Another, Vol. 1 (19 page)

“Oh. Um…where is everyone?”

“They picked a new class representative for the girls in homeroom. Akazawa.”

“Oh?”

So that’s why her name was on the blackboard.

“Um, so then where is everyone?”

But Mr. Kubodera basically ignored my question.

“You can go home for the day,” he repeated. “I’m sure the incident with Mizuno’s sister has been quite a shock for you, too. But you can’t let yourself get too downhearted. Things will be all right. If everyone pulls together, I’m sure we’ll get through this.”

“…Yeah.”

“For that, do you agree?”

Although he was talking to me, Mr. Kubodera’s eyes were turned not on me, but on the empty lectern.

“We need to obey whatever the class decides, without fail. All right?”

The next day, Saturday, June 6, I stayed home from school so I could go to the municipal hospital in Yumigaoka. If things were still normal, I might have seen Ms. Mizuno again today, but…

Her memorial service was being held right now at a funeral home somewhere in this town…I was conscious of that fact as I went to my outpatient exam in the respiratory unit. The lead physician, just entering old age, certified me in an unusually compelling voice, saying “In this state, you should be fine.” Afterward, I headed to the inpatient ward alone.

I wanted to see the site of the accident that had taken Ms. Mizuno’s life with my own eyes, if only once.

Just as the detectives had told me, the location of the “back elevator” I was searching for was hard to find, pretty far back in an old part of the inpatient ward, which had a complex floor plan. I managed to make my way there somehow or other, but of course the elevator was off-limits and several strips of yellow police tape had been put up to cover the entrance.

Why had Ms. Mizuno, the novice nurse, gotten on this elevator that day, when even the employees hardly ever used it? Had she actually been in the habit of using it? Or had she just happened to get on it that day? Even now, those details weren’t clear.

I took a different elevator up to the roof, alone.

It had been relatively humid all day, slightly cloudy and windless.

I was walking from one end of the empty roof to the other, feeling that someone would call out “What’s wrong, Horror Boy?” to me any moment, when I came to a sudden stop. I wiped the sweat from my face with a handkerchief. There may have been some tears mixed in there.

“Why…Ms. Mizuno…” I mumbled without realizing it. I was suddenly oppressed by the visceral weight of the emptiness of “death,” to the point I thought my chest might crumple in on itself.

As I slowly brought my breathing under control, I leaned against the fence and looked out across the town of Yomiyama. When Reiko had come to visit me in the hospital, she’d shown me a distant view of the town from the window of my room; that image hung hazily over what I saw now.

The mountain range in the distance. Where was the one called Asamidai? The river that ran through town was called Yomiyama River. Beyond it I could see the field at North Yomi…

…When I’d gone back to school yesterday, the first thing I’d done was catch Yuya Mochizuki and talk to him.

“Where did everyone go for sixth-period homeroom?”

I asked him the question that had been on my mind, but Mochizuki’s answer wasn’t very articulate.

“We were talking and so we just headed over to Building S…”

“Building S? You mean the special classrooms?”

“There’s a conference room that students can use there, too. We went there and, you know, just talked about stuff.”

Talked?
About what?
I wondered.

“I heard you guys made Izumi Akazawa class representative for the girls.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Was there a vote or something?”

“Akazawa was nominated. She was the tactical officer before, anyway.”

“Tactical officer?” I hadn’t heard that title before. “What’s that?”

“Oh…uh, well, it just means—”

Mochizuki struggled with his answer a long time.

“We have stuff like that. When the class has some kind of problem, the tactical officer’s in charge of thinking up how to deal with it. Kazami does that stuff, too, but…”

This, too, was pretty inarticulate. Trying to tease him a little, I said, “Looks like Ms. Mikami’s out again today,” and I deliberately added a little sigh. Instantly, Mochizuki’s face clouded with worry.

This guy was way too easy to read, or maybe he was too innocent, or I don’t know what. It really made me want to ask “That doesn’t bother you, kid?”

It wasn’t just Ms. Mikami, though. Mei hadn’t shown herself at school the entire day yesterday. And today, there was one other person absent from third-year Class 3: Ikuo Takabayashi. I recalled that Takabayashi had been out back on my first day at school, too, along with Izumi Akazawa. Apparently he had some sort of health problems, so even when he came to school, he always sat out of gym class. Anyway, he seemed dull and hard to talk to, and even though he was my
sit-out buddy
, I had barely ever spoken to him…

I couldn’t work up any enthusiasm to explore on my way back from the hospital, so I went straight home.

