NOVEL NEXT chapter 41
41: Invitation to the Summer Festival
The blueness of the sky is irritating.
In the oddly uneasy air that pervades the classroom, spring passes at a reasonable speed. Finally, the hot season arrives, where just climbing the slope to the school building makes sweat pour down from my forehead.
The restless air remains restless, repeatedly expanding due to the summer heat. The entire classroom, no, the entire second-year class on the second floor of the school building, exudes such tension that it feels like it could explode with a needle prick.
It was all because of “love.”
The fever called love, under the influence of the summer heat, has become a serious illness.
I’m not interested in love—I’m really not interested. But when I look to the right and the left, everyone around me seems to be infected with this fever. If I don’t come up with a reason why I’m not interested in love, I won’t be allowed to say that I’m not interested, and to be honest, it was really annoying.
There might be a reason like this: “It’s a topic I’m not interested in, so I neither like nor dislike it. However, because society keeps talking about it, I hear it whether I like it or not, and as a result, I get tired of it and start disliking it.”
For me, talk about love has become exactly that, and now I feel a sense of aversion just by having a love fever patient pass by.
For me, who wanted to keep a distance from the classmates infected with the fever, the approaching summer vacation was a perfect timing.
Above all, it was the summer vacation of the second year of the advanced course. For the sake of my future, to survive, I wanted to improve my grades even more during this summer vacation, review my studies, and firmly establish a path for the future.
So, when Martin and others asked about my summer vacation schedule, I always dismissed it with “studying alone.”
If it’s Sheila, who I’ve made an agreement with, I can study together with her. And I do have plans to meet Anna-san and Milim…
Love fever patients tend to believe that “others are also infected with the same fever as themselves.”
When they hint at their schedules with the opposite sex, they lean forward and ask, “Are you in love too?” It’s terribly troublesome, so I resolutely maintained the attitude of “spending the summer vacation alone” and never let slip the fact that I would be meeting Milim and the others.
That’s why my schedule was filled with studying, studying, and more studying.
I sometimes wonder what I’m doing by studying this much. But being misunderstood as being interested in love is quite annoying. And apparently, there is a “study” at the opposite end of “love” (or so it seems to many people). So, in order to rid myself of the love fever, I devoted myself to studying more than necessary.
During such times…
To me, who had ended up being told by Milim, “You should go out and have fun,” even with a schedule full of studying, a message arrived.
The moment I saw the sender, my heart returned to my middle school days due to the overwhelming nostalgia—yes, the one who sent me the message was Karina, whom I haven’t been in contact with much since entering the advanced course.
Once comrades and bearers of past memories, the “Dark Lady” and the “Flame Manipulator”… The memories from our middle school days are etched into my brain along with the pain. It hurts a lot.
After struggling with flashbacks for a while, I was finally able to properly read the message.
The girl who contacted me after a long time greeted me briefly and then told me this:
“I want you to work as a vendor at the ‘Festival’.”
It was a “promise” of a “reunion”.
It was a rescue request from a “comrade” with whom I had spent time together in a previous life due to our “fateful connection”, something that couldn’t be asked of just anyone.