“Hey, uh… Eri?”
“Yeah? What is it?”
“Listen, I’m sorry for all that stuff I said before. That was really immature of me.”
“Huh? What are you even talking about?”
“You know. We got into that argument, and then I basically stormed out of the house…?”
She squinted her eyes and looked at me dubiously for a moment, then let out a soft “Ohhhh,” as if I’d refreshed her memory on some irrelevant factoid she’d long since purged from her mind.
“Yeah, don’t worry about that,” she said. “I’m over it. Besides, I said some stuff I probably shouldn’t have too.”
I was extremely taken aback by this response. This was the same girl who would never dream of apologizing, or even back down the slightest inch, no matter how mad you got at her. This, more than anything else, drove home for me how much she’d grown in the past two years. As I silently admired her newfound maturity, Eri was seemingly getting impatient for some reason and changed the subject.
“So, hey… Shouldn’t you be getting ready?” she asked.
“Oh, right, yeah. Sorry, I’ll get right on that… Er, ready for what, exactly?”
“…Wait. You didn’t forget the wake is tonight, did you?”
“Wake? What wake? Did someone die?”
As soon as these words left my lips, she squinted at me yet again. Only this time, it wasn’t a look of confusion but one of reproach.
“Kanae. You’re kidding me, right?”
I decided to take her disrespectful tone on the chin this time and answer as honestly as I could.
“No, I seriously don’t have any idea… It wasn’t anyone close to me, was it?” I asked.
Eri hesitated a moment, then answered in a fragile, soft voice:
“…It was Akito. Akito Hoshina. How could you even forget that?”
It took my brain a solid few seconds to connect the dots between the name “Akito” and the word “dead.” Once it did, my mind went straight into denial mode.
“Wh-whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on. Are you pulling my leg? I saw him down at the ferry dock earlier today.”
“Huh?”
“Wait, I see what’s going on here. This is all just one big April Fools’ joke, isn’t it? Very funny, you guys. But it’s really not cool to lie about people dying, y’know. Feel free to give it a rest now.”
“…Kanae, what are you talking about?”
Her expression was graver than I’d ever seen it before. She was looking at me as though she genuinely thought I’d suffered some sort of brain damage. The next thing she said almost made me start to consider that as an option, myself:
“It’s not April Fools’ Day anymore, Kanae—it’s the 5th. Akito died four days ago. I dunno if you’re in denial or what, but you need to snap out of it. Now could you please move? I need to fix up my hair.”
Eri gave me a side-eyed glance as she squeezed past me into the bathroom. I stood stock-still in the middle of the hall, unsure what to believe anymore.
Was Akito really dead? And not only that, he’d been dead for four days…? If that were the case, then who did I see down at the harbor when I got here this afternoon? A look-alike? Or his ghost? As if. Then I remembered something else Eri had said—that today was actually April 5th. Now, I knew I was on spring break, and thus could afford to lose track of the date a little bit, but there was no way I could be four whole days off. I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket in the hopes of vindicating myself, pressed a button, and the screen lit up. My phone’s screen announced that it was indeed April 5th, exactly as Eri had said.
“…No way.”
I ran into the living room, checking everything I could find that might display today’s date—the TV, the newspaper, the electric table clock—but each and every one of them said the same thing: April 5th. Yet I still refused to believe it. Something definitely wasn’t right here. This was going way too far, even for a very elaborate prank. I left the living room and went looking for my grandmother. I opened the sliding door to the Japanese-style sitting room, where I found her rummaging through some drawers.
“Hey, Grandma? Could I ask you something?”
“Oh, Kanae!” she exclaimed, turning around to face me. “I didn’t know you’d come home. Good timing too. I was thinking that for the wake, you could wear—”
“Grandma, what day is today?” I asked, cutting her off.
“Goodness. Where’s this coming from?”
“Just tell me, please.”
“Well, let’s see… It’s Thursday, so I suppose that’d make it the 5th.”
“And that’s the truth? You’re one hundred percent sure of this?”
“Assuming I haven’t gone senile yet! But yes, I’m sure. I can swear it on your late granddad’s grave, if that’ll convince you.”
Okay. I knew my grandmother would never lie on her dead husband’s name, so I guess that meant it really was April 5th, without a doubt. I couldn’t find any hard evidence to the contrary, and both my sister and grandmother seemed pretty adamant about it. Maybe I really was the crazy one here.
“Man, what the hell is happening to me…?” I whispered.
It felt like the whole world was collapsing in on me. First I pass out and wake up somewhere completely different, then I find out Akito’s dead, and then they tell me I’ve got the date wrong by several days…? This was starting to feel less like an elaborate prank and more like a nonsensical nightmare. While I stood there, clutching my head in my hands, my grandmother pulled a set of black clothes out of the drawer and held them out to me.
“Here, you should change into these.”
My grandmother explained to me that proper funeral attire for kids my age was to simply wear our normal school uniforms. I, however, had run away from home, so I didn’t have my own uniform with me. She graciously offered me my dad’s old uniform from his days at Sodeshima High to wear instead. It was a traditional all-black affair with a stand-up collar, and it happened to fit me perfectly, much to my chagrin. Once we were all changed and ready, my grandmother, Eri, and I started walking over to the Sodeshima Community Center where the wake was being held. The chilly night air was the perfect temperature to cool off my overheated brain, and the travel time gave me a chance to try to put some of my disparate thoughts in order.
I did some logical deduction while we walked and eventually managed to convince myself of two objective facts. Number one: today was not April 1st but April 5th. That was what all the evidence pointed to, including two separate testimonies, so I had no choice but to accept it as true. Number two: I had absolutely no memory of the four-day period from 6 p.m. on April 1st to 6 p.m. on April 5th. Or in terms of actual events, there was a huge gap in my memories between me touching that rock at the shrine in the abandoned park and sitting on the seawall talking to the island patrolman earlier. The only reason I knew both events happened at almost exactly 6 p.m. was because in both instances, I could hear the island’s six o’clock chime ringing out in the background.
This meant that there was a ninety-six-hour period for which my memory was completely blank. The first, and perhaps most rational, explanation I could come up with was that I’d suffered some sort of brain injury or neural malfunction. An amnesic episode, or a case of early-onset dementia. Granted, I didn’t know how rare it was for kids my age to come down with the latter, but the former was extremely possible—it happened to kids who got concussions all the time. I’d read so many books with amnesic protagonists that I considered it a bit of a boring plot device, but now that I was faced with the possibility of it happening to me in real life? It was damn scary. The thought of having potentially serious brain damage at such a young age was not an appealing one.