A Firefly's Glow

Chapter Eleven: Part Six

He felt a warm breeze blow into his face and he jerked his head upright. A list of names droned into his ears and he recognized it as attendance.

He felt his eyes slowly begin to close, and his head leaned towards his shoulders. But a few seconds later, he was forced to jerk his head back upright as he heard his own name.

“Hanabusa, Keitaru,” a cheerful voice rang into the wind.

He simply held his hand weakly over his head and the figure he recognized as his teacher firmly nodded his head.

“Alright, everyone! Head over towards the field! We’re going to do some jogging today!”

The students that surrounded him murmured a displeasured groan as they trolled towards the freshly mowed grass ahead.

Keita rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. He felt so drowsy that regardless of the bright sunlight that hit his eyes, he would have fallen into sleep right where he stood on the spotless concrete below him.

He pondered what he had been doing the night before. Why was he so drowsy that afternoon? What had he been doing?

A dim, weak flashback droned into his mind. After returning home from the Orange Café, he had sealed himself inside his bedroom.

“Call me when she gets home,” he had murmured to his sunglasses wearing chauffeur before he had shut the door behind him.

And as usual, everything went as he expected. Megane quickly rapped on his bedroom door. It must have been far in the depths of night, and he should have been asleep.

As he peered at the red-headed girl from around the corner of a doorway that led to the main room, he had noticed that he had misplaced his time for his teacher’s homework assignment.

His agonizing moments of sitting at his desk and attempting to complete the assigned math sentences were vividly etched into his mind. He had never seen so many unfamiliar drawings used in such a simple concept that only needed to contain numbers and shapes.

Plus, the next morning, he was caught wandering the hallways by the red-headed girl, and she wished for him to assist her with marking the path to her bedroom.

He had absolutely no idea why he had accepted this task when there were plenty of other maids and chauffeurs that knew the hallway’s path much better than he ever would.

He lifted a hand onto his shoulder and he felt mild patches of sweat on the sleeves of the white T-shirt that hung over his shoulders. As he felt the soles of his phys ed uniform tennis shoes endure the soft padding of the fresh grass, he lowered his head and closed his eyes. He knew his classmates were surrounding him but he couldn’t care less.

He wished for sleep.

“Jog to the other end of the field, everyone,” his cheerful voiced teacher—Keita addressed him as “Haru”—delightfully announced. “The last one to finish owes me the second half of tonight’s math homework.”

At the sound of “math homework”, Keita weakly jerked his head upwards. He decided to loathe Haru’s math assignments, and if he was ever offered to do any extra math homework in the future, he would refuse—not matter how low it made his grade slip.

“Ready?”

Keita’s eyes began to narrow, and his head began to nod.

“Set?”

He silently forced them open, gritting his teeth in weak frustration.

“Go!”

He listened to footsteps clattering around him as his fellow classmates hurried across the grass. But instead of trailing along with them, he slumped forward. He felt a few strands of grass enter his mouth, and the coppery smell of dirt entered his nostrils. He heard his name being anxiously called.

He demanded himself to stand up and to begin running, but his senses didn’t obey. He closed his eyes and drifted into unconsciousness.