Karma has no menu. You get served what you deserve.
— Somebody
Hinata huffed as he scrubbed the toilet, sweat beading on his face. The toilet brush flattened against the edges of the toilet bowl before Hinata finally released the damn thing, his arms aching.
This was an absolutely shit (no pun intended) situation.
Hinata pressed his ear against the closed bathroom door, hearing Maru whistling in another room. Ripping noises could be heard.
"What?" Hinata muttered to himself, "What is she doing?" He gave the toilet brush one last glance before opening the door, relishing the air conditioning that blasted into his face. He walked down the corridor, stopping in he living room, where he saw Maru tearing something apart.
"Hinata," Maru said without turning around, continuing to rip at whatever was in her hands. "Are you done with the toilet yet?"
"Eh?!" Hinata flinched, grimacing. "How did you—"
"You walk loudly." She finally turned around, the ceiling light glancing off her glasses. "So, are you done or what?"
"Done?" This time, Hinata outright glared at her. "No, I'm not done! I know I agreed to your deal but..." He made a face. "I'm sick of cleaning the toilets...!" Why does she live in such a big house by herself anyway? Instead of just one bathrooms, I'm cleaning three!
Maru stared at him intently, to the point that Hinata was having second thoughts about his outburst. Perhaps he should just go back down quietly and—
"Fine, whatever. I was getting hungry anyway." Maru walked over to a nearby bin for paper and dropped the paper shreds into the can. "Let's go to the grocery store."
He blinked. "What. Now?"
"Yeah. Problem?"
"No, but..." Hinata puffed out his cheeks indignantly. "Just because you're being nicer doesn't mean—"
"Actually, I really am hungry, so can we go already?"
"I—"
"Oh, I'm sorry, was the beginning of my sentence interrupting the middle of yours?"
By now, Hinata was certain that she was being troll just for the sake of being a troll. Rolling his eyes, he picked up his jacket and tossed it around his shoulders. Tonight would be slightly chilly.
"Cute," Maru commented as they left the house.
Hinata blushed, eyes widening. "What do you mean?"
"I said you're cute. Like a puppy."
At that, his face fell. "I told you, I'm not your dog. I'm only doing this to protect Miku. If it was just me, you'd be cleaning your own toilets." He beamed triumphantly, thinking that he had won this round.
"So you're Miku's dog."
"Exact—what, no! I'm not anyone's dog."
Maru tilted her head. "Could've fooled me."
"Hey!" Hinata glared at the pavement, his hands clenched. Dammit, she's not exactly wrong... but she doesn't have to be so... so mean about it! He said as much, and Maru stared at him, unimpressed.
"Alright then," she said, "Now that we've gotten that out of the way, tell me about yourself."
"Hah?" Hinata gave a strange look. She's moving so quickly... she drops matters faster than I can tie my shoelace! "Like what?"
"What do you want to be when you grow up?"
He sweatdropped. She sounds like a teacher now... or my aunties and uncles. "A volleyball player. What about you?" Getting to know each other isn't as bad as scrubbing toilets, at least.
"Geez, really..." Maru blew a strand of hair out of her face, adjusting her glasses. "I'm pretty content with life as it is now... I don't want things to change." She huffed. "Well, when I graduate... I'm going to be an astronaut."
Hinata noted that she didn't use the word 'want', opting for 'going to be' instead. "Don't you need really, really good grades for that kind of career?" She's in my class; not even in the college prep classes.
"Yeah." Her lips curved upward ever so slightly. "What; are you saying I'm dumb?"
"Erk! N-no, that's not it! Well... uhh..." He pointed a finger at her. "D-don't misinterpret my words like that!"
"Ah," she waved a hand at him, "you're so easy to wind up. How cute." As if to make a point, she slouched in a way that allowed her to be at eye level with the diminutive boy. "Hinata, I know I'm not the brightest person around, but anything can be achieved with hard work."
"Anything?"
"Yeah." Maru threw back her head and laughed. "Of course, I'm too lazy to work hard!"
"Eh?! And you sounded so cool before too..." Maru-chan is so strange, Hinata thought, She can be really straightforward and blunt, but she has a very weird sense of humor as well.
"Cool?" Maru repeated, "Hinata, I'm not cool. All I do is stay indoors and play video games and read manga and light novels. Why do you think my house is so dirty? I never have time to clean because I'm so busy with my games and reading material."
"That's why your house is so dirty?!" he exclaimed, "All this time, I thought you were just incapable of taking care of yourself!" This girl...!
"Hm?" Maru grinned. "There's that too, don't get me wrong."
