"Just how bad is your eyesight...?" Sonoko Suzuki sighed helplessly. "That's Conan. This is Mori Kogoro."
"Oh, oh, sorry, how rude of me." Eisuke Hondou took his glasses back and put them on, finally looking in the right direction. "Detective Mori! Hello, my name is Eisuke Hondou. It's a pleasure to meet you, and I hope we'll get along well—ah!"
As he bowed, he hit the bookshelf behind him this time, knocking a box from the top.
Odds and ends spilled all over the floor from the box. Eisuke Hondou, who had only just gotten back up, immediately clutched his head and crouched down again.
"...So that's why you kept calling him 'that kid,' 'that kid,'" Mori Kogoro said, the corner of his mouth twitching. "You made me think he was some cute little girl."
Seeing him like this, even after thinking it over for a long time, there did not seem to be a better way to address him.
"He's just a little slow, and... his reactions are a bit sluggish, I guess..." Ran Mouri recalled bumping into Eisuke Hondou that morning and shook her head.
She now vaguely understood what he meant when he said he wanted to borrow some luck.
Thinking about it carefully, aside from being a little too familiar with people, Eisuke Hondou had not done anything inappropriate. Yet ever since meeting him that morning, almost every movement he made seemed likely to trigger a chain of mishaps.
"I told you, I'm not slow. My luck is just terrible," Eisuke Hondou argued. "I'm the kind of person who takes group photos with everyone else, and every candid shot catches me at the exact moment my eyes are closed. Ah, it's like the gods hate me."
Sonoko Suzuki looked him over and shrugged.
How should she