Shinohara opened the door of the lecture hall. There was one student inside, and the moment he saw that student’s face, a surge of emotion ran through him.
He wanted to beat the student to death, but Shinohara stomped down those emotions, forcing himself to call out a friendly greeting instead. He planned to pretend to know nothing.
The student looked up. “Hello, Mr. Shinohara.”
It was like always, nothing out of place—yet Shinohara knew the student was laughing at him on the inside, enjoying the performance and being around him like this. Yes, the student had come to the lecture hall to watch Shinohara squirm, knowing that his hands had been taken.
Hiding his nauseous rage, Shinohara drew closer. He must not betray his plans. He must not reveal that he knew the student to be the thief.
The foolish thief suspected nothing and didn’t try to run. Shinohara was able to stand directly behind the student without arousing suspicion.
The thief had taken away the doll’s hands—but nobody should have recognized those as hands. The doll was too small, and there were no fingers on those hands—they were just balls of cotton covered by a half sphere of cloth. Yet the thief had taken them with the rest of the hands.
The only person who would’ve known those were hands and taken them … was someone who had accidentally found the handless doll. The moment that person found the doll, the thief must’ve guessed that the chemistry teacher was the one behind the Wrist-Cut Case.
Shinohara put his hand on the shoulder of the student in front of him. Her shoulder shook. She turned slowly around, looking at him. “What is it?”
She was good at acting, Shinohara thought.
He had placed the handless doll in the wastebasket in the chemistry office. There was only one person who would have had a chance to see it—Morino, the girl who had been in the lecture hall while he’d been cleaning the chemistry office, while the office trash was sitting in the lecture hall. The male student who had been helping him would never have had time.
“Please take your hand off me, Mr. Shinohara. You’re interfering with my reading.”
This girl was always reading in the corner of the lecture hall. Her eyebrows twitched—more expression than he’d ever seen from her before.
When Shinohara had noticed the dirt on his keyboard the day before, he’d also found a long black hair between the keys. It had been sheer coincidence that the hair had landed there, out of all the places in his house it could have been. Shinohara’s hair was short, so it couldn’t be his—meaning the intruder must have had long hair.
And the bookshelves … On his shelves was the follow-up to the book the girl was reading. And it had been pulled out, ever so slightly. He always kept his spines aligned, yet this one had been jutting out a full five millimeters. This girl had found it and looked at it.
There was no doubt in his mind: she had stolen his hands.
Shinohara tightened his grip on her shoulder, squeezing as if to break it.
Morino winced.
“Tell me where you hid the hands,” he ordered, as politely as he could manage.
But Morino just tried to push him off, complaining that he was hurting her. The book she was reading fell to the ground.
“Where are the hands?” he asked again, loosening his grip and making sure she heard him. Her usual, expressionless mask had crumbled, and she shook her head as if she had no idea what he was talking about.
Pretending not to know, Shinohara thought. Instantly, his hand wrapped itself around her slender throat, squeezing.
Morino’s eyes opened wide, staring up at him in shock as his fingers sank deep into the soft flesh of her neck. He was going to kill this girl, but there was no help for that. His grip tightened.
In a minute, she would stop moving. As he mused on that, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a small cylinder in her hand—some sort of spray. By the time he noticed, it was too late: the spray was aimed right at his eyes.
There was a hiss of compressed gas, and his eyes began to burn.
✦ ✦ ✦
†
✦ ✦ ✦
Morino had been carrying around a can of pepper spray. She unloaded it in Mr. Shinohara’s face, and then she hit him in the head with her chair before she began shouting for help. She did not scream—she just called out, calmly but loudly.
A minute later, several students and teachers came running. Mr. Shinohara lay at the center of the crowd, clutching his throbbing eyes.
I could not leave my hiding place beneath the podium until the crowd dispersed.
✦ ✦ ✦
epilogue
✦ ✦ ✦
Mr. Shinohara was arrested—but not as a culprit behind the Wrist-Cut Case. Instead, he was convicted by society for a much lesser crime. No one knows his real crime, even now.
He’s no longer a teacher and has since moved away. There have been no new victims in the Wrist-Cut Case.
The hands I stole from his house are buried in my backyard. I didn’t need them. I didn’t care about hands the way he did.
I had wanted to convince him that Morino had stolen his hands.
When I saw the hands in the refrigerator, I knew he was keeping them all, just like I had predicted. Even before I entered his house, I had been planning on using that fact and the doll hands to lead him to suspect Morino. I was glad he was smart enough to figure out the clue about the doll hands. He simply didn’t know that I had switched the trash bins, sifting through the contents afterward.
I also left behind a long black hair—the same type of hair Morino had. It was my sister’s hair, which had come in handy. I had remembered Shinohara cleaning his office keyboard with compressed air, and so I figured the hair stood a good chance of being discovered if I were to place it on his computer keyboard at home.
Moving the book he had mentioned to Morino had been insurance.
If he had determined that Morino was the thief, causing him to cut off her hands and kill her, my plan would’ve been complete. I only would’ve had to wait until her severed hands were in his fridge, and then I could’ve gone to steal them. Of course, there were a number of holes in this plan: there was no guarantee he would’ve taken her hands home even if he had killed her … but there was a good chance he would’ve.
The only hands I had wanted were Morino’s pale, beautiful hands.
“Will you teach me how to smile like that?” she asked me the next day. It was the first time Morino had ever spoken to me.
Whenever I talked to someone else, I smiled. But inside, I had no expression—and Morino had somehow picked up on that. The performance that no one else had ever seen through was no match for her.
After that, we each had someone to talk to. Our relationship was a little too cold to call friendship—but when I spoke to her, it was the only time I could stop acting, letting my face remain devoid of expression. It gave the muscles of my face a well-earned respite. There was a comfortable disinterest to our relationship that allowed me to express the inhuman and unemotional sides of myself.
✦ ✦ ✦
†
✦ ✦ ✦
The world had long since forgotten the Wrist-Cut Case by the time summer vacation ended and second semester began.
The light in the classroom was yellow as the sun began to set. A breeze came in the open windows, toying with Morino’s long black hair as she stood in front of me.
“So this movie used real freaks as actors, but the story was even stranger: the freaks were carrying around some sort of shrine …”
As she spoke, I murmured the movie’s name. Morino looked ever so slightly surprised. Her expression barely changed at all, but I could tell.
“Right.”
It was a movie directed by a German woman. Of all the people I knew, only Morino and I would be interested in something so strange.
“Do you remember the Wrist-Cut Case?” I asked.
“The one from last spring?”
“If you had been one of the victims, what would you be doing now?”
Morino stared down at her hands. “It would be very hard to put on a watch. Why do you ask?” she said, looking puzzled.
She didn’t know the man she’d grappled with had been the wrist cutter … and I still stared at her hands from time to time. Perhaps it was better that Mr. Shinohara had not cut them off. Perhaps they were more beautiful alive—and Mr. Shinohara might have cut them in the wrong place.
“No reason,” I said, and I stood up to leave.
The reason I wanted her hands was because she had those beautiful scars, from when she had tried to kill herself.