Crossover Fan Fiction ❯ From Beta To Sigma ❯ Festivals ( Chapter 4 )

I had to spend money to buy new spandex, which cost more than I liked, and meant I couldn’t buy camping gear after all. I worked out a lot, riding until my right knee started to hurt. I had to stop riding, because it was the predictable repetitive stress injury. I could bike the two miles to school, but no more than that. This was disappointing. I had gotten used to travel, even at the slow speeds of a bicycle, and there was so much to see that wasn’t Chiba City. I started learning the motorcycle handbook and watched a lot of videos to break up the periods of intense studying. I wanted to make top student to spite Yukinoshita.

Yukinoshita had apparently been picked up by her sister and the limo that hit me for some kind of family function, and I didn’t see her for the rest of summer break. I did get invited to the local summer festival by Yuigahama. I was tempted to decline but I realized she was a cute girl and there would be drunken rapists around and opted to show up and protect her, a second time. This is not a date. She dressed up and hung on my arm like a date, and I tried not to grumble. I’d joined a gym and worked muscles I could work since my knee was damaged. I would never be able to ride a bicycle properly again. It was that bad. Damn it all. Looking around with our food and Yui being a cheerful girl full of energy, we found our names being called by a woman I recognized. Yui was shocked I knew a woman until she realized this was the full-figured sexy version of Yukinoshita, the elder sister. She introduced herself as Haruno and asked us to join her in the VIP section.

“So is this the legal one? Did Yukino lose again?” teased the woman semi seriously. Women attack each other for dominance and power and because they like to cause pain for rivals. This is no different from what I’ve read about. Decoding women requires education, and I had some.

“Its lovely to see you again, Haruno-san. How is our friend and clubmate Yukino-san? We both miss her and wanted to invite her to this festiva,” I smarmed at her. She recoiled, as expected.

“I did invite her, but she said she was busy with family business,” complained Yuighama beside me. I raised an eyebrow. It being dark my ugly eyes are visible and I still looked like a Yakuza, especially wearing this traditional Haori. The yak running the stalls at the festival were trying to recognize me, I expect. Too bad for them.

“You should have come to the Chiba Mountain Village. You would have met my sister,” I pointed out to Haruno. “And gotten to see me in spandex.” Yui’s eyes got misty then and her cheeks went red.

“See? Even thinking about it makes Yui blush.”

“You don’t look that buff to me, high school boy,” Haruno rumbled.

“Yes yes, you have your pick of college men, and good for you. Play your games and pick a man your parents will approve of, right?” I taunted, returning fire for that “legal one” insult. She frowned.

“We miss Yukino. Please tell her so,” I urged. Haruno sighed, letting go of her mask.

“I have to make these appearances because Father is too busy, or Mother can’t be bothered. I’m showing the face of our family in public. Do you really think I have the leeway to date men I like?” she complained. I eyed her for sincerity and admitted it was possible she might be telling the truth.

“Sorry,” I apologized. “You know we are friends of your sister, as much as anyone can be friends with her.”

“Hikki, you consider Yukino a friend?” Yui asked, a bit surprised.

“She doesn’t actually like me very much, but we agree on one thing.”

“Oh? And what would that be?” asked Haruno, slipping her mask back on.

“We both hate politics.” Haruno laughed then, loud and genuine before covering her mouth. The fireworks started then, booming into the sky above Tokyo bay and sparkling on the water. It was very pretty. Yui squeezed my hand in happiness. I think maybe she considers this a date, after all. The legal one, indeed. I need to be more careful. She’s a good girl, as good as girls can be, but her ambition is the same as all women: land a husband early. A good girl does this with the intent to stay married, raise kids. A bad girl does this to get divorced and child support for a drug habit, more common than many men would believe. I don’t see Yui as a future drug addict, but even fat girls can get hooked on Meth, and it was invented in Japan in the 1920’s, and explains the atrocities of the World War and Japan’s eventual defeat by the Americans and their atom bombs. We had it coming. Am I making things worse for a lovesick girl?

A couple weeks into the return of school classes Yukino returned, as graceful and stoic as ever.

“We missed you at the festival. Haruno said you were regrettably detained for family obligations,” I said, offering an olive branch. Yukino nodded agreement. Her composure restored, her mask hard as ice. Club had been quiet without her. Yui texted on social messaging or watched videos on cooking things, chatting back and forth with friends like Drills and Fujoshi. I worked on my essays and studied. When Yukinoshita returned in September, so did a new problem.

