Chapter 6: Fish, Prawns and a Squid - Part 1
PE class ended up being cancelled due to heavy rain outside.
We ended up just having a free period instead, and most students just ended up doing nothing in the class. I spent the entire time reading through as much of To Kill a Mockingbird as I could; I managed to read over a quarter of the small novella.
Fujiharu was relatively quiet throughout the period—it seemed she had some important work to do.
The bell rang for the end of the day, and all the students quickly rushed out the door. The substitute teacher didn't seem to have much authority over them, so it was basically anarchy. I stayed in my seat since I didn't have anything to attend to after school. I was planning on just reading for a few more hours before I made my way back to the dorms. Fujiharu got up from her seat.
"See you tomorrow, Mizuhara!"
"Bye."
A few minutes later, the classroom was completely silent. The substitute teacher cleared her items off the desk and also left the class. The room was completely empty, aside from me.
Ah, how relaxing.
I picked up To Kill a Mockingbird and consumed its literary content for about two hours or so. I silently read through the pages as the bright sun shined through the windows. As I finally reached the middle of the book, I placed it down and looked out the window down at the courtyard.
I should probably get going.
Almost two hours after all the other students had already left, I got out of my seat and placed my belongings into my bag and made my way toward the lockers. After walking through the empty hallways of the prestigious school, I reached the area where my locker was. For some reason, there was a distinct smell of seafood.
Did someone have raw fish for lunch?
As I walked closer to my locker, I finally realised what had happened.
My lock had been cut, and my locker had been filled with raw seafood. On top of some of my workbooks lay slices of fish, barely-defrosted prawns and a single dead squid. I could tell that the juices and smell had begun seeping through my locker.
Oh my.
I thought about who would do this. It was possible that one of the boys decided to harass me as a result of seeing me hanging out with Fujiharu.
It didn't really matter.
There was a security camera in the area, so whoever did it would be easily caught... or so I thought.
I looked at the security camera and noticed that it had been covered by some sort of spray paint. It looked like there was a black liquid that had hardened and begun dripping before solidifying.
It seemed the perpetrator knew that there was a security camera there.
What a hassle...
I walked back over to my locker and observed the contents. Luckily, I held most of my belongings in my bag, so there wasn't much in my locker that could be destroyed. The main annoyance was the smell.
However, the perpetrator would likely escape due to the vandalised security camera.
The only possible time that they could have done this was between the end of school and the time I left the classroom. Which meant the seafood had only been sitting in there for two hours at most.
I considered reporting the incident, but it would likely be to no avail. With no evidence, the perpetrator wouldn't be able to be found, and there wouldn't be any point in reporting it.
I looked at the raw seafood in my locker and thought about it for a little.
I guess I'll take this into my own hands.
I pulled a paperclip out of my pencil case and bent it so that it was basically a straight wire. Every lock on the lockers had a small keyhole in case of emergencies. however, as a result, you would also be able to pick them if you knew how.
I picked the lock on the locker to my right. After a bit of fiddling, I decided that I'd need another wire. I opened my pencil case again and grabbed another paperclip. A few moments later, I managed to pick the lock, and it popped off.
I grabbed all of the seafood and dropped it all into the locker I had just opened. It was a really messy locker with paper and books everywhere. The seafood fit right in with the other random junk that was inside. After doing so, I grabbed my personal lock, which was cut, and placed it into the little hole where their lock would've gone.
This person was not going to be having a good day tomorrow.
My goal was to make it look as if the perpetrator had accidentally placed the seafood into the wrong locker.
It was pretty obvious that it was a targeted attack since they even brought bolt-cutters with them. As a result, they were likely going to be quite unsatisfied if they accidentally dumped the seafood into the wrong locker.
In doing so, I would be able to lure them out. I assumed that they'd want to get me again tomorrow time, so I'd simply sit and wait for them to act.
The cleaners' storeroom was very close by. Since the security camera was covered, I decided to pick the lock to the storeroom and grab some odour remover and other cleaning equipment in order to get the smell out of my locker as much as possible. I also dumped all of the belongings that were in my locker into the bin. It was only a few cheap workbooks that I wasn't going to use anyways.
After that, I returned all the equipment and closed my locker with my neighbour's lock.
With all that I'd done, it was quite convincing that the perpetrator would think that they harassed the wrong person's locker.
Now my preparations were set.
After setting up the trap, I made my way over to the toilets to wash my hands. The smell of the rotting seafood was beginning to stick to me, which was annoying.
Ah, I wonder who did this?
Chapter 7: Fish, Prawns and a Squid - Part 2
Back in the dorms, I took a pretty long shower.
**
The next day, I arrived at school early as usual. As I entered the cold, quiet classroom, I noticed that someone was already seated.
