The Wavering of Haruhi Suzumiya (10 page)

The final stage of Nakagawa’s life plan, as I read it out, involved a leisurely lifestyle in a nice house in the suburbs, with two kids and one white West Highland terrier. Nagato silently watched me as I read. A keen sense of the absurdity of what I was doing rose up within me.

It
was
stupid.

I stopped my emotionless reading. If I had to read any more of this nonsense, I’d go crazy. I’d never reach any kind of
understanding with Nakagawa. There could be no relationship with anyone who possessed a mind capable of putting forth such oppressive lines. No wonder we were never close friends in junior high. He’d fallen in love at first sight, let it stew for half a year, then suddenly had a messenger deliver an insane love confession—he was beyond help.

“Yeah, so, it goes on like that for a while, but you get the point, right?”

To which Nagato replied, “Understood,” and nodded.

Seriously?

I looked at her, and she looked at me.

Time passed quietly, as though the very word “silence” had sprouted wings and was flying around us.

“…”

Nagato tilted her head just slightly but took no other action, simply fixing me in her gaze. So, uh, what now? Was I supposed to say something?

As I was riffling through my vocabulary for a response—

“Message received.”

Her gaze never wavered.

“But I cannot comply.” Her voice was as calm as always. “There is no guarantee that I will remain autonomous for the next ten years,” she said, then closed her mouth. Her expression did not change. Her eyes did not move away from me.

“Yeah…”

I looked away first, pretending to shake my head just to look away from those deep, dark eyes that threatened to suck me in.

“Yeah, I guess so. Ten years is too long for anyone.”

There were other problems with the confession besides the length of time, but for the time being I was relieved. As to where this sense of relief came from, the short version is that I didn’t care if it was Nakagawa or not—I didn’t want to see Nagato walking around with some other guy. I can’t deny that the image
of the way Nagato looked back when Haruhi disappeared had stuck with me. It wasn’t that Nakagawa was a bad guy—he was actually okay—it’s just that I couldn’t forget Nagato’s distressed face as she pulled softly on my sleeve.

“Sorry, Nagato.”

I crumpled up the loose-leaf slip.

“This is really my fault. I shouldn’t have so faithfully written down all that stuff. I should’ve just told Nakagawa ‘no’ when he called me. Just forget all about this. I’ll give that moron a good talking-to. He’s not really the type to turn into a stalker, so you don’t have to worry about that.”

Of course, if Asahina were to get a boyfriend, I’d probably wind up stalking him.

Wait—Ah, so that’s how it was.

I realized what the hazy feeling in my chest was.

To put it bluntly, I didn’t like the idea of some other guy getting between Asahina and me or Nagato and me. It just bothered me—hence my relief. I guess I was pretty transparent.

What about Haruhi? I didn’t have to worry about her. She rejected any guy who got close to her. If there were some kind of natural disaster and Haruhi actually started going out with someone, she wouldn’t be constantly looking for aliens and time travelers, would be nice to Earth, and would make things easier for Koizumi too.

And the craziness I seemed to be constantly getting tangled up in would come to an end too, surely. Perhaps that day would actually come, but it definitely wasn’t here yet.

I opened the window. The sharp winter chill cut through the indoor air, which had been warmed by our body heat. I wound up and chucked the crumpled-up ball of paper as far out the window as I could.

The ball caught the wind and traced a steep arc down. It soon fell in the grassy area beside the covered path that led to the clubroom. I imagined it’d be blown along the ground, winding up in one of
the gutters that ran along the school buildings, and eventually decompose along with the rotting leaves.

How wrong I was.

“Oh, shi—”

Just then, a person walking down the covered path to the clubroom changed direction and made for the grassy area. She looked up and glared at me as though I’d tossed a cigarette butt, then strode over and picked up the paper I’d just tossed.

“Hey, stop! Don’t look at that!”

Ignoring my protests, she picked up the trash that no one had asked her to pick up and, uncrumpling the paper, began to read.

“…”

Nagato continued to regard me wordlessly.

I know it’s sudden, but let’s put on our thinking caps.

Thus did Haruhi Suzumiya scan the paper intently for a few minutes, eventually looking back up to me sharply, then for some reason grinning unpleasantly.

… That cinched it. Today was not my day.

Just ten seconds later, she had already burst into the clubroom with ferocious speed and seized me by the collar.

“What the hell are you thinking? Are you an idiot? I’m gonna set you straight this instant—jump out the window! Now!” she shouted with a grin. That grin looked pretty forced, but if you converted the force with which she dragged me to the open window, it’d be enough to power a heater all day. She didn’t let up even a little as I frantically tried to think of the words I could use to explain the situation.

“No, look, this is—there’s this guy I knew from junior high named Nakagawa, and he—”

“What, you’re gonna try to make this someone else’s fault? You wrote this, didn’t you?”

Haruhi dragged me along, then stared right in my face from maybe ten centimeters away, her eyes large and clear.

“Just let me go. This is no way to have a conversation.”

Just as I was wrestling with Haruhi, a fourth person appeared, his or her timing seriously bad.

“… Wha—”

Asahina’s eyes were as big as saucers as she stood in the open doorway, then she covered her mouth elegantly.

“… Um… are you busy? Maybe I should, er, come back later…”

We were at each other’s throats, but that didn’t really count as “busy.” There wasn’t anything fun about wrestling with Haruhi, and if I had to wrestle, I’d take Asahina, thanks—so come on. I’d never once denied Asahina the right to enter, nor did I plan to.

Anyway, Nagato was sitting right there doing nothing, so there wasn’t any reason why Asahina couldn’t come in too. And I’d owe her one if she could help me out of this.

I tried to smile at Asahina as I grappled with Haruhi.

