Final Chapter
APPARENTLY, I’D SNUCK OFF in the middle of my class trip.
And then run all the way back to Tokyo without telling a soul.
…Or at least, that’s what seemed to have happened, anyway.
But I didn’t actually remember doing anything of the sort. All I knew was that I’d been in Hakodate one moment, then in Tokyo the next. I knew it sounded crazy—but it was the truth. All of my spending money was gone, and my phone was dead too. Luckily, I still had my ATM card, so I went and withdrew some cash, then headed into a nearby fast-food restaurant to charge my phone so I could call my mom to come pick me up.
“So you think you just, what—teleported back here or something?” she asked on the drive home as soon as I finished telling her what happened.
“…Yeah, I guess so,” I said. “Not sure how else to explain it.”
“Well, hey, that’s pretty cool,” she said, humoring me. “Kinda like Goku.”
I could tell she wasn’t actually buying it, though I didn’t blame her. I was finding it pretty damn hard to believe myself.
“Though I’ve gotta say,” she went on, “it does seem like you’ve grown up a bit since the last time I saw you. Which is funny, since that was only, what—a few hours ago, right? Guess you’re getting to be about that age, though… I swear, if you cut your hair short right now, you’d look just like a younger version of your father. Speaking of which, wow—that hair of yours has gotten long again, hasn’t it? Maybe I should trim it when we get home.”
I just sat there in silence, gazing out the passenger-side window.
In the end, I didn’t tell anyone but my mother what really happened. I knew they wouldn’t believe me even if I tried, so all that would accomplish would be making people think I was either insane or a delusional edgelord—and I didn’t know which was worse. So when I had to explain myself to my teacher over the phone, I just told them I’d bought a flight back to Tokyo using my own money. They told me they were very disappointed with my behavior, but I didn’t get in any major trouble, at least.
All that being said, it was still an extremely unsettling experience for me, not to mention inexplicable. Given that my wallet was empty, could that mean I really had used my spending money to pay for a flight back home? But even then, shouldn’t I at least have a ticket stub or a receipt? There were also a few articles of clothing and a couple of towels in my backpack that I didn’t remember buying, and I found a random wristwatch in my pocket that definitely wasn’t my style—not that I’d ever been a watch guy to begin with. There was no way I could just shrug this all off as some weird, trippy phenomenon.
And so I decided to try to get to the bottom of it.
First order of business: I needed to retrace my steps and ask around to find out if anyone in my group might have seen me walk off or noticed anything out of the ordinary around the time that I supposedly disappeared. Nagai seemed like the obvious choice.
With that sole purpose in mind, I set foot on campus for the first time since the occurrence. This took an awful lot of courage for me; not only was I a known truant even at the best of times, but I knew by now that word of me having run away in the middle of our class trip had surely spread among my fellow classmates. I was fully prepared to be the laughingstock of the day.
But these fears proved to be unfounded.
No one pointed and teased me as I walked into class—in fact, I didn’t even get so much as a curious glance. No one seemed to have any interest in me at all. It was honestly a little bit anticlimactic, given what I’d been bracing myself for, but I was relieved to know that my classmates paid just as little attention to me as I hoped they did.
“H-hey, uh…Nagai-kun? Could I talk to you for a sec?”
I wanted a chance to speak with him alone if possible, so I’d been waiting in the hallway for him to emerge after he went to use the restroom during lunch hour.
“Oh, hey there, Mugino-kun,” said Nagai, turning to face me as he wiped his hands off with a handkerchief. “Sure, what’s up?”
“Well, um… I was just, uh…” I stammered.
Damn. I’d rehearsed what I was planning to say and everything, but now that I was actually standing here facing him, the words just weren’t coming to me. I racked my brain as hard as I could for something, anything I could say, then suddenly blurted out:
“I’m really sorry for shoving you the other day!”
