The Book of Heroes (6 page)

Let’s get out of here!

As they passed, Yuriko’s hand lightly brushed one of the girl’s hands. So lightly, she almost didn’t notice—the kind of contact that happens all the time in a crowded school. But the girl leaped away from her like she’d been burned.

“Whoa! S-sorry!”

All the other girls around her squealed with terror.

“You’re Morisaki, aren’t you?” the girl she had touched said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to run into you, honest!
So please, pretty please, don’t stab me!”

Her voice echoed off the cold walls and ceiling of the bathroom. The girls continued screaming, like they were under attack, rushing to be the first out of the bathroom. The swinging doors to the hallway burst open. The girls ran out into the hall, where their screams quickly changed into whooping bouts of laughter.

Yuriko stood still in the doorway.

She glanced over at Kana. Her friend was so pale, Yuriko thought she might faint.

Fourth period rushed by and Yuriko barely even noticed. Whenever she took her eyes off Kana, Kana would be staring at her, and when she turned toward her friend, Kana would look away, an apologetic look on her face.

The next incident took place during lunchtime.

Mr. Katayama was helping the students pass out lunch trays, when a woman about the same age as Yuriko’s mother came up to him in a hurry. She wasn’t a teacher at the school, and she wasn’t dressed like one of the assistants either. It took Yuriko a while to realize that she was the mother of one of her classmates.

She wasn’t just in a hurry, she was
angry
. She grabbed Mr. Katayama and started talking rapidly before turning and calling her daughter—a girl named Fukuyama, whom Yuriko hardly knew—to her, pulling the girl close to her side. Every so often she would turn and find Yuriko in the room, then glare icily at her. Mr. Katayama grew red in the face, and he managed to coax the woman out into the hallway, but not before everyone heard what she was saying.

Criminal.

Murderer.

My child. No explanation. Unconscionable.

What is the school thinking? What about her parents?

Even in fragmented snippets, her point was crystal clear.

It was then that Yuriko first noticed several of her classmates were absent that day. Far more than usual.

I’m not a criminal.

I’m not a murderer.

But Hiroki was. He had killed another boy. And she was his sister. Who would want their own child to sit in the same classroom as the sister of a murderer? That was what Fukuyama’s mother was saying. She hadn’t heard that Yuriko would be coming back to school today. If she had, there was no way she would have let it slide. What was the school thinking?

Fukuyama’s mother had been trembling. Her daughter too. They were scared of Yuriko. And Yuriko thought she detected the faintest trace of something else in the mother’s eyes. Disdain. They were mocking her. How could she be so stupid to come back to school? Did she really think everything was going to be just the way it was before?

Yuriko looked up to find every head in the room looking in her direction. Kana was one of them.

Then, one by one, they turned away. They looked off to the side. They looked down at their lunch trays. There was the sound of clattering dishes. But not a single student in the entire room was talking.

All conversation in the room had been sucked into the tiny black hole at its center. A black hole named Yuriko.

Yuriko threw her books and her pen case into her bag and left school before Mr. Katayama could come back into the room.

I’m going home. I’m going home. I’m going home.
A little music box was playing a dark tune over and over in Yuriko’s mind.
Go home. Go home. Never go back to school.

There’s no place for you there anymore.

Her knees buckled, her jaw sagged. When she ran, the world seemed to sway around her, and the pavement turned to wet sand beneath her feet.

Back home, she ran into the living room and grabbed on to her mother. Then she cried and wailed louder than she ever had. Louder than Fukuyama’s mom.

For a long while, the two of them sat there, hugging and crying.

Yuriko wouldn’t be going back to school. She would never go to that school again.

Late that night, Yuriko went back to her brother’s room. She didn’t want her parents to know she was in there, so she left the light off. The light coming in through the window from the streetlamp outside was enough.

The red book was back on the bookshelf. It was sitting at the edge of one of the front rows. Her mother must have come in here and picked it up. The bent pages had been smoothed out.

Yuriko stepped closer and gently touched a finger to the book.

The magic was back, she could tell that instantly. The jacket felt warm to the touch.

“That you, little miss?” the book asked in her head. Yuriko nodded silently. She began to cry as quietly as she could. The more she cried, the more tears came.

She grabbed the book off the shelf and hugged it to her chest.

“Y’know, that kinda hurt the other day,” the book said, pouting.

“I’m sorry,” Yuriko said, the tears rolling down her face.

The book sighed. “Sounds like you got hurt too.” A gentle vibration came through the book’s cover. Yuriko nodded, hanging her head, and she slumped down against the wall with the book in her arms.

She told him what had happened that day at school. She kept backtracking, adding details, and crying in between parts of the story so that in the end it must have sounded like a tangled mess, but the red book seemed to understand. The whole time she talked, he said only one thing.
It’s okay. Don’t cry.
No matter what she said, no matter how much she cried.
It’s okay. Don’t cry.

“It’s like that for everybody, you know,” he told her when Yuriko had finally finished her story and her tears had dried. “Everyone feels the same thing you do, little miss, when the Hero takes someone.”

When the book spoke, it sounded almost like a song. There was a melody to his words. It was a song about the river of tears that people had cried over the ages, over countless sorrows.

