Disclaimer: Haruhi Suzumiya and company do not belong to me. I'm just playing, and will put them back when I'm done.

The Melancholy of a Normal Girl

by Netherwood

Part 1 - Half-Sick of Shadows

Class time is when she disappears into herself. She leans onto her desk, puts her head into her arms, and… well, she doesn't sleep. But she doesn't do anything else, either. Apparently it's not a problem, or so the teachers have decided, because they never try to call on her. Perhaps they heard her reputation from East Junior High, so when she just lies down and dies in the back of their classroom every day, all they think is, "Thank god she isn't trying to rearrange the desks."

For now, the teacher is droning on about how to calculate molarity or something else I really don't care about. I suppose I pay about as much attention in class as Haruhi. In the slight pauses between teacher asking a question and student answering, I can hear Haruhi breathing and occasionally twitching—still awake. I shift toward the window, just enough to see her head rise out of her arms to watch me.

Our eyes catch. Haruhi, still slumped over and hair obscuring her face, blinks a few times. I give her a tiny smile. On her desk, one hand slides forward far enough to tap the back of my chair a few times. Then her head falls back into her arms.

We do this a few times every class, the only thing she does. I turn around, she hears me shifting and looks up, we watch each other for a moment, and she taps my chair before going back to her nothing. The fact that she's paying enough attention to catch me so much as twitching in my seat… no, that makes it sound too much like she's anxiously waiting for me. I have no idea what goes on in this girl's head. It could just be that in a room full of high school dullards, Haruhi can't be bothered by anything farther than arm's reach.

If she'd only started acting like this sooner, I never would have noticed her. No, that's not right. If she'd started acting like this sooner, I'd still notice her, but she would just be that girl in the back of the class who never looks up. But, because she waited, I met the real Haruhi, the one that can stand up on the first day of a new school year and announce that everyone mundane is simply not worth her time. And after she did that, she slowly fell apart before my eyes.

Behind me, Haruhi sighs into the desk. The voice of the teacher hums on, punctuated by the staccato ticks of the hands of the clock.

OoOoO

Lunch is when she shows the most energy. As far as school goes, anyway. Every day, as soon as the lunch bell rings, she stands up, slides her bento from her bag, and I follow her out the door. This little ritual of ours began… probably about a week after she started walking to lunch, instead of sprinting out the door and simply disappearing to who-knows-where.

Taniguchi and Kunikida, putting their desks together, say hello as I walk past them. Usually, something like, "Hey Kyon, don't wander too far, okay?" Taniguchi. "Have fun, Kyon." Kunikida. Neither of them says anything to Haruhi, though they both look at her. Taniguchi, with the sort of aversion reserved for the communicably ill, and Kunikida with the simple awkwardness of not knowing what to do, even though something clearly needs to be done. I can relate to that.

She doesn't so much as glance at them, naturally.

At first, I tried splitting my lunches between them and Haruhi; one day, I'd pull my desk up with them, and the other day I'd get up and follow Haruhi. Then, one lunch, I was already getting my chopsticks out when I realized she was hanging back a few steps from my desk instead of being already out the door, looking like she was actually having trouble opening her mouth for once.

How do you respond to that? We hadn't actually talked about our lunch arrangements at all. We just seemed to understand that I'd go with her half the time, and the guys half the time.

Well. That's what I thought, anyway.

I liked eating lunch with Kunikida and Taniguchi, surprisingly. It was normal. Relaxing, in a way Haruhi couldn't manage.

"Um, Haruhi… Do you want to eat with us?" I thought that was a decent compromise. Maybe I could get her talking to the other two for once.

But, she just got a look like she was going to punch someone. This was when Kunikida and Taniguchi finally clued in to Haruhi standing behind them and turned around to get an eyeful of her scowl. She crossed her arms and glared. "It's fine. You don't have to eat lunch with me. Do you whatever you want, Kyon, I'm fine by myself." So she stomped out the door and onto the grounds, and I'm pretty sure she deliberately picked a spot in the field where I could see her bristling back from the window.

All I could really think of was to apologize to Kunikida and Taniguchi and tell them Haruhi could use my company right now. Kunikida agreed, although he looked regretful; Taniguchi told me to send up an emergency flare if I wanted someone to come recover my corpse for proper funeral rites. They both seemed pretty relieved I didn't ask them to come with me, though. Somehow, my desire to eat lunch with them dropped off when I realized that.

So, now I eat with Haruhi every day.

