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here is the first rule of the pretty boy detective club:
you must be pretty.
mayumi’s a side character kind of girl; a girl abandoned by the stars. she hides in corners and eats in bathrooms, and always, always, hides her eyes behind her glasses. maybe she’ll say it’s for protection, but really she just hates them.
mayumi dojima has always hated her eyes.
but on her 14th birthday, when her dream is slipping away from her grasp, she takes her glasses off. she’s on the roof of the school in the middle of the night, and here she raises her cursed, horrible eyes to the stars (not the one she’s been trying to find for 10 years, though. that one’s never there.)
but as she looks back down- there is a boy. surprised, mayumi slips off the edge of the balcony (looking back, she can’t tell if it’s on purpose). for an eternal moment, she’s falling. she’s not scared, just resigned. the stars are lovely, she thinks. even if they’re not hers.
but then a hand grabs her wrist, and she’s pulled back onto the balcony with a twirl and a pretty boy. a precarious catch for a precarious fall.
he says: i am manabu sotoin. you have beautiful eyes. were you looking for something?
-o-
here is the second rule of the pretty boy detective club:
you must be a boy.
gender’s a shapeless, formless thing for mayumi: an abstract thought hovering meaninglessly around her, a decorative scarf around her neck. she wears it like her uniform- a simple formality to have long hair and curve her shoulders in, to cross her ankles or wear a skirt. it’s a skin she wears without complaint; she’s always been rather ambivalent about such things.
but well, when sosaku tucks her hair away and fits her into pants, hides her not-curves behind stripes and cleverly fitted blazers, it feels bold. it feels daring. mayumi is not a girl: she is a marvel, a wonder, something to be beheld. if it makes her a boy, well? she doesn’t mind so much. it isn’t forever, anyway.
mayumi wants to stay with them, these pretty detective boys, these mysterious benefactors of hers. she wants and she wants and she wants. she wants to wear her newfound gender like a shiny piece of jewelry. she wants to use her eyes as her gift and not her doom.
she wants to be one of them. she wants to use “ore” with “watashi”, “he” with “she” with “they". can’t she be female, and still a boy?
so mayumi (metaphorically) kicks down the door to the club room, and asks for a place, and dares them to say anything. there’s a few token protests, but manabu settles it with a gleam in his eye.
after all, he says, you has the heart of a boy, a shounen, after all, don’t you, dojima mayumi-kun?
-o-
here is the third rule of the pretty boy detective club:
you must be a detective.
this one mayumi learns along the way. she learns to listen to manabu’s inane talk, and to pluck the details from the diatribes. she learns to weave a story into a tapestry, to cut her own puzzles out of hints and observations.
she watches the other boys with their skills. manabu the aesthete, creating diamonds from coal-mysteries. nagahiro the orator, braiding his words into scapels. michiru the epicure, pan-frying joy out of 5-course meals. hyota the adonis, sprinting across the earth to battle the sun. sosaku the artiste, sculpting the final detailing out of fresh clay and minute observation.
mayumi is the seer. she stares and peers and glances, takes all of the information in and narrows in on her prey. she teases the knowledge out as much with skill as with raw talent, her thinking picking up what her eyes cannot. she dresses as a schoolboy, as a bunny girl in a casino, as an artist in an attic, as a friend to a lonely girl, as a candidate for school president. she takes on all the roles, and she learns from them, and she becomes a part of them as they become a part of her.
she learns that sometimes the most obvious answer is the correct one, and sometimes as much as you convolute it, the truth will emerge untwisted. she learns that no view is too outlandish, that no theory is too impossible. she paints the cosmos with an empty auditorium filled with stolen students, and steals a sculpture with a not-so-magical carpet.
the mysteries are lovely to see, lovely to solve. it is the only path to take when acting as a detective in this club, she learns. the boys seek the most beautiful answer, always. and so the prettiest answer becomes the one that fits, the one that they can add as a sparkling star to their collection. even if it seems unsatisfying at first glance, they can make it so.
the mysteries are always mysterious, and they are always beautiful. mayumi unravels the beauty into glittering moondust, and she marvels at the glory.
she becomes a pretty boy detective.
-o-
“you see”, manabu says cheerfully, extravagantly, “you can be pretty, be a boy, and be a detective, but then we’d all just be pretty boy detectives.”
here is the final rule of the pretty boy detective club:
you must be a team.
mayumi sees it in the little things. the way that manabu knows hyota’s favorite food, and the way michiru cooks it for him when he’s tired. the way that with just a light tap on a shoulder from sosaku, manabu can speak an essay. the way that michiru and nagahiro banter, old and worn arguments slipped on like a favorite t-shirt. the casual way that hyota leans on sosaku, legs dangling loosely in the air.
and of course, of course, the way that the boys band around their leader. the way that they shield manabu from the worst of it, and let him experience the beauty he so badly craves.
at some point they slip from dojima (dojima mayumi-kun, manabu’s voice says, echoing in her head) to mayumi (mayu, even), so casually that she almost doesn’t notice- in between the star-seeking and the invisible casinos and the auditorium within an auditorium.
she gets folded into the love like it’s easy, somehow: mixes into the beauty. pretty, joyful manabu who twirls her around in joy, who believes in mayumi with his whole heart. brash, bold hyota who walks her home after school, who scolds her for “consorting with the enemy”, worrying over her safety the whole time. sarcastic, gruff michiru who makes mayumi food with a brusque word, who watches her cry over tea with some amount of embarrassment, who jokes with her dryly in between missions. intelligent, refined nagahiro who slips her into their own form of banter in a way that seems so natural. (“ah, don’t worry about it, mayumi-san. you’ll be scum no matter how old you grow”). and lovely, wise sosaku, who paints her a sky full of stars and molds her into a bishounen, a beautiful boy, who whispers “mayu” into her ear like a song.
mayumi leans back on the couch with hyota’s legs over her lap, and sips her perfectly brewed tea. she stares up into the stars on the ceiling. michiru and nagahiro are bickering again: something about a lunchroom standoff last thursday. sosaku’s perched on the corner of an armchair, molding a miniature clay replica of a happily chattering manabu.
mayumi dojima has always hated her eyes, but she loves the beauty she can see.
so this is what it’s like to love, she thinks. the stars above her twinkle, swirling into constellations. somehow, they don’t seem so far anymore.