Another, Vol. 1 (13 page)

The second I came out of the classroom, I saw Mei standing beside a window in the hallway. The window was open and a little bit of rain was blowing in. She was staring outside blankly, not paying it the least attention.

“You always finish early,” I said, walking over to her.

“Do I?” Mei replied without turning around.

“Both days, you left the room halfway through the test time for all of the subjects.”

“Are you saying you came to keep me company for the last one?”

“No…I’m good at language arts.”

“Huh. You could answer those questions, huh?”

“What do you mean?”

“Where you have to summarize whatever in a certain number of words, or where it asks what the author’s objective was.”

“Oh. Yeah, I guess so.”

“I suck at those. I hate them. I’d much rather do math or science. Those only have one clear answer.”

Ah, yeah. I could see what she was getting at.

“So you just wrote down whatever and left?”

“Yeah.”

“Is that…okay?”

“Yeah, I don’t care.”

“Uh, but what about…”

I started to say something, but I decided to abandon the subject.

Leading the way, I moved over to the top of the stairs adjacent to the eastern side of the classroom—called the “East Stair.” Mei opened the window there, too. The breeze that blew in, sprinkled with drops of rain, played through her black bobbed haircut.

“Her name was Misaki Fujioka, wasn’t it? The girl who died at the hospital that day.”

I boldly presented the information I’d gotten from Ms. Mizuno over the weekend. Her eyes never turned from the window, but Mei’s shoulders trembled ever so slightly—or seemed to.

“Why her?”

“Fujioka Misaki…,” Mei began to speak softly. “Misaki Fujioka was my…
cousin
. A long time ago, we were together more and she was more than that.”

“More than that?”

I had trouble understanding what she meant. But…was that why she was her “half her body”?

“That story you told me two weeks ago.”

I changed the subject yet again.

“About the third-year Class 3 twenty-six years ago. How does the rest of it go? The ghost story part?”

“Did you try asking someone?” she shot back. As I searched for some sort of response, Mei turned to face me and said, “No one would tell you?”

“Uh, no.”

“Well, what can you do?”

That was all she said before clamming up again and turning back to the window.

Even if I asked her for
the story
now, she probably wouldn’t tell me anything. That was the feeling I got. Reiko’s words, that “there’s a time for finding out about some things,” came back to me with a strange weight.

“Um…look,” I said, then took a deep breath, just as I had at the doll gallery. I walked up to stand beside Mei, who stood next to the window. “Look, I’ve wanted to ask you this for a while now. It’s been bugging me ever since I transferred here.”

I thought I saw her shoulders tremble slightly again. I pressed on.

“Why do they do that? Everyone in class, and even the teachers. It’s like you’re not…”

Without letting me finish my question, Mei replied in a murmur, “Because
I don’t exist.
”

Got it, Sakaki? Quit paying attention to
things that aren’t there.

“That doesn’t…”

I took another deep breath.

It’s dangerous.

“But that doesn’t…”

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

Mei turned her face slowly toward me. A shadow of a smile flashed in her right eye, the one unobscured by the eye patch. Was it my imagination that made me see a tinge of loneliness there?

“No…that can’t be true.”

If I closed my eyes then, and opened them, say, three seconds later, would she have disappeared right in front of me? For a moment, such thoughts had control of me and I hastily shifted my gaze away to the world beyond the window. “It can’t be true…”

That was when it happened. I heard the sound of someone bolting up the stairs.

The footsteps were frantic, completely out of place in this situation, with the entire school wrapped up in test-taking. Even as I wondered what was going on, I saw who it was—a figure wearing a navy blue sweat suit.

It was Mr. Miyamoto, one of the gym teachers. I was still sitting out of gym classes, but I knew the name of the head teacher and what he looked like, at least.

Mr. Miyamoto came toward us and opened his mouth to say something, but in the end ran up to the Class 3 classroom without a word. Then he opened the door at the front of the classroom and called in, “Mr. Kubodera! Mr. Kubodera, could you come over here?”

After a moment, the language arts teacher—who was in the middle of supervising a test—stuck his head out from the classroom. “What’s going on?”

His shoulders heaving with his ragged breathing, the gym teacher said, “Well.” Where Mei and I were, I could just barely hear what he said.

“We just got the news…”

…And that was all I heard. He had lowered his voice partway through.

