Starting a New Chapter
On an inconspicuous Friday in October, Natsuki arrived at the daily Literature Club meeting five minutes late and in an unpleasant mood. The boy in front of her in the line for the vending machine had taken forever to figure out what to buy, and when Natsuki asked if she could get her stuff while he deliberated his order, she'd been shot down. She would have made her point more clearly, but there'd been a teacher in the area and she didn't want to get escorted off the premises right before her favorite part of the day.
"Sometimes, there's no winning," Natsuki thought. "All you can do is lose as little as possible."
Fortunately for her, that sentiment didn't extend to her friends at the Literature Club: Yuri with her quiet demeanor and brilliant insights on everything; Sayori with more energy and enthusiasm than the rest of them combined; and of course, Monika, the warm, comforting ribbon that bound the rest of them together. They were there for her, she was there for them, and she wouldn't change that for the world.
She said hello to everyone as she entered, they returned the favor, and then she sat down, scanning everyone's desk. Apart from a half-finished energy drink on Sayori's desk, no one had anything in front of them but their books. Natsuki bucked that trend; she appreciated her afternoon snack more than most, so it was staying with her come hell or high water. She knew she'd finish it before she came close to opening any of the books, so she reasoned everything would be fine.
Right after Natsuki took her seat and pulled her book out of her bag, Monika started the meeting. "Well, it looks like everyone's here. Before we move on to our daily poetry, does anyone have something to say about the books they read this week?"
Natsuki scanned the covers of the books her friends had brought so she could figure out what she needed to say when they presented. Monika's novel looked like historical fiction, which would have been a surprise had Natsuki not known Monika didn't stick to a theme; once she'd brought War and Peace and The Host in consecutive weeks. Yuri had brought her well-used copy of Portrait of Markov alongside her book of the week, the title and cover indicating a fantasy novel with a horror bent. Sayori's cover implied her book was a light-hearted romance, but the book was far thicker than even Yuri's; a series, perhaps?
Meanwhile, Natsuki brought the book Sayori had recommended to her last time, We Are Two. The synopsis promised a sci-fi take on a bog-standard rom-com, which Natsuki didn't oppose on principle but wouldn't have sought out on her own. It had decent characters and an attention-grabbing premise but balanced that out with inconsistent pacing and a predictable plot, and it ended on a sour note. She barely finished the book, and if Sayori's recommendation hadn't been so earnest she would have stopped before getting that far.
She didn't mind. She'd hidden what she'd actually been looking forward to reading in the storage closet. As soon as everyone left, she would dig it out and read until she'd finished the latest volume of Parfait Girls. A poisonous whisper at the back of her mind told her this would be much easier if she sucked it up and showed them the manga, but she shoved it down. Doing that had burned her before, and she refused to let it happen a second time.
Sayori's voice brought her back to reality. "Natsuki, how about you present first? I'd love to hear what you thought about my book!"
Great. At least she'd finished this book, so she didn't have to make stuff up like she did some weeks. "It was kind of meh. I liked the characters well enough. The whole body-sharing premise didn't get taken anywhere near as far as I thought it would, it was just kind of window dressing. Most of the plot was just okay, but the ending almost sank the book for me; if I was honest, the two leads… or I guess four leads, depending on whether you're counting bodies or identities… really shouldn't have stayed together. If they each dislike half the other person that badly, I can't see their relationship lasting."
After she finished, she looked at Sayori, hoping she hadn't taken that too harshly. While Sayori wasn't the most discerning of her friends, she seemed to figure out Natsuki's intentions in seconds and started shaking her head.
"Don't worry, I'm not mad you didn't like it or anything," Sayori said. "It's just not what I was expecting. Maybe you'll like my next recommendation better!"
"I hope so too," Natsuki said. She had nothing more to say, so she opened the floor to Monika.
"You sound enthusiastic today," Monika said. "How about you share next?"
Beaming so wide she could have chased off a thunderstorm, Sayori demonstrated that enthusiasm by turning to face the others just a little too sharply. The energy drink Sayori brought in with her got knocked over by her careless elbow, spilling brightly colored liquid all over her desk and the floor. Thankfully, she'd been carrying her book, so nothing of value got ruined, but it still left quite a mess.
Sayori blushed. "Whoops! Silly me. I'll grab some paper towels from the bathroom and clean this up. Be back soon!"
"I'm sure there's paper towels in the closet, that's closer," Yuri said. "I'll go check."
As soon as Yuri mentioned the closet, Natsuki stiffened. The whole purpose of the classroom's closet was that no one ever used it, not even them. Apart from her stashed manga, the room was empty except for a single chair and a couple of boxes.