A younger student a year below me named Iroha, with a very irritating fox-like manner, explained she needed the club’s help with getting nominated for the school student council president. She said she didn’t want the job, and that the girls who nominated her were doing so to humiliate her, and that calling off the nomination would be a loss of face. Her father was a detective with the Chiba City police department. That didn’t seem to matter here, but she mentioned it anyway. Sigh. I felt like handing this off to Yukino, but she hated politics as much as I did and looked bored. Yui had a helpless expression. I don’t know what to do here.

“Well, you could just run and take the job. Or you could explain the situation to the current student council and have them pass a resolution to allow involuntary nominations to be removed. Or you could ask the teacher of this class to file a formal complaint against the girls for bullying, which will hurt their college applications and probably escalate the problems. Or you could change schools,” I said, which was more of a long shot. She didn’t like the choices. I could talk her into it, but do I want to deal with this obnoxious girl who thinks too highly of herself? I want a motorcycle, not a girlfriend. Or a girl who thinks she’s girlfriend material. No thank you. Her telling us about her plans to seduce Hayama made Yukinoshita laugh out loud and not apologize. Iroha looked stricken at this.

“I don’t think we’ve ever failed a quest before, but this might be the one. So what are you going to do, Iroha? You have to choose from the possible options.”

She eventually went to the student council and they explained that being nominated for the council was an honor and they did not want to offer a way out of that obligation. Shiromeguri, the outgoing president, was firm on this. Most of her staff was also going to third year and would not be participating in school activities to focus on their college exams. I sympathized, because I’m struggling to see the point of college, the more I know. If you aren’t in a STEM field, college is a waste of time.

Women who go to college and don’t marry there are rapidly aged out of the marriage market, so they’re wasting their precious time and their family money, unless they get a good paying degree. Even then, a career is the opposite of a family and men don’t care about how successful a woman is. They want to know if they’d make a good wife, and after a certain age that no longer matters because they can’t have kids. This is the cold hard reality, and why Japanese women are expected to marry by 24. Any later and having kids just gets harder, and men aren’t going to waste time with women who care so little for family. This is why sensei is so lonely. She made the bad choices, and she’s paying for them now.

What is worse, men who go to college for other than STEM fields are asking for trouble. Many colleges cater to women and their ideals rather than the real world, which is often quite different from what the college professors “believe to be true” and generally do so by ignoring all evidence which contradicts them. The Americans were closing colleges due the toxic wasteland they’d become, though this was not happening fast enough according to many parents whose kids were returning home as unemployable degreed adults. Funny how insisting your child get a college degree was less than worthless advice. My parents are both degreed adults and they spend so little time at home I basically raised my own sister. They are slaves to the corporations they work for, and those companies are run by people who know the right people, not have the right minds for the job or reached the heights through education. It’s corrupt, bloated, and doomed to fail. Do I want any part of that? Not really. But still I study, just to spite a girl for being snobby.

The situation with Iroha eventually resolved into her running for real and becoming the student council president. She found people to be her helpers on the council and they complained they were doing all the work, but it wasn’t my problem. Neither myself nor Yukinoshita claimed credit for this outcome. We both hate politics.

Unfortunately, as fall rolled around I was dragged into another request for Iroha, this time as the official Student Council President. She came to the club asking for help dealing with idiots. She’d been forced into participating in an intra-school winter festival at the Chiba City Civic Center. The basic idea was a Christmas holiday meal and a bit of light entertainment with participation with elderly people from the local retirement home nearby and school children from the elementary school.

This sounded like a fine idea, in principle. However when we attended we saw the hench in chief repeating himself, waving his hands in a way that indicated he was out to lunch and unworthy of respect as a human being, and Orimoto Kaori cheered on the disaster like this wasn’t going to be utterly terrible. The other high school was causing endless delays and needed a smack upside the head to get anything done. We looked at each other, hating the obvious politics here, and wondering why Soubu agreed to get involved in Smarmodon school, for henchmen and sycophants.

“Who decided we should “work with another school”?” I asked Iroha, making sure to do so where the idiots on the other side of the table could hear us. I wanted this to hurt their pride.

“Sensei said she was told to do this,” Iroha admitted.

“And was her boss told to do this? Stop waving your hands, dummy. I swear I will smack you. Stop it. So far what I see is is a massive loss of face, caused by this other school. This isn’t complicated. And we don’t have time to study things. Stop moving your hands. Last warning. I will break you in half. Iroha, tell them who your father is.” She told them. They stopped moving their hands. “So you can listen. Good. Here is what is going to happen. We will decide what happens next, and you will do it, quickly, efficiently, and without fuss or drama or second guesses. If you can’t handle someone else being in charge, you are to publically withdraw from this council and return to your school in shame, and explain to your principal that you made yourselves look like incompetent fools. And be sure that this will have consequences. Yukinoshita. Tell them who your father is." She told them. They paled. “Ah, I see you understand, finally, just what is happening, and how deep in the doodoo you have fallen. Your games have irritated too many people. So now we solve this problem. Here is the timeline.”

