A Headphone Actor Read online

  Except there was nothing “regular” about him right now.

  —No matter which way you sliced it…he had nothing on apart from his boxers.

  “W…wha…?!”

  I was rendered speechless at this otherworldly turn of affairs so early in the morning. I tried to focus my eyes on something else, but he briskly walked straight toward me, as near-naked as before.

  “Hey, uh, I can explain this…Earlier, over on the school grounds, there was this cat, right? And it kinda made a beeline for me, so I figured I’d pet it, but…like, it kept trying to dodge me and stuff, right? So then I lost my balance and fell into the fountain, so—”

  “That’s fine, that’s fine!! I don’t care why, okay?! Just…just put some clothes on!!”

  My fervent shouting stopped Haruka in his tracks as he attempted to tell the tale behind his nudist habits, an “oh, woe is me” expression on his face. He tilted his head quizzically at me.

  “Aw, come on. They aren’t even dry yet. You see?”

  He pointed at the school uniform drying in front of the heater, gesturing as if I was the one at fault here. He couldn’t have been more than fifty centimeters away from me.

  I reared back, unable to cope with this bizarre state of affairs, and tried my best to speak up for myself as my body banged against the sliding door I just closed.

  “Ah…okay, okay! All right! It doesn’t matter if it’s wet or not! Just put that stuff on! I’ll go find a jersey for you, so just put on everything else!!”

  “Really? Well, okaaay…but, uhmm…hang on, where’s my shirt? Shirt, shirt…”

  “You’re stepping on it, Haruka! Look down!…Ugh, just give it to me!”

  With all the speed of an elderly tortoise, Haruka began to clothe himself, apparently incapable of grasping the full import behind this “half-nude in front of a girl” situation.

  But I was in no shape to stand there and take it all in.

  Grabbing the shirt Haruka picked up, I closed my eyes, trying to avoid the sight of him as I all but forced him to put it on.

  “Whoa! Hey, I’m fine, I can put it on myself! Hey, that’s the wrong sleeve…!”

  “Aghh! Quit moving around! Don’t point yourself this way!!”

  No matter how you looked at it, this was not how normal people interacted with each other. Why do I have to force my only classmate to put his clothes back on, in school, first thing in the morning?

  If this guy hadn’t been the only other person in my class, I’d have no regrets turning him over to the police.

  But if someone happened to see us right now, it’d be an utter disaster.

  Who knows what kind of crazy shoujo manga-style misunderstandings this might lead to…? As I pondered over this, the absolute worst situation I envisioned came to life.

  “Hey-yo! Time to get started with homeroom…uh?”

  The leisurely voice chimed in as the door suddenly rattled open. On the other side stood our proctor, Kenjirou Tateyama, the teacher in charge of science classes at this school.

  Tateyama’s dumbfounded face likely provided a nice accompaniment to mine as his attendance record fell down to the floor.

  “Oh…uh…So, Mr. Tateyama, this isn’t what it…”

  “Oh, mornin’, Mr. Tateyama!”

  In stark contrast to the way I was frozen in place, the nearly bare Haruka greeted our proctor with a broad smile.

  From an impartial perspective, I imagine there was only one interpretation for this. Here was this meek, naive male student, and here was this evil-looking girl attempting to rip all the clothes off him.

  I imagine the moment lasted for only an instant, but the silence that followed felt like an eternity to me. Mr. Tateyama, apparently coming to some sort of internal conclusion in his mind, said, “Oh…sorry if I, uh, intruded…” and attempted to make his way back to the hallway.

  “Ahhhhh!! No! No, teacher! He was…he was going around without any clothes on, so I-I-I was just trying to help him get dressed!!”

  Mr. Tateyama, his face conflicted as he tried to leave the classroom, suddenly stopped.

  “Huh? Oh. Uh…okay, I get it. I just thought, you know, you guys couldn’t restrain yourselves any longer or something…”

  With a visible sigh of relief, our teacher flashed a smile at us as he picked the attendance ledger up off the floor.

  “Could you stop acting like we’re trying to go at each other all the time like that, sir? I mean, if we were, that’d be really bad news, wouldn’t it?! You were trying to run away from us right now!”

