Thursday
Day
IT WAS A MORNING like any other. A normal, unproblematic everyday morning.
I took care not to look at Yano as she entered the classroom, giving her cheerful greeting. I carefully avoided looking her way as she was pelted with eraser shavings and when the other girls said cruel things about her well within earshot. I tried not to look at her and see the face that she always made, that she was probably making now.
What was different today was my own perception, but I should have been able to put that from my mind, so I decided not to pay any more attention to her than usual.
Besides, there were three particular things other than Yano for me to concern myself with. I decided to focus on those.
The first was that Motoda had not come to school. Honestly, as far as he was concerned, it would be more of a mistake for him to show up, given what had happened just last night. No one was likely to believe that he had actually seen a monster. It would be weird for someone to accept such a thing that easily.
The second thing was that no one brought up the problem of the lamp being broken in the middle of the night at all. Perhaps it had been kept a secret so as to squash any strange rumors, but still, it bothered me.
The final thing was that yesterday someone had broken the window of the baseball club room again. Kasai laughed that it was probably Motoda who’d done it, and he hadn’t shown today because he was afraid of getting caught, but knowing that this was probably not the case, I began to worry that the culprit might have seen me in my kaiju form.
I wasn’t interested in scaring intruders away from the school again. Besides, I wouldn’t be coming back here at night anymore.
During the twenty-minute break after second period, I decided to go and take a look at the broken lamp.
I slipped out of the classroom, pretending that I was headed for the bathroom. As I thought about it, it had probably already been fixed anyway, but I still wanted to see for myself. Of course, I probably only became concerned about the light because I wanted an excuse to leave the classroom—just as Motoda had made up a pretext for sneaking into the school.
When I climbed to the fourth floor, sure enough, the broken light bulb had been exchanged for an intact one. I continued up to the fifth floor to make sure that no traces of last night’s scuffle remained, but there was nothing really to see, so I did my business in the fifth floor bathroom and started back to the classroom.
On the way, I passed by a classmate, about to ascend from the fourth floor. It wasn’t great that someone had seen me descending from the fifth, but given who it was, it was probably no big deal.
I casually raised a hand and greeted her.
“Yo. Off to the library?”
“Mm,” Midorikawa replied, nodding in such a way that implied I shouldn’t ask questions that I already knew the answers to. Still, I thought that I might try making a bit of conversation.
I do realize that this was just another excuse to keep away from the classroom for as long as possible.
“What’re you reading?” I asked.
She held the book in her hands out to me. This was an appropriately meaningless thing to ask, so I was surprised when I took a closer look at the cover.
“Harry Potter.”
“Mm.”
“…Are the books good, too?” I asked.
“Mm.”
I was a bit relieved to see her nod. It was an utterly meaningless relief. It occurred to me that the conversation was now over, and that not only was Midorikawa unlikely to offer up any new topics, but I wasted more than enough time. She looked towards the stairs that stretched up to the fifth floor.
“O-oh, yeah, I just wanted to fix my bedhead a bit, someplace where nobody else could see.”
A reasonable excuse. Midorikawa replied, “Mm,” with a nod. What was that affirmation in response to? Did she mean it like, Oh yeah, yeah, sure, of course that’s your excuse, whatever? Kasai would be totally disillusioned, if that was the case.
Now that I was already drawing out the conversation, I decided to try and promote my friend a little bit.
“Oh yeah, by the way, you hear that someone broke the baseball club’s window again?”
“Mm.”
“Oh, so you did know. There’s a lot of destructive things happening lately, like with Takao’s bike.”
“Mm.”
“And someone messed with Nakagawa’s shoes—everyone’s all upset thinking it might’ve been Yano, but even Kasai, who usually doesn’t think much about anything, was saying that we don’t even have any proof of that, so we probably shouldn’t leap to any conclusions…”
Midorikawa said nothing, but she did not tilt her head at this. Maybe I had come on a little too strong with the point I was trying to make. It was impossible to tell from her reaction how she had taken it.
It was probably best to leave it there.
“W-well, I’ll see you in class, then.”
I stepped past her, taking two, three steps down the stairs, when suddenly I heard, “Kasai-kun is a bad guy.”
At first, I had no idea who had spoken to me. As I turned around, I finally remembered the voice as Midorikawa’s. For a moment, she locked eyes with me and then turned back and headed for the library.
It had been ages since I had heard her say anything at all outside of class.
Kasai was a bad guy? What?
I watched her disappear around the corner, having no idea what she meant. I thought long and hard about what she was trying to tell me for the rest of the day, but I came to no conclusion. I came up with a lot of hypotheticals, but it wasn’t good to dwell on such impossible things.
As far as outstanding incidents were concerned, that was the only one that day.
Well, maybe two—there was still no Totoro key chain hanging from Iguchi’s bag.