It was a quiet afternoon after school. The halls of Tsuwabuki High School stretched before me as I made my way toward a door marked Student Guidance Office. Shooting a quick glance down the hallway to make sure I wasn’t being watched, I pushed open the door and slipped inside, closing it behind me with as much stealth as my awkward limbs could manage. I flicked on the lights.

The room greeted me with all the charm of… nothing. It was an impossibly plain, depressing room fitted with only a single table and two chairs. I set down my bag and stood there blankly for a moment, waiting.

It didn’t take long. Soon after, the door eased open again, and a girl creeped in. I turned my gaze over to her as she locked the door behind her with a soft click.

“Right on time.”

She spun around. “Nukumizu-san, we’re completely visible from the window!” she hissed, rushing past me to yank the curtains shut. “Did anyone see you come in?”

Tiara Basori. Student council president.

“I don’t think so.”

She sighed in relief, her shoulders dropping a few centimeters from her ears as she set her bag down on the desk. I couldn’t blame her, honestly. The last thing a girl like her needed was gossip about secretly meeting with a gloomy loner like me in an empty office after school. I sank into a chair, hiding my bitter smile.

Well, I realize calling it a secret meetup makes it sound weird, but just to be clear: this wasn’t that kind of meetup. Tiara-san sometimes randomly asks me to study with her on a whim, I guess; and today, it was for classical Japanese. She’d texted me for help, I said yes, and so here we were. Though, I’ve got no idea why she asks me for help. I’m nowhere near qualified enough to teach her anything.

“I’m really sorry for making you come all the way out here,” Tiara-san said, taking the seat across from me with an awkward expression. “I just haven’t been making any progress studying for the upcoming tests.”

“You’ve got your hands full with council stuff, Basori-san. Nothing you can do.”

“Oh? But you have your Literature Club duties too, don’t you, Nukumizu-san? Or does your club not do much?"

“That’s—” I started, but caught the playful glint in her eyes and simply shrugged. “You got me. I’m just so swamped with club activities, what can I do? Guess I’ll be counting on you today.”

“Yes, of course,” she replied with a soft giggle. “If there’s anything you don’t understand, I’ll be happy to teach you.”

Truth be told, of course, her grades weren’t exactly stellar. I mean, my own averages were definitely tanking too, but Tiara-san was basically always one bad day away from failing her classes. Gotta admit, though, she was practically valedictorian compared to Yakishio, considering she wasn’t pulling straight fails in literally every subject our school offered.

Tiara-san slid into the seat across from me, and we spread our notebooks and textbooks across the table.

The both of us then fell silent. For a while, the only sounds in the room were the turning of pages and the scratching of mechanical pencils against paper. Honestly, it was a pretty nice change of pace from the Lit Club’s room, where the usual background noise was the sound of one particular person loudly tearing through snacks. The quiet here felt strangely therapeutic in comparison.

About maybe fifteen minutes later, Tiara-san finally looked up from her notes.

“We studied The Pillow Book in middle school too, didn’t we?” Tiara-san murmured, eyes still on her notebook. I couldn’t remember for the life of me, so I just let her keep talking. “I don’t remember classical Japanese being this difficult back then.”

“Well, in middle school, they kinda just want you to get the vibe of it,” I told her. “Everyone just used to shout famous lines at each other and goof off.”

Tiara-san looked up at me, eyebrows gently raised. “Oh? So even you had a normal middle school experience, Nukumizu-san?”

“Nah, I was talking about everyone else. I didn’t have any friends.”

“...I’m sorry. Please forget I said anything.”

No, Tiara-san, that was supposed to be a joke. You’re supposed to laugh.

No thanks to the girl sitting in front of me, a strangely heavy mood settled over the room. We continued our study session in silence. I spent some time reviewing my notes before stealing a quick glance at Tiara-san. Her lips moved faintly as she recited conjugation tables in her head.

It kind of just hit me, but man, imagine how we looked from outside.

After school. Room locked. A guy and a girl, all alone. Studying.

Hold that thought. Wasn’t I… literally having a genuine high school romcom moment? Was this the peak high school experience?

Nah, couldn’t be. I remembered Yanami telling me something along those lines at the underground resource center last summer. Then, all that so-called “high-school experience” proceeded to sprint past me at full speed right after. Yup, I had to be misunderstanding something.