  “Yeahhh, well, you know, if something freaky’s going on, it’s always easiest if you pretend you were oblivious to it, right? You know what I mean…I just want you guys to grow and mature in as free an environment as I can give you, so…”

  “Ugh, come on! That’s totally awful, Mr. Tateyama! Can you at least help me get some clothes on this freak? I’m gonna call the administrator!”

  Mr. Tateyama scratched his head in distracted reluctance, but the moment I mentioned the administrator, he whispered, “Okay,” and with suddenly lightning-fast reflexes, he began to clothe Haruka.

  As far as grown-ups go, you couldn’t ask for much worse of a role model.

  For a fleeting moment, I reflected about how, in his own way, Mr. Tateyama has given me a master class in what to avoid becoming when I’m older.

  “Ergh…This is still all wet and clammy, sir…”

  Haruka, once again decent thanks to Mr. Tateyama’s nimble fingers, sounded utterly disgusted as he settled into his seat.

  I sat down as well, but the moment my rear end touched the chair, I felt a sudden influx of extreme fatigue.

  Who knows how many hit points I’ve already had to expend thanks to this idiot next to me?

  Somehow I doubted I’d be smiling much for the rest of the day…

  The teacher’s desk was directly across from and slightly above the two student stations, neatly arranged next to each other. Mr. Tateyama settled into the high-backed folding chair behind his desk as he opened his attendance record.

  “All right, Haruka, all right. I’ll go find you a jersey later on…Uh, so anyway, good morning. Guess you’re both in attendance, so…check, and check. Gotta say, I’m glad you guys haven’t gotten bored of showing up here every day.”

  “That’s…not really something a teacher should be saying, sir.”

  With a heavy thud, Mr. Tateyama placed his head on the desk. “Well, I’m the teacher, aren’t I?” he whimpered. “So there you go, okay?”

  There must be some kind of chronic staff shortage if someone like this guy is allowed to be with students.

  It honestly gives me pause when I think about the future of this country.

  “Oh, yeah, so homeroom this morning…Uh, what was it…? I’m pretty sure I made a note of it…unless I didn’t…”

  “Just tell us, sir!”

  I was already irritated at the morning’s events, but just looking at my teacher was enough to make the negative emotions within me swell to bursting. Watching him doodle in small circles in his ledger with a red pen reminded me of a bored grade-schooler staring into space during math class.

  “Hang on, hang on…uh…Oh! That’s right. We gotta come up with some kinda booth for the school festival soon, or else. What’re you guys gonna do?”

  “Whaa?! Didn’t you say, like, ‘Oh, who says you had to do anything?’ the last time we asked about that, Mr. Tateyama?! We haven’t thought about anything! We never even talked about it since then!”

  I bolted out of my chair, pushing it back as I did, but Mr. Tateyama just stared at me with his zombielike eyes, unwilling to drum up the energy to stand himself.

  “Well, yeahhhh, but…You know, last week, the administrator asked me what kind of booth my class was working on and stuff, so. I hadn’t thought about anything, of course, so I just said to him ‘Oh, we’re working on a special surprise that’ll knock your socks off, so watch out!’”

 
“Geez, Mr. Tateyama, how much do you want to suck up to the administrator, anyway?! Don’t say we’ll ‘knock their socks off’! What’re we gonna do?! There’s only a week left…!”

  I slumped back into my chair and covered my face with my hands. Next to me, I heard Haruka say, “Oooh, I’d kinda like to run a shooting gallery”—a silly idea he tossed out without any consideration of supplies or budgets. It only served to fan the flames of despair within me.

  Honestly, I didn’t care one bit about this teacher. But if this “special surprise” we were allegedly working on (not that we had any plans yet) wound up being advertised as such in the flyers passed around school, we were completely screwed.

  Once that happened, all that awaited us was despair, darkness, and my final fall into the abyss of destruction…

  “Errrggghh…!”

