The Sigh of Haruhi Suzumiya (6 page)

“That’s because, Kyon,” Haruhi said, “Mikuru will be wearing this outfit in the movie.”

“A maid won’t work?”

“A maid’s job is to go to a rich person’s mansion and provide personal service. It’s different for a waitress. The goal there is to provide assorted services to an unspecified number of customers in a shop on a corner for seven hundred thirty yen an hour.”

I’m not sure if that’s a good wage or not, but it’s not like Asahina is dressing up to serve in a mansion or work some part-time job. Maybe if Haruhi actually paid her.

“Don’t sweat the small stuff! It’s all about feeling. I like how this feels.”

Who cares about you? How does Asahina feel about this?

“Su-Su-Suzumiya… This seems a little too small for me….”

Asahina seemed quite concerned. She was incessantly tugging downward on the hem of her miniskirt. But her motions were too tantalizing. You realize that my eyes can’t help but be drawn there, right?

“It’s just fine. A perfect fit.”

I forced myself to look away and focused instead on Haruhi smiling like a colorful flower blooming in the jungle. Haruhi directed her eyes, always looking forward, at me.

“The concept for our film”—she pointed to Asahina, curled up in a fetal position—“is this!”

“This? Are we doing a documentary on the daily life of a girl working in a café?”

“No. There isn’t anything fun about taking secret videos of Mikuru’s daily life. The only way you could ever get an interesting story out of filming someone’s daily life would be if it was about a person living an extremely eccentric life. Filming the daily life of an ordinary high school student would only be for self-satisfaction.”

I fail to see how that would satisfy Asahina, and from an objective point of view, I’d think that self-satisfaction would be important in itself. Besides, Asahina’s daily life would actually be considered quite eccentric… but I’ll keep my mouth shut.

“As the director representing the SOS Brigade, I decided to provide quality entertainment. Just you watch. Every single member of the audience will be on their feet in a standing ovation!”

Upon closer look, I noticed that Haruhi’s armband had changed from
Chief
to
Director
at some point. She sure was prepared.

As I watched the female director getting excited by herself, the female lead getting depressed, and the male lead standing back smiling enigmatically like a bystander, I was wondering what exactly was going on. Then the door opened without a sound.

“…”

I thought something big had come to make an appearance. Scared for a moment there that they’d come to retrieve me from my rather short life. It almost made me wonder if I hadn’t accidentally stepped into the music room from the movie where Salieri goes to Mozart to commission a requiem.

“…”

As she delivered her signature ellipsis, Yuki Nagato entered the room with a paler face than usual. Only her face was visible. Everything else was covered in black.

I wasn’t the only one at a loss for words. Haruhi and Asahina were the same. Koizumi’s smile had a hint of surprise tacked on like a tax. Nagato was garbed in clothing strange enough to startle Asahina.

Her body was wrapped in a mantle as dark as a blackout. Her head was covered by a wide-brimmed pointy hat of the same color. She looked like a vampire hunter. Or maybe the Grim Reaper.

As we watched, Nagato silently headed to her designated seat in the corner, withdrew her bag and a hardcover book from under her mantle, and set them on the table.

And—completely ignoring our shock—she began reading her book.

Apparently, it was the costume for her class’s fortune-telling convention.

That’s what I gathered from Nagato’s short responses to Haruhi, who was the first one to recover and issue a rapid string of questions. Nagato’s class must have had an extremely resourceful and talented stylist to make Nagato wear such a jolly costume.

In any case, if she walked here from her classroom in this monk-like getup, did it mean this was supposed to be Nagato’s way of competing with Asahina? She made guessing what Haruhi was thinking look easy.

An unpleasant silence hung over the room. Only Haruhi looked like she was really happy.

“Yuki, now you understand! Yes, that’s it!”

Nagato slowly turned to look at Haruhi before returning to her book.

