VOLUME 4Chapter 2: Part 3
As 3:00PM rolled around, the night festival started even though the sun hadn’t set yet.
There were some schools that held school festivals which weren’t open to general admission, but our school allowed anybody to come. Actually, there were even cases where the neighborhood a.s.sociation helped us out with some of the festival stands.
In fact, this night festival wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for relations.h.i.+ps like that.
I mean, usually, it would be pretty hard to get permission to raise such a ruckus at night.
We had declared that we were opening up a monster café, but in the end we were just a yakisoba (1) shop. Well, it’s not like you could do much more than that at a school festival.
We also served drinks. We had normal coffee, and then to make it seem a bit more monster-ey we had tomato juice. Also, there was this Hakkaisan Kongous.h.i.+n… wait, that was really expensive sake! Who the h.e.l.l brought sake to a school festival…?!
“Alright, sensei is going to stay here and be the first customer to attract more, so you all can just feel free to do whatever.”
Our homeroom teacher, “tasteless and odorless,” clapped his hands and issued his commands to the students. This good-for-nothing teacher… he bought that d.a.m.n sake for himself, didn’t he?
“Kufuu~~, sake is good. It makes me feel like my old self again.”
I turned away from my teacher as he downed his first cup, and joined a circle of other students to talk.
In the end, it was decided that my s.h.i.+ft in the shop would start at 5PM.
Should I maybe walk around the school until then?
I checked to see how much money I had in my wallet when Haruna’s gauntleted hand grabbed onto my blazer.
“Haruna-“
Ayumu. Let’s go.
I saw an energetic young girl in front of me. It seemed that she was now fully prepared to enjoy this school festival that had just started, this school festival she had been looking forward so much to.
She wasn’t emotionless at all, but her face was stuck in that almost annoying Haruna-like smile I was used to.
“Are you okay?”
More than okay! She gave me a thumbs up.
“What about Sera and Yuu? If we’re gonna go around we should do it togeth-“
Shut up! Hurry up and let’s go!
Haruna took my hand with a grumpy expression on her face.
And then…
“Ah-…”
A guy was making yakisoba for our homeroom teacher (the first customer), when his hand slipped and that metal spatula thing… that thing you saw a lot when people cooked on flat-iron grills… what was it called again? It wasn’t just a spatula… oh, right, a trowel. His trowel flew towards me.
But I had spent so long trying to think of the word that I hadn’t even bothered to dodge, and the corner of the metal part went right into my eye…
“A-Aikawa-kun!”
Hiramatsu ran towards me. Ahh, she sure was a nice girl.
On the other hand, Haruna was holding her mouth with her hands. She didn’t look like she was trying to m.u.f.fle a cry of alarm. Rather, she was trying not to laugh. Ah, right, if she laughed she would get a headache.
“Are… you okay…?”
To be honest, I really wasn’t. If I weren’t a zombie, I would have gotten blinded there.
Well then, the true question here was whether this was a pure accident.
Or maybe, it was because Haruna was so excited for this school festival that bad things would happen to the person closest to her right now (which was me).
Was something as ridiculous as that happening here?
Or maybe this was just pure bad luck?
“Aikawa-kun…”
“Don’t worry. It’s nothing… Haruna, let’s go.”
If Haruna really was to blame for that, then it would be best if we didn’t go around the school festival with too many people.
And I mean, it wasn’t a bad thought to walk around the school together with Haruna.
I’ll look for Yuu and Sera after I’m done hanging out with Haruna and then we can look around again together.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTES
(1) Grilled noodles.