Another, Vol. 1 (25 page)

Mei returned the question curtly. “What?”

“How you are with your mom. You talk so politely to her…like how you would talk to a stranger.”

“Is that weird?”

“I don’t know if I’d call it weird, but I guess I was just wondering if that’s how mothers and daughters talk to each other.”

“I think it’s usually different.” Her reaction was incredibly dry. “That woman and I have always been like that. What’s it like in your family? How does a mother talk to her son?”

“My family doesn’t have a mother.”

All I knew of how mothers are supposed to behave with their children, therefore, was information I’d gathered from the outside.

“What? I didn’t know that.”

“She died right after I was born. So it’s always been just me and my dad…And my dad had to go abroad for a year this spring, so all of a sudden I had to come here. I’m freeloading with my mom’s family in Koike. So all of a sudden, my family’s twice as big.”

“…I see.”

Mei walked several paces with her mouth shut, and then said, “My mother and I can’t help it. I’m one of her dolls, see. Exactly the same as the little darlings in the gallery.”

She didn’t sound obviously sad or despondent or anything like that. Her tone was detached, like always. Still, I was a little taken aback and the word “No…” escaped my lips.

“That can’t be…You’re her daughter, and you’re alive.”

She was nothing like a doll. Before I could tell her that, Mei replied, “I’m alive, but I’m not the real thing.”

Naturally, I couldn’t help being flummoxed by that.

Not the real thing? Meaning—

What? I wanted to ask, but the words stuck in my throat and I swallowed them, hard. Because it seemed wrong to trespass that far. So I nudged the conversation back to “our problem” a little.

“Does your mom know about that stuff we talked about today? About what’s been going on in class since May?”

“Not a thing,” Mei replied promptly. “We’re not allowed to tell our families, anyway. Even if we could, I don’t think I could talk about it.”

“Would your mom be mad if she found out? About the crazy thing the class is doing to you?”

“I’m not sure. It might bother her a little. But she’s not the kind of person who’d get mad and complain to the school, either.”

“What about how you’re out of school so much? You didn’t come today, either…You were at home, weren’t you? She doesn’t say anything to you about that?”

“You can chalk that up to her being the hands-off type. Maybe it’s more indifference than just hands-off. She’s shut away in her studio basically all afternoon, anyway. It’s like she forgets about everything else when she’s got a doll or a painting in front of her.”

“So she’s not worried, then.” I stole a glance at Mei’s face, in profile beside me. “Not even right now…”

“Now? Why now?”

“What I’m saying is, you’re walking home the first boy who’s ever come over to your house, and it’s dark already, so…like that.”

“I dunno. That stuff doesn’t really bother her, either. She’s told me before ‘That’s because I trust you,’ but I don’t know if that’s true. It could just be
that’s what she wants to believe
.”

She stole a glance back at me, then, but she quickly turned her eye ahead again and went on, “Just…aside from
one thing
.”

“One thing?”

…I wonder what.

I looked at Mei’s face in profile again. She nodded, “Yup,” then blinked slowly, as if to say she didn’t want to talk about it, and suddenly sped up her stride.

I called out pretty loudly, “Hey, Misaki!” trying to stop her. “Now that I’ve heard your explanation, I feel like I have a pretty good idea about ‘the secret of third-year Class 3,’ but…are you okay with that?”

“What are you talking about?”

Again, her question came back harshly.

“I mean, how you have to act, for this
talisman
…”

“Nothing I can do about it.”

This time, Mei’s pace slowed suddenly.

“Someone has to be the one who’s ‘not there,’ after all. It just happened to be me.”

Her tone was just the same as always, but somehow I found her words hard to accept. She said “there’s nothing I can do about it,” but it didn’t seem as though she had very strong feelings about “doing it for everyone’s benefit,” for instance. I also didn’t get the impression “self-sacrifice” or “devotion” really jibed with her behavior…

“You mean you’d have been fine with whatever?” I tried. “Like, you were never very attached to hanging out with the kids in class or to your connection with them?”

Was that why she could be so detached even when she alone out of the class was being treated as if she didn’t exist?