I found myself studying her face instead of my notes. Like always, Tiara-san had her hair pulled back tightly. Those prominent eyebrows of hers furrowed in concentration as her mechanical pencil tapped a rhythm against her study guide. It was easy to forget, what with all the other beautiful girls in the student council, but Tiara-san actually had a very small, well-proportioned face herself. Having her hair tied up like that really put her slender, pale neck on display. And that mole on her neck was actually pretty se—uh, seldom noticed. Right. But seriously, if her personality was even just slightly more approachable, she’d probably be crazy popular.

I suddenly realized she was staring right back at me.

“Is there something on my face, Nukumizu-san?”

“Wha-? Oh, no. You’ve just had this really intense look, so I was wondering what was wrong,” I lied.

Tiara-san sighed heavily and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Haaa… I can’t memorize these conjugations for the life of me.”

“Oh, yeah. I had a hard time with those too.”

“I forget them the second after I learn them! I get to the end, thinking I finally have the entire chart memorized, but then when I try and say them back, I start to forget the ones at the beginning.” She pushed her reference book towards me, eying me questioningly. “Do you have any tips?”

“Well,” I said, “usually, you try to connect the conjugations to other things you remember.”

“Connect them?” Tiara-san blinked in confusion.

“Yeah. The most obvious example is the alphabet song. You remember the tune and rhythm, right? Mnemonics and puns are the same principle. Though, what I usually just do is”—I pulled a ballpoint pen from my pencil case—“write it on my hand.”

“Huh?! By cheating?!”

“No, no, not like that. Look, you’re trying to memorize the conjugation tables, right? So, what you do is assign a category to each of your fingers. Like, for example, index finger for shimo-ichidan^[1], middle finger for S-stem henkaku^[2], and so on. Then during the test, you can just glance at your fingers and it’ll jog your memory.”

“Oh, I think I get it,” she said, nodding deeply. “You engrave it on your body so it sticks.”

Tiara-san immediately grabbed her own ballpoint pen and started writing on her hand.

Oh, she’s doing it right now? Here?

I couldn’t very well tell her to stop, seeing that I was the one who suggested it to her. So I stared down awkwardly at my notebook as she continued to fill her hand with conjugations. At one point, she let out a small laugh.

“You look like you’re having fun,” I noted.

“Writing on my hand like this feels so childish. I can’t help but laugh.” She continued scribbling across her skin, giggling intermittently. She even started humming a cheerful little tune.

Well, whatever. If she’s having a good time, who am I to judge?

With the sound of her humming in the back of my mind, I went back to reviewing my notes. Another thirty minutes or so passed before I finally reached the end of the material I planned on reviewing for the exam.

I stretched my arms high above my head, feeling satisfied. However, as I looked in front of me, I noticed Tiara-san had gone completely quiet, tightly gripping her pen.

“What’s wrong, Basori-san?”

“I—I ran out of room,” she said weakly, holding up her left hand. Every inch of her skin was buried beneath cramped conjugation tables that crawled from her wrist all the way to her fingertip. It was pretty gross, actually. “What do I do now…?”

“Uh, maybe write on your right hand?”

“I thought about that too, but I’m right-handed.”

Oh. Right. Fair point.

I suddenly found her pen held up to my face. Tiara-san squirmed a bit. “Would you”—her eyes darted to the floor—“mind writing it for me, Nukumizu-san?”

“Huh? Write… on your hand? Me?” I quickly backpedaled. “W-wait, why not just wash off your left hand and write there again?”

“I could, but you said the whole point was connecting the memory of me writing it to the hand that I wrote it on, didn’t you? If I write completely different things on the exact same fingers, won’t I just get confused?”

I hate the fact that she’s actually making sense.

“But that would mean I’d have to, um, touch your…” I trailed off, trying to refuse gently.

“D-Don’t get the wrong idea!” she exclaimed, her face flushing bright red. “I-It’s not like I want to hold your hand or anything, okay?!”

There goes ‘gently’, I guess. “Y-Yeah. I know. We’re just studying.”

“Exactly! Therefore,” she said, forcefully shoving her right hand across the desk toward me. “For the sake of my studies, I am perfectly willing to defile this body!”

Slow down there, Tiara-san. Also, that’s a huge red flag in eromanga. Please never say that out loud again.

“Well, uh. If you’re okay with it, I guess.”

I reached my hand out across the desk, but she frowned. “The letters will be upside down if you write them from there. Could you come sit next to me?”

“Oh. Sure.”

