Toradora! Vol. 2

by Yuyuko Takemiya

  A noise exploded right in front of him. “Ack! Cough! Cough, cough, cough!”

  “K-Kushieda-senpai, are you okay? …Huuuh?!”

  …GOGH! As though she were calling out the great painter’s name, the self-styled hag Kushieda mussed up her hair, slipped down, and collapsed to one knee.

  “Um, this is a performance, right? You’re joking, right?”

  “This hag…is done for. You can ask…about the rest…from the one named…Takasu…”

  And then in the hallway during their break, she pretended to fall over flat as though she were dead. Her skirt also flipped up, exposing her white underwear and butt for the whole world to see, but she didn’t make any signs that she was in a rush to fix it. Normally this would be incredibly lucky, enough to give him a nosebleed, but… What should I do? I’ve gotten mixed up with someone weird, and not just a little weird, either…

  “…Um…who’s Takasu?”

  The passing classmates just stepped over Kushieda’s body. Finally one girl said, “Hey, watch your underwear. Underwear!” and fixed the flipped-up skirt. But even then, Kushieda remained collapsed on the ground as she aimed a finger towards one corner of the classroom. Over there, several second-year boys were having fun chatting.

  Guh. Kouta swallowed his breath. Within that group, one person had noticed him and turned around.

  “…Kushieda, what are you doing?”

  Shall I beat you to a pulp?

  The guy’s voice held that kind of tone. That sharp gaze was no amateur’s. His mean-looking features were twisted in irritation. He fidgeted, menacing everyone in his vicinity with the incredibly dangerous aura that exuded from his whole body. Why was there such a transcendent delinquent in this tiny high school?

  Then it came to him.

  This delinquent was definitely Takasu.

  Kouta’s fortunes always flowed in the least desirable direction, so that definitely had to be Takasu. I think I’m good, I’ll go back to my class. Kouta was quick in coming to that appropriate conclusion, but…

  “Takasu-kun…this young’un seems to have business with ya…”

  “Wha?!”

  Just a moment too soon, Kushieda, who should have been dead, politely called Takasu over.

  The one who replied “Whaaaat?” was, unsurprisingly, that delinquent boy. His eyes glinted, and his chair screeched as he stood. He wasn’t that large, but the power emanating from his body as he stood up was terrible enough that the air behind him seemed to warp.

  Licking his dry lips to moisten them, Takasu approached. At full speed, on long strides, he stepped, stepped, stepped over.

  “Eeek!” Reflexively, Kouta turned on his heels. He jumped to change direction and tried to make a dash for it, when…

  “Ah!”

  “…Tsk!”

  He felt a hard impact against his chest. He had run into someone. Tottering, he turned around. “I’m sorry!”

  “…Oww…”

  …Flustered, he lowered his head and tried to start running away, but it seemed the crash was a bigger deal than he’d initially thought. In a corner of the hallway, a petite girl was crouched down. It seemed Kouta had sent her flying with the force of the collision, sending her tumbling to the ground. Surprised, he tried going over to her.

  “Ah!”

  …Squish. He felt something below his foot—probably what that girl had been holding. It was a sandwich, its toppings strewn through the hallway. He’d stepped on just one part of it. But Takasu was drawing closer, and the girl was still crouching. He didn’t have time to spare for bread. At any rate, he could at least help the girl. He extended his arm. “Are you ok…?”

  His words were stolen from him.

  Her small body was enveloped by her long, doll-like hair. She quietly brought up her face and turned her gaze to Kouta.

  Her ivory profile looked almost transparent.

  Her wondrous eyes glittered as though reflecting the color of the cosmos itself.

  Her small, rosebud lips were open.

  Through a gap in her disheveled hair, he caught a glance of an intensely bewitching face. For a moment, he nearly even forgot to breathe.

  “…Wh…whoa.”

  It struck him with all the force of a lightning bolt to the head. Kouta instantly forgot whatever destiny might soon befall him. Instead he was drawn into those entrancing eyes. Going into those eyes was a dangerous act, like jumping naked into a starlit sky—so captivated was he that he lost all track of his surroundings. He didn’t know anything—he didn’t know why the nearby second-year students had frozen, or why they had collectively swallowed their breaths.

