Agrippa
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All Right! Fine! I Will Take You! – Chapter 71 – Shizuka Hiratsuka Is Too Genuine
🕑 Added 2023-03-20 00:51:55 +0000 UTCPrincipal Inoue is…
Precisely what one would expect him to be.
On the wrong side of middle-aged, hair graying and balding, with sunken cheeks and square glasses that play up to his image as a stern schoolmaster that will allow Sobu High to retain its prestige. He’s the kind of man one would choose to keep things as they are, neither to allow them to deteriorate nor to risk them in an attempt at improvement.
He’s… not a bad man. Maybe not a good one.
I wish he was a good one.
“Well?” he asks from the other side of the dark wooden table I’m sitting at, the high-backed, green leather chair not quite contrasting with his gray suit and hiding too much of the dim sky behind him.
Everything is so gray…
“I…” ‘I can explain,’ I want to say. ‘There’s nothing to explain,’ I should say. ‘This is all a misunderstanding,’ I have to tell him.
I don’t.
I don’t say anything.
My own black chair is far less ostentatious. It’s still leather, and comfortable, just in case one of the many, many rich parents whose traumatized kids attend this school would deign to visit, but there’s a clear hierarchy in furniture.
He’s the principal.
I’m the teacher about to lose her job.
“Ms. Hiratsuka, I didn’t call you here so that you would stare at your lap and stammer,” he says.
And so I raise my eyes and…
And, on top of the dark desk, a few printed pictures stand out.
Hachi entering my house with Iroha.
Hachi leaving by himself, a day later.
I have to lie. I have to say something that will explain how this is perfectly innocent and not at all what it looks like, even if it is, even if I’m sleeping with my student, my students, and…
And I don’t want to.
I don’t want to deny it. Him. Them. I don’t want to lie and say that there’s nothing going on when there is, and it is so important for all of us, but…
“I’ll leave Sobu this year,” I say. Not answering.
“You had asked to remain,” he replies without any inflection, and I could just imagine him doing the Gendou pose right now. But he doesn’t wear white gloves, and the lighting is all wrong for it.
It’s a winter’s day. Late winter, yes, but still early morning.
Still dim.
Still gray.
“I… I won’t. I’ll proceed with the transfer as planned.” Like I should have. Because it was a very bad idea to keep teaching here alone with Iroha just because I didn’t want to leave her behind after Hachi graduated. And it was even worse that I wanted to spend the next year with the two of them and help Hachi graduate, and maybe have him chase me up the stairs once more, and…
Bad idea.
So many bad ideas.
Principal Inoue looks at me. At the teacher who isn’t saying anything in her defense, and so is confessing anything he cares to accuse me of.
“There’s… There have always been concerns about how close you are to some of your students,” he says.
And I rear back.
“What?”
“Since you came here, you’ve always latched onto some of the problem children and allotted them far more time and attention than some thought proper. I remember one Haruno Yukinoshita—”
“Leave Haruno out of this,” I say.
And I’m surprised when he shuts up and looks at me with wide eyes, his pale, sunken cheeks somehow gaunter at the moment.
It takes me a moment to realize that I’m clenching my hands so hard it hurts. That they tremble.
“I wasn’t aware that the older Yukinoshita was such a sore subject,” he says, conciliatory in tone and body language, even as he pushes his chair just a tiny bit away from his desk.
From me.
“I wasn’t either. You learn something new every day.”
He arches an inquiring eyebrow.
I force myself to open my hands, and I discreetly smooth my white coat over my legs, letting it fall to my sides as I repress the urge to stand up.
“You are aware that this doesn’t make things look any better?” he finally says, forced to break the silence.
And, this time, I don’t look away.
I look past square lenses and into dark brown eyes that haven’t often met mine since he hired me and kept pushing irregular duties on me.
Irregular students.
So, my own eyes narrow.
“You know about the Service Club. That I’m the advisor,” I say.
“I do?” he half asks, eyebrows scrunching, eyes still locked on mine.
“You know what it does.”
“Some vague thing that I can hardly justify as a club worth having a budget.”
I… I look for something. Something in his eyes that shifts. That lets me see past the impregnable façade of the indifferent administrator.
Because… There are bad teachers. Plenty of them. People who clock in and then forget about their students. Who don’t care to wonder what happens to them when they graduate. Who never play favorites, not because they care about being impartial, but because they don’t care.
By that metric, most teachers are bad.
But this is the man who hired me. Who allowed this ‘vague thing’ my club is to keep having a budget. To keep existing.
So… I bet.
“Have you ever talked with the Yukinoshita family head about having a psychotherapist on the staff?” I ask.
And, suddenly, I’m not the one clenching my fists.
“Once,” he says.
And that’s answer enough.
Because there’s… a stigma. Japanese people don’t talk about mental health. Therapy is for those too weak to overcome their own issues. For crazy people. For damaged people.
The country with the third highest suicide rate in the world, and we still scoff at those who ask for help.
“And she said it was not proper,” I guess without risking too much. Because there’s a reason I latched onto Haruno and another reason why I set Hachi on Yukino, even if both reasons became something far more complicated than I ever intended. “She said it would depreciate the prestigious image of this school. She said nobody should pry into a student’s private life and that things should be taken care of within the family.”
