I firmly nodded. All I wanted to know about Ramos was whether he was dating the fortune-telling instructor. Because in my future memories, she meets the father of Stephan Kirkpatrick, whom she will soon meet during parent visit week, and becomes Viscountess Kirkpatrick in two months. (Kirkpatrick made pocket money by secretly selling the genealogy that she tipped him off after seeing it in a crystal ball, but none of the information was right at that time, so after the final exam he was listed in several hit lists).
But there’s one more thing I’m curious about.
“About Rosemary Blossom.”
“Bryce’s pointless target of admiration?”
“If you want to express it that way, yes, her. Anyway, do you have any plans to let her be part of the student council?”
‘Why were we suddenly talking about Rosemary Blossom here?’ Ramos looked at me with an expression as if he were saying that. Even if it sounds out of the blue, it’s an important issue to me. Whatever it may be, I tried to look as casual as I could…
“It won’t be a bad idea if she became a secretary. It can protect her from discriminatory people like Pedro Cantrell. She’s also close with all of the student council members, and she has pretty handwriting.”
I have never seen her handwriting, but it must be pretty. To be honest, Rosemary Blossom does not have any part of her that is not beautiful.
“It’s interesting. Bryce said exactly the same thing as you, but…”
“But?”
“Keran said we’d have to wait and see.”
It was Keran Illestia again. If you open the book <The Questions of Ariel Dalton>, his name will definitely appear every two lines. In my imagination, instead of the tortured Adam Walsh, a handsome man who seemed to have been carved, appeared. A young man sits reverently among the cornelian, birch, and camellia trees, waiting every morning for someone who does not come.
He was also putting a brake on Rosemary Blossom’s romance novel-like academy life. However, I could not understand it at all. Even if Illestia really had memories of the past five years, that wouldn’t be a reason to distance himself from Rosemary Blossom because Illestia loved Blossom for all those five years.
***
I fell asleep for a while and woke up. When I opened my eyes, I thought the room that I had been longing for and my beloved Brianna would appear, but what greeted me was Edgar Ramos playing with something like a green hairball in the musty practice magic tools storage room. The disappointment was great.
“Dalton, do you know this?”
As soon as I had came to my senses, Ramos thrust the hairball he was holding at me. When I looked closely, it was a memorable toy that children of our age group would go crazy about.
“My God, of course!” I ran amok like someone meeting an old friend after a very long time.
“That’s Baby Gremlin Marnie!”
Baby Gremlin Marnie was a toy that went viral when I was about six or seven. If placed near the magic circuit according to the concept of “Gremlin”, the flow of magic will be disturbed. I couldn’t even count how many adults I made angry with this.
“Oh, you know! Then, do you remember its theme song? ‘Baby Gremlin Marnie, mischievous Marnie…’ .”
“’The swamp witch’s friend who turns naughty adults into frogs…’ Crazy, I completely remember.”
Baby Gremlin Marnie starts to dance on Ramos’ palm as we hum the theme tune used by the vendors selling her. It was so cute.
“Has she also been in the forever messy closet?”
“Yeah, with the unicorn top*.”
*(a toy having a body of conical, circular, or oval shape, often hollow, with a point or peg on which it turns or is made to whirl.)
“I’m a unicorn top expert, give me that.”
The unicorn top is a top in the shape of a unicorn, and it was played by turning the horn part as an axis. It was not well balanced like a normal top, so without considerable skills, itt was difficult to turn it even five times.
At my confident words, Ramos snorted and put the baby gremlin Marnie, back in the closet. Then he pulled out two unicorn tops.
“No matter how well you spin the unicorn top, you won’t be as good as me. Wanna bet?”
“What are you betting on?”
In my nineteen years and forty-six months of life, I swear, I’ve never avoided a fight that came my way.
“To gain honor by becoming an authority in the field of unicorn tops?”
“Who makes such a boring bet? Let’s make it a consequence.”
“A consequence? Great. No turning back.”
Ramos accepted my offer with bright eyes. It seemed as if he had been waiting for this. He seemed excited, so I felt uncomfortable, but there should be no problem, I just had to win anyway.
I was the first to win the unicorn top battle of the century, which was held at dawn in the practice magic tools storage room where no one was watching. My blue unicorn got exactly two and a half more turns than Ramos’s pink unicorn.
“I lost. What is your wish?”
“Sing the theme song of Baby Gremlin Marnie in the cafeteria during lunchtime.”
“That’s too much!” Ramos burst into anger.
“Think of another wish, I’m tone-deaf….”
“Really? That’s great then. Sing up to verse 3.”
“Please, Dalton. Can’t I do anything else besides that?”
“You must be serious about being tone-deaf.”