Sayori's cheerful giggling jolted her out of her thoughts once more. "You don't have to do that for me! I made this mess, and I'll clean it up!"
She made a beeline for the closet. Natsuki restrained herself from swearing, but just barely. Still, she kept her hopes up; there weren't paper towels in there from what she'd seen, so maybe she'd be in and out quickly enough that they wouldn't notice what she'd done.
However, Sayori clearly wanted to be thorough. Instead of taking a quick peek and resigning herself to running to the bathroom, she stepped inside, scanning all the dust-covered shelves for something that served to clean up her mess before looking up. She stopped turning in the worst possible position, and Natsuki's heart stilled in her chest.
"Uh, guys?" Sayori pointed to her volume of Parfait Girls, which sat in a box balanced on the edge of a high shelf, the wobbly chair still where Natsuki had placed it so she had the height to reach it. "What the heck is that doing there?"
Yuri and Monika joined Sayori in the closet a few seconds later, taking in the unusual sight.
"I'm not sure," Yuri said. "Maybe someone left it there by accident?"
More silent curses. If she'd been less obvious or six inches taller, this wouldn't be happening. She had no one to blame but herself for this failure.
"This might just be me, but I don't know anyone who's using the closet as a manga storage space voluntarily," Monika says. "My guess is it got confiscated from someone and they forgot about it."
"I'd say we get it down," Yuri said. "Maybe it has a name on it."
Natsuki knew it didn't; a rarity but still true. She'd usually write her name on the inside of the front page, but she'd only gotten that volume two days ago, so she hadn't gotten around to it yet. For a second she breathed a bit easier. She could still salvage this if she played her cards right and things went well.
Yuri, the closest and tallest of them, stepped onto the chair Natsuki had used to reach the shelf and grabbed the box. From there, the four of them returned to their original location. Yuri set the box down on an unoccupied desk before she carefully opened the manga volume it contained (Natsuki was relieved that Literature Club members treated books gentler than most), checking both sides of the first and last page before closing it and returning it to its original storage space.
"If there's a name, I didn't see it," Yuri said. "You three can check, but I wouldn't expect anything."
"Don't worry about it," Sayori said. "I'm sure its owner will come looking soon enough. Let's give it until the end of the meeting."
"How about we pause for a bit," Natsuki said, needing a moment to think. "I'll go get some paper towels from the bathroom and we can clean this up. I'll be back before you know it!"
She exited the room as fast as possible without running, then, once she was sure none of the other Literature Club members could hear her, beelined straight for the nearest girls' bathroom and didn't stop until she'd ducked into a stall.
How had things gone so wrong? They'd never gone into that closet before, and based on how much dust had been in there nothing inside had been moved for at least a few months, yet her manga hadn't even made it a week.
At least it meant she had some time to figure out what she needed to do or say to get out of this. This was an unpleasant situation, that was certain, but it wasn't yet an irredeemable one. All she needed was to make this work.
On that hopeful note, Natsuki began the trek back to the Literature Club meeting, paper towels in hand. The mess Sayori made wasn't going to clean itself, after all.
The rest of the meeting passed as usual, but Natsuki's heart wasn't quite in it. She listened to what her friends had to say about their books and read her poetry alongside everyone else's, but her mind remained elsewhere, the gears whirring madly as she attempted to solve the glaring problem that had been dropped on her.
Naturally, the supposed owner of the manga volume never showed up. Throughout the meeting, Natsuki noticed Monika stealing glances at both doors the classroom had like the person this volume belonged to would materialize out of thin air, but unless Natsuki-Prime or Natsuki-Lambda or some other Natsuki from a science fiction setting had gained access to a dimension-hopping device, the manga belonged to her and her alone.
She'd gotten so out of sorts she barely registered when Monika announced the end of the meeting. As she did, she tapped her fist against the desk, the noise like a judge's gavel to Natsuki's ears. "If we're going to conclude this meeting, we need to figure out what to do with this manga."
A pause. Natsuki thought about it. She could rip the band-aid off now, or take a chance and come clean later. Both options sounded horrible, and the resulting indecision gripped her by the throat.
Yuri remained somber. "If it doesn't belong to any of us, I'd say we ask around and see if the owner's still here. If that doesn't work, we can put it in the school's Lost and Found bin. I'm sure someone will come looking for it eventually."
