Project Cupid | Ongoing

20 | introducing kanome high's no. 1 heartbreaker

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER FAILURE.

I slumped in my chair. There wasn't a sound to be heard at Kanome High School's library early Wednesday morning. I'd chosen a table at the front of the room—which gave me a proper view of the door and surrounding students—and had been leafing through volumes of Skip and Loafer for the better half of twenty minutes now.

I'd been visiting since June 1st, in hopes of garnering some clues about Creeper.

So??? When were you going to tell me you won his heart??? (*≧∀≦*)

Looking back on his text messages, he'd found out about what exactly happened between Takumi and me, even before I could notify him. How? Was he there, in the library that day?

Haunted by that thought, here I was.

From what I could remember—and my memory was pretty reliable—the library was empty that morning. It was just Takumi, Naoya, and I.

Well, to be more precise, the librarian, Mrs. Hanma, was there too.

My eyes drifted to the main desk, where the woman in question was, sprawled across the hardwood—out like a light.

Mrs. Hanma was a chronic napper. At all hours, you could find her with an elaborate sleeping mask pulled over her eyes and a thin blanket draped across her torso. Apparently, her sleeping habits were so horrendous that students had stopped visiting the front desk to borrow books, and instead loaned and returned them whenever they felt like it. While I'd heard rumours about how bad of a librarian she was, it only really settled in when I tried confronting her yesterday morning.

"What happened on June 1st?" she slurred her letters, rocking back and forth on her comfy chair, head poking out from her blanket like a caterpillar in a cocoon. "I remember very clearly! That was the day a UFO appeared in the sky! The sun disappeared, everything fell to chaos, and NASA had to release a statement over the radio to warn everybody to stay indoors because of an impending alien invasion. But, they were too late. Those extraterrestrial life forms took over everyone's brains one by one, gorging out their bodies from the inside out, and then duplicating themselves. I saw about five hundred— what was his name again? That one handsome student teacher we have? Mr. Cheetos! I saw so many Mr. Cheetos. . . !"

. . .It was a pointless effort.

How had she not been fired yet? I couldn't tell you, honestly.

Her overactive imagination for a thirty-year-old aside, Mrs. Hanma was definitely there that day. Except, she was so out of it that she never noticed what happened. She didn't pay attention to whoever had entered and exited the library, either.

I knew for a fact, though: nobody popped by after Takumi and I had already gotten here.

Meaning, Creeper had to have been there that day, even before we showed up.

The timing was too abrupt to plan to be there in advance, as there was no guarantee Takumi and I would even be in the library.

If I looked at it like that, it had to have been a coincidence.

Creeper was here on his own agenda. He frequented the library regularly—on his own terms. June 1st was just any other day for him until, of course, we burst in.

If he was a regular, this was my chance to finally unearth his identity.

He could be any one of the students in this room right now. . .

And that was the problem.

If he could be any single one of them, then naturally, I'd suspect them all. Meaning, I wasn't any closer to solving the mystery today than I was yesterday.