Day 103

[from I Watch You Sleeping]

Our third class of the day is math, with Sasaki-sensei. We're doing group work, which usually means pairing up with your friends and just talking for the whole fifty minutes without actually doing the work. But not in Sasaki-sensei's lessons. She's not an idiot. Instead, she puts us into groups herself.

"Shiina, Matsuhara, Minatoya, you're a group…" I smile to myself as I imagine Raiden trying to coax the answers out of a silent Aiko. "…Kurozawa, Asano, Miyazaki, you're a group…" And the smile's gone.

Once all the groups have been read out, we proceed to rearrange our desks so we're all sitting together in the right groups. Taking a cursory glance at my temporary group-mates, I ponder who got the worse deal, me or Raiden. Me and Kurozawa don't talk much, but he's a nice enough guy. Mizuki Asano, on the other hand… "Quit staring at me!" …yeah.

"I'm not staring at you," I reply calmly.

"Yes you are!" she insists.

"No I wasn't," I calmly reiterate. "I'm looking at you now, because that's the polite thing to do when talking to someone. There's a difference between looking at someone and staring at them."

"No there isn't," she says rather bluntly.

"Come on, you two," says Kurozawa, trying to keep order and get us back on track. "We should be getting on with the work."

"Whatever," says Mizuki. Mercifully, she decides not to argue any further, and we settle down to start working on the exercises.

Mizuki Asano is notorious among the entire student body for her delinquent behaviour. She's argumentative, abrasive, and violent. Even the teachers have given up trying to straighten her out, for the most part. If she walks out during a lesson, they just let her. She won't go back inside no matter what they do to try and convince her. Raiden says she reminds him of Taiga Aisaka from Toradora, only taller and less clumsy. I've never watched the show myself, so I can't say whether that's an accurate comparison or not. Probably, though. Raiden knows his stuff.

We begin working our way through the questions. Kurozawa's fairly smart, so we burn through them pretty quickly… or at least we would, if Mizuki didn't keep insisting that we stop and explain things to her. She doesn't seem to be the brightest when it comes to math. I'm guessing all those lessons she misses aren't helping matters. How the hell she got through the entrance exams, I have no idea. Maybe she just beat the crap outta the examiners until they agreed to give her a passing grade.

Anyway, there's one question in particular that seems to have her especially stumped. "How the hell have you two got the right answer for this one?" she asks, confused. "The question doesn't make any sense!"

Once again, Kurozawa steps in to try and defuse her temper. "Okay, calm down a moment, Asano," he says. "Which part of the question are you stuck on?"

Mizuki throws her hands up in exasperation, something I'm sure her teachers feel like doing on a regular basis. "I dunno… all of it!" she snaps.

"Okay, well, it's pretty easy if you look at it like this…" Kurozawa proceeds to take Mizuki through the problem, step-by-step. I have to admit, I barely understand this stuff myself. It's pretty advanced, and there's a ton of different formulas and rules you have to remember. I'm managing to cope with it, just about, but Mizuki clearly isn't.

"…and so, dy/dx=(6x²+12)/4y," says Kurozawa, jotting down the final answer underneath the rest of his marking. "Do you get it now?"

Mizuki just stares at him, her expression an intriguing mix of glazed incomprehension and pure frustration. "It still doesn't make any fucking sense!" she exclaims.

"Maybe it would make more sense if you stopped cutting classes and actually attended your lessons."

The words are out of my mouth before I can stop myself. Mizuki instantly leaps from her seat, slamming her palms down onto the desk, glaring down at my with a half-furious, half-wounded expression.

"Sit down, please, Asano," says Sasaki-sensei, vainly trying to avert disaster.

"You can't judge me, Miyazaki!" shouts Mizuki. The whole class has fallen silent by now, their attention drawn to Mizuki's latest outburst, torn between looking at either me or her.

"Perhaps you'd like to move to a different group, Asano?" suggests Sasaki-sensei. Mizuki's response is to angrily snatch up her back and start packing up her things. I fully expect her to storm right out of the classroom, as she usually does, but instead she simply moves over to the nearest group, which happens to be Raiden's, and violently pulls back his chair with him still in it.

"Get up," Mizuki snarls. Raiden promptly obliges and vacates his seat, which Mizuki then sits down in. Raiden, in turn, heard over to our table and sits down in the seat that Mizuki had just left.

I hope Raiden doesn't start talking about his search for the second photography club member in front of Kurozawa. I don't want a virtual stranger knowing about the stalker, or the lengths we're going to to track them down. Thankfully - or not - he looks like he has other things he wants to talk about. He's wearing that stupid grin he always puts on right before he says something "smart".

"What was that all about?" he asks, turning to me, the amusement clear as day on his face. "'You can't judge me, Miyazaki!'"

"I told her that if she stopped cutting classes, she might actually learn something," I reply simply.

"And you have a point," Kurozawa chimes in. "There's no point in complaining that you don't understand something if you're not willing to put the effort in."

Raiden ignores Kurozawa's perfectly valid statement and continues talking to me. "I bet, secretly, she likes you," he remarks.

I roll my eyes. Honestly, I should've seen this coming. "Oh don't start with the whole "tsundere" thing, Raiden," I say. "I told you, tsunderes only exist in anime and manga. If a girl in real life is mean to you, it's because she hates you, or because she's a dick, not because she loves you."

"I dunno about being a dick," remarks Raiden, "but she totally wants your dick."

"What was that about penises, Shiina?"

Suddenly Sasaki-sensei is standing right next to our table. The entire class falls silent again as she speaks up, and as she mentions Raiden's name, they all turn to look at him. Then, one by one, the entire classroom bursts out laughing, myself included.

Raiden simply brushes it off without a care. "Well, you see, Sasaki-sensei, I was just telling Kentaro-" Oh great, now he's done it.

"If you boys want to compare sizes, I suggest you do it in the boys' toilets during lunch break, not during my lesson, when you should be working," says Sasaki-sensei. This time neither I nor Kurozawa join in, my face growing bright red as his grows pale.

"Sorry, Sasaki-sensei," says Raiden.

"Don't do it again, Shiina," says Sasaki-sensei. With her punishments meted out, she turns her attention back to the rest of her class and sets about restoring order. "Alright, everyone, show's over, get back to work." Within moments, the classroom has settled back down again, and everyone gets back on with their work as though nothing had happened. Raiden, too, silently carries on with the exercises, his pen having sat idly in his hand the whole time he's been at our table.

This whole incident reminds me why Sasaki-sensei is such a popular teacher. She's not exactly strict, but she doesn't tolerate any nonsense. If you push her, she'll push right back. And instead of giving you a detention for stepping out of line, she'll just call you out on it and embarrass you in front of the whole class. Public humiliation is a surprisingly powerful deterrent. She wasn't really telling Raiden off for… comparing sizes or whatever… she was telling him off for talking and not doing the work. She was probably listening to our entire conversation, waiting for the right moment to jump in to cause maximum embarrassment. Sasaki-sensei's friendly, laid-back, and sometimes eccentric approach to both teaching and discipline means that pretty much all of her students are on good terms with her.

With Mizuki having moved to a different table, the rest of the lesson passes uneventfully, as does the one after it. Before I know it, the bell has gone to signal the start of lunch. As usual, I pack up my things and prepare to leave the classroom.

"We heading to the cafeteria as usual?" asks Raiden, as he picks up his bag.

"Of course," I reply, as I pick up my own. I always eat lunch in the cafeteria with Raiden. No point in changing that just because of the stalker. Except… they'll be there, won't they? They'll be expecting me, surely. Well… at least Raiden will be there with me.