With the power of imagination, I could even create a whole universe, I began to think, when I suddenly remembered the one who was still inside of me. Goodness, she could be drowning in there.
I had no clue what would happen to things within my body once I swallowed them. If it was as I imagined it, it would be like wandering around in space. At first, I thought I might head for the classroom, but after reconsidering, I decided to head up to the roof. The force exerted in spitting her back up might break a window or something, which would be bad news. I had already broken that one fluorescent light as it was.
I leapt up high, changed myself into a comfortable sitting size while still midair, and landed upon the rooftop. As I tried to cough the supply cabinet up as quickly as possible, I suddenly grew uneasy.
What if, because I had imagined the interior of my body to be like outer space, she had asphyxiated and died from the lack of oxygen? What if there was a black hole somewhere inside of me, and the whole cabinet had been crushed up to pieces?
There was no point in sitting here getting frightened. I was going to have to bring it back up sometime. I summoned up my courage, along with the image of carefully spitting the cabinet out from my mouth. At last, from the depths of my mouth, the rectangular box emerged, parting the black droplets as it came. I was immediately relieved to see that it at least had not been crushed.
Before I spat the whole thing out, I supported it with my tail, standing it upright on the roof so that it wouldn’t fall over. I doubt the supply cabinet had any plans of coming up here to the roof, either.
Now came the worry of whether or not Yano-san was breathing.
I stood before the supply cabinet, which looked eerie in the moonlight. After several seconds of waiting, with no apparent activity from inside the cabinet, I gripped the handle with my tail and tentatively opened the door. Inside was Yano-san, standing straight up, frozen, her eyes closed.
Was she…actually dead?
As I looked upon her, growing increasingly worried, her eyes suddenly popped open. They opened with such force that you could practically hear the sound effect. I jumped in shock. After blinking numerous times, she took a step out, and her lips pursed.
“Oo,” she said.
“…Oo?” I repeated.
“Ooo.”
“…”
What was she trying to say? I took a step forward, straining my ears.
“Ooo…oooo…ooooo…oooooowaaaaahhh!!!”
Out of nowhere, she raised a battle cry.
Not at all prepared for such a loud sound, my body swelled in proportion with the distress inside my heart.
Utterly unconcerned for me, once she had expended all the air in her little body, Yano-san took another deep breath and once more opened her mouth in a “Wah” shape.
“Waaaaaaaaaaaaaahhh!!!”
This time she started hopping around the rooftop, still spewing out a scream that sounded like a broken toy. She wore her usual self-satisfied grin, and I worried that she had finally gone mad from being swallowed up by a monster. However, I some realized that was not the case.
“That was…crazy! So…effin’…crazy!”
She took off suddenly, running around in circles.
“I thought…they’d found me!” she burbled, still grinning as she run up to me, both hands outstretched. “You ate me all up!”
“Quiet! Keep it down!”
My voice was probably plenty loud too as I scolded her, but Yano-san kept on raising her voice, as if drawing a circle with it.
“That was soooo scary!”
I twitched. She hadn’t heard me at all.
“Yano-san.”
“What?! What?!”
“I was the one who was scared! Why would you show your face?! Why would you talk?!”
“Yeah…seriously!”
“Don’t just agree with me!”
Perhaps reading the exasperation on my face, she began to sway restlessly, an even more amused smile on her face. Back and forth, back and forth.
Suddenly, something within me burst. I don’t know why—surely I was utterly dumbfounded by her behavior, on top of my existing agitation.
“Seriously, what is with you?”
Even I realized that there was not a hint of actual malice behind my words. I think I had genuinely begun to take some sort of strange interest in this even stranger classmate of mine.
The fact that we had made it out of this safely only meant that we would have to be even more resolute, more cautious, if there was to be a next time. But there was no need for such things at the moment. So, it was fine to bask in our victory for now. I could understand why Yano-san might be in the mood to revel.
