We like to think the world revolves around us in some unreasonable way. The sun shines through the windows and our mood is subsequently brightened, but we act as though the effect is in fact the cause, and that our joy has caused the world to appear awash with illumination for our own sake. Pathetic fallacy indeed, in name and in substance. Mother Nature listens to the whims of no one – she grants her blessings and showers her fury upon the land as she sees fit.
And when it rains, it really does pour.
The water lashed against the glass as I slunk through the packed corridors, the usual optimism of after-school club-goers and do-gooders replaced by a subdued hush, an unspoken yet unanimous fear of the prospect of having to trudge bravely through a violent storm with naught but a flimsy plastic umbrella to protect themselves. The sky was a deep gray, the same color as the concrete pillars that stood firm against the wind, preventing the school from collapsing into itself whilst the torrents battered the walls beyond. The resultant cacophony was equally forceful, a drum-beat of anger and bluster punctured by the occasional lash of rumbling thunder and concomitant lightning arcing across the sky.
The weather report had blithely mentioned something about impending rainfall, but it had proved difficult to anticipate just how obstreperous the tempest would turn out to be. The umbrella I'd brought with me would be of little use; my best bet would be to find some place to wait out the storm. Let Mother Nature throw her tantrum. Patience would be my greatest asset, and I was nothing if not a patient person.
I briefly considered letting my feet lead me subconsciously towards the Service Club, but after what had happened yesterday, I decided I would be better served allowing the other two some space to breathe. Yukinoshita's feelings were as much of a mystery to me now as they had been 24 hours ago, so there was little chance of my mollifying her enough for me to be able to stay safely in the clubroom until the weather cleared.
The front entrance was blocked by a curtain of water stretching across the stairs leading out into the unknown. I eased myself onto the far corner of the topmost step, watching as my schoolmates lingered about, chatting to each other, debating whether to take the plunge. A few did, and were never seen again; others shook their heads and meekly retreated back into the building. Soon the front lobby was mostly empty, leaving me alone with my thoughts, and with the rain.
Some things never changed. The weather was not one of them.
Just as I was entertaining the thought of steeling myself to run headlong into the watery deluge ahead of me, I heard the sound of barely audible footsteps encroaching from behind.
"What're you doing here, Senpai?"
I didn't need to turn my head to know who was speaking.
"What does it look like I'm doing? Waiting out the rain, of course."
Isshiki squatted beside me, wrapping her small hands around her knees, staring at me curiously as though I were a gorilla chewing idly on bamboo shoots at a zoo. "Don't you have club today?"
"I…" I looked away. "There's no club today. They have stuff to do."
"Oh, really? I saw Yukinoshita-senpai in the clubroom, though."
"Well…"
"That's rare." Isshiki flattened her skirt along the back of her thighs and sat down next to me, hands on her knees, still looking at me with the same intensity.
"What is?" I muttered.
"I heard a rumor, you know. That the two of you were going out. Even if that's obviously not the case," she added just as I was prepared to rebuff that wholly malicious piece of gossip, "I'm sure that means you get along well. So, for the two of you to have a fight must be pretty rare."
"Does it look that way to you?"
"Who knows?" She put a finger to her mouth, bouncing it absent-mindedly on her lower lip as though she were pondering the mysteries of the universe instead of the relationship status of the patently lonely and undesirable high-school boy beside her. "Anyway," she continued, gliding away from the topic without so much as a second thought, "have you thought of something?"
"About your request, you mean?" I confirmed.
"What else could I mean?"
"I could think of a number of things." I blew a tired breath through my nose. "In either case, after spending a long, long time agonizing over how I could help you become the president everyone wants you to be…"
As I trailed off, Isshiki's eyes gleamed like dewdrops in the morning sun. "Yeah? What?" she pressed.
"…I couldn't come up with anything. Sorry."
"Boo!" Isshiki puffed out her cheeks and punched me on the shoulder. It hurt a little, though the damage was by my estimation 1% physical and 99% psychological. "All that suspense for nothing. But I guess that's just like you, Senpai."
That was an observation I expected from someone like my sister, who had long since been privy to the considerable depths of my many shortcomings. Not from a person who'd revealed as little about herself to me as I'd had to her. "You're not wrong, though I'm not sure you know me well enough to say that," I commented.
"Maybe not." Isshiki gazed nonchalantly into the watery thicket, as though looking for something that she knew wasn't there. "But I know someone like you very well."
"I… see. Anyway, there's something else I wanted to talk to you about regarding the student council."
"Something else?"