“Connections with people and connecting with people…It’s true, I’m not very good at that stuff.”

After she said that, Mei was silent for the briefest of moments.

“How should I put it? I kind of wonder whether these
things
that everyone seems to want are so important. They seem a little unsettling sometimes…Ah, but maybe the bigger issue in this case is that—”

“What?”

“Suppose they hadn’t picked me to be ‘not there’ and they’d picked someone else instead. Then I would have had to stand next to everyone and go along with them and treat that kid like they didn’t exist. Isn’t it way better to be cast out by everyone than having to do that? Don’t you think?”

“Hm-m-m…”

I could only give her an ambiguous nod. Mei moved suddenly away from me. I hurried after her and saw that ahead on the left, beside the road, there was a small playground. Mei was heading into it all alone, her feet seeming to glide beneath her.

There was a tiny sandy area in a corner of the empty park, and beside it stood two iron bars at different heights. Mei grabbed onto the taller of these—though higher, it was still a low bar meant for children—and lightly flipped herself over it, then rotated and landed solidly on the ground. In the dusky light of the streetlamp, the silhouette of her black shirt and black jeans seemed to flutter and dance.

Struck momentarily dumb, I chased after Mei, into the park.

Leaning back on the bar and arching her back, she let out an “Ah-h-h.” It was a fed-up sigh unlike anything I’d heard from her up till now. That’s how it sounded.

I walked up to the other bar without a word, and matched Mei’s pose. She seemed to have been waiting for that.

“By the way, Sakakibara—”

The gaze of her right eye, unobscured by her eye patch, arrested me.

“There’s still something important we haven’t talked about.”

“Yeah?”

“Come on. How you’ve become the same as me now.”

“Oh…”

Right. There was that.

The things that had happened at school today, that had given me a personal experience of
the decision
that the class had enacted on Mei. From my perspective, of course, it was a huge issue.

“You can probably pretty much imagine why they did it.”

Even so…

Not to sound craven, but I could honestly say that I hadn’t gotten my thoughts that far ordered yet. Maybe she guessed that, because Mei started to tell a story, her attitude like someone lecturing a thickheaded student.

“Mizuno’s sister died and Takabayashi died, so there are already two ‘deaths of June.’ So there’s no more doubting that this is an ‘on year.’ I’m sure everyone came to the natural conclusion that the
talisman
wasn’t working because you talked to me. Even the people who only half-believed it before couldn’t half-believe it anymore.”

I couldn’t answer.

“So then, what should they do? If they let it go on, the ‘disasters’ might keep on coming. More people would die. They say that once it starts, it won’t stop. But there must be some way to stop it. Even if it can’t be stopped, maybe there’s a way the ‘disasters’ can be weakened. That’s how people normally think.”

I spread both my arms out to grip the bar I was leaning back against. My palms were pretty sweaty and they slipped against the metal. Mei went on talking.

“They probably considered two strategies there.”

“Two?”

“Yeah. One would be to pull you into line now, at least, and do everything they could to keep treating me like I’m ‘not there.’ But that might be
too weak
. Even if it had some effect, you could hardly call it a decisive blow.”

I see—at last, I was getting the idea.

The moment Ms. Mizuno’s death had become known, the kind of discussion Mei was talking about had been held. That had been last Thursday. After I’d been released by the detectives from the Yomiyama P.D., I’d gone back to the classroom, but there’d been no one there. It was the period for our extended homeroom. In order to have the discussion without my finding out, they’d gone to a conference room in Building S, like Mochizuki had told me.

“Then the other of the two methods was…”

When I said that, Mei nodded quietly and picked up where I’d left off.
“Raise the number of people who are ‘not there’ to two.”

“…Huh.”

“They figured that by doing that, maybe they’d be able to strengthen the effect of the
talisman
. As for who suggested it…Maybe it was the tactical officer, Akazawa. From the very beginning, she’s seemed like—how should I put it?—a hard-liner about this issue.”

I could believe that Izumi Akazawa’s being chosen as the new class representative for the girls that day might have had an effect on other developments in the class.