I had just realized that with everything going on, it had been two weeks since I’d talked to my father in India. I ought to call him tonight or maybe tomorrow. Then I could tell him about what had been going on and use that to ask him a little bit about how my mother died fifteen years ago…I was thinking these things over when—

I reached my grandparents’ home in Koike around two in the afternoon. When the front gate to the house came into view a little way ahead, I sighed internally.

A middle school–aged boy wearing a summer uniform was loitering in front of the gate, alone. He had a somewhat unsettled air about him…He kept looking up at the house, then looking down or up at the sky. I didn’t have to take a closer look. It was…

“What are you doing here?” I asked him, and he practically jumped in the air, he was so surprised. He turned to look at me, then turned his eyes away in embarrassment. He started to leave without ever saying anything, but I stopped him with a harsh order. “Hold on. What’s going on? You had some reason for coming here, didn’t you?”

It was Yuya Mochizuki.

He didn’t run away after all, but even as I came up to him, he kept his eyes turned away, fidgeting and squirming, and didn’t offer any response. When I came even closer, I peered into his face and loaded on another question. “What might that reason be, Mochizuki?”

Then, finally, he spoke: “I was just, uh, worried. My house is near here, in this town, so I thought I might, uh…”

“Worried?” I cocked my head slightly, sarcastically. “What made you worry about me?”

“Uh, well…” Knitting his thin, girlish eyebrows and looking perturbed, Mochizuki dropped his voice. “You weren’t at school again today, Sakakibara.”

“I had an appointment at the hospital all morning.”

“Oh…But still, um…”

“You plan to keep standing around out here talking? Come inside for a second.”

I invited him in with a casual tone.

“Wha—? Uh, okay. Just for a second,” Mochizuki agreed, his face a mix of smiling and tears.

It looked as though my grandmother had gone out somewhere. The black Cedric wasn’t in the garage next to the front door. My grandfather was probably with her. I thought Reiko was probably in the side house, but I decided not to announce myself.

I brought Mochizuki around to the backyard, where the porch was. I knew that the glass door to the porch wasn’t locked during the day. It was a level of carelessness unthinkable in Tokyo…But no, I should probably chalk it up to peacefulness.

We sat down next to each other on the edge of the porch, and Mochizuki almost immediately started talking, with a speed that suggested he’d decided to just go for it.

“Sakakibara, ever since you transferred to North Yomi, you must have thought a bunch of stuff here seemed weird.”

“Does that mean you’re going to explain it to me?” I shot back, and Mochizuki’s response died off.

“Er…I…”

“That’s what I thought.”

I glared at him out of the corner of my eyes.

“What horrible secret is everyone getting together to hide from me?”

“That’s…”

Again Mochizuki got stuck, and he was silent for a short while.

“I’m sorry. I guess I can’t say it, after all. It’s just…”

“Just what?”

“Something might happen soon that you’ll think is really unpleasant. It’s actually bad that I’m talking about it like this, but…I couldn’t stay quiet.”

“What does that mean?”

“We
talked about it
at the meeting two days ago…So—”

“You mean the homeroom in sixth period two days ago? When everyone left to go to the conference room?”

“…Yeah.” Mochizuki nodded apologetically. “We knew you were going to be late since you were talking to the police, so that’s how the idea came up. Akazawa and some of the others said we needed to talk without you around. That we should go somewhere else so there wouldn’t be any problems if you came back in the middle of it.”

“Hmph.”

Which meant that Mr. Kubodera had been on board with their suggestion, too.

“…And?”

“I can’t say any more.”

Mochizuki bowed his head and let out a feeble sigh.

“But even if something bad happens to you after this…we need you to put up with it.”

“How can you even say that?”

“Just tell yourself that it’s for everyone’s benefit. Please.”

“For everyone’s…?” I offered him the phrase that came to mind just then. “So that’s a decision by the class that I have to obey no matter what?”

“…Yeah.”

“Hm-m-m. What to do.”

I stood up from my seat on the edge of the porch and stretched, reaching toward the slightly cloudy sky. This was the time when I could have actually used Ray’s encouragement to “Cheer up!” but this was the one time that she (…probably) was utterly silent in her cage.

