I would’ve appreciated not being lumped in with her brain. My own head didn’t have anything to do with space-time distortions, data explosions, or monochrome parallel dimensions. Compared with Haruhi’s unprecedented conceptions, it was a cute little miniature dachshund.
“Listening without comprehension is a waste of time,” I said, without any particular conviction.
“Oh yeah?” Her eyes still fixed on the scenery outside the window, she spoke as though addressing the silent glass. “Should I help you out with studying, then? I don’t mind—we’d just be going over the class material again. And I can definitely explain language arts better than they do in class.
“The teachers suck, after all,” Haruhi murmured quietly to herself. She glanced at me, but then looked immediately away.
As I was trying to figure out how to answer—
“I mean, Mikuru’s been freaking out too, right? This school’s just a prefectural public school, but this time of year they get all weird and start acting like a prep school. It’s really hard on the juniors. They’ve got all those special classes and mock exams and everything, and it turns their big class trip into a total mess. If that’s what they’re gonna do, they should move the class trip to freshman year. And the school festival should be in the spring, not fall, am I right?”
Despite her rapid-fire delivery, her eyes remained fixed on the drifting clouds. As she seemed to be waiting for a reply, I gave her one.
“Yeah, I guess,” I agreed, looking at the clouds myself. “I just want to make it through the school year.” Then, on the chance I got held back a year, I played up to Haruhi’s ego and added, “Heya, Suzumiya-senpai.”
“Kyon, you dork. Just go buy me some rolls. I’ll pay you later.”
I resented the prospect of such mundane conversations making their way into the clubroom. There wasn’t anything wrong with getting Haruhi to make a test preparation guide in order to avoid that, right? Wait—it’d be good to have Nagato on the production staff too. I bet we could sell them for five hundred yen a pop, make a little money on the side. I figured I could cut Taniguchi a break and give him a bad-influence discount of 30 percent or so.
“No way,” said Haruhi, immediately nixing the profitable-sounding idea. “That wouldn’t really help your academic ability at all. It would just be a temporary fix. If a slightly different question showed up on a test, you’d have no idea what to do. If you don’t build up your knowledge properly, you’ll fall for all their sneaky tricks. But don’t worry. If you’ll just apply yourself, I can get you to Kunikida’s level in six months, easy.”
I didn’t really want her to get too enthusiastic about it. Despite my efforts not to, I found myself imagining the scene—sweating nervously as Haruhi thwacked me on the head with a yellow megaphone, happily yelling at me, “No! Why can’t you understand something so simple? What are you, an idiot?”
“I’ll just ask you about the places I don’t know,” I said, “and all you have to do is explain those. I’ll handle the rest myself somehow.”
“If you can handle it yourself, why haven’t you done that already?”
She certainly knew how to figure out the most annoying thing to say. She was dead right, I told her.
“Why’re you being so stubborn?” Haruhi faced me, her lips tight with frustration, then leaned suddenly forward. “I won’t allow the kind of scandal that would come from a member of the SOS Brigade failing out of school. That’d give the student council all the ammunition they’d need to come down on us. I need you to be just a tiny bit motivated so they don’t get that opening. Got it?”
Haruhi’s words were delivered with her brow furrowed in irritation, her mouth curving into a keen smile, glaring at me until my face showed acceptance of her demands.
Classes were over for the day.
I took my leave from Haruhi by pretending that I was headed for the staff room, then proceeded to the student council room. It was right next door to the staff room, so there was no need to take a detour, and soon I’d arrived at my destination.
Truth be told, now that I was here, I was feeling pretty nervous.
I didn’t remember the student council president’s face at all, even though I would’ve seen it during the council elections that came right after the school festival. I remembered hearing the candidates’ speeches in the auditorium, but as a completely unaffiliated voter, I just picked the most mundane-sounding name on the ballot and immediately forgot it. What kind of person had it been? Whoever it was had to be at least a junior, since to be called “president” I figured you’d have to be an upperclassman of some kind. And surely it had to be someone with more dignity than the computer club president.
As I stood there hesitating in front of the door—
“Heya, Kyon! Whatcha doin’?”
A familiar long-haired figure popped out of the staff room. It was Asahina’s classmate and an honorary adviser to the SOS Brigade, a junior girl who I knew by now was no ordinary individual.
No matter who you were, you had to tip your hat to her.
“ ’Sup,” I said.
“Ha ha ha—’sup!” she replied to my jock-ish greeting.
Tsuruya raised both hands and smiled brilliantly, then looked at the door in front of which I stood.
“What’s this? Got business with the student council?”
I was here to find out exactly what that business was, I explained. I’d never have business with them myself.
“Whaa?”
Tsuruya strode toward me vigorously—it was hard to say whether she or Haruhi was better at that—and despite my flinching away, put her mouth in close proximity to my ear.
“Hmm? Are you by some chance a student council spy?” she asked, in a quiet (by Tsuruya standards) voice.
I detected a hint of seriousness in Tsuruya’s close-range smile. It was an expression I wasn’t used to, given her standard of constant optimistic mirth. For some reason I felt compelled to explain myself.