Inoue stares at me.
I stare back.
“And so you hired me,” I say.
“So I did.”
“A teacher you knew to be problematic. Who had gotten too involved during her internship. Who had caused some parents to complain because of how much she meddled.”
“You were quite a handful.”
“And you gave that handful free rein to create a club for misfits to gather and support one another and, with time, the other students.”
He leans forward, elbows on his desk, and now he does the Gendou pose.
It’s a pity his glasses don’t glint. I guess he needs some tips from Zaimokuza.
“I may have expected you to become involved, Ms. Hiratsuka. Certainly, I expected you to go behind my back and do something outrageous from time to time. But I didn’t expect… this,” he says.
And then he stares down at the pictures a nosy, hopefully well-meaning neighbor took and sent with a concerned note to my workplace.
I don’t know whether I should praise them or punch them.
I also don’t know how to answer.
So I don’t.
Inoue… sighs.
“I have not heard anything too incriminating,” he says, lying through his teeth. “And… Are you sure you want to transfer?”
This is it.
He’s giving me an out.
And I…
I think about being happy. About allowing myself to be happy. About Haruno crying and smiling, about Hachi holding me, about Iroha…
Iroha has been abandoned for too long.
But what can I do? What should I do?
Inoue is staring at me. Just at me. Not at the pictures or… or at anything in his office with old furniture made of glass and dark wood. He’s focusing on me like he often does not, allowing me to do what I think I should rather than what I was hired to do.
And I… I don’t even know how much I’ve disappointed him or even hurt him. How much I’ve messed up his plans to have somebody do for his students what he’s been stopped from officially doing.
Because… There are bad teachers. And it seems Inoue is not one of them.
But I may be.
I was ready to leave, to go somewhere else where Yukinoshita would not loom so large when I was given the chance to. It would have hurt to leave Hachiman, Yukino, and Yui behind, but they were already on their way to something better, and I would have guided them one last time if they needed me to, even if, as a teacher, my hope was that they wouldn’t. That they would have grown enough to manage on their own.
They had. The three of them had. More than I hoped or expected.
And now that they have surpassed everything I ever wanted for them, now that they have grown…
So have I.
And that’s it, isn’t it? I am… better than I was when this whole thing started. I’ve been forced to grow as much as I wanted my students to. I’ve been dragged through highs and lows, and… and learned.
The students have become the masters.
I suppress the fleeting, entirely inappropriate smile the thought brings me, particularly when I realize how Iroha would react to being called anyone’s mistress, but… but that’s it. That’s the joy I’d given up on and that I now finally have in my reach.
So, what are my options?
Stubbornly stay. Make an issue out of this. Fight to remain teaching here despite Inoue having lost his trust in me just so I can watch over them two more years. So I can see Hachi and Iroha graduate and move on from this place before I do.
I want this. I want it so badly it hurts.
But also… I can… leave. Like they will.
Like Hachi will next year, and Iroha the one after. It would be just like graduating. Like being a Senpai from their bizarre, nonsensical cub who will move on just a bit before they do. And it would be so much easier if this chance to hide everything these two particular pictures insinuate is sincere, if Inoue really is willing to put up with me till the end of the school year and send me away without looking too closely into things he suspects but doesn’t know.
It would be easy.
But would it be right?
“Can I… think it over?” I ask. Stupidly. Like someone who thinks they have a choice. That there really is something to do but what a principal elected to maintain the status quo is offering.
He closes his eyes and leans back.
Then he slowly takes off his glasses and neatly folds them before placing them inside the breast pocket of his dark grey suit.
And then brown eyes look at me.
“What can you do but go away, Shizuka?” he asks.
And I… I swallow a lump in my throat and wet my dry lips, still too scared to outright defy him, to risk everything I already have.
“I don’t know,” I say. “That’s why I want to think.”
He chuckles, the façade breaking for a moment, and I almost join him out of sheer nerves.
“Take a personal day off. And tell me what you decide tomorrow.”
I nod, my throat still uncooperative.
And then I stand up and walk out of the too-gray room and toward…
Toward the rest of my day.
***
“Shizuka? Why, I didn’t know you’d miss me so much already,” Haruno says, her tone implying the kind of smile that I need to see right now, even if it brought me literal and figurative headaches one too many times.
And a bit of a stomach ache on Saturday.
… Damn me and my scheming lovers.
“Hey,” I tell her with a voice slightly unsteady that I know she will latch onto. “I just… I have an unexpected free day, and I was wondering if you have any free period to—”
“What happened?” she cuts me off with a cold, curt tone that is devoid of all her earlier playfulness.
And I stop, my own smile finally coming back at Haruno being… Haruno.
At least, in one of the acceptable, non-headache-inducing ways for her to be.
“I’d rather tell you in person,” I answer after enjoying the brief silence.
“And you think I’d care for my attendance record in such circumstances?”
The smile grows wider.
“Not really, no.”
There’s another pause.
“Is this a bad time to suggest a love hotel—”
“Haruno!”
“Well, yes, the plan is for you to scream my name, but don’t jump the gun—”
And I go from smiling to laughing.
And then I once again lower my car’s seat until I’m lying almost horizontally on it, staring up at the beige felt covering its roof.
It’s not gray.
Neither is my day.
Not with them in it.