“That costume is perfect for the role I had in mind! Let the people who put you in that know later. I want to wire them a message to show my appreciation.”

Don’t. If someone were to receive a message of congratulations from Haruhi, that person would probably suspect some kind of catch and end up being scared of his own shadow. You need to take an objective look at how other people view you.

Haruhi looked to be in high spirits as she hummed the Turkish March while opening her bag and withdrawing a stack of photocopy sheets. She quickly passed them out, looking like Kintaro after wrestling down a black bear.

Not having much choice, I turned my eyes to the sheet of paper.

The following passage was scribbled across the page:

… Yeah, that’s just. Yeah.

Has her level of intuition transcended mere disbelief? Or did she hit the mark without even trying? I’m starting to wonder if she’s just feigning ignorance. What’s with her sharp senses that only work at odd intervals?

As I stood stunned, I was brought back to the real world by the sound of chuckling next to me. The only person with that kind of laugh would be Koizumi.

“Well, this is quite…”

I envy how you seem to be enjoying yourself.

“What should I say? Just as one would expect? Indeed, the casting seems quite appropriate for Suzumiya. It’s wonderful.”

Don’t smile at me. It creeps me out.

Asahina was reading the sheet of paper clutched in her slender, violently trembling hands.

“Wha…”

A soft cry escaped from her mouth. She turned to me with eyes seeking salvation. Except upon a closer look, her eyes seemed very sad, even reproachful. Like a kind, slightly older female relative scolding a young child whose prank had gone too far…. Oh. I remembered. That’s right. After the incident six months earlier, I’d revealed their true identities to Haruhi.

Gah. Crap. Is this my fault?

I frantically spun to look at Nagato, the human-contact-purpose humanoid interface clad in a black mantle and black hat.

“…”

She was silently reading her book.

“I see no problems of consequence,” Koizumi later asserted optimistically.

I failed to see the humor in this situation.

“While these circumstances may not invite humor, there is no need for pessimism.”

“How do you know?”

“For the simple reason that this is merely casting for a movie. Suzumiya does not actually believe that I am a boy esper. I only play the role of a boy esper named Itsuki Koizumi within the fictional context of the movie.”

Koizumi sounded like a tutor talking to a pupil with a really bad memory.

“You can say that the Itsuki Koizumi that exists in reality, myself, and this particular Itsuki are entirely different people. Nobody would confuse a character in a movie with the actor playing the role, right? Even if someone out there were to get the two mixed up, that person would not necessarily be Suzumiya.”

“That’s not very reassuring. There’s no guarantee that what you’re saying is right.”

“If she were for mixing reality and fiction, then our world would have become the stuff of fantasy long ago. As I mentioned before, Suzumiya is still a person who can think rationally.”

I know that. But since Haruhi’s rational reasoning is half-possessed, I’ve been dragged into many bizarre incidents. And Haruhi, the key to all of this, doesn’t have a clue about what’s happening around her.

“For we must not allow her to discover any evidence of what is happening,” Koizumi continued calmly. “There may come a time when we have no choice but to reveal the truth. But not now. Fortunately, Asahina’s faction and Nagato’s faction are of the same opinion. I would prefer that the current situation never change.”

So would I. I don’t want to watch the world turn into a huge mess. That can’t happen until I’ve beaten the game that comes out next week or I’ll have lingering regrets.

Koizumi was still smiling. “You should worry less about the world and be more concerned about your own safety. Nagato and I can probably be replaced, but you have no understudy.”

I took care not to let these feelings of frustration affect me and pretended to be engrossed in pressurizing the gun I now had back in my hands.

Haruhi called it a day after assigning Asahina her costume and announcing the cast. Actually, she apparently wanted to drag Asahina around in her waitress outfit and hold a press conference for the upcoming film, but since Asahina was seriously on the verge of tears, I made Haruhi give up on that idea. It’s not like this high school has a journalism club, news club, or advertising club to begin with. Once I brought that up, Haruhi’s lips pouted into waterfowl status.

