When Kana got home, nobody else was there. Her father was at work, and that woman must have gone out shopping. That suited Kana perfectly. The woman and her father were on the second part of her list. They weren’t the ones to start with.
She put a few things she’d prepared in her bag, changed from her indoor school shoes to sneakers, and went out again to get on the train.
At last, it was time. Time to begin. She was going to follow her lifeline to hell. She’d end it all after that awfully long wait. She’d been so patient, believing the time would come, and now all the conditions had been met.
Today, she would kill. She’d remove the people she hated from this world. A steely determination focused her.
On the train, it seemed people were stealing looks at her. Schoolkids, office clerks, little children. For some reason, they were all furtively glancing at her, or at least she thought they were. On a different day, Kana would assume they were laughing at her, and her chest would tighten painfully, but at that moment, she couldn’t care less.
She got off at the Kinshicho Station and went to the restrooms. She had to wait in line for a bit. Inside a stall, she changed into a light summer hoodie and jeans she’d bought at a thrift store. She put on a cap, pulled her hair through the opening at the back, and then pulled the hood over her head. She stuffed her uniform and schoolbag into a tote bag she’d also gotten at the thrift store.
The gun went into the back pocket of her jeans. The oversize hoodie covered her bottom, so nobody could tell she was carrying a gun just by looking.
Kana left the stall. Women were standing before the wall mirror, touching up their makeup. Kana looked at her reflection. In her new getup, she looked like a boy. She also finally understood why people had been looking at her on the train—there was dried blood on her face, smudged sideways from when she’d wiped her bleeding nose earlier. She almost laughed out loud, thinking what a sight she must have made, a schoolgirl in her uniform with a bloodied face. Stifling giggles, she washed her face, wiped it with her sleeve, and left the restroom.
She found the station lockers and left the tote bag there. The less she had to carry, the better.
“This feels good…”
There was a lightness in her step. No, her whole body felt lighter. She had to stop herself from skipping. A weight had been lifted off her shoulders. Not the weight of the bag she’d been carrying, but the mental load of suffering and depression. She’d shaken it off, which made her feel… a lot like how she did on the way to Café LycoReco. It was the feeling of becoming a different person, someone who wasn’t Kyouko Katashiki, a pitiful schoolgirl bullied and blackmailed by her classmates, a helpless toy in the hands of others, treated as an outsider in her own home, almost forced into joining a criminal “tea club.”
But who was she? Kana, or a nameless murderer?
She could tell that she was probably going down the wrong path, but it was better than being stuck at a crossroads as Kyouko Katashiki, who was destined for pain and suffering.
“I wonder if Ruri and her friends are already inside,” she said to herself.
It surprised her how it sounded like a line spoken by an ordinary girl on the way to meet up with friends, and she laughed. She was feeling buoyant, exhilarated.
When she’d escaped from the “tea club” building, she’d run randomly, scared out of her mind, but she remembered which way Ruri had taken and had no trouble finding the place.
Kana observed the building’s entrance for a while. Sure enough, adult men and teenage schoolgirls were going in, disappearing inside as if the building was sucking them in. From the looks of it, the tea party had already started, but numbers one to three from Kana’s list weren’t showing up. They’d had enough time to stop by at their houses after school, get changed, do their makeup, and arrive in Kinshicho, so they were likely already inside. That didn’t put Kana off. She didn’t mind waiting, no matter how long.
Kana went to stand next to a vending machine outside a nearby building. Given her surroundings and outfit, she probably looked like a hoodlum—she liked that. It would be fun waiting, pretending to be a hoodlum.
But after two hours standing there waiting, her excitement began to wane. It was nighttime, but nobody was leaving the building. Without anything better to do, Kana distracted herself with her phone. She tried to find some news about the fire at her school but couldn’t find anything. She trawled social media next and found a few comments that were most likely written by students.
“Turns out there was no fire. Boring!”
“Must have been a prank. I bet it was someone from a sports club.”
“I-hara got injured, though, did you hear? Wonder how. Maybe he fell down the stairs. Lol.”
That last comment was evidently about Ishihara. If only Kana had more bullets, she’d have put him at the top of her list. He deserved it more than even numbers two and three… But she couldn’t shoot him when she’d tried to. She probably hadn’t been in the right state of mind to reprioritize her targets then. Yes, it was because she’d been too confused to decide if it was justifiable to shoot him. But now she was thinking clearly…
Thinking about Ishihara brought back that nauseating feeling from before she’d made her decision, though—the feeling of being the powerless Kyouko Katashiki.
“It’s no good…”
The more she tried not to think about it, the more her thoughts gravitated to that incident. How annoying. If nothing else, Kana was pleased Ishihara had gotten injured. It served him right. That stretcher had probably been for him.
“You’re always so popular, Ruri!”
Kana quickly looked up from her phone. Ruri and her two friends had come out of the building. Perfect to have all three of them together.
Hiding behind the vending machine, she took out the Glock 42 from her back pocket and slipped her hand and the gun into the front pocket of her hoodie.
“Your stamina is something else!”
“I’ve got to do my best for my boyfriend, after all.”
They giggled. If they hadn’t been on the south side of Kinshicho and if they hadn’t been talking about something so twisted, they’d make for a heartwarming sight of three cute schoolgirls.
Kana thought she couldn’t shoot them in that alley lined with bars and nightclubs. Since night had fallen, more people were milling around. She had to be patient and wait for a clear shot. It didn’t matter where she started her plan. Her targets stood no chance, but she wanted to ensure everything went as smoothly as possible.
Then again, she couldn’t wait too long. It would be riskier to try to kill them back in their town. Kana wanted to kill the three girls in Tokyo and return home before the police were on the hunt so that she could kill her father and his woman too. If news of Ruri and her friends’ murder got out too fast, any of Kana’s classmates would immediately point to her as the most likely suspect, and then her parents would be on guard against her.
Or was she worried for nothing? This was Kinshicho, after all. Nobody would probably make a connection between a gun crime incident and Kana.
“What do you guys want to do? We got all this money. Might as well go shopping.”