All In The Head
In which the principal's imagination runs wild
Strolling about in a suit while waving a paper fan and being escorted everywhere by his gangly second-in-command had its drawbacks. The principal of Seidou High knew it made him look every inch the caricature of an administrative buffoon. It also meant that people could spot him and his shadow a mile off, so he rarely saw their real side – kids and teachers would be on their best behaviour. Except, of course, for the unholy duo of Kataoka Tesshin and Takashima Rei. Those two never altered their demeanour regardless of his presence.
But the costume of suit, fan and sidekick was also an advantage, because when he shed it, he seemed to become invisible. Once a month, usually in the evenings, he would put his paper fan away, give his vice-principal the slip, exchange his loafers for running shoes, pull on a black baseball cap with no logo and a pair of glasses with non-refractive lenses, and don an anonymous dark windcheater of the sort that the school security and maintenance crew wore. Only the security staff knew in advance about these inspections, and left him alone to move around with a borrowed bag of tools to aid his thin disguise.
He was pleased that most of the misbehaviour he'd spied so far was minor. He himself was an old boy, and the place was much as he'd remembered it as a student – yes, some rule-breaking went on, but it was heaven compared with the terrible tales of misdeeds at certain public schools (awful incidents that made salacious headlines, drew police cars to the gates, and had members of the public bemoaning the distressing state of Japanese youth in this day and age).
Seidou was different. In such a sports-obsessed establishment, every student knew how strict the baseball federation governing the game in high schools was. The entire team could be thrown out of the tournament and barred from any hope of sniffing the air near Koushien for the rest of the year if a serious scandal was linked with the school.
The principal's biggest dream was to see Seidou's name in nice, big headlines as the institution that had returned to its glory days by reaching – and better yet – winning the tournament at that hallowed ground. But until that happened, his worst fear was that under his watch, Seidou would make the wrong headlines – the kind that would ruin the team's hopes of participation if students were caught taking drugs, or getting involved in gang fights, or if a player was accused of getting a girl pregnant. Even the widespread adult habits of smoking and drinking – so socially acceptable in this country – were taboo for students and treated like a crime by the Japan High School Baseball Federation.
Thus far, however, little had happened to justify his fears. His primary realistic worry, in fact, was that the boys would drop dead from overtraining one of these days.
The rest of the students who weren't players hailed largely from good families that could afford to send them to a private school where they would feel encouraged by how much better their grades were compared with those of the nutters who ran around all day swinging bats, waving mitts and staring hard at catchers' crotches to read mystifying finger signals. And the teachers were always carefully handpicked. As a result, the bulk of the issues that cropped up with the general school population were negligible, nothing that couldn't be dealt with in counselling sessions.
As for the baseballers, the kinds of trouble they gave him were what he called "good problems". They wore down equipment, broke bats while thwacking the balls to shreds, fell asleep in class because they'd trained too hard, put holes in the dorm ceilings when they tried to practise pitching in their rooms at three in the morning, argued heatedly about strategies, got raucous after winning tough matches, sometimes needed group counselling after losing games, and individual counselling when they weren't picked to start a game.
Nothing that would destroy the school's reputation. No time to join gangs and engage in knife-fights. Barely enough time left over to think about girlfriends, much less impregnate them. And too smart to smoke (unlike their demon of a coach these days). Definitely too smart to do drugs.
This was the familiar domain the principal had overseen for years, and he hoped that even when games couldn't be won, school discipline, at least, would remain good. Still, he liked to continue making his incognito rounds, to keep his eyes and ears close to the ground. He trusted Kataoka and Takashima to give their utmost to the team, but he was sometimes nervous about their radical methods and leap-of-faith choices.
Among the unnerving decisions Takashima had made in the past couple of years had been accepting students who had been in trouble in middle school for brawling – Kuramochi Youichi the shortstop who'd enrolled last year, and Sawamura Eijun the southpaw pitcher who'd entered this year. Takashima had assured the admissions office that the boys had had honourable intentions in starting those fights and had learnt their lessons well, but the principal had been on tenterhooks until each of them had played a few games for Seidou and shown no signs of wanting to trigger a massacre. In fact, they'd become valuable members of the first string. So his fear that he would see the headline "SEIDOU THROWN OUT FOR BRAWLING AT KOUSHIEN" had receded significantly.
Well, Takashima was a fearless devil whose motto seemed to be that any strategy which worked was fine as long as no one blabbed about what rules might have been bent to get it done; and Kataoka… hmm, the principal confessed to himself that Kataoka made him nervous, and he would be able to stomach the scary-looking fellow a lot more easily if he would only get the damned team to Koushien.
On this particular inspection walkabout – at night, as he hadn't checked on the boarders for months – the principal had just nodded to the security guard at the periphery of the area leading to the dormitories when he saw a shadowy figure slinking along the ground-floor veranda of the block furthest from him, a pillow under its arm. The figure stopped at one of the rooms and looked around as if to check that no one was following, and that backward glance cast light on the eyeglasses and well-formed features of catcher Miyuki Kazuya. From a previous dorm visit, the principal vaguely remembered that Miyuki's room was an upstairs one, so why was he downstairs with a pillow at this hour? Sleeping over in someone else's room? Why? Had that boy sneaked a girlfriend in and borrowed a pillow for her…?
