleep in class at all. I didn't notice anything else though; all the teachers seemed to be keeping a close eye on our corner, so I can't turn around to chat with Aki-sempai as much as I used to."
Letting go of a sigh, I looked back at the sleeping girl. Kuromura had been steadily nodding off the whole morning, even before first period was through!
As much as our teachers were glad with Kuromura starting to look the part of a proper student, to the point of not wearing her many earrings for some reason that I was sure had nothing to do with improving her image, the memory of her past behaviour was definitely still fresh in their minds.
Skepticism was like a second nature to the teachers in this school.
"I don't understand how she could get so tired so easily," I wondered aloud as I watched my chopsticks drag the noodles around in circles, clumping around the wooden sticks. Perhaps it had something to do with her family?
The conversation that I had overheard between Haru and his mother invaded my mind then. Kuromura was very sensitive to the things happening around her. Maybe she had felt something already?
"She would be tired if she played games the way I did. Say, do you think Aki-sempai was actually gaming the whole time while you were worrying to the point of transforming your lunch into a single lump of cooked flour?"
I looked down at my lunch. It was becoming more and more visibly inedible.
"Can you even imagine Kuromura sitting before any gaming console, staring at a screen with a near fanatical look while jabbing her fingers at the control?"
Covering her mouth to stop the laugh that the mental image was surely stirring up, Erika shook her head "No".
"And, Kuromura has no interest in gaming." The body that owned the smooth drawl sat up with a small stretch. "I can't even catch a wink, what with the two of you chattering away about me as if I wasn't even here."
"Aww... We weren't even loud, Aki-sempai!" Erika pouted.
"What can I say, I have good hearing."
Kuromura rubbed her eyes for a second, then put on her spectacles and stalked towards us.
"I see you're not hungry, Torikawa. I guess you won't mind then," she barely warned before picking up the extra onigiri that I always bought for lunch.
"Hey!"
"A little charity never hurt anyone," she dismissed my protest while pushing up her spectacles with her pointer and middle fingers, rice ball gripped safely with her thumb and last two fingers.
"You're not eating anything else, Aki-sempai? You're not doing much justice to your health, you know," Erika commented.
The other girl walked back to her desk, rearranging some papers before slotting the thin stack in a dark grey plastic folder and replied without missing a beat, "I know my limits."
"Are you going somewhere?" The dark-blonde asked as Kuromura walked away from our corner of the classroom.
The former redhead stopped and turned slightly to give Erika a sidelong glance from behind her reflective lenses.
"Art studio. And don't bother following," she added, as if directing her last command to me, then turned on her heels to stroll out to the corridors.
Erika tilted her head and gave me a questioning look, raising one eyebrow the way Kuromura would.
I threw my hands up in indignation, "I do not follow her around anymore!"
It was true! I had not been doing that ever since her whole 'I am avoiding mankind for- oh- the rest of the time when I have black hair upon my head and spectacles on my nose' business.
"That's not the purpose of my look," Erika rolled her auburn eyes at me. "I was going to ask you about your noodles. Are you gonna eat them? Cos' I'm still feeling hungry."
"Knock yourself out," I said, pushing the paper-thin cardboard carton in her direction.
The younger girl gave a happy whoop and dug into her second lunch with vigour.
"Onii-san, do you think maybe it was Aki-sempai's elective subject that was tiring her?" Erika asked from across the stone table that we always occupied when studying in the science garden.
"Hmm..." I ran the suggestion through my mind while twirling a pen with my right hand. "It could be. She kept mentioning her 'extra assignment', and if it was anything the teachers gave her in class, we would already know."
"Hey! Sekai-kun! Erika-chan!"
The two of us turned towards the source of the loud voice and saw Takagi-sempai swaggering up to us.
"Sempai!" Erika called out in response. I waved instead.
"Here to terrorise other not-yet-graduated juniors, Takagi-sempai?" I joked.
"No, no, no," he raised a hand as he shook his head, now missing his past Mohawk style but had hair cut short enough to spike on its own without hairstyling products. "I leave the terrorising to the remaining rebels in this school. Although Aki-chan once complained that they were weak to the point that she had to put in more effort during Physical Ed. lessons. She said that it was to make up for the loss of workout usually sufficient when dealing with bullies in my batch who stood in her way."
"But why are you here in the science garden? Shouldn't you be in the art studio?" Erika voiced her confusion.
"I am heading up in a while. But seeing as I'm already late, what's the point of rushing when I'd get the same length of nagging, whether it was five or fifteen minutes that I missed?"
I shook my head, slightly worried yet at the same time amused at the familiarity of my senior's thinking process.
"Besides, I wanted to check on those weeds Kentaro and I planted on graduation day. I am very sure they are around here..."
"Weeds?" I exclaimed in disbelief.
"Dandelions. Flowers, of sorts. But still weeds," Takagi-sempai explained as he bent over and under several bushes to search for his "cultivation".
Erika gave me a flabbergasted look. I shrugged at her. There was no denying- on my part, at least- that the artistic population consisted of strange people.
"Damn! The gardener must have cleared them off. Guess I'll never know what the school will look like, overtaken by weeds."