“Well, I guess I won’t ask you anything more about it, then.” I turned to look back at Mochizuki. “But can I ask you a favor, too?”

“What kind?”

“I want a copy of the class list.”

Mochizuki looked thrown by that, but he nodded, once, immediately. “You never got one, did you?”

“Nope.”

“Then you shouldn’t really be asking me for…”

“Listen up, kid,” I interrupted him. “I’ll worry about me, and I can tell you I’ve got some pretty touchy emotional issues going on. So…”

Mochizuki was opening his mouth to reply when a gentle electronic sound played inside the bag resting on his lap. “Oh—” he made a noise, then opened his bag. The next moment, he was holding a silver cell phone.

“I didn’t know you had a cell phone.”

“Kind of. It’s a PHS,” he answered, then accepted the call. After a moment, Mochizuki cried “He
what?!
” sounding very surprised.

I wondered what had happened. I was preparing myself for whatever was coming when I saw the color in Mochizuki’s face drain visibly, the phone still pressed to his ear. Then, at last—

“That was Kazami,” Mochizuki told me, his voice smothered and low—as if he were being crushed flat. “He told me that Takabayashi died. He had a heart attack at his house…”

Ikuo Takabayashi.

He’d had a weak heart ever since he was little and had often been out of school. Last year, his condition had gotten much better, but the last two or three days it had taken a sudden downturn until he had an attack that had led to his death.

The sudden death of this classmate, whom I had hardly ever talked to, followed on the death of Ms. Mizuno in the elevator accident at the hospital. Thus, there were two “deaths of June” for third-year Class 3 this year.

I ran into Ms. Mikami, who had been out of school for so many days, that morning on the stairs. It was the start of the week, Monday, June 8.

It was on the landing between the second and third floors on the East Stair in Building C. I was going up and Ms. Mikami was coming down. It was just slightly before 8:30.

“Oh…Good morning.”

Flustered, I gave her an unintentionally awkward greeting. Ms. Mikami came to a stop and looked down at me as if she’d seen something odd, but her eyes shifted immediately away from me and floated unnaturally in space.

“Good morni—um, you’re early. The warning bell hasn’t even rung yet. Uh, I mean…”

She didn’t greet me or respond in any way. I thought it was a little strange, but I couldn’t ask her if anything was wrong here in the stairwell, either. There was a brief, incredibly uncomfortable—or rather, embarrassing—moment, and then…

Finally, we went past each other, Ms. Mikami never saying a word. That same instant, the bell began to ring.

Obvious question number one: Why, at this hour, was the teacher
coming down the stairs
? The short homeroom period was starting
now…
And yet she was moving away from the classroom, not toward it. Why?

There were still several kids hanging around in the hall on the third floor. But they were all from the neighboring classes, and no one I recognized from Class 3 was among them.

Was Mei here today? I wondered. Was she going to show herself at school, or…?

Thinking about it without really thinking, I opened the door at the back of the classroom.

I was surprised.

This surprise was the exact opposite of the one I’d had last Thursday, when the detectives from the Yomiyama Police Department had released me from questioning and I’d come back to the classroom.

That day, I’d been surprised that not a single person from my class was in the room in the middle of sixth period. This was the opposite…Meaning that even though only the very first morning bell had rung, nearly everyone was in the classroom already, and they were all sitting at their desks, totally disciplined and silent.

“Oh…”

I made a sound inadvertently and a few students turned around to look at me. But they gave no more reaction than that and turned back around right away.

Mr. Kubodera was standing next to the teacher’s platform. There were two students standing atop the platform: Tomohiko Kazami and the new class representative for the girls, Izumi Akazawa.

Extremely confused by the weird atmosphere in the silent classroom, I slowly moved to sit at my own desk.

“So that is what we’ll be doing. Are there any…No, we’ve said enough, I’m sure,” Kazami said from the platform. I heard something fearful in his voice. Beside him, Akazawa stood slightly at an angle, her arms across her chest. Something about her looked—to use a slightly anachronistic phrase—like a bandit queen.

I lightly poked the back of the student in front of me, then asked in a whisper, “Did something happen this morning?” But the boy, named Wakui, didn’t turn around or respond.

This was why Ms. Mikami had been coming down the stairs, anyway. The lightbulb went on for that, at least. As the assistant teacher, she had been present for this class meeting until a few moments ago, and then…

I swept my eyes furtively around the room.

