Confessions (7 page)

“Ma’am,” he said, when she finally paused. “I want you to leave Naoki’s problems to me!” There was a noise from upstairs just then, and I looked up at the ceiling again. Naoki must have heard everything.

Still, he didn’t show up for school the next day, or the day after that. On the other hand, that seemed natural enough to us—as natural as the fact that we were all pretending 
Sh
ū
ya
 wasn’t there, even though he was. It seemed the best solution at the time.

They started handing out milk again on the first Monday in June. The Health Ministry had published the results of the pilot program “Promoting Dairy Products to the Nation’s Secondary Students”—“Milk Time”—and the prefecture had decided to follow up with a program of its own.

As class officers, Y
ū
suke and I had the job of handing out the cartons, but as we made our way around the room, we could feel the air getting heavier, feel the bad memories coming back. Fortunately, no one
had
to drink the milk. The prefecture had made the case for the benefits, but plenty of parents had complained that their children didn’t like milk or were allergic to it. I’m amazed that there are so many moms and dads willing to spoil their kids like that, but that day it meant that there were no names on the cartons and that we were free to drink or not—and when you looked around, the only person in the room sucking on a straw was Werther himself.

“Hey, hey! What’s the matter? Don’t you know milk’s good for you?” He finished the last drops and crushed the carton. Yumi made the mistake of looking up and catching his eye.

“I’m taking mine home,” she murmured.

“Great idea!” Werther laughed. “A pick-me-up for when you need it.” He watched as we all put our milk in our bags.

Sh
ū
ya
 had classroom cleanup duty that afternoon. Just as he was turning around to get the broom out of the closet, there was the sound of something splattering. Y
ū
suke had thrown his milk carton at him, and his aim was perfect. It had exploded all over 
Sh
ū
ya
’s back. I was sitting at my desk working on the class log, and I didn’t realize what had happened at first. There were just a few kids still in the room, but every one of them was staring at Y
ū
suke.

I don’t know how they really felt about 
Sh
ū
ya
, but even if they hated his guts, none of them would have had the courage to do something like that. Courage? I’m not sure that’s the right word. But I guess it felt like courage, coming from an athletic, outgoing kid like Y
ū
suke. Sh
ū
ya hadn’t turned around when Y
ū
suke spoke up.

“You aren’t even sorry, are you?”

But that didn’t get a look out of 
Sh
ū
ya
, either. He glanced down at the milk all over his pants, picked up his bag, and walked out of the room. We just watched him go in silence.

That was the beginning of 
Sh
ū
ya
’s punishment.

I think Y
ū
suke must have liked you a lot.

I realize now that you weren’t the kind of teacher who makes a fuss over her students. You were more interested in finding the real value in each individual. You never made a big deal about it, but you always noticed when someone got the top score on a test, or did something great for her club, or got elected to school office.…You would announce it before homeroom or science class and make sure we gave them a round of applause.

You had them clap for me more than once in homeroom. The “class president” is really just the class maid, someone who never gets noticed or thanked, but you made a point of telling everyone I was doing a good job and asking them to show their appreciation. It was awkward, standing up there, but it still felt good.

Werther, on the other hand, never does anything like that. He’s always talking about “only one” or “number one”—some song he’s obsessed with. When they introduced the new teachers at the assembly on the first day of school, he even sang part of it when it was his turn to speak.

“I don’t want to focus only on the best students or the top athletes. I want to value each individual for the effort he brings to everything he does. I want to be a teacher who can view each student fairly.”

At the beginning of May, our baseball team beat this private school that usually wins the whole league, and they made it all the way to the semifinals. It was a first for the school and the local paper even had an article, with pictures of the team—and to top it all off, the hero of the game, the ace of the pitching staff, was our own Y
ū
suke. After the tournament, he was named to the all-star team and interviewed for another article in the paper. Everybody was totally in awe (with the possible exception of 
Sh
ū
ya
), and for the first time since the start of the school year the classroom didn’t seem like a funeral home. But leave it to Werther to screw things up.

Despite everything he’d said about wanting to treat everybody the same, he didn’t seem to care about anybody but “number one.” He made a really big deal out of Y
ū
suke and ignored everybody else. If you’d been here, I know you would have praised Y
ū
suke, too, but I’m sure you would have pointed out that he hadn’t won the game alone, that baseball’s a team sport and no matter how good the pitcher is, he can’t play the game alone. You would have had us applaud the whole team. Why couldn’t Werther have done that?

I don’t think they realized it at the time, but I’ll bet Y
ū
suke and every kid in class you ever singled out felt there was something missing in the way Werther handled things. You could feel the frustration and anger in the room, feel that kids needed a way to let it out. But no one took it out on 
Sh
ū
ya
—at least not yet.

I was going with Werther every Friday to visit Naoki’s house. That first day, his mother had sat us down in the living room so she could complain about you, but after that, when we kept coming back, she cut the visits shorter and shorter and kept us standing in the entrance hall. Finally, she stopped letting us in or even undoing the chain. She just took the envelope through a crack in the door. I could tell from the glimpses I got as we talked with her that she was still taking time with her makeup, but I thought her lips looked a little swollen.

Naoki’s oldest sister had married and moved to Tokyo, and his father usually got home late from work, so much of the time it was just Naoki and his mother—and he was living with a terrible secret.