Yes, definitely strange.
"Sempai, since you come back every week to help out at the art studio, do you know if Aki-sempai has received some special art assignment?" Erika asked, peering over a row of low bushes in an attempt to find Takagi-sempai's face.
"She didn't tell the two of you?" Takagi-sempai stood, straightening himself. "It's the usual First Semester Major Assignment for elective subjects. It is common consensus among elective-taking students to be some school conspiracy to kill off survivors of the final examinations in the third and last semester of the previous year."
"So what's Kuromura's assignment? She gets tired very easily these days and we think it's got something to do with her elective," I joined in the questioning, twirling my pen again.
"Are you sure it isn't you draining her patience this time?" Takagi-sempai teased as he took a seat beside Erika.
"Well..." I bit my lips. "We're not the main cause of it this time."
Erika gave a look, saying not to drag her down along with me.
"I'm still amazed that Aki-chan hasn't wrung your neck clear off your shoulders yet. She seemed close to doing it the semester before I graduated," the senior laughed.
I scowled and rolled my eyes. "I don't piss her off on purpose." I just wanted to get the stolid girl to pay attention to anything, as opposed to her not caring about everything.
"We won't know the real story anyway so we'll believe you for the moment," Takagi-sempai shared a knowing look with Erika while I held back a groan.
"Can we talk about Kuromura's assignment first?"
"All right. Back to that, her class was given some crafts-related art project for this year's Major Assignment."
"You mean like sculptures?" Erika asked doubtfully.
Takagi-sempai waved it off, "No, not that. Too difficult. Although it may come up for third year. Aki-chan's class got something else. And when I saw the plans, prints and sketches that she had- Whoa! I've got to say, that girl's ambitious."
Erika and I shouted out in collective frustration, "What is it already?"
Nakamine Erika
"What are you doing here?" Aki-sempai asked as she opened the door to her room.
I took in her short, messy ponytail and thick white hair band that held up her fringe, too short to be tied. "Nothing much. Just... checking up on Aki-sempai. Oh, and I need to borrow your chemistry notes. I lent mine to onii-san and curfew will be long over before he's done copying it."
"Be thankful that I'm too preoccupied to bother chastising the funny way you two study," Aki-sempai let out a sharp sigh as she dug into her bag for the notes. "Can't you make him finish his notes during your study sessions?"
"Onii-san says if he does that then there wouldn't be time to do homework together. And if he's left alone in his room to do it, he'll end up trying to finish his PSP game instead."
Aki-sempai snorted. "Why am I not surprised?"
I sat myself down on her bed of midnight-blue covers and allowed myself an eyeful of her room. It was neat, in a sparse kind of way. The walls were still in their original white paint (thanks to school rules about our dormitories), lacking the posters and photographs that I had seen hung in my volleyball teammates' rooms. The only somewhat-decorative objects were the many paintings stacked standing up against the free wall space between the foot of the bed and its facing wooden wardrobe.
Save for the pieces of Aki-sempai's strewn (artistically, maybe?) sketches on the desk, the standard dormitory room was free of clutter and mess- a polar opposite of mine- which made the large wooden board that lay on the remaining walking space between the side of the bed and the desk seem very out of place.
"What's that?" I pointed innocently at the black painted board, its suffocating fume much dissipated with the paint being dried enough. The scent was still lingering though, I confirmed mentally as I sniffed the enclosed room.
"It's a wooden board painted black," Aki-sempai replied monotonously as she turned around, chemistry notes in hand.
"No, duh," I arched an eyebrow at her.
The currently dark-haired girl exhaled a long breath before tossing me the notebook, which I caught with hand-eye coordination perfected from long hours of sports training, while she collapsed in the nearby chair with none of her usual grace.
"It's for my art-elective assignment," Aki-sempai said with a hint of exhaustion.
"Cool," I supplied noncommittally, bending over the edge of the bed to examine the board. "We saw Takagi-sempai this afternoon. He was telling us about it."
There were sewing threads running across and down the board, forming little inch-wide squares before being taped down the sides of the board, pulling the thin strings taut over the vast wooden space.
"Isn't it taxing to do all these by yourself?" I gestured at the large board on the tiled floor. "There're only less than two weeks to finish this before the semester exams."
"I've had preparation done," Aki-sempai nodded her head at the various bags sitting by the bookshelf fitted into an empty space created by the wall that protruded out of the room under the window. "All that's left is filling up that blasted board, which I'm going to do once you head back. Heavy thing, that one."
I hummed an agreement. The board looked a ton just lying there.
The two of us sat in comfortable silence for a while, staring at the wooden board, until I decided that I had seen enough.
"I'm going back to my room to finish up chemistry homework," I stood up, waving the notes. The older girl pushed herself from the chair and followed me to the door. "Oh, hey!"
Aki-sempai looked up from her hands on the doorknob.
"Take this before I forget about it," I gushed, thrusting into her hands a can of strawberry milk that I had brought with me. "I don't know about you, but this never fails to help me sleep better."
"Um. Thanks."
I grinned and gave the taller girl a pat on her arms. "See you tomorrow!"
A nod was the last thing I saw before she closed and locked her door.
...To be continued