The Book of Heroes

  “Yes. They said I could come just to use the library even if I don’t go to class. Of course,” she added, “I can’t stay for very long each time. I don’t want to be here during break and have any of the students see me.”

  A look of fear quickly crossed the girl’s delicate features. She didn’t want anyone to see her. She didn’t want to see anyone.

  “Don’t worry about that,” U-ri said. “If anyone should come, I will hide you until they leave.”

  U-ri had barely finished talking when the bell rang to mark the end of the period. Michiru began to shake visibly.

  “How long is the break?”

  “F-five minutes.”

  Moments later, they heard the sound of students dashing out of their classrooms. Doors opened and closed, and laughter echoed down the halls. There was the sound of running feet.

  U-ri quickly stood, walked over to Michiru, and wrapped the vestments of protection around them both. She lifted her index finger to her mouth. “You’ll be safe here. Just close your eyes.”

  Michiru’s entire body was tense and she was sweating. She’s breathing so fast. She must be really scared. Scared of her classmates, of everything outside these library walls.

  U-ri glanced at Sky, who still stood rigidly behind the empty chair. His eyes were fixed on Michiru, as if he were seeing something for the first time in his life and couldn’t look away.

  The bells rang again, and silence returned to the school. As luck would have it, no one had wanted to use the library during the short recess.

  “There, now we can relax a bit,” U-ri said, letting the vestments fall away from her again as she returned to her chair.

  “You’re shorter than I would have imagined,” Michiru said. “You look like you’re in grade school. Or…maybe you just made yourself look like that so you wouldn’t frighten me?”

  For a moment, part of U-ri wanted to tell her the truth—I really am a grade school student. I’m Hiroki’s little sister. Aju used to call me “little miss” too. But the thought was gone as quickly as it had come.

  “I like this form,” she replied quietly. “And I fit well with Aju like this.”

  “That’s true. Like a little girl with her pet mouse,” Michiru said, smiling more broadly than she had before.

  “You know,” Michiru said, “Morisaki had a younger sister in grade school. He talked about her all the time. Yuriko was her name. ‘My little Yuri,’ he always called her. Yuri…kind of like your name.”

  U-ri gritted her teeth. I’m not going to cry. I’m not going to cry.

  “I can’t imagine how Yuriko feels,” Michiru went on. “Losing a brother like that.”

  Then Michiru began to talk more rapidly. It seemed her smile a moment before had upset some delicate balance inside her, and now the floodgates were open and everything came spilling out. “I have to go apologize. It was my fault Morisaki did what he did. It’s all my fault. I wanted to go apologize to her. But I couldn’t, I couldn’t…”

  The sudden outpouring of emotion took U-ri by surprise, and she looked around for something to cling to so she wouldn’t faint. She could feel the color draining from her face.

  Then Aju batted at her ear with one paw. His long tail snaked down off her shoulder and tickled her neck. Behind her, Sky grabbed her shoulders, propping her up so she wouldn’t sway.

  U-ri looked up at Sky. He was still entranced by Michiru. She could see the girl’s white school-uniform blouse reflected in his dark eyes.

  Aju stuck his nose into U-ri’s ear and whispered, “Stay with us, kid.” It tickled so much, U-ri almost laughed despite the seriousness of the situation.

  Across from her, Michiru’s face twisted and she began to cry. She held her head in her hands and doubled over so fast she almost fell out of her chair. U-ri stood up, sweeping the vestments behind her, and knelt by her side.

  “You bear a great burden. Is this why you wanted to end your life?”

  Michiru nodded her head up and down, trembling uncontrollably. U-ri gently rubbed her back. Curiously, it felt like she was comforting herself at the same time. “Your burden is heavy,” she repeated. “It must be very hard for you.”

  Michiru was sobbing out loud now. The tears she had kept dammed up inside came out in a great torrent. U-ri stood off to one side, watching it flow by.