“My goodness.”

The last brigade member had arrived, and he stood next to Asahina.

“Am I a bit early, perhaps?”

Koizumi smiled brightly and brushed his hair aside.

“Asahina, it seems we’re intruding here. It’s best not to interfere in domestic quarrels, so perhaps we should excuse ourselves for the time being and return once things are settled. I’ll treat you to a coffee from the vending machine.”

Hang on, Koizumi. If he thought this was some kind of lovers’ quarrel, he needed to get his eyesight checked. And don’t use this to abduct Asahina either—this is no time for her to be nodding in agreement with you!

Haruhi had grabbed my shirt with her madman’s strength while I gripped her wrist. At this rate I was going to tear a muscle, so I called out for help.

“Hey, wait, Koizumi! Where are you going? Help me out!”

“Hmm, what to do?”

Koizumi decided this was the time to play dumb, while Asahina cowered like a scared rabbit, blinking rapidly. She didn’t seem to notice Koizumi putting his arm around her waist as though escorting her somewhere.

When I looked to see what Nagato was doing, she was unsurprisingly reading her book, as though none of this had anything to do with her. This was all about her to begin with, so couldn’t she spare a few words of explanation?

Haruhi’s grip tightened.

“I’m such a dope, letting someone into my brigade who’s so stupid that they wrote a ridiculous letter like this. I should resign in shame! I feel like I stuck my foot into a shoe filled with roaches!”

Despite her anger, Haruhi was still smiling incomprehensibly. It was as though she didn’t know what expression to use in a situation like this.

“I’d already thought up thirteen different punishments before I got here! First, I’m gonna make you jump on top of a wall with a
dried mackerel in your mouth and make you fight for territory with the rest of the alley cats! And you’ll have to wear cat ears!”

Now if Asahina had worn cat ears with her maid outfit, that would’ve been something to see, but if I did it, I’d get hauled off in one of those legendary super ambulances.

“We’re fresh out of cat ears.”

I looked toward the open window and sighed.

Sorry, Nakagawa. If I didn’t spill my guts, I’d wind up getting tossed out that window just like your love letter. It wasn’t what I’d wanted to do, but if Haruhi’s misunderstanding wasn’t cleared up, it could mean trouble for the whole of the natural world.

I looked into the brigade chief’s eyes and used the same calm tone I used when trying to calm Shamisen as I trimmed his claws.

“Listen. First, put me down. Haruhi—let me explain things. I’ll make it clear enough to get through even your thick skull, all right?”

Ten minutes later.

“Hmph.”

Haruhi sat cross-legged on a folding chair, sipping a cup of hot green tea.

“You’ve got some weird friends. I mean, he can fall in love at first sight all he wants, but the letter’s going too far. It’s so stupid.”

Love could cause brain damage as well as make someone blind. Not that I disagreed with her last statement, though.

Haruhi held up the wrinkled piece of notebook paper and waved it around.

“I thought for sure you’d teamed up with that moron Taniguchi to give Yuki a hard time. It’s the kind of thing he’d do, and Yuki’s so quiet. She’d be easy to fool.”

I figured there wasn’t anyone less easy to fool than Nagato
anywhere in the galaxy, but I listened without interrupting. Haruhi seemed to notice me exercising my self-control and gave me a glare before her features relaxed.

“No, I guess you wouldn’t do that. You don’t have the cunning for this kind of thing.”

I wasn’t sure if she was complimenting me or just being nasty, but at least she didn’t think I would do the kind of thing a thoughtless elementary school kid would pull. And even Taniguchi had a reasonable amount of discretion for his age.

“Still…”

It was the angelic pride of the SOS Brigade that lit the fuse.

“… It’s lovely, isn’t it?”

Asahina spoke in a dreamy voice.

“If someone were like that over me, I think I’d be kind of happy. Ten years? I’d love to meet someone who would wait ten years for me. It’s so romantic…”

She clasped her hands, her eyes shining.

I wasn’t completely sure if Asahina’s definition of “romantic” was the same as the one I’d learned or not, but it didn’t seem to be. Maybe some words’ definitions have changed in the future. And she was the kind of person who didn’t understand how boats floated until you explained it to her.

Incidentally, Asahina was just wearing her school uniform today. We’d taken the maid outfit, nurse outfit, and all the other costumes to the cleaners—even the frog costume. When Haruhi and I had gone to the cleaners with the stack of clothes all scented with Asahina’s fragrance, the old man behind the counter had given us both a stare so unnecessarily hard that I felt a little traumatized afterward.

“True romance and Nakagawa are worlds apart.”

I swallowed the last of the tea in my teacup and continued.

“Trust me, he’s a big, thick guy who’d never in a million years wind up as the hero of a girls’ romance comic. In animal fortune-telling terms, he’d be a bear with a crescent moon on his chest.”

As I spoke, I thought of ad copy to perfectly match the image I had of him from junior high.

“Yeah, like a gentle giant,” I said.

I didn’t have much to go on, but that was the image that came to mind. His physique was well-developed, anyway. In a different sense than Asahina’s, I mean.

I should’ve apologized to Nakagawa for this, but soon Haruhi had given a dramatic reading of the words he’d dictated to me—I didn’t have the stamina for such a reading—and Koizumi’s impression was rather different from Asahina’s.

“That was an excellent composition, I must say.”

His smile was as pretentious as ever.

“Above all, it was concrete. While it was a bit too idealistic, the honest way in which he’s clearly looking at reality is appealing. One does get the sense that he’s lost himself in the passion of the moment, but reading between the lines, one can feel his rising spirit and heart. If he keeps up the effort, this Mr. Nakagawa will become a formidable man indeed.”