And I laid it out for them using the shared calendar, appearing on all the project leader laptops. The henches could see what needed to be done, and when. Cost estimates started being called in, scheduling, deposits arranged. The budget had lost a third from this arguing and delays. The head clown was sweating. I glared at him. So much foolishness. This is why I like being alone. And not being able to exercise had made me extra aggressive.

In two days of meetings we squared away the process and got the project moving, racing to catch up with the soon approaching festivities. Buses brought the old folks in from their rest home. More buses brought the kids. I found Rumi making stars on her own, and helped her finish, then showed her around to the now-cowed students of the other school working efficiently to finish setup and heat the food for service with help from the caterers, led by her mother, since I’d asked her to. She knew what she was doing.

“I was a caterer in college and became a teacher after five years. I needed the income to help raise my little girl,” she said, ruffling Rumi’s hair. There were a bunch of subcontractors, including the rental dinnerware and wash service for the silverware, cheap stuff but the old folks didn’t care. They were happy to see kids in costumes running around, acting as waiters. Later the kids sang a song they’d practiced and did a short play for the Christmas scene, it being appropriate for the festival. Eventually the event wound down and we managed the return of kids and old folks to their school or rest home and took down the decorations and all the tablecloths and chairs and cleaned up the food to turn over to a waiting homeless shelter van, scheduled with hope in their eyes. There were lots of rolls left over, and butter patties and some various pasta and meat dished. Enough food to feed a hundred people a filling meal.

“Thanks for thinking of us, kid,” wished the driver well and left. The vans were loaded and signed off, pulling away. It was late, one AM. I was tired, as were Yui and Yukinoshita. We exited the grounds, too late for buses. Yukino gave us a ride in the limo that hit me, dropping off Yui first. We were both too tired to say much.

“Haruno said you quit riding your bike?” Yukino remembered to ask.

“My knee is damaged from riding too much. Its permanent,” I explained.

“Oh. I’m sorry. Is it the leg you broke?” she asked.

“No, the other one.”

“I was in the car when the crash happened. I was not paying attention. Our driver was at the wheel.”

“Sorry about your leg, sir,” said the driver in apology. I wondered if I was supposed to just accept that.

“Hmm. Well, thanks for paying my doctors bill. It would have bankrupted us,” I said to Yukino. She flushed.

“That would have made it all worse. Still, I am sorry.”

“Did you know this about me when I first joined your club?” I asked her.

“Yes, but I wasn’t going to let you slide on your decorum just for that reason,” she argued. I chuckled.

“Right. Never change, Yukino. This is me,” I said, pointing out the window to my home in the Chiba suburbs. I stepped out and closed the door gently. She rolled down the window.

“Good night, Hachiman.” Then they rolled away and my knee ached. I hobbled inside and got some ice on it, which helped a little.

I woke up the next morning a bit stiff and faced a day of school. It was cold and raining. I sighed. Komachi met her boyfriend at the door and they walked to school under the same umbrella, the brats. I slowly moved along behind them, falling back step by step. I barely made it to school before the bell rang and limped up the stairs in my school shoes. Shizuka, thankfully, did not insult me for being tardy. Apparently she was satisfied with the reports from the school festival. So I had that going for me. My knee swelled, unfortunately, and I went to the nurse for an ice pack. This helped a bit while I tried to take my mind off the pain and study.

The rest of the week I suffered through the indignity of buying a bus pass and dealing with crowds and slow service. Actual Christmas was spent at home, babysitting my sister and chaperoning our guest, her boyfriend. The parents paid for fried chicken, which we enjoyed as a family together as it did a mix of rain and snow outside.

My doctor’s appointment two days later recommended rest and relaxation and anti-inflammatory pills to help the swelling. In time this change worked, but I was very sad. My workouts at a gym cost money, and I had to get some kind of income to cover the costs for bus pass and gym membership. Worse, I couldn’t take a job that required standing around, so my options were pretty much gone. I sighed and watched my bank account deplete. This situation is ridiculous. By the time new years eve and an early morning wake up to try and catch first light on New Year’s Day, only to find snow falling. Well it’s all a bit disappointing, really.