He kept to the shadows and watched as Miyuki entered the room he'd stopped at and shut the door after him. The principal moved cautiously towards that block at the far end of the yard, but as he approached, he was distracted from Miyuki's odd behaviour by strange noises coming from upstairs.
The closer he got, the greater his alarm grew, for it sounded frightfully like an S&M orgy in full swing. He tiptoed up the stairs and inched his way along the open-sided corridor towards the only room in that stretch with its door open, light from within spilling out onto the walkway. He was now sure it was Miyuki's room – had the catcher vacated it so others could run wild? Grunts interspersed by gasps were what he heard first. Then strained noises and heavy breathing reached his ears. A few more tiptoed steps down the corridor, and words took shape:
"Ah – aahh – nggh – don't push your fist in – I can't breathe!"
"Stop squirming – I'm not done with you," was the sharp, growled-out reply. "And if you can't breathe, you shouldn't be able to talk either, Bakamura – so I should push a little harder… like this!"
"Aaagggh – hhhnngh – n-no – no, don't – gah! – didn't Takashima-sensei tell you off for doing this to me for no reason?"
"Heh – this time I have a reason."
"Nnngghhh – stop pushing! That's just sick!"
"It will get a lot sicker if you're cheeky to Tetsu-san again! Good enough reason for you?"
A third voice said sternly: "Hey, don't kill him before I've finished playing with him. I was just making my move when you grabbed him, you know."
As the principal shifted closer to the open doorway, a fourth voice and then a fifth became clearer:
"Is this how you like it, Isashiki-senpai?" was the soft, low query he heard.
"Harder," came the snappish reply.
"I'm trying."
"Harder! It doesn't feel good yet."
"Like this?"
"Higher up – higher – ahhh – right there."
"Here?"
"Faster, Furuya – don't you have any damn stamina?"
"Hrrrgh…"
"Hey, don't fall asleep on me!"
"Ah – I'm sorry, senpai."
Somewhere above all that, the principal heard somebody snoring (exhausted from too many rounds of whipping someone else into obedience, perhaps?), and others yelping and snarling.
Just as the dreadful headline "SEIDOU BOOTED OUT OF TOURNAMENT FOR PLAYER ORGY SCANDAL" appeared in his imagination and made him break out in a cold sweat, he put his head cautiously round one edge of the door frame, and…
… oh thank all the gods that had been listening to his pleas, because the grunts and gasps were only coming from Kuramochi and Sawamura, locked in a wrestling hold in the middle of the floor with Kuramochi's knuckles shoved deep into one half of Sawamura's nose and mouth.
The one who hadn't finished "playing" with the victim was captain Yuuki Tetsuya at the shougi board, presumably waiting for Sawamura to return to the game, preferably in one piece.
Vice-captain Isashiki Jun was having his legs massaged by the monster rookie, Furuya Satoru, who appeared to be putting little into the exercise and getting scolded for it.
A mound of flesh and muscle that – the best he could tell from this angle – looked like the large third baseman Masuko Tooru, was snoring loudly on one of the beds, dead to the ruckus going on around him.
And at the far end of the room, with their backs to him so he couldn't see their faces, were another two boys growling as they battled each other in a fast-paced video game.
The principal's legs went wobbly with relief as he quickly retracted his head before he could be noticed and inched away back downstairs. Ah, if those horrifying noises had turned out to be nothing incriminating, Miyuki couldn't be up to anything wicked either. To put his nervy mind completely at ease, he found the downstairs room he had seen the catcher sneak into with his pillow – Room 5, it turned out to be – and the names slotted into the nafudakake outside were… of course: Masuko Tooru, Kuramochi Youichi and Sawamura Eijun. If all three had invaded Miyuki's room, it was no wonder the boy had decided this would be the best place to get some shut-eye as it was guaranteed to be empty.
The principal turned the handle carefully, opened the door a crack, and flashed his torchlight into the darkness to see Miyuki fast asleep on the lower bed of the double-decker bunk, hugging one pillow and drooling into another. He switched off his flashlight, closed the door quietly and breathed easily again. He spent a further twenty minutes inspecting the rest of the area and found nothing amiss. Satisfied, he started walking away from the dorm blocks along the unlit, tree-lined side path that ran closest to the administration block.
All was well. Everything was good. Such decent boys they had on their baseball team. No ghastly newspaper headlines. No scandals. No…
"…just what made you think he wouldn't be teased once you grabbed his crotch in public?" came a deliberately hushed but clearly angry voice coming from behind the side wall.
The principal stopped dead in his tracks as the voice and those damning words reached his ears. He couldn't see the speaker as he couldn't look through walls, obviously, but there was no mistaking Oota-san's voice.
Who had grabbed whose crotch in public? the principal wondered in a panic as the headline "SEXUAL PREDATOR IN SEIDOU" screamed in his head.
