Boss Yumiko

And that’s how it went. Masako preached to Natsuki that consistency was key, so the Web Novel Club blocked off most of the club time specifically for writing. Well, Natsuki mostly did. Yumiko usually stayed up late the night before to do her writing, so during club time she either slumped around and slept or talked about anime she had watched until Masako finally got her to do her school and cram school work.

To be fair, Yumiko also gave Natsuki a lot of pointers, but that was mainly Masako’s domain. She spent the club time either editing Natsuki’s and Yumiko’s writing, doing homework, or helping Natsuki write. When Natsuki asked her if she was going to write, Masako brushed it off with a shrug.

By the end of the second week of school, Natsuki completed her first chapter. About two hundred to three hundred words a day finally reached a solid two thousand words about a hard-nosed Time Cop beating up timestream robbers in an Egyptian pyramid. The feeling of looking at a completed chapter…it's a feeling like no other.

“I’m sure it must feel like something,” Mitsuko said, walking alongside Natsuki in downtown Miyazawa that Sunday.

“I made it with my own two hands,” Natsuki proclaimed, looking proudly at her own two hands. “I would’ve loved to hug a thick stack of paper with my writing, but since it was all digital, I hugged my laptop when I finished.”

Mitsuko drank from a juicebox as they passed through a small park in the center of the city, bright skyscrapers all around them. “I’m jealous of that laptop,” she supposed.

Natsuki moved her own two hands to wrap around Mitsuko, holding her close. Mitsuko just rolled her eyes, then shook her head so her glasses came off a little. She rolled her eyes again so Natsuki could see this time. “Don’t hug me until I get my character,” she complained with her deadpan voice.

Natsuki laughed and freed her friend. “Soon. Your character comes in at Chapter 27.”

Mitsuko wiped down her glasses. “27? That’s a little far off.”

“I can write a chapter a week!” Natsuki proclaimed. She did some quick mental math, then decided on checking the calendar app in her phone. “So I’ll get to your character by the start of…October!”

Mitsuko placed her glasses back on, hiding her eyes. “I’ll have to mark my calendar.”

She watched as Natsuki took a long look at the electronic billboard on a skyscraper, advertising the newest drama stars out of Tokyo. She had a pleasant look on her face, one that seemed far more at peace than usual.

“You’ve been enjoying the club?” Mitsuko asked, already knowing the answer.

Natsuki looked back at her and nodded. “You bet. I’ve been learning so much!”

“And you like the club members?”

Another nod. “I’ve been learning so much from them!”

She suddenly raised her hands. “But I didn’t ask you to hang out today just to talk about me. How’s Graphic Design Club going?”

Mitsuko took a long sip from her juicebox, then gestured with her head at the normal billboards above the electronic one. Natsuki spotted a sleek-looking advertisement for the hit anime Fudge Sundae.

Natsuki scratched her head, then gasped. She looked over at Mitsuko, who left the unsaid question hanging in the air.

Natsuki looked back at the sign. “You…you made that?”

Mitsuko tossed her juicebox in a trash can. She looked at the advertisement alongside her best friend.

“In another life.”

........................................

The third week of school went very much the same way. On the whiteboard in the club room Masako wrote:

‘“We are what we repeatedly do; excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”

         - Aristotle’

                  - Masako

By the end of the third week, three hundred words in two hours had steadily risen to four hundred. Natsuki found herself falling into a swift rhythm - wake up, go to school, bang out the writing, go home, do homework, hang out with her younger sister, sleep - on repeat. But while she fell into the rhythm, she never consciously realized the importance of the rhythm. That’s something she would realize in the fourth week - because that’s when the trouble began.

The fourth week started off like any other Monday. Natsuki waved goodbye to Mitsuko at their lockers and then headed up to the club room for her daily dose of writing. When she opened the door (which, for some reason, was already open at just a crack), she expected to see Masako and Yumiko up to their usual shenanigans, but instead, she saw Yumiko looking out the window. Then an eraser fell off the top of the door and onto Natsuki’s head.

Yumiko glanced back and sighed. “Dang. I can’t believe I missed it!”

As a confused Natsuki reached down to pick up the eraser, Yumiko stepped toward the podium at the front of the class. “I waited for five minutes after setting that up, but of course, the moment I glance out the window, that's when you come in.”

Yumiko crossed her arms and shook her head; Natsuki placed the eraser on the club room podium then took a seat. She suddenly realized the Masako-Yumiko comedy duo was missing an integral half.

“Where’s Masako?” Natsuki asked, looking around the classroom.

“Did you check under the desk?”

“Oh.” Natsuki peeked under her desk. “Nope, no Masako.”

Yumiko’s face bore the widest grin Natsuki had ever seen. She placed one fist behind her back; she slammed the other onto the podium. “Today is the dawn of a new era in the Web Novel Club! Our beloved President Masako is out of commission, so Vice President (and Secretary) Yumiko is now Acting President Yumiko!”

Natsuki raised a hand. “Um…where’s Masako?”

Natsuki wouldn’t say it out loud, but she felt far more comfortable around Masako than with Yumiko. Nothing against her Vice President (and Secretary); it was just that Natsuki had spent far more one-on-one time with Masako than Yumiko. She still felt a little guarded around her.

“Masako’s sick,” Yumiko admitted. “She came down with the flu.”

“Is she alright?”

Yumiko shrugged. “I spoke with her on the phone. She says she’ll be okay but she’ll be out for a couple of days. Which, of course, means that Boss Yumiko is now in charge!”

Right on cue, she played the sound of applause from a video on her phone.

Natsuki still felt concerned about Masako. “Are her classmates bringing her homework? Does she have enough medicine? Does she have insurance?”

