Another, Vol. 1 (21 page)

With the low whir of a motor, the iron doors opened to either side. It was the door to an elevator that linked the basement with the upper floors.

“Come along, Sakakibara.” Mei got into the elevator, then gestured for me to join her. “We can talk things over upstairs.”

Three black leather sofas were set around a low glass-topped table. There was one two-seater and two single-seaters. After plopping into one of the single-seaters, Mei gave a short sigh and then looked at me.

“Go ahead. Sit down, at least.”

“Oh…right.”

“Do you want anything to drink?”

“Uh, no…I’m fine.”

“I’m thirsty. Do you want lemon tea? Tea with milk?”

“Um, whichever.”

We’d come up to the third floor on the elevator, to the Misaki family home. My first impression was how the place seemed barely lived in, if at all.

We’d moved to the spacious living/dining room. The furniture was unpleasantly sparse for the amount of space they had and, to top it off, every detail of the room was too precisely arranged. Even the carelessness of the TV remote being tossed into the center of the table seemed unnatural.

The windows were all closed and the air-conditioning was on. It was still only early June, but the air-conditioning was running surprisingly hard.

Mei stood up from the sofa and went into the kitchen, then immediately returned with two cans of black tea. “Here.” She set one can in front of me. Then, pulling the tab off her own can, she plopped back down on the sofa.

“So?” Mei took a swig of the tea, then looked at me with a cool gaze. “What do you want to talk about first?”

“Uh…well.”

“Why don’t you ask me questions? Maybe that’ll be easier.”

“I thought you hated being interrogated.”

“I do hate it. But today, I’ll allow it.”

Mei spoke in a teacherly tone, then smiled in amusement. Drawn in, my tension was easing, but I quickly got on the ball and straightened my posture.

“All right. Let me just confirm something again,” I said. “Mei Misaki—you’re
alive
, right?”

“Did you think maybe I was a ghost?”

“I’m not going to say I didn’t have doubts sometimes, to be honest.”

“I guess I can’t blame you.” Mei smiled in amusement again. “But now all your doubts are gone, I hope. If we’re talking on the level of whether or not I exist, then absolutely, I’m
alive
. A real, flesh-and-blood human being. The only people who think I’m ‘not there’ are the ones in third-year Class 3 at North Yomi. Though actually, that was supposed to have included you, too, Sakakibara.”

“Me?”

“Yeah. But that failed pretty early on. Now you’re like me and…It’s hard to explain.”

I noted down the words that stuck out to me—“failed,” “like me”—in a corner of my mind and asked Mei another question. “When did it start? When did everyone in class start
pretending
that no student named Mei Misaki existed? Has it always been that way?”

“What do you mean, always?”

“Like, as soon as you started third year? Or before that?”

“Once we joined third-year Class 3, of course. But it wasn’t right away.”

There was no longer a smile on Mei’s face as she answered.

“When the new semester had just started, we thought this year was going to be an ‘
off
year.’ But then we found out it probably wasn’t going to be, and the discussions wrapped up in April…So, to be accurate, it started on May first.”

“May first?”

“You got out of the hospital and first came to North Yomi on the sixth, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Friday the week before that was the first day. There was a three-day weekend after that, so effectively, that was the third day.”

It had started that recently? That threw me for quite a loop. I had gotten the idea somehow that this had been going on longer—at least before I came to this town—and in a sustained way.

“A lot of stuff must have seemed strange to you after that first day.”

“Well, that’s true.” I nodded deeply to underscore her comment. “Every time I talked to you or said your name, Kazami and Teshigawara…everyone around me would react so weirdly. It looked like they wanted to say something, but nobody ever did.”

“They wanted to tell you, but they just couldn’t do it. I think that’s how it turned out. They wound up cutting their own throats. They should have told you everything before you came to school. They’re paying for it now.”

“What do you mean?”

“You should have done like everyone else and treated me like I’m ‘not there.’
It doesn’t work
otherwise…but up till then, I don’t think any of them were taking it that seriously. Remember what I told you? How even I only half-believed it, deep down. How…I didn’t buy into it a hundred percent.”

