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Nagisa was sleeping peacefully until her alarm clock went off as it usually did every morning. She rolled over, cut it off, and then opened her eyes. But this morning, things in her bedroom looked different. She closed her eyes again, waited a few seconds, and then opened them again. Nope, everything was still different. For one thing, there was a plate of corn sitting on the floor by her bed with a note that said SORRY written in Naoya’s distinct handwriting. She guessed that the note was in response to the fact that her room was a complete mess. Some of her clothes were hanging from the window curtains, a few of her pictures that had been hanging on the wall were scattered on the floor, and a water polo ball was somehow wedged between her desk and the wall. On top of all that, her lampshade was missing, her window was open, and her textbooks had been moved. “Idiot Naoyaaaaa,” she shouted in frustration.Instantly, her bedroom door swung open and the source of her frustration stuck his blond head through the doorway. “You called?”She shrieked at the unexpected entrance and pulled her bedcovers up to her chin. Nevermind that she was wearing a non-revealing t-shirt as pajamas so she didn’t need to hide. “My door was locked when I went to bed,” she said.“I know,” Naoya said with a nod, as though she’d just declared that the sky was blue. And then, without warning, Naoya bowed very deeply in apology, and ended up cracking his head on the baseboard of Nagisa’s bed. “Ouch!” He rubbed his head. “Did you get my note and the corn?”She just glared at him. “What were you doing in my room? While I was asleep?”Naoya laughed. “It’s quite a funny story actually.”Nagisa didn’t look amused, but Naoya didn’t seem to notice.“I’ll tell you the whole story,” Naoya said. He picked up the plate of corn and placed it in her lap before he sat down in the middle of the floor. “You can eat this while I’m explaining.”“It’s 7 am. I don’t want corn for breakfast.”But Naoya paid no attention to her complaints and launched straight into his story. “It all started when I got a phone call from Ryuji…” “Oh Banchou!” Naoya happily answered his phone. “Are you calling about some extra water polo practice? It’s kinda late but I’m sure we could get into the school somehow.” He already had his water polo ball in hand and had stood up in anticipation. “No,” Ryuji answered. “I need my science textbook back.”“Hm?”“The one you stole.”Naoya blinked. He didn’t steal any of Ryuji’s books, although now that he thought about it, he had borrowed Ryuji’s science book during class earlier today. Where did he put that anyway? He tried to think back. Before Ryuji called, he’d been thinking about strategies for their upcoming match against Suiran. Before that, he’d eaten corn for dinner. And before that, he had… tossed his textbooks on the floor when he’d gotten home from practice!“Ah! The living room!” Naoya exclaimed. “Banchou, are you still there?” He looked at the phone and saw that the call had already ended. He shrugged. Maybe Ryuji had decided to go do some extra practice after all. He stepped into the living room to grab the textbook, but it wasn’t there. He searched under the table, but there was nothing. He checked the closet, but it was textbook-free. He even warily glanced up at the ceiling, but no, there was no science textbook magically attached to the light or anything. And that’s when it hit him. After dinner, Nagisa had said she was going to her room to study and had grabbed all of her schoolwork when she left. She must have picked up Ryuji’s science book by accident. Confident that the problem was finally going to be solved, Naoya walked proudly up to Nagisa’s door and grabbed the doorknob. It was locked.Looking down at the floor, he could tell that the lights were off too. Nagisa had already gone to bed. He crossed his arms as he considered the solution to this dilemma. It didn’t take him long to remember that he had his trusty lock-pick in his pocket. He carried it everywhere (well, almost everywhere. He’d decided that sticking it in his speedo was a bad idea after the first time.) He smiled as he stuck the thin piece of metal into the lock, waiting to hear the familiar click of the door unlocking. It’s a good thing he’d picked up this skill. When he first started learning the yankee lifestyle, he realized that one of the most important things was being able to make a grand entrance and a quick escape. At first, he’d just tried dramatically kicking doors open, but that didn’t last too long because, well, it hurt. (And his parents kept complaining about the scuff marks on the door.) So he turned to learning the beautiful art of lock-picking. And he got really good at it. In fact, he had quite the reputation for successfully breaking into all the warehouses in his old town. That was what yankees did, right? In all the TV shows he watched, yankees were always fighting each other in abandoned warehouses. What always baffled him, however, was that abandoned warehouses were much harder to find in real life. Naoya was interrupted in his musings on warehouses when the door unlocked. He peeked his head inside. “Nagisa?” he whispered. It was dark in the room, but he could just barely make out the outline of