Monthly Quiz

During the last week of the first month of school, a notice about the quiz was posted on the bulletin board at the front of the classroom.

There were five subjects: English, mathematics, Japanese, history, and science. Each was worth one hundred points, and the passing mark was half the class average.

When Mashima announced it during homeroom, his tone was as indifferent as usual, but the air in the classroom tightened. Pages rustled more frequently than before, and even the noisiest boys in the back opened their textbooks.

Kiryu Yume looked at the list of subjects on the bulletin board and ranked them in his head. English was no problem; he had at least passed CET-4 before being transported here. He could still remember most mathematical formulas after brushing up on them, so he should be able to clear the passing mark. Everyday Japanese conversation was fine, but reading comprehension would expose him, and grammar questions were even more of a guessing game. He could answer the basics of science, though some explanations of crustal movement differed from what he remembered, so he would lose points there.

History was dead last, a complete disaster. He had no knowledge at all of this world's eras and wars. He had barely known Japanese history to begin with, and what little he did know had been pieced together from bits and pieces online. Everything he had heard in class slipped through his fingers like sand.

Three days before the exams, he began cramming. At night in the dorm, he spread the notes for all five subjects across his bed. He skimmed the English vocabulary once and tossed it aside. He did a set of math exercises and got four wrong. He copied the uses of Japanese particles three times and still mixed up two of them. He spent an extra half hour on the chapter about crustal movement, circling the points that differed from his memories and forcing himself to memorize them.

He flipped through the history textbook from beginning to end, then gave up halfway through. There was too much. One month's worth of material felt like an entire dictionary pressing down on his face. When he reached the chapter on the Edo Shogunate, he silently recited the order from Tokugawa Ieyasu to Tokugawa Iemitsu five times. After closing the book, he forgot who the third shogun was again.

The exams lasted all day Wednesday. English came first. Kiryu Yume opened the paper and found that the reading passages were shorter than he had expected, while the multiple-choice traps were not particularly subtle. He finished, checked his answers once, and still had fifteen minutes left. He put down his pen and looked out the window. Someone was having PE on the field, and the red rubber track gleamed in the sunlight.

Mathematics came second. He remembered most of the formulas, but he got stuck on the third part of the final big question. He drew a semicircle, then a triangle, on his scratch paper. He tried two auxiliary lines, but neither worked. He answered only the first two parts and handed in the paper with the rest blank. Passing should not be a problem, but his score would not look good.

During lunch, he ran into Yamamura Miki in the cafeteria. She held a rice ball and took tiny bites from it, while the science notebook for the afternoon exam lay open on the table. "How did your morning exams go, Kiryu?" Her voice was very quiet.

"Probably okay."

Yamamura Miki pushed her notebook toward him and pointed at the page on atmospheric pressure. "This might be on the test." He read it twice, and it did indeed appear that afternoon. He got it right. After handing in his paper, he glanced at Yamamura Miki from several rows away. She was lowering her head as she packed her pencil case, her side ponytail falling over her shoulder and hiding her face. From the rhythm of her movements, he judged that she had probably done fairly well too.

Japanese was the first afternoon subject. The reading passage was an essay from the Meiji Era, with several archaic terms he could not understand woven between the lines, so he could only guess their meanings from context. The grammar section tested several particle usages; he guessed one out of three correctly. The essay topic was "Summer." He wrote about the sea and fireworks, did not dare use complicated sentence structures, and steadily filled the required word count.

He got the final atmospheric pressure calculation in science correct, but reversed the answer for "winter pressure patterns over the Japanese Archipelago" earlier on and lost four points. He flipped the paper over and checked it once more, then changed one multiple-choice answer, unsure whether he had changed it to the right one.

History was the final subject. When he opened the paper, the very first multiple-choice question pinned him down: "Who was the third shogun of the Edo Shogunate?" He knew the first was Tokugawa Ieyasu, and he had clearly memorized before the exam that the third was Iemitsu, but even after staring at the options for a long time, he still did not dare be certain.

He skipped ahead. Era sequences, the beginning and ending years of battles, the names of reform decrees—every question required someone to sit down and go through several months of textbooks before they could answer it. But he had only been transported here for four weeks.

He filled in what he knew, roughly enough for forty points, and guessed blindly on the rest. When he handed it in, more than half of the back page was blank. The papers of the students beside him were packed with writing, while his looked like uncultivated wasteland. The proctor looked down at him when collecting the papers but said nothing.