  I couldn’t help but groan out loud as I contemplated a future too nauseating to imagine. If I had any sort of capable classmates, maybe this sort of adverse challenge would’ve pushed all of us to passionate creativity, but having this drenched dunderhead next to me and one of the most despicably lazy teachers in the universe in front of us, we were distinctly lacking in war power.

  Surely there was some kind of attack plan I could work on by myself…or so I thought. But thanks to my day-and-night gaming habit, or perhaps because I still hadn’t fully woken up, my brain wasn’t performing up to the standard I was hoping for.

  I rubbed my head, trying to come to grips with the cruel reality thrust upon me and the utterly hopeless hand I had to offer in response, when I noticed Mr. Tateyama staring awkwardly at me.

  “Uh…well, let’s just calm down, okay? You’re not gonna die or anything. We’re free to use this classroom any way we want, more or less, and I’ll be happy to help you guys out however I can. So could you just try to come up with something for me?”

  Whatever confidence remained was crushed when our teacher (if I could even will myself to call him “teacher” any longer) added “I’ll be happy to help you” to his feeble stab at a pep rally.

  I wasn’t remotely naive enough to have any faith in that.

  If we came up with some lame plan for the festival despite the “special surprise” ad copy, I knew that’d result in rumors. Bad ones. I’d probably be unable to function for my remaining two years as a student here.

  I doubt the thought even occurred in Haruka’s mind, of course, but to me, this was nothing short of a crisis.

  I was already persona non grata around school to some extent. Doing anything that’d make me stick out any further was something I had to avoid at all costs.

  But I realized that Mr. Tateyama’s offer to use this classroom as we wished opened up the slight possibility of a great breakthrough—some way out of this mess.

  This room had grown to seem all but normal to the three of us, but for the casual visitor, it was packed with rare and unusual curios. If we put up displays touting “Experiment X” or whatever with the scientific stuff lying around, that’d no doubt get people excited.

  “Well, gee, I hope we can come up with something interesting…Oh, but what about our budget? Each class gets a budget for their festival activities, right, Mr. Tateyama? How much can we get?”

  The moment I asked the question, Mr. Tateyama’s face froze—I could almost hear him nervously swallow—and he turned his eyes toward the equipment shelf behind us.

  “Huh? What’re you looking at—”

  The gaze didn’t escape my attention. I turned toward where I thought his eyes were pointed, only to find a bizarre, eerie-looking, yet oddly familiar fish specimen lying among the scientific equipment and bottles of chemicals.

  It was a rare ocean specimen, one I had noticed Mr. Tateyama staring at as he glossed through an educational-materials website, muttering, “This specimen’s so cool…but, ooh, it’s pretty expensive…” to himself.

  “Hmm? Hey, what’s that? Didn’t you say that specimen was too expensive, Mr. Tateyama?”

  It was relatively chilly in the classroom, but I could see a small forest of sweat beads form upon Mr. Tateyama’s forehead. He was unable to look me in the eye as I whipped out my trademark glare. He drooped downward silently, like a criminal in a detective manga just confronted with some kind of incontrovertible evidence, all but ready to reveal his motives and methods to the entire room.

  “Mr. Tateyama, did…did you use up our festival budget?!”

  “It…it’s all that thing’s fault…!”

  He then went into an impassioned, unconvincingly acted defense of his crimes, which can be summarized as follows: Just as the budgets assigned to each class were being calculated, the rare specimen (i.e. “that thing”) went on sale for 40 percent off. If he was expecting us to understand his motives, he did so in vain.

  …That isn’t even a real motive in the first place.

  Watching him defend himself, as if he were the victim and the fish specimen was the real culprit, my emotions sped far beyond anger and revolution, eventually settling into something resembling sympathy.

  “So, like, what’re we gonna do? I mean…I still like the idea of a shooting gallery, but…”

  As our teacher shifted gears to explain how charming and attractive the fish specimen was, and as I thought over how to best confront the administrator about this, Haruka parroted his shooting-gallery request once again, doggedly sticking to the only idea he was capable of conceiving.

  “…If we do that, we’d need to have a lot of prizes to give out. It’d be a huge pain to prep. How could we pull that off with just the three of us? Plus, thanks to our stupid teacher, we don’t even have any money to work with.”

