Durarara!!, Vol. 2 (novel) (6 page)

“Now, I’ve got all of what just happened captured, audio and video both.”

“Wha…?”

“So,” Masaomi began, strolling into the hallway with eyes narrowed like a reptile’s, “can you show me how to pressure people into doing what you want, for the sake of my future career as a pimp? Well, Teach?”

“Heh-heh-heh. So now I have some of the questions on the final exam. I didn’t think it would be that easy,” Masaomi gloated with his usual breezy smile as they walked out to the front gate of the school.

After their confrontation, Masaomi went into the classroom to work out some kind of deal and had apparently gained some of the questions on Mr. Nasujima’s final exam.

Anri looked at him sidelong, unsure whether she should thank him for saving her from trouble or berate him for blackmailing a teacher.

If it had been anyone else, Anri wouldn’t have said a thing. She didn’t want to criticize someone and wind up on their bad side.

But Masaomi was one of her few friends, someone whose bad behavior she could call out for what it was. And in part, she didn’t
want
him to behave badly.

Still, she held back on saying so. It was quite likely that he’d inserted himself into the conversation not for the material gain of the blackmail, but to help Anri out of her pinch. If that was true, she didn’t know how to respond.

He seemed to sense her hesitation and put on a childish grin.

“I got to help you out of trouble, and I got myself the exam questions. Two birds with one stone.”

“Huh?”

“You weren’t sure whether to thank me or not, right? I agree with both sides, so…it’s even. They cancel each other out. How about that?” he suggested nonsensically.

Anri had no words.

He took that as affirmation and continued talking. “So let’s say no words need to be traded. How about we start by holding hands instead?”

“Can I be angry with you?”

“Nope. But I am at that age where I want a girl to hold my hand, kiss me, or even more than that.”

Masaomi had professed his love for Anri since the moment they met. But he did the same thing with 60 percent of the other girls he met, and hardly anyone took him seriously. And anyone who took that seriously would chew him out just as seriously.

“You say that to everyone, Kida. Who do you really like?”

“Me? I like all the girls I’ve asked out, of course. With all my heart! And I’m head over heels for you, Anri. And you can believe me.”

“…Um, I don’t know what to say…”

Though she was exasperated by his lack of shame, Anri couldn’t help but allow a relieved look to cross her face. Oblivious, Masaomi brought up the other boy who was part of her life now.

“On the other hand, Mikado really doesn’t have any game, does he? He still hasn’t asked you out yet, has he?”

“Huh?”

“I mean, you do know that he’s crazy about you, right? You have to.”

Masaomi never pulled his punches when it came to sensitive topics. Because he felt no shame about his own romantic travails, he freely stomped all over the business of others in that regard.

“Ryuugamine is…a very good friend…”

“Heh-heh. Well, my best friend’s totally in love with you, so I’ll take the backseat and observe for now. That’s my way of life. I’ve got to be free to get along with all the pretty girls in the world, so I can’t let you steal my heart all to yourself,” Masaomi babbled on, completely ignoring what Anri said. She realized that nothing else was going to get through to him when he was like this, so she gave up and let him continue.

“Ooh…did I sound cool just now? Or was that lame? Are you in love? Did you fall for me? Fall colors? Fallen off the wagon? Fall-falla-falla-falloo?” he jabbered on, engulfing Anri in nonsense syllables. But Anri was ignoring him and paid it no mind.

“By the way, Kida…”

“What? I’ll answer anything you want.
Heh-heh!
By my visual gauge, your measurements are thirty-three, twenty-two, thirty-two…the type of girl who really slims down in her clothes. Or were you going to ask for heroic tales of my middle school exploits? Well, there was the time I had hundreds of henchmen…”

Anri ignored Masaomi’s fond reflection and raised the question she’d been mulling over.

“What did you mean when you said you wanted to be a pimp?”

“Whuh?”

“What kind of job is a pimp?”

It wasn’t sarcastic, but a straightforward question from an innocent girl who was ignorant of the seedier side of adult society. Faced with a curious gaze from behind her glasses, Masaomi had no answer for a moment.

As he grasped for words, Anri looked up at the evening sky and murmured quietly, “You’re so lucky though, Kida. Already got your future and life planned out.”

