Chapter 51

"A cafe!"

"A haunted house!"

It was homeroom the next day, and Mitsuru stood at the front of the class taking suggestions from everyone as to what their class should do for the upcoming culture festival. She recruited Ryuichi to write down the ideas on the blackboard as they went along, allowing everyone to see what their options were and to think about what they wanted to vote for.

"All right, any other suggestions?" Mitsuru asked their classmates.

A girl raised her hand. "If we do a cafe, can we do a theme for it?"

Ryuichi wrote "Theme?" next to "Cafe" on the board while their classmates chattered about their ideas.

"What kind of theme should we do?" asked Mitsuru.

"A host cafe!"

"Zombies!"

"Anime!"

One guy quietly raised his hand. "How about noir?"

"Noir?"

"What's noir?"

Mitsuru eyed the boy with intrigue. "Could you tell everyone a little more about the noir theme?"

Nodding, the boy stood, his knees trembling slightly. "Well, it's like those old crime dramas with hardboiled detectives," he explained, and pointed to Ryuichi. "They wear hats like that and trench coats, and they solve crimes and mysteries brought to them by a damsel in distress."

Ryuichi flinched when his classmate singled him out. Everyone stared at him—his hat, rather—with curiosity in their eyes. His stomach felt queasy from all the stares, and he tilted his head down so the brim of his fedora would block his view of them.

"That's a unique theme," Mitsuru said to the boy. "Ryuichi, add 'noir' to the list."

He gladly turned his back so he wouldn't have to see everyone gawk at him. As he wrote the boy's suggestion on the board, a girl spoke up.

"Since a lot of other classes might do a cafe, should we do something else to make our class stand out?" she asked.

"Hey, yeah!"

"It's no good if everyone's serving coffee and tea—"

"What if we served food?"

"Like a restaurant?"

Mitsuru nodded and glanced back to Ryuichi, who wrote "Food?" on the board.

"If we serve food, what should it be?" Mitsuru asked everyone. "The trouble with food is that it has to be cost-efficient, so try to think of something simple to cook that we can make in large quantities."

The room fell silent for only a second before the ideas flowed.

"—Yakisoba doesn't really fit with the theme—"

"—what do detectives even eat—"

"—takoyaki's easy enough, right—"

Someone gasped. "How about burgers?"

The excitable murmurs began. Ryuichi raised an eyebrow as he attempted to figure out how the noir theme and hamburgers fit together.

"Hamburgers are too expensive for our class to serve," Mitsuru told the class.

The class groaned as someone shouted, "We'll make them smaller!"

"Ryuichi-kun, your family runs a burger restaurant, right?" a girl piped up.

He turned and put on a bitter grin. "Unless you want to charge five hundred yen for a single slider, there's no way it's doable."

Their lack of disappointment confused him, until he realized that his classmates might not know what a slider was. He drew a circle bigger than his palm on the board to show the standard burger patty size, and then a smaller circle next to it that was about a fourth of the size.

The class chorused a disappointed "Awww" when they put together the size of the puny slider with the hefty price. Ryuichi turned back to the board to erase his diagram, using the opportunity to savor his smugness. He felt as though he preserved his father's recipe's honor, protecting it from becoming little more than cheap festival food.

"What if instead of hamburgers, we do an Italian menu?" suggested Mitsuru. "If we serve pasta, the cost for sauce and noodles will be inexpensive and it will still make our class stand out."

Ryuichi added "Italian food" to the board, thinking that their noir theme was slowly looking a little too mafia for a school environment.

"Other than the menu, are we doing anything else?" a boy near the front asked.

Mitsuru finished writing some notes before replying. "Hm. We'll need to consider decorations, and if it's not too difficult, we can try dressing up, too."

"How about music?" the boy piped up.

"What kind of music?"

"We should have live jazz music!" a girl said excitedly. "Yuri-chan, you're in the Jazz Club, right?"

Her friend's face lowered. "Well, yeah, but I play the drums," she murmured.

Shiori sat up in her chair. "Say, Ryuichi-kun, you can play piano, right? Can you play some jazz music?"

He felt like he had been outed. "Why am I coming up a lot today?" he muttered bitterly to himself.

"Do you still play the saxophone, too?" Shiori asked, looking hopeful. "If it's jazz, it's gotta have a saxophone."

