Chapter 12: Overnight Committee Chaos

The day started off suspiciously normal, which, in Yuuji's experience, usually meant something was about to go wrong.

He sat at his desk, minding his own business, not thinking about Airi or Usagi or the whole two-people-one-body situation he still hadn't fully made peace with. Just enjoying the quiet.

The quiet lasted exactly until Mr. Kumagai walked in, papers in hand, and set them down like he was about to deliver very bad news.

"Class 1-B." He paused, letting the silence sit a beat too long. "Your committee has locked in the haunted house."

A few people clapped, unsure if that was the right response.

"Fitting," he continued, undeterred. "Autumn is coming. The leaves will fall."

"...Okay," someone said.

"And so will your classmates. When you frighten them. For the glory of Seiryou High."

Total silence. Somewhere in the back, a pencil dropped.

"You'll be holding a full planning and build session this week," he went on, apparently satisfied with that reaction, "starting with an overnight prep session in the library tonight."

A groan rolled through the room. A bird startled off the windowsill, possibly out of secondhand embarrassment.

"Ah." Kumagai closed his eyes, savoring something only he could hear. "The sound of youth, groaning under the weight of responsibility. I should write that down."

"Please don't," someone muttered from the back.

He wrote it down anyway, on a spare corner of his notes, then squinted at it for a second like he was already unhappy with the line, crossed it out, and wrote it again slightly differently.

Daiki leaned over, already pale, despite not technically being on the committee. "Glad that's not me."

"You say that like you're not going to show up for the snacks anyway."

"That's different. That's recreational."

"There's no difference, Daiki."

"There's a HUGE difference."

The student council room smelled like old paper and coffee that had gone stale hours ago. Usagi was already there, hairpin in place, a stack of haunted house sketches spread out in front of her.

"Let's finalize the layout today," she said, clapping softly as the others filed in.

Kenta dropped into a chair and slapped both hands on the table. "I still think we need a fog machine."

"We already voted on this," Hina said, not even looking up. "No fog machine."

"That was two weeks ago. Things change."

"Our budget has not changed, Kenta."

"You don't know that."

"I do. I control the budget."

"That's oppressive."

"It's a spreadsheet."

Kenta sagged in his chair like he'd personally lost a war. "One day you'll understand my vision."

"I understand it. But it costs money we don't have."

"Vision always costs money we don't have. That's what makes it vision."

Hina didn't even look up from her notes. "Sit down."

Kenta actually sit down.

Mika pointed at one corner of the layout sketch, leaning across the table to reach it, and knocked over an entire cup of pencils. They scattered everywhere. "Sorry! Sorry, I've got it-" She dove after them and hit her head on the table leg on the way down.

"Are you... okay?" Yuuji asked.

"I'm fine!" she said, muffled, from somewhere under the table. "This happens. It's basically scheduled at this point."

Hina, without looking up, slid the pencil cup back into its original spot like this was routine maintenance.

Mika resurfaced, rubbing her forehead, and pointed again, more carefully this time. "Should the maze section go here? Or would that block the exit route?"

"Good catch," Usagi said, marking it down like nothing had happened. "Move it left."

Yuuji leaned over the sketches, trying to look useful without getting pulled into the fog machine fight. "What do you need from me?"

"Prop building, mostly," Usagi said, glancing up at him with a small smile. "And keeping Kenta from turning the maze into a legitimate safety hazard."

"That's not a real job description."

"It's basically been your job all week. You're very good at it."

"Is that a compliment or an insult."

"Yes."

They spent the next forty minutes hammering out the walkthrough path, prop placement, and a jump-scare rotation schedule that Kenta insisted needed to be "randomized for maximum chaos" and Hina insisted needed to just be written down on a clipboard like a normal person.

"Randomization is chaos," Kenta said. "Chaos is fear. Fear is the whole point of a haunted house."

"A clipboard is also fear, if you're the person managing you."

By the end, worn down but functional, they had an actual floor plan.

"That went better than expected," Usagi said, capping her pen.

"Define better," Yuuji muttered.

"Nobody cried this time."

"The day's not over."

That night, the group got permission to hold an overnight prep session in the school library. Brainstorm decorations, run through festival logistics, and practice sleeping in shifts for festival night security.

The plan, according to Kenta, was mostly an excuse to eat snacks in a library after dark.

By the time Yuuji arrived with his sleeping bag under one arm, the others had already claimed a section between two bookshelves. Hina had brought an actual travel kettle and was steeping tea like she'd done this exact thing a hundred times before. Mika reached for a bag of chips on the top shelf, missed, and pulled the whole shelf down on herself.

"I'm okay!" she called out from underneath a bag of rice crackers before anyone had even asked.

"We know," Hina said, already handing her a cup of tea like this was simply the second scheduled event of the evening.

It sounded fine right up until Yuuji sat down and realized he'd be spending the whole night in the same room as Airi.

Scratch that. Both Airis.

By nine, blankets were spread out, the kettle had gone cold, and Mika had fallen asleep mid-sentence, face down on her pillow. Kenta had already been banned from the snack pile twice for sneaking pudding cups.

"You did the exact same thing during our sixth grade camping trip," Mika mumbled without opening her eyes.

"That was one time!"

"It was four times. I counted, because you kept doing it right in front of me."

"You've known me too long," Kenta grumbled, and didn't actually deny it.