“I suppose you’re right.”

Amazingly enough, she agreed.

“It’s better to keep the details under wraps until the very last second. Kyon, that’s rather clever of you. We can’t have people ripping us off.”

This idea isn’t exactly at the level of a Hollywood or Hong Kong film. Who would want a storyboard that’s still bubbling in your mind?

“So, Kyon, have the gun ready for use within the day. Filming starts tomorrow. You also need to learn how to use the camera. Ah, that’s right. You’ll need to move the video data from the camera to the computer and do the editing, so pirate the necessary software. Also…”

And once Haruhi had finished dumping a load of assignments on me, she left while humming the theme from
The Great Escape.

Didn’t matter if she was in a good mood or a bad mood, she was always causing trouble for other people. Honestly.

Which was why I was currently face-to-face with another guy, Koizumi, struggling to make the model gun shoot BBs with reference to the instruction manual.

Once Asahina finished changing, she left with sagging shoulders. Nagato, still dressed like a witch invited to a Sabbath, went off somewhere without her bag. I guess Nagato had only come to show us her costume. Based on her record, there may have been some kind of significance in that action. Or she was just showing her face in the club room. She’s probably doing something in her classroom at this moment. Like practicing fortune-telling with a crystal ball or whatever.

I got the impression that the level of commotion in the school was slightly increasing on a day-to-day basis. Each time I heard the wind ensemble practicing after school, the crappy horns made fewer mistakes. There were also people cutting up veneer and balsa wood in the shadows of the courtyard. And a growing number of people were dressed in odd costumes like Nagato’s.

But this was just a festival at a plain old prefectural high school. I expected a cultural festival without anything extreme or out of the ordinary. As far as I could see, maybe half the student body hadn’t given up on working hard to make this a fun festival. Incidentally, our class, 1-5, had just given up on having fun, period. The ones who weren’t in a cultural club would probably be really bored that day. And here we had two people who could easily represent the go-straight-home-after-school club, Taniguchi and Kunikida.

“Speaking of cultural festivals…,” Taniguchi said.

It was lunchtime. These two-bit characters and I were surrounded by box lunches.

“Speaking of cultural festivals?” Kunikida shot back.

Taniguchi had a sickening smirk on his face that couldn’t hold a candle to the refined Koizumi smile. “It’s a super-event.”

“Don’t talk like Haruhi.”

Taniguchi’s smirk was abruptly wiped from his face. “But it’s got nothing to do with me. It pisses me off.”

“Why?” Kunikida asked.

“The sight of people having fun when I’m not really annoys me. Especially if it’s a boy-girl couple. Gives me homicidal urges. What? Got a problem with that?”

I suppose this is what you would call blind rage.

“And what’s with our class? A survey? Ha! Bo-ring. It’ll probably just involve asking people what their favorite color is, right? Where’s the fun in gathering that information?”

Then why didn’t you throw out your brilliant idea? That might have prevented Haruhi from mentioning anything about movies.

Taniguchi swallowed a lunch wiener in one gulp. “I never say anything that will give me work to do. Well, I might say something, but I don’t want to end up being put in charge of the mess.”

Kunikida voiced his agreement as he took a break from cutting his rolled omelet. “The only people who are going to raise their hands and open their mouths in this situation are those who are easily influenced or have a strong sense of responsibility. If only Asakura were still here.”

He threw out the name of our former classmate who had moved to Canada. I break into a cold sweat every time I hear her name. Nagato may have been the one who erased Asakura, but I was the reason it happened. Of course, if Nagato hadn’t done anything, I would have been erased, so there isn’t any point in feeling bad about it.

“Yeah, that was a waste,” Taniguchi said. “Just had to be my A-plus who transferred. I’m really down on my luck. She was the only good thing about being in this class. Damn. Wonder if they’ll let me change classes at this point.”