“Er, well, actually—”

“I don’t even know what I’m doing with my life
right now
, much less my future…”

She turned to look at him with a note of sadness in her eyes, then noticed a figure standing at the front gate of the school. The boy had noticed them as well, and he waved to Anri and Masaomi with a big smile on his face.

Masaomi raised a hand back and muttered in a voice only loud enough for Anri to hear, “Speak of the devil, it’s the wimp without the guts to ask a girl out.”

Anri felt her cheeks blush just a little bit, but she didn’t respond.

There was nothing else she could do at that moment.

There were already stars sparkling in the sky, an all too faint layer of glitter next to the brightness of the city lights.

Under that winter sky, Anri walked alone through Ikebukuro.

After they met up with Mikado, the three went shopping at the Parco department store on the way back from school, and then she left the two boys to continue her trip home.

Anri looked around idly as she walked the street to Sunshine City. It was essentially the same Ikebukuro as ever, people passing wrapped up in their own thoughts, approaching and leaving.

But it was only “essentially” the same, because there was something just slightly off.

Yellow.

It seemed that many of the young people walking about the town were wearing yellow bandannas.

What could that be about?

Anri found it odd but didn’t give it any more thought than that as she headed straight for home.

Off the main road, she headed into a narrow alley in the direction of her cheap apartment. Despite being barely half a mile from the shopping district, this might as well have been a different world altogether. There were no passing crowds. The streetlights cast lonely colors on the empty alleys.

At first, the trip from the train station to this point was such a drastic shift that she felt like her heart was shriveling up, but after a year, the loneliness of the trip became familiar to her.

As she headed down the empty path, Anri thought about what Masaomi said as they split up.

“You know…you really should be careful, Anri.”

“?”

“I’m talking about Nasujima. Most of the rumors are just that, but it’s true that he’s put the moves on his students.”

“…!”

She held her breath in shock at this sudden pronouncement. Masaomi was not the type to lie or joke about this topic. She’d imagined the story might be true, but learning its veracity put a suffocating clamp over her mind.

“There was an older student, a second-year named Haruna Niekawa. She transferred out in the middle of the second semester, but it was apparently because her relationship with Nasujima was about to be exposed. Either the school didn’t want the scandal and forced her to go, Nasujima threatened her himself, or Niekawa decided to transfer on her own accord.”

“…”

If Niekawa transferred out in the middle of the second semester, then that was the same time Nasujima started putting the moves on Anri. That confluence of details gave Masaomi’s statement weight in her mind.

“Just be careful. And if anything happens, Mikado and I will do something about it. Right, Mikado?”

Mikado hadn’t been paying attention. He blinked in surprise as the conversation suddenly focused on him.

“Um…I don’t know what you’re talking about, but if it’s within my ability, I’ll be there.”

“
Tsk-tsk-tsk.
Don’t be an idiot, Mikado. In this situation, you’re not a real man unless you say, ‘Even if it’s beyond my ability, I’ll accomplish it with the power of love’!”

“That’s a contradiction.”

“Ha-ha-ha! Well, you don’t know what you can or can’t do until you observe it for yourself… I call this rule ‘Schrödinger’s Mikado.’ What that means is that I’ll lock you inside a box and pump poison gas into it, thus testing whether you can resist it or not with the power of love. But in fact, I’ll just be doing that to get rid of you so Anri can be my girlfriend. Is that cool?”

Anri smiled and nodded, glad to see Masaomi back to his usual goofy self.

“Yes… Thanks, both of you.”

Anri tried to get her emotions in order as she walked the lonely route home.

She liked Mikado Ryuugamine.

She understood this fact.

But she also liked Masaomi Kida, and she even still liked Mika Harima.

It’s the same. My love for Ryuugamine is the same as for Kida and Mika.

Which told her that it probably wasn’t a romantic feeling. It must be still in the realm of a love for a friend.

If Mikado told her that he loved her in a romantic way, she probably wouldn’t be able to accept or reciprocate that. She could tell that somewhere in her heart, she would feel that she was cheating on him with Masaomi, and the guilt of that knowledge would be too much to bear.

It would be so much easier if she could just love either Mikado or Masaomi.

But she couldn’t really tell the difference between friendship and romance, and even if she had the option of choosing to love them, that was different from being able to
choose
one of them.

It felt like choosing one of them would mean destroying what they had going now.

Even here, in this happy place, she was unable to find her proper standing.