"I'm sorry, sensei," came a gruff reply to Oota's angry questions.
The principal could not put a face to that voice right off the bat, but he stayed stock-still under a tree and continued listening.
"I can't believe you first sorted things out with him after that incident and made him think everything was well, only to blindside him with your declaration!" Oota chided the mysterious party he was conversing with.
"The way I did it was really stupid of me," the person admitted frankly.
"Yes it was!" the teacher snapped. "And why the devil are you agreeing with everything I say?"
"Because you're right?"
"Aarrgh, Miyauchi, you are the limit!"
Miyauchi? As in third-year catcher Miyauchi Keisuke? The principal asked himself, startled. Whose crotch did Miyauchi grab? Why didn't anyone tell him these things?
"I will make things right with Kawakami, I promise," the student murmured.
Kawakami Norifumi?
"I think we've already seen how your attempts to do that turned out!" Oota snapped.
"No, Oota-sensei – I think it's better for him to know the truth and deal with it, then move on. I should have been more tactful about it, but I shouldn't have hidden it from him in the first place."
"Some things are better hidden!"
"I thought so too at first, but I've changed my mind."
"Why are you disagreeing with me now?"
"Because you're wrong this time?"
Before the principal could hear any more of that exchange, a commotion erupted from Room 5. "MIYUKI KAZUYA! WHY ARE YOU SLEEPING IN MY BED?!" came Sawamura's ear-busting bellow. "YOU'RE DROOLING INTO MY PILLOW!"
"Oi, Miyuki!" snapped Kuramochi from the doorway. "Get off Sawamura's bed and get back to your own room!"
Scuffling noises from inside culminated in three figures tumbling out onto the veranda – Miyuki, laughing hard, trying to hook his spectacles back over his ears while clutching two pillows; Sawamura attempting to wrest one of the pillows from him; and Kuramochi trying to pry them apart.
Still laughing, and obviously half-asleep, Miyuki slurred: "It's my pillow I was drooling into, Sawamura – yours is the pillow I was hugging."
"Shit! That was mine? You even had a leg swung over it! Why the hell were you hugging my pillow in my bed?" Sawamura demanded, switching his grip to the other pillow as he tried to snatch back his property.
Miyuki, apparently completely drunk on sleep, stopped pulling back and allowed the pitcher to yank him all the way forward, then leaned right into his face and purred: "Mmm… because you weren't there in your bed with me, Sawamura…"
"Aaaagh!" Sawamura yelled, letting go of the pillow abruptly and shoving Miyuki backwards in the same motion, throwing him against Kuramochi in the doorway.
"Dammit, Miyuki!" the shortstop growled, catching him to keep them both upright. "Wake up! You're bloody sleepwalking, aren't you?"
"Nope," the catcher stated breezily. "Totally awake. Totally taking Sawamura's pillow back to bed with me."
"Hey, give that to me," Kuramochi snapped, tugging at his roommate's pillow himself. "And yeah, we're sorry we invaded your room, but humping Sawamura's pillow is just too much, man."
"Why?" Miyuki grinned, leaning over right into his classmate's startled face this time. "Jealous much?"
"Ugh! Miyuki Kazuya!" Kuramochi roared, sounding awfully like Sawamura as he, too, shoved the catcher away from him.
"Give me back my pillow!" Sawamura yelled, but without trying to make any more physical contact with Miyuki.
"If you come to bed with me we can share the pillow…" the catcher propositioned.
"What's going on?" came a soft but stern voice from the end of the veranda, as Takigawa Chris Yuu stepped out of the shadows.
"Chris-senpai!" Sawamura wailed.
"Chris-senpai!" Miyuki hailed him cheerfully at the same time. "Come to make a foursome? We can all sleep with Sawamura…"
Chris stepped up to the trio, smartly plucked the pillow Sawamura pointed at out of Miyuki's arms and tossed it to the first-year before seeing him and Kuramochi back into their room just as Masuko Tooru came stumbling along, rubbing his eyes, and sparing Chris and Miyuki a bleary glance before shutting the door after himself and his roommates.
It left only Miyuki and Chris facing each other on the veranda – Chris wearing a stern expression and Miyuki sporting a smirk. Then Chris turned on his heel and headed back upstairs without another word.
Miyuki, left alone, laughed to himself for a good while before straightening his glasses, tucking his pillow under his arm, and likewise heading upstairs. The principal watched from where he stood as Chris' door on the second level clicked shut so the third-year could retire for the night in the hope of not being disturbed again. A minute later, Yuuki, Isashiki, Furuya, someone who looked like reserve shortstop Nakata Ataru and another boy left Miyuki's room just before the catcher entered and shut his door too, cutting off the spill of light into the upstairs corridor.
The noise had obviously chased Oota and Miyauchi away to some other spot to continue their argument about molesting and such, and the principal found himself standing alone in the darkness under the tree, in a renewed state of shock as the headline shouted loudly in bold letters in his mind's eye: "SEIDOU TEAM IN MOLESTATION AND GAY GROUP SEX SCANDAL".
He dropped his head into his hands and groaned.