I dragged my chair over to her side of the table and gently took her right hand in mine. Her palm lacked the bewitching, dangerous allure of Shikiya-san’s, but it was incredibly small and delicate nonetheless. And undeniably the hand of a girl.

Huh. I guess she really is a girl.

…Wow, that was rude, even for me.

I inwardly chided myself for that thought and quickly placed it out of mind, gripping the ballpoint pen. A little nervous, I slowly pressed the tip against her palm and—

“Nn!”

—an incredibly sensual gasp slipped from Tiara-san’s lips.

“A-Are you ticklish?”

“I-It’s fine. Please continue.” She cast her eyes at the ground, biting her lip. I nodded silently and began slowly dragging the pen across her skin.

We started today’s kink sess—er, I mean, mnemonic practice—with the kami-nidan^[3] conjugations at her wrist. Slowly but surely, I worked my way down her fingers for the N-stem henkaku^[4], the pen caressing the back of her hand with gentle strokes. As I began to trace out the character for nu on her pinky, she flinched violently.

She looked at me with rosy cheeks. “N-Nukumizu-san, p-please don’t… rub it all around like that.”

“I can’t help it. ‘Nu’ is just really, er, loopy and curvy. Hang in there for a little longer, alright?”

“O-Okay,” she said. “The second conjugation in this row was—”

“‘Nuru,’” I finished.

“Ngh!”

Nu. Nuru. Nure. Ne. ^[5]

The na-gyou henkaku began to slowly spread across her right pinky, and the more I traced, the more Tiara-san seemed to tremble. A thin layer of sweat started to bead on her nape, quivering with every stroke I made. Crap. Now I’m feeling really weird too.

Look, this was just for studying, okay? This was absolutely not some kind of weird kink session. Seriously. I swear, it’s not.

Desperately trying to convince myself, I finally finished writing the very last character of the row. The moment I brought the pen off her skin, Tiara-san let out a pained, ragged sigh.

“P-Please, just give me a second to catch my breath!”

“Nah, we already have momentum. We might as well use it to push through the R-stem henkaku.”

“The… R-stem?” Tiara-san cast a teary-eyed glance at her reference book.

Ra. Ri. Ri. Ru. Re. Re.

Way less curves compared to the N-stem. Tiara-san gave a small nod, the flush of her cheeks still visible. And so I began slowly dragging the pen once again, this time on her ring finger.

However… there was one thing Tiara-san hadn’t realized. The two, curvy ‘re’ lying in wait for her at the finish line.

—Exactly one month later, Tiara-san would confess her feelings to me. Looking back on it now…. I guess the signs were there all along.

Translator Notes

1. Shimo-ichidan (下一段) - (lit. “lower monograde”) refers to a specific category of Japanese verbs that exhibits changes during conjugation on the “lower” (shimo) row of Japanese vowels. In the Japanese phonological chart, sounds are organized by the vowel rows: a, i, u, e, o, where u is the “middle” row, and e is considered the “lower” row. They are called “monograde” (ichidan) because they keep a consistent single verb stem during conjugation. There is only one true lower monograde verb in Classical Japanese (keru, lit. “to kick”); the rest of them are lower bigrade verbs, where the verb endings switch between the e and u vowels. ↑

2. Sa-gyou henkaku (サ行変格) - (lit. “s-stem irregular verb”) is an irregular conjugation class in Classical Japanese grammar consisting primarily of the verb su (meaning “to do”) and its honorific derivative ohasu. These verbs are considered irregular because their stems fluctuate across the various sounds of the S-column depending on the grammatical context. The modern verb suru ultimately developed from this conjugation class. ↑

3. Kami-nidan (上二段) - (lit. “upper bigrade”) refers to a category of Classical Japanese verbs where the verb endings switch between two vowel grades on the “upper” rows of the phonological chart (i and u, with u as the middle and i as the upper). Unlike the monograde (ichidan) verbs, bigrade verbs alternate their endings depending on the grammatical context. In Modern Japanese, verbs in this category have been simplified to upper monograde verbs (kami-ichidan). ↑︎

4. Na-gyou henkaku (ナ行変格) - (lit. “n-stem irregular verb”) is an irregular conjugation class in Classical Japanese grammar consisting of only two verbs: shinu (“to die”) and inu (“to go”). They use the N-column as opposed to the S-column. ↑

5. Nuru sounds like nurunuru (ヌルヌル) in Japanese, which is the onomatopoeia for “slimy” or “slippery.” Nure sounds like nureru (濡れる), which is a verb meaning “to get wet.” ↑