He put his water-resistant messenger bag back on, covered the bottom half of his face with his scarf, and walked toward the entrance, mixing in with the other students.
Retrieving his school slippers from his shoe locker, he put his sneakers in and closed the metal door, spinning the three-number combination lock at random. Truthfully, using a little padlock would keep his things safer here, but the risk of standing out in a bad way was bigger. Once you reached high school, it was hard to imagine people pulling pranks like hiding shoes. Most students didn’t even use a combination lock, but that was Minoru’s nature and he couldn’t help it.
At the end of the day, I guess I don’t trust people. It’s too late to change that now, so I guess I’ll just have to keep it from showing. Just keep quiet all day today without having unnecessary conversations with anyone. Anyway, I don’t think there’s anyone who’ll be concerned about my attitude.
Minoru had spent the morning absorbed in this negative introspection.
Someone behind him gave him a pat on the back. At the same time, an energetic voice called out, “Mornin’, Utsugi!”
His whole body went tense in an instant, and he turned around awkwardly.
Tomomi was standing there dressed in workout clothes from top to bottom, an innocent smile on her face. She was carrying a yellow day pack on her shoulders that seemed to have everything from notebooks to writing utensils to track equipment inside, and her forehead had a light sheen of sweat.
She won’t strike up a conversation with me at school.
Shuddering at the fact that this prediction from a few minutes ago had been contradicted just like that, Minoru somehow managed to return her greeting.
“…Good morning, Minowa.”
Since things had ended up like this, he knew he should get out in front of it and apologize for his sudden escape yesterday, but he didn’t know how he should bring it up. Even so, how would it help things to fall silent when Tomomi was right here? Somehow, he had to handle this in a natural way that wouldn’t cause offense…
What came out of his mouth as a result of this super-speed thinking was, “Do you run to school every day?”
At this, Tomomi nodded as she took off her running shoes and stepped onto the wood floor.
“Yeah, but just a light run. By the way…you’ve gone past me on your bike a bunch of times before, Utsugi.”
“Oh…s-sorry, I never noticed…”
After apologizing, he asked another question about something that had him somehow concerned.
“Are there other people besides you who do the same thing, Minowa?”
“Hmm, as far as the track team goes, there are about three guys and girls other than me who do it. If you include all the sports teams, I think there are probably more? The sidewalks around here are wide so it’s easy to run.”
“Huh…is that so…?”
“Do you want to do it, too, Utsugi? Where was your house again?”
“Oh, it’s near the water treatment plant in the Sakura district.”
“Oh, over there? It’s pretty far, huh? About six kilometers one way?”
“Yeah, something like that. How about you, Minowa?”
“’Bout four kilometers. It’s pretty close to your place, Utsugi…but I guess that’s no surprise, since we were at the same middle school.”
The reason this exchange happened so naturally as they walked from the school entrance toward the classroom was because Minoru was halfway zoned out. He was using half of his mind to consider if it would be possible for him to run to school, too.
To avoid trouble, Minoru kept the things he carried around with him to an absolute minimum, so if he could get by without his bicycle, too, he couldn’t do any better than that. Six months ago he got himself into a mess once when he got a flat tire and had to walk his bike to the nearest bike shop. It hadn’t happened to him yet, but obviously the risk of running into a pedestrian or a car was higher than it would be if he walked.
But still, there were definitely people who would think Minoru, who wasn’t involved in sports, was odd for running to school. He would also have to change bags and buy a backpack. He had enough savings for it, but his sister Norie had just this April bought the messenger bag he had now, so he would feel guilty if he stopped using it after just six months. The sales tax had just gone up to 12 percent, too…
“…gi. Hey, Utsugi.”
“Huh…? Oh, s-sorry.”
“We’re at your classroom.”
Hearing that, he realized that at some point they’d stopped in front of the door to Class One for the sophomores.
Tomomi giggled and said, “If you do want to jog to school, let’s meet up somewhere in the morning and run together,” giving a wave as she dashed off toward her own classroom.
Minoru groaned inwardly as he belatedly became aware that a lot of students had observed him having a long conversation with the star of the track team.
Running to school together every morning?
It was ridiculous, inconceivable, and just thinking about it was frightening.
Just rewind the clock five minutes. No, please, rewind it seventeen hours, until early yesterday morning. If that’s impossible, just erase the memory of Minowa and me talking from everyone in school.
Minoru entered his classroom as he sent this prayer to the creator of the world.
Of course, time did not go backward. And the memories of the students who saw Minoru and Tomomi as they walked and chatted did not disappear.
School was out. When Minoru unlocked his shoe locker and opened the door, he noticed a small scrap of paper floating to the floor. It had probably been stuck between the door and the frame.
Despite a keen sense of foreboding, he picked up the scrap that had fallen to the wood floor. A row of words was scribbled on the paper, which seemed to have been torn from a notebook. It said, “Come to the back of the dojo.”
