The Wavering of Haruhi Suzumiya Read Free

unpleasantly, and Kunikida nodded with a self-satisfied smile, which grated on me, but I couldn’t find a retort. It wasn’t that I was afraid I’d be spotted by somebody inconvenient if we started hitting on girls, it was just, uh… just because.
    “Fine by me. That’s just the kind of guy you are. No, don’t bother with excuses. I guess that’s friendship for you.”
    Taniguchi sighed dramatically, and Kunikida spoke up to mollify him.
    “Actually, Taniguchi—I think I’ll pass on the girls too. Sorry, but if you have any luck on your own, could you introduce her friend to me? That’s friendship for you, after all,” he said, sidestepping the issue. “See you later, okay?”
    Kunikida walked briskly away. As Taniguchi stood there staring like an idiot, I decided to follow Kunikida’s example.
    “See you later, Taniguchi. You can tell me tonight about your success rate—that is, if you succeed at all.”
    So, where to go next?
    If I went back to the clubroom, there’d either be nobody there or I would bump into Haruhi, and if we wound up walking around the school together, no doubt she would do something insane that would destroy my reputation, so my feet naturally took me in another direction. If she had kept conducting her PRcampaign at the front gate in that bunny girl outfit, someone might have stopped her by now, and she could well be sulking all alone in the clubroom. Please, just let me do something else today! My mom and sister were coming the next day, and I could just imagine Haruhi crashing the proceedings.
    I took another look at the program. There wasn’t much of interest. I wasn’t interested in the results of the school survey, nor did I have any intention of spending time on ridiculous displays about things like research into the distribution of local dandelion varieties. I’d well and truly had my fill of the kinds of movies each grade seemed to have made one or two of, and I did not care about amateurish art displays or cardboard labyrinths. Was there any point in a handball tournament against other schools’ teams? Only our homeroom teacher, Okabe, seemed to be excited about that.
    “The best thing for killing time would be…”
    My eyes lit upon it. The sole event with any kind of ambition to it—they’d probably been preparing for it more than any other group. Now that I thought about it, I’d recently heard the trumpets blaring away late into the night.
    “The orchestra concert it is, then.”
    I checked the pamphlet again. Unfortunately they wouldn’t be performing until the next day. Lots of groups seemed to have signed up to use the auditorium. The drama club and the chorus club were the next day too. Today, the space was booked up by—
    “The pop music club and other registered bands, eh?”
    It was pretty standard for a school festival, and although it would probably be mostly cover bands, taking in some live music isn’t a bad thing once in a while. They had probably put in a hundred times the effort and enthusiasm that I’d put into making that movie. I’ll go listen to the results of their labor and just kind of space out, I thought. At the very least, I’d be able to put the terrible film I’d made out of my mind.
    “A man needs time to himself sometimes.”
    So I told myself, having no idea that my notions were about to be blown to smithereens.
    I was naive—I thought there were limits in this world. Even though I knew there was a being who could ignore such limits as she pleased, I’d somehow forgotten that. Despite the maelstrom of chaos I’d experienced just a few days previous, I suppose this was what the limits of the common-sense man were. The extraordinary events I was plunged into showed me my own shallowness. I’d like to leave this as a lesson to future generations. Let’s not worry about whether or not such lessons would be taken seriously.
    The auditorium doors were wide open, and from within boomed a terrific racket, as though the god of