Toradora! Vol. 2

by Yuyuko Takemiya

  She had arrived. Ami-chan was here.

  “This Ami-chan, beaten and ruined by that pervert! Agh! Damn it, what the hell?! It really makes me angry..it really makes Ami-chan…so…angry…! Argh!”

  “K-Kawashima…hey, hold up a second…”

  “Takasu-kun, you said it, right? Stop with the mask… you just said that to me, right? Well, I get it. I’ll stop. Ami-chan’s done. I’ll stop, I’ll stop, I’ll stop, I—will—stoooop! I’ll live with my terrible personality on my face, I’ll live on!”

  “Wai- that’s…not what I…”

  “SHUT UP! That shrimp, Aisaka Taiga, wasn’t losing to that guy! So Ami-chan won’t let him just keep doing what he wants, either! And I have a guy with me! I’m gonna show that stalker! Don’t underestimate the daughter of an actress!”

  There beside Ryuuji (who was at a loss for words), Ami suddenly made a one eighty. He realized too late that she’d turned on her heel.

  “HYYYYAAAAAA!!”

  She dashed out fiercely with all her strength, aiming at the man behind them. She swung around her bag, pretty features distorted into those of an ogre.

  “Hah?! Huuh?!”

  It wasn’t unreasonable for the man to run away. The pursuer became the pursued in an instant role reversal.

  “GET BACK HERE YOU SCUMBAAAAAG!”

  The man ran away desperately, Ami just behind, spitting out her scorn.

  Of course, Ryuuji couldn’t just stand by and watch. “Don’t be stupid! Stop it! Calm down! Even though I look like this, I can’t stand fights!”

  But Ryuuji’s words seemed to fall on deaf ears. He saw the man run into the park.

  “THERE!”

  With an amazing leap like a fawn, Ami jumped over the shrubs. She cut him off with the short cut, and readied her finishing blow.

  “DAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!”

  She threw her bag at him. The rectangular bag tumbled and flew low through the air.

  “GAH!”

  It hit the running man’s feet. As the things he carried flew from his arms, he dove face-first into the sand.

  Without hesitation, Ami picked up the man’s fallen phone.

  “…Haah….haah…haah…!”

  With the face of an ogre, she was still out of breath, speechless.

  Crack crack crack!

  …She broke it right in half.

  “H-horri…”

  She tossed the two pieces of wreckage down before the man, who was backing away in terror. But she still wasn’t done.

  “Haah… you’ve got another one… Ami-chan saw it… take it out… take out the camera…NOW! Hurry up and fork it over!”

  “…I-It’s there…”

  The man shakily pointed at the ejected contents of his bag. A state-of-the-art model camera indeed was laying there. Ami bent down and took it into her hand. For a while, she turned it around, pressing buttons. She fiddled with it for a bit, like she was trying to figure out how to delete the data.

  “S-stop! You’ll break it!”

  “…Haah…haah…”

  The man didn’t quite grasp the position he was in. And his voice seemed to have touched on Ami’s nerves. Still breathing roughly, she took the strap of the camera in her hand.

  “HI-YAH!”

  …And after twirling it around for a while, she used its centrifugal force to smash it against a concrete bench.

  “WAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!” The man was shrieking. As was maybe expected from a state-of-the-art camera, its casing withstood one or two attacks (though who knew about the inside).

  “TAKE THAT! TAKE! THAT! TAKE THAT!

  …TAAAAKE THAAAAAT!”

  After suffering repeated atrocities, the camera at long last cracked with a satisfying crunch. Pieces that never should have disconnected came falling down. But Ami kept right on hitting it against the bench.

  “DAH! DAAAH! DAAAAAHHH! Break…BREAK…! Into pieces…BREAAAK!”

  …Ami must have built up a lot of stress. She kept hitting it again and again, with the strap still in her hand, until the camera no longer looked like a camera. The man, half-buried in sand, was already soundlessly crying. Seeing that picture of hell before him, Ryuuji couldn’t find words to address either of them.

  “Uhh, wha, my camera…”

  “There…I wonder what should I break next? Ami-chan’s kind of having fun now. Oh?”

  Ami ground the wreckage of the dispersed and broken digital camera under her heel. She cruelly twisted her lips into a smile.