As expected, Mei wasn’t there. There were two other empty seats: Yukari Sakuragi’s and—right—the boy who had died suddenly over the weekend, Ikuo Takabayashi’s.

Kazami and Akazawa came down from the platform and went back to their seats. Mr. Kubodera took their place in the center of the platform.

“It was a brief two months, but we should all offer our thoughts and prayers for Takabayashi, who studied with us in this room.”

Mr. Kubodera strung the words together with a solemn expression and yet, somehow, sounded as if he were reading an example sentence out of a textbook.

“His memorial service will be at ten o’clock this morning, so Kazami and Akazawa will attend on the class’s behalf. I’ll be going as well. Should you need anything during that time, please talk to Ms. Mikami. Are there any questions?”

The classroom remained utterly silent.

Though he’d been addressing everyone, Mr. Kubodera was looking at an angle up at the ceiling, and his eyes never moved.

“We’ve had yet another sad event, but we can all pull through it without losing heart, and certainly without giving up, if everyone works together.”

Pull through without giving up? If everyone works together? Hm-m-m. I couldn’t quite pinpoint what he meant by that.

“Now then…We must all respect the decision of the class. Even Ms. Mikami, who is in a very difficult position, told us earlier that she would do ‘whatever possible.’ So…are there any questions?”

After the third repetition of “are there any questions?” Mr. Kubodera lowered his gaze to the students’ faces for the first time. Probably every student but me, all probably wearing the same solemn expression as their teacher, nodded deeply.

Ah. So I really hadn’t understood what he was getting at. Even so, this was not exactly an atmosphere where I could put my hand up and declare “Question!”…

Right up until he left the classroom a few minutes later, Mr. Kubodera never once looked my way. I don’t think it was my imagination.

First period was social studies. When that class ended, I immediately stood up and called to Yuya Mochizuki.

After receiving the phone call two days ago, on Saturday, when he’d learned of Takabayashi’s death, he had hurried home, his face ashen. Obviously the news had bothered him. But then—

In a certain sense, his reaction was extremely honest.

He must have heard me call to him, but he didn’t react at all. He had looked around, seeming twitchy, then scurried out of the room, as if fleeing from me. It was driving me crazy chasing him down, so I let him go.

What’s his deal?

That was all I thought of it at the time. That he really didn’t want people to find out that he’d snuck over to my house on Saturday.

But that wasn’t the end of it. Between the end of that class and lunch, I became uncomfortably aware of something.

It wasn’t just Mochizuki.

For instance, the boy in front of me, Wakui. Before second period started, I poked him in the back again and asked, “Got a second?” But he didn’t turn around.

What’s up with him?
I frowned.

Wakui had chronic asthma, I guess, so he would use a portable inhaler, even during classes. I, at least, had felt a kind of kinship with him as a fellow sufferer of a respiratory condition, and now…What’s up with this cold-shoulder treatment?

I was vaguely annoyed, but even so this was nothing more than one example. In other words…

Not a single person in the class came over to talk to me. Even if I tried to talk to them, they didn’t react at all, like Wakui, or they left without ever saying a word, like Mochizuki. Even people whom I’d chatted with pretty casually up till last week, like Kazami and Teshigawara and a couple of others.

At lunch, I tried calling Teshigawara on his cell phone. But all I got was the standard message that “This phone may be turned off or in an area without adequate signal…” I tried calling him back three times during the break, and got the message three times. I spotted Mochizuki and called out to him again but, just like after first period, he didn’t respond.

And so it went all day.

In the end, I never had a full conversation with anyone from class that day. Really, forget that, I never once had a chance to even be called on during class by a teacher, and pretty much never spoke out loud except to talk to myself. Even if I did talk, no one answered me, and that treatment just went on and on and on.

Given all of that…

I was forced to take a fresh look at things.

To reconsider the alienness ( = “enigma”) surrounding Mei Misaki, whether piece by piece or the overall picture of it, that I had detected since first becoming a part of this third-year Class 3 at the beginning of May. To rethink what it meant, which I had almost but never quite managed to grasp all this last month. What lay behind it. And the form of this “reality” that encompassed it all…

What became my focus was the question—which shouldn’t have needed asking—of
whether or not Mei Misaki existed
.

Was she there, or wasn’t she?

Was she present in this class, in this world, or wasn’t she?

So many questions that had started to bother me as soon as I transferred here. I couldn’t even start to list them all.