“At any rate, they talked about the ‘strategy’ going forward and decided
to do that
. And then today, you became the same as me.”

That gathering this morning had been held to confirm the “additional countermeasures” they were going to carry out starting today, and it had been held in secret from me. When he’d gotten news of Ikuo Takabayashi’s death over the weekend—

“But look.”

Even so, I still couldn’t completely accept it.

“That kind of thing…There’s no guarantee it’ll have any effect. And yet they’d go that far anyway?”

“I told you, everyone is desperate.”

Mei’s words were forceful.

“In May and June, four people
actually died
. If things go on like that, they could be next, or their parents or siblings. If you think about it in concrete terms, it’s not so crazy.”

“Yeah…”

…That was true.

If you supposed that every month a “sacrifice” would be taken at random from the people related to third-year Class 3, it could even be Mei next, or me. It could be Kirika—Mei’s mother, whom I’d just met—or it could be my grandparents. It didn’t seem possible, but could it even get my dad, away in India? I could picture it in my mind, but I still just didn’t have the sense of immediacy that Mei was talking about.

“Do you think it’s illogical?” she asked me.

Instantly, I replied, “Yeah, I do.”

“How about if you think about it like this?”

Mei leaned her back away from the bar and turned to face me. Without so much as holding down her hair as the wind scattered it, she said, “There may not be any guarantee…But if there’s even the slightest chance that this strategy will put a stop to the ‘disasters,’ isn’t that good enough? I always thought so, and that’s why I agreed to be the one who’s ‘not there.’”

I couldn’t say anything.

“It’s not like there’s anyone in the class who’s my ‘best friend,’ as everyone likes to call them. What Mr. Kubodera said about ‘needing to overcome the suffering together’ and ‘graduating as a class’ feels totally creepy and totally fake, it’s true…But it’s sad when people die. Even if I won’t feel the sadness directly, there are plenty of other people who will.”

Incapable of responding, I fixed my eyes on the movement of Mei’s lips.

“We don’t know yet if these ‘additional countermeasures’ will be effective. But if the two of us stop existing, maybe that’ll put a stop to any further calamities. Maybe nobody will have to be sad because someone died. If there’s even a whisper of a chance that’s true, I think it’s all right.”

As I listened to Mei talk, the words Mochizuki had spoken to me on Saturday came to mind.

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

But I couldn’t care less about pretty ideals like that. Even the way Mei was explaining it now, the phrase “for everyone’s benefit” carried still another nuance. I could sense that, and plus—

If I were to roll over now and accept that I would be treated as if I were “not there”…

If I did that, how would that affect our—my and Mei’s—relationship, I wondered.

We’d be able to interact without having to worry about what anyone else thought, as the two fellow “non-existers” in the class.

At any rate, we would have to be completely “nonexistent” to everyone. Which meant, from our perspective, that everyone else in the class besides us would become “not there”…

And right then, I thought maybe that would be okay, too.

It came alongside a faint bewilderment, a faint regret, and a faint fidgetiness whose true shape not even I could really grasp.

We left the park and went up the road along the levee on the Yomiyama River, the round moon in the night sky tingeing the spaces between the clouds…Finally, at the foot of the bridge that crossed the river, we parted ways.

“Thanks. Take care going home,” I told her. “If you believe the stuff you told me today, you’re just as close to ‘death’ as Sakuragi and Ms. Mizuno were. So…”

“You’re the one who needs to be careful, Sakakibara,” she answered unflappably, then stroked the tip of her right middle finger diagonally across the eye patch that covered her left eye. “I’ll be fine.”

How could she say that with such certainty? Something about it seemed odd, and I narrowed my eyes. As I did so, Mei dropped her hand from her eye patch and reached it out to me.

“I look forward to not existing with you tomorrow. Sa. Ka. Ki. Ba. Ra.”

She shook my hand lightly. Her hand felt surprisingly cold…But my own body felt a growing heat, as if fired up by the sensation.

She spun around and walked off down the street we’d come by. I could only see her from the back so I can’t say for certain, but I thought I saw her hands pull the eye patch from her left eye then.