  “Hey, can Ami-chan break some more? Can Ami-chan break eeeeverything? Are you even listening? Answer me! Should I break you in the same way?”

  “P-please forgive me!”

  The man prostrated himself in the sand, and with his hands shaking, firmly faced Ami.

  “Can you promise me that you won’t follow me around anymore?”

  “I don’t need to swear, I’ve already had way more than enough!” the man, who had become strangely childlike, cried pathetically. “Now that you’ve shown me that demonic face, I won’t anymore! Ami-chan isn’t my angel anymore! You’re a liar—you’re really an ogre! You’re pitch-black! I don’t want to be involved with a fraud like you anymore! The cute angel Ami-chan never actually existed! ‘Ami-chan’—what a joke! Come to think of it, why are you with that scary delinquent?! I just noticed him!”

  “H-how am I supposed to be the delinquent here…?”

  It seemed that rather than his shattered camera, his shattered dreams were what the man was really struggling with. There was no sign he was planning a counterattack. He just raised his voice and kept on shamefully crying. Ami was lucky he wasn’t a “real” danger who would do something like wave around a knife.

  At last, the man spoke his last words:

  “You’ve got a terrible personality!”

  “So what?” Ami shot back coldly. As though she had just remembered it, she pulled a hand mirror out of her uniform pocket. Then she looked at her reflection, smiled, and made a cutesy pose.

  “Ami-chan is this cute. ♥ Her personality doesn’t matter. ♥”

  ***

  Ami’s show of courage only endured until they left the park and turned the first corner.

  “Here, sit! Move those newspapers!”

  “Uwaah… wah…”

  Ryuuji led Ami, practically carrying her, and tried to sit her down on cushions, but…

  “I-I can’t let go.” Ami looked up at Ryuuji, tears streaming from her eyes. The fingers she used to grab onto Ryuuji’s arms were shaking, frozen so stiff that she couldn’t peel them off by herself.

  “Just relax. Take all the time you need.”

  The setting sun’s rays pierced into the Takasus’ two-bedroom home. Sitting on the burned tatami mats, Ami closed her eyes and desperately tried to regain control of her breath.

  Ami had been fine while laying into the stalker…but as she had lumbered down the sidewalk and turned the corner, she’d suddenly fallen to her knees. “I-I was so scared!”

  She’d shuddered all over. Tears had dripped from her eyes. Her whole body had been tensed up with nerves, and Ryuuji had had to halfway carry her. She was in no state to walk or stand alone. Even her dry lips had been shaking—she certainly couldn’t go on by herself.

  The Takasus’ house wasn’t that far if you went around the park. So, somehow, he’d managed to lend her his shoulder and bring her in.

  “…Where the heck is Yasuko when you need her?”

  Ryuuji sat Ami down on the cushion and went into the kitchen. He looked around his own silent home, troubled. He couldn’t believe that no one was there. If he’d known, he would have called a taxi to take Ami back to her own house. Bringing a crying girl home to an empty house wasn’t something Ryuuji could handle. Even a girl who wasn’t crying was out of the question. As for Taiga? That was just one big exception.

  At any rate, in order to calm Ami down, he brought over milk he’d heated up on the stove and sweetened with honey.

  “Th-
thank you…”

  “If you want more, you can have as much as you want. If you don’t like sweet things, I have tea or coffee… or actually just coffee, I guess.”

  “…No, this is fine…” Ami took a sip and finally let out one long breath. “It’s good. Hey, could you put in more sugar?”

  “It’s honey, is that okay?”

  Ami nodded, and he carefully dripped some honey into her cup. After he mixed it up with a spoon, Ami’s lips finally lit up with a pale smile. “…How unexpected. Takasu-kun, do you drink stuff like this?”

  “No, not so much. Taiga’s the one who likes it that way.” After he accidentally blurted that out, Ryuuji glanced up at Ami and noticed her looking up at him.

  “…Taiga. Takasu-kun, you always call Aisaka ‘Taiga,’ right?”

  “It’d be weirder to hide it, so I’ll tell you.” It’s not really an excuse, because there isn’t a reason to need an excuse in the first place—that was his preface. “We live pretty close by, and she lives alone, and I just live with my mom, but that’s mostly like living alone so… well, somehow or another… you could say I’m helping her with chores, but we started eating together, kind of like siblings…”

  “…Hmm. So that’s how it is.”

