Himitsu Yume ch.3

Mia’s wishes were answered, as she had no unfortunate run-ins with her sister for the first half of the day. She followed Sho from class to class, uncovering that their schedules miraculously matched period for period. This was not news to her, though. In the middle of her first class, she realized how advanced all her fellow classmates were, and remembered the dreadful experience in the cafeteria earlier that morning. Fearing the prospect of knowing nobody in any of her classes, she disobeyed her own rules once again. Mia cast a spell on her schedule, matching it to Sho‘s perfectly.

“Nothing can possibly go wrong with this kind of spell,” Mia thought, as she was not nearly as clumsy with magic as her sister.

Mia and Sho followed the same arrangement for the next few classes: he’d take his usual seat at the front, and while she spent time talking to the teacher, no seats would be left except ones in the very back. She even fell into the trap of no seats at all being available when she entered Advanced English. What she hadn’t realized as she cast her spell was that some classes were already full, and changing her schedule would not make room. Mia could not use magic in plain view of everyone after this discovery was made. Until another desk was added, a chair was pulled up to the teacher’s desk, leaving her vulnerable to the glares and sneers of her classmates. She could not even find oasis from this new level of humiliation in Sho. Every time she glanced at him, it was obvious he averted his eyes and acted as if he didn’t even know her.

“I was right telling Quin not to use magic in this world, it’s done nothing but make my life miserable so far. I just hope she’s recovered from my vengeful plots this morning and her first few classes were better than mine,” Mia thought as she tried to hide herself from the embarrassment she was meant to endure, while taking notes furiously to catch up to the levels of all her classmates.

English was their last class before lunch. Mia continued to follow Sho closely, as they made their way to the cafeteria. Walking in to this large familiar room, Sho stopped and turned to Mia.

“Mia, you’ve been to the cafeteria before, you don’t need me to show you around anymore,” Mia looked blankly at Sho. “You can go meet up with some other people now. You don’t have to stay with me during lunch.” Mia would not desist staring, rather she changed her expression from empty to sad. Sho hesitated for a moment, looking from a table of boys he seemed to know to Mia and then back to the boys. “Fine, I’ll eat lunch with you today. I guess my friends can survive a day without me.”

“You’re so nice, Sho. Thank you!” Mia exclaimed as the two of them proceeded to the lunch line.
She could feel the angry stares of Sho’s friends beating down on her back as she looked through the lunch options, but there was nothing she could do now. Keeping a friend meant making many enemies at this school. This was the one thing she learned in her first morning, although she didn’t realize how closely this theory depended on her personality.

“So is this like breakfast, do I just take whatever food I want and go?” Mia wondered.

Sho looked at her oddly for a moment, “You didn’t pay for breakfast?”

Pausing before answering him, “Was I supposed to? How do I pay? Am I supposed to carry tons of money around with me everywhere or do they want me to go back to the dorms before every meal?”

“Nooo…” Sho said slowly, “Do you still have your student ID on you?” Mia nodded, “You use that like a credit card. At the end of the line there are card readers. They take money out of your account and your parents are supposed to put more money in.”

Glancing at the point indicated, Mia remarked, “I don’t think they were there this morning. The cafeteria was full, but there was no one over here by the food. Everyone was just sitting around, eating their breakfasts.”

Sho and Mia walked through the food lines slowly. It seemed to Mia that Sho was making all his choices fairly easily; it was obvious he was used to this. Mia walked over to the end of the line without picking anything.

“Do you see anything you like?”

“Ummm… ya, I do,” Mia, too embarrassed to admit she knew nothing of the traditional Japanese food they served at lunch, grabbed the closest foods she saw: takoyaki and the ‘specialty’ onigiri.
Sho stared at her food choices for a moment before asking about them, “Are you sure you want to eat that?”

“Why wouldn’t I? Is there something wrong with my choices?”

“No, if you like it, by all means, go ahead. I’ve just never seen a foreigner who wanted to eat octopus and leek-strawberry jelly onigiri the first time they came here. Especially not in the same meal.”

Mia gazed at her newly discovered grotesque food choices, but she couldn’t change her mind now.

“Nope, this is what I want. I’m sure of it.”

As they paid for lunch, an unusually happy life force was noticed approaching them at a rapid pace. Mia was stopped dead in her tracks as she realized Quin had found her.

“Sho, I think we should go sit down somewhere. Now.”

“Ok, hold on just a minute. I’m almost done paying,” he said as he argued with the card reader over the price of miso soup, “I hate those stupid card readers. They never get the prices right, and keep making me overpay.” The matter was settled, but it was too late; Quin was already embracing Mia in a tight grasp, causing her to drop her lunch, which she wasn‘t too excited to eat in the first place.

“I missed you so much Mia. This morning was so fun. I met so many new people, and I even made new friends. Thank you so much! If you hadn’t put that spell on me this morning I would never have wandered around and then I wouldn’t have met Rika she’s awesome! She’s in my class, and she’s been showing me around, and we’ve had a great time. Thank you, thank you, thank you!” Quin exclaimed, as she dragged Mia through the cafeteria to a table where a beautiful girl with long light brown hair sat, “This is Rika.”