This wasn’t at all what I’d come here to say, but it was still a decent start, I figured. Nagai looked at me like a deer caught in the headlights for a moment—but then his face suddenly lit up, and he smiled as though I’d just reminded him of an amusing inside joke.
“Oh, that?” he said, laughing it off. “Yeah, don’t worry about it. You’ve got some condition or something, don’t you? I should’ve totally known better.”
“No, I mean it. That definitely wasn’t cool of me,” I said. “Especially when you were already going out of your way to include me…”
“Nah, it’s fine, I swear. Though if you really feel that bad about it, then maybe you can just buy me a soda sometime, and we’ll call it even.”
“S-sure, yeah… That works for me.”
Thank goodness he was such a laid-back guy.
“Was that all you needed, then?” asked Nagai.
“Oh, uh… No, there was one other thing, actually…”
I proceeded to ask Nagai if he’d noticed anything strange at all when we were walking down the street as a group that first day of the class trip—the last thing I remembered doing before my memories abruptly cut off.
“Mmmmm, yeah, I dunno… You kinda just up and vanished all of a sudden. Only thing I remember aside from that is when you pushed me down.”
“Gotcha…”
“I can try asking the other guys if you want, though.”
“Wait, really? Are you sure?”
“Heck yeah, man. Just leave it to me. We’ll talk more later, all right? See ya.”
And with that, Nagai headed back to the classroom.
…Man, what a great guy. Goddamn.
From that day forward, we started talking to each other at school on a regular basis. Before long, it felt like I’d finally made my first real friend since I started high school. It was surprisingly easy developing a rapport with him, actually—like maybe my communication skills and social awareness weren’t quite as underdeveloped as I thought. By the time December rolled around, we were even eating lunch together every day.
“So,” he said as we opened our respective bento boxes in the classroom one day. “Still trying to figure out what the heck happened to you on the class trip, I take it?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Just can’t seem to let it go, I guess…”
Perhaps the weirdest part of all, though, was that as I continued looking into it, I’d remembered two other instances in which I’d had similar experiences in the past: once in elementary school and once in junior high. Sadly, those leads hadn’t proven to be of any use to me thus far.
“Man, you’re really taking this seriously… But anyway—so I was gonna ask you…” Nagai said, then turned his cell phone to show me something. “Have you seen this before? Guess it’s some viral video that was making the rounds on Twitter about a month ago.”
I looked down at his screen and saw what appeared to be a reposted TikTok video of some high school girls horsing around at a kitschy diner. They seemed to be playing charades or something. A few seconds into the video, one of the salads that had been sitting on their table just instantly vanished without a trace. This was followed by a second or two of the girls all freaking out about it, and then the video promptly cut off.
“…Yeah, what about it?” I said. “It’s just faked, isn’t it?”
“I thought the same thing at first, but I guess there were actually a bunch of these kinds of videos going around. Apparently, all of them were recorded at the exact same time, if you can believe that. Folks in a few of the occult communities I follow were saying there must’ve been some kind of rift in the space-time continuum. Maybe you were just unlucky enough to get caught up in that somehow?”
“What, like an interdimensional traffic jam or something? Get real.”
“I’m telling you, man—there’s all sorts of urban legends out there about stuff just like this. Like a tunnel that rapidly ages you the moment you walk inside, or an island that turns back time, or even—”
Nagai was a pretty big fan of the paranormal. Once he got started talking about stuff like this, there was no stopping him. Not that it didn’t usually make for pretty entertaining lunchtime conversation fodder, to be fair.
Eventually, classes ended for the day and it was time to head home. I packed up my things and walked out into the hallway. Today was the day the next issue of my favorite weekly manga magazine came out. I already had a subscription to it via the official app, so I was planning to curl up in bed and read it on my phone as soon as I got back home. But as I walked eagerly down the corridor, a couple of boys came running up from behind me. When one of them bumped shoulders with me, I gasped in fright. The boys both immediately stopped and spun around, startled by my reaction.