  He only knew about the beauty before his eyes.

  “Run!”

  “…Huh?!”

  It was Takasu.

  At some point, the delinquent Takasu had approached and jumped in front of him. He was blocking the girl with his body, as though to hide her away. He had the most terrifying look in the world on his face…

  “Hurry! If you value your life, you need to go now!”

  “…Huh?”

  Takasu was shouting. He shooed Kouta away with a move of one hand. “Don’t just stand there! Go!”

  “Y-yes sir!”

  It was undoubtedly a threat. Still not quite understanding what was happening, Kouta couldn’t resist Takasu’s command. He could only run, leaving the girl behind.

  ***

  Basically, the girl had been taken captive.

  Looking back on how things had unfolded, Kouta came to that conclusion. She had been forcibly caged like a bird by that delinquent Takasu. Did his reign of terror know no bounds? He didn’t know about the details, but it was surely something like that.

  “…I wish I could help her.”

  Haaah… He loosed a heartfelt sigh, there in the post-school-day student council room.

  Two people’s gazes turned sideways to watch Kouta, not too quick, not too slow. It was like they stared straight through him.

  “As expected from Kouta.” The one who muttered that with such strange admiration was Sumire.

  Beside her, arms folded, was Kitamura. He chimed in, too. “You seem to naturally head toward misfortune. You rush towards it like it’s drawing you in… maybe sometimes it’s in a slightly different direction from what we expect, but it’s like you’re always running blindly into bad luck.”

  Yes, yes. The other members agreed, too. A strange kind of solidarity was born in the cramped room.

  “…Well, please, go right ahead. You can say whatever’s on your mind about me.” Being excluded from the conversation by his upperclassmen, Kouta turned to show them the back of his head.

  To put it bluntly, Kouta wasn’t afraid of bad luck at that moment. On the contrary, Kouta would put himself in the way of any misfortune if he could help that beautiful, second-year girl. He would suffer any bad luck, he thought, if it was for her—in short, he was smitten.

  Even now, he deeply regretted having left the girl in that place. He was willing to face the misfortune of putting himself on that delinquent’s radar—no, he was willing to have a full on confrontation with him. If he could endure a little pain to achieve the best-case scenario, his true happy ending would be waiting for him, after all.

  “President, I’ll do it.” Kouta abruptly lifted his face and looked firmly into Sumire’s apricot eyes. Sumire was brought to silence for a moment, but after a while, she slowly shook her head.

  “Don’t. Don’t get eager. Don’t do anything unnecessary. I just felt a chill run through me… now that I have a thorough understanding of your unlucky predisposition, I’m starting to think you should limit your mobility to a restricted area.”

  “No! I’m going to do it. I’ll definitely follow through. I’ll go and save that poor prisoner. And then, I’ll touch the Palmtop Tiger and be blessed! We’ll touch it together, so that we can be blessed together… after all, you were the one who told me to do this in the first place, president.”

  “…
Well, I don’t remember saying a single word telling you to save that poor soul.”

  But Kouta was lost in a daydream, too far gone to listen to anyone else. He was recalling that white profile. Those misty, starry eyes. The expression that looked as though it were spun out of delicate glass. Like a fairy, she had a soft outline. There wasn’t anyone else like her in the whole world.

  “Umm. Kouta, you know, I’d like you to listen for a sec.”

  “Please leave it be.”

  He didn’t even turn away from Kitamura’s voice as it tried to break his warm fantasy. Kouta was immersed—he was a resident of the world of dreams. His mind was wrapped vividly in the vision of him, that person, and the Palmtop Tiger, the fortunate trinity.

  “Ahh, it’s fine. It’s fine, Kitamura, please just leave it be. It’s come to this, so please let it go wherever it leads.”

  Even Sumire’s blunt voice didn’t reach Kouta’s ears.

