Runner's High

Theo rapidly settled into the rhythm of student life, at least as well as he was going to. 

So far he found none of the obligations of the opening semester a hindrance to the pursuit of his actual objectives, and so he was only really going through the academic motions.

The same was true of his social life, in spite of whatever promise his burgeoning popularity as the go-getting transfer student might have held. He would come to make acquaintances out of most of his class, but inevitably kept them all at arm’s length. If he was to more closely associate with anyone, he would choose carefully.

He ran into one of those prospective associates on the second day's commute, and they picked up where they left off with gusto. If the subject was up his alley, Shigeru Sakai could talk the ears off a chicken. To Theo’s mild surprise, he found out that Sakai was actually close friends with Hara. He discovered that fact when he came into the classroom one morning to see the two casually speaking.

“Yo, Shigeru.” that they were on a first name basis was the biggest outright tell.

“What?” that that Sakai would so casually respond was another.

“If humans were originally from the sea, then do you think we had gills way back when?”

“Back then, you would have been a fish, Kohei.”

“Fish? That’s crazy. Fish and man are way too different. You’re saying little old me is supposed to belong under the water? I’d drown in three minutes!”

“Well, you don’t look like a man-fish, don’t you? It takes billions of years, stupid.” snapped Sakai.

Hara acted as if he hadn’t heard Sakai and kept talking.

“Maaaan, all this talk of fish’s got me hankering for some braised cod. Maybe it’d be better if I was a fish-man, then I could have fish whenever I want. I wonder what I’d taste like?”

“You want to live forever!?”

If that bizarre routine wasn’t enough, the sight of the five-foot-four Sakai , more moxie than meat on his bones, blaring at the burly Hara would have made him do a double take either way. It was close, but he managed to rein himself in and go about the business of prodding his classmates for intelligence.

For all the bruised pride of that first day, Hara and Theo had, without once speaking, figured out an armistice of sorts. Hara would keep his distance when Sakai and Theo were having a chat, and Theo would do the same when it was Hara with Sakai. That was the case when it was Sakai’s turn to be interrogated on the second day, just before lunch. 

“Hey, Sakai-san. What do you know about Ema Kurose?” Theo asked. 

“Kurose-san? This is about what happened with you two on the first day, huh?”

“How does everybody– never mind. That’s the girl, yeah. Just curious.”

“Fisherman’s daughter. That’s pretty much it. I mean, she isn't exactly a loner, but nobody’s really close with her, since she was a transfer herself back in middle school. She'd be at the back of the list for scuttlebutt if she hadn’t picked you to almost do a flying lariat on, man. She’s pretty much a mob. Ah– that girl gets caught dozing off all the time nowadays too."

The word mob caught his attention. 

“Mob, as in the mob, yakuza? That girl, is connected to yakuza?”  Theo asked, incredulous. 

“No-no-no, it’s not that.” replied Sakai, before explaining his turn of phrase.

Mob meant background character. Though Sakai lost him when he segued into a monologue about something called a galge, mob seemed as apt a moniker as any for Ema Kurose. 

A shame, he thought. A point of contact with local crime could have been useful, though Theo doubted if Maho would ever approve. 

In-between the various classes were interspersed five to ten minute breaks, and the students were apparently free to spend the time however they liked. Most chose to hang around the classrooms, some preferred the roof or the stairways for their rendezvous. 

They had a longer break for lunch, and that was naturally when most students made their way to the cafeteria on the ground floor.

That wasn't to count the delinquents. Some flouted the school regulations, eating when they pleased like Hara sometimes did. Theo didn't share many a classmate's distaste for their types; sticking it to the regs was just the natural thing to do, as Theo himself and his pals from the training days could attest. 

On the second day, Theo made his own way to the cafeteria, and had his first run-in with another type of delinquent when he passed by a group of girls whose uniforms were decked out with accessories. 

