Editing Maria-sama ga Miteru:Volume14 Chapter4 1 (section)

===<noinclude>Finding Me. </noinclude>Part 1===

"So what happened then?"

Yuuki asked, spinning around on his chair.

"Not much."

Yumi answered, as she leaned back on her brother's bed and tossed a cushion in the air.

"We went to the old greenhouse and they took photos of me with a Rosa Chinensis bud. They're calling it the "Rose Name Series.""

A recent shot of a Rose family member from a Takeshima Tsutako photo-shoot and a mini-interview. Mami-san was jumping for joy as she paid for the pastries.

"Is it okay for you to be doing that on your own?"

Her little brother asked as he tossed the towel he'd dried his hair with over the bed's headboard. Yumi hastily dodged out of the way.

"I got permission from Sachiko-sama. I only co-operated with the newspaper club because she said okay. The Yamayurikai's busy too, so it's a pain if the newspaper club follows us around looking for something to write about. Since they're calling it a series, we'll be able to keep them quiet for a little while with just a photo and a short comment."

Still, Rosa Chinensis was a perennial, so they could find one blooming in the greenhouse at any time, but what about Rosa Foetida and Rosa Gigantea? Well, as long as they had the name of one of the Roses in the title, the newspaper club probably didn't care about the actual flower.

"Hmm. Still, since we're both so busy we don't get to talk that much. Sounds like there's lots going on at your school too, Yumi."

"Well, yeah."

Yumi adjusted her pajama trousers around the knee and sat down cross-legged. 

She longed for a quiet and peaceful school life, but she couldn't really spend much time in blissful ignorance. She was Rosa Chinensis en bouton after all.

Yuuki was just as busy, or probably even more so, since he'd been getting home after 7 or 8 at night for a while now. The Hanadera Academy's school festival was next weekend.

The upshot of this was that they'd been having dinner separately and Yuuki was so tired that Yumi would regularly find him lying down in bed when she thought he'd gone for a bath. 

Since, unusually, he got home before 7pm today, the entire family had had dinner together for the first time in a while. It really had been a long time since they'd chatted like this before bed.

"By the way, what about Alice? What happened after that?"

Yumi asked the question that had been nagging at her.

"What do you mean?"

"That thing before, where it was like he was being haunted …. what was it, shivers?"

That was it. The victim of "something akin to a haunting but it's probably actually a human" was Arisugawa Kintarou-kun, also known as Alice.

"Ah. Alice has been fine since then."

"''Alice'' has?"

So it sounded like someone other than Alice hadn't been fine. Her curiosity piqued, Yumi questioned him further.

"Kobayashi's been acting kinda strange."

Was the response she got.

"Does Kobayashi-kun have a bad feeling like he's being haunted by something too?"

"No, it's the opposite. He seems to be walking around in an inexplicably good mood."

Yuuki shrugged.

"A good mood?"

"He says someone's got a crush on him, so he's on cloud nine."

What was that all about? Yumi shrugged. Well, Kobayashi-kun was the sort of person who could get a bit carried away.

"Alice is one thing, but I think Kobayashi has the completely wrong impression. He hasn't noticed it himself, but he's picked up Alice's shadow."

Apparently one or two days after Alice had said something about his bad feeling, Kobayashi-kun had happily announced, "Me too."

"But one's a bad feeling and the other a good feeling. They're the complete opposite."

"Not necessarily. They both involve someone harboring a strong emotion towards them, so in that sense it's the same. Depending on how they interpret that, they could have either a bad feeling or a good feeling, don't you think?"

"I see."

That was another way of looking at it.

Someone was watching them.

Whether they took it as a friendly gaze or a hostile gaze would vastly alter their impression of the onlooker.

"Ah, right."

Yuuki suddenly changed the topic, as though he'd just remembered something.

"Are any of the Roses afraid of heights?"

"Why?"

"Everyone sort of got carried away and they've made enormous towers."

"Towers?"

"Yeah. For the Roses to judge from."

"Ah – "

Yumi clasped her hands together.

That's right, Sachiko-sama and the other Roses had been asked to be judges and presenters at Hanadera Academy's school festival. From memory, it was called the "Hanadera War" or something.

"It's tall, huh."

"Well … yeah."

Yuuki answered somewhat reluctantly.

He said that while they were building it, they kept going, "More, more," and things escalated so it was about 1.5 times larger than the original blueprint.

According to Yuuki, "When building this sort of thing, guys tend to be generous." But then he said, "Their eyes were sparkling, like little kids playing with building blocks." Boys were hard to understand.

"If there's someone that can't handle heights, we'll have to change the towers. But in that case, the sooner you let me know the better."

"Alright. I'll ask around."

Having agreed to this, Yumi rose from her younger brother's bed.

As she left the room, Yumi turned around to say goodnight but Yuuki was already nodding off in his chair.