Durarara!!, Vol. 4 (novel) (13 page)

“Oh, sorry, sorry! It’s oil based, so it won’t come out easily, I bet. I’ll help!”

She pulled a piece of cloth out of the chest pocket of her black uniform and began to wipe with the boy.

“It won’t come out. And I suppose water won’t work on permanent ink… Would it be faster to shave it off with a plane?” she laughed.

If you only looked at her face, she was a pretty, tidy, nerdy-looking girl. But when the boy realized he was staring at her, he quickly looked down and subsequently noticed something odd.

The cloth she was using to wipe the desk was trailing what looked
like a string. It seemed strange to him, but he went back to focusing on his own work rather than get distracted.

Which meant that he failed to realize that it was the bra of the female student who’d just been dragged to the bathroom.

In the end, the girl who was primarily responsible for scribbling on Mairu’s desk did not return to the classroom. She left school early without even retrieving her bag.

There was no way for anyone else to know what kind of “discussion” the two had in the bathroom—and no one was inclined to find out, either.

The students who had silently watched the defacement happen certainly weren’t going to stick their necks into even bigger trouble. That was the only reason they needed.

Time passed, and then it was homeroom before the end of school.

As a result of Mairu Orihara’s rampage in Class 1-B, the twisted network of female gossip set its sights instead on Kururi Orihara, her sister.

Aoba considered the desk graffiti in silence.

She had done nothing. Kururi became the target of harassment for no other reason than being Mairu’s sister. They didn’t hate Kururi, they just wanted revenge against Mairu.

Actually, I don’t really care
, he thought, looking out of the window in boredom as time ticked down to the start of homeroom.

The teacher showed up and began to run through the standard procedures before the end of school. As Mr. Marumura looked dutifully over the entire class, he noticed the miserable state of Kururi’s desk and asked, “Orihara, what happened to your desk?”

“…”

“Just to be sure…you didn’t write this yourself, did you?”

He looked down and saw the content of the messages and grimaced as he waited for her answer.

“…No,” the girl in the gym clothes claimed in a quiet voice.

Marumura surveyed the classroom and asked, “Does anyone know who wrote this?”

I don’t care
, Aoba thought, as he watched Kururi stare downward at
the desk. He had nothing to do with this bullying. It represented neither benefit nor harm to him.

I really don’t care.

And because he truly didn’t care…

“Tsukiyama and a girl from another class did it,” Aoba said, simply answering the teacher’s question with the truth. Because he
didn’t care
. He had no opinion either way on the bullying. He just answered the question.

Meanwhile, the girl named Tsukiyama whom he accused looked shocked. No one had stopped her when they were doing the deed. So it never occurred to her that she might be betrayed in this way.

Of course, in reality, there was no cooperation in the deed from the start, so there was nothing to betray, but from her perspective, she had been stabbed in the back.

“Come to the faculty room after this, Tsukiyama. And bring your friend from the other class. Got that?” the teacher ordered sternly.

Tsukiyama ground her teeth and shot Aoba a look that said,
You didn’t do anything earlier. You just watched!
But as he didn’t care, this meant nothing to him.

The one thing that he
did
care about was that Kururi herself looked at him with some amount of surprise. He couldn’t deny his interest in that.

After school, school entrance

Several hours after that incident…

“After school tomorrow…I can’t wait.”

Once Aoba had finished observing the various school clubs, he got a message from Mikado agreeing to show him around Ikebukuro the following afternoon.

He was heading for the school entrance to leave for the day when a fierce voice called out, “Hey, you.”

Aoba turned back to see a group of girls. They were from his class, and standing at the center was Tsukiyama, the girl he’d sent to the faculty room earlier.

“What?” he asked.

Tsukiyama scowled. “You know what. What do you think you’re doing?”

“Are you going to ask me out? Is that what this is? Well, sorry. I don’t think I’m up to the task of going out with all of you at once,” he commented lightly, but the girls did not find that amusing.

“Huh? Are you an idiot or something? Try to take a damn hint. Who snitches to the teacher in that situation? You think you’re some kind of hotshot, playing the hero like that?”