I watched silently as Yano-san leapt and bounded and danced a strange step like a hyperactive child. Finally, she stopped in place, as though having expended all the excess energy in her body, her shoulders heaving with breath as she stared at her hands for some reason.
“That was…so…exciting.”
“So I figured.”
“I was really…scared.”
“…You’re weird, you know that, Yano-san?”
Yano-san tilted her head at my friendly ribbing, her shoulders shaking with ragged breath.
“What’s…weird?”
I pointed at her with my tail. “What do you mean, ‘what?’ It’s you. You’re weird.”
“No, I’m…not.”
No matter how you looked at it, the outrageous way she shook her head back and forth was incredibly odd. I laughed again. “I mean like, back in the classroom, and now.”
“Hm…hmm?”
“That face of yours.”
Caught up in the mood, I let one of my most persistent thoughts slip.
“My face?”
“Even when you’re talking about how scared you were, you’ve still got that big smile on your face. It’s super weird!” I said, teasing, only a little malice behind it. She should be able to accept at least this much of a jab as payback for making me worry so much, I figured. It was the sort of thing you would say to a friend, not taking into account things like whether or not it would hurt them.
For a moment, she was stunned. She put her hands to her face and muttered, “Aa…aa…ahhh.” Then she explained, as though there was something she had forgotten to mention this whole time. “So…I…”
She moved the hands that had been pressed to her cheeks towards her mouth.
“I can’t help…it, but when I…get scared, I al…ways…smile.”
Then, she pushed up both corners of her mouth.
“Sort of…like this, all…sm…ug…ly.”
Ugly?
“…Huh?” I said.
Oh. Satisfied. Smugly.
She pushed the edges of her mouth all the way to their limits.
There it was. Her usual smile. That strange smile that I saw every single day.
“I guess it’s a ha…bit. I’m…always doing that…huh?” she said, squishing her own cheeks.
Always.
At any given time?
I thought over what she was saying, my brain on fire. It felt as though the night wind had suddenly blown away all the sense of triumph within me.
“What?” I asked.
She was grinning smugly, here, right before my eyes.
She grinned when Motoda struck her with the bottle.
Every morning, when she futilely greeted our classmates, she smiled.
When she replied that she “didn’t know” why she had attacked Iguchi-san, she grinned.
The night that she first met me in my monstrous form, a satisfied grin.
All those times, there was Yano-san, smiling.
Even on the day when everything changed for our class…
I couldn’t breathe.
“What’s…wrong? Acchi…kun?”
Her voice felt far away.
I felt myself sinking deeper into my own memories inside my head.
So many, many times I had seen that smile. Every time, I had wondered, how could she keep smiling like that?
It was because there was something wrong with her in the head. Because she lived by a different philosophy from the rest of us that she could always smile, I thought; so happily, so freely, despite everything around her.
That was normal, I thought, because she was different from me. Thinking that way helped me understand it. I was glad to think that way.
“Acchi…kun?”
Just then, her alarm went off.
Saved by the bell.
At this juncture there was no point in my even asking what she would have done had the alarm gone off when the others were still here.
“I-I better hurry up and get this cabinet back into the classroom,” I said.
Brought back to awareness by the sound of the alarm, I swallowed up the cabinet. Now that I had done it once, the second time was a breeze. After we solemnly put the cabinet back into place, it was time to depart from the darkened school.
“See you…later,” she said at the gate, but I could not reply.
I didn’t look at her face.
“Thank…you.”
I replied simply, “Mm,” before leaping off into the night, leaving the place behind.
At first, I thought that I might continue on to somewhere else, but all sorts of unwanted memories began rushing through my head, and instead I found myself following Yano-san, watching over her as she tottered along on her bike.
I remembered her smiling the other day, a smile aimed at no one, when she was all alone.
And then, I came to one more unwanted realization.
Yano-san no longer smiled at me, the monster, like that.
I couldn’t come to the school at night anymore.