Another, Vol. 1 (6 page)

She was staring into space, as if sunk in contemplation, but she reacted to my voice. Her eyes—though the white eye patch hid her left one—turned to me and halted.

“Hey.”

I tried to act nonchalant and raised a hand casually.

“The name’s Misaki, right?”

I walked up to the bench where she sat. My heart was beating faster than it had this morning when I spoke in front of the entire class. I felt as if my breathing was getting more strained, too.

“We’re in the same class, huh? Third years, Class 3. I, uh, I transferred here today…”

“…Why?”

Her lips moved only slightly. The same tone of voice I’d heard in the elevator at the hospital, the same cool, detached way of talking.

“Why?” she repeated. “Are you sure about this?”

“Wha?”

I didn’t understand her questions.
“Why?”
“Are you sure about this?”
I didn’t have the faintest idea what she was asking me in either case and could only stand there, shaken.

“Um-m-m, what I meant was…”

I scrambled for some way to keep the conversation going, but she turned her eyes from me and stood up from the bench in silence. That was when I got a clear look at the name tag hanging from her blazer.

It was a light purple card, indicating that she was a third-year. While I may have been imagining how very dirty and beat-up the paper looked, her name was written there quite clearly: “Misaki,” viewing the cliffs…Mei “Misaki.”

My mouth flopped, fishlike. I tried to tell her, “I saw you at the hospital the other day,” but the words wouldn’t come together. I was still trying when she said simply, “You should be careful.”

Then she quietly turned her back to me.

“W-wait,” I called out in a rush to try and stop her, but she kept her back to me.

“You…should be careful. It might have started already.”

Then Mei Misaki left me, as I stood rooted half in shock, and departed the shadow of the tree where the bench stood.

I watched her go.

She moved toward the entrance to Building Zero, then disappeared inside the aging building. As if melting away in the lingering gloom…

The bell announcing the end of lunch began to peal, releasing the frozen moment. I looked around me, feeling as if I had been jerked back to my senses.

“Hey! What’re you doing, Sakakibara?”

Teshigawara’s shout reached me.

“We’ve got gym next. The locker room is next to the gymnasium. We better hurry if we’re gonna be on time.”

When I turned around, Teshigawara’s lips were pursed so far out he might have been whistling. Beside him, Kazami was shaking his head incessantly over something, his face pale and bowed.

Gym class was divided into boys and girls.

I was sitting on a bench in the shade of a tree on the north side of the field, still in my uniform. I still wasn’t allowed to do vigorous exercise, according to the doctor’s instructions. So, as I’d told Teshigawara, there wasn’t any particular need for me to hurry over.

I was the only boy sitting out of the class.

Everyone wore matching white exercise clothes and ran around the 400-meter track. Despite the balminess of the afternoon sunlight, only ten or so figures moved about on the broad field. A slightly cold sensation went through me, for some reason, as I watched the scene.

When I ran, I liked to do long distances and short distances. I liked using exercise machines and swimming, too. What I didn’t like was soccer, or basketball…basically, I’m terrible at team sports.

I wish I could run
, I thought. I tried taking a few deep breaths, and I didn’t feel anything strange in my chest. Which just made me want to join in even more.

And yet, there was a part of me that cringed in terror. That felt as though, if I were to run and jump around recklessly, a hole would immediately open up again somewhere in my lungs.

“You’re not going to have a third one.” That’s what my dad had told me, but that wasn’t nearly convincing enough for me to take seriously. If I was stupid and pushed myself too far, I would have to go through all those horrible feelings again, and I was done with that. What I had to do now was take it easy for a while. That was my only option.

The girls were doing long jumps in a sandlot on the western side of the field.

I thought I would see her among them—Mei Misaki. I squinted my eyes to look, but they were pretty far away and I couldn’t really make anyone out.

Considering she had an eye patch over her left eye, maybe she was sitting out. In which case, she’d be on one of the benches nearby…

I spotted a person who might have been her.

Standing all alone a short distance from the sandlot in the shade of a tree, wearing a uniform—was that her?

