333 Chapter six, 2017, friends from far: 1 (1/2)
There was, Yukio decided for himself, a certain perverted satisfaction in watching Himekaizen descending to hell while he was doing the watching from the outside.
He never told Kyoko. Even lovers held secrets from each other. Total honesty hurt more than it provided. In her case doubly so since her best friend, and his, both were stuck in that hellhole. She'd be angry with him for being so callous about what Kuri had to live through, and she'd be aghast he held the same attitude towards Urufu's fate.
Thing was, Yukio couldn't care any longer. No matter what atrocities the madman playing at being principal threw after their best friends, it didn't even come close to what they inflicted on each other.
This was the reversal of his and Kyoko's drawn out shyness from last summer, one that bordered on idiocy. One that kept them from becoming a couple for a full two months during which they each knew their feelings were mutual, and still none of them made a move.
In Urufu's and Kuri's case it was a shared love they both decided to destroy, and in doing so they kept hurting each other and those closest to them. In the end Yukio grew sick of watching the horror show.
He'd been on the verge of cutting contact with his best friend when suddenly the lunatic five from Sweden arrived and made everything interesting again. Ai's big brother Jun who chased after skirt a continent away, and the love chain trio. The chased after skirt was here as well, and despite being a bubbly ball of never ending happy energy Jenny-sempai was by a wide margin the most sane of the bunch.
Secretly Yukio doubted if the honorific 'sempai' should be applied to the insane, but they were fun to watch, and something in how they talked and reacted made Yukio suspect that each of them would easily have made it into a prestigious university had they been Tokyoites.
The cut-off was four point three for my year, Urufu had once told him. A high school where the weakest admitted student averaged above four on a scale from one to five was scary. With perfect grades when he graduated, Urufu had merely been one of almost half a dozen in his class, and classes were apparently smaller in Sweden than in Japan.
Scariest of all, while Yukio could accept that Urufu's English was better than Jeniferu-chan's, despite her being from the US, that both Jenny-sempai and Alexanderu-sempai matched her was beyond the pale. English was still a foreign language in Sweden, just as it was in Japan.
At the moment he tested his own English out.
”Surprisingly good for a Japanese,” Rika-sempai commented, as she had done several times before. Not only to him, but to just about every junior in the club.
”I had a good teacher,” Yukio said and turned to Alexanderu-sempai to continue the conversation Rika-sempai had just interrupted.
”It was fun, and very cool,” Alexanderu-sempai said, but Yukio felt the graduate had his attention fixed on the girl he was infatuated with.
'Why don't you just move on. She rejected you.' But Yukio suspected it wasn't all that easy.
They stood waiting for the water bus to arrive and take most of the club and the lunatic five to the beach out in the Tokyo bay. With finals looming closer this was probably the last chance they had to spend time together for two weeks.
”So,” Yukio started, ”hot springs in this weather made sense after all?”