“…Oh…”
Since this was the first time he’d received a summons like the one in his hand, the word had slipped out of his mouth involuntarily; he wasn’t able to put up a carefree front.
He could either follow the instructions on the scrap of paper or ignore them. He had to think seriously about what choice would allow him to keep his life at school peaceful.
For now, he changed into his shoes, went outside, and came to a stop again, glancing in both directions. If he was going to the bike parking lot, it was on the left, and if he was heading to the dojo, it was on the right.
The air he sucked into his lungs changed into a long sigh and came out as a “hah.” Minoru turned to face right.
The only reason that came to mind for someone to call him out was his conversation with Tomomi Minowa. Of course, Tomomi herself wouldn’t be the one waiting for him; it would be another person who had an issue with them talking. If Minoru could convince the person who had summoned him that he had no designs on her, he should be able to end this and make it an irregular onetime event.
Once he had cut across a few corridors and passed the side of the gym, the square dojo came into sight ahead.
There were small thickets at the sides of and behind the dojo, and it was fairly dark at this time in winter. It was the first time Minoru had set foot there.
When he turned the corner of the building, walking carefully on the damp and slippery ground, he heard multiple voices coming from his destination.
“Oh, he’s here, he’s here. You gotta buy me fried chicken now.”
“Seriously? He didn’t hafta come.”
“Hang on, weren’t you the one who told me to call him out?”
Looking ahead as he walked, Minoru’s eyes fell on a few male students wearing matching Windbreakers. Judging by how they were talking to one another, the two leaning up against the wall were upperclassmen and the one standing a little way away was a sophomore.
Coming to a halt about five meters away from them, Minoru observed the guys wordlessly. This school had never had full-on gang
sters or delinquent students, but still, there wasn’t even a hint of danger in the appearances of these three.
Although it seemed like they had had a little bet going about whether Minoru would come or not, they really just had the air of exceedingly normal jocks.
Minoru stood there with a mixture of relief and wariness.
One of the upperclassmen broke away from the wall and, with a friendly smile, said, “Uh, you’re Utsugi? Sorry for calling you out so suddenly.”
“…It’s fine.”
Minoru observed the three of them further, keeping his words to an absolute minimum.
The long-haired upperclassman who had spoken to him was smiling, but the other one leaning against the wall, who had a bald head like a monk, was sullen despite winning that fried chicken. The sophomore seemed to be the one who’d written the summons and stuck it in Minoru’s shoe locker, but he probably just did it on orders.
The long-haired one threw another question—the real question—at Minoru, who had lapsed into silence again.
“It’s kind of a personal question, Utsugi, but are you going after our little Minowa?”
Minoru was visited by two thoughts at the same time: I thought so, the confirmation, and No way, the surprise.
He had thought the summons was related to Tomomi Minowa, but he couldn’t believe that just talking to her for the two or three minutes it took to get from the entrance to the classroom would be considered “going after her.”
Minoru faced the three—who must be track team members, since they called her theirs—and answered with the words he had prepared.
“We were classmates in middle school, so we were just talking a little.” He thought for a moment, then added, “…I’m not really going after her or anything.”
But the long-haired one, a thin smile still on his face, tilted his head as if to say, “But still.”
“But Utsugi, seems like you don’t normally talk to girls at all, do you? What’s with you only talking to Minowa?”
“It’s not that I…never talk to them. If somebody talks to me, I’ll at least answer them…”
“But according to my information, I guess you talked for a pretty long time? Ogucchi, how many seconds was it?”
“W-well, I didn’t exactly time it. Um…I think it was roughly fifteen minutes or so…”
Minoru wanted to ask if they really thought it took that long to get from the lockers to the classroom as a retort, but he held back. Even if fifteen minutes became three minutes, that didn’t change the fact that it had been a conversation.
So what if I am going after her?
It wasn’t like he didn’t have any desire to give a cool retort like that. But if he did, the other guys probably wouldn’t be able to back down anymore, and Minoru would surely go home and sit with his head in his hands, groaning in regret for an hour or more. Whenever there was trouble, he kept his head down and let it pass. That’s how he’d lived for these eight years.
“…Um, I have absolutely no desire to get involved with Minowa, really,” Minoru stated clearly, his gaze fixed somewhere around the long-haired one’s chest.
But his enemy was more persistent than expected.
“Hmm. But still, what are you going to do if Minowa talks to you again?”
“I d…”
He started to say, “I don’t know,” but corrected himself just in time.
“I’d say hi, since she’s an acquaintance, but—”
“Enough, I’m tired of this.”
The guy who suddenly broke in was the bald one resting his back against the wall behind them. With both hands still stuck in the pockets of his Windbreaker, he sprang upright using just the strength of his body, passing the long-haired one and walking toward Minoru briskly.
Coming to a stop right before Minoru, his nose at the same height as Minoru’s eyes, he snorted and murmured in a deep voice, “You’re a math and science guy, right? If so, you should just keep your nose in those books. There’s seriously no way you can mess with our girls.”