Hinata's eyebrows knitted together as he fully put on his jacket, shoving his hands into his jacket pockets. "You know, you can't be an astronaut if you can't even cook dinner for yourself." Maru's eyebrows raised; the boy was sounding particularly serious. "If you're that lazy... you'll never get anything done. How can you expect to be an astronaut? If you really want to be an astronaut, you can't afford to laugh through life like this." He stared imploring at her before breaking his gaze away, his solemn demeanor melting away. "Oh, there's the convenient store!"
As the words sank into Maru, Hinata picked up the pace, leaving her to linger in her own thoughts.
"This kid," she muttered, "Is nuts. Oi!" she called after him. Had he been anyone else, she would have likely busted his melon (a phrase that her dear old dad had liked to use).
He jumped; he would have smacked his head against glass had the doors not been automatic. "H-huh?"
"What do you want for dinner?"
"You're so cheap," Maru said when they emerged from the store with meat buns.
"Sorry," he said, sounding not very apologetic at all.
Ueno Konami couldn't help but lean to the side as she eavesdropped on a conversation in the aisle next to the one she was standing in. She had a pair of hollowed out headphones over her ears, and her eyes were at half-mast (as per usual), giving others around her the illusion that she was lost in her own little world.
"And then she pushed me over!" the girl who was talking exclaimed to her friend. Konami knew that this had been the girl that Saito Maru—that ungroomed girl from this afternoon—had 'bullied' during the volleyball game.
She—Konami—had followed one Saito Maru and one Hinata Shouyo into the store just to be diverted by this very interesting conversation.
"Oh my gosh!" her friend cried, and Konami imagined her placing a hand over her mouth in shock.
"I know, right?! And all I did was," she dropped her voice to a whisper and Konami had to press the side of her head against some instant noodle packets to hear properly, "tease her about her gang background. My dad is a police officer, you see, and he knows all about her Yakuza family because he worked on a case involving them a few years ago."
"And she hit you just for that? How uncool!"
Konami blinked, staring at the floor as she absorbed the new information. These two girls were notorious for being huge liars, but she was plenty certain that this was the real deal.
"I'm going to tell the whole school about her," sneered the girl, "She'll be so hated that she'll have no choice but to leave school and go back to her hick home!"
"Hick home?" murmured Konami.
"Hick home?" the girl's friend at the same time. "What do you mean?"
"After her family became ex-Yakuza—otou-san told me he saw her father's missing finger!—they moved to the countryside and lived off growing and selling potatoes and radishes."
"Wow. And after that?"
"Dunno. I guess they're all dead now? Since she's here and all."
"Haha, serves her right..."
Konami took a deep breath and exhaled, folding her arms. Wow, to think there's someone like that at our school. She frowned. I'm going to have to take some extreme measures... how bothersome.
She fished out her phone from her skirt pocket, pulling up a screen full of information about nearly everybody in the school. Saito Maru did not have a profile yet; and Konami didn't have dirty information about her friends or certain teachers that she liked.
The black-haired girl fiddled with some things before finally finding the profiles that she needed.
"I really hate to do this," she said to herself, quietly, "But I have a feeling that Saito won't appreciate it if these girls blab. And the fact that they seem like complete bitches doesn't really help their case..." Just because these two are known as huge liars won't mean that everybody won't believe them. They'll always be those fools that believe anything they say. But if they're going to do dirty things...
Her fingers practically flew across her phone screen.
... They need to learn how to clean up after themselves.
Ennoshita Yuuna sighed deeply when she heard Nagisa call her name. The girl turned around to see her best friend running toward her in the corridor, waving her phone around.
"What is it now? Is this about Comiket again? Because you know that I—"
"Just look!" Nagisa said impatiently, shoving the phone into Yuuna's face.
Grumbling, Yuuna took the device from her, her eyes widening when she read what was on the screen. "Whoa, you're kidding! I thought they'd have way more integrity than that! I'm going to send this to Chikara."
On the other side of the school, Miku was brushing her hair in a bathroom mirror when her phone dinged. The girl pulled it out, the hair tie in her mouth nearly falling out when she read what one of her friends had sent her.
"Oh, good morning, Kimura-chan," Yachi said as she entered the bathrooms, her cheeks slightly flushed from running or some other strenuous activity. "Haha, I'm running a bit late today..." Training went a bit late... I feel a bit guilty for leaving the boys to clean up but I really needed to use the bathroom...
"Oh, hi, Yaachan! Hey, have you seen this? To think that people at our school do these kinds of things." Miku gave Yachi her phone.
