Editing Maria-sama ga Miteru:Volume32 Chapter2 1 (section)

===<noinclude>Onee-sama's Racket. </noinclude>Part 1.===

The wooden spoon that comes with the ice-cream has a shape like a tennis racket.

So too the magnifying glass that her grandmother uses to read the newspaper, the ladle used for serving rice and the small hand-mirror she carries in a pouch. She hadn't been conscious of it until just now, but they all had the same basic shape as a racket.

The screen door was like the strings of the racket. So too was the lattice over her neighbor's ventilation ducts. Now she had moved on to noticing racket strings.

(Is this some kind of illness?)

Flopping down over her desk, Katsura sighed softly.

Some time ago she had been cleaning this very classroom. At that time, despite the vast differences in shape and materials, she had thought that the plastic dustpan resembled a tennis racket. And now this problem seemed terminal. 

"What's wrong, Katsura-san?"

She raised her head to see who had called out to her and Toudou Shimako-san was standing in front of the lockers at the rear of the classroom, looking her way.

"What do you mean?"

"Are you feeling unwell?"

Shimako-san had a slightly anxious expression. She was still a beautiful person no matter what expression she had on her face, but Katsura still felt sorry for causing her to worry.

"Ahh, no, I'm fine."

Hastily shaking her head, she smiled to show she was well. Her illness may have been terminal, but it was a problem with her mind not her body. So even if she was taken to the sick bay, she didn't think they would cure her.

"Shimako-san, have you been there all along?"

Because there was practice for tomorrow's graduation ceremony and other such things, afternoon classes were called off. Now, after lunch, they were the only two that remained in the classroom – and until just recently Katsura had thought that she was the only one. The third years may have been having private farewell parties in their classrooms but the first and second years were expected to go home immediately or, if they had a reason to stay, to move directly to their destination.

"All along? Umm, no? I had just come from the staff room and stopped in here to pick up some of my things."

Shimako-san opened her locker and took out her coat.

"Are you going to the Rose Mansion?"

"Yeah. There's some odd-jobs to be done."

She'd just been at the staff room and was now going to the Rose Mansion. As you would expect, Rosa Gigantea was busy.

"As for me,"

She hadn't been asked, but Katsura opened her mouth.

"I'd arranged to go home together with my onee-sama. But it seems like her class is doing something, so I'm waiting until they're done."

She hadn't been challenged by Shimako-san, but it sort of felt that way. She wanted to explain that she had a reason for staying back, and wasn't just aimlessly loitering.

But Shimako-san hadn't really been interested in finding out if her classmate had a reason for being in the classroom, and had simply wanted to get something from her locker.

"Oh, really. That's good."

Shimako-san probably thought that going home together with your onee-sama would be 'good.' But for Katsura, she couldn't think about it as something 'good.'

"Well, I think I'll head over to the third year classrooms and see if I can find my onee-sama."

Katsura stood up, and left the room together with Shimako-san. In the hallway they bid each other farewell with 'Gokigenyou' and went left and right, respectively.

Katsura was thinking as she walked along.

She wondered what she would do when she got there. If she arrived while her onee-sama still had things to do, she would have to wait there. Or her onee-sama would have to hurry-up to accommodate her. That would be no good. She didn't want to cause a fuss now that it was right at the very end.

(But will she really be in her classroom?)

Suddenly, she stopped walking.

A very dangerous thought had just entered into her head.

(What am I thinking?)

If her onee-sama wasn't in the classroom, just where could she be, and what could she be doing?

(And who with?)

Stop it, stop it. If she kept thinking about that, her racket illness would worsen.

But would she be able to spontaneously recover from this illness if she went about her life as though she saw nothing, heard nothing and thought nothing?