  “Hmmm…I dunno, I thought it was a good idea, is all. I checked out what all the other classes were working on, and I don’t think any of them were working on a shooting gallery, so…”

  Haruka’s tone was matter-of-fact, but it honestly seemed like a surprise to me. If no one else had a shooting gallery in the works, their budgets had to have something to do with it. With all the renovation issues the school’s had to deal with, it’s hard to imagine the administration gave enough of a budget to any class for a presentation that required fancy prizes to pull off.

  But an even more pressing issue was Haruka here. Haruka, who usually just sat there glassy-eyed, making it impossible to guess what he was thinking, apparently was interested enough in the school festival that he knew what all of the other classes’ presentations were going to be.

  “…Huh. You must be looking forward to the festival an awful lot.”

  “Kind of,” he replied, a little embarrassed. He didn’t act that way at all back when he was in his skivvies in front of me. His standards for feeling shame must diverge a bit from the average person.

  “That’s kind of surprising. I mean, like, when we thought we weren’t gonna do anything, you kept your mouth shut, so…”

  “Yeah, but, you know, I’m not very strong, and it’d be a big deal if I suddenly collapsed or something. Prepping a booth looked really hard when I was looking at all of them, so I thought, you know…oh, well, right?”

  Haruka flashed a fleeting smile as he spoke.

  I wasn’t up on the details, but I knew that Haruka’s “illness” was something far more dark and serious than anything I had.

  Something so severe, in fact, that if he had some kind of attack or whatever, it could easily lead to death. That kind of thing.

  Mr. Tateyama told me about that long after I joined this school, but thanks to Haruka’s easygoing, simpleminded approach to life, it just didn’t seem real, somehow.

  Haruka, for his part, seemed aware of it, as if he’d had some bad times in the past.

  Perhaps this entire experience of going to school and interacting with other people had been a trial for him, in a lot of ways. And I just didn’t notice it.

  “Yeah, fair enough. But you wanna do something, right?”

  “…I think I do, yeah. But, you know, I don’t wanna put a bu
nch of stuff on you, Takane…” Haruka still acted bashful as he spoke to me. I didn’t quite follow why this was making him act all fluttery like that.

  “…Well, I know our teacher doesn’t really give a crap either way, but you don’t have to put up with that, Haruka. Just try and do something, okay? If you screw it up, you can worry about it then.”

  “Sure, yeah, but I can’t do anything all by myself…I haven’t really done anything like this, either…I dunno if I can really do it, you know?”

  Watching Haruka hem and haw to himself as he rolled an eraser around his desktop made me unreasonably angry somehow. I slammed both palms against my desk table.

  “—Ugghhh!! Stop acting all wishy-washy like that!! You wanna run a shooting gallery, right? Well, great! Let’s do it! I’ll help you set it up! All right?!”

  I fully exercised my latent talent for glaring as I shouted at Haruka. “All right…” he whispered, a look of abject fear on his face.

  It wasn’t enough to placate me. Turning back toward Mr. Tateyama, I continued my tirade.

  “Mr. Tateyama, please, go withdraw some money for us! We’re gonna give out that specimen as a prize, too, okay? Okay?!”

  “Whaaa?! Wait, we…We don’t have to go that far! How much do you think that cost—”

  “…Administrator.”

  “Right! Roger that! Let’s go with that idea! Boy, this is starting to get exciting, huh?”

  Mr. Tateyama threw together the most elated, refreshed face he could muster. Even Haruka stared coldly at him, finally keying in to just how despicable our proctor really was.

  —Looking at the clock, over half an hour had passed since homeroom began. We were already well into the first period of class.

  In this school, classes were more or less shunted aside for the week before the school festival. Instead, the planning committee for each class took over, guiding the students as they prepped their festival presentations.

  First period was held in the homeroom for every class, but after that, the students were likely sent off to the classrooms where their festival prep work awaited them.

  The original idea was that Haruka and I would generally engage in self-study type stuff during this time, but since we were now tasked with coming up with a killer idea, we had to get to work. And fast.