“Actually, if I thought I was doing the right thing, I would have stopped you when you were doing it, right? Why would you ask me this?”

“Then why did you snitch on me?!”

“Well, you didn’t tell me not to. To be honest, if I had to judge you and Orihara on a scale—based only on your looks and actions, since that’s all I have to work with—I’d say it’s pretty much a law of nature that a girl who draws nasty messages on someone’s desk is less desirable than a mysterious, well-behaved girl with a big rack in tight gym clothes…”

“Fuck you, you little—”

Just as the girls began to close in on Aoba, Tsukiyama noticed something wrong.

Her body was sending abrupt danger signals, centering around her nostrils.

Something smelled
charred
.

“Huh…?”

A fire?

The girl looked around in a panic, searching for the source of the burning smell. It was Aoba who pinpointed the location of the smell first.

“Hey, is that…?”

“Huh? Aaagh!!”

Tsukiyama looked down to see that smoke was issuing from the bag slung over her shoulder. She screamed and threw it aside. Instantly, flames erupted from it, the smoke pouring from the burned hole in the fabric.

The smoke alarm set into the ceiling of the school’s front entrance went off, ringing all throughout the school.

After that, every student present, including Aoba, was summoned to the disciplinary room for individual questioning.

Aoba answered truthfully about everything he’d seen. Oddly enough, they asked to see the contents of his bag. Surprised that they would demand this, he asked what the cause of the fire was. The teacher wouldn’t tell him at first, then admitted the answer as long as he didn’t tell anyone else.

They didn’t know what caused the fire in Tsukiyama’s bag to start, but the investigation turned up several energy drink bottles that were actually full of paint thinner. And not only that, but the bags of the other girls present led to more bottles of thinner. They denied any knowledge of this, but they’d also just been disciplined for bullying.

“Huffing paint right on the first week of school… Then again, these are bullies we’re talking about. They were bothering you about what happened at homeroom, weren’t they?”

“Pretty much.”

“Well, they could be looking at a suspension…but there’s no telling how they might try to get back at you. If things are seeming dicey, come and tell me at once.”

After that, Aoba was unceremoniously released, and he headed for the school exit again—but there were two girls waiting at the front entrance this time, which still contained a bit of ash from the burned bag.

One was Kururi, carrying her bag and still in gym clothes, and the other was dressed almost the exact opposite—yet aside from the glasses, they had the exact same facial features.

“Heya. Hi! Or should it be ‘good evening’? And between you and me, I guess it’s ‘nice to meet you’! I’m Mairu Orihara! Kuru’s twin sister! It’s a pleasure!”

The other girl was as bright and chatty as her sister was silent and somber.

“Um, n-nice to meet you.”

They sure are odd twins
, Aoba thought. Kururi, who was standing in Mairu’s shadow, mumbled toward the ground, “…Thank you”

“Huh? …Oh, for the thing at homeroom? You’re mistaken. I didn’t do it to earn your thanks, and I didn’t stop them from writing on your desk in the first place.”

“…I know.”

“Hweh?” he mumbled.

Mairu cackled and added, “You know that Kuru was secretly watching them do that from the hallway, right? And you know that the both of us were secretly watching the whole scene that happened here earlier?”

“What?!” Aoba stammered, shocked at this revelation. “But…wouldn’t that give you even less of a reason to thank me?”

“Kuru’s happy that you said you thought she was cuter than that Tsukiyama girl! You know how she’s more of the silent, thoughtful type, yet she wears those gym clothes all the time? Kinda weird, right? So she’s just happy that a boy actually said that about her!”

“…Be quiet,” Kururi commanded her little sister. She took a step closer to Aoba, still facing downward. She and the boy were about the same height.

She said, “…Your reward.”

And she looked up at last, leaned forward, and covered Aoba’s lips with her own.

?!

Not realizing at first what had just happened, Aoba’s mind was a total blank. He only watched as Kururi shuffled away, her face red.

But that wasn’t the end of his confusion. Mairu stepped forward to take the place of the retreating Kururi, and unlike her sister, she forcefully grabbed his body and yanked him toward her for a powerful kiss.

?!
?!?!?!