Chapter 5

Of course I know that no one will listen attentively at an opening ceremony. After all, when I'm standing ramrod straight and giving my speech, I'm not thinking about whether the hundreds of people sitting below are listening to me; my task is simply to finish what I'm saying. To those listening, these words are just another part of a boring group activity.

To be honest, I don't like speaking from this position, but I probably dislike listening to people speak from below even more.

Back when I was in the same class as Niou, we were responsible for cleaning the classroom every Friday afternoon. Occasionally, some junior members of the student council would come to our class in a hurry. I would put down the mop and walk to the door to tell them what to do, while Niou would hold the mop in one hand and press the buttons on his phone with the other to chat with his girlfriend.

When I turned back, he had a rather intriguing expression on his face.

"Seriously, do you actually enjoy this 'top student' status, Ms. Okada?" he asked.

"Considering we've known each other for three years, I'll forgive your unpleasantly sarcastic tone." I pointed somewhat rudely at his forehead with my index finger.

"Piyo," Niou stuck out his tongue, "Sorry."

"I didn't realize how apologetic you were," I said, throwing the rag into the bucket and taking two steps to stand on the podium. "Then let me tell you the benefits of being a 'top student,' Niou-kun."

Niou, standing at the back of the classroom, pulled out a chair and sat down. "I'm all ears."

"The first point is that there will always be people willing to listen to you, and most of the time they will believe you." I bowed slightly. "The second point is that 'top students' don't make mistakes, because even if you do, those who believe in you will find excuses for you before you do. The third point, which is the one I personally find hardest to give up, is that in addition to the first point of having a voice, you will gain more control. For example, whatever I say, someone will do it; whatever I do, someone will do it."

"Oh—" he said, a long, drawn-out "Oh."

"Fourth point, all of the above is nonsense. I dislike it most when people call me a 'top student.'" I waved my hand and jumped off the podium.

"Fifth point," Niou added, "the podium has just been wiped clean and is now in your hands."

I spat, bent down to wring out the rag, wiped away my footprints, and then said, "But isn't it really appealing that someone is willing to listen to you?"

"Who knows?" He shrugged and didn't say anything more.

Although I can make fun of myself like this, there was a time when I was extremely averse to terms like "top student" or "model student." It was probably most severe when I was in the third grade of elementary school. At that time, Genichiro Sanada and I finally escalated from the low-level competition of the number of little stars the teacher gave us as rewards in the first grade to a more substantial competition of who got more perfect scores in math class and who got first place in dictation in English class. However, we would still compete to see who could run faster in PE class, and even shout childish things like "My grandpa/master is the best."

In elementary school, Sanada wasn't the precocious boy secretly known as "Black-faced God"—referring to his appearance. Back then, he didn't possess any "Iron Fist of Love" skills; he was just the well-behaved, obedient young master, Genichiro. As for me, although I was more serious about things due to my master's influence, deep down I was still that ramen shop girl who would drag Tezuka Kunimitsu, whom I had just met, to the beach for a whole night. Making me a role model at all times was almost torture. It seemed that ever since I insisted on being excellent, it meant I couldn't make mistakes. There were always many voices around telling me what a student like me should and shouldn't do.

I was young then and didn't know how to use my "top student" status to establish a voice. I only knew that I was annoyed by being defined because I didn't want to lose to Sanada. So I couldn't do anything outrageous that would make the teacher criticize me. In the end, I transferred my resentment to these titles.

Fortunately, I gradually learned to be smarter and grew from a passive top student to an active top student.

Or to use a phrase from Niou, he said that Yagyu and I are both top-notch fraudsters, the kind of people who can talk nonsense with a straight face and still make everyone believe it.

When I heard that, Yagyu and I replied in unison, "Thank you for the compliment."

As for Sanada, I sometimes miss that well-behaved boy, the kind who would even blush when he got angry. I didn't have any particular thoughts about him, I just felt more accomplished when I teased him like that. Now, even if I'm ahead of him on the rankings, Sanada Genichiro will just glance at his ranking with a cold face and leave. Moreover, he'd rather go to Group C at the end of the corridor to ask Yanagi Renji for the solutions to the big questions than ask me, his neighbor, for a copy of his test paper.

Wait a minute, this seems quite fulfilling.

Compared to Hyotei's perennial number one Atobe Keigo and Seigaku's former perennial number one Tezuka Kunimitsu, Rikkai's top ten in the annual rankings almost always change. But the so-called changes are just the same ten people, with who goes up and who goes down. Among the top three, the closest are naturally Sanada and me. Our names are right next to each other eight times out of ten. The other two times, it's probably Yagyu Hiroshi or Yagyu Renji, two friends with almost zero competitive spirit, who appear between us.

Rikkai University's most famous prodigy, Yukimura Seiichi, is essentially excluded from the top ranks due to his long-term hospitalizations and severe imbalance in his academic performance. Just how severe is his imbalance? Well, before each exam, Sanada would spend at least three days helping him cram his biology and chemistry notes.

However, the top scorer in the entire school's high school exams wasn't any of the people mentioned above. It was the guy who mocked me for being a "top student."

The naive me heard it from Yagyu: there really is a creature in this world who likes to manipulate his own scores in exams; his scientific name is Niou Masaharu, and he is also known as a conman.