The girl in the middle of it caught his eye, though for something else than her flashy fashion statements. Her eyes were a deep blue, and she was clearly half-something. This school seemed to have no shortage of good-looking people, but she definitely stood out. Fresh off his conversation with Sakai, the word mob flashed into his mind. If there was an opposite of that then that girl qualified, Theo thought, as he approached his destination. 

It was rush hour. In-between the crush of the crowd he could see the cafeteria’s setup: round tabletops, and wall-to-wall glass paneling on one side to let sunlight in. 

Theo unknowingly ended up cutting the line to order, but the crowd parting before him didn’t exactly help him find the start of it. Before he could say anything, he was already in front of the lunch lady. After some awkward back-and-forth, he settled for something on the menu that looked edible enough.

He wasn’t sure what it was about the stuffed bread that made people look at him weird as he walked and ate, but it hardly stopped him from finishing his meal in the time it took him to walk to the garbage bins. He decided to take advantage of the rest of the break to scope out the campus layout.

For a public school, Hokishi High was well-appointed.

Styled in modernist lines and provided for with generous greenery, the campus itself was oriented on an imaginary northwest-southeast line. Two main buildings at the eastern half housed the majority of classrooms, built in parallel and joined together by a large two-tier walkway.

The south classroom building was larger, coming up to three complete stories against the north’s two, and augmented by a small annex. Another two-story, older than the rest, ran perpendicular to the main buildings and counted for the easternmost point.

Together they formed something like a loose quadrangle, which was furnished with benches and wrap-around seats for the shrubs and broadleaf trees dotted at regular intervals.

The gymnasium and adjacent pool shared a building, taking up the middle of the campus, and was the only building without a rooftop deck. A smaller walkway adjoined them to the classroom buildings.

The main entrance for all this was in the south, leading up to the larger classroom building and a smaller office ringed around by parking spaces. Scattered service and utility sheds could be found in their own odd corners.

What was left of the campus on its western half was eaten up by a dirt field used for athletic activities, bounded on one side by a high mesh fence.

Theo considered all this as he walked the campus for the rest of lunchtime. He was trained to pick out the smallest details from the fog of war, but he wasn’t here to appreciate the architecture on this lovely sunny day.

As he looked to be wandering, he was already running a terrain analysis: mapping out dead-zones, chokepoints, observation and access. One had to know the ground over which one fought.

At the time, he could have never guessed just how intimately he would come to know this school.

 

While he worked on his campus awareness, Theo's strategy of deliberate showmanship was in the meantime coming to full fruition. By the third day, Theo Lovell could feasibly claim to be the most popular guy in Hokishi High.

Unfortunately, there were second-order effects to this popularity that he hadn't foreseen. That he could be spotted all over the school doing who-knows-what, and had a habit of popping up in the strangest locations did not escape the rumors now raging around his person. 

Teenage word spreads fast, and Theo soon learned how his little scheme could sweep his time and space off along with the cherry blossoms. 

His troubles started off on an innocuous note. He was emplaced on the south classroom building’s roof, establishing pattern-of-life for lunchtime for a third year in the apparently dwindling “Occult Research” club that he’d tagged as a person of interest.

After a time, Theo sighted somebody sneaking around the stairs leading up to the roof. He had a high-end camera on him, marking him as a member of the photography club.

Nothing suspicious there. Theo had seen their members around in the background, hunting for subjects amid the day’s activities. Theo was careful to not get caught in too many shots himself, but if he did this job right it didn’t really matter if they had him on some photo.

This one wasn’t much a stealthy camera like the others, though. Peeking around only made him more obvious, and the sparsely populated roof didn’t offer much in the way of noise masking for the beep-snaps of his photo-taking. It was those sounds that prompted Theo to give the guy a closer look, and that was when he noticed that the camera was pointed at him. 

This guy was shooting photos of him, and he couldn’t look any more sketchy doing it.