Ramos’s nodding as if he were about to get his neck dislocated almost made me roll around from laughing. So, Edgar Ramos also had some shame. He always revealed his private life all over town, so I thought shame was not part of his vocabulary.
There was another wish, I suppose, that would satisfy me and Ramos. Well, honestly I don’t know if Ramos will be satisfied with it. After all, he always showed up in the arms of a popular, pretty kid like Anais O’Brien.
“Have you decided on a partner for the beginning month banquet?”
The annual Beginning Month Banquet held at the end of March has traditionally had a theme of “international exchange.” So, the students must be accompanied by a partner from another country.
My social relationships were extremely narrow, so I was always troubled at this time of year. In my freshman year, I was with Kelly Ramirez’s now-graduated brother, and from second to fourth grade, the damned Adam Walsh was my partner. At the 5th-year banquet, however, there was no dog crap like Walsh to use as medicine*. Kyle is usually the most convenient person for me to bring with me in situations like this, but he is also a Milua native.
*(From a famous Korean proverb: There’s no dog poop to use as medicine. It is used when things that are common or even useless are unavailable when you urgently need them.)
The fifth, Ariel Dalton, dropped out before the Beginning month banquet. Before that, I attended alone, and before that, I was with Bree (because she had already broken up with Walsh). I was accompanied to the first two banquets by Trevor Gibbons, with whom I had developed a close friendship. Perhaps mistaking it for a sign of something, he made a public confession to the second Ariel Dalton, so I decided not to repeat the same mistake.
Edgar Ramos seemed unlikely to make a public confession. It was also important to take into account his royal status and good looks. Perhaps realizing what I was getting at, Ramos softly smiled while wiping the despair off his handsome face.
“If that’s what you want.”
He acted as if he was going to kiss the back of my hand.
“Hey, don’t do things like this.” Somehow embarrassed, I pulled my hand from him and I heard a low giggle.
***
After a fierce battle, it was Ramos who won the second battle. I doubted whether his overflowing mana had not been used illegally, but he looked so aggrieved that I decided to let him go.
“Great. Tell me what you want.”
I was ready to sing the Baby Gremlin Marnie theme song until the third verse, but Ramos’ request was totally unexpected.
“Tell me about yourself.”
“About me?”
“Anything, even a small thing. Talk about your childhood… I’m just curious. About what kind of person you are.”
“You wonder about a lot of things.”
“It’s the basics of socializing, Miss Dalton.”
Ramos scolded me as if I was pathetic. I didn’t have any friends because I was ignorant of the basics of socializing, and because I had no friends, I had to go to the banquet with Ramos, so I decided to stay put.
“Well, I am from Milua.”
“I know that. I heard your parents run a merchant guild?”
“Damn, I was just about to say that… Uh, also Kyle Villard and I are childhood friends.”
“I know that too. I heard you can even go to the same bathtub together.”
Ah, Brianna Mosley. I loved my roommate, but I couldn’t love her light mouth* at all.
*(Someone who can’t keep secrets to themselves.)
“I’m sure you don’t know this. I fell from a tree when I was five.”
“Was it Holly tree? You want to pick its fruit?”
“What, how do you know that?”
Even Brianna Mosley did not know that Ariel Dalton developed a fear of heights after falling from a tree while trying to pick holly berries. I don’t know if it’s a coincidence, but my intelligence, which I was told was very high among my peers, showed a somewhat sluggish improvement curve after that day, so my parents couldn’t help but lament that their child fell from the tree and became stupid.
Did Kyle gossip about it? No way. While I doubted my friendship with my childhood friend, Ramos rubbed his arms as if he had found something creepy.
“Wah. I didn’t know that there would be three people around me who fell from a holly tree at the age of five.”
“Who else did?”
“Anais, Maeve, and you.”
Maeve was the name of Miss Proctor, the fortune-telling instructor. The witness story on Finnigan Street was real. I was shocked and took a deep breath. There were a lot of things to be surprised about.
“Isn’t it strange?”
It was very strange. No matter how many women Ramos had dated, he would not have dated everyone on the continent.
Honestly, it wouldn’t be a big deal if there were similar scenes in the childhood memories of three people on the continent. I can just say that three people are exactly like me in this world. But three out of five hundred people at the Fitzsimmons Academy, at most, is a different case.
Ramos and I looked at each other for a while. How much time has passed? It was the moment when he suddenly opened his mouth while thinking about something. Above his head, there was the sound of something sharp scratching the glass. Our heads turned toward the window at the same time.
“Clay!”
“Oh my God, Clay!”
It was an unexpected moment of rescue.
T/N: Hi, you can now sponsor an extra chapter by buying me a KoFi! 2 KoFi= 1 Extra Chapter. It will be released every Monday together with the regular update.