"Hey, Mizuhara!"
The happy-go-lucky, carefree girl greeted me from her seat.
"Hi, Fujiharu."
I wasn't really expecting her to be here already. I guess she noticed my daily schedule and decided to match me by arriving early as well. It was getting much more convincing that she was, in fact, the 'seatmate bully' that some people call her. There was no way that this could have been a coincidence.
Suddenly, she grabbed a book out of her bag.
"You know, since you were reading it, I thought it'd be interesting."
Turns out she also had a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird; not only that, judging by the appearance of the book, it was definitely brand new. It wasn't a library copy or an old copy; she likely went out and bought it a little while ago from a bookstore.
"Ah."
"Hehe, aren't we matching now?"
"I guess."
I took my seat beside her and placed my bag on the floor. I grabbed my copy of To Kill a Mockingbird and began reading it. I had done a significant amount of reading the previous night, so I was only several pages from the end. When I flipped to the page that I had left off, Fujiharu glanced at me with a perplexed look.
"You're already that far in?"
"Yeah, I did some reading last night."
As if taking it as a challenge, she quickly flipped open her copy and began quickly reading it. She seemed to have quieted down as a result, so I wasn't too fussed.
I brought the book up to my eyes and began reading through the final few pages. The father-daughter relationship between Scout and Atticus was just reaching its narrative conclusion, and all the loose ends were being tied up.
There were still around twenty minutes before more students generally arrived. In that time, I finished the book and placed it down on the table in front of me.
Fujiharu looked over.
"You're done already...?"
"Yeah."
"Ah... but I've just started."
"That's fine, have fun reading."
"N-no... that's not wh..." her words trailed off.
I wasn't dense enough to be unable to tell what was going on. However, I still couldn't decipher the true intentions behind all of her answers. It just didn't seem to make sense. Was everything coincidental? Was she deliberately trying to make me fall for her?
Well, it didn't really matter that much.
Class doesn't start for another 25 minutes. In that time, I decided to go to the library and borrow another book. As I got up from my chair, I noticed that Fujiharu was still avidly reading the novella. I made my way out of the classroom and over to the school library.
As I entered the large haven of literature, I looked around and contemplated what I was going to read next. I decided to make my way over to the contemporary section and find another novel. I quite liked mystery novels, so I looked through that section. After a few moments, a novel caught my eye. It was Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie. It was another relatively old novel, but it seemed to be quite interesting.
After flipping through the first pages, I took it up to the counter and passed it to the librarian.
The librarian scanned the books and my library card. I returned To Kill a Mockingbird and made my way back outside.
As I walked back into the classroom, I noticed that several other students had also entered. Fujiharu was still quietly reading To Kill a Mockingbird, and I took my seat next to her. There were still a few more minutes until class began, so I decided to read through the first few pages of my new novel.
A few minutes later, I looked up at the teacher, who was fiddling with some television cables. Apparently, she was trying to connect her laptop to the TV, but it wasn't working. A few students helped her, and before long, the television lit up with the contents of the lesson.
I looked over at Fujiharu, who was still reading the novella even though the class had started.
It seemed she was trying really hard.
"...the helper t-cell then activates the naive b-cells which undergo clonal expansion. After that, the b plasma-cells produce antibodies which bind to the pathogen..."
As usual, the lesson was relatively uninteresting. It wasn't really anything I hadn't learnt before, and a few days prior, when I was completing the homework, I managed to learn everything she was teaching right now anyways.
I decided to just sit back in my seat and listen to the lesson. I looked around me at the students who were frantically taking down notes, with some scribbling down every word the teacher was saying, to others who were busy choosing which colour of pen to use.
I wonder if life was more fun for them.
Obviously, nobody liked to be under stress. But maybe something even worse than stress was boredom.
The class went by without much hassle, and after setting us some work to do, the teacher then moved on to the next lesson. Turns out the next lesson was chemistry.
"Alright, everyone, did anyone struggle with the homework I set yesterday?"
There was a uniform answer of yes.
It seemed that the homework last night must have been quite hard—I didn't have much issue with it last night, but I guess I mustn't have found it as difficult as the others.
The teacher sighed and pulled up a digital copy of the homework on the television.
"...in the redox reaction, you have to balance the charges on both sides of the equation..."
As she explained the answers to the homework, I noticed that Fujiharu was still fully concentrating on reading To Kill a Mockingbird. Her eyes were glued to the pages like they were gospel, and page after page, she read through them without any break.
Honestly, I couldn't understand her.
I remembered that I needed to tell her something.
"Fujiharu, is it fine if we postpone the visit to the cafe? I have something I have to deal with after school today."
"Huh?"
Gifts
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