Scrubbing his rooftop recon short, Theo approached him. He really wasn't planning on doing anything but dissuading the guy, by signaling that his photo jig was up. But just then, Camera Guy chose the most suspicious move possible; he bolted, practically falling down the stairs, and looked to Theo like the devil himself was hot on his heels. 

His instincts won out, and Theo went after him. In one minute flat, he chased the snapshooter down, hauling him to a disused storage room after his desperate attempt at escape.

In the heat of the chase, Theo had begun to think that he had just nabbed a possible lackey, or perhaps even this mission’s quarry, and he gave the first-year a shakedown that probably left him traumatized.

It turned out to be none of those– scared shitless by Theo’s bad-cop act, he quickly fessed up to getting pressured into taking peep shots of Theo by his seniors, part of some bizarre photo-selling scheme. Glossing over that Theo found the concept ridiculous, as far as he could tell the poor guy was telling the truth. He let him go after making sure he deleted the relevant shots.

Courtesy of Sakai, he would later get his hands on other photographs of himself and fail to see what the fuss was about. By then, Theo thought that he had bigger issues at hand. 

He would end up dropping surveillance on the suspected third year, after ascertaining that he and his buddies’ “occult research” amounted to what were predictably abortive attempts at summoning succubi. 

His next most promising lead, Tanabe-sensei, was just as fruitless. After seeing Tanabe walk around the faculty on tip-toes after making the claim that the floor was scorching hot, Theo couldn't accuse him of anything but being the most profoundly weird individual at the school. 

But the photo-scheme was just the leading edge of the storm; the biggest trouble for Theo was still to come. In the end, the incident with the wannabe paparazzi only added to the growing mystique around the blue-eyed transfer student. 

Theo got his fifteen minutes of fame, alright, and then some.

At some point, a consistent trend started: whenever Theo stuck around to one place, he would invariably attract attention, drawing a throng of mostly female admirers around himself. 

To begin with, he had tried to play along with the crowd like he had with his class, but he quickly realized that approach was a non-starter when he witnessed first-hand how savage the so-called fangirls could be.

When he had to throw somebody’s handkerchief back and some girl caught it, the rest of them damn near tore the poor girl apart. That was Theo's cue to get. 

It took one hell of an effort to disengage from the crowd, but he was able to give them the slip and relocate to a safe spot. Or not– contact, fangirls to his rear– bug the hell out! 

From then on, that was how his break periods went. The hunting dogs were never far behind, snapping at him with inane nonsense like “What’s your type?” all day. 

At times they really did start sounding like dogs to Theo’s ears, with their panting, grunting and what he could have sworn was barking as they ran him down to the ragged edge of his stamina.

Don’t you bastards have something else to do with your spare time?

Maho would be presently occupied with her own part of the operation, at any rate. She was supposed to be making a racket in the faculty and all-around being nosy about her predecessor’s activities. Except now, the one she was supposed to running distraction for had gone and stirred up a racket of his own.

Not for the first time during an op, things had turned sideways fast, and now he had to cope– just like the Unit had trained him to, Theo would have to work the problem with his native wit and what he had on-hand. 

Give them the same treatment as he had with that cameraman? No, there were simply far too many for that, and could just as well stir up the pot even more. 

He devoted whatever energy was left from running away grasping for a way out of this predicament that day, throwing ideas out as fast he could think them up whenever he could escape the fangirls. 

As it turned out, he had to contend with the ravenous hordes for the rest of the week.

It was an unlikely series of events that led Theo to his sought-after solution.

The first unlikelihood was him staying after school.

He’d turned down the avalanche of invitations to the various athletic clubs, preferring to utilize the evening to enhance his awareness of the wider city. That the long walks through decrepit sections of suburbia was a good way to let off steam, after an entire day of escape and evasion, was a welcome side-effect, besides other benefits. 

But his turn on day duty had come up; he’d never flaked out on the duty roster back in garrison, and he wasn’t about to start here. It wasn’t anything as elaborate as he was accustomed to. For one, there was nothing of logbooks and relief procedures. If anything, it was pretty much an excuse for teachers to order you around. 

