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Koguma, who had come to use the Cub as a daily companion and as a work tool for her summer vacation job, had now encountered her biggest enemy as a motorcyclist.
The timing was right in the middle of delivering the documents. It happened during the outbound trip of the evening delivery of her twice-a-day round trips.
The summer sky, halfway between sunny and cloudy, was covered with ominous clouds. And then the enemy launched a relentless attack.
A sudden rainfall.
In order to escape from the rainclouds, which she couldn’t escape even if she tried, Koguma shot off on her Cub and rushed to the high school in Koufu that was her destination, but her tracksuit and helmet were completely soaked.
Fortunately, the documents for delivery were safe in the steel box in the back. In order to end her time in the rain as soon as possible, she ran to the staff room where the young female teacher, the recipient of the documents, was.
The teacher, who was alone in the staff room during summer vacation, looked shocked to see Koguma in that condition and handed her a towel she had taken out of her desk drawer.
Koguma accepted the towel, and as she wiped her wet tracksuit with it, she handed over the bag of documents she had used to protect herself from the bike parking lot where she had parked her Cub to the staff room.
After thanking the teacher, returning the towel, and confirming that there were no documents to be returned today, Koguma stared tiredly at the intensifying rain outside the window and was about to leave, but the teacher stopped her.
“It’s just an evening shower anyways, so you might as well wait here until it stops.”
Koguma sat back down in response to the teacher’s suggestion, and she made her a cup of tea.
She was a female teacher who looked like she might be the advisor for a sports club. Koguma didn’t know if she actually did that, because they had never really asked each other about themselves.
As Koguma herself wasn’t good with chitchat or small talk, the female teacher, perhaps out of concern for this, said nothing in particular and concentrated on checking the documents that had been delivered.
As she sipped her hot tea, Koguma thought that this person still didn’t seem to be a fan of papers with a lot of words on them.
The staff room during a shower. Time passed without them saying anything to each other. It was extremely uncomfortable, and the watery green tea for visitors tasted bad.
The tea in the staff rooms always tasted awful. Maybe it was the environment, she thought. The last time she drank it was when she had to apply for a scholarship after her mother disappeared.
Soon after, the rain stopped, just as the teacher had said, and the sun shone, which was a relief for people on motorcycles. Koguma thanked her for the tea and towel and stood from her seat. Before she left, she asked her.
“Are you the advisor for some kind of club, miss?”
“Oh, didn’t I tell you yet? It’s a literary club.”
Inwardly, she thought that this was the most unlikely club activity for this teacher, but without any further conversation, Koguma took her leave from the staff room. She didn’t know why she asked about that.
She wondered if she was just trying to be friendly, just for the cup of tea, or if in the mind of Koguma, who had never been interested in others and that foundation remained unchanged while some kind of exception like this evening shower occurred.
Koguma’s thoughts were quickly interrupted on the way home to Hokuto City from Koufu. It had stopped raining, and there were even flashes of blue sky peeking through, but now it had clouded over again. This time it rained heavily, and there was even thunder.
Since she didn’t have documents to send back, Koguma went straight back to her apartment, soaking wet down to her underwear.
She thought she could go anywhere on her Cub, but that wasn’t so when it rained. Visibility was poor, the tires slipped, and more than anything, you got soaked. If one rode in such conditions for a long time, one might catch a cold.
Since Koguma had bought the Cub in the early summer after the rainy season, she had been able to avoid encountering rain, the enemy of motorcyclists, but she wouldn’t be able to do so from now on.
The next day, Koguma was rained on for two days in a row.
Since the first evening shower, she had put the plastic raincoat she used to wear when she rode her bicycle in the rear box of the Cub, but the rain relentlessly poured in through the buttoned-up front and it didn’t seem to fit her, as it kept flapping around in the wind.
She thought that it would be better if she didn’t wear it, but apparently she couldn’t say that either. There was no way she was going to walk into the staff room where she was working with rainwater dripping from her clothes.
On her way home from work after the rain, Koguma stopped by the home improvement store to look for rainwear in the work clothes section, but couldn’t find anything worth mentioning.
This one looked like it might get caught in the wheels when she rode, this one was just a piece of plastic like the one she used for her bicycle and seemed stuffy, and she didn’t like the color of this one.
In the end, she went to a major used motorcycle supply store in Chuuou, Yamanashi, which was within her range of activities in her round-trip to Koufu, and bought a motorcycle-specific product that was sold as an unused second-hand item with a little bit of excitement.
She thought the yellow color would be gaudy, but in bad weather with poor visibility, such a color was a necessary safety feature. That was also just an excuse, and she wanted it as soon as she saw it.
She put the new rainwear in the Cub’s box and went to work. On the way to Koufu, the grey rain clouds began to spread again. Before, she would have felt as gloomy as those clouds, but today’s Koguma wanted to grin and laugh out loud.
She immediately parked the Cub at a convenience store on the side of the road, put on the rainwear under the eaves, and rode out. The breathable wear wouldn’t let raindrops through and wouldn’t feel stuffy.
The high collar of the rainwear hid her mouth that was uncovered by the open-faced helmet, and as it was made specifically for motorcycles, it didn’t impede her body even at high speeds.
The raindrops that hit her eyes were also blocked by the goggles she bought last month, and the lenses didn’t fog up due to frequent polishing with a cleaner.
Koguma arrived at the Koufu high school and shook out her rainwear under the eaves of the staff room entrance. The raindrops cleanly rolled off, and the rainwear was almost in the same condition as it was when dry.
Before opening the door and entering the school, Koguma, wearing her yellow rainwear, looked back outside at the falling rain and said,
“Serves you right!”
Ever since she bought her new rainwear, Koguma no longer hated the rain or rain clouds.
Perhaps it was because she learned that there was a wonderful scent when riding a Cub after a shower.
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