Mia attempted to shake hands and talk to her, but lost her chance as Quin continued to drag her to yet another table. Rika, being curious since she was with Quin all day and didn’t notice her have a strong attraction to any other students, followed, along with Sho who was all but forgotten followed even further behind. Quin walked past many tables, before reaching one. It wasn’t until they were a few feet away that Rika realized who Quin was so eager to introduce Mia to. They were standing before a table with several boys sitting around.

“This is Kiley,” as Quin remarked this, Kiley spat out a glob of ramen that he was snarfing down as they approached.

Mia approached him, arm outstretched, while everyone else stared at the two of them, “Hi, I’m Mia, Quin’s tw- I’m her sister,” Mia said as she took Kiley’s hand and shook it, while he stood there staring at her dumbly.

Quickly coming to a realization, Kiley turned to Quin, “So you finally got over your cold feet, changed your mind a bit? You wanna ditch these… people and be alone for a while? We could do a lot in the last half hour of lunch.”

Now Mia’s expression too changed, but after a short moment she got over her shock, and turned to rage. Still holding on to Kiley’s hand, she reached back and punched his face to the side.
“Jerk,” Mia remarked, replacing Kiley’s hand with Quin’s, “You shouldn’t be associating with creeps like this Quin. Let’s go.”

Mia, leading Quin by the arm, and followed by Rika and Sho made her way to the table where Rika was sitting originally. As they sat down, Quin looked back at the direction they came from. “I know Kiley seems like a creep and a player on the outside, but I think deep down he’s really nice and a good person. I really want to get to know him better,” Quin thought as she turned back to the table where her sister and real friends were sitting.

“So, it’s Rika, right? How did you meet my sister?”

Rika glanced at Quin for confirmation, “Most of our morning classes were the same. She seems nice, I hope to be her friend.”

Sho looked inquiringly at Rika. He and Quin both knew she had just lied, but he was awaiting Quin to correct Rika’s version of the story, and Quin was too preoccupied with her thoughts of the previous moment to say anything at all.

“Ah, so Mia how was your morning?” Quin finally broke the silence.

“It was ok. I was a little behind in all my classes, but Sho helped me catch up.”

“Yep, it was a little strange actually, Mia was in nearly all my morning classes too.”

Mia and Quin, both just then realizing the similarity between what Rika and Sho said turned to each other wide-eyed. Simultaneously they tried to speak, then each stopped as she saw the other was also beginning.

“Did you…?” Quin began.

“You didn’t…” Mia answered.

Mia, noticing Sho and Rika were both solely focused on the two of them, took Quin by the arm and led her to the corner of the cafeteria, where she had partook of a breakfast earlier that morning. As the two sisters wandered off, they left Rika and Sho behind at the table, pondering even further the strange behaviors or the sisters.

“Hmm. Those girls are so weird. So how’d you meet them, Sho?”

“Oh, well believe it or not, my room is next to theirs.”

“Don’t they always separate the dorms so that girls are on one side of the hall and boys are on the other, though?”

“I thought they did. I guess they ran out of rooms on the girls’ side.”

“Well, no. I’m in the girls’ undecided dorms, and we actually still have 3 more open rooms. That is very strange. Oh! You know what else is odd? This morning, my first class with Quin was normal, but in every class after that they had to add an extra desk for her. Almost like there was no room left and the class and they just kinda stuck her in there.”

“You’re kidding! The exact same thing happened with Mia this morning. There’s definitely something strange going on with those two. Do you think they’re secretly connected with the Japanese government and were sent here as spies? Rika, you should ask your dad, he knows everything about all the students.”

Meanwhile, as Rika and Sho thought up other theories about Mia and Quin, the latter were still in the corner of the cafeteria.

“What happened Quin? I told you not to use any more magic while we were here!”

“What about you? Huh? Why are you exempt from the rules?”

“I-”

“You not only used magic to change your schedule, you also used it to unpack your things last night, while I did everything by hand, and you cast a spell on me this morning. If you’re so scared about being discovered, why’d you take a huge risk like that? You knew I’d have to go through the entire school to get the reversal spell from Sho, and you still did it!”

“Ok, fine, so I let my anger get the best of me. It all worked out in the end though. No harm, no foul. You still shouldn’t be using magic to change your schedule, though.”

“I had a good reason. You see, this morning, after I got the reversal spell, Rika and I had Japanese comp. together,” Quin began as she and Mia entered a flashback of Quin’s morning.

“After I got rid of your spots, I took my things and went to the language department, and there I saw Rika. She was talking to some girls and they were being really mean to her and telling her not to sit with them, that she can’t get any real friends, that she’s just a over achiever, and a boy stealer, and that no one would ever want to sit with her. So I walked up to them and asked Rika if she wanted to sit together, and when we sat down, she said she wished I was in all her classes. So I cast a spell on my schedule. After that all my classes were the same as Rika’s, so it worked perfectly,” Quin shined a big smile at Mia.

“The classes were a little hard, but I managed. And don’t worry, I definitely didn’t mess up this spell. I said every word right: ‘make this be the same as me so we should share a similarity.”

“No, Quin!” Mia was too late in stopping Quin from saying the spell. They both gazed around them, watching the damage Quin had done by repeating her spell