"Huh?" Yachi quickly skimmed through a bunch of social media posts before going slack-jawed and blushing deeply. "Oh my gosh!" she squeaked. "Now that I think about it, I did see them with some older men downtown the other week..." How could they possibly do this?
"The photo evidence is right there," said Miku, scowling, "I knew that those two were horrible, but not this bad!"
Isn't she the girl that that bigger girl supposedly pushed over? Yachi asked herself as she took a closer look at the photo. Perhaps there was a lot more to that incident than I thought.
At the shoe lockers, Rami was changing into her indoor shoes when her phone dinged. Konami had sent her something. She opened it up and immediately gaped at what she was seeing. "Eww...!"
The volleyball boys had just finished cleaning up the gym when all of them simultaneously received alerts for their social medias. There was a mild outcry as all of them scrambled to remove their phones from wherever they kept them.
"Argh!" cried Yamaguchi, patting his pants pocket. "I think I lost my phone...!"
"You left it on the bench so I grabbed it for you," Tsukishima said, presenting the missing phone to his best friend. "Don't be so careless next time or you really will lose it for real, Yamaguchi."
"A-ah, sorry, heh."
But Tsukishima was no longer paying attention. What could it be? Perhaps it was a notification for Sycamore Valley Online, a popular MMORPG that Tsukishima had been playing for a little while now, having joined near the end of his first year. But why would everyone else get that same notification? Tsukishima scratched that off his list.
"I got a text from my sister," Ennoshita said, reading the message aloud, "You need to see this."
"I got one from Miku," Hinata supplied. "What about you, Kageyama?"
"From my Spacebook and Flitter feed," the black-haired boy replied, frowning. "It's... a post about two girls in our grade, Hinata."
"GWAH!" Nishinoya suddenly exclaimed, his face going beet red. "I-I—I don't believe it!"
"What, what?!" Tanaka shouted. "My internet is laggy! What does it say?"
"Sycamore Valley is having a sale on diamonds!" Hinata suddenly yelled, his eyes becoming stars, having scrolled to something completely off-topic.
Tsukishima stared impassively at the back of Hinata's head. So, he plays Sycamore Valley too, huh? ... I hope I never meet him in-game.
"Not that!" Noya showed Tanaka and Hinata the contents of his phone. "This!"
At that, all of them nearly fell over.
"C-compensated dating?" Hinata stammered, as if he had never heard of such a thing before.
Kageyama scowled. "Why would you ever go out with old men? Even for money..."
"Who posted this?" Ennoshita wondered, frowning. If my sister got her hands on it, I'm betting that everyone else in the school did as well...
"Someone who calls herself 'Mystery-chan'," Kinoshita said helpfully, "This isn't the first time she's posted something dirty about someone in the school. There's a long string of other posts."
"Can we trust the source?"
"Well, there is photo evidence."
"Gah, yuck! This is getting too explicit! Why are they kissing?!"
"That old man looks like a prune."
"Okay, everyone, calm down!" Ennoshita said sternly. "I know this is pretty big, but don't get too worked up about it. The school will decide on how to discipline them. Whether they'll be suspended or expelled, I don't know. But this isn't our problem, so we shouldn't let it affect us. Understand?"
"Yes, captain!"
Inwardly, Ennoshita sighed in relief. Thank goodness. How did Daichi handle all of them so well? These boys were a real handful... I can't wait until the first years arrive. No application forms had been handed in for the club yet, but after Karasuno made it to nationals, Ennoshita was sure that they'd start getting them soon.
"Well, don't you look like the cat that just swallowed the canary," Rami remarked as she sat beside Konami in the first class of the day. "Would I be correct in assuming that...?"
"Yeah, that's my work," Konami said, placing her head on her desk. "After all that, I can't wait to take a nap..."
"Geez, you're so irresponsible. Did you stay up all night gaming?"
"Yeah."
"... Wow. Sycamore Valley again? Didn't you say that the guys in your guild are all jerks?"
"They are, which is why I'm leaving soon and starting my own. I've already got one guy agreeing to follow me. He thinks all of our guildmates are shitheads too, even if our guild is currently ranked number three in the server."
"Oh, who? Is it somebody we know?"
"It could be anyone in Japan for all I know. And I don't care either." Konami sat up slightly. "And don't act like I'm the only gamer bum around here, PinkRami018."
"A-ack! Shut up, Konacrow."
Konami turned away, staring outside the window. That Saito totally owes me one for this, even if she doesn't know about it herself. With the dirt included in the exposure of those girls, they were pretty much guaranteed to expelled. Neither of them came from particularly rich or influential families, so they were no doubt going to get the boot.
She smiled her cat-like smile.
I almost feel bad.