Today, we find a quiet patch of grass in the courtyard and unload our lunches, sitting with the sides of our legs brushing. If I'm lucky, she'll have frustrations to work out. As unexpected as it was the first time it happened, that's probably the easiest way to help. Admittedly, it's not just for her benefit. Maybe Kunikida was right. Maybe I do have a thing for strange girls.

Unfortunately, today is like most days, and we just eat and talk. Haruhi is the first to peel back the layers of disquiet and start a conversation. "Hey, Kyon."

I swallow my mouthful of stir-fry. "Yeah?"

"Did you ever believe in aliens, demons, wizards, and all that other stuff when you were younger?"

I lower my bento. Haruhi's looking blankly at a beetle crawling over a blade of grass in front of her, instead of at me. She looks like she doesn't want to hear the answer. "Sure. Those, and time travelers, ghosts, secret societies, doomsday cults, the moth man, and anything else I could find in a book. It's a little embarrassing to admit, but I think I took my manga too seriously when I was a kid."

"Doomsday cults are real, even if we keep passing every one of their apocalypse dates," Haruhi says, then shakes her head. "What a waste, though. We get solid proof of one out of eight of those things, and the stupid zealots can't even end the world properly." She picks up her lunch again and nibbles at it half-heartedly. "So what made you stop believing in all that?"

"It was just time to move on, I suppose," I tell both of us. "It's not like I can get through school if I'm spending all my time running around talking to all the plants in the city trying to figure out which one is really a nature spirit in disguise."

"Tch. You just gave in like that? That's a waste, too. Besides, it's not like you're getting through school properly anyway." She looks back and studies me while she forces down a few bites, as though weighing the worthiness of my intentions on the scales of Ma'at. I must have passed, because she puts her bento down—again, looks like she doesn't have much appetite today either—and starts talking. "Hey, you know what I used to do during lunch?"

"Well, since you used to eat lunch during class after break, I guess you were probably out breaking into the principal's office to find his secret files on the students. You know, this one's a psychic mutant, that one's paying off the board of directors, a third might be an enemy spy from another high school, that sort of thing."

She flashes a single short smile, a nugget of gold peering at me out of a dried riverbed I stumbled across and likely won't find again. "Pretty close there, Kyon. I used to patrol the halls and the grounds, looking for anything interesting."

"Find anything?"

The smile sinks from her face, disappeared back into the mud. "Not really. The closest I got was this one girl who spends every lunch staring off into space…."

"And, if I guess right, you stopped your patrols the same time you stopped running out the class during breaks?"

"Yeah. I mean… I kinda fell into a pattern for where I'd search, and then one day I noticed that I was really just going around to all the most deserted parts of the school. I wasn't really looking for interesting things anymore, I was just… It was stupid, and there wasn't any point anymore. So I just started eating lunch."

I wish I hadn't asked.

Sometimes I look at someone and think, "They're missing something." It's like some crucial part of their psyche has been cut out by an expert surgeon and the psychic wound sewn up and healed over so nicely that you can't be sure what got taken out, even though you know something's gone. Purpose. Or, strength. Maybe it's the personal agreement to deal with the universe, the idea that yes, I can get up out of bed and go through another day. Whatever it is, Haruhi's missing it.

Haruhi sets down her barely-touched lunch. "Come on, let's go back to class. I'm full."

My bento's almost empty, so I guess I'm about done too. But still, back to the classroom, back to droning lectures, back to Haruhi putting her head on the desk and staring out the window… staring at where we usually eat lunch together, now that I think about it. "You sure about that? We could stay out a bit longer."

Haruhi shakes her head as she closes up her bento. "It's baking out here, I don't want to eat in this heat. I'll finish lunch during next break, or maybe you can finish my leftovers again so Mom won't bite my head off."

I shrug, and we get up and head inside. About half the time, Haruhi has me finish her bento, because her mother gets on her case when she brings lunch home uneaten. Apparently, just throwing it away is also too much of a waste.

I want to meet Haruhi's parents. I want to sit down and hear all the tales of what an unruly, ridiculous child she was. I want to see her face light up in embarrassment while she also has to listen to her parents' rendition of, I don't know, the story of how she rolled a watermelon down the stairs when she was three or whatever. This girl has to have absolutely classified stories somewhere in her past! I want to see where she eats dinner, where she lazes on the couch, where she does her chores. I want to slap her parents silly and shout at them, "Don't you see what's happening to your daughter?"

But for now, I follow Haruhi back to class.

OoOoO

Afterschool is when we do the work we can't be bothered to pay attention to in class. I'd be perfectly happy ignoring the whole lot of it, or better yet, having a textbook bonfire out on the grounds.

