June 28th, 2024

Mion rolled to one side, but wallowing on her hands and knees like this –one of them occupied with her desperate clutch on her weapon– meant that her ability to dodge was severely hampered.

"HAAAAH!" Keiichi roared, bringing it down in one mighty swing.

Mion took a pillowcase-shrouded wrecking ball of feathers to the face with a poomf, and she bellowed around the muffling fabric as best she could, swinging her own pillow for his knees.

Chaos reigned around the room. Rena was all but whirling her longer, thinner pillow from hand to hand like a nunchaku as she fended off Satoshi and Shion, but there! Satoko had jumped onto her shoulders from behind, raising her own pillowcase high. Rika and Hanyuu were engaged in a one-on-one duel, frequently interrupted by pulling their long hair out from under their own knees or rolling out of range from an attack.

Keiichi stumbled at her blow, and Mion shot to her feet with a roar, tackling him onto the futon-covered floor and whacking him with her pillow, over and over again.

"Surrender!"

"Never!" he howled back, trying to bowl her over with a shoulder-strike. "You'll never –mmph!"

He spat out the pillowcase, and they both kept going.

A clanging sound interrupted the club's furious battle, and they all paused, a few tufts of down drifting to the floor, as they halted their attack and looked towards the doorway. Kasai stood there with a set of tongues and a tossing fork, and he had tactfully interrupted by chiming them together.

"The barbecue is ready, Sonozaki-san," he announced.

"Ah, alright," Mion said, and at her nod everyone began to disentangle themselves. "Pillow fight postponed until later, okay guys?"

"Sounds fine to me," Keiichi replied as he stood, reaching up to comb his short hair back into order.

"Hmph. Only the truce spares you this day," Satoko told Rena, whom she had driven to her knees, as she hopped off her shoulders.

"What's for dinner?" Hanyuu asked hopefully.

"Hot dogs," Mion answered as she led the club out to the Hojo backyard, rubbing her hands together. Everyone had deviated from the norm a bit, as they were all wearing nightclothes. "If we're gonna do an American-style sleepover, we're gonna do it right."

"It's going to be strange not having Onee as club leader anymore," Shion said, taking a paper plate and letting Kasai fork over some sausages. "Not to say that Kei-chan will do a bad job, of course…"

"Damn straight!" he replied, gesturing so wildly that Kasai's toasting fork had to shoot out, spearlike, to impale the hotdog that had flown off his plate. Everyone made a point of not mentioning this as Kasai, deadpan, returned the food to Keiichi and kept serving. "I'm gonna make sure the club stays just as awesome while Mion's away."

"Muu, it'll be a bit strange to only have the whole club for a few months," Satoshi said, carefully balancing his own plate.

"A few months? A few months?" Mion repeated incredulously. She threw an arm over his shoulder. "I'll be back every summer break, of course! You're not getting rid of me that easy!"

"But still," Rena said, balancing her own plate on her knees as she sat at the edge of the porch. Her lip wobbled a little as her eyes grew shiny. "It's kind of the end of an era, isn't it? Everyone's growing up, growing apart…"

"Growing up doesn't necessarily mean letting go," Rika chirped from her position a little ways further down the porch. "The Hinamizawa Club will always be part of us, and we will always be friends. It doesn't matter if there's a whole lot of distance between us; we'll still always know that in our hearts."

"Damn straight," Keiichi agreed proudly, putting one hand on the grass as he folded himself down to sit. "Mion's still the leader; I'm just subbing in for a bit while she's away. Things will go back to normal next summer."

"And the summer after that, and the summer after that, and the summer after that," Shion said, and sighed wistfully. "An eternity of perfect summers when the club is together again."

"Okay, this is getting sappy," Mion huffed, even though she felt a warm glow kindling inside her chest. "Moving on to tonight's itinerary –after dinner, we can do the gossip, hairdo stuff, and nail-painting to give time for our food to settle, and then, since we've got two movie choices, we can continue walloping each other in a pillow fight to decide which one we wanna watch. Kasai-san will have gone home at that point, so we'll use the Hojo kitchen to make popcorn."

"You do know it's not a proper sleepover unless everyone stays up obnoxiously late," Shion said.

"Well, then we can argue over the order we watch the movies in," Mion replied, rolling her eyes. Then she grinned. "First one to sleep loses?"

"YEAH!" the club cheered, and Mion laughed along with them.

Tomorrow was her first day of high school, her first time living outside Hinamizawa, and the rest time in what felt so irrepressibly long since she hadn't had her after-school club with her friends to look forward to. Tomorrow, in fact, was the first true step to her life growing up.

But tonight laughter filled the garden, lit by the glow of the western horizon and the coals beneath the grill, as her club –her friends, her family– planned for their last perfect summer game.

10.59 AM, USA Central Time