Because of the distance, I couldn’t tell if it was Mei or not.

And I couldn’t exactly stare at the girls all class long. A sigh escaped me as I laced my fingers behind my head and reclined into them. I squeezed my eyes shut and, all at once, I heard the shrill voice of Ray the mynah bird asking
“Why?”
ringing in my ears.

I guess it was about five or six minutes after that.

“Um, Sakakibara?”

Someone was talking to me.

Surprised, my eyes opened. Just three feet away, I saw a girl in a navy blazer.

It wasn’t Mei Misaki, though.

She wore not an eye patch, but silver-rimmed glasses. Her hair was cut not in a short bob, but grew to her shoulders. It was Yukari Sakuragi, the class representative.

“Are you sitting out of gym for now?”

Taking care that she wouldn’t notice the slight disappointment I was feeling inside, I replied, “Yeah. It’s only been a week since I got out of the hospital and all. The doctor told me to hold off on exercising and see how I feel. Are you sitting out, too? Do you feel sick today?”

“I fell yesterday and twisted my leg.”

Yukari Sakuragi dropped her eyes to her leg. That was when I noticed the painful-looking bandage wrapped around her right leg from the top of her knee down to her shin.

“Um…you didn’t happen to fall on the hill outside the back gate, did you?”

I asked it half as a joke. When I said it, Sakuragi smiled, as if letting go of some kind of tension.

“Luckily it happened somewhere else. You already know about that jinx, huh?”

“Kind of, yeah.”

“So then—” she began, but I ignored it and seized the chance to cut in.

“I wanted to thank you for coming to the hospital the other day.”

“Oh…we were happy to do it.”

“Do you want to sit down?”

I stood up, offering the bench to the injured girl. Then I changed the subject.

“Can you tell me why there aren’t two class groups in this gym period?”

I’d been wondering about that for a little while.

“I thought it was normal for a class split up into boys and girls like this to join up with the class next door? Especially in public school? Plus, there are two teachers for the boys and the girls, so with just the one class, there’s half as many students as there should be…”

At least with this few people, we wouldn’t be able to have a soccer game in class. Not that I could care less about that missed opportunity.

“The other classes are different,” Sakuragi answered. “Class 1 and Class 2 have gym together, and Class 4 and Class 5 have gym together. Class 3 is the only one by itself.”

“Why Class 3?”

I could understand since there were an odd number of classes in third year, but then why was Class 3 the one by itself? Wouldn’t Class 5 usually be the odd one out?

“You were with Kazami and Teshigawara during lunch, right?”

This time, she was the one to change the subject.

“Yeah, I was. What about it?”

Still sitting on the bench, she cocked her head and looked up at me. “Well, did they…tell you anything?”

“Kazami and Teshigawara?”

“Yeah.”

“They gave me a quick tour of the school. Basically, hey, that’s Building A, behind that is Building S where the special classes are—like that. They told me the ghost story about the lotus pond, too.”

“That’s all?”

“We went to Building Zero last, so they told me a little about what the old school building’s for.”

“And that’s all?”

“Pretty much, I think, yeah.”

“…Oh.” Yukari Sakuragi bowed her head with a quiet whisper, then lowered her voice even more. “…I have to do this right, or Akazawa’s going to get mad at me…”

I caught only snatches of what she was murmuring to herself. Akazawa? Wasn’t “Akazawa” one of the students who didn’t come to school today?

Sakuragi slowly got up from the bench, wearing a pensive expression. I could clearly see how her movements accommodated the injury to her right leg.

“So, Sakuragi—”

I decided to just try asking her.

“I mean, where’s Misaki?”

“…What?”

She tilted her head to one side.

“The girl in our class, Mei Misaki. You know, with the patch over her left eye. Is she sitting out of gym class, too?”

Sakuragi kept cocking her head and repeating “What? What?” She looked completely baffled, for some reason. Why? What was making her react so bizarrely?

“I ran into her outside Building Zero during lunch.”

