Maria-sama ga Miteru:Volume30 Chapter5 5

What Kind of Groups? Part 5.

When Yumi returned from the roller-coaster, Yuuki told her:

"I saw Touko-chan."

"Touko-chan? You mean Touko?"

He responded somewhat sulkily to this question with, "Who else would it be?"

"So, where is she now?"

The only other people gathered at the makeshift waiting area they had established around a bench beside the teacups ride were Sachiko-sama, Rei-sama and Yoshino-san.

"I dunno."

Yuuki spat the words out.

"You don't know?"

"That's what you say when you don't know."

That hardly seemed pertinent. It was the kind of thing a little child would say. Fairly irritating when you were trying to better understand the situation. Perhaps Yuuki's foul mood was contagious.

"If you saw her, how come you didn't call out to her?"

Then, just before she was about to add, "Are you an idiot?"

"Yumi."

Sachiko-sama intervened.

"Yuuki-kun went to a lot of effort. So don't blame him."

"Huh?"

"It was our fault that he lost sight of Touko-chan."

Yoshino-san chimed in on Yuuki's behalf. What on earth had been going on at ground-level while Yumi was screaming her lungs out on the roller-coaster?

For some reason everyone was fussing over Yuuki, who looked suitably depressed.

But, her onee-sama had said, "Don't blame him," so Yumi ceased her interrogation of Yuuki (she could always force a confession after they'd returned home) and changed the topic by asking a different question.

"So, was Touko by herself?"

"No, she was with Kanako-chan."

So Yuuki had noticed who Touko was with. And since she was with Kanako-chan, it meant he probably hadn't mistaken someone else for her.

"And she called out to Rei-chan too."

Yoshino-san said, standing and pointing her finger.

"Called out to you?"

Rei-sama nodded.

"I heard someone call out, "Rosa Foetidaaaaa," but when I turned around I couldn't see anyone I knew. I couldn't say definitively, but I thought it sounded like Touko-chan's voice."

"Did you hear it too, onee-sama?"

Yumi asked Sachiko-sama. If two or more people had heard it, they could be reasonably sure about who it was.

"I didn't. I was with Yoshino-chan at the time."

With Yoshino-san? Just the two of them?

"Yeah. I'd gone off to buy some soup, right?"

Rei-sama said smoothly.

Still, the way Rei-sama said that made it sound like she was asking for confirmation, which raised more questions than it answered for Yumi, who was hearing this for the first time.

Now that she mentioned it, Yoshino-san had been nursing something in a Styrofoam cup for a while now. That was probably the soup Rei-sama had just mentioned.

A number of nagging questions were piling up in her mind, but if she got sidetracked here then the conversation wouldn't progress at all, so Yumi decided to plow on ahead.

"So, where were you, Yuuki?"

Yumi glanced at her brother, who was looking down, unwilling to say anything. She couldn't tell why, but it looked as though he had been off on his own at that time.

"Just what kind of groups were you walking around in?"

Kashiwagi-san muttered, standing beside her. Yumi shared the exact same opinion.