The end of the line had come rather suddenly. Even if Natsuki somehow got the manga out of the Lost and Found bin without being noticed, she didn't have anywhere else to store the volume safely. Her locker was full, storing anything inside her desk was a recipe for it to get stolen, and bringing it back home wasn't an option anymore. She hadn't made the choice, so the choice had been made for her.
Natsuki's voice came out as weak as a kitten's. "...It's mine."
Silence reigned for far too long, Natsuki bracing for the worst. This was it. This was when everyone's opinion of her soured, and there was nothing she could do about it. Oh, well. She'd had a good run with the Literature Club, but maybe the time had come to look for something else to occupy her time after school.
Yuri, ever the logical one, was who finally spoke up. "I don't mean to be rude, but it took you a while to say that it belonged to you, and the manga still doesn't have a name on it. Do you have any proof it's yours?"
With her secret already out, there was no point in holding back anything else. Nothing was stopping her from just getting this over with.
"Follow me," Natsuki said. "My locker should count as proof enough."
Sure enough, Monika, Yuri, and Sayori all fell in line behind her. Still, Natsuki took a deep breath as she exited the classroom, preparing for the worst.
The walk to Natsuki's locker was silent and tense. By then, school had been over for quite some time: apart from clubs that had meetings today, the building was empty. Therefore, despite crossing the school to get to Natsuki's locker, the Literature Club didn't run into a single soul.
They finally stopped in an out-of-the-way hallway near a handful of classrooms that stayed perpetually empty. When Natsuki had picked that locker, she hadn't cared about its location: before the incident, she rarely used it, since the school was large enough that the odds of reaching her locker while still making it to class on time were a coin flip at best. That made it perfect for how she repurposed it, since she only needed to access it at the beginning and end of the day. Plus, while the combination lock was a weak defense, it at least meant a two-bit thief would need to pick the lock first, which was enough of a deterrent that she doubted her locker would be chosen at random.
The other three stepped back while Natsuki entered the code. She'd never gotten the hang of these combination locks, so it took her a few tries, but after a minute or so the telltale final click occurred, and Natsuki braced herself for the reveal.
She opened the door to reveal the other volumes of the Parfait Girls manga she owned, resting atop last year's history textbook to prevent it from touching the bottom of the locker. Her volumes were sorted chronologically, starting with the first and ending with the eleventh. There might have been room for the volume in Yuri's hands if she squeezed it in, but that ran the risk of damaging the books as she tried to get them out, hence, she put it in the closet.
Just in case the other three needed more proof, she slipped the first volume out of her locker and opened it, revealing that she'd written her name on the inside, then did the same for the last volume. "I could do all the others too if you'd like, but I'd like to believe you think volumes two through ten are the same."
"This one didn't have a name, though," Monika said. I'm reasonably confident Volume 12 on its own doesn't get you very far, so I'm not doubting it's yours, but why not write your name on it?"
"I only got it a few days ago, it just slipped my mind," Natsuki said. She meant that: she'd gotten the volume on Wednesday and hidden it Thursday morning, meaning the timing of this whole affair came down to extraordinarily bad luck. A few more days and she would have been found out even faster, but at least it might have been less stressful.
Monika wasn't done with her yet, though. "I'm not sure why you went through all these steps to try and hide this. Why was this such a big deal for you?"
"I was nervous," Natsuki said, each word a struggle to get out of her mouth. "I thought… I thought you might see me differently once I showed it to you."
The smiles dropped off of everyone's faces; none of them seemed to feel that way. Sayori beat the others to the punch in expressing that, though. "You thought we'd judge you over it? I know I wouldn't."
"I wouldn't either," Yuri said. "There's no point in doing something like that."
"It would be rather unfitting for the president of the Literature Club to be so judgmental about what forms of literature others enjoyed," Monika said.
Well, that had gone over far better than she expected. Perhaps expecting everyone to react the same way to her manga was a bit outlandish, but that one experience had left her with a far worse taste in her mouth than any trashy romance novel could replicate. She never wanted to feel that way again if she could help it.
Judging by Sayori's next question, the universe obliged her desires. "Just asking, and you don't have to answer if this is uncomfortable, but why?"
"My dad," she said. "He doesn't care for my manga, and he's pretty obvious about it. I didn't want to repeat that experience."
Monika and Yuri remained silent, but Sayori raised another question. "Were you trying to get him to read it or something?"
"I know better than that," Natsuki said. "He has his interests and I have mine, and it's not like I can force him into doing anything." A bitter, sharp laugh. "If it was just that, I wouldn't have needed to hide it from him."
Sayori continued her onslaught of questions, but her voice had gone weak. "Was he mocking it? Did he say anything to you about it?"