  “Kouta said he wants us to leave it alone, and he’s at the point where he’s refused to listen to our advice, too. Let’s just let him do the best he can.”

  “…Are you sure? Well…I guess it’ll be fine.”

  ***

  Th-there!

  Kouta resisted the urge to exclaim out loud. For a little while now, he had been passing by the front of second-year class C in order to avoid standing out. He’d done it several times now, coming from both sides of the hallway. Casually peeking in through the window, he finally found the person he was looking for. He was lucky he hadn’t been caught by Kushieda or Takasu.

  He hid himself along the corner of the wall and ruminated over his fleeting glance at her. Even though it was break time, she was alone in her seat and not talking to anyone. Her small shoulders shook from the loneliness, like a fragrant rose. She doesn’t have friends, either… just like me, Kouta thought for a moment, but then immediately shook his head.

  It was definitely that jealous Takasu—he must have forbidden her from letting anyone get too close. He’d threatened her; there was no mistaking it. That Takasu. Just how small could his heart be?

  “…Just hold out a little longer. I’ll get the Palmtop Tiger soon and come for you,” he muttered in a small voice. Once again, trying to act as casually as possible, he started walking down the hallway. He put his hands in his pockets and grasped the present he had gotten for her in the palm of his hand. He had just bought it—a still-hot can of coffee.

  It would have been best if he could give it to her by hand, but they didn’t have that kind of relationship yet. So, for now, it would be from an anonymous benefactor.

  “…There!”

  Go! He released the hot can of coffee with miraculous skill from his spot near the window, aiming at his beloved girl. The scene playing out in his head was: “Here, drink it!” “Huh?” Shoot! Tumble tumble tumble…bop! “It… it’s warm…” and then she’d squeeze the can between her hands… Just like in his vision, the can traced a pretty line as it tumbled through the air directly toward her head. After he watched it go that far, he dashed away.

  WHAM, came a sound from behind Kouta, but he was in a delirium as he ran. He didn’t even notice, let alone stop. Even Kouta himself didn’t believe he could have made such a brazen move. He couldn’t believe someone shy like him could do something so pompous that it might as well have been from a TV drama. Ahhh, he sighed. Now that he knew this love, he was becoming more and more of a man. He held his flushing cheeks in his hands, smiling slightly as he ran away.

  The hot can of coffee had a deep meaning to Kouta. Sometime I’ll give you something warmer… something even more heartwarming as a present, okay? That was right. In other words, what he would give her was daily bliss. He meant to release her from Takasu.

  With things going like this, the day when he and his rescued damsel would touch the Palmtop Tiger wasn’t far. Hand in hand, with their cheeks touching, they would take the image of the palm-top-sized tiger—or whatever it was—and would caress it together. “Let’s be blessed together ♥” he would say. “Yeah ♥,” she would say back.

  “…I can’t believe it. I’m finally going to have some luck coming my way.”

  Kouta shivered in delight.

  ***

  “Tsk.”

  He was soon shivering for an entirely different reason. The two oscillations canceled each other out then and there, after school. He had been passing time alone in the student council room like always, and when he finally thought of going home, he saw something in front of the shoe racks.

  Kouta found a methodically folded loose-leaf sheet of paper nestled in his shoe cubby. It seemed to be addressed to him. Wondering what it might be for, he opened it. His heart suddenly froze.

  On the note, written in scrawled letters, was just one phrase.

  Careful on your way home tonight.

  —Takasu, second year-C

  Someone spoke. “Oh?”

  “Wah!”

  Kouta jumped at the voice, but instead of standing, he backed into the shoe racks, producing a loud racket.

  “Wh-what is it?! Sh-shouldn’t you be at your club?!”

  “I have today off.”

  Despite Kouta’s rude tone, Kitamura’s gentle smile was unwavering. He glanced at the paper in Kouta’s hand. “Did you get a warning from Takasu? He sure goes out of his way,” he muttered, as though it were a joke.

  “It’s not the time for that! Basically, th-this is…this is bad, right?”

  “It basically says something like be careful going home tonight, right? Takasu’s a kind guy, giving a warning like this to an underclassman he doesn’t even know.”