  “You have to put your burden down, Michiru. Talk to me. Tell me what it is you’re suffering, why Morisaki did what he did. I—” U-ri shook her head. “Gah! Enough with the stuffy talk. Look, Michiru, I’m a book-spirit. I know a lot of things, but it’s hard for me to see what’s going on outside—in your world. I can’t just walk off by myself and talk to people and look into things.”

  U-ri looked up at the library books lining the shelves. She could feel their silent support. She nodded to them, then turned back to the girl. “Michiru, please tell me. What happened? If we know that, we books might be able to do something to help you and Morisaki.”

  The girl sat up, hiccuping. Her face was streaked with tears, her eyes rimmed with red. It made the scar over her right eye look even more painful. U-ri gently brushed away the girl’s hair where it was sticking to her forehead.

  “We books are on your side. We are your friends. Please, you have to trust me. You have to tell me what happened.”

  Tears dripped from Michiru’s chin. She pulled a handkerchief out of her skirt pocket and wiped at her face. The handkerchief was wrinkled and already soggy—she’d probably been using it earlier, before U-ri arrived.

  “Morisaki…” She began speaking in fits and starts. It seemed painful for her even to breathe. U-ri rubbed her back again. “He saved me.”

  “Saved you?”

  “He told them…told our class it wasn’t right to pick on me. He told everybody.”

  Michiru and Hiroki had been in the same classroom in seventh grade.

  “Some of the kids picked on me from the first day I got to school. But it wasn’t anything too bad. It wasn’t until the second quarter that more started doing it, and more openly. Probably when we started swimming in the pool for phys ed.”

  U-ri blinked. “So the other kids in your class were always picking on you? Why?”

  Michiru’s left eye opened wide and she stared back at U-ri. “U-ri, don’t you notice my face?”

  “You mean the scar above your eye?”

  The girl nodded, lightly brushing the scar with one finger. “I fell from the second-floor veranda of our house when I was three. Someone had left a gardening hoe out on the lawn…”

  The metal edge of the hoe had cut deep into her face. A little deeper and she would have lost sight in her right eye entirely.

  “I had surgery twice. Once right after the accident, and once a year later. They took soft skin from my back and my inner thigh and moved it to my face. So…I have scars in three places now, instead of one.”

  When her class started using the pool, the other girls noticed. That was when the teasing really took off.

  “I’m sure I looked ugly to them. I understand why. Even I don’t like to look at myself in the mirror.”

  Some of the kids had already started calling her “monster” when the school year began, but only in whispers. When they found out about the other scars, they stopped holding back.

  “Of course, not everyone was that bad. Some people never said anything at all. But they didn’t protect me, either. If they had, they knew they would have gotten picked on themselves, so they just pretended not to notice.”

  U-ri screwed her mouth shut, afraid she might scream with rage. She understood how the other kids picked on her—that is, she understood the mechanism by which it had happened. But how could kids be so mean? She couldn’t understand that. She didn’t want to understand that.

  “So they were picking on you about the scar on your face—that’s all?” U-ri said, realizing she was sounding like a detective questioning a witness.

  “Yes…”

  “That’s the only reason?
”

  Michiru flinched away. “I don’t know. Maybe if I had just been able to laugh it off they would’ve stopped—”

  “No. This isn’t your fault. You did nothing wrong.” U-ri gritted her teeth. “So who was the ringleader of all this? Who started it? Was it a boy or girl?”

  “In the beginning it was mostly boys, but the girls started after the second quarter…there were five or six of them.”

  “Can you tell me their names?”

  “U-ri,” Aju butted in. “Maybe you should calm down a little.”

  “How am I supposed to do that? Have you even been listening to what she’s been saying? I can’t calm down, Aju!” U-ri practically shouted. Her hands clenched into fists. “I mean, those kids are just plain evil. You can’t forgive something like that. Michiru, you have to tell me who they were. Aju, I’ll need a spell.”

  “What kind of spell?”

  “A spell to send the lot of them to the nameless land! We’ll shave their heads and make them go barefoot and throw some old rags on them and they can push the Great Wheels of Inculpation for the rest of their lives! They’re the real sinners here!” Midway through her fit, U-ri stood and caught a glimpse of Sky and his dark, sad eyes.

