Headphone Actor (2 page)

Proceeding down the hall, and checking that there was no one around, I let out a huge sigh.

Passing art rooms, music rooms, and home economics rooms, in the hallway on the left-handed side that led to the clubroom wing, there was a plate facing the right that said, “Science Preparation Room.”

——Underneath that, there was the familiar pale green sliding door.

Because I had various complaints, it was a sense of relief that this classroom didn’t have many people.

At any rate, the teacher would be late as usual, as well as that one classmate; the ‘my pace’ guy that drew pictures all the time.

While thinking, “I guess I’ll sleep a bit before the teacher comes”, I opened the door, and there, an unexpected scene that blew away my drowsiness jumped out at me.

“Good mor— …. wh— uwaaaah!!”

“Eh? Ah, Takane. ‘Morning~”

There, returning my greeting with a bright, clear smile, stood my classmate, Kokonose Haruka.

Just by looking at him, he had sickly, pale skin and an easygoing demeanor. His hobby and talent was drawing pictures. Including his name, he seemed like a girl, but he was just a normal guy.

However, right now this guy was not “normal.”

——No matter where or how I looked ….. He wasn’t wearing anything other than his underwear.

“Wh— ….. wha— …..!?”

I was speechless at this unrealistic scene first thing in the morning. Although I was trying desperately not to focus on him, he was rapidly advancing towards me in that state. 

“Ah, hey hey, I want you to listen to this …. This morning, at the fountain in the school courtyard, there’s a cat that comes around, and I thought about petting it, you know. But like, how should I put this, it dodged me really well. And then I lost my balance, and fell into that fount——”

“I-it’s fine!! It doesn’t matter how it happened!! H— …. Hurry up and put some clothes on!!”

Without showing any urgency, and with an expression that was like, “Ah, what should I do,” Haruka, who had tried to talk indifferently about how he’d come to become half-naked, merely tilted his head a bit in regards to my desperate shouting.

“Ehh? But my clothes aren’t dry yet. See?”

While pointing to his uniform that was drying in front of the heater, he was showing me a behavior as if I was the one that had said something wrong. That distance between us was 50 centimeters.

Leaning back because of this too-unrealistic scene, I fell back into the door I’d just closed with a crash!

And while colliding with it, I threw out desperate suggestions.

“Ah, ah, ahh!! I got it!! It’s fine if they’re wet! J-just put them on for now!! I’ll go look for a jersey or something, so just put them on until then!!”

“Eh? H~m, okay …. But um ….. Huh? My shirt isn’t here …. Shirt~ ….”

“You’re stepping on it!! Under your foot!! Aah, geez! Give it here!”

Was it because he didn’t feel the seriousness of “being half-naked in front of a girl”? Moving with the slowness of a turtle, Haruka finally began to get dressed.

However, that wasn’t a situation that I could just watch over leisurely.

Snatching the shirt that Haruka had picked up, and turning a blind eye so I wouldn’t have look directly at him, I tried to force him to wear it.

“Uwaa—! No, it’s fine, I can put it on myself! Wait, that’s the other arm~ …..”

“Gyaaaa! Stop moving!! Don’t face this way!!”

No matter how anyone looked at this, it wasn’t a decent situation. Why should I be forced to dress my half-naked classmate first thing in the morning? If he wasn’t a classmate, it was at a level when I could have just quickly handed him over to the police.

However, if anyone saw us in this situation right now, it would be extremely bad.

It would be like what often happened in shoujo manga, and possibly be misunderstood … was what I was just thinking, when the worst case scenario happened.

“Alri~ght, homeroom is starting~ Uh …..”

Accompanied with a flat voice, the door burst open with a rattle, and there stood our homeroom teacher, and also the teacher in charge of teaching science at this school, Tateyama Kenjirou.

Tateyama-sensei made an appalled expression that could have rivaled my own from earlier, and the attendance book slowly fell out of his hands and onto the floor

“Ah …. no ….. Um, Sensei, this is …..”

“Ah, Sensei, good morning~”

In contrast to me, who immediately had a chill run down my spine, the half-naked Haruka returned the greeting with a smile.

Objectively, at a glance, this situation could possibly be seen as “a bad schoolgirl that strips a naive high school boy, even early in the morning.”

Although that moment didn’t last long, it felt much longer than it actually was. As I wondered what conclusion Tateyama-sensei had come to during the silence, he uttered the words, “Oh …. I’ve interrupted something …. Sorry …..” and tried to exit into the hallway.

“Gyaaaa!! It’s not!! It’s not what it looks like! This guy, he …. h -he was fooling around without any clothes on, s -so I was just trying to put some clothes on him!!”

With an ambiguous expression, Tateyama-sensei, who was about to leave the classroom, stopped in his tracks.

“Eh? Ah, ahh, what, is that what this is? …. Ahh, no, I thought that surely you hadn’t been able to hold it in anymore ……” Tateyama-sensei sighed, and picked up the attendance book while smiling.

“Please stop saying those kinds of things on a regular basis! Anyway, if that really was the case, that would be a serious matter, wouldn’t it!? Didn’t you just intend to run away!?!”

“Ahh, well, see, if it became some kind of trouble, it’d be the easiest to just say ‘I didn’t know’. Plus, it’s that, you know. After all, I want to give you a carefree environment to grow up in, with freedom to do what you want ….”

“You’re the worst!! Anyway, please lend a hand in dressing this guy! I’ll tell the principal!”

Although Tateyama-sensei was scratching his head like it was a bothersome thing, the moment the word “principal” came out, he gave one word of “OK” and began putting clothes on Haruka at lightning speed.