Nagisa’s sleeping form. No matter, he thought. He’d just grab the textbook and be in and out in a flash. Nagisa would never even know. But as soon as he stepped into the room, Naoya tripped over something and lost his balance. He waved his arms in an attempt to steady himself, but it didn’t work. He only managed to knock a few pictures off the wall as he fell to the floor. “Oops. Ouch,” he said out loud as the pictures bounced off his head and clattered to the floor beside him. Then he clasped his hands over his mouth as his eyes got as wide as saucers. He looked over to Nagisa, but she was still sleeping. Apparently, she had no trouble sleeping through loud noises. He breathed a huge sigh of relief. He was still near the doorway, so he reached back out into the hallway and picked up his water polo ball that he’d been holding before he started picking the lock. He placed the ball right by the doorframe. “Guard the door for me,” he whispered to the inanimate object. Satisfied, he now turned back to the task at hand: the textbook. He inched his way forward slowly as his eyes adjusted better to the darkness. He was on a mission. And he never gave up when he had something to do. He fumbled around a few minutes until he successfully made it over to Nagisa’s desk without breaking anything. The stack of school books were there, just where Nagisa usually left them. It was still too dark in the room for him to pick out which book was Ryuji’s so he pulled out his phone to shed some light on the stack. He noticed there was a text message waiting for him from Chiaki. Yo! We have practice tomorrow? it read. Pausing in his task, Naoya hastily typed out a response. Of course! But right now I’m trying to find a textbook. At least, that’s what it was supposed to say. In his haste, Naoya had misspelled basically every word and auto-correct had changed the message to: On calves! But tight not I’m tiger to fiend a sexboot. He didn’t notice as he put his phone back in his pocket. “Ah-hah!” he exclaimed in a triumphant whisper when he found the science book at the bottom of Nagisa’s stack of textbooks. He glanced over his shoulder, but Nagisa was still sleeping peacefully. With his mission accomplished, Naoya was about to make his daring escape from Nagisa’s bedroom. But then his phone started ringing, startling Naoya so much that he dropped the textbook. The caller ID said Tomoki. He fumbled around his pocket to grab the phone and try to silence it before Nagisa woke up. In a panic, his fingers couldn’t find the right button to silence the ringing or shut off the bright light emanating from the screen. Desperately, he grabbed the lampshade from her lamp to cover up the phone but immediately realized that did absolutely nothing to fix the situation. Not having time to think properly, Naoya flung open the window and tossed out both his phone and the lampshade. He’d deal with that later. (Unbeknownst to Naoya, at the same time his phone was ringing, he’d also received a text back from Chiaki which simply read OH MY GOD.)Not even daring to breathe a sigh of relief this time, Naoya slowly turned around to see if Nagisa was still asleep. She was. Apparently, the house could be on fire and Nagisa would sleep right through the whole thing. Naoya made a mental note to check on Nagisa in the event that he ever accidentally set the house on fire in the middle of the night. Now where did that textbook go? Naoya crouched down to feel for the missing object and bumped into her laundry basket. He hadn’t realized the basket was right by his feet. He reached inside and began throwing clothes out over his shoulder as he searched. Finally, his hands found the unmistakable solidness of the missing book. He held it slowly up in the air like a trophy as he mentally played triumphant music in his head. Happily, he shuffled silently back towards the door before anything else could go wrong.Of course, Naoya had forgotten that he’d placed his water polo ball by the doorway for safekeeping. He stepped on it, lost his balance, and in the process, sent the ball flying across the room. He couldn’t see in the dark, but it sounded like it had landed somewhere near her desk. But after all this work, Naoya didn’t dare go back to search for the ball. Instead, he creeped to the kitchen, fixed a plate of corn and a sorry note for Nagisa. He reopened her bedroom door and slid the plate beside her bed. And then he settled down outside to wait for her to wake up so he could apologize for the mess in person… “So that’s what happened,” Naoya concluded with a nod. “You understand?”“Nope,” Nagisa answered flatly.“Eeehhh?”Nagisa rolled her eyes. She was still annoyed at the mess but she couldn’t ever stay mad at Naoya for long. He had good intentions after all, and she supposed it was partially her fault since she’d accidentally taken the book in the first place. “So you returned the book to Ryuji, right?” she asked.Naoya blinked twice. It suddenly dawned on him that he’d been so focused on his apology that he never got the book back to Ryuji. He scratched the back of his head and laughed nervously. Nagisa shook her head in disbelief. She handed the plate of corn and the sorry note back to Naoya. “Take this and the book back to Ryuji and apologize.” “Okay!”“Now get out of my room!”