Usagi settled beside Yuuji, legs folded under her, notebook still open even though the meeting had ended hours ago. "Yuuji-kun. Can I ask you something?"

His stomach did a slow flip. "Sure."

She twisted the ends of her sleeves. "If someone liked you a long time ago, but didn't know how to say it back then, would it be too late now?"

He blinked, hard. "Wait, are you-"

"YUUJIIIII!"

Kenta's voice detonated the moment like a wrecking ball. "Do we have more pudding? I think I saw one hiding behind the encyclopedias."

Yuuji sighed. Usagi had gone completely red. Hina, without looking up from her tea, calmly beaned Kenta in the head with a spare pillow.

By midnight, most of the group had drifted off. Yuuji stayed up flipping through half-finished festival sketches. Usagi had dozed off beside him, head resting against a stack of mystery novels.

He kept circling back to the question she'd almost asked, the one Kenta had blown up before she could finish it. He was still thinking about it when she moved beside him.

The hairpin slid loose and clattered to the floor.

She sat up slowly, eyes half-lidded. "...Huh?" She blinked at him. "Did I fall asleep on you?"

Airi.

She cracked her neck, then smirked. "Nice. You got the cute one and the cool one in the same night."

"More like the confusing one and the terrifying one."

She laughed. "I think she almost confessed something back there. Want me to finish it for her?"

"Don't you dare."

Her grin only widened.

They ended up sitting side by side near the library window, watching the stars while everyone else stayed asleep around them. The building felt unusually calm.

"You know, for someone who used to make my life miserable, you're surprisingly okay to sit next to," Yuuji said.

"Don't get used to it. This is a limited time offer."

"How limited."

"Extremely. Blink and it's over."

"You say that every time and it's never actually over."

She elbowed him lightly, not hard enough to actually hurt. "Don't analyze me. It's annoying."

"You analyze me constantly. With a notebook. Featuring a bunny sticker."

"That's different, I have research goals."

"Sure you do."

"You still owe me an answer, by the way," she said, after a while. "From Monday."

"I thought I already gave you one."

"You did." She glanced at him sideways. "I'm just checking if it still holds up at one in the morning in a library. People say a lot of things during the day they take back later."

"It holds up."

"...Good." She let that sit for a second, then, like she wanted to change the subject before it got heavier than she meant it to, added, "So what was your actual childhood like. Before all this. Before me being a menace to society."

He huffed something close to a laugh. "Normal, mostly. Boring, even. My mom made me take piano for two years and I was terrible at it."

"Terrible? how terrible."

"I once played the wrong song at a recital for a full minute before anyone noticed, including me."

She snorted. "That's incredible. What song did you think you were playing?"

"Genuinely no idea. I just kept going until it was over and bowed like it was intentional."

"Confidence. I respect that." She pulled her knees up, resting her chin on them. "I used to take ballet. For, like, three weeks."

"Three weeks?"

"I fell during a recital and refused to go back. Dramatic exit. Very memorable, apparently, my mom still brings it up."

"Did you cry?"

"Obviously I cried. I was SEVEN."

They sat with that for a moment, something easier settling between them than usual, no test running underneath it, no notebook, no grading.

"You know," she said eventually, quieter, "she doesn't actually remember most of this. Before middle school, I mean. Ballet, piano recitals, all of it. That's mine. She wasn't really around yet."

"What do you mean, not around yet?"

"She started after graduation. Before that it was just me. So everything before then, she only knows because I wrote it down for her eventually. Secondhand." A small, humorless smile. "Feels weird sometimes. Being the one who actually lived it, and she's the one everyone likes better."

He didn't say anything to that, just let it sit there without trying to fix it.

"Anyway," she said, standing up and stretching loudly, like she'd decided that was enough honesty for one night. "You'd better keep holding up that answer from Monday. Or I'll kick you."

And just like that, the softness folded itself back up, replaced by her usual sharp edges. She curled into a different corner, yanked a blanket over herself, and was asleep within a minute.

The hairpin stayed where it had fallen, glinting faintly on the library floor beside her.

Somewhere around one in the morning, the door creaked open just wide enough for Daiki to slip through sideways, arms loaded with convenience store bags, like he'd planned this whole entrance ahead of time.

"Heard there was a pudding shortage crisis," he whispered, dropping down next to Mika, who was half asleep. She woke up when she heard the bags rustling.

"...Daiki? Weren't you dying of a nosebleed a few hours ago?"

"Miraculous recovery." He held out a pudding cup like a peace offering. "Also, felt kind of bad you guys got stuck here all night while I got to go home."

She sat up, rubbing one eye, and accepted the cup, studying him for a second like she was recalculating something. "You're not as much of a slacker as you pretend to be."

"Don't spread that around. I have a reputation to maintain."

"Your reputation is that you fake nosebleeds to skip committee work."

"Exactly. And it's doing great, thank you."

She laughed quietly, careful not to wake the others. He stayed longer than he needed to, half watching her eat the pudding, half pretending to check his phone. When her eyes closed again a few minutes later, he was still there, back against the bookshelf, not in a hurry to leave.

Yuuji's Mental Diary – Day ???
Cultural Festival: Officially in motion
Committee Casualties: One (Kenta's dignity, AKA: the fog machine that will never happen) Confession Attempt: Interrupted by a pudding emergency, again
Sleepover Status: Successfully shared a room with both versions of Airi
Notes: Progress unclear. But I don't mind the confusion as much as I used to.