Durarara!!, Vol. 2 (novel) (16 page)

In her dream, the girl met her dead parents.

At a theme park, surrounded by the smiles of her family.

On a mountaintop covered with flowers.

At a riverside blanketed with warm sunlight and the smell of barbecue.

In her own kitchen with a birthday cake in the center of the table.

“You’re going to be just as pretty as your mother someday, Anri.”

“No, I think she gets it from you.”

Her mother and father were smiling.

There were no mirrors in her dream, but she was probably smiling, too.

Mom, Dad.

We’ll be together forever and ever, right?

Anri Sonohara always repeated the same phrase in her dreams.

A happy home.

Her family’s smiles.

So small and insignificant, but the greatest joy of all to a young girl.

The more she had those dreams, the more she recognized they were dreams as they happened.

But within her waking dream, she would smile.

She indulged in the happiness of her dreams, knowing they represented times that would never return.

Food was set on the table.

It was a meal she cooked with her mother.

Her father ate it and smiled, said it was delicious.

She would smile again.

That symbolic process repeated over and over.

Just a repetition of the most orthodox, simplistic series of events, so standard that if
happy home
appeared in a dictionary, this would be the definition. She’d seen the dreams so often that she knew exactly what would produce smiles in each and every one. There was no need for any other action. She just repeated the process.

That was enough for Anri.

She was fine with the happiness in her dream being a simple, predictable, repetitive process. That was what it took to get her to smile. She could relive the same dream over and over without growing tired of it.

She convinced herself that this was true happiness. And she
was
truly happy.

Perhaps it didn’t look like happiness to someone else, but this was the world of her dreams. No one else could see it for themselves.

In her dreams, she was in early elementary school. She would talk to her dream parents with a face full of innocence.

“Mom, Dad, we’ll be together forever and ever.”

Her parents grinned and nodded, and the dream ended there.

It was the same dream every single time, and it ended at the same point every single time.

Together forever and ever. It was like a magical mantra that ensured she would have the same dream the next night.

The same process. The same happiness.

She felt that happiness over and over and over, as regular and predictable as breathing.

And on this particular day, just like any other day, she would wake from that dream.

Anri’s eyes opened to take in the morning sunlight filtering through her curtains.

The sleepiness was gone. The last words she spoke to her parents in the dream were always the alarm that snapped her out of the final REM sleep of the night.

Anri stretched and hopped off the bed to trot to the bathroom in her pajamas.

Before she washed her face, she looked at her reflection in the mirror—blurred without the help of her glasses—and smiled.

But when the reality of her parents’ death set in, the smile faded a bit, turned cynical and self-deprecating.

Anri’s parents were dead.

It had happened five years earlier. So she would never again taste the happiness that she found in her dreams.

It was in her dreams that she sought what was impossible in reality.

It wasn’t that she could have whatever dream she wanted. In fact, the first time she had the dream, she hadn’t been hoping for it.

In the dream, she just lived with her parents, with no upheaval or excitement. But after they died, she began having the dream more and more often. Now she experienced it every single night.

A popular theory said that dreams were the brain subconsciously processing memories, but that would mean that her brain cells were processing the same things over and over. Taking out something that was already neat and ordered, then rearranging it into the exact same pattern. If that process was completely pointless, Anri certainly didn’t let it bother her.

At first, it felt completely empty.

Dreams were hollow things, producing nothing, providing no solace.

But as the dream came to her again and again, Anri changed her mind very quickly.

Was it really just a hollow fiction?

Yes, the table and the meal sitting atop it were false. No amount of eating would provide her real body with any nutrition.

But what about the emotion?

In her dreams, Anri felt happiness. She felt her heart being at ease.

Was an emotion produced by a fiction really false? Did that mean the emotions she felt when watching a movie were utter lies as well?

No. That wasn’t true.

Anri denied the fiction. Movies weren’t fiction. Whatever happened on the screen was
real
. And if that was true, then the events in her dream that moved her heart were just as real.

Since then, Anri had the same dream every night.

She indulged in a happiness of her own creation, over and over and over…

But in the real world, she was just a bit—just a
bit
further away from happiness.

The horrible incident that had taken her parents’ lives was five years in the past.

And Anri Sonohara still couldn’t find where her life belonged.

At the same time that Celty bolted out of her apartment, Anri Sonohara was wandering.

All through Ikebukuro without a destination.

The end-of-term exams were over, and only graduation and the end of the school year ceremonies were left. So she walked about the town with a goal in mind.

A goal, but not a destination.

She didn’t know where she should go, but she wasn’t in a mood to hang around her house. So she wandered the neighborhood.

The night was cold despite the imminent arrival of spring, and its chill winds tore mercilessly through Anri. She took in the sights of the town through her glasses as she walked and suffered the cold.

The usual waves of humanity. It seemed like the ratio of yellow bandannas was higher than before, but she didn’t give it any more thought than that.

As the various people walked past her with their own various troubles in mind, Anri sought out just one of them.

Haruna Niekawa.

Anri was wandering the night in search of the girl one year her senior. She hadn’t been back home. Once school had wrapped up, she
came out here still dressed in her uniform. Raira Academy allowed for students to wear private clothes, but the uniform looked good and was suitably warm in the winter, so plenty of people wore it.