Just then, far off in the distance, we heard a deep, reverberating
rrrmmmble
. Was a plane taking off? No, it didn’t sound like that. Could it be thunder?

I craned my head back to look at the sky.

From what I could see here in the shade of the tree, it was the same, clear May day it had been before. So I thought, but when I scanned around, I saw that ominous clouds were gathering slightly to the north. So it really was thunder from over there that we’d heard?

As the thought occurred to me, the same
rmrmbmrmmmble
sound came again from far off.

So it is that. Distant spring thunder.

Must be in for a little rain after sunset.

I ventured this prediction to myself, casting my eyes over the northern sky.

“Huh?”

I spotted
something
in a place I hadn’t expected, and the question slipped out of me.

“What’s someone doing up there?”

Building C, the three-story school building that stood on the north side of the field. There, on the roof—

Someone was standing just inside the railing that circled the roof. Was that—?

It was her. Mei Misaki.

The realization came suddenly. Even though there was no way I could have clearly seen her face, or even her clothes.

And in the next moment I had left Yukari Sakuragi behind, still wearing her perplexed expression, and started running toward Building C.

While I was running up the stairs, the shortness of breath finally hit me. The X-ray image of my collapsed lung flickered through my mind, but I was more focused on the figure I’d seen from the field.

I found the door to the roof easily.

It was a cream-colored steel door. A cardboard sign was taped to the door, which read
NO UNNECESSARY ACCESS
in red ink.

I decided in less than a second to ignore such an inexplicably ambiguous prohibition. The door wasn’t locked. I pushed it open and burst outside.

My instinct had been right. The identity of the figure was, indeed, Mei Misaki.

On the roof of the iron-ribbed school building, a grimy concrete wasteland. Alone in the center of it all—

She stood right against the railing that faced the field. She was facing this way, so she must have noticed me right away. But without a word, she spun her back on me.

Bringing my ragged breathing under control, I walked over to stand beside her.

“Hey…Misaki…” I called weakly to her. “Uh…so you’re sitting out of gym class, too, huh?”

…No response.

I closed the distance one step, then two. “Is this okay? I mean, are you allowed to be up here?”

Her back was still turned when a voice came back to me, “So? Watching up close hardly has more meaning.”

“The teachers aren’t going to yell at you?”

“…Doubt it.”

Her reply was a whisper as she finally turned around to face me. I saw then that she was holding an octavo-sized sketchbook tightly against her chest.

“You’re up here, too.”

She turned the question back on me.

“So?” I said, copying her earlier response. “It’s true there’s not much point in just watching gym classes. Do you draw?”

Without answering, she hid the sketchbook behind her.

“I mentioned this when I ran into you at lunch but, um…I transferred today, into Class 3…”

“You’re Sakakibara.”

“Uh, yeah. And you’re Misaki, right? Mei Misaki?” I glanced down at the name tag pinned to her chest. “How do you write Mei?”

“Same way you write ‘howl.’”

“Howl?”

“Or ‘sound.’ Like in ‘resonance.’ Or ‘scream.’”

Howl
, huh? Howling on a cliff…

“Um, do you remember? We met at the municipal hospital recently.”

I was finally able to ask her the question, but my heart was still utterly unable to find an even beat—basically, it was halfway to overdrive.
Thmp…thmp…
I could hear the beats strong in my ears.

“It was Monday last week. I happened to get on the same elevator as you in the inpatient ward, then you got off at the second basement level. You told me your name when I asked you. You don’t remember?”

“Last week, Monday…” Mei Misaki murmured, her right eye, not hidden by the patch, slowly closing. “That…might have happened.”

“That’s what I thought. It’s been on my mind…ever since. Then when you were in class today, I was shocked.”

“Oh.”

It was a curt reply, but her small, thin lips looked as though they held the phantom of a smile.

“Why were you going to the second basement level that day?” I pressed. “You said you were dropping something off or something like that, right? For who? You were carrying a white doll, it looked like. Was that what you were dropping off?”

“I hate the way you’re interrogating me.”

She spoke in the same curt voice and turned her eyes away.