Private Lightfield Academy is a private high school located in Meguro Ward, Tokyo.
From the outside, it doesn’t look any different from an ordinary private school: a three-story teaching building, a small playground, and a row of ginkgo trees lining the slope at the school gate.
By December, all the ginkgo leaves had fallen, the bare branches forming a row of desolate skeletons under the gray winter sky.
But the inside of this school was completely different from an ordinary high school.
For example, the bulletin board in the hallway didn’t have “Math Competition Registration” or “Sports Festival Preparation Committee Recruitment,” but these strange notices:
“December Schedule Change Notice”
“Acting Department Year 2: Graduation Performance Audition Schedule”
“Idol Department Year 1: Year-End Special Course Participant Recruitment”…
Lightfield Academy is one of the few long-established “entertainment-oriented schools” in Tokyo.
Although it is a private “elite school,” it is a legitimate high school recognized by the Japanese Ministry of Education, offering the compulsory courses required by MEXT (Japanese Language, Mathematics, English, etc.), but it mainly offers a large number of specialized courses related to performing arts.
After completing the required credits and graduating, students can obtain a formal high school diploma.
The student body here is roughly divided into three categories:
[Acting Department] — Aiming to become actors.
Courses include acting basics, dialogue training, improvisation, etc.
[Idol Department] — Aiming to become idols/singers.
Courses include vocal music, dance, stage performance, camera sense training, etc.
[General Course] — Regular college preparatory high school courses.
But even in the General Course, many students have performing arts activities outside school.
They choose this school either because they don’t want to be bound by specialized courses, or simply to satisfy their parents’ request of “at least get a normal high school diploma first.”
Haruka naturally belonged to the [Idol Department].
Given Hoshino Haruka’s workload, it was almost impossible for her to attend class regularly according to the schedule.
Coming once or twice a week, or even just one or two hours to show up for two classes, was already a rare occurrence.
Her attendance rate had long been hovering between “barely passing” and “if we’re strict, she should repeat a grade,” but the school chose to turn a blind eye.
This was an unspoken rule of entertainment-oriented schools: for a student like Haruka who had already made a name in the industry, the school’s attitude was always “we warmly welcome you when you come to class, and we absolutely understand if you don’t.”
After all, the most convincing advertisement on the recruitment brochures of such schools was “a graduate from our school has become a top-tier star.”
Haruka’s existence itself was a golden signboard for Lightfield Academy.
The school board wasn’t stupid enough to offend a living signboard over some rigid attendance rules.
As for why Haruka still had to come to school despite being so busy, it was probably a joint request from her father and the President, with reasons like “a 16-year-old should go to high school.”
At 1:45 PM, the minibus smoothly stopped at a concealed intersection a little way from the school gate.
Mr. Uehara purposely chose this spot to avoid unnecessary attention.
Haruka sat in the back, looking down at her legs.
At this moment, she was wearing Lightfield Academy’s winter uniform: a tailored dark blue blazer with a fleece lining, a white shirt underneath, and a wine-red ribbon tied at the collar.
And for the lower half, a standard Japanese pleated skirt that just barely covered her knees.
An hour earlier, she had been in front of the apartment’s full-length mirror, engaged in an ultimate internal struggle.
Before going out, she had tried to find if the uniform had a pants option, or at least a pair of thick, warm tights to wear under the skirt.
After all, it was December in Tokyo, and the wind was biting cold.
Every winter, when she walked on the street and saw girls wearing skirts with bare legs in the freezing weather, her only thought was “beautiful but freezing.”
In the end, she found that after searching through the closet, the school uniform only had two versions, summer and winter, and the bottoms were skirts, not pants.
She clung to a sliver of hope and searched online for Lightfield Academy’s school rules, even browsing the school’s anonymous forum, and in some corner Q&A section, she found a rule that made her despair:
Q: Can female students choose to wear pants for the winter uniform or wear thick tights under the skirt?
A: To maintain the school’s excellent campus atmosphere and the public image of entertainment students, female students must wear the prescribed uniform skirt while on campus.
Changing into pants is strictly prohibited, and wearing thick tights/pantyhose that ruin the beauty of the uniform is also strictly prohibited.
‘This is such an inhumane rule?! If my legs get cold, will you compensate me?!’
She raged helplessly in her apartment.
But rage aside, in order not to stand out too much in a school full of future celebrities, she could only surrender in tears.
Fortunately, after rummaging through boxes and drawers, she found a pair of modesty shorts with a bit of fleece.
As long as the skirt didn’t fly up, they could cover part of her thighs and keep her somewhat warm, but her knees and calves would still be exposed to the cold winter air.