The others voiced their agreements, some pleading with Ryuichi to play for them. He shrank lower beneath his fedora, wanting to protest that someone else should play, but not wanting to disappoint his classmates.

"What do you say, Ryuichi?" asked Mitsuru. The hairs on his back stood up like bristles on a brush. "It sounds like we're set on a noir theme. Are you up to playing some jazz music for us?"

"How is this gonna work, exactly?" he asked, finding strength in his own voice. "There's no way I can play all day for both days."

Mitsuru turned back to the rest of the class. "Is there anyone else who is willing to play? It doesn't have to be piano or saxophone."

The class started naming others who had some musical inclination, but those whose names came up were quick to say that they weren't familiar with jazz. Ryuichi began to feel more and more alone, hoping that there would be at least one person who could share the burden with him.

"In that case, we can always play a CD so you're not playing the entire time," Mitsuru told him when no one else volunteered. "However, I think the real draw for our class will be the live music, so if anyone would like to volunteer later, please feel free to let me know."

She scanned the board, then turned back to the class. "All right, since we appear to have chosen our theme, we will take a vote on our class theme out of formality," she announced. "All those in favor for the noir theme?"

Nearly the entire class responded with an emphatic "Aye!". Ryuichi hung his head and sighed, not having said anything.

"All those opposed?"

No one spoke. Ryuichi wanted to protest, but everyone's hopes and expectations made him keep quiet. He didn't want to disappoint them.

"Then it's settled: Our class will be doing a noir theme," Mitsuru concluded with a nod. "Ryuichi, if you would, please wipe the board clean so we can start taking down ideas and responsibilities."

Their class wasn't the only one excited about the noir theme. During lunchtime, Ryuichi overheard students from other classes discussing what they were doing for the culture festival and the word "noir" kept coming up in conversations. Some students griped about how lame their ideas were, with one class performing Romeo and Juliet on stage. One class decided on a haunted house while another chose a maid cafe. Ryuichi pitied the class that was going to do a rest room.

"At least you don't have to be Romeo," Akihiko grunted to Ryuichi when they crossed paths at the small store in the foyer.

Ryuichi burst out laughing. "That was your class? You're Romeo?"

"It's not funny! And I'm not gonna do it!"

He wiped tears from his eyes. "I can see it now: All your fan girls scrambling to snag the role of Juliet."

Sighing with a grin still on his face, he whipped out his cell phone. "I gotta tell Mitsuru and Shinjiro!"

"Like hell you are!"

Akihiko grabbed for the phone, but Ryuichi bolted down the hall. The boxer tore after him, Ryuichi slipping past students while Akihiko crashed into some girls.

"Akihiko-senpai!"

"It's Akihiko-senpai!"

"Oh, no," Ryuichi heard Akihiko moan.

He was just about to dash up the stairs when Akihiko shot past him. A gaggle of girls shoved Ryuichi out of the way as they gave chase, their shrill voices crying out for their beloved Romeo while misquoting lines.

"Exeunt pursued by screaming fans," Ryuichi muttered, quietly closing his phone. "Oh, well. It's more fun to tell Mitsuru in person anyway."

The festive fun tried to follow Ryuichi to the restaurant later that day, but the moment he smelled the smoky meats, the mood abandoned him. For the second week in a row, Toshio yelled at his son for being late to work in front of all the workers and customers.

"I already told you last week that I'd be coming late from now on!" he told his father.

"Then get to work," was all his father said, unapologetic as always.

The next day, Ryuichi went to his parents house to watch over Megumi by himself, as both Shizue and their mother had to help out at the restaurant. He couldn't recall a time when he didn't feel like his balls were in a vice just by being in his family's house, but without his parents or his sister, the place felt less oppressive, like he could take a deep breath and not choke on it. Megumi certainly seemed happier, where she was all giggles when they played and when he sang to her, and only crying once when he accidentally woke her up from her nap.

"Hey, Megs? Would you rather live somewhere away from here?" he asked her as he warmed a bottle of breast milk for her.

With grubby, chubby hands, Megumi reached for the bottle while her uncle tested to see if the milk was too hot. When he decided it was just warm enough, he held it for her as she greedily pulled it to her face to suckle.

Ryuichi chuckled at the sight of his baby niece. "Yeah, I don't know anyone who could stand to live here," he told her. "I couldn't do it, so I don't know how you or your mom are doing it."