But when it came to the city at night, that number dropped precipitously. If you were out at night, chances were high that you’d still be out very late, and wearing a uniform just meant it was easier to be singled out by the police.

Anri wasn’t planning to be wandering the streets that late, but she didn’t know what the most effective time to return home was, either.

“…What should I do?”

It was an honest lament of her present situation.

So why was Anri searching for Haruna Niekawa?

The answer to that question came earlier in the afternoon.

And the cause was nothing other than Nasujima’s fixation on her.

“Hey, Anri… Have you finished all your preparations for the Raikou Festival?”

The Raikou Festival was an event held the day after graduation along with the remaining students of the school, a type of thank-you party. Participation was optional, but because the class representatives of the underclassmen were central to the planning, Anri and Mikado were enrolled by default, and the preparations for the event were ongoing.

It was after school, and Anri was walking the empty halls on her way to get ready to leave, when Nasujima’s imposing face loomed up, as though he’d been waiting to ambush her.

“Well, Anri? You’re here awfully late again… Is everything all right?”

“Um, yes…”

She felt a small measure of unease and fear at the fact that he was calling her Anri now. If he’d started off calling her that, she would have told herself he was just one of those teachers who used first names…but until recently, he was calling her Sonohara. Now she was Anri to him.

It made her feel like the distance had suddenly shrunk between them. Perhaps that was exactly Nasujima’s intent.

After she saw her personal bullies attacked by the slasher and had to undergo police questioning, Anri was nearly caught by a TV
interviewer for a segment. She barely managed to escape, thanks to the arrival of Mikado, who had come out of concern for her. But given the stress of the encounter, she took several days off of school to let things calm down.

The final exams were starting just as she came back, and thanks to her diligent studying, she did just fine on the tests. Things were slowly getting back to normal, until…

“I thought you’d still be taking a break from school. Why didn’t you just tell me you were feeling better, Anri?”

She had no reason to report something like that to an instructor who wasn’t even her homeroom teacher. She didn’t tell him anything specific at all, but Nasujima kept badgering her.

“Don’t you know how worried I was? They say that Nomura was the one who got attacked, and she was apparently one of those bullies harassing you… Why were you together? Were they picking on you again? I’m worried for you…so, so worried. But more importantly, I’m worried about that street slasher. I know you said you didn’t see a face on TV, but the slasher might think you
did
see him!”

He had found his perfect excuse—feigned concern over the incident. The other teachers simply avoided the topic out of consideration for Anri, or ignored her to sidestep the trouble entirely, or showed obvious and honest concern—but Nasujima was the first to reference the attack directly to her face.

Today was the first time she’d seen Nasujima since coming back to school. It was almost as though he’d been waiting to catch her in another lonely situation with no one around.

“Are you sure you want to be waiting around here this late? Don’t you think it would be safer to have someone escort you home?”

He wasn’t even bothering to hide it. Anri’s willpower helped her resist the urge to turn her face away in disgust.

She just wanted to live in peace and quiet.

Her dreams every night gave her the happiness she needed. So she didn’t expect much from reality. She just wanted to avoid trouble.

That was exactly why she wasn’t sure if she should reject the teacher’s advances explicitly. She was already garnering enough attention because of the slasher attack. If she raised a fuss about sexual harassment from a teacher next, that attention might turn against her.

Besides, even if she complained to someone about Nasujima’s actions, what he was actually
doing
wasn’t against any rules. The best she could do was raise a new rumor among the girls, and that was altogether too risky. If Nasujima claimed that she was the one who tried to seduce
him
, she might be forced to transfer schools.

She was fine with being shunned. She felt that no matter what happened to her, Mikado and Masaomi would take her side and believe her. That showed how much she trusted them, but it also caused her to realize something else.

I really am just leeching off of Ryuugamine and Kida after all.

But she didn’t feel much regret about this. That was just the way she lived.

The problem was that the teachers and the school system were not that simple to deal with. If she caused a stir and caught the wrong kind of attention, the school might grow concerned with outward appearances. In that case, Anri would be forced to transfer whether she liked it or not.

On the other hand, she couldn’t just let Nasujima continue to have the wrong idea about her. If she didn’t stand up to him at some point, her peace of mind would be threatened in a different way. In fact, it already was.

In normal circumstances, she could just come out and say it plainly. But now, when Nasujima was in what Masaomi might call his “blown-fuse” mode, there was no telling how he might react. On the other hand, if she tried to be subtle about it, he wouldn’t pay any attention.

Anri was so troubled about this turn of events that she started treading down the path toward the worst possible conclusion: that transferring schools was her best option.

Transfer… Yes, that’s an option…

As she weighed the idea, Anri recalled a piece of information that Masaomi had taught her—and decided to try to
rattle
the teacher a bit.

“…Then, do you think I should hide myself by transferring schools…?”

“N-no! You shouldn’t worry about that. The security here is absolute. You know that, right?”

Anri recalled an event a few days after the start of school, when a man in black and a mysterious motorcyclist went on a violent rampage, but she chose not to bring that up. It occurred to her now that
it was the Black Rider that the whole city was talking about, but that didn’t matter now. She ignored it.