The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya Read Online Free PDF Page A

be put into the same class, so we should all be friends, right? I’m counting on you.”
    Counting on me, huh? Easy for you to say.
    “If I need to tell her anything from now on, I’ll ask you to pass on the message for me.”
    Wait, hold on. I’m not her spokesperson or anything.
    “Pretty please?”
    She even clasped her hands together. I could only stammer grunts in the form of “ah” and “uh” which she apparently took to mean my consent. And with a smile like a yellow tulip in our direction, she returned to the cluster of girls. The fact that every girl in that cluster was turning their attention this way was enough to sink my mood another two notches.
    “Kyon, we’re buddies, right?”
    Taniguchi said this with a suspicious glint in his eyes. What was he talking about? Even Kunikida was standing there with his eyes closed and arms crossed while nodding his head for no reason.
    Guys are all idiots.
    Apparently, it was decided at some point that the seating order was to be changed every month. Class president Ryoko Asakura went around with a cookie tin of quadruple-folded pieces of paper to be drawn. I drew a quite excellent seat next to the window facing the courtyard, second from the back of the room. And as for the person in the seat behind me, I don’t know how it happened, but Haruhi Suzumiya sat behind me looking like she was suffering a cavity.
    “I wonder if students will start disappearing one by one. Or maybe a teacher will be found murdered inside a locked class-room.”
    “That’s some dangerous stuff.”
    “There was a Mystery Research Society.”
    “Heh. How was it?”
    “A joke. They haven’t encountered anything remotely resembling a case. All the members are just mystery novel fanatics. None of them look like detective material.”
    “Well, duh.”
    “I was expecting more from the Supernatural Phenomena Research Society.”
    “Really.”
    “But it was just a bunch of occult freaks. What do you think of that?”
    “Not much.”
    “Oh, man. It’s boring! Why doesn’t this school have a single decent club?”
    “You can’t do anything about what doesn’t exist.”
    “I expected high school to have more radical clubs. I feel like a stupid baseball player aiming for the national championships who just discovered that this high school doesn’t even have a baseball team.”
    Haruhi glared at the sky with crocodile eyes like those of an enchantress ready to begin a one-hundred-prayer ritual and sighed like a breeze.
    Was I supposed to feel sorry for her?
    All else aside, Haruhi hadn’t even specified what kind of a club would satisfy her. Did she even know? She was just vaguely thinking, “I want to do something fun.” What would the “something fun” be? Solving a homicide? Looking for aliens? Exorcising demons? I got the feeling she hadn’t even decided yet.
    I offered my opinion: “In the end, humans have to settle for what’s in front of them. If you think about it, the only humans who couldn’t were the ones who made discoveries or inventions and advanced civilization. Planes were invented because people wanted to fly. Cars and trains came to be because people wanted easier means to move around. But this all came from a limited number of people who had innovative plans and concepts. In other words, geniuses made it all possible. Average people like us are best off living ordinary lives.”
    “Shut up.”
    Haruhi cut me off and turned away, just as I was getting into a groove. She looked like she was in a really bad mood. Well, nothing new about that.
    That girl probably didn’t care what it was as long as it was a phenomenon that defied the tedium of reality. But such a phenomenon wasn’t going to readily appear in this world. Or rather, it wasn’t going to appear, period.
    Long live the laws of physics! They’re what allow us to live life in peace and quiet. Too bad for Haruhi.
    At least that’s what I thought.
    That’s normal, right?
    What was the catalyst