Hence Theo was on the return trip from a faculty errand– and an unwelcome last-minute fangirl chase through the gym– to take care of his actual class duties, when he picked up on voices coming from the 2-C classroom.

One belonged to Ema Kurose, the Rolling Girl– but it was a different girl who was paired with him on the roster for today, wasn’t it? The other three he matched to other girls in his class, a clique that from his observations seemed to be of some social consequence.

The second unlikelihood was him stopping in his tracks just as he walked into earshot.

He had no real reason not to crash the girls’ party, and he probably would have any other time. It was in fact more in his interest to get this duty done with. 

But something made Theo back off and let things run their course that day. He leaned with his back against the hallway wall and listened as the clique ran off their mouths on after the other.

“You’re overdoing it with the ditzy good girl act, don’t you think?”

“C’mon, you think we didn’t hear about your little accident with Theo-kun? And now you just happened to sub a duty on the exact day that he’s on? Like, methinks that it’s a bit suspicious, y’know?”

“Ema-chan, aren’t you worried what he’ll say when he smells the fish on you? That’ll be a bother for him, right?”

“Ohmygosh, Nao-cchi!”

Their laughter spilled into the hall, and something about the situation bothered him.

They could never quite get the ‘th’ sound in his cover name right.

Anyway, what he was seeing tracked with what he’d seen so far. Unremarkable as she was, cheery Ema happened to be missing the word "no" from her internal dictionary. A pushover of a girl, doing everyone but herself favors.

So this was girl-on-girl drama unfolding in earshot; Theo hadn’t really gotten the group dynamics down yet, but he doubted this one was mission-relevant. In any case, it wasn't his problem. 

He’d already learned where meddling got you in this town, much less butting into a mess as this. For all he knew, this group could have their own reasons to be teaming up on the girl.

The final unlikelihood. In the middle of eavesdropping, an idea suddenly popped into Theo’s mind. A hot wave of excitement broke over his hitherto detachment at the scene.

Here was his solution!

With one stroke, he could turn aside the overwhelming mass of meddlers that interfered with the conduct of his operation. He’d much rather deal with one civvie than the mass of them.

The other girls had gone on ahead when he finally showed himself in. He shot off a smile and a wave when he passed by them in the hall, and now he was doing the same to the girl who was waiting on him.

Ema greeted him warmly, and explained that she was filling in for the girl who was supposed to be here.

She eagerly, if clumsily, showed him the ropes for his first time on cleaning duty, doing a fine job of tying together the disassociated hints that he had gathered for the past few days. 

There were no janitors here, and each class was responsible for a share of school space. He was intimate with that kind of system, alright– at least you didn’t need to clean latrines with a toothbrush here. With two pairs of hands, they got it done in no time.

The last of their duties discharged, Ema congratulated the both of them a job well done and excused herself to leave. And that was when Theo blocked her way out.

“Wait!”

Slamming his hand against the wall next to Ema effectively pinned her in place. The setting sun set the windows aglint like soft flame, and the dusky shadows grew fuller as they grew longer.

Theo was just as surprised as Ema was at how he ended up acting on his notions. With the two of them locked in that awkward pose, he got an up-close look as her expression turned into one of bashful bewilderment. 

Holding himself perfectly still, he realized that he hadn’t thought up what to say in advance. He froze as he deliberated on his next words. Ema would have likely beat him to saying anything, if her initial cry of surprise hadn’t caught in her throat, and she ended up frozen along with him.

The last puffs of sun-beat wind blew through the open windows, and draped the two school-uniformed statues in billowing folds of green cotton. Theo stared into this girl’s eyes. There was something there, something he couldn’t pin down. Maybe he did find something about her interesting.

The seconds stretched long until Theo asked a single question.

“Kurose-san, would you go out with me?”