I told Werther that I didn’t think we’d get to see Naoki no matter how many times we went to visit, and that it actually seemed like we were stalking him or something. For one second he got this nasty look on his face, but then he forced another smile.

“No, Mizuho,” he said, “we’re just getting to the critical point for both of us. If we can hold on a little longer, I’m sure they’ll understand what we’re trying to do.” It was clear he wasn’t going to give up on the visits, but I wasn’t sure who he meant by “both of us” or the “critical point.” I wasn’t even sure Werther had ever met Naoki, since he hadn’t come to school once this year. But it seemed too late to be asking about that now.

The next Monday Werther showed up for math class with a piece of white cardboard and said he wanted us to write messages to Naoki to “buck him up” and get him to come back to school. I knew the room’s aura was in for a change, but it wasn’t exactly what I expected. As they worked on the “get-well card” for Naoki, some of the girls were giggling and a few boys even laughed. I had no idea why, but when it reached me, the board was nearly filled up with a line of odd phrases:

Only now, as I’m writing this, can I see what they were doing. How could I have been so stupid? But they sure seemed to be enjoying themselves as they worked.

Do you remember that you told us about the Juvenile Law that day? Even though it’s meant to protect kids, I already had my doubts about it before hearing what you had to say.

What about that case in H City where that boy killed a woman and her baby? I remember seeing her relatives talking about them on TV for days, about how senseless it was, how happy they’d been in life, how brutal the boy who killed them had been. I remember thinking then that you really didn’t need a trial in a case like that. You could just hand the criminal over to the victim’s family and let them do what they wanted with him. The people who are hurt most should have the right to judge the ones who hurt them, the way you did with Naoki and 
Sh
ū
ya
, and you’d only need a trial when no one was left behind. But it wasn’t just that evil boy who bothered me. I couldn’t stand the lawyers, the way they stood up there and said everything they could think of to defend the kid. Anybody could tell they were lying. I’m sure there’s a reason they have all those laws, and I know they have to stand up there arguing like that and looking important, but when you see them on TV you can’t help thinking you’d like to have them right there in the room with you so you could give them what they had coming. Or maybe if you could just find out where they live and go throw a few rocks through their windows. At least that’s how I feel.

And that’s in a case where I don’t even know the victims or their family. Something I’ve only seen on TV—something that happened far away. But if I feel that way, I’m sure a lot of other people do, too.…

But as I’ve been writing this to you, I’ve changed my mind. I’ve realized that you have to have a trial, no matter how terrible the crime is. Not for the criminal but for the average people, to make sure they understand what’s happened and to keep them from taking the law into their own hands.

I suppose everybody wants to be recognized for what they’ve done; everybody wants to be praised. But doing something good or remarkable isn’t easy. It’s much easier to condemn people who do the wrong thing than it is to do the right thing yourself. But even then, it takes a certain amount of courage to be the
first
one to come out and blame someone else. What if no one else joins you? No one else stands up to condemn the wrongdoer? On the other hand, it’s easy to join in condemning someone once someone else has gotten the ball rolling. You don’t even have to put yourself out there; all you have to do is say, “Me, too!”

It doesn’t end there: You also get the benefit of feeling that you’re doing good by picking on someone evil—it can even be a kind of stress release. Once you’ve done it, though, you may find that you want that feeling again—that you need someone else to accuse just to get the rush back. You may have started with real bad guys, but the second time around you may have to look further down the food chain, be more and more creative in your charges and accusations.

And at that point you’re pretty much conducting a witch hunt—just like in the Middle Ages. I think we regular people may have forgotten a basic truth—we don’t really have the right to judge anyone else.

After that day when Y
ū
suke hit Sh
ū
ya in the back, there were almost always milk cartons shoved in Sh
ū
ya’s desk. The worst was when somebody kept one for a week or more and the milk turned sour, or when there were too many and they broke open. They put them in his shoe cubby and his locker, too. But Sh
ū
ya just cleared them all away without a word, as though it was just part of his morning routine. His notebooks and gym clothes disappeared a lot, and someone wrote “Murderer” on every page of one of his textbooks. Most of us were still ignoring him, but a few mixed-up kids harassed him nonstop.

But one day we all got the same text on our phones: “You be the Judge! Collect points for every blow you strike against 
Sh
ū
ya
 the Killer!”

It came from the same person who sent the text after you talked to us. The system was simple: Every time you did something to harass 
Sh
ū
ya
, you’d send details to the original sender and he would award you points. He’d total up the score on Saturday, and the person with the fewest points would be labeled “Friend of the Killer,” and he’d get the same treatment as 
Sh
ū
ya
 starting on the following Monday.

You know I didn’t feel any sympathy for 
Sh
ū
ya
, but this just seemed totally dumb, so I decided right away that I was going to ignore the whole thing. And I was pretty sure a lot of other kids would do the same. But a few days later I happened to spot two of the quietest girls in the class, Yukari and Satsuki (you know them…their idea of excitement is an Art Club meeting), standing near the shoe cupboards, sending a text—and then I realized they were reporting that they’d just stuffed their milk cartons in with 
Sh
ū
ya
’s shoes.

If those two were playing the game, I’d be the only one who ended up with no points at all.

So I was a little nervous when I headed to school the following Monday, but the day passed without anything unusual happening. Apparently, some other kids had refused to join in—had decided not to score points off 
Sh
ū
ya
. Maybe the world wasn’t going crazy after all.