You most likely wouldn’t encounter such a “poor example of an adult” very often.

In a certain meaning, he really taught us valuable lessons, buy …. The time that I fully realized that lasted only a moment.

“Ueee … it feels gross to be soaking wet, Sensei ……”

Haruka, who was dressed again from Tateyama-sensei’s nimble handiwork, let out a terribly gross-sounding voice and sat down in his seat.

The moment that I, too, finally sat down in my seat, I was stuck by a tremendous fatigue.

Because of this guy’s doing, just how many of my hit points been taken away first thing in the morning?

There probably wouldn’t be even one thing to laugh about today after all of this ……

Facing the two desks was the teacher’s desk, positioned slightly elevated from the rest of the room. Tateyama-sensei sat down in the slightly tall, metal folding chair and opened his attendance book.

“Yeah, yeah, I know, I’ll go get you a jersey to wear later … With that said, good morning. Ah~ You two are here. I really have to applaud your hard work of coming to school every day without growing tired of it.”

“…. That’s not something a teacher would say.”

While lying his head down on the desk, Tateyama-sensei muttered in a dull voice, “If the teacher’s said it, then 
isn’t
 
it something a teacher would say~?”

Was our society peaceful because this kind of person had become a teacher?

However, I was honestly concerned about this country’s future.

“Ah~ So about today’s homeroom … Uhh, what was it again? Errr, I think I took down a memo, or maybe not …..”

“Please just get on with it already!”

Even though I was already annoyed this morning, just looking at this person make my negative feelings increase even further. The way he was spinning his red pen around make him look like a lazy elementary schooler.

“Uh~ Wait, wait, errr … Oh! Right, right, we have to decide what we’re doing for the School Culture Festival. So, what did you guys decide on in the end?”

“Ehh!? Sensei, when this was brought up the other day, didn’t you say ‘Isn’t it fine even if we don’t do anything’”!? We’ve never talked about it since, so how could we have decided on something!?”

I jumped up from my chair with a loud thump, but the teacher with the dead eyes didn’t seem to give a rat’s ass about it, or even bother to get up.

“Ah~ well, about that …. Last week, the principal asked me, ‘What’s Tateyama-sensei’s class doing for the festival?’ Of course I hadn’t thought of anything, so for the time being, I just told him, ‘We’ve prepared a ‘Special Project’ that will really wow everyone, so please look forward to it!’”

“Just how good were you trying to look in front of the principal!? What do you mean ‘I just told him’!? What are we going to do!? We only have a week left …!!”

I collapsed into my chair again and covered my face with my hand. I heard Haruka pipe up beside me with a silly suggestion, “Ah, then how about we do a target shooting booth?”, when we didn’t have anything prepared or even a budget to work with, making the feelings of hopelessness stir up even more.

Truthfully, I didn’t care what happened to this teacher, but if our current no-plan act became so famous it was written about in the school paper as “Special Project” or something along those lines, it really would be hopeless then.

If it actually became like that, there would only be despair in the end, the abyss of darkness, and complete ruin ……

“Ahhhhhh …..!!”

Just imagining that horrifying future made me cry out without thinking. If I had a reliable classmate right now, perhaps I’d be able to make something out of this adversity. However, no matter how you thought it over, with the soaking-wet optimistic boy beside me, and the teacher that was THE Trash of Humanity, the three of us were greatly lacking in fighting strength.

If I could just think of a way out by myself ….. But even when I tried—perhaps because I always did nothing but play games, or perhaps because I wasn’t fully awake, my brain wasn’t functioning as well as I hoped it would.

Faced with this severe situation, and at wit’s end with the helplessly miserable hand he’d been dealt, Tateyama-sensei looked over with an uncomfortable expression.

“…. N-now, now, calm down, it’s not like we’re dead yet. In any case, you’re free to use the space of this classroom, and I’ll help out, too. So why don’t we just come up with something?”

The latter half of Tateyama-sensei’s …. No, he could no longer even be called “sensei”—of this 
man
’s statement, “I’ll help out too”, I had no confidence in whatsoever.

For me, things weren’t ever so easy.

If, even without it becoming famous as a “Special Project”, our act for the festival became something so shameful that various rumors cropped up, I probably wouldn’t be able to have a decent school life my remaining two years here.

Haruka might not care much about this type of thing, but for me, it was kind of a big deal.

It was bad enough that my presence at school had become so instable, and I didn’t want to stand out in a negative way even more than this.

However, I had a feeling that the part where Tateyama-sensei had said we could use this classroom was a leading factor to some kind of breakthrough. Although we were already tired of seeing this classroom, for visitors, there must be many rare things to discover. For example, if something labeled “___ Experiment” was brought out, there wasn’t one person that wouldn’t feel excited.

“…. At the very least, it’d be nice if we could come up with something interesting …. Wait, budget! Sensei, if I’m not wrong, each class was given a budget to work with, right!? How much did we get!?”

The moment I asked this, Tateyama-sensei visibly flinched, and at the same time, glanced at the supplies shelf behind us.

“Eh? What’re you looking—”

Not missing even a second, I followed Tateyama-sensei’s gaze, and mixed among lab supplies and chemical bottles was an eerie-looking fish specimen I remembered seeing somewhere before.

It was the rare oceanic fish specimen that he had been looking at the before in the course materials online store, while muttering, “This specimen is so cool …. But it’s so expensive …..”

“…. Huh? That’s odd. Sensei, wasn’t that specimen too expensive for you to buy?”

Although it’d become rather cool, I saw a considerable amount of sweat beading on Tateyama-sensei’s forehead.