Monday
Night
WHEN I STEPPED OUTSIDE, I spied the moon peeking out from the clouds. I ran beneath the moonlight. I was not thrilled with the task ahead of me, but I knew that I needed to say something. Maybe I felt some twisted sense of obligation, since I was probably the only one who could get some honest answers about this.
In short, I was headed for the school.
“What was that all about?” was the first thing I said to Yano-san upon entering the classroom. She was sitting at her desk, apparently playing a game on her phone, before she looked up at me. “Oh…you came.”
“This morning. What was that?” I continued, moving towards the more spacious rear of the classroom and shifting my body to my usual size.
“This…morning?”
“With Iguchi.”
When I tried to press her, she gave her typical, tiresome reply. “No talking…about the daytime.”
“You do not get to pull that right now.”
“You’re so…annoying, Acchi…kun.”
“I could say the same about you.”
“It’s not like…you did anything…about it.”
She had a point. Now that she mentioned it, I hadn’t. When I mulled it over again, wondering just why I felt so viscerally moved by this, I soon realized.
“So what happened to not wanting to hurt nice people?” I asked.
“I don’t…want to.”
“So then why?” I demanded again.
Yano-san pursed her lips. The look on her face resembled the faces of adults I remembered seeing as a small child, as though she were looking annoyedly at a toddler making some selfish demand. She heaved a theatrical sigh and opened those pursed lips to speak.
“No one’s… ignoring Igu-chan anymore…are they?”
With an air that strongly suggested that she had been forced to say something that she did not want to, Yano-san once again returned to her game.
Though I had been the one to raise the question, I hadn’t prepared myself for the reply. I felt eviscerated by her words. It felt as though the earth had just moved beneath my feet, though it hadn’t.
“Daytime talk…is over now.”
“Wha?”
“It’s cloudy…but the rain stopped. Let’s…do something.”
With a sound effect that sounded very much like a Game Over, Yano-san slipped her phone back into her pocket and looked out the window. I followed her gaze and was startled to see something moving in the building across the field. But when I looked closely, I realized it was just the shifting moonlight playing tricks on my eyes.
I was still flustered by Yano-san’s words, by the reason for her actions.
Still, it was a bit strange.
“Iguchi-san was the one who wrote on your notebook, though.”
“So I heard. You keep…saying…the same things.”
“That’s because you keep ignoring them.”
I couldn’t understand her. Iguchi-san was most certainly a nice girl. However, that was only as far as I, living on the inside of our class’s united front, was concerned. Iguchi-san had actively ignored Yano-san for months, and Yano-san had to have known how shaken Iguchi-san was in the moment that she’d picked up that eraser. She would never had picked it up if she hadn’t been caught off guard.
So, was Yano-san really saying that she made herself a scapegoat for the sake of even that amount of kindness?
“I don’t understand you.”
“You keep…repeating yourself, Acchi-kun. Did you forget…what you said yourself?”
“What do you mean?”
“That mysteries…are only mysteries…when they’re mysterious.”
“Iguchi-san was the one who said that.”
The black droplets across my body trembled but not out of irritation or malice. This was an uneasy feeling that my heart did not know how to handle, like the sensation of seeing a shape or a color I had never seen before.
“S-so you’re fine with that?”
“With…what?” she asked.
“I mean…”
With the fact that things were going to become even worse for her than they ever were before, I wanted to say, but could not find the words to do so.
I don’t know what Yano-san thought in response to my wordless hesitation, but she grinned smugly. “Well…I don’t know.”
Did she mean that she didn’t understand my question? Or did she mean that even she wasn’t sure that she’d done the right thing? The former would be best, as the latter would mean that she really was an odd duck, someone who couldn’t ever follow the flow of a conversation or read the room.
Of course, when I imagined the ramifications of that, I grew afraid.
So far, I had lived under the assumption that Yano-san was a girl who operated by a sort of logic that the rest of us could never grasp; a girl who seemed to live every day to its fullest, who always wore a grin on her face even when she was ignored or shunned or bullied. A girl who suddenly attacked classmates during morning homeroom.
A twisted, addled girl.
With someone like that, one might be able to think that the sort of treatment she received was inevitable.
But what did it mean if she was just someone who was working and living the best way she knew how, by her own philosophy? What did it mean if, after spending the whole weekend agonizing over it, Yano-san had decided to come to the rescue of a classmate who had become embroiled in something heinous thanks to a momentary interaction with her?
I suddenly began to worry that there had been some similar situation with Midorikawa-san, that Yano-san had done what she did out of following her own Yano-san line of reasoning. But I didn’t ask about it. If I asked, and was met with some rationale that I had no choice but to accept, then I would no longer be able to hide behind our class’s sense of righteousness.
I shook my head and forcefully banished the thought from my mind. That just couldn’t be. There was no way that a normal person could carry on with such a smug look on their face, day in and day out, while dealing with Yano-san’s burdens. No normal person would make their already poor circumstance worse just to help a classmate who didn’t even like them. Even then, there had to be far more normal ways to help than a slap in the face.
There was no doubt about it. This girl lived by a mindset that was thoroughly different from the rest of ours. That much was certain.
The fact that she liked the same music I did, that she was a fellow Jump reader, and that she also looked forward to Kinyou Roadshow was totally irrelevant.
I decided to stop talking about Iguchi-san. No matter how much we discussed the topic, there was nothing that I could do to change the circumstances, so it was pointless.
Instead, I decided to discuss an issue that I might actually be able to understand. That would be far more constructive.
“Th-that reminds me, there was something else that I came here to talk to you about, Yano-san.”
Yano-san looked at me suspiciously. “Only if it’s not something about…the daytime…again.”
“It’s not. Or, I don’t think it is. Truth is, one of the guys from our class saw me coming to the school, so he was apparently saying he’s gonna sneak in here to catch me.”
“Wow…how stupid.”
“Seriously. Catching a monster?”
“No, I meant…you…Acchi-kun.”