  “Oh…sorry.”

  U-ri had forgotten that the real deal—a shaven head, barefoot, rag-wearing devout—was standing right behind her. He was a sinner. An outcast sinner, at that.

  “Stop being foolish, U-ri,” Aju said, his voice suddenly sounding much older and wiser than it should have coming from a tiny mouse. “You may be an allcaste, but you don’t have that kind of power. And there is no such spell. You can’t just grab somebody out of the Circle and cast them off into the nameless land!”

  “Then who can?”

  Aju paused a moment, his whiskers trembling. “The god of stories. Well, I guess.”

  “You guess?” U-ri rolled her eyes, though seeing Aju being so clueless did take the edge off her temper. She could feel her blood pressure dropping back down to normal. “There is a god of stories too? I thought the gods were stories.”

  “Yeah, well,” Aju sighed deeply—surprisingly deep for a mouse. “It’s an enigma. A mystery not for us to unravel.”

  “That what the Sage told you?”

  Aju clapped his paws over his nose and squeaked “I guess” again.

  “I think I understand what the Sage was talking about when he said you were still young.”

  “Lady U-ri,” came Sky’s gentle voice from behind her. “You’re confusing the Lady Michiru.”

  U-ri glanced over at the girl who was sitting there with a look of utter confusion on her face. “You’re right. I’m sorry. Thanks,” she said to Sky.

  Suddenly, Michiru unfroze and spoke. “U-ri? Who was it you said ‘thanks’ to just now?”

  That’s right—she can’t see him.

  “Oh, no one. I was just talking to myself,” U-ri said, attempting to smile. Aju left her shoulder, ran down her arm, and hopped onto Michiru’s knee.

  “I think I’ll hang with Michiru awhile. You scare me, U-ri.”

  Rude little vermin, U-ri thought. She was about to say something, but when she saw how happily Michiru was petting Aju’s head she decided to hold back.

  “So then this Hiroki Morisaki turned against the kids who were picking on you?”

  Holding Aju in her palm, Michiru nodded.

  “When was that?”

  “Around October last year, I think. He stood up in homeroom and just started talking.”

  “You said that both of you were on the library committee, right? Then why didn’t Morisaki notice what was going on sooner?”

  Surprisingly, Michiru smiled at that. “Why would someone as popular and as busy as Morisaki notice someone like me at all? Besides, the kids didn’t pick on me out in the open at first.”

  “Wasn’t Morisaki a class officer too?”

  U-ri remembered hearing Yoshiko and Hiroki talking about something of the sort. “Weren’t you elected to class office? Are you going to accept?”

  “No—he said he was too busy with clubs for that. He offered to go on the library committee because it seemed like the least amount of work.”

  “And you were elected because you like books?”

  “No. The girl committee member was chosen by drawing straws. Because no one wanted to do it. Besides,” she added in a quiet voice, “you really think anyone would’ve elected me for anything?”

  “So…Morisaki joined the committee later?”

  “Yes.”

  U-ri thought to herself for a moment. For Michiru, that might not have been an entirely good thing. She was sure some of the other girls had been jealous when they heard she’d be on the same committee as Hiroki. It would’ve only gotten worse as the year went on, until someone started to wonder why that “monster”—U-ri hated to even think the word, but that was probably what they’d said—got to be alone with him in the library all the time. Yeah, there was definitely some jealousy going on there.

  “So he noticed when the teasing got worse.”

  And then he stood up for her. He called them all out in front of the class. Didn’t they think it was wrong to pick on her? Weren’t they ashamed? Didn’t everyone else think they were wrong?

  “When he did that, the kids who’d been pretending not to notice came out of the woodwork and agreed with him. It was easy to say teasing was bad when the great Morisaki was saying it first.”

  The worst teasing stopped—for a time.

  “I came to school every day during the third quarter,” Michiru said quietly, her eyes narrowing, her thoughts drifting back. “Things were good.”