He was given no opportunity to say that he wasn’t messing with them. The bald one pulled his left fist from his pocket and casually drove it into Minoru’s stomach—more precisely, he tried to drive it into Minoru’s stomach.
Minoru reflexively bent forward and backed away. But there was no way he could have dodged the punch with those movements. The fist, muscled like an adult’s, plunged into his solar plexus. Minoru stopped breathing, getting a clear premonition of the hopeless pain that accompanies being hit in the abdomen.
But that pain never became a reality.
That phenomenon was triggered once again. His field of vision changed hues. All sound disappeared and both his feet left the wet ground. Exactly as if he were detached from the world.
The bald one’s punch dug into his abdomen. Yet there was no pain, no impact, and not even the sensation of touching something. It was exactly the same as yesterday morning when he had made contact with the handles of the racing bike…
No. They weren’t touching. With both his eyes wide open, Minoru had seen it clearly. Between the suspended fist of the bald one and the uniform Minoru was wearing, there was a gap, if only just a few millimeters.
Was he pretending to punch me…? Did he stop right before the impact…?
When Minoru looked up as he thought these things in the silence, what he saw was the bald one’s violently contorted face. It wasn’t rage—pain probably.
He took another breath, and at about the same time, the mysterious phenomenon faded away. The color, the sound, and the feeling of touching the ground returned.
The punch hadn’t connected, but Minoru backed away, his body still in the position of escape he had moved himself into. His feet slipped on the damp fallen leaves, and he landed on his backside.
From behind them, the long-haired one gave a compassionate smile, while the sophomore had an odd, tense one. Neither had noticed the strange force that had come over the bald one.
Holding his left fist in his right hand and gritting his teeth, the bald one seemed as if he was desperately suppressing a scream that threatened to burst forth from him. It was the expression of a person who had hit not a soft human body but something like a concrete wall with all their might.
Once the pain seemed to lessen after a few seconds and the bald one exhaled slowly, he looked down at Minoru seated on the ground with an odd look in his eyes.
“…You…,” he whispered in a hoarse voice.
He was probably wondering what in the world the sensation he had just experienced was.
Luckily, he didn’t seem up to taking deep breaths, so he spit out in a low voice, “Don’t get cocky. Next time, it won’t end so easily.”
When the bald one headed off at a quick pace, the sophomore followed him at a half run.
As the long-haired one passed by after the other two, he called out, “Sorry, Utsugi, but we’re just teaching you the ways of the world.”
Minoru was barely listening. Inside his head, the words what if were playing over and over.
What if…what if, what if in that moment, he hadn’t backed away as fast as he could of his own accord? What if he hadn’t been able to respond to the punch and just stood there bolt upright?
Was the bald one’s fist smashed up all the way down to the bone? He wasn’t basing this on anything; it was just a gut feeling. But if that had truly happened, Minoru would believe it without a doubt in his mind.
What was that just now? Just what did that bald guy hit?
Still sitting on the ground in a state of shock, Minoru lifted his right hand and touched his sternum over his uniform.
Nothing was there. But there was something. Something…living.
“…Did you do it?”
The question came out like a gasp, and no voice rose to answer it.
How did I get home from school—?
When Minoru came back to reality, he was on the porch of his house locking up his bike. Looking at his wa
tch, the time was 6:30 p.m. The sky had already gone completely dark, and warm light poured from the living room window as he looked into it from the small garden. His sister Norie had probably come home already.
Hit by a sudden realization, he peered into his bag. The library books he’d meant to return on his way home were gone, replaced by different books. Somehow, he’d apparently managed to get to the city library, return the books, and check out new ones while on autopilot. He walked toward the door to the entryway, thinking absentmindedly that he was lucky he didn’t cause an accident.
He had never told Norie this, but on the days when she came home before him, he got just a little bit nervous when he was opening the door. Even though he knew in his mind there was no way it would happen, he ended up picturing it no matter what he did. He wondered if, when he entered the house, he would find Norie on the floor covered in blood.
Minoru traded his bike key, which was still clutched in his left hand, for a large dimple key.
They had a house rule that they always had to lock both the front door and the back door, even when they were home. When he slid the key into the keyhole and turned it to the left, Minoru heard the reliable clunk of the door unlocking and exhaled a bit.
Before he could take his shoes off, he heard the pitter-patter of slippers running toward him. Next, he heard a voice that was gentle in tone but full of energy.
“Welcome home, Mii!”
“Hi.”
It had taken him a whole year before he could naturally return her greeting. As he thought this, he changed from his sneakers into the slippers that were there just for him and stepped into the hallway.
Standing before him was a young woman wearing an apron and clutching a ladle in her right hand. She was about the same height as Tomomi Minowa, but even though Minoru had long ago surpassed her in height, she didn’t feel petite. Was this because she was related to him as his adoptive sister?
Eight years ago when Minoru had lost his family, Norie Yoshimizu had taken him in and raised him.