"I've been thinking about the Christmas event." I frowned. "The more I chew over it, the more it feels like a bad idea."
Isshiki joined me in frowning, a small crease materializing on her proportionately small forehead. "Why's that? We're doing a collaborative music event, aren't we? It sounds like a good idea."
"We're lacking in basically every department. Personnel, funds, and most of all, time. It just won't work, or if it somehow does, it'll come out badly. This is your debut mission as student council president, so you don't want it to be shabby, do you?"
"I guess not, but it's a bit late to be making changes to the plan. Plus… I don't know how to deal with that weirdo. He's so confident in himself, maybe too confident. It'd be nice for me to have a bit of that, though."
"The problem isn't just with Tamanawa," I continued. "It's also with everyone else at the meeting. Including you, me, and the rest of the Service Club."
"What do you mean?"
"Hmm…" An idea struck me. If I couldn't figure out a way to improve Isshiki, maybe she would figure out a way to improve herself. Starting with learning how to solve the issue at hand. "What do you think the problem is?"
"Huh? What's that about? Of course I don't know – that's why I'm asking you."
So much for that. "Listen, Isshiki." I held up a finger. "If you wanna become a better student council president, this is the sort of thing you need to be able to navigate. Being a president involves working with the people around you just as much as it involves working with your own position. Think about what went wrong at the last meeting. Why weren't we able to make good progress?"
"Because…" Isshiki puffed out her cheeks, tilting her head from left to right as she ruminated. "Because their student council president is an annoying, loud-mouthed weirdo who thinks too much of himself."
I felt a migraine growing in the space between my eyebrows, but I resolved to ignore it and maintain my composure. "And what about you? You just let him walk all over you. Don't you think you should learn to stand up for yourself a little bit?"
"If it were so easy, I would've." A cloud seemed to settle over Isshiki's typically sparkling eyes. "Also, that's rich coming from someone who lets people like Yukinoshita-senpai roll over him every day."
"If my principles are infringed upon, I still know how to stand up and speak on behalf of them. I'm happy for everything else to run their course. That's the difference between us."
"Huh. Maybe." A pause. "I don't really have any principles, so I don't know what that's about either."
A silence descended upon us, though the overwhelming sound drowned out any thoughts I could muster. If someone had spotted us, they might just have mistook us for a wantaway couple searching for a private moment for themselves. The unbearably vulnerable and hopelessly emotional part of me hoped that would be the case, but the front lobby had long since been deserted, leaving no potential witnesses behind. Everyone else in this school had made a choice, and only those who never decided anything for themselves remained in purgatory, a world between heaven and hell, encapsulated within the long, thin strips of concrete that comprised the stairs upon which the two of us sat.
The longer we remained, the more conscious I inevitably grew of my partner-in-indecision. A tuft of hair fell over her ears, dangling aimlessly beside her chin. In another universe, those chestnut-colored strands would have been within stroking distance, but they were as far away now as my rational mind deemed them to be, which was very far away indeed. Her shimmering eyes were innocent, inquisitive, fixed wistfully upon an unseen point in the unseen horizon. On another day, their longing gaze might have been cast towards something – someone – else.
These were strange thoughts to be having, especially considering what I really thought of Isshiki, whose undeniable beauty only ran skin-deep. It'd barely been a matter of days since she had been rejected, which made me feel all the more scummy and insensitive. Yet as long as we remained unable to read each other's minds, I was content to let my turbulent imagination continue its march towards the painful oblivion of reality.
"I think it's time we headed out," Isshiki abruptly said, standing up and stretching lazily as she did. "Should we go, Senpai?"
"Go where?" I queried tentatively. "Surely you don't mean-"
Isshiki pointed outwards, where the storm had shown absolutely no signs of letting up at all. "Home, of course."
"You do realize that the moment we step off the stairs, it'll be like us diving headfirst into a swimming pool?" I sighed. "Do you wanna catch a cold? Because that's how you catch a cold."
"Yeah, but I have something I need to do, so I need to get back. You brought an umbrella, right? I forgot mine."
"How do you get home?" I asked.
"By train," she replied.
"You do realize I don't take the train home, right?"
"You can walk me to the station."
"Why should I do that?"
"I'll get wet if you don't."
"And why's that my business?"
"Because I'll get a cold, and all my friends will wonder what happened to me, and they'll be worried sick. Then I'll tell them that it was all your fault, and they'll come and bug you at lunchtime, which I know you wouldn't want. So," she winked, "I'm counting on you, Senpai."