Mr. Kubodera’s reaction when he heard Mr. Miyamoto’s news, though, I could interpret clearly. As soon as he heard whatever it was, he became speechless and his face stiffened.

“I see,” he replied solemnly, then went back into the room. Mr. Miyamoto looked up at the ceiling, his shoulders still heaving badly.

Finally—

The door Mr. Kubodera had shut was flung open and a student came flying out of the room.

It was the class representative, Yukari Sakuragi. She had her bag in her right hand. She looked to be in complete turmoil.

She shared a few brief words with Mr. Miyamoto, who stood near the door, then Sakuragi grabbed her umbrella from the stand outside the classroom. It was a beige stick umbrella. Then, her legs tangling, she started to run…

At first, she headed toward the East Stair. But then, who can say why, that impulse was checked and she seemed frozen in place. It seemed to happen the instant her eyes locked on us, standing by the windows in front of the staircase.

The next moment, she had spun around on her heel and started running down the hall in the opposite direction. It looked as though her right leg, which she told me she’d twisted after a fall, still hadn’t healed completely. Her run was awkward, trying to favor it.

She ran off down the hallway that ran east to west and soon disappeared from my view. She’d gone down the West Stair on the other side of the building.

“I wonder what that was about.” I turned back to Mei. “What do you…?”

Mei didn’t react in the slightest. She stood frozen, her face ashen. I moved away from the window toward the sweat-suited gym teacher and tried asking him.

“Um, Mr. Miyamoto? What’s going on with Sakuragi?”

“Huh? Oh…” Mr. Miyamoto looked at me with a grimace on his face, as if scowling at me. “Her family was in an accident. We just got an urgent message for her to go to the hospital right away.”

I wasn’t sure whether he was finished or not when it happened—there was some kind of violent sound and a short, shrill scream echoed up the hall.

What was that?

Immediately, I felt intensely unsettled.

What just happened?

I started running down the hall before I could give it much thought. As if I were chasing after Yukari Sakuragi, who had just run down this same hallway.

I bounded down the West Stair, the same she’d gone down, to the second floor. I didn’t see her there. I started to run from the second floor down to the first…and instantly I saw it.

A bizarre, horrifying scene filled my vision.

At the bottom of the wet concrete staircase, at the landing between the second and first floors, was an open umbrella. A beige stick umbrella. The one Yukari Sakuragi had just taken out of the umbrella stand. And draped over the top of it, Sakuragi herself had fallen, facedown.

“Wh-what…”

Her head lay over the center of the open umbrella. Both of her legs were still two or three steps up from the bottom. Her hands were thrown out at different angles in front of her. Her bag had tumbled into a corner of the landing.

…What had happened?

What could have possibly…?

It was hard to comprehend at first sight. But right away, I could get a general idea.

In her upheaval after learning of her family’s emergency, she had flown from the classroom in a scramble and her foot had slipped partway down the stairs between the first and second floors. The umbrella she’d had in her hand had flown out in front of her. The impact of hitting the ground had made it open, and it fell onto the landing. The metal spike at the top end had landed pointing exactly in her direction. And then…

She had radically lost her balance, and the force of her fall had brought her toppling
right onto
it
. As if she’d been floating through the air. Unable to do so much as turn her head or put her hands up.

Sakuragi’s body didn’t move at all as she lay there. A nauseating red color was eating away at the beige of the open umbrella, spreading across it. That was blood. A huge amount of blood…

“Sakuragi…?” I called out to her, my voice shaking. My legs trembled as I climbed down the stairs.

Making my way fearfully down to the landing, my eyes fell on a new horror.

The tip of the umbrella had skewered Yukari Sakuragi’s throat, crushing it, sinking all the way to the base. Profuse amounts of fresh blood gushed from the wound.

“How…”

I turned my eyes away, overwhelmed by the sight.

“How could this…?”

I heard a sudden
fwump
as Sakuragi’s body rolled to one side. The shaft of the umbrella that had miraculously—no—that had, through balance born of an evil coincidence, so far supported her weight now snapped.

“Hey!”

A loud voice came from overhead.

“What happened? Is everyone all right?!”

It was Mr. Miyamoto. Behind him were other people, teachers who must have come out of the nearby classrooms.

“It’s bad. Call an ambulance!” Mr. Miyamoto shouted as he dashed down the stairs. “And call the nurse’s office right now. Urk—this is awful. How could something like this—hey, are you all right?”

