The Intrigues of Haruhi Suzumiya (34 page)

With no other option, I wound up having Asahina change back into her shrine maiden clothing, as I stood in the hall, slumped against the clubroom door.

Haruhi and the others were sure taking their sweet time. It was convenient for me, sure, but I worried that it was a little too convenient. Meanwhile, along came a person carrying a paper bag in her hand, a person whose arrival would have saved me some trouble if it had been a bit sooner.

“Yoo-hoo! Kyon, apologies! Here, I got Mikuru’s uniform and her school shoes. I was gonna give ’em to you during lunch, but I forgot.” Tsuruya closed the distance between us with a few steps. “So! Haru-nyan and the others are up to something in the courtyard, but where’s Mikuru?”

She grinned as I pointed wordlessly at the clubroom door, then turned the doorknob as though she were casually opening her own refrigerator.

“Heya, Mikuru! Getting changed? Hey, perfect timing. I’ll just take those clothes home with me!” Tsuruya winked at me, then went into the room. Staring discreetly at the opposite wall in the hallway, I couldn’t see into the room, but it was still easy for me
to imagine Asahina’s surprised face. I’d seen it many times before, after all.

“Here, lemme help. Time to change, time to change! Was today free shrine maiden day or something?”

I sat down in the hallway, listening to Asahina’s frantic cries and Tsuruya’s childish laughter. Tsuruya probably didn’t care why Asahina was wearing the clothes Tsuruya had supposedly lent to her long-lost sister. Both she and I knew that trying to explain it was pointless. Tsuruya’s greatness lay in the fact that she wasn’t worried about it. I doubted I would ever reach her level in my lifetime.

I smiled ruefully, just as Haruhi returned with Nagato and Koizumi in tow, the latter carrying the folding table on his back. She strode toward me, proudly rattling the tin full of money, as though she were a fisherman and it was her big haul.

“Why’d you drag Mikuru away? We got booed!”

I’d been afraid she would catch a cold if she were outside in those flimsy clothes any longer, I told her. Besides, it was a waste not to charge at least five hundred yen for the aesthetic appeal of that costume.

“Yeah, good point. I see what you’re saying. We’ve gotta go all out in times like this. People will stop appreciating us, otherwise,” Haruhi readily agreed. Perhaps she’d already started the second phase of her plan. “Anyway, Kyon, I was really surprised! Yuki started giving out consolation prizes!” She patted the girl on her slender shoulders. “You know those bargain-size bags of chocolates? The kind with the letters of the alphabet and stuff on ’em? Yuki passed one out to everybody who lost the game! I was really surprised she did that kind of preparation. Yuki, you were really thinking ahead. But it’s a good idea. We’ll have a consolation prize next time we do something like this, and it’ll definitely loosen people’s wallets!”

I was sure they only wanted to get close to Nagato, but I was
deeply moved by her quick thinking. She’d bought me time that I’d desperately needed.

“…”

Nagato moved slightly, as though indicating that she wanted to get inside the room and start reading. It was an expression only I could read.

Just then, the door opened from the inside.

“Oh, Tsuruya, you’re here. What’s up with those clothes?”

“Heya, Haru-nyan! I lent these to Mikuru—just comin’ to get them back, so I won’t get in your way!” Tsuruya draped the coat over her shoulder, putting the remaining clothes in the bag and spinning a shoe around on the tip of her finger. “See ya, Haru-nyan!”

“Sure, see you later, Tsuruya.”

After exchanging a high five with Haruhi, Tsuruya disappeared down the hallway, having not even once so much as indicated that anything strange was going on—as though it were a totally ordinary day. I’d never be that good of an actor. She was a person to be reckoned with. The Tsuruya clan would prosper so long as she was around.

“…”

Nagato drifted into the room, artlessly taking a book down from the shelf, opening a folding chair, and immediately sitting down to read.

Watching out of the corner of her eye as I helped Koizumi bring the table in, Haruhi didn’t seem to notice that Asahina, in her shrine maiden outfit, was looking a bit nostalgic. “Mikuru, next time you buy tea, go ahead and get the expensive stuff. Our war chest is pretty full now, thanks to you! Be happy, Mikuru! These grades mean I’m promoting you to second lieutenant brigade chief!”

Watching Haruhi sit at the brigade chief’s desk looking immensely pleased with herself, I secured a seat at the edge of the table and collapsed on it, exhausted.

I was seriously tired. I now understood all too well what it was like to tamper with time in order to make events match up. Even if I’d wanted to blame someone, I’d been the one to do it all, so the responsibility target would be painted squarely on me. Were things always this hard for time travelers? If so, I’d have to be careful not to tell Asahina anything for a while. She was carrying a heavy psychological load, and she might roll into a ball like a pill bug at the slightest prod.

“You could have shared some of that burden with me, you know. Cleaning up after messes is my specialty,” said Koizumi quietly enough that only I could hear as he removed the wrapping on a booster pack of trading cards. “I believe I’ve come to understand a bit of Haruhi’s plan.”

I looked up to see Koizumi scrutinizing his cards and smiling; our eyes met. “I wonder which hairstyle would go the best with this outfit,” I heard Haruhi say; she’d sat Asahina down in a chair and was playing around with her hair. As I watched, Asahina narrowed her eyes like a cat whose fur is being brushed.

“Didn’t you say something about Haruhi’s behavior not being any different than usual?”

“That’s exactly what I mean. Treasure hunting and city patrols are the kinds of things Suzumiya would do. Or rather, she was deliberately trying to appear as though she was simply doing her usual activities. Nobody would’ve thought you’d actually forgotten Valentine’s Day—not even Suzumiya. It’s a day every high school boy worries about, whether or not he has someone likely to give him a present. The two consecutive days of patrolling were the embodiment of that. It was designed to make you agonize over whether or not you’d actually get anything.”

