Book Girl and the Corrupted Angel Read Free Page A

room, where a boy I didn’t recognize stood in front of the door.
    He was about my height. He had bright, colorless hair, was thin, and wore glasses—a perfectly ordinary student with no distinguishing features.
    He kept his face down and glided past me like a breeze.
    Huh? Didn’t that guy have some reason for being at the music room…?
    When I opened the door, I saw Mr. Mariya sitting on a fold-up chair, drinking chai. He had a finger pressed to his lip, as if he was thinking about something, and the sight of him spacing out unguardedly called to mind a certain braided book girl, and I smirked. A heavy-looking watch glinted at his wrist.
    “Hmm? By yourself, Inoue? Where’s Nanase?”
    “She said she had to take care of something and was going to be late.”
    “Ah, good. I thought I might have tormented her a little too much yesterday, and she’d run away on me. It was a chilling thought.”
    “If you realize what you’re doing, why don’t you take some responsibility?”
    “Oh, but her reactions are so much fun I can’t help myself.”
    He grinned at me, his eyes seeming to declare, “It’s a secret.”
    Ever since the day before, Mr. Mariya had been giving me that same sort of familiar look, as if he was a kindly older brother. Whenever he did, it made my chest squirm a little.
    “I heard that you won a competition abroad, and people used to call you a genius.”
    “Ha-ha, it’s been said, yes.”
    Mister Mariya laughed lightly.
    His smile was so natural I couldn’t stop myself from asking, “Why didn’t you go professional?”
    The moment it was said, a thorn shot through my heart. As I waited for his answer, I held my breath completely in earnest.
    Because I had once been called a genius, too.
    It was in the spring of my third year that I, an ordinary middle schooler, had been swallowed up by a gigantic wave.
    At fourteen years old, I won the new author’s prize of a literary magazine that I’d entered on a whim, their youngest winner ever, and because my pen name was Miu Inoue—a girl’s name—I was crowned with the exaggerated title of a mysterious genius in the body of a masked, young female author, and I became famous throughout the country.
    Now that more than two years had gone by, I was spending my days peaceably again. I’d even made friends and learned how to laugh.
    How had it been for Mr. Mariya?
    He’d been hailed as a genius by everyone around him and had great things expected of his future, so why had he become a teacher?
    What did he think about it all now?
    Through the sweet-smelling steam, Mr. Mariya’s lips bent into a soft smile.
    “I wanted the time I spent at leisure with the person I loved to be more important than anything. Florid strangers, gut-wrenching practices, intense schedules—they weren’t for me.”
    His voice was clear and unwavering.
    His eyes narrowed in a gentle smile like gooey, golden honey, and he raised his paper cup as if in a toast.
    “So I can affirm that I have no regrets about my decision. So long as I have a cup of chai, life is wonderful, and an ordinary life beats anything else.”
    His words and his voice penetrated my heart like beams of light, and like the sweet chai that gave off the aroma of cinnamon, they seeped slowly and warmly into every corner of my body, leaving a sharp excitement behind.
    I couldn’t take my eyes from Mr. Mariya’s smile.
    Man, that would be great.
    Someday, I wanted to be able to validate my own life like he had.
    I wanted to spend every day in easy normalcy while cherishing the gentleness of the ordinary.
    Mr. Mariya, who I’d only thought of as a weirdo, seemed like a very broad-minded, generous person.
    Finally Kotobuki appeared, out of breath.
    “Hello, Nanase. You were so eager to see me that you rushed that much to get here?”
    “N-no, I—”
    “Oh no, is that a worm?”
    “Eek!”
    “Kotobuki, worms are hibernating right now.”
    “Er…shut up, Inoue!”
    Mr. Mariya was teasing Kotobuki the