Chapter 4: And Then, Nothing Again

The next morning, everything went back to normal.

Or at least, the kind of normal I was used to. The fever broke around dawn, and I was glad because I really thought that yesterday was my last day.

But no, that golden bombshell just barged into my room and played Florence Nightingale in a classic Shonan High School uniform.

She didn't even let me finish my meal and went home in a rush, no reasons included.

No "thank you for letting me break into your house and insult your air circulation."

No follow-up messages.

What do I expect? I don't have her LINE number at all.

No golden light on the sink.

No single strand of hair caught in the drain.

I think that the last one was way too obsessive. Maybe perverted. I ignored the thought and prepared for school.

***

Shonan High School grounds wasn't the exception of 'normal' too.

Kousaka-san walked into class fifteen minutes later than intended, headphones in, passing through me with the same practiced indifference she wore like armor.

She didn't glance at me, the same goes on my account. We didn't even have the awkward tension one would expect after sharing soup and verbal violence in a dimly lit rotten apartment. The memories of yesterday seemed to have remained there permanently.

She slumped to her seat next to the window as usual, and spun her chair around like a bored office worker—detached, uninterested and unreachable.

The golden silk crowning her was untied with flair, and she started scratching her sketchpad and put the walls on her domain.

And just like that, Kousaka-san was untouchable again.

The mundane day proceeded after that.

I scribbled notes and let the droning voice of the first to third period melt into background noise. Then, I reviewed formulas for the term exams during lunch as usual, and returned to the classroom without a hitch.

I realized that being a second year student at Shonan High School puts you in the middle of the opposite poles high school life offers: the first being that fiery curiosity to taste what being a highschooler is, and the second, the looming fear of graduating and navigating the merciless adult world outside the confines of the campus.

But if you're going to ask me, I don't fear the latter. I lived through enough suffering and losses to be hinged.

I don't regard myself as a supremacist, but I believe that those who were introduced to struggle at an earlier age will be more resilient in the challenge of the outside world.

And the struggle, if I were to transform it into a tangible event, was Nakabeni-sensei drawing bizarre algebraic expressions on the blackboard.

An outsider can call this a 'normal' school last period, but to Nakabeni-sensei's students, it would be an impending disaster before going home.

This already played out a dozen times before. She's going to drawl complicated rules of solving this and that, then write equations long enough to fill half of the board. Then surely after that, she'll turn around and scan the room.

Make eye contact with her and find yourself on the board answering everything she had just written.

So today, the usually loud Class 2-1 classroom became hushed when she turned to look at us. Even the normally rowdy, sometimes overly excitable girls and brash delinquents in front of me stopped talking altogether.

Only Tsurugi-san had the joy of being challenged by her questions, and the only one that saves this classroom from mathematical demise.

But today, she was absent.

The classroom became Nakabeni-sensei's hunting ground in the afternoon.

And here I am, hoping that she'll choose the most detached student, the one that doesn't care about classes, whose mind is always preoccupied by the desire of going home and doing nothing.

Her eyes found the target, it was behind me. Two rows, three meters.

"Yes, Kousaka-kun?" she sounded almost pleasant, but it carried the complications of her math problems.

Looks like my wishes backfired.

My head turned towards the back, but no, Kousaka-san wasn't raising her hand.

“Kousaka-kun,” the teacher repeated, chalk tapping the board, “Would you kindly solve this?”

She stepped aside to reveal the equation: (3x - 2)(x + 5) - (x² - 4x - 10) = 0.

A classic foil-expansion and simplification type. Not really impossible to answer, but it looked aggressive by how it was sprawled across the board in big, bold strokes.

Kousaka-san didn’t even glance up. She kept sketching, her pencil swishing softly across the page like she hadn't heard a thing.

"I’m doing something,” she said, flatly. “Don’t bother me.”

A couple of snickers sparked around the classroom. They knew she wouldn't bulge at all.

Nakabeni-sensei pushed up her glasses with terrifying calm. “Sorry but, can you spare some time and answer these problems? You can draw again unbothered after this. Please come to the board.”

The porcupine exhaled sharply.

And I can say that she was finally annoyed.

“You’re condemned to be free, thus you're responsible for everything you do. You created that problem on the board yourself, I am not the one responsible for solving it.”

The temperature in the room dropped.

A few of them actually gasped.

Including me.

I don't know if she embodied herself in Sartre's philosophy or this is her narcissism taking place overtly.

“But Kousaka-kun, your responsibility, as a student here, is to engage with the material and participate in that learning process. This equation isn't that hard though, and as a teacher, my responsibility is to guide you to correct answers.”

I don't see this situation escalating because of Nakabeni-sensei’s practiced tolerance and leniency, and the good counterargument.

But I'm not going to stick around on this ridiculous back and forth just because one side thinks so highly of themselves.

So before I could stop myself, before I could calculate the pros and cons, before I remembered that this wasn’t my problem—I raised my hand.

“If it’s alright, Sensei…” I said, voice steady, “I’ll solve it.”

Nakabeni-sensei blinked. There was a twitch at the edge of her mouth. Amusement, maybe. Or relief that she won't have to deal with the immovable object sulking behind the classroom.

“Shimizu-kun. Very well. Please proceed.”

I stood, walked to the board, and took the chalk from her hand.

I ignored the strange silence behind me, the subtle tick of pencils pausing, the scratch of Kousaka-san's charcoal suddenly stopping.

I focused.

Expand. Combine. Subtract the second expression. Factor out. The computations went smooth, like I was a scientific calculator propped with red hair.

Final answer: x equals zero… and negative eight point five.

I capped the chalk, placed it down gently, and turned back to the class.

Nakabeni-sensei nodded. “Correct. Well done, Shimizu-kun. Kousaka-kun, I hope you followed the calculation’s steps. This would appear in our term exams.”

A few of the braver students shot an awed glance at me, and I returned to my seat wordlessly.

Behind me, I didn’t hear Kousaka-san sketching anymore. Her chair was finally turned forward now, and she was introspectively fixed on something far beyond the windows.

I don’t know if my heroic ploy did her good, but seeing her completely abandon what she’s doing just earlier made me feel slightly guilty.

I didn’t mean to ruin her moment.

But at least I returned the favor, although unappreciated.