She could’ve just put the chocolates in my shoe locker or something. It wasn’t only a post office box for time travelers, after all.

“Suzumiya simply hates conventionality. No doubt she thought
that wouldn’t be very interesting. But toiling to dig up buried treasure makes it that much more rewarding when you finally find it.”

Koizumi continued to rearrange the cards in his hand.

“I was very pleased, myself. Were you not?”

What was that, some kind of leading question?

Just as I was trying to think of an effective rebuttal—

“Hey, Kyon and Koizumi! No more private chatter! Break time’s over!”

Asahina started at the sudden exclamation, which got both Koizumi’s and my attention. Haruhi removed her hands from the chignon into which she’d arranged Asahina’s hair.

“Now, it’s time for a lecture!” She tapped the whiteboard. “Kyon and Koizumi especially, you guys better listen up.”

A strategist’s smile flickered across the brigade chief’s face, and she spoke like a cram school instructor addressing a group of pleasant but less-than-bright students.

“We’re going to discuss activities for the month of March.”

I thought about the March calendar. “Oh, like Hinamatsuri?”

Haruhi was silent for a moment. “… Yes, good point. There’s that too.”

So she’d forgotten about it, I said.

“I remembered it. If you want to enjoy new experiences, it’s important to learn from the past, so obviously I’d never forget something like that. So on March third, yes, we’ll scatter hina-arare down from the top floor balcony!”

That was the first time I’d heard of that particular Hinamatsuri tradition.

“Be that as it may, there’s another March event we can’t forget.” Haruhi’s smile was as brilliant as the heart of the Milky Way galaxy as seen through a powerful telescope. “And today I want you and Koizumi alone to carve that day in your brains.”

So what was it that she was so excitedly lecturing us about?

“I’m talking about White Day! March fourteenth! You’ve got to
pay back every single girl who gave you anything on Valentine’s Day with a reward thirty times greater!”

Normally she was like a blinkered horse charging madly ahead, so why did she always have to choose the most inconvenient times to turn suddenly conventional? I supposed the “thirty times” figure was the Haruhi inflation factor at work.

“Yuki and Mikuru, you should ask for whatever you want! These two”—Haruhi pointed to Koizumi and me—“will pay you back with anything you ask for. The days of crane spirits repaying their debts are long gone; nowadays humans do it too. And with better stuff than fabric too!”

Haruhi grinned hugely.

“I’ve thought of many examples of stuff I might want, but I’m still thinking about them. I’ll reveal them soon, though. And don’t worry; I’ll make sure it’s something you can get within a month.”

She certainly had no compunctions. She’d probably be just as bad as Kaguya-hime in “The Bamboo-Cutter’s Tale,” who sent all her poor suitors on impossible tasks. I just prayed it wouldn’t be something totally impossible, like “finding the kingdom of Atlantis” or “discovering the Fountain of Youth.”

“Okay, but we’re going to take into account the amount of effort we wasted on all that treasure hunting,” I said. By the time I realized my retort was going to backfire, it was too late.

“Of course!” said Haruhi, her eyes shining as though the entire Pleiades was concentrated within them. “I look forward to that. If you’re going to give me what I want, I’ll go anywhere to get it—even Mars. Right, Mikuru, Yuki? You’re with me, aren’t you?”

Asahina and Nagato both nodded, though Asahina reluctantly, and Nagato without looking up from her book. At this I could only shrug, along with Koizumi, our timing perfectly in sync.

We don’t know in advance what we’re going to do in the future, but the truth is we often don’t even know what we were thinking in the past.

Saying “I don’t remember what I was thinking then” might be more accurate than “I don’t know,” which is why we supposedly make notes—to avoid forgetting. But then there are times when we forget what the note was even talking about. For example—

… So that’s how I was going to start this afterword. But when I pulled out an old notebook to prove it, the contents were so incomprehensible that it wasn’t a question of having forgotten what I meant—it was more like my past self had been receiving mysterious signals and gone into an automatic writing trance. Looking at titles like “The Million Strands of Ginger” or “Pavlov’s Tadpole,” I found myself totally bewildered; I couldn’t even begin to interpret them.

At the time I was no doubt brimming with confidence in the power of my memory, thinking that if I just wrote down those few words, I’d be able to read them later and remember all the
related details. Looking back at them now, not only do I not remember what I was thinking about, I don’t even care. I’m sure they were stupid ideas, and if by some miracle they were good ones, I’d just be annoyed at having been bested by my past self. So I’d rather not know.

In any case, nowadays when I make notes, I’ve learned to write down as many details as I can. Of course, it’s all well and good to write something down, but it often happens that I forget the plain fact that I ever wrote anything at all. I suppose that’s a different problem…

Incidentally, this volume wound up being the longest in the series.

The long winter that began in
The Disappearance
finally ends, and from here on out we’ll be getting into spring. I should say that my very favorite time of year is early summer, when you can hear frogs’ tranquil voices along with cicadas’ busy cries. Just knowing that it won’t be cold again for a good long while is enough to make me happy. Plus it’s a lot easier to walk over to the corner store in the middle of the night.

All that aside, it’s thanks to the support of many people that I’ve managed to get this far. When I look back, it truly seems like the blink of an eye since the very first volume, which fills me with a combination of surprise and frustration—has the trip been a good one?

Even as I thank you again for your support, I hope that you will enjoy the next volume.

Until we meet again.

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