"He did both those things for a while," Natsuki said. "Then he realized that didn't work on me because I didn't care how he felt about my hobbies. That's when my volumes started going missing."
Her friends' faces all darkened. None of them had audible reactions, but Monika at the very least looked like she wanted to have some words with her father. Natsuki would have taken it: having someone else to back her up, even if that someone was no older than her, would have made standing her ground much easier.
"Wait a moment," Yuri said, her expression shifting back toward something neutral. "Are you sure it was him and you didn't just leave your manga behind somewhere by accident?"
Natsuki shook her head, her face going hot for a second over being accused of something for no good reason. "Until this started happening, they never left my room: there was nowhere to lose them. He wasn't very subtle about it either, he kept saying that maybe I'd read some real literature now that I didn't have them anymore."
Monika's face turned the color of a strawberry. "He sounds… not fun, is all I can safely say."
"He's not," Natsuki said. "He's what I have, though; there are some things I just have to live with."
That line of reasoning was precisely why she had yet to invite any of the Literature Club members to her house: not only did her father promise to make anything she did there stressful at best (even if he permitted someone to come over at all), they hadn't needed to know about their frequent disagreements and strained relationship. At least she had a roof over her head and food on the table, which was better than many could say: she didn't need to bother her friends with her father's… quirks.
"I don't get it," Natsuki said before anyone else could ask her more questions. "It's not like I don't read other books. Manga just happens to be something I enjoy. I'm not sure what his problem with it is, but regardless of that answer, I can't leave my volumes in the house anymore. Not as long as he's there."
The other three all seemed to accept her explanation, which did wonders for Natsuki's mood. However, that didn't mean this conversation was finished quite yet, as Monika still had more questions. "Are there any other hiding spots we need to know about, or is this it?"
"These are all my other volumes," Natsuki said, pointing to her locker as she did. "I only put the newest one in the closet because I ran out of room. Everything in that closet was so dusty I didn't think anyone had any reason to go in there. Until now, anyway."
"Given how empty that closet was, that might actually be true," Yuri said. "Nothing that was used anytime recently has that much dust on it."
"On Monday, we can talk with the teacher whose classroom we use," Monika said. "There's so little in that closet I don't think she'll mind, but it'd be polite to make sure. If that doesn't work, we can figure out another arrangement."
Another pause; Natsuki scrutinized every word to ensure she'd heard Monika correctly. "You guys don't have to do that for me…"
"Of course we don't," Monika said. "We're not doing this because we have to. We're doing this because we're your friends. That's what friends do."
"Thank you," Natsuki said, and she meant it with every fiber of her being. This could have easily gone so much worse with a different crowd, but her friends had taken everything in stride and gone out of their way to help her. Natsuki made another decision right then and there: no more secrets. No important ones, anyway.
The smile had returned to Sayori's face. "Now that that's dealt with, how about we head back to the classroom and talk a little more?"
Everyone nodded assent, including Natsuki.
"In that case, let's go," Sayori said, beginning to speedwalk toward their new destination. Natsuki followed her alongside Yuri and Monika, the tightness in her chest gone and her breaths easy. The storm had passed, and the time had come to bask in the sunlight.
Returning to the Literature Club's classroom felt much easier than leaving it. Her newest volume of Parfait Girls had returned to its rightful owner, her friends had no problems with her reading preferences, and unless the teacher whose classroom they met in said no, she now had a place to store as many volumes as she could fit without any further issues.
The four of them entered the classroom and sat back down in their original spots, ready to resume their meeting even if it technically had ended earlier. Before anyone could start talking, though, Natsuki noticed Yuri glancing at the clock, the smile on her face beginning to waver once more. "Our scheduled block is over, do you think we should go somewhere else?"
"No other club is using this room, and the night janitor isn't here until five," Monika said, how she'd obtained that information a question she didn't answer. "As long as a teacher doesn't tell us we need to leave, I'm sure no one will mind that we're staying a bit late. It's Friday, after all."
Smiling, Natsuki gestured to the cover of her actual book. "This is also something I read this week. It's the latest volume of this adorable manga called Parfait Girls. You guys want to hear what it's about?"
"Certainly," Yuri said.
"I'd love to," Sayori said.
"I'd be delighted to," Monika said.
Before Natsuki could start, a giddy laugh escaped her. All that stress and worry had been for nothing; her friends accepted her for who she was without the slightest hesitation.
She started explaining the many intricacies of Parfait Girls with a rather uncharacteristic smile on her face. Happiness may have been fleeting and hard to obtain, but the Literature Club, as always, remained somewhere she could find it.