She was right; I did remember her saying those words, but…

“It’s not just ‘bullying,’ is it?”

I pushed on with my questions.

“No. I don’t think anyone is thinking of it like that.”

“…So then why are you the target?”

Mei cocked her head slightly. “Who knows? It’s kind of just the way things worked out. But I never interacted much with anyone anyway, and plus my name just happens to be Misaki, too…So maybe it seemed perfect. In a way, it almost makes things easier for me, too.”

“Easier? You can’t—”

“I can’t mean that?”

“That’s right, you can’t. There’s no way it’s a good thing that the kids in class, and even the teachers, are ganging up and ignoring a single student.”

My voice grew rougher as I spoke, but Mei let it wash past her.

“I’m pretty sure that the teachers who deal with Class 3 spread the word through different channels than the students.”

Her tone was stubbornly detached.

“For example, not taking class attendance by roll call. There are teachers who do roll call in other classes. But they don’t do it in Class 3. You know, so they don’t have to call my name. Class 3 is the only one that doesn’t have to ‘stand’ and ‘greet,’ too. It’s the same reason the teachers never go down the rows and call on us in order, no matter what class we’re in. I will never be called on, and if I’m absent or I leave halfway through the class, no one’s going to say a word about it. And I’m excused from all cleaning rotations and everything else. The teachers reached that understanding amongst themselves. And when the midterms rolled around, I guess they weren’t allowed to excuse me from that, but they didn’t care how lazy I was when I filled out answer sheets just to get out of there, did they? Just like everything else…”

“So gym class, too, then?”

“Gym class what?”

“Since they split gym class into boys and girls, I heard that Class 1 and 2 have gym together and Class 4 and 5 have their gym together, but Class 3 is the only one by itself. I thought that was kind of weird. You could argue that one class has to be the odd one out since there’s an uneven number, but why would it be Class 3?”

“So other classes don’t get pulled in. So the number of students affected doesn’t go up. Maybe they do it out of some kind of concern like that. Although there’s always been an ‘arrangement’ for gym class that the person who’s ‘not there’ doesn’t participate and sits out whenever they can.”

“An arrangement, huh?”

That word called up a memory.

Obey whatever the class decides.

The third “North Yomi fundamental” that Reiko had taught me. And then last week, Thursday, when the classroom was empty, Mr. Kubodera had said…

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

I let out a deep sigh, feeling overwhelmed, and reached for the can of tea Mei had brought me. It was bitingly cold lemon tea. I pulled the tab off the top and drank half the can in one go.

“If we go through listing every single thing, I don’t think we’re ever going to finish.”

I looked back at Mei’s face.

“Basically, the same thing that’s been happening to you since the beginning of May started happening to me this morning. So with everything I went through today, I felt like I had a pretty good idea of
what was going on
. But the thing I still don’t understand is
why are they doing it?
”

Yes. The question was “why?”

It wasn’t simple “bullying.” Mei, the one going through it, had even said so. And I agreed. But on the other hand…

The students and the teachers had agreed to treat one particular student as if they’re “not there.” In a normal context, no, that wasn’t “simple” bullying. It was heinous, over-the-top bullying. That was why my voice had gotten so raw before when I said, “There’s no way doing something like that is a good thing.” But…

Thinking about this by forcing the word or the concept of “bullying” onto it, at least, was wrong; it didn’t make sense. That fact was inescapable.

There was probably no malice in what they were doing, whether student or teacher, like in so-called bullying. If there was no contempt or mockery of their target, then there was also no intent to try and strengthen their group ties by singling her out…That’s how I thought of it.

What they had instead was fear and dread…That’s also how I saw it.

Before, I’d thought they were afraid of Mei, but it wasn’t that. Rather, it was like fear and dread not of Mei herself, but of
something they couldn’t see…

“Everyone’s desperate now,” Mei said.

“Desperate?”