Now, sitting in the warm car, although it was a bright, sunny noon, Tokyo in December was by no means warm.
She took a deep breath, as if steeling herself to go to the execution ground, pushed open the car door, and stepped out with her leg clad only in black knee-high socks.
“Tch–!”
The cold wind rushed into her skirt, and Haruka shivered violently.
But strangely, the bone-deep chill lasted only a few seconds.
Her body seemed to have some kind of strong cold resistance buff, with qi and blood flowing quickly; as soon as she started moving, it wasn’t as bad as she had imagined, like “too frozen to even take a step.”
‘I have to say, Japanese high school girls’ ability to withstand cold is truly an unsolved mystery of the world… Well, or maybe this body, as an idol who sings and dances all year round, is naturally more cold-resistant than the average person?’
Haruka muttered to herself as she wrapped her blazer tighter and headed toward the school gate.
As she walked toward the school gate, her mood became extraordinarily complicated.
School.
For Eitai, even the memories of his college days from four or five years ago were already hard to recall, let alone high school from more than a decade ago.
That high school era of watching new anime in a small room with Ritsu, staying up all night playing games, and ditching class together to go to the arcade felt like something from the previous century.
And now, as a 16-year-old idol, she was stepping into a high school full of popular and good-looking people, an entertainment high school she had never experienced before.
Watching the students in the same uniform passing by in groups of two or three at the school gate, an indescribable feeling, somewhere between nervousness, strangeness, and nostalgia, slowly welled up in her heart.
She took a deep breath of the cold winter air and walked through the school gate.
Using her phone memos and student ID, Haruka successfully found her indoor shoe locker.
After changing her shoes, she followed the second-floor hallway to find [Class 1-3].
The first class of the afternoon hadn’t started yet, and it was the tail end of lunch break.
About half of the students were in the classroom, some chatting in groups, some scrolling on their phones, and some sleeping on their desks.
Just as Haruka pushed open the back door, a male student by the door caught a glimpse of her and let out a short exclamation:
“Ah–!”
Like an arrow through the clouds, all the eyes in the class snapped to Haruka at the door.
“Hoshino?!”
“Haruka is back!”
The previously quiet classroom instantly erupted like a bomb, with many students stopping what they were doing and crowding around.
The first to rush over was a male student, calling out with a delighted expression: “Welcome back!”
Then several girls from the back rows also got up, surrounding her like chattering little sparrows.
“How are you feeling–“
“We were so worried when we saw the news–“
“Are all the injuries on your head healed–“
“Have you lost weight–“
Facing the varying degrees of concern and greetings from seven or eight classmates, Haruka didn’t panic.
She quickly activated the “idol response mode” she had honed over the past few days and began replying skillfully one by one:
“Thank you all for your concern!”
“I’m much better now, totally fine!”
“Mm-hmm, the wound on my head is almost healed. I’m just wearing a bandage to prevent infection.”
“I might have lost a little weight, but I’ll gain it back soon enough, hehe…”
Although she couldn’t match any of their faces, that didn’t stop her from handling the situation with a perfect professional smile.
After all, in this setting, there was no need to call each person by name.
However, Haruka keenly noticed something.
The look in these classmates’ eyes when they crowded around was completely different from that of the employees at her agency.
When the people at the agency saw her, their expressions were “relieved,” the subtext being “thank goodness the company’s core asset isn’t scrapped.”
But these peers’ expressions were simple; they saw Hoshino Haruka back and were purely happy and curious.
‘As expected, the air at school is much purer…’
After dealing with the first wave of enthusiastic greetings, Haruka used the excuse of putting away her bag to squeeze out of the encirclement.
The other students dispersed after satisfying their curiosity.
She scanned the classroom and quickly found her seat–because there was a nameplate on the side of the desk.
‘Back row by the window… the king’s homeland?’ she silently joked to herself.
The seat really was in the third-to-last row by the window.
In a manga, that would be the perfect spot reserved for the protagonist.
As she got closer, she saw that the desk was wiped clean with no dust, so obviously someone had been regularly cleaning it for her during her month-long absence.
What surprised her even more was that in the pen slot on the corner of the desk, there was a small paper crane sitting quietly.
The folding was a bit clumsy, the wings not even symmetrical, but it was clear the person who made it had put in effort.
Haruka picked up the paper crane and was about to see if there was any writing on it when her peripheral vision caught the seat next to her, and she saw someone lying on the desk.
Her deskmate.
The person had their face buried in their arms, lying on the desk and sleeping soundly, completely oblivious to the commotion that had just occurred.
‘Sleeping really soundly.’