Despite how utterly famished I had been a few hours ago, now that I was actually home and had a plate of warm food in front of me, I just couldn’t work up much of an appetite. Probably because I couldn’t get the image of Akito’s lifeless body out of my brain. Both Eri and my grandmother were very careful not to ask me anything about it, but I could tell from their expressions and tones of voice that they were dying to know more—and they had a right to know, to be fair. I wasn’t in the mood to talk, though, so I took a quick bath and decided to hide out in my bedroom. I felt bad, realizing that I hadn’t really spent much time with the family this week—I was either out and about or holed up in my room for most of it. But if they knew what I was going through, I was sure they’d understand.
I rolled under the covers and looked up at the ceiling, where I could almost see a faint image of Akari’s face. By now, she’d probably already heard the news of Akito’s death. She was probably in a state of shock with her hands clasped over her face, shaking in disbelief. I was obviously worried about her, but I decided to leave her be for right now. With things like this, people usually needed a little time to come to terms with it themselves before they were comfortable talking about it with someone else.
I yawned. It was a little early, but I felt about ready to turn in for the night.
Then I got a phone call. It was my dad. My mind raced back to the day I ran out of the house on him, and that negative association made me hesitant to answer the phone. Still, I knew ignoring him would only get me in more trouble in the long run, so I reluctantly picked up the phone.
“Hello?”
“Heard you got yourself wrapped up in a bit of an incident. Is that true?”
No preamble, no nothing, he just dove right in. I assumed my grandmother must have told him about what happened with Akito.
“That’s a bit of an overstatement, Dad. They brought me in to ask me some questions and that was it. It was an accident, not a murder.”
“So you really did find a body, huh…?” my father sighed wearily. “Sad to hear what an unsafe and run-down place Sodeshima’s become. Dead bodies just lying around on the streets…”
This pissed me off a little bit. I totally agreed that Sodeshima had fallen into a pretty sorry state in recent years, but I could tell my father was hunting for an excuse to trash talk the island and its people. He loved to talk as if they were all a bunch of backwater hicks. I wouldn’t stand for it.
“It has nothing to do with what ‘kind of place’ it is, Dad. This was just a series of unfortunate events, plain and simple.”
“You say that now, but I’m telling you…”
“Tokyo’s pretty unsafe too, y’know. Lots of less-than-pristine areas in big population centers like that.”
“…Yeah, I guess that’s true. Fair point, son.”
Now this I was surprised to hear. My father almost never acknowledged the value of anything I had to say about social issues and whatnot. I figured that maybe he was feeling a little bad for all the things he’d yelled at me before I left, but it quickly became clear that in actuality, he was just trying to pivot to a different subject.
“Anyway, enough about that. Now listen. I want you back here in Tokyo ASAP.”
I groaned. Of course that was the real reason he was calling.
“…Yes, Dad. I’ll be home before spring break is over, don’t worry.”
“You’d better be. Speaking of which, I hope you’ve been doing your spring break homework.”
My heart sank. I’d wanted to completely forget everything to do with school when I ran away, so I hadn’t even put it in my overnight bag. I’d need to either finish it really fast after I got back to Tokyo or turn it in a little bit late. Not that I could tell my father that.
“Yeah, I’ve got it handled. Quit worryin’ so much.”
“Quit worrying? That’s pretty rich, considering how—”
I felt a lecture coming on, so I hung up the phone. Probably for the best, I told myself. Still, the thought of having to do homework again after I went back to Tokyo was not a pleasant one. Then the school year would start up again, and I’d have to study for all-new classes, with harder material, and harder exams… Thinking about the unending stream of hard work that was in store for me made my bones ache. I dove face-first into my pillow, hoping to drown out these thoughts before they made me too depressed.
April 3rd, 10 a.m. I climbed out of bed and opened the curtains. It was another beautiful day. Come to think of it, there hadn’t been a single day of cloudy weather since I arrived on the island. Weather like this made me itch to go out and take a hike up a mountain or something, but I knew I had work to do here. This was my last day to figure out what happened, and what I was going to do, on the night of April 1st—because in just eight hours, at six o’clock tonight, I was finally going to be sent back there. To the night of Akito’s death.
In a certain sense, these next eight hours would be like one final stretch of prep work before the big day. I wanted to be as prepared and as psyched up to save Akito as I possibly could be. That being said, I already knew his approximate time of death, where he died, and what he was doing beforehand. I had to think of other things that I still needed to do… Oh, right. I was going to write down the rest of the notes in my Memos app. Not so that I wouldn’t forget them, mind you, but so that future me would have them for his reference. I pulled out my cell phone and tapped my way to the note in question, then added the remaining two bullet points underneath the one I’d typed out yesterday.
Est. time of death between midnight and 2 AM that morning.
Was drinking heavily earlier that night @ the Asuka Tavern, ~9 PM to midnight.
There—that ought to do it. I wasn’t one hundred percent sure if I’d used the exact same wording as the way I’d originally seen it written, but I was pretty sure I got close enough. As I closed the app and locked my phone, a thought flashed into my head.
“Oh, right. I was supposed to go ask around at the bar…”