“Sakuragi and her mother died in those accidents in May, so they couldn’t say they only half-believed it anymore. And then once June started, there were two more.
It’s begun
, for sure.”

…Which didn’t explain much.

“So then…I mean, why is that?” I asked, each word a gasp for oxygen to my depleted lungs. “How is any of that related to anything else? Why would that make everyone gang up on someone and act like they’re ‘not there’? It’s so pointless.”

“Why? You really think that, don’t you?”

“I do.”

The short sleeves of my summer uniform exposed my arms, which had been covered in goose bumps for some time now. And it wasn’t going away. And not just because the air-conditioning was too cold.

“Do you remember the story about Misaki from twenty-six years ago?” Mei asked at length, covering the eye patch on her left eye with the palm of her left hand, as if to hide it.

Twenty-six years ago?…Ah, so this really did have something to do with that.

“Of course,” I replied, leaning forward on the sofa.

Her hand still resting over her eye patch, Mei’s voice was quiet as she told the story.

“Misaki, the popular kid in third-year Class 3, died and everyone kept
pretending
that ‘Misaki’s still alive anyway’…And then on graduation day, the image of Misaki, who couldn’t possibly have been there, showed up in the class photo. I think that’s as far as we got.”

“Yeah.”

“You still don’t know the rest?”

“No one will tell me.”

“Then I’ll tell you now,” Mei said, moistening her lips with a flick of her pink tongue. “What happened twenty-six years ago was the trigger, and ever since, third-year Class 3 at North Yomi has drawn nearer to ‘death.’”

“Nearer to death…?”

Actually, on my first day at school, Mei had said something similar when I’d talked with her on the roof of Building C. I still remembered it vividly.

Third-year Class 3 is the closest to death. More than any other class at any other school. Much more.

“What does that mean?”

I inclined my head, rubbing my arms briskly.

“The first time
something
happened, twenty-five years ago, Misaki’s classmates had all graduated. It was the third-year Class 3 that came after them.
The same thing
started to happen after that, though it doesn’t happen every year. Maybe about once every two years.”

“And that is…?”

“I’m going to tell it the way I’ve seen it, but don’t get the wrong idea: I’ve heard all of this from other people. This has been passed on through lots of people over a lot of years.”

So basically, some kind of legend
—the situation made it impossible to write the whole thing off as just that. I nodded solemnly, my eyes fixed on Mei’s lips.

“The students have their own channels for handing the story down among themselves, separate from the teachers’. Last year’s third-year Class 3 tells next year’s third-year Class 3. That’s how I first found out about most of this. This stuff goes around in the other classes and the other years kind of like a rumor, but at its root, this is a secret that only people involved in third-year Class 3 know, that they absolutely cannot talk about to anyone else. So…”

“Come on, what
is
it?”

I couldn’t stop chafing my arms. The goose bumps just wouldn’t go away.

“
A mysterious event
that first happened to the third-year Class 3 twenty-five years ago,” Mei said, flinging the words out. Then she broke off and my breath caught. “When
that
happened—when it started, I mean—there was at least one death every month, without exception, in third-year Class 3 that year. Sometimes it was the students, sometimes it was their families. There were accidents and illnesses, sometimes a suicide, or they would be involved in some kind of accident. There were people who said it had to be a curse.”

A curse…“The curse of third-year Class 3,” huh?

“What is it?” I asked again. “What is this ‘mysterious event’?”

“Well—” Mei finally dropped her hand from her eye patch and replied, “
There’s one extra kid in the class.
No one notices when they get added. There’s an extra person, and no one has any way of telling who it is.”

“There’s one extra person?” I repeated it back to her, not understanding. “Someone had to have…”

“I told you, we don’t know who it is,” Mei answered, her expression unmoving. “It first happened twenty-five years ago. April 1973. As soon as the new semester started, they realized they were one desk short in the classroom. They thought they’d gotten enough desks ready for the number of students in the class that year. And yet when they tried to start class, they realized they were one short.”