“Yes to all of the above!” Yumiko proclaimed, sticking a finger out and swiping the air in front of her for emphasis. She glanced over at the window. “I feel bad for the kid bringing her today's homework, though.”

Outside, rain poured down steadily. Individual drops pelted the window, coalescing into waves that cascaded down the glass. The sky outside was a dark grayish color; it had been like that for a few days with no sign of stopping.

“Rainy season sure is something,” Yumiko observed. Her head slumped down onto the podium. “Rainy days are tough. I don’t feel like doing anything. I just want to lay down and listen to the rain and drift off to sleep.”

She shifted her head up so she could look at her junior. “What do you like to do on rainy days, Natsuki?”

Natsuki watched the rain fall. “Uh…I don’t really know. Rainy days are just sort of like any other day, right?”

That woke Yumiko back up. She slammed a fist on the podium, nearly making Natsuki jump out of her seat.

“Let this be Acting President (and Secretary) Yumiko’s lesson of the day!” she declared. “A lot of people say that the days all blur together. Nonsense! Days carry their own sort of feeling. A rainy day is far different than a sunny day. And an early summer rainy day is far different than an autumn rainy day. A sunny day in June is different from a sunny day in August. A sunny day in June - when you lounge outside, you get that feeling of early summer, a summer that’s just started to take shape. But a sunny day in August - it’s bittersweet, since it’s late summer. The days don’t blur together when you take notice of each one.”

Yumiko stood proudly as Natsuki clapped for her little spiel. But then Yumiko sighed and her head slumped again. “Doesn’t make me feel any less tired, though.”

“Did you have trouble sleeping last night?” Natsuki asked.

Yumiko rolled her head along the podium. “I didn’t get any sleep. I had cram school after school, then I homework after cram school, then I started watching anime, then I started writing, and then my morning alarm went off.”

“That’s no good,” Natsuki realized with a gasp. “A good night’s sleep is important.”

Yumiko brushed her concerns away with an easy-going hand. “I can sleep when I’m dead.” When Natsuki looked at her with worry, she grinned. “C’mon. Isn’t that a kick-ass line?”

And speaking of lines, Natsuki noticed that the quote on the whiteboard behind Yumiko now went

          - Aristotle

                 - Masako

                           - Yumiko

“How much sleep do you get?” Yumiko asked, stifling a yawn.

Natsuki reflected on her nightly routine. “I get home, do my homework, take a long bath, watch baseball with my little sister-”

Yumiko’s face lit up and she brought both of her hands to her cheeks. “You have a little sister? How old is she? Can you bring her here?”

Natsuki chuckled. “Well, she's in middle school…”

And that’s how the three hours of club time went. Only when she was knee-deep in her long bath that night did Natsuki realize she hadn’t written her daily word count yet. She resolved to do it once she got out of the bath, but that bath felt so nice that she just wanted to lay in bed afterwards and sleep a peaceful sleep.

........................................

The next day, Natsuki walked into the club room full of resolve. Consistency was key! Writing was a talent that needed to be honed! If she neglected her daily practice, what little progress she had made would soon disappear-

Yumiko’s groans made Natsuki jump after closing the door behind her. She glanced at her senior, who sat in a desk near Natsuki’s usual desk, her face slumped onto a stack of papers.

“I have so much work to do,” Yumiko mumbled into the papers. “School work, homework, cram work. It never ends.”

Natsuki took a seat at her usual desk. “Do second-year students usually have this amount of work?”

Yumiko rubbed her eyes. “My mom wants me to be the highest-ranking student in the whole class. I’m currently 17th, so according to her, that must mean I’m not doing enough.”

“17th? Wow!” Natsuki’s rank in middle school had hovered comfortably around the 70th mark - not great, but not bad, either. Her parents never gave her any trouble about it - well, they were usually out working, so Natsuki didn’t really see them enough for them to give her any trouble.

“My roaring intellect is both a blessing and a curse,” Yumiko supposed, rolling her head along the stack of papers. “Life’s tough, isn’t it? School work used to come so easy to me. I was close to being top of the class back in middle school. Then, when I started high school, school work stopped being so easy. But how was I supposed to actually work hard at things when all my life they came so easily to me? So my grades dropped, and my parents decided the obvious solution was to sign me up for more work, and it’s become a nasty cycle of…uh…Natsuki…”

Natsuki wanted to help but wasn’t sure how, so she reached over and started to rub Yumiko’s back.

When it became clear that wasn’t exactly helping Yumiko, Natsuki retreated her hand and looked down, her face red.

“I genuinely want to be a full-time author when I’m older,” Yumiko said, imaging the future via looking at the ceiling. “To a lot of people, writing’s just a hobby, which is fine. But I want to make it my career. And I think I really could.”

She patted the stack of papers. “I guess I just gotta wade through all of this first.”

Before Natsuki could say anything/try to soothe her again, Yumiko suddenly stood up. “But enough about that! I have something to show you, Natsuki!”

Yumiko sat back down. As Natsuki wondered why she stood up in the first place, Yumiko pulled out her laptop and quickly brought up a webpage.

“Check it out!” she exclaimed.

Natsuki thought it would be something writing-related, but instead, she saw a picture of a text message between two celebrities - one sent a long message about the difficulties in her relationship, and the other answered with a picture of his hand holding a broken carrot with the caption “grosery list” below it.

Yumiko had to hold her stomach from laughing so hard. Natsuki just scratched her head.

“Um…is that real?”

Yumiko laughed even harder. “You said your experience with the internet is limited to funny cat pictures, right?”

Natsuki smiled and nodded because she did like funny cat pictures.

“Then let me catch you up to speed.”

The rest of club was spent acclimating Natsuki to modern humor. Once again, only when she took her long bath did she realize she hadn’t done her daily dose of writing. Once again, resolve filled her, but the moment she got out of the bath, all she could think about was grosery list.