Shaking my head, I withdrew my umbrella from my bag. It was an old friend, one that had served me on many rainy days past, yet such was its age and wear that I had no idea how well it would fare against the adversary that we now faced. As I opened it, Isshiki quickly slid into the meager cover offered under the other half of the umbrella, making sure to stay near enough that only her shoulder was uncovered, but not so near that I would get any silly ideas. Which, of course, I was evidently prone to do.
Without further ado, we gingerly set foot into the wasteland.
The hammering of the raindrops was amplified tenfold, beating the weathered canopy of my umbrella into submission, the flimsy metal ribs creaking and groaning under the unprecedented pressure. Still it held, and still we continued to walk. By the time we reached the school gates, my left half was completely soaked, and I presumed that the same was true for Isshiki's right side.
"You okay?" I called.
"I'm fine," came the response. "Don't yell in my ear, Senpai."
"My bad. Your blazer looks… pretty wet. You sure you don't need to come a bit closer?"
"Why would I do that?" Isshiki replied, drawing away as though I had suddenly metamorphized into a giant insect. "You're not trying to take advantage of the situation to come onto me, are you, Senpai? As much as I'm grateful for you sharing your umbrella with me, I don't think now's the right time. Maybe in another time I would've fallen for it, but not today. I'm sorry about that, I really- Achoo!"
"What'd I tell you?" I snickered, trying not to appear too triumphant. "That's what you get for trying to be too smart for your own good."
"Shut up," came the stuffy, red-nosed reply. "Let a girl make fun of you in peace."
"I'm already way past the point of letting that happen. Here." I leaned the umbrella towards her, allowing her shoulder some respite, but exposing the top of my head to the elements in the process. My noblesse oblige instincts were kicking in – as the host of this tiny umbrella-covered space, I had a duty to ensure my guests were as well-treated as they would reasonably expect to be, even at the expense of my own health.
The rest of the trudge towards our unseen destination was icy, waterlogged, and bathed in both rain and silence. Thus we were more than happy to see the hulking silhouette of the train station loom from amidst the endless white and gray, a haven of dryness within the all-encompassing maelstrom. We ran the last couple hundred of meters, stopping only when we were safely ensconced in the embrace of the overhang in front of the station entrance.
"Man, this sucks." Without warning, Isshiki pulled her blazer off, revealing a shirt underneath that was quickly taking on a peachy color as it stuck to her skin. A flash of what seemed like pink lace entered my vision, but my eyes flitted away instinctively, and I dared not look again to confirm what I had seen. "This is way too much rain for winter. We never got anything like this during summer break."
"Y… yeah." I shook the water off my umbrella, which was now far more ragged and broken in appearance as befitting its age, and slipped it back into my bag. "Anyhow, you can manage from here, right?"
"Probably. By the way, why are you looking at the wall?"
"It's an interesting wall."
"Hmm." Isshiki slid in front of me, staring at the bland, dreary off-white tiling. Her back was as drenched as her front, and there was no averting my gaze from the strap that protruded noticeably from under the soaked fabric. "I don't really see anything. But maybe you do, Senpai." She looked back at me and smirked.
"Knock it off," I said, hoping that the sheer cold would be sufficient to prevent my ears from burning. "I'm heading back. See you at the next meeting."
"Okay. You should make up with Yukinoshita-senpai before then, Senpai. Otherwise, it would be pretty awkward to have the two of you around like that."
"I'll try."
With a wave and a smile, she rounded the corner and disappeared. My detour had added an extra half-hour to my journey, which might as well be an eternity in the circumstances. Regardless, I had to get back to Komachi before she started worrying, and so I turned and began my own long march home.
I wondered if I'd been too hard on her. Her fears about speaking out weren't unwarranted, especially if she'd never been confronted with an obstacle like Tamanawa before. Yet although it was – as always – hard to tell what Isshiki was really thinking, for the first time since we'd met, I felt as though the comfort she seemed to exude in my presence wasn't purely a façade. For the first time, I felt as though the mask she wore in front of me were being lifted, albeit only ever so slightly.
However, that wasn't necessarily the relieving notion that I had expected it to be. Instead, all I experienced was a deepening sense of unease. The unusually blank expression on her face after our conversation about the Christmas event – and about her lack of backbone in the face of Tamanawa's verbosity – had remained, despite her best efforts to hide it behind her typical antics. There were more layers to the onion than I had anticipated, yet I wasn't sure if I wanted to continue peeling them away.
Perhaps what I feared most, after lifting the mask off her face… was finding nothing beneath it at all.
