On the rooftop.
After crouching and covering her face for a while, finally dragging her sanity back from the "what did I just do" spiral, Utaha pulled out her phone from her skirt pocket, her face completely red.
Her fingers trembling slightly, she unlocked it, opened her contacts, and dialed a certain editor who was definitely slacking off at work.
Beep... beep...
Listening to the busy tone, Utaha complained anxiously in her head.
'Pick up! You editor who does nothing but slack off every day!'
"Hello... Utaha-chan?"
"Machida-san!" The moment she heard Machida Sonoko's voice, Utaha, who had just been mentally cursing the lazy editor, felt like she'd been granted salvation.
"What's wrong?"
Machida frowned slightly on the other end.
That's weird. Why does Utaha-chan's voice sound so off?
And... she didn't scold me for calling her "Utaha-chan"? She usually yells at me every single time.
While puzzled by her author's strange behavior, Machida received Utaha's slightly frantic reply.
"Do you have time later? I need to discuss something very important with you!"
"Huh?"
Hearing Utaha use the polite honorific for the first time in a long while, Machida's brain took a moment to catch up, leaving her stunned.
But she was quickly snapped back to reality by Utaha's urgent follow-up: "Do you have time or not?!"
"I do, yes."
To avoid further agitating the emotionally unstable Utaha, Machida instinctively slowed her speech.
"Can you roughly tell me what happened?"
After she spoke, Utaha fell silent for several seconds on the phone.
During the silence, Machida didn't rush her, patiently waiting for Utaha to collect herself.
After a few more seconds, finally.
"Ah, um, I happened to run into Aragaki-kun on the rooftop, yeah, yeah..."
Listening to Utaha's incoherent retelling of the events, Machida slowly pieced the scene together in her mind.
"So it's because you said something like that... Oh, and Aragaki-kun ran away... So now you don't know what to do..."
As Utaha continued to ramble,
the expression on Machida's face gradually froze over.
By the end, her face had completely morphed into a look of sheer disbelief, screaming: "What are you talking about? Did I just hear that right?"
After arranging to meet at a café near the school tomorrow after the holiday, Machida hung up and looked down at her slightly warm phone.
"Sigh....."
In that heavy sigh lay a kind of exhaustion even Machida couldn't quite put into words.
"You talk a big game, but fall apart the second you have to actually do it."
"Mou, if that's the case, then stop acting like you know everything, Kasumi Utako-sensei..."
....
The final bell rang. In the Class 1-B classroom.
After politely declining Ishikawa Tooru's invitation to grab cake at a nearby café, Miyahito stayed behind until everyone had left, leaving him completely alone in the room.
The "I'm totally fine" expression he'd maintained for over an hour instantly shattered.
"Aaaaaah!"
Clutching his head, Miyahito slammed his forehead against his desk, wailing loudly.
"What kind of idiot move was that?! Ahh!!"
"Why did I run away?!"
Right now, Miyahito's mind was on an endless loop, replaying the moment over an hour ago when he'd accidentally run into Kasumigaoka Utaha on the rooftop.
And his subsequent, brainless act of bolting without a word.
He wanted nothing more than to stab the version of himself from an hour ago who did something so incredibly stupid.
"Ugh—I don't wanna live. Quick, just kill me already..."
Even now, he could vividly recall glancing back as he ran down the stairs, catching sight of Utaha standing at the rooftop door, her face frozen in sheer bewilderment.
Finally, unable to bear the overwhelming wave of cringe and embarrassment, Miyahito slid sideways and face-planted onto the floor from his chair.
Curling into a ball, hands wrapped around his head, he started rolling around on the floor.
And as he rolled, he kept wailing.
"I'm dead! I'm dead! I'm dead!"
Anyone! Please come finish me off!
Suddenly.
"Eh, really?"
"Yeah, yeah... I heard Miyahito-kun really likes that street stall's crepes."
Hearing the increasingly loud chatter drifting from the hallway outside, Miyahito, who had been throwing a tantrum on the floor a second ago, instantly scrambled up, sat perfectly straight in his chair, and adopted a "I'm totally studying" pose.
Slam!
The classroom's sliding door was pushed open from outside, revealing two laughing Class B girls standing in the doorway.
Not expecting anyone to still be inside, the two girls were startled to see Miyahito.
Once they recognized him, one of the girls, who had short hair, spoke in surprise.
"Huh, Miyahito-kun?"
"Ah, yeah... it's you guys." Mind slightly short-circuited, Miyahito couldn't recall their names, so he instinctively changed the subject to cover it up.
"Why haven't you gone home yet?"
"Ah, um." The other girl, with medium-length pinkish hair, lowered her head slightly and spoke softly: "Seira forgot to take her math textbook home, so I came back with her to get it."
"Got it."
Forcing a stiff, "polite and friendly" smile, Miyahito gave them a "warm" reminder.
"Then you should head back quickly. It's getting dark, and it's not safe to walk home."
"Mhm, we got it." Touched by his "sincere" concern, the two girls' cheeks instinctively flushed. They scrambled to grab the forgotten textbook and hurried toward the exit. Just before stepping out, the pink-haired girl turned back, her voice barely above a whisper.
"Um... Aragaki-kun, you should head home early too, okay?"
"Yeah, I will. Thanks."
"See you Monday, Aragaki-kun."
"See you."
Though it was a bit rude to admit, from the moment they walked in to the moment they left, Miyahito hadn't remembered their names at all. Yes, even though they were in his own Class B, it still hadn't clicked.
"Haa..." Clutching his pounding chest, he let out a massive breath.
So close... I almost added another cringe moment to my record.
Sensing things were getting worse by the second, Miyahito frantically shoved everything on his desk into his backpack. Swinging it over his shoulder, grabbing his gym bag from the floor, he bolted out of the classroom without looking back. He left the school without a second glance.
[Today, another entry was successfully added to Aragaki Miyahito's Embarrassment Log.]
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