I can’t forget what it looked like.
A beautiful girl, covered in blood, being carried away on a stretcher. In her porcelain hand, she clutches a posy of white lily-of-the-valleys.
Even though someone has died, that death was fantastically beautiful, almost uncomfortably so, and mesmerized all those who witnessed it.
I will not forget her death for as long as I live.
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I met that girl—Itsumi Shiraishi—soon after enrolling at this academy.
Since I was a child, I had always felt I had no place to go.
Whether I was at home, in school, on the route that connects those two places, or even at the convenience store that my classmates often visited, I couldn’t shake this feeling of alienation. My four family members and I live in a small, two-bedroom home where I can’t even have a room of my own, which, in the literal sense of the words, has left me with “no place to go.” I share one of the bedrooms with my little sister, who is in middle school. My two little brothers, who are in elementary school, share the other bedroom. Our mother sleeps on a pullout sofa in the corner of our eight-mat living room.
I’m not sure why my mother ended up raising the four of us by herself. Every time I come back to our cramped, 600-square-foot home, I let out a sigh and wonder why my parents couldn’t have just each taken two of us when they got divorced. Maybe my father didn’t want custody. Or maybe my mother couldn’t bear to let any of us go. My parents won’t tell us what happened, even though I think it would be better if they did. Despite the fact that my father won’t talk about the divorce, he has no problem boasting about the twenty-five thousand yen he pays for each of us every month in child support whenever we see him.
“In other words, every month a hundred thousand yen just vanishes from my paycheck,” my father always says, whenever my siblings and I are sitting in a diner booth with him, leaving us to awkwardly poke at our chocolate parfaits. It’s like his catchphrase. He’s bragging when he says this; he doesn’t sound patronizing or disappointed. He seems to genuinely enjoy our infrequent meetings and—on days where he wins his bets on horse races—he will even take us to a high-class Chinese or barbecue restaurant instead of the usual diner. On those occasions, he won’t balk even slightly at my little brothers’ healthy appetites.
My mother has never said, “We don’t get enough child support,” or “It’d be nice if he offered to pay more,” or anything like that in front of us. She just goes through the daily motions of working her part-time job and taking care of us. On her days off she does sporadic jobs and works from home.
Just because my parents aren’t in a divorce war doesn’t mean that our lives are easy. To be frank, my family is very poor. My father is a taxi driver, and my mother is a cashier at a supermarket, who hems and repurposes clothing on the side. Despite our financial struggles, I was able to enroll at the famous missionary school St. Mary’s Academy for Girls, thanks to their scholarship program. The scholarship guidelines are as follows:
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Our academy will endow one student at the Elementary, Middle, and High school levels, who is of high educational merit and has passed the academy’s entrance exam, and whose household demonstrates financial need, with the necessary funds for academic courses, transportation, textbooks, and expenses for extracurricular and other school activities. Scholarships do not have to be repaid.
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I have adored this academy since I was young. On the train, I’d catch glimpses of the lovely, prim uniforms of the schoolgirls. The school had a noble and dignified spirit built on Christian principles. And most of all, I liked the shining faces of the students who went there.
I was enamored with the idea of studying at the academy. If I could just pass the entrance exam and become the scholarship student, I would be able to go to the academy—this was my only goal. I started studying my hardest in my later years of elementary school. Since my parents couldn’t afford private teachers or cram school, I only asked that they buy me textbooks, and I solved every problem in my textbooks over and over, as if painting them in ink.
I can’t tell you how thrilled I was when I received the notice that I had passed the St. Mary’s Academy for Girls’ entrance exam and the scholarship acceptance letter in the same envelope in the mail. I had been expecting this. I had never given up hope. But, I still couldn’t believe that I got to be the one and only scholarship student!
In the days before the entrance ceremony, I was measured for my uniform, picked up my shoes for school, and visited the campus for orientation. The first time I stepped onto the school grounds my heart raced so fast that it hurt. Now I looked forward to becoming like the graceful upperclassmen in uniform I had seen.
However.
Two weeks after classes started, I realized I didn’t belong here, after all.
Certainly, I made friends. There were girls I had lunch with. Yet I was still haunted by the feeling that I didn’t fit in. Even during the before and after-school prayers, I was the only one out of place.
At first, I thought I was just self-conscious because I was the only student who needed scholarship funds, or that I was jealous of my classmates who didn’t have financial burdens like me. But after I started my part-time job, I realized it wasn’t either of those.
Though the academy strictly forbids part-time jobs, I worked as a cashier in the same supermarket as my mother. But I didn’t hit it off with anyone my age and ended up working in silence. When I’d first started my job, some other girls at the supermarket had come to talk to me during the lunch break. When they first heard I was a student at St. Mary’s Academy for Girls they acted impressed, but the next day they started keeping their distance from me.
“Why would a girl from St. Mary’s Academy for Girls work part-time at a supermarket?”
“Her mother works here, too.”
“What?! She’s not rich. So she’s lying about the school?”
“But she was wearing their uniform the other day.”
“For real? I don’t believe it.”
I overheard these conversations coming from the locker room. No matter where I go, I’m never quite enough, I thought.
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Until I met Itsumi Shiraishi.