  He wasn’t sure if she accepted his explanation or not, but Ami didn’t say anything more about it.

  “This really is good. I think I’ll try my own version at home.” She held the cup in both hands, the hot milk now flavored with a considerable amount of honey. She kept on drinking, lapping it up.

  “How are you feeling?”

  At his inquiring voice, Ami raised just her eyes. With the cup still at her mouth, she smiled, as though embarrassed. Then she suddenly turned her face to the side. “Ahhh, seriously…it’s just humiliating! And after I committed so hard to going after him, too! I really thought I had what it takes, but…in the end, you had to put up with seeing me turn into a terrified, shaking mess.”

  “That just comes with the territory. Because as soon as you started running, I was terrified, too. You were seriously lucky that guy didn’t get violent.”

  “…I’m really sorry.” Ami finally turned back and put the empty cup on the table. Maybe it was because of the setting sun shining on her cheeks, but she was faintly dyed in pale orange. Her brown eyes looked like transparent amber.

  “I can’t believe it myself… if my mom finds out, she’d kill me for doing something as dangerous as that. Maybe it’s Aisaka Taiga’s influence? Yesterday, I saw her chasing away that stalker guy so easily at the riverbank, and then, I suddenly got embarrassed that I was scared. And I guess you could say… I kind of felt…like she’d shown me up, somehow…”

  “…Taiga is kind of a special case. I’m not sure you want to use her as a benchmark.”

  “The Palmtop Tiger, right? I heard it from Maya-chan and everyone. Hah, it fits her too well, that nickname. Since crossing paths with the Palmtop Tiger, maybe I’ve grown a little braver, myself.”

  “…Kawashima, you were a strong girl from the start.”

  “A strong girl? Aha, I’m just messed up. I’m saying this about myself, but Ami-chan is a really messed up girl, and inside her belly is darkness. I’m a mean girl—you know that now, don’t you? Maybe since yesterday… or maybe even before that. There’s no point to putting on my act again at this point.”

  Ami shrugged and laughed. It wasn’t her normal mask. Somewhere in her big eyes lurked the glimmer of an awakened arrogance. Her mouth was warped with a slight hint of what you might call cruelty. There was no trace of an angel’s purity there. In its place, what her face revealed was her slyness and mercilessness, a real spite—the arrogance of a person who didn’t think of others as people. But somehow…it was still beautiful.

  But at the same time, something about that face made Ryuuji feel awfully judgmental…

  “Oh. I forgot about the other two. Who both…fell into gutters…somehow.”

  “If she’s with Yuusaku, she’s fine,” said Ami—though Taiga being with Yuusaku was probably exactly what was dangerous. Her expression faded after she spoke, remembering the two. Her smiling face slowly tensed up, and she quietly held her breath. She looked as though she were trying to endure a faint pain. “That girl has it good.”

  “That girl… you mean Taiga?”

  Without answering, Ami looked down. “…For example, like with that stalker earlier…it’s easy to get people like that to like you. If you just put a little effort into being cute in pictures or on TV, people can’t help but like you. …See, because Ami-chan is super cute!”

  She said those last words as though they were a joke, but Ryuuji didn’t feel like laughing. When Ami dropped those words, he looked at her hard-set profile—and he didn’t see anything to laugh about.

  “…It’s more or less just as easy to get people to hate you. If I told everyone that this isn’t the real Ami-chan, that this isn’t what I’m actually like… if I showed them the real Ami, everyone would just hate me.”

  Ryuuji averted his gaze in spite of himself. Ami’s self-effacing expression was so pitiful he couldn’t look—though if he told her that, she would definitely be hurt even more. “You shouldn’t say something like that.”

  “But it’s true. The guy just now was just like that, right? What’s difficult is getting someone to like the real me. That’s it right there. That’s why that girl… that’s why I’m jealous of Aisaka Taiga. That girl doesn’t even feel like she needs to keep up appearances. But you don’t hate her at all, not even a bit. That’s a little… no, that’s extremely frustrating. And I tried to steal you away from her just because I wanted to see that girl frustrated…and I couldn’t get so much as a grip on you. That’s a first. ‘Why?’ I thought. ‘Ami-chan is definitely cuter, so why? How can I fail to be number one? Isn’t this unbelievable? Isn’t this unforgivable? Are she and I so different?’ …I really am jealous of that girl, aren’t I?”