Friday afternoon, the results were posted on the bulletin board in the hallway. Class rankings, scores for each subject, averages, passing marks—everything was printed clearly on the paper, line by line. A crowd packed the space in front of the board. Shorter students stood on tiptoe, while taller ones in the back called out scores to those in front. Hashimoto Masayoshi squeezed to the front, glanced at his ranking, whistled, and left. It looked like he had done well.

Kiryu Yume stood at the edge of the crowd and scanned the sheet.

Seventy-eight in English, sixty-two in mathematics, fifty-six in Japanese, sixty-one in science, and forty-one in history. His overall average put him in the lower-middle range of the class. Aside from history, all four subjects had barely cleared the passing line. His life had hung by a thread, but he had not fallen.

His forty-one in history had just scraped past half the class average, but the words "Failed" were still printed on the score sheet. He stared at that line for a moment, then folded the paper in half and tucked it into his pocket.

Morishita Ran appeared behind him, holding a lollipop. She stood on tiptoe to glance at the board, then tilted her head and looked at Kiryu Yume.

"Forty-one in history." She pulled the lollipop from her mouth, the corners of her lips curled up. "Did you fill it in with your eyes closed?"

Kiryu Yume said nothing.

"I got eighty-five in history. Even if I lent you twenty points, you still couldn't catch up." Morishita Ran put the lollipop back in her mouth and lightly patted his shoulder. Her tone was purely teasing, her eyes curved, carrying the same feeling as when she had asked him, "What happened to your hand?" in the cafeteria. As she left, the lollipop stick bobbed twice at the corner of her mouth. "Next time, don't guess C. Guessing B has a better success rate."

Yamamura Miki squeezed out of the crowd with her score sheet clutched in her hand. When she saw Kiryu Yume, she froze for a moment, then hurried over. She looked at the bulletin board, her lips pressed into a line.

"Kiryu, do you want my history notes? I got eighty." Her voice was still quiet, but her tone was a little more urgent than usual. "We can study together before the next exam."

"Okay."

Yamamura Miki nodded, then looked at his score sheet again. Her lips remained pressed together, and her eyes looked as though she were watching a rain-soaked cat. Then someone coming up behind her to check the scores squeezed her aside. Outside the crowd, she turned back and silently mouthed, "Saturday," to him. Kiryu Yume nodded once. Only then did she turn and leave.

Sakayanagi Arisu's score was ranked first in the class. She gently used her cane to part the crowd before the board. Her violet eyes swept over the rankings from the top all the way down to the lower-middle section, pausing briefly on Kiryu Yume's name. She tilted her head slightly, her expression unchanged, as though confirming a number she had expected all along.

Kamuro Masumi stood beside her, holding her score sheet face-down against her chest. Kiryu Yume could not see her score, but from how tightly she pressed her lips together, he could tell it was not pretty. Sakayanagi Arisu turned around, tapped her cane twice against the hallway floor, looked at Kiryu Yume, then at Kamuro Masumi.

"Come for tutoring this weekend. Kitty, Masumi, both of you."

It was not a suggestion. Her final syllable was clipped and decisive.

The tips of Kamuro Masumi's ears turned red. She folded her score sheet twice and shoved it into her pocket. "I don't need tutoring." Her voice was flat, but the hand in her pocket clenched the paper tighter, her knuckles faintly whitening through the fabric.

"Fifty-nine in history, and you have the nerve to put that on a Class A score sheet?" Sakayanagi Arisu tilted her head toward her, the corner of her lips faintly curved. There was no mockery in her tone, as if she were merely stating a fact that needed correcting. "Tutoring two people is more efficient than tutoring one."

Kamuro Masumi did not argue again. She shifted her gaze toward the hallway window, and the redness at her ears spread farther along the side of her neck. In the reflection on the window glass, her lips were pressed into a thin line.

Kiryu Yume slipped his hand into his pocket, his fingertips touching the score sheet folded into a square. Yamamura's notes, Sakayanagi's tutoring, Kamuro's history score that was only a little higher than his, and Morishita's words—"Guessing B has a better success rate." There would be another exam next month. He hoped he could get a respectable score.

"Saturday morning, nine o'clock, third floor of the library." Sakayanagi Arisu turned and walked toward the other end of the hallway, the rhythm of her cane tapping the floor neither hurried nor slow. "Don't be late."