  “What did the teachers do about all this? Were they also just pretending nothing was wrong until Morisaki stood up?”

  Michiru shook her head vigorously. “No, not at all. Mrs. Kanehashi helped me a lot—and she would scold the kids teasing me.”

  Akiko Kanehashi was a young teacher. She taught English.

  “But Mrs. Kanehashi was new at the school, it was her first time with a class of her own, and…” Michiru swallowed. Then, slowly, she began to explain that the mother of one of the kids who had been teasing her was a real loudmouth in the local PTA. When Mrs. Kanehashi punished her son, she came screaming to the school and called all the other board members.

  “She hit so hard and so fast, and she lied about everything. Somehow she made it seem as though Mrs. Kanehashi was the one who was wrong all the time.”

  U-ri gritted her teeth again. “Didn’t the principal have anything to say about this?”

  Michiru was quiet.

  “Let me guess. He didn’t take Mrs. Kanehashi’s side. And he didn’t take your side. He just apologized on his hands and knees to the kid’s parents and pretended nothing was wrong?”

  Michiru slumped down in her chair and said, “I guess,” in a tiny voice, just as Aju had moments before.

  “What about your parents?” the mouse asked, his long whiskers trembling. “Weren’t they worried? Didn’t they notice you were having a hard time?”

  Michiru’s color had been improving while she talked, but now she went pale as a sheet. Her lips began to tremble and her shoulders sank. “My mom was there when I fell off the balcony.”

  She had just taken her eyes away for a second.

  “My father blamed my mother for what happened. And his parents blamed her as well.”

  Things got bad between her folks, and shortly thereafter they had gotten a divorce.

  “After that my mom raised me by herself and worked a full-time job. She was tired all the time. And grumpy. When I started going to school, she started working nights too…and drinking a lot.”

  It sounded to U-ri as though Michiru’s mother had been so busy providing for her daughter she didn’t have time to care for her.

  “And your dad?”

  Michiru grimaced like she was being squeezed between two giant hands. “Dad can’t stand to look at my face.”

  He co
uldn’t stand to see her. He didn’t want to see her.

  “I haven’t seen him once since the divorce. I know he remarried and had more kids.” Michiru’s voice cracked, but she didn’t cry. It was as if the pain was so great it had seared her heart and dried up all her tears. Her fingers twisted into claws, and U-ri half feared she would start ripping at her own face. “My mom blames me. She says—she says she and dad were in love when they got married. It was my fault that it all fell apart.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa, that is so not true!” Aju squeaked. He ran up Michiru’s shoulder and jumped to where her hands rested on her face. He beat at her fingers with his long tail until she moved them away from her face. “Your mother blames herself, you know. But it’s too hard on her—so hard she can’t be kind to you. She doesn’t really think it’s your fault.”

  Michiru scooped Aju up in her hands and snuggled against his fur.

  A cold thought crept across U-ri’s chest. So cold, it felt like her heart had gotten frostbite. Pain stung at her.

  What happened to Michiru could have happened to anyone. It was an accident, a tragic accident that brought her one unhappiness after another and made her life a living hell. How fragile happiness is, U-ri thought. And how easily taken away. And we take it for granted when things are good.

  It was too easy for evil to seep into the cracks and turn a person’s heart black.

  Envy. Anger. Guilt. Regret over that which could never be undone. Sadness. Grief. By themselves, all of these things were harmless. Everyone had them in varying amounts at one time or another. One could hardly live without these emotions. But once evil got a foothold in a person’s heart, everything changed. Evil twisted them, making their internal envy, anger, guilt, regret, sadness, and grief into something external—into energy. Energy in need of a target.

  Michiru’s face was scarred; her heart was scarred. Her father had abandoned her, and her mother treated her like a stranger. The teachers at school pretended not to notice. Only one young teacher took her side, but she was powerless to help. She couldn’t hope to stand against the legions of evil that bore down on Michiru from all sides. Michiru had nowhere to run.

  She was a princess, trapped in a high tower.