Ore, Twintail ni Narimasu:Volume 1 chapter 1 contradiction old translation

After school on the first day of my high school life. A day I should have remembered fondly.

I - Mitsuka Souji - was eating a late lunch at the Cafe Adolescenza, together with my childhood friend, Tsube Aika.

Considering that we are students, it’s pretty fashionable for us to be eating lunch at a cafe with a nice atmosphere under private management - although it's my house, so it's a normal meal for me.

The cafe's unique pride is its special blend of coffee, which has many fans. Unfortunately for them, my mother only runs the cafe as a hobby, and its hours depend on her mood. She locks up and leaves whenever she feels like it.

We were the only two people behind the "Closed" sign on the door.

The intense spicy smell hanging in the air was nothing compared to the hard weight of sorrow in my chest.

"...Why did I write something like that..."

"There isn't a twintail club, you know," my childhood friend said, looking at me amazed as she shoved the source of the spicy smell into her mouth.

"I was hurrying... I didn't mean to do it at all! It was totally unconscious!!"

"You know, if your thing about twintails is buried so deep in your brain that it comes out unconsciously, that's scarier."

"Hey, shut up! You know, in a person's life, they make lots of mistakes no one can expect!!"

"Yeah, yeah, ta-daa--"

She held the two tails on both sides of her head, long enough to reach her hips, and swung them as though to stir the air.

"......nguh."

She herself was probably intending to provoke me, but I felt a kindness in it as though she were holding out her hand for a handshake.

As always, spectacular twintails.

They are the most basic kind, hanging down to her hips, evenly on both sides, but their fundamental nature lets you feel all the better the elegant conceit of hair that has been worn in twintails every day for years. A great artist draws people in with their paintings even when they aren’t using flashy colours or a surprising subject. It’s like that, I think.

"Let's say you’re right. Still, the teacher didn't have to read it out loud, did he?"

"It was probably weird enough that he couldn't help but say it."

"Oh, well, sorry!"

No matter how long we continue this pointless argument, it will not change this fact: I am going to spend more than a thousand days of my life as a high school student, and on the very first day, I made the biggest mistake of my life.

The private school that I go to, Yōgetsu Academy, can take you straight from elementary school into university. A super-escalator school. I wasn't going to feel anything special just because I’d moved up into the high school division.

That's what I thought, but... the size of the school building, the gymnasium, everything was so much larger than junior high school that I was overwhelmed.

And the highlight was the orientation in the gymnasium by the leaders of the clubs, after the entrance ceremony had ended.

The sports clubs and culture clubs took the stage one after another to show off their performances and make appeals to the new students. I saw the passion of every club concentrated down to its essence, and it impressed me deeply.

But.

The image I see when I close my eyes is the girl who took the stage after that.

To be exact, her hairstyle. Twintails.

Shindo Erina.

She wasn't much taller than an elementary school student. But her welcome to the new students as president of the student council could have ranked among the speeches of the great orators of history. It shot through the hearts of everyone in that room, wrapped in an overwhelming magnetic power.

"There are no limits to what you can accomplish. I, together with the high school division of Hizuki Academy, will guide your brilliant future on the path to its full bloom. I promise you!"

She wasn't much taller than an elementary school student, but although you could not avoid hearing the superiority in her voice, I felt no resentment of it. Instead I was fascinated, to take just one thing, by the cold dignity in the way she stood.

(She's beautiful...)

I was staring at her. I forgot even to blink.

She wasn't much taller than an elementary school student. But it was the first time I'd ever heard a woman use 'young lady' language, and I was shocked again by how natural she made it sound.

And, more than anything -- her twintails.

Hair, of course, does not have a peerage. But if it did, then those beautiful twintails would have held a high and noble title.

The way the tips of her hair curled softly into circles also showed the excellence of her upbringing.

As she put heat into her words and moved more vehemently, the twintails danced through the air, responding to her motion, just as if she were a princess and the twintails were her partner on the dance floor under the lights of a magnificent chandelier.

I couldn't get my heart to stop pounding.

I had the feeling that the guys near me looked as though a kitten had gotten up on the stage, but that was probably my imagination.

