Maria-sama ga Miteru:Volume32 Chapter3 4

Me and the Interviewer. Part 4.

"How did it come to this?"

Sitting on a chair in the clubroom, Minako looked at the two people in front of her.

"What do you mean, this?"

One of the two was Sachiko-san, who had accompanied her here.

"Didn't Sachiko tell you? That we wanted to speak to you?"

The other one you could call Sachiko-san's partner in crime, Hasekura Rei-san. Rosa Foetida.

The Red and Yellow Roses were seated on the other side of the desk to Minako, and looking at her with composed expressions. Usually, the innermost chair was the seat of honor, but her two guests stubbornly refused to move from their positions. Encamped by the door, they probably intended to block any attempt Minako might make to flee.

"Well, she definitely said that. Although I didn't hear anything about you lying in wait for me, Rei-san."

"Oh, I must have forgotten to mention that Rei had gone on ahead of me. We thought you might be suspicious if we both showed up, so we thought one of us should go and bring you here. That's all."

"Go and bring me here?"

So their target was the newspaper club's clubroom from the outset, and their prior conversation had just been to draw her here.

They'd caught her unprepared.

Minako had been completely taken in by Sachiko-san's meek appearance. Ahh, she'd been completely blinded by her desire for a scoop, and was now left looking foolish.

But, still, who could have imagined that Rei-san was lurking in the locked clubroom, or that both her arms would be seized the moment she stepped inside?

"Mami. You're there, aren't you? You're their accomplice in this, I'll bet."

Venting her frustration, Minako looked at the door between Sachiko-san and Rei-san and called out, loudly.

It would have been impossible for Rei-san to go into the staff room and nonchalantly retrieve the key for the newspaper club's clubroom. Which naturally led to the idea that there was someone helping her. Someone for whom retrieving the key wouldn't be out of the ordinary. And someone who could innocently return the key after Rei-sama was inside. In short, it had to be someone in the newspaper club.

"I'm sorry, onee-sama. But I was helpless when faced with the awesome power of Rosa Chinensis and Rosa Foetida."

Just as Minako had expected.

The feminine voice answered her from the other side of the door. The answer, and the way it was said, made it sound like something from a cheap drama. Minako was definitely not amused.

Upon reflection, the newspaper clubroom was a little, no make that a lot, cleaner than normal. The usual clutter of papers were stacked neatly on the shelves, and the computer and printer had been shifted slightly. As though an infrequent clean-up had just recently been completed.

And thinking back on it, her conversation with Mami in the hallway had probably been to plant the idea of coming to the newspaper club's clubroom in her head. This wasn't some spur of the moment deal, but a meticulously planned and rehearsed operation. The toothache, headache and stomachache were probably a pack of lies too. Oh Maria-sama, please forgive this naïve fool.

"Oh, by the way, Hidemi really did have to leave to see the dentist."

Sensing what she was thinking, Mami's voice came through the doorway.

"Hmm, now you tell me."

Was that supposed to make it any better, having a single truth mixed up in all of this?

It seemed as though she had no choice but to accept the situation. Minako settled back in her chair and turned defiant.

"And so? What is this? Have you come to settle some old scores?"

Thinking about it, it was completely out of character for Sachiko-san to approach the newspaper club to discuss something. Let alone divulge her years of memories on the eve of graduation.

"A settling of scores, you say?"

Sachiko-san smiled. Then she produced a small note-taker from somewhere and pressed the record button.

"I will now begin our exclusive interview with Tsukiyama Minako-san."

"Huh!?"

Their rationale was as follows:

For the past three years, Tsukiyama Minako had been single-minded and, at times, quite aggressive in how she went about gathering information. If things continued like this until graduation, there could be no closure. So it would do her good to have the tables turned on her just once.

"Wait, hold on just a moment."

"We will not wait."

Quite right. If her opponent asked her to wait, there's no way she would hold back.

"As this is the first interview, we've been checking up on you for the last couple of days."

"What do you mean?"

A glance at the scattered papers that Rei-san spread out over the desk revealed that they contained detailed notes about her actions during the last few days at school.

Her school arrival and departure times, how she spent her lunch break (where she was, who she was with and what she ate), who she talked to that wasn't in her class – .

"I get it. You've been following me."

"It was surprisingly easy to follow you. You didn't notice a thing."

"I noticed. I had a bad feeling."

"Even so, you didn't work out that it was us, did you Minako-san?"

"When you swept your gaze around, you were never able to pick us out of the swarm of people in the same school uniform, right?"

In other words, when she had discreetly looked around Sachiko-san or Rei-san had been amongst the crowd of students. That was somewhat vexing.

"Tsukiyama Minako-san, what's your most profound memory of your three years in high school?"

"Huh?"

That's a fairly abrupt change of topic, Sachiko-san.

"Hmm, let me see – "

"Please tell us about what you plan to do after graduation. Share all of your thoughts about the future."