My God, if I may, I wish for the extinction of this species.

"Do you know the reason why a nine-tailed fox can live for a thousand years?" Liu Sheng said this as he saw me praying with my hands clasped together and my eyes closed.

I opened my eyes and looked at him, then said, "I only know the principle that Confucius did not speak of strange phenomena, physical prowess, disorder, or spirits."

He paused for a moment, and then we both laughed.

With the start of the fall semester, for Rikkai University natives like myself who went straight from junior high to senior high, it also means that the Umihara Festival is coming again this year.

In fact, we always start preparing during the summer vacation. It's the largest and most formal event of the year, and it's definitely not something that can be prepared in just three weeks. Since I'm a freshman this year, I'm considered a newcomer to the senior section, and 80% of the pressure has already been taken care of by the sophomores and seniors. What's left for me are just some minor tasks.

I had just opened my lunchbox when I received the email from the student union office at noon today, and hadn't even had a chance to take a bite before being called to help. Carrying a thick stack of freshly printed invitation pages back to the external relations department, I waved to the department head, who was still on the phone with the head of a student union from another university, as I pushed open the door. He looked at me, nodded, and then returned his attention to the phone. Seeing that he was still holding half a half-eaten fried noodle bread, I, who hadn't eaten, felt a little better.

Besides liaising with student representatives and teachers from visiting schools, the External Relations Department is also responsible for arranging joint meetings between the secondary, higher, and university departments. Receiving the school board members is the responsibility of the university student council; the secondary student council doesn't have this department, so our workload has always been the lightest of the three student councils. And I actually thought that was the peak; I was so naive.

As far as I know, most schools schedule such large-scale events during the semester, or at least not at the beginning of the semester. I even went to Seigaku's cultural festival and Hyotei's school festival as a representative of Rikkai University Junior High School, both in November. Even Teiko Junior High School's Teiko Festival is in June, during the middle of the spring semester.

I've complained before about why it always has to be September; isn't November a bad month? Back then, Liu Lian'er, who was the student council secretary, told me a story in his gentle yet incredibly persuasive voice about a student council member's collective struggle that ultimately failed. The plot was dramatic, epic, and even a little touching. I must clarify that I believed this story entirely because it was told without any logical flaws, and one shouldn't expect too much from a high school student driven to irritability by tedious work.

As a result, this incident made me the laughing stock at a rooftop lunch party of Rikkai University's tennis club. It also indirectly led to the incident that year during the club's traditional challenge event, where I threw my friend, Masaharu Niou, who was laughing very happily, onto the mat in the judo classroom.

That's not the point; we'll talk about it later.

When people are so busy they can't stand seeing others idle, they can't stand seeing others doing nothing. Whether it's Yanagi Renji sitting on a bench in the open-air garden, engrossed in reading Natsume Soseki's novel, or Niou Masaharu playing Sudoku while rocking in his chair when I walk past the window of the next classroom, they've been my thorns in the side lately. Who doesn't want a lunch break? Lunch break should be for resting, not working.

"That's why I decided I definitely wouldn't join the student council in high school," Yanagi Renji said casually, but influenced by the subjective bias brought about by that story, I couldn't help but feel that what he said was actually a veiled sarcasm.

I sat down at the table, sighed softly, quickly folded the inner pages in half and put them into the prepared envelope. I glanced at the densely packed work schedule on the whiteboard and felt a more real sense of busyness than ever before.

"Hey, Okada..." the department head called me as soon as he hung up the phone.

Just as I was about to answer, the door was pushed open again, and Liu Sheng walked in with a budget sheet from the accounting department. He switched hands and threw the red bean bread from his pocket onto my lap, then handed the sheet to the department head with both hands. "I just came from the accounting department. Senior, I wanted to ask if the budget for the arranged gifts could be reduced by 10%. The school allocated less funding to the higher education department this year than last year."

The minister clearly swallowed his anger, then snatched the list, glanced at the numbers on it, and said, "The president couldn't compete with the university department for funding, and now he wants us to save money? I'm not that patient. You two must get the invitations sorted out and sent out today. I'm going to find them."

Looking at the pile of blank envelopes on the table, Liu Sheng and I exchanged a glance. He sat down next to me, took a carton of milk from his suit pocket, and then reached out and took the contents of the envelope from my hand: "Eat something first, you have class this afternoon."

I tore open the bread wrapper, took a bite, and mumbled, "Yagyu, are you Doraemon? Why do you have a four-dimensional pocket?"

"Shouldn't you just say thank you in a situation like this?" Yagyu's face was expressionless as he spoke, but you could always hear a hint of amusement in his voice.

"Okay, thank you for your good deed." I swallowed the bread in my mouth, inserted the straw to drink the milk, and shook my head because some of my hair was blocking my eyes.

He gently brushed the stray hairs from my face behind my ear, but his gaze didn't linger on me for even a second. Instead, he took out a pen from his breast pocket and began writing the mailing address on the envelope.

I instinctively touched the left earlobe where his fingers had just touched, and felt a warmth that seemed like an illusion, because normally when people touch their earlobes, they are never warm.

As time went by, the work assignments on the whiteboard were checked off one by one, but the tension of the busy people only increased.