Haruhi responded to that by calling me too lazy to live.

Hey, I pay as much attention in class as she does!

Anyway. Once every week or so, Haruhi gets a burst of manic determination and drags me down to the school library—the first few times when she still had the energy, this madwoman literally dragged me by my tie! Once in the library, we plow through a week's worth of homework in a few hours, and that's the extent of our study habits.

She seems to know everything without listening to the teachers, or she picks it up immediately with just a fast pass through the textbook. And, blessed day, she somehow managed to figure out how to explain it to me so I pick it up fairly fast, because actually reading those dense, ink-riddled, cursed doorstops posing as books and written to achieve the greatest soporific effect is simply beyond my patience. Thanks to Haruhi, I actually manage decent grades.

Today, though…

Well, she just can't keep this up.

"Oi, Haruhi."

She blinks a few times, like she's waking up. Haruhi's lucky we're sitting in a quiet library instead of trying to cross a crowded intersection. She'd never make it across like this.

"I'm paying attention! We're on math, right?"

I just point down to her book.

She makes an effort at scowling, doesn't quite pull it off. "Literature, that's what I said. That's your subject, not mine. Ugh, what's the point, anyway? It's not like all these books are going to get us anywhere." With that, she pushes her book closed and sets her head atop it.

I clasp my hands in mock prayer. "Haruhi, I beg of you, don't leave me to wade through this sea of ink alone. The unbroken miniscule print rises up to swallow me into the scholastic depths. Are you going to abandon me to this fate?"

She glares up at me before letting her head fall back into her arms on the table. Okay, so she's not in the mood to be amused right now. Deliberate silliness coming out of my mouth sounds wrong, anyway. "I told you, there's no point anyway," she mutters. "The only reason I'm doing this is so my parents don't yell at me about school. All we're doing is running around the academic spinning wheel so we can go to college and do the same thing for another four years so we get qualified to sit behind a desk and rot for the rest of our lives. No thanks."

I want argue that point, but I'm not really sure I can pull it off. It's not like I've ever seen an adult looking happy behind a desk, after all. But I still need to do something. So, I try a different tack.

"I guess it's going to be a long four years after we graduate, then. It may be boring, but I was still planning on heading to college. It beats construction work, after all. But, somewhere in the back of my head, I guess I was planning on you being there too. Maybe I'll have to drop out after all. There's not much point if I'm going alone."

Haruhi listens to my little speech, and stays still for a minute. Then, like the weight of the heavens is bearing down on her, she pushes herself upright, achingly slow. She has her "I'm frustrated, time for you to help" face on, but less angry, softer, almost… vulnerable.

"Hey, Kyon, I guess we could study, but I want something first to keep me going. Is that okay?" She slides her chair around the table, closer to me.

"Of… of course."

She almost always leads, now is no different. She leans forward in her chair, one of her hands clasping mine and her other going to my head. I cling back for everything I'm worth as she presses her lips to mine, and for a few minutes, things don't seem so bad.

By the time she pulls back, she's somehow ended up in my lap. When she moves back enough for me to see her face clearly, my head promptly drops out of the clouds—she's crying?

She turns her head again so I can't see her tears and presses it against my chest. "Hey, Kyon… I said… I said we'd study after that, but I… Let's not, not just now. I don't feel up for it."

"That's… sure. We don't have to. Tomorrow, maybe?"

She nods, face still hidden, and doesn't let go.

OoOoO

A/N: I usually try not to say too much about anything I write, because writing ought to stand on its own, but I feel like I need to expand a little on this one. This story is going to be terribly melodramatic and you'll be hard pressed to find plot or action, but I think there will be a particular sort of person who will find this little story cathartic despite all my many weaknesses as a writer. My inner editor is telling me that this story starts in the deep end of sentimentality and only sinks and drowns from here on in, and that's part of why this story sat on my hard drive untouched or only occasionally fiddled with for so long. On the other hand, I haven't come up with a more honest way than diving into the deep end of sentimentality to tell this particular story, and it may even be a little therapeutic for those of us who spend too long keeping our faces carefully blank. (Ah, see, we're already choking on the melodrama! Off to a nice start, eh?)

Anywho. Several short chapters already written and just need cleanup editing. Will post them when I feel like it. The bit after those chapters still needs some work-again, will work on that when I feel like it. I wrote this primarily as a way to sort more carefully through some old baggage, a bit of a meditation on the past, so I won't be surprised if it doesn't do much for anyone else. But, if it does, yokatta ne. Ureshii yo. ^_^