“No one can do anything about it. I’m sorry, but no one can undo what has been done.”

You can’t turn back time.

“You’ll be at home for a while now, won’t you, miss? You should take it easy. Time may be your enemy now, but in a while, it will become your ally.”

“You mean I’ll forget?”

“Maybe. Probably.”

No I won’t. How could I?

“But my brother is gone.” Her brother’s absence had stopped the clock for Yuriko. The whole Morisaki family was frozen in time. “Remember what we were talking about yesterday?” Yuriko asked, holding the book up in front of her face. “You know more than you’ve told me, don’t you. If you know why my brother did what he did, I’ll bet you know where he is now.”

The red book hesitated.

Bingo,
Yuriko thought. “Where is he? Where’s Hiroki? What happens to people taken by the Hero? Does the Hero bring them somewhere? Is he in some kind of prison?” Her questions came out one after the other, with barely a pause between them. “Hiroki didn’t stab his friend because he wanted to, right? The Hero made him do it, right?”

After a pause, the book answered. “That’s correct. That’s in
its
nature. It manipulates people, starts wars, turns the world on its head.”

Yuriko had to think hard to understand some of the words he was using.

“The Hero starts wars? That’s weird. The heroes I know about are always ending wars.”

That was how it was in all the stories. That was how it was in her textbooks.

“Beginnings, endings, they’re all the same, miss. They’re the head and the tail of the same beast.”

This she understood even less. She wished the book would stop talking in riddles and just get to the point. “So my brother isn’t bad, then. He’s not the evil one. Something evil grabbed him and made him do those things.”

Hiroki is a victim.

“I have to help him!” she said out loud, and then she had the strange sensation that the words took shape as she said them and floated up in the air of the darkened room, glittering as they rose.

“I have to go help him. You have to tell me where he is.” Then a light went off in her head. “Wait, the answer is written inside you, isn’t it? All of this is written inside you. That’s how you know so much about the Hero!”

Even before she had finished talking, Yuriko tried opening the book. But to her surprise, he resisted.

“What? You can’t do that!”

The book tensed, dug in its heels (or would have if it had them), and fought against Yuriko’s grip. Yuriko tore angrily at the book. Still, the pages wouldn’t open.
You opened up easily enough yesterday!

“You can’t do that!” she fumed. “You’re…a…book!”

“You can’t save him,” the book said. His voice wasn’t singing anymore. There were no more gentle vibrations either. “No one who the Hero takes can be saved. Not by a person.”

“Well I can. Just tell me where he is and we’ll save him! I’ll get the police and the firemen, and Dad and Mom!”

“Ridiculous! What can adults do? They can’t get near the Hero. They can’t even leave this world!”

There he goes again. Talking in riddles.

“Fine, whatever, I don’t care. Just let me read you. What I need to know is written in you, isn’t it?”

Yuriko struggled with the book there in her brother’s neatly tidied-up room, in the pool of pale white light that spilled in through the window from the streetlamp outside. When she thought about it later, she couldn’t remember exactly
how
she had struggled with the book, but she had. At the time it felt more like she was fighting not with a book but with a boy—a boy just about the same age as her brother.

Of course, that was a losing battle. She had never actually fought with her brother, but her arms were shorter, and her feet were slower. Luckily for Yuriko, though, girls have a secret weapon when it comes to fights.

Yuriko bared her teeth and bit into the book’s jacket. She heard the red book yelp and slip out of her hands, turning over in the air to land, pages up, on the floor.

Out of breath, Yuriko scooped up the book. The book looked like it was sagging in shock. She could clearly see her own teeth marks on one corner of its cover. A perfect little semicircle. She had always been proud of her teeth.

“Now that was a very mean thing to do,” the book moaned.

“You’re the one who’s mean!”

“Look, even if you got me open, you still couldn’t read me. You can’t even read the letters on my cover.”

She had to admit he was right.

“I never took you for someone so fierce, little miss. I guess it’s true what they say. Don’t judge a book by its cover.” The red book chuckled and then groaned. He sounded less surprised by the whole thing than hurt. Just like a real person. “You may have very sharp teeth, but you’re just a little girl. You can’t save your brother. Now be good for a change and dry your tears and blow your nose, and get to bed. You’ll feel better in the morning, and pretty soon you can go back to school. That’s how you do it. Just live life the same way you always have. It’ll be hard at first, but that’s what you have to do.”

That was the last thing Yuriko wanted to hear. She might have had her temper back under control, but she was still just as angry, and it was bubbling up inside her.

“I can’t just pretend everything is normal.”

“You have to try.”

“If I go back to school they’ll pick on me again.”

“You’ll find some who won’t. They’ll be your allies.”

“Oh what do you know? You’re just a book.”

For a moment it was quiet in the room. Then the book spoke again, his tone somewhat different than before. “I get it. You just don’t want to go back to school. That’s why you wanted to go help your brother. It was just an excuse to play hooky.”

Yuriko went to throw the book on the floor again, but her hand stopped in midair. She stood there, holding the book over her head. An unbearable sadness washed over her, and her eyes burned with shame. Yuriko lowered her hand and gently slid the book back onto Hiroki’s bookshelf.