Here was someone that not a single person in the class had any contact with—or even tried to. Thinking back on it now, I had never once seen anyone from class go up to her, or talk to her, or call her name, or even say it out loud.

And the reactions everyone had when, in the midst of this treatment, I approached her or talked about her…

The reactions of Kazami and Teshigawara that first day, for instance, when I had spotted Mei on a bench in front of Building Zero and talked to her. The reaction of Yukari Sakuragi that same day when I had spoken Mei’s name in conversation while we sat out of gym class. The reactions of Teshigawara and Mochizuki—had it been the next day?—when I’d gone into the secondary library after seeing Mei there. And there were others. A lot of others.

In the end, Teshigawara had been thoughtful enough to call and give me a warning.

Quit paying attention to
things that aren’t there.
It’s dangerous.

And there was what Ms. Mizuno’s little brother Takeru had said to her, too.

He demanded “Why are you asking me that? There’s no one like that in my class.” He looked totally serious, like I’ve never seen him before.

Is she actually there?

The way no one made contact with Mei, or even tried to, wasn’t limited exclusively to the students. Overall, the teachers involved with third-year Class 3 seemed to do the same.

None of the teachers ever took attendance at the start of class by calling out names. So they never spoke the name “Mei Misaki.” I had never yet seen Mei get called on in class to read from the text or solve a problem.

I couldn’t fault her for going up to the roof by herself during gym class instead of watching from nearby. Even if she was late to class, or skipped completely, or left in the middle of a test, or was absent for days at a time…Neither the teachers nor the students seemed to take any notice.

The circumstances under which I first encountered her at the hospital—that had probably helped, and even though I believed it was impossible, there were times when even I considered the possibility of “the
nonexistence
of Mei Misaki.”

Because
I don’t exist.

She’d even said it herself at some point.

To them, I’m invisible. You’re the only one who sees me, Sakakibara…what would you do then?

And I had seen firsthand the uncanny way she suddenly appeared and vanished in that basement room in “Twilight of Yomi”…

Maybe Mei Misaki really
isn’t there and she doesn’t exist
, after all.

Maybe she
is
like a ghost that only I can see and hear, and not real at all.

The fact that her desk was the only one in the whole classroom that was such an incredibly old model and the fact that the name tag pinned to her chest was made of such stained, wrinkly paper seemed to corroborate that idea somehow.

…However.

Thinking about it realistically, no—there was no way such a ridiculous thing could be true. In which case I had to explain all of these various events and facts some other way…In fact, there was a conclusion that
made much more sense, thinking about things this way
.

Mei Misaki
is
there, she really
does
exist.

But everyone around her
deliberately acts as if there’s no such person as Mei Misaki
. That was the conclusion.

I even wondered if this was some sort of “bullying,” which you hear so much about. Bullying in the form of every member of the class flat-out ignoring her. But—and I was pretty sure I’d talked to Ms. Mizuno about this, too—even if that were the case, there was still something strange about it.

I’d been dragged into that “Sakakibara” issue last year and had real experience with how terrible that had made me feel. So maybe that was just making me oversensitive. This was totally unlike simple bullying by
snubbing
. This is going to sound vague, but something in the air around this case was very different. Too different.

It could be that they’re all afraid of her.

Oh, right. Ms. Mizuno had said something like that, too…

…Anyway.

Did Mei Misaki exist or not?

I pondered over which was true and which was false, but it was incredibly hard to figure out the answer. That was the problem. Unless I took some sort of decisive action.

I had wavered again and again between the two theories, between the opposite extremes, swayed by the situation or my state of mind in the moment. Telling myself that I didn’t have any choice. But…

Today, at last, I felt as if I had reached at least one answer thanks to my own visceral experience. I couldn’t say I had it all, but I felt as if I understood the “shape” of what lay at its heart.

That being, in other words,
this
. What was happening to me.

Something like
this
must have been happening to Mei this whole time.

To test it out, I stood up from my seat without asking in the middle of sixth-period language arts class and left the room. A minor commotion had popped up across the room momentarily, but Mr. Kubodera didn’t say a word to reproach me. Ah. So it was true.

I went over to a window in the hallway and looked up at the rainy sky where low clouds were piling. I was feeling pretty depressed; but on the other hand, my heart felt a little bit lighter.

I thought I now understood “
what is this?
” to a certain degree.