“Um, well…”
What do you want me to say, Tsuruya? I pointed out that if I were a spy under orders from someone, I wouldn’t be going to all this trouble at the moment.
“I guess that’s true.” Tsuruya stuck out her tongue. “Sorry for doubting ya! I just kinda overheard something, y’know? Know anything about the rumor that the student council’s been overrun with people making secret deals behind the scenes? I hear it even goes back to the last election for council president. Not sure I buy it, though.”
That was the first I’d heard of it. It was hard to imagine that kind of intrigue happening at our shabby little public school, so it was probably nothing more than a rumor. Although it did seem like the kind of academic drama that Haruhi would’ve loved.
“Tsuruya—what kind of person is the student council president?” I went ahead and asked her. It seemed like she might know more about the subject than I did.
I hoped she’d tell me something about his personality or something, but—
“I don’t really know him very well. He’s in a different class and all. He’s sorta stuck up but also handsome, and pretty smart, from what I hear. If he were a character in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, he’d be Sima Yi, that cunning army general. He’s constantly working for more student independence, I hear, since the last student council was out of touch—total pie-in-the-sky.”
It was troubling that despite the reference to a famous historical figure, I couldn’t easily imagine his personality—and the comparison to airborne pie was suspicious, as well.
“Uh, by the way—why were you in the staff room?”
“Hmm? Oh, it’s my turn to deliver the weekly reports, so I came by to do that,” she said easily, slapping my back and purposefully raising her voice. “Anyway, Kyon, good luck! If you’re gonna wrestle with the student council, I’ve got your back! I’m an ally to all in Haru-nyan’s club!”
It was certainly reassuring. However, I didn’t want things to go that far. There was no tel
ling what methods the ecstatic Haruhi would employ upon the appearance of a truly worthy adversary. It exhausted my mental capacity just thinking about it. And as things stood, I already had enough to worry about.
Tsuruya waved her hand in a good-bye gesture, and having said everything she wanted to say, strode off briskly.
As usual, she’d gotten to the heart of the matter without my saying anything. In that sense, her cognitive abilities rivaled even Haruhi’s. She was probably the only person at North High who could demonstrate power equivalent to Haruhi’s in a matchup. The difference between her and our pain-in-the-neck brigade chief was that Tsuruya hadn’t left her common sense behind.
Given the thin construction of the wall and door, though, it was a safe bet that her last words had been audible on the inside. There was something Haruhi-like hidden within her, in the end.
Oh, well—it was time to gird my loins and do this.
I gave the door a polite knock to avoid offending whoever was inside.
“Enter,” came a sudden voice from within the room.
It was surprising to hear somebody actually commanding me to “enter,” especially in a voice so deep and severe you’d expect to hear it overdubbing some famous veteran actor in a foreign movie.
I slid the door open and entered the student council room for the first time in my life.
While it boasted a slightly larger size than the literature club’s room, it wasn’t that much different than any other room in the old building. In fact, without a triangular plaque reading COUNCIL PRESIDENT on one of the desks, it felt a little drab compared with our room. It was really nothing more than a meeting room.
Koizumi, having arrived before I did, greeted me. “I’m glad you made it.”
Standing next to Koizumi, evidently also having waited for me, was Nagato.
“…”
Nagato cast her clever gaze toward the window, in front of which stood the president.
He was… how to put it?
It was obvious enough that he was a tall male student. For whatever reason, he was looking out the window, his hands clasped behind him, not so much as moving a muscle. His form was indistinct, backlit as it was by the afternoon sun that streamed through the south-facing window.
There was another person, sitting at one corner of the room’s long table. It was a female student, face downturned over an opened notebook, mechanical pencil in hand, poised for recording the proceedings. Apparently she was the secretary.
The president did not move. I had no idea what was so fascinating about the scenery visible from the window—all you could see from there were the tennis courts and the totally abandoned swimming pool—but the meaningful silence dragged on.
“Mr. President,” Koizumi finally said after an appropriate interval, his voice brimming with fresh solicitousness. “All the individuals you asked to come have arrived. Feel free to proceed with your business.”
The president slowly turned, at which point I finally beheld his face. He was a second-year student, and he wore a slim-framed pair of glasses. He was a pretty handsome guy, but not like Koizumi’s dime-store-teen-idol good looks. There was a callous look in his eye, like a young and upwardly mobile professional whose every thought was turned toward improving his own position. I reflexively anticipated that I would not get along with him very well.
His face expressionless—but not like Nagato’s—he spoke. “I believe you have already heard this, Koizumi, but I’ll state it again. The reason all of you are here is quite simple. The student council is giving the literature club its final notice.”
Final notice? Had we ever been given a notice at all? If we had, I couldn’t imagine Nagato had meekly complied with their summons, which was what had allowed us to continue using the clubroom as our base of operations.
“…”
Unconcerned with Nagato’s lack of response, the president coldly continued.
“Currently you are the literature club in name only. Is this correct?”
I guess holing up in the clubroom and reading books wasn’t good enough.
“…”
Nagato said nothing.
