Durarara!!, Vol. 2 (novel) Read Free Page B

after school, carrying out their class duties. As she walked the empty halls, Anri was suddenly taken with a feeling of incredible loss.
    She was trapped in her own naive thoughts about her existence.
    At the start of her adolescence, the usual time for this soul-searching, Mika’s presence had meant she didn’t need to worry about this.
    I don’t understand.
    Perhaps she was actually completely fulfilled at this moment, and the anxiety was nothing but an illusion. But there was no way for her to be sure of this.
    I don’t even know what I should want…
    “What’s up, Sonohara? You haven’t left yet?”
    The voice caught her off guard as she wandered along the hall. Anri tensed.
    “Ah…”
    “Why are you so surprised?”
    She turned around and saw an imposing-looking teacher in a suit. She remembered that he was the teacher for Class 1-C, but his name didn’t pop into her head immediately. Yet that wasn’t for the lack of an impression.
    “What’s wrong? Hmm? Not feeling well? Need me to escort you to the nurse’s office?”
    His greedy gaze locked onto Anri’s body. That unpleasant stare was extremely familiar to her. Perhaps that was why her mind actively resisted remembering his name.
    “N-no, I’ll be fine.”
    “You sure?”
    At first, she had thought it was just her usual persecution complex speaking.
    “Need me to escort you home?”
    “Ha…ha-ha…”
    “I’m only kidding, of course…ha-ha.”
    She tried to brush his comment past with a vague smile and laugh, but Anri knew that the teacher wasn’t joking around—he was 80 percent serious about that. At this point in time, Anri was perfectly aware of the meaning of the gazes he was giving her.
    “He’s been with several female students and tries to use that fact to keep them close after graduation.”
    “He harasses them, then threatens them to keep them quiet.”
    “I heard he uses their grades to pressure them into sleeping with him.”
    The rumors were fairly typical, but they swirled around him, and his atypical looks (for a teacher) helped burn the image into her head.
    She started hearing the stories soon after she joined the school, andthey said that multiple girls had suffered nearly indecent behavior at his hands. For that reason, most of the female students kept an eye out for him around the school.
    But Anri did not treat this teacher any different from the others. She’d never met any girls who had been his victims. To her, it seemed like a different kind of predictable behavior: the teacher with the distinct looks who served as a convenient scapegoat for school frustrations, a “sacrifice” who would bear the unfair brunt of the girls’ unhappiness.
    So Anri neither avoided his presence nor sought to get in his good graces. She simply treated him as any other teacher while in the process of carrying out her class representative duties.
    But toward the end of the second semester, the girls around her—more than strangers, less than friends—began to butt into Anri’s business with warnings.
    “I think he’s got his eye on you, Sonohara.”
    “Be careful. If you keep sucking up to him, he’ll get the wrong idea.”
    Not that I was sucking up to him…
    “I’m saying that the fact you’re not ignoring him completely means he interprets that as sucking up! See how all of the girls ignore him? You’re the only one who talks to him normally, so he sees that as his opening.”
    “The way he looks at you, it’s just wrong.”
    But still, she thought that was just everyone else getting the wrong idea. One day, even the increasingly distant Mika said,
“Anri, you should be careful around him. The way he looks at you, it’s not love, it’s more like overflowing lust.”
    At that point, Anri finally understood the gravity of her situation. Mika’s words carried far more weight than those of a hundred acquaintances, and that trust was still strong, even now that they had drifted apart.
    All I want is to live