I nodded, “Yes.” That’s what I meant to say, anyway, but all that came out of my mouth was a groan. A sharp pain lanced through my chest.
Ah—this terrible pain, this is…

“I-I’m sorry.”

Putting both hands to my chest, I fell up against a wall.

“I don’t…feel so…”

“I’ll handle this. Go to the bathroom,” Mr. Miyamoto ordered me. I guess he mistook this as me fighting back the urge to puke.

I had started tottering up the stairs when I saw Mei in the hallway on the second floor. She was standing behind the teachers, looking intently down at us.

Her face was ashen to the point of death. Her right eye was wide to the point of popping. Like the doll inside the black coffin in the basement display room at “Blue Eyes Empty to All, in the Twilight of Yomi,” her slightly open lips seemed about to make some appeal…

For what?

What is it that you would ask?

Mere seconds later, when I’d made it back to the hall on the second floor, however, she was no longer there.

The accident involving Yukari Sakuragi’s family had been a car accident. The car her mother, Mieko, was riding in had crashed. Sakuragi’s aunt was at the wheel, and her mother was riding in the passenger seat. The cause wasn’t clear, but while driving down a two-lane road along an embankment on the Yomiyama River, the car had lost its brakes and crashed into a tree beside the road.

The car was totaled. Both women were in serious condition when they reached the hospital. Her mother’s injuries, in particular, did not allow much optimism. That was when the urgent call had come to the school.

Mr. Miyamoto had passed the message to Mr. Kubodera, who had told Sakuragi to get to the hospital quickly. He’d decided that she would take her test some other day.

Her mother was treated, but to no effect, and she passed away that night. Her aunt had barely pulled through. But according to what I heard later, she was in a coma for more than a week after the accident.

Sakuragi herself, who had met with that unbelievable misfortune in the West Stair of Building C, was taken to the hospital by ambulance, but on the way there she passed away from the blood loss and shock. I found this out later, too, but she had just turned fifteen two days earlier.

That was how Yukari Sakuragi and her mother, Mieko, became “the deaths of May” for third-year Class 3 at Yomiyama North Middle School that year, in 1998.

…Someone in third-year Class 3 died.

Yeah, it was a huge deal.

They said she slipped on the stairs in Building C and she landed badly…

No, that’s not what happened.

It’s not? Then what was it?

I heard that when she fell on the stairs, she threw her umbrella in front of her and the tip of it went through her throat.

Eek!

I heard another story that said she got stabbed through the eye, though, not the throat.

Oh my gosh. Really?

Either way, it was such a gruesome scene that they put a gag order on the witnesses or something.

She was the class representative for the girls, right? The girl who died?

That’s what I heard.

I heard that her mom died the exact same day, in a car accident.

Yeah. I heard that, too.

Hey, do you think this is
because of that curse
?

“That” curse? You mean you know about that?

Just what I’ve overheard. I don’t know the whole story.

They do call it “the curse of third-year Class 3.”

See?

But it’s dangerous to just go blabbing about it.

But secretly everyone knows the story, right?
How a popular kid from that class named Misaki died twenty-six years ago…

Y-yeah…

And how this year is
one of those years
?

Could be.

That’s awful. What if I get put in Class 3 next year?

No use worrying about that now, is there?

But…

Why not transfer out while you’re still in second year?

Hm-m-m.

I mean,
it’s not like
it happens
every year. I think last year was an
off year
.

What about the year before that? That year
it happened
.

The curse is capricious.

Once it starts, something bad happens to the class every month, right?

Yeah.

Someone dies.

Yeah.
Every month, at least one person with ties to the class…

Not just the students?

Their families are in danger, too. Especially the immediate family. I heard more distant relatives are fine.

Wow. You sure know a lot about it.

There’s an upperclassman in my kendo club named Maejima. He’s in Class 3. He’s been telling me about it on the sly lately. He acts like he doesn’t really believe in it, so that’s probably why he told
an outsider
like me about it.

Okay, so he doesn’t believe it. But I mean, someone really did die…

Purely coincidence. Purely an unlucky accident. Curses are baloney…That’s what he says.

Maybe he’s right.

I have no idea. But really, I think the best thing you can do is to just stay away from that class.

Yeah?

How awful would that be, if we got sucked into that? God forbid. I mean, just talking to you about this stuff could be super dangerous. What should we do? What if…

Hey, cut it out.

Yeah. Let’s just drop it.