After burping her, he set her down in her bouncy chair so he could play some piano for her. The old, upright piano had never been tuned, emitting the familiar off-key notes that were nearly a whole note up from what they were supposed to be. As wrong as the notes sounded, he was used to it, hardly recognizing the wrongness of the pitches until he played on other pianos.

Since his class decided on having live music, Ryuichi decided that he absolutely had to practice. He didn't actually know any jazz songs, but he had some idea of how to imitate the style and sound. He looked up some smooth jazz music on his sister's laptop and tried to follow along on the piano. After a few listens, he made stuff up as he went along, hoping it sounded jazzy enough to pass.

He knew he couldn't make up a song for a whole hour or so, not especially in a style he wasn't too familiar with. With some of the basics in mind, he chose a song he knew and gave it some jazzy flair, starting off with chords to get the sounds down. He started playing around with it, making up his own melodies to familiarize himself with the keys before trying to incorporate the original tune. At times, he would revert back to a more easy-listening style with a simpler sound, often catching himself to make the adjustments. He just hoped that he wouldn't make the same mistakes during the culture festival.

After bathing Megumi and putting her to bed, Ryuichi went to cook dinner for his family. He figured some curry rice would be easy to make and plentiful for his family when they came home from work, though he waited until around nine o'clock to do the actual cooking so the food would be hot and ready for them. For the moment, he only prepared the ingredients for easy assembly later.

As he finished up throwing away the potato and carrot skins, he thought about how his sister still needed to find a babysitter for Megumi. Despite Mitsuru's advice on limiting how much he stuck his nose into his family's struggles, he ached to help them out. He kept telling himself to let his sister figure the nanny problem out herself, that last time his opinion on which nanny to hire meant nothing to Shizue. For a few moments, he actually started to believe that he wasn't needed for the task until he heard Megumi's jarring cries from upstairs.

Ryuichi held his niece as he softly sang her back to sleep. As Megumi quieted down, his resolve for keeping away from his family's affairs faltered.

"If I don't help out, what will happen to you?" he asked Megumi softly.

Once he managed to get his niece back to bed, he went back onto his sister's laptop to see if they received any new resumes.

The next day after work, Ryuichi had to speed back to the dorm to meet up with the other SEES members for another full moon operation. Thanks to his father coming in on a day he wasn't supposed to, Toshio and Shizue ended up arguing the entire afternoon and evening. After Shizue left for the night, it was just Ryuichi and Toshio left in the restaurant after closing time. Ryuichi ended up preparing the next batch of meats by himself while his father's rage erupted onto him.

"—trying to help her, and what does she do?" Toshio kept ranting while Ryuichi cleaned up. "Math was her strongest subject, and now she can't even add simple numbers! What was the point in sending her to college if—"

By the time Ryuichi finished, the only way he could get his father to go home was by flickering the lights on and off. It took his father a few flashes before he got the hint, muttering a disgruntled "G'night, son" with a rigid hug on their way out.

It was thanks to his father that Ryuichi made it back to the dorm with mere minutes before the Dark Hour struck. He parked his motorcycle and closed up the back room, congratulating himself on not getting arrested for running a few red lights.

As he retrieved the key to the rear door, his cell phone rang. Swearing, he quickly slipped off his helmet to answer the call.

"I can't take it anymore!" Shizue sobbed. "Ryu-chan, come get me and Megumi, please!"

"What happened?"

"Dad went too far! He went too fucking far and I'm just done!"

He held the phone away from his ear. "What did he say?" he asked. In the background, he could hear their father yelling and Shizue shouting back. "Hey, are you okay?"

"Just come get me, Ryu-chan! If I have to stay here another minute, I'll—"

The line went dead. The storage room went completely dark, and it took Ryuichi a moment to realize that the Dark Hour had begun. Right then, his family had no idea that they had been transmogrified, their arguments suspended for the moment.

It took a few tries to blindly find the right key for the door. Just like everywhere else, the lights in the lounge were all off, with only the moonlight guiding him enough to not bang his shins against any furniture. He had only just crossed the dining room when Ken dashed down the stairs, panting.

"Okazaki-san!" he gasped. "Have you seen Junpei-senpai anywhere?"

Ryuichi looked at him with concern. "No, I just got home. Why?"

Ken groaned. "He's missing and nobody knows where he is!"