As soon as she had finished answering the first question, Rei-san asked her another one.

"What's your favorite phrase?"

"Which subjects do you like?"

"Sum up your thoughts about Lillian's Girls Academy in one sentence."

The two of them took turns bombarding Minako with prepared questions. They were all quite banal. Uninteresting details. This was probably just another part of their harassment.

"Hey."

Minako opened her mouth.

"This is kind of boring, isn't it? Asking me these kinds of questions."

"You're right."

Sachiko-san agreed, and pressed the stop button on the recorder.

"Huh?"

Not actually expecting them to stop, Minako was dumbfounded.

"So, are we done?"

"The interview was just a pretense."

Rei-san smiled.

"A pretense …"

"If we hadn't done that, we wouldn't be able to have a nice, long chat with you."

As she said this, Rei-san leaned over and took something out of her bag. After Sachiko-san had cleared away the note-taker, Rei-san placed three containers of milk coffee on the desk.

"We'll only need until we've finished these, for our friendly chat."

"I don't understand."

A friendly chat. Why a friendly chat here? Why did these people want to have a friendly chat with her? Inside Minako's head, these questions were swirling around in confusion. Watching this spectacle, Sachiko-san smiled.

"I'm not sure when, but you spoke with Yumi. Some time when you weren't collecting data or preparing a story. She said it went well."

"Well?"

Yet another thing that Minako didn't understand.

"I don't know the details, but apparently she learned a lot from it."

"No way."

"Come now, my petit soeur is not one to lie."

Sachiko-san smiled. Was that a joke? No, probably not. Sachiko-san was always deadly serious.

Just when did she become the sort of person that could so openly praise their petit soeur like that? At the very least, when they had started high school she was a grumpy, hard to please person who seldom smiled. Quite the changed person.

"I don't think I explicitly taught her anything, more that your petit soeur was able to derive a lesson from a meaningless conversation."

After putting down money for the milk coffee, Minako took one of the packs, inserted a straw and gulped it down. If the two Roses wanted to continue to chat, she wasn't going to allow them to hold this over her.

"Once more, you're not making yourself very endearing."

"Well, that's just Minako-san's way, isn't it?"

Rei-san and Sachiko-san both took their milk coffees.

"Speaking of petit soeurs,"

Minako suddenly thought of something, and changed the topic.

"Yumi-san, Yoshino-san and Shimako-san all made something cute for the White Day return gifts, didn't they?"

If they were just having a chat, any topic should be fine.

"As usual, you have keen hearing."

Well, that's true. Even though she had retired from making the newspaper, her intelligence gathering antennae had not grown dull.

"Those girls, they couldn't wait for White Day and so they made and distributed their gifts the following day."

"Their reasoning was that things would be in chaos because of the approaching graduation ceremony, and they might not have a chance to see each other because of class scheduling."

"Purses, weren't they? After they'd finished they had to hand them over right away."

The older sisters shared a glance as they spoke.

"Still, I can understand how they felt."

Minako murmured. Sometimes she'd be gathering information for a story to put in the Lillian Kawaraban two editions later, but when she finished the article sooner than expected she would want to put it in the next edition. It was the same thing.

"So it's not that they didn't wait for White Day, it's that they couldn't wait."

The three of them laughed.

"And how about you two? Did you also get the handmade purses?"

The response of 'We didn't' was instantaneous from the two of them.

"I see. How did that make you feel?"

She felt like delving into this a bit deeper. She thought it was a long shot from the start, but surprisingly they answered in a carefree manner.

"Part of me was disappointed, but part of me was okay with it. It was a complicated feeling."

"If it had been something that Yoshino had worked her heart out to make then I would have wanted it, but because she made it with the others I didn't. Oh, Minako-san, why are you smiling?"

"Huh?"

Minako hadn't realized that she was as she listened to them talk. But she definitely did seem to be smiling. Listening to Rei-san and Sachiko-san speak when they weren't on guard, being able to see them as they really were, made her feel happy.

"I was just thinking that friendly chats are surprisingly good."

If she was to put what she heard here into the Lillian Kawaraban, it would probably make her readers very happy. But, bad luck. This was a friendly chat. It would be uncouth of her to turn this unguarded conversation between friends into an article.

After about thirty minutes of chatting in the clubroom, the pair of Roses left.

"This was fun."

"Later"

Those words stuck with her.

As she saw them off, Minako pondered the question she had thought of a while back, but hadn't voiced.

(Hey. Why did you choose the newspaper club's clubroom as the location for our friendly chat?)

She didn't ask, but she had a rough idea of the answer.

Those two had been checking up on her movements. So they must have known how many times a day she would walk to the front of the club house, but then return without going inside.

Sachiko-san and Rei-san understood Minako's feelings.

What that pair knew, Minako too knew.

And some things are better left unsaid.

This is what they call empathy.