  Ryuuji quietly breathed in.

  Ami was jealous of Taiga. Taiga was so jealous of Ami that she holed up to cry by herself. They each wanted the things that the other had. In the end, they were just both the way they were, so things were bound not to go well. Their feelings naturally clashed, and unlike Taiga and Minori, they didn’t have the rapport they needed to stick close together. That was just the way it was—and there was definitely nothing anybody could do to change it.

  Although Ami had said Taiga didn’t feel the need to put up appearances, there was one thing he wanted to say, for Taiga’s sake. He wanted to say it for the part of Taiga that desperately put up appearances in ways no one except Ryuuji could see. “Kawashima, you’ve got Kitamura though.”

  “Yuusaku?”

  “That guy, he really worries about you, thinks about you, and takes care of you. He really understands the real you. He even got stuck in a gutter for you.”

  “You’re right. But…Yuusaku is no good.” A tendril of her hair slipped and fell over her face. At that moment, Ami’s expression was hidden from Ryuuji. “Because Yuusaku has already chosen the one and only girl he likes.”

  “…Huh?”

  Ryuuji’s brain stalled.

  He immediately thought of the person Kitamura had confessed to right after enrollment—Taiga. But Kitamura had plainly told Taiga he just wanted to be friends. Regardless of whether Taiga accepted that, he didn’t behave like she was the girl he liked. At least, he wasn’t acting like that at the present. But who was it? If it was new, then Minori? Or maybe Maya? Or maybe…

  “What about you, Takasu-kun…?”

  Ryuuji’s heart jumped.

  With her body arched like a cat’s, Ami’s face drew near. She didn’t make so much as a sound. He could smell the milk on her breath. Not daring to look at Ami’s face, Ryuuji just shuffled backwards on his butt—but his back immediately hit the wall.

  Ami didn’t come any closer.

  She didn’t come any closer, but he felt like he was being drawn into the bottom o
f those damp, amber eyes…

  “…Takasu-kun, if I showed you the real me…what would you do?”

  “Wh-what would I?”

  “…Would you like me?”

  The world was robbed of sound.

  Ryuuji’s feet hit the legs of the table. In the silence, the cup rolled onto the tatami.

  They were five centimeters from their noses touching.

  Right at the last moment—right before it was too late to play it off as a joke—Ami’s lips suddenly lifted up into a smirk.

  “…Just kidding! Did I get your heart racing?”

  And it was a joke, but… the only ones who would see it as a joke were the two of them.

  “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, oh dearie me…”

  Thump. Thump. At the sound of plastic bags being dropped onto the tatami, Ryuuji pretty much jumped.

  Ami reflexively turned. She was straddling the lower half of Ryuuji’s body.

  Ryuuji reflexively turned. He was nonchalantly supporting her waist.

  “…Oopsie! I…I didn’t do this on purpose, promise! Umm… I went shopping and I found Kitamura-kun and Taiga-chan stuck in the storm gutters, and then… uhhmm… ahhh, this is awkwarrrrd!”

  Yasuko brought both her hands to her bare face and wriggled around in a pose reminiscent of Munch’s “The Scream.”

  Behind her, Kitamura’s whole body was covered in mud. He looked to be in a terrible state. He tried to push his bent glasses up his nose, using a wooden sword as a cane in his other hand.

  And then there was Taiga, who also was covered all over in mud. “No way…” Taiga, who was being carried on Kitamura’s back. At the sight of Ryuuji and Ami, she was struck dumb—both eyes wide open.

  In an obscure corner of the room, wholly unnoticed, Inko-chan shed fluffy feathers from her whole body. As it turned out, she’d seen everything.

  Side Story:

  The Legend of the Lucky Palmtop Tiger

  He was on the third floor of the old school building.

  Even though it was after classes had ended, there was no sign of any students in that dim hallway. Under broken, fluorescent lighting, Tomiie Kouta walked with a gloomy expression illuminated by the lights’ cheerless, flickering buzz.