“You are no longer a functioning student organization.”
“…”
Nagato silently regarded the president.
“I’ll be clear. The findings of our inquiry are this: we of the student council do not currently see any purpose in the existence of the literature club.”
“…”
Nagato was very still.
“Thus, I am informing you of the immediate and indefinite suspension of the literature club. You will promptly vacate your clubroom.”
“…”
Nagato remained silent, as though she didn’t care one way or another. But I knew better.
“Miss… Nagato, was it?” The president calmly returned Nagato’s tangible gaze. “There are non–club members in your room, and you’ve allowed them to stay there. And I wonder what you’ve done with the budget provided to the literature club this year. Would you suggest that your film counts as a literary activity? According to my investigation, that film was produced by and credited to the SOS Brigade, an unauthorized organization, and the literature club’s name appears nowhere on it. And the film itself was made without the permission of the school festival’s organization committee.”
It was painful to hear. Perhaps because Koizumi and Nagato never had any intention of stopping Haruhi, the responsibility of restraining her tyranny fell solely to me. And there was Asahina to think about as well—forced to play the powerless heroine.
“…”
Nagato’s profile did not suggest any assertiveness on her part, though that was just an amateur’s observation.
Perhaps taking her silence as a sign of acquiescence, the president maintained his pompous demeanor.
“The literature club’s activities will be temporarily suspended, and you will remain prohibited from entering the clubroom until such time as new members can be recruited next year. Are there any complaints? Feel free to voice them. We will listen, if nothing else.”
“…”
Nagato didn’t move a muscle, but Haruhi, Asahina, or Koizumi would’ve understood what was going on. And if that crowd could understand, then it would be obvious to me. That much I could gather.
“…”
Nagato, sunken into silence.
“…”
Nagato, quietly furious.
“Hmph. You have no objections, then?” The president curled the corner of his lips unpleasantly. “The literature club has but one member—you, Miss Nagato. You are effectively the club president. If you’ll consent, in order to preserve the clubroom, we can immediately begin the removal of all foreign objects from it. Such objects will either be disposed of or stored by us. Any personal items must be immediately removed—”
“Now wait just a second.” I interrupted the president’s monologue before Nagato’s silent rage reached critical levels. “You can’t just suddenly say stuff like that. It’s not fair to ignore us for so long, then drop this on us out of nowhere.”
“Oh, is that so?” The president regarded me with a cold glare, snickering. “I’ve had a look at the Student Organization Establishment Form you submitted. It’s like a bad joke. If we approved every organization whose goals were so absurd, there would be no end to it.”
The sneering, haughty upperclassman pushed his glasses up in an exaggeratedly dramatic fashion.
“You should learn better rhetoric. In fact, you should probably devote yourself more to academics in general. I can’t imagine your grades are so good that you can afford to be wasting so much time after school playing around with this ridiculous ‘club.’ ”
So that was it. The president’s real goal all along had been to destroy the SOS Brigade. All this nonsense about the literature club was just a pretense. At least Ultra Director Haruhi had managed to come up with some kind of an excuse to put Nagato in her movie’s script—this guy wasn’t even
bothering.
“And don’t tell me you’ll just join the literature club,” said the president, heading off an option that hadn’t even occurred to me yet. “Consider this: even if you all had been good-faith members of the literature club, you have not done a single thing that can be remotely recognized as literary activity. Just what have you been doing, I wonder?”
The president’s glasses glittered pointlessly. What was that, some kind of special effect?
“And yet we have been tolerant. The ‘SOS Brigade,’ as you call it, was established without permission and has simply acted as it pleased. Detonating fireworks on the school roof, threatening faculty, wandering around the campus in lascivious clothing, cooking stew in a building with a no-open-flames policy—these would be unacceptable for any club. Just who do you think you are, exactly?”
I could see that everything he was saying was totally accurate. That was all on us. We should’ve at least asked about these things first. I seriously doubted we would’ve been given permission, but we sure weren’t going to just roll over and do what they wanted now.
“This is dirty pool,” I said, inheriting Nagato’s fury. “If that’s your problem, you should’ve just gone straight to Haruhi. What’s the point of bringing in Nagato and threatening to dissolve the lit club?”
The president had anticipated this tack. “It should be obvious, shouldn’t it?” He was totally unperturbed, folding his arms and speaking as though he was an elite executive who’d just finished reading a proposal written by an inept subordinate. “The SOS Brigade does not exist as a student organization. Am I mistaken?”
Had it really come to this?
No matter how hard the student council or its president tried, they could not dissolve the SOS Brigade—because administratively speaking, no such brigade existed in the school. Trying to make something that didn’t exist disappear was like multiplying by zero; the answer was still always zero. Even if it didn’t go badly and wind up being analogous to multiplying a negative by a negative, you never knew what was going to happen if you poked Haruhi Suzumiya wrong. She might go flying off in any direction. Her behavior was totally unpredictable, like a hooked ball heading for a 7-10 split that jumps into a different lane for a 10-pin strike.
The Indignation of Haruhi Suzumiya Page 2