As if to underscore this, she remembered the upperclassman Masaomi had mentioned just minutes earlier.

Haruna Niekawa.

While she knew the girl had ended up transferring, what was the truth behind that decision?

Was she able to find her place in the world?

Even if it ended up in disaster, had she felt true love for Nasujima at the time? Or had their entire relationship been the product of coercion?

No amount of imagination would provide an answer. Anri stopped at the side of the road and heaved a sigh.

The next instant, a light shock ran through her back, and Anri lost her balance, falling to the ground.

She turned around, baffled at what had happened to her, only to see a familiar face.

“
Haw-haw!
She fell on her face.”

“It was just a little love tap, and she fell right on her face.”

“You really are a sick little worm.”

Three girls wearing the Raira Academy uniform stood in the glow of the streetlight. It was the trio that had it out for her, the ones Mikado called the “old-fashioned manga bullies.”

“…”

Anri stared up at them, but there was no fear or anger in her eyes. She was simply watching them emotionlessly, waiting to see how they would act next.

The trio did not appreciate this. One of them put a foot on Anri’s shoulder as she rose, knocking her over backward.

“First, you suck up to Mika, then Ryuugamine and Kida, and now you’re cozying up to Nasujima?”

“When are you going to stop selling your body to get ahead, you dirty slut?”

“It’s like you can’t survive unless you’re leeching off of someone else.”

Despite the cascade of insults, it was all Anri could do just to stare back at the girls. She understood their meaning.

It was true that she’d been dependent on Mika Harima before this, and she had no means or intention of arguing that point. Perhaps it
seemed like the same thing with Mikado and Masaomi, and even in that case she was still searching for where she belonged.

The case of Nasujima was where they were completely wrong, but nothing she could say to the girls in this situation would convince them. In fact, whether or not they were convinced by her answer was beside the point to them.

As they barraged her with jeers, Anri felt an illusion that she was actually something from another world, watching all of this happen to her from afar. Perhaps it was a kind of self-defense.

“What are you spacing out for?”

“You live around here, don’t you? Show us the way.”

“It’s time for a little home inspection.”

Anri viewed the world from her eyes as events happening within a picture frame. The girls’ voices seemed to be coming from the painting within the frame.

Until middle school, Mika was in front of the frame, and she glared back at it to keep the painting from talking.

When the picture frame appeared this spring, Mikado came through the frame to stand on this side.

When Nasujima’s attention started, it just meant that the picture of Nasujima slid in front of the picture of the bullies, nothing more.

But nobody was going to save her now.

It was better not to resist in this spot. Nothing good would come from fighting back with force.

Yes, nothing good at all…

Just when Anri gave in and decided to sit through the situation, the world within the picture frame went abnormal.

The girls in the painting were moving their mouths.

Behind them, a black shadow squirmed.

As Anri looked into the shadow’s eyes, she absentmindedly held her breath.

Huh? What?

A human figure appeared beneath the streetlight. It was behind the girls, so the face and clothes were indistinct. But the general air it carried told her that this was a man. And most striking of all…

The man’s eyes were red, so red.

“Why don’t you say some…”

One of the girls stopped mid-sentence, and the black suddenly spread in Anri’s picture frame.

The liquid that she’d assumed was black took on a reddish hue in the streetlight as it sprayed around the area.

The world was dyed red.

The sound of screaming.

The sound of screaming.

Blood on the gray asphalt still just looked black.

Only for the moment that it flew in the air did she remember the drops were blood.

The sound of screaming.

The sound of screaming.

The screaming eventually reached Anri’s ears as an actual voice.

The figure disappeared at once, leaving one screaming and wailing girl and her two friends paralyzed with fright on the ground.

The scene was so unreal that it somehow brought Anri back to reality.

Why? Why is this happening?

Anri was surprised to find that she was quite calm as she sat on the asphalt, watching the scene impassively. Not because she was helpless to do anything, but because she didn’t know what to do.

What—what do I do?

Should she cry?

Should she scream?

Should she rage?

Or should she laugh that they’d gotten what they deserved?

What was she to the girl who’d just been slashed?

An enemy or a friend?

A stranger or an acquaintance?

Even here in this situation, Anri couldn’t tell exactly where she stood.

She got to her feet on the asphalt, the action devoid of meaning.

In the midst of blood and screams, the only thing Anri Sonohara could do was stand.

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