A school whose student council president has such amazing twintails. I can only imagine how wonderful the next three years of my life are going to be.

On the way back to the classroom, I was aware that the other first-year students were talking freely with each other, but they were like a candle compared to the brilliant light still burning in my heart. The lingering memory of the orientation and everything else wasn't much more than a fart.

All I could see at that point was the beautiful scene in my memory. My head was full of twintails. I had my head in the clouds for the self-introductions once we got back to the classroom, too.

And when a questionnaire about which clubs we were interested in was handed out, I don’t even seem to have noticed.

"All right, pass your sheets forward starting from the back, ple~ase."

"Oh!"

The drawn-out voice of the homeroom teacher brought me back to myself. I took the sheets handed to me from behind by a girl whose name I didn't know (of course, because I hadn't listened to her introduction) and hastily ran my pencil over the blanks--.

"Hmmmm... Oh, there's one sheet with no name on it."

"Ah… sorry, that's probably me, I was rushing."

The teacher, looking up from the sheets she was going through one by one, tilted her head in doubt, so I gave her my name.

"Ahh, Mitsuka, was it? ...Twintail club? Did we have a twintail club here? ... Oh~h, you mean you want to set one up."

"What!? No, I didn't want to start a club, I wanted..."

I was even more nervous now, and I had gone beyond rescue.

"I see~. ... Twintail club? You like twintails quite a lot, don't you, Mitsuka."

"Oh, yes, of course."

-- Conditioned reflex.

And I was thinking that I could finally get a fresh start in a class with all these unknown faces.

That was the instant that decided my position for three years of high school.

"Well, then, everyone, that's the end of homeroom, but it seems like there have been some deviants in the area lately, so be careful!"

"Hey, the timing of that announcement!? Look, teacher, please wait! I am serious! I really, seriously love twintails!! Ah, ... No... Wait!!"

Excuses were useless, and with a huge disaster that I created myself, that bright first day of high school was over---

"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah...."

Just the memory of it is killing me.

When I see a blank I write "twintail" in it, that is a pretty ridiculous conditioned reflex.

It's already part of my physiological makeup -- no, it might be closer to the field of ecology.

"Mguh... mm. I'm having seconds."

Ignoring me, and the full cup of coffee in front of me that hadn't even passed my lips, Aika calmly put her hand on the second plate of curry.

Uh, I don't have any appetite, so it's fine, but still, that’s mine.

"The mistake on the sheet wasn't as bad as that followup. I know you were really nervous, but come on."

"If you knew that I was nervous, then you should have come in and backed me up! Aren't we friends!!"

"Friends... yeah."

There was something sullen about the look on Aika's face. What are you mad about, you just stole my lunch.

"You have to use questionnaires and stuff like that to make a good first impression. All they wanted to know is what club you wanted to enter. Yeah, they also asked, "if there's an association you want to try setting up, please write it here," but, you know, that part was just a formality. What new student would suddenly assert themselves like that?"

"Uh... You mean..."

"I mean, if someone wanted to set up a new club at this point, they're making a clear announcement that even though they've only just watched the club presentations and maybe taken a look through the club guide, they already know without hesitation what they want to do -- they want to set up a new club. Right?"

"So you're saying that... I wrote twintail club on that line?"

"That's what I'm saying."

"You can look back and analyze it calmly now, but at the time my mind was totally blank, you know!!"

"I should at least have stuck out my chest and said, 'A lot of people don't even know the word for that hairstyle, so don't suddenly start talking about it.'"

"That wouldn't have helped at all, and what are you going to stick out? There's nothing thbuhhh"

My little resistance was cut off in the middle.

Her chest seems to worry her, so it's easy to make fun of it in an argument, but, as you can see, if you do that, she will take a short break from lunch to punch you in the face.

It can't be helped, the rest of her is perfect. The twintails, especially, and the twintails.

"Ah, if only I were better at ad-lib..."

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that it's indirectly the fault of the student council president that my future was destroyed, the exact opposite of what she said in her speech. Although, as Aika says, I was basically inviting this result by being such a loser.