  Kouta didn’t even have the strength to respond to Kitamura’s incredible optimism. Careful on your way home at night was pretty much a stock threat from the mafia, wasn’t it? If you get up to anything strange, it won’t be tolerated, be prepared, was what it meant.

  “Yeah…”

  Chills ran down his spine. Although he had been prepared to fight Takasu for her, now that it came to this, he remembered those glinting, dangerous eyes, and couldn’t stop his whole body from shaking.

  For a guy with crazy eyes like that, a surprise attack on an innocent underclassman would be as easy as breathing. He would definitely brandish a polished wooden sword or something like that and wave it around, aiming to take Kouta’s life.

  “Well then, see ya tomorrow.”

  Leaving Kouta scared and alone, Kitamura heartlessly went ahead out of the school building. Reflexively, Kouta tried to stop Kitamura. “…Wait!”

  He clenched his extended hand into a fist.

  In his heart was the girl’s fragile profile. He had decided to save her from her own misfortune, hadn’t he? Then he couldn’t get scared by every little thing, especially not by something as small as Takasu’s threat. He couldn’t ask Kitamura for help.

  He would school himself to extreme patience. He’d toughen up. Kouta crumpled up the paper after a single breath, and then, without taking a good look at his surroundings, tossed it toward where the waste basket should have been.

  “Wahaha, it’s all good! I just threw it away!”

  “You seem to be having fun.”

  He turned towards the bitter voice. A little ways away, he saw Sumire.

  “President, what are you doing?”

  “I got an earful of your talk just now.”

  On top of her head was a single piece of crumpled paper, sitting in place because of her amazing balance. Sumire frowned as she furrowed her brow.

  “If this were a pebble or something else, my temple would have gone up in a fountain of blood and I’d have suffered an unsightly death.”

  “Ahh… and if it were a plate, you would’ve turned into a kappa.”

  After vaguely nodding, Kouta finally grasped the situation. The thing on top of Sumire’s head is the trash I just tried to throw away.

  “…President, you’re pretty unlucky, yourself. Normally, a paper has no business staying put like that.”
>
  I’m very sorry. He went over to Sumire, took the paper off her head, held it up, and this time tried to get it into the waste bin. But suddenly he burst into laughter.

  “Hahaha, what you looked like a second ago… ahaha, it was like this!”

  He’d won out against Takasu’s threat. That feeling manifested in Kouta as a kind of strange elation. He plopped the paper onto his head and turned himself back towards Sumire. It was a pretty boneheaded reproduction, but he still couldn’t stop laughing.

  Sumire’s expression didn’t change. She just watched Kouta the whole time.

  He had just enough self-awareness to think Ah, this isn’t good, but then he kept right on going. “You’re eighteen, hahahaha, but you had trash on your head!”

  The fit of laughter made his body shake so much that the trash began to fall, grazing the tip of his nose on its way down, but he couldn’t stop.

  “Hahahahaha, ahahaha, haha…haaa!”

  He finally took a breath. The fit had gone on for a full minute. He bent and picked up the trash and again threw it into the waste basket. Then, he wiped the sweat that had formed on his brow from having laughed too hard.

  “Well, then, see you.” He turned his back to Sumire and tried to start walking home.

  “Kouta.”

  The one who firmly grabbed his shoulder was Sumire.

  “What is it?”

  A grin. The smiling, living Japanese doll dropped a key into Kouta’s hand.

  “This is the key to the student council room. Just now, I was on my way to return it to the vice-principal’s office, but I forgot a very important matter. There’s a locker, right? Inside it are nearly one hundred historical logs of student council activities. We need to put a printed sticker on each one to label those activities by fiscal year. We need stickers on the front cover, stickers on the back cover, and we need to organize them to be easy to see. Today. I leave this up to you, General-Affairs-kun.”

  “…What? Right now? All by myself?”

  “That’s right. I’ll check it tomorrow morning, and if they’re not all done… You understand, right? Well then, get to work.”

  “But that’s impossible.”