Anyway, Haruhi was now fixed on tennis, so we got five rackets and a couple of balls, and marched down to the public courts to play.
Haruhi and Nagato were on one team, and Mikuru, Koizumi and I were on the other. No one actually knew the rules, so we just hit the ball back and forth a few times to get the feel of it, then we set up the scoreboard and settled in to play a few rounds.
Well, as it turns out, Haruhi and Koizumi are really really good at tennis, while, Mikuru, Nagato and I all really really suck. Nagato was the first to bail, once she started wearing her racket as a hat, because it got so tangled in her hair we couldn't get it out. She sat on the bench and read a pulp novel. I cried uncle after being simultaneously bashed by Koizumi's backhand and Mikuru's flailing. Mikuru eventually clotheslined herself on the net and joined us on the bench.
So we sat in the shade for the next two hours watching Haruhi and Koizumi hit the ball back and forth so hard it never even touched the ground. Towards the end, it started to look like Koizumi might actually win the game except Haruhi, finding this outcome to be unacceptable, took all the tennis balls and put them under her skirt and sat on them so Koizumi couldn't get at them. This result was identical to the time they tried playing basketball.
