Tobi took the opportunity to get a long, close look at her—something he’d never bothered doing before. In the past, he’d gotten the impression that she had bold, distinctive features, but on a more careful inspection, her eyes, nose, and mouth didn’t seem especially large or small. Her features didn’t have any defining curves or slants to them, either. Tobi didn’t quite know how to put it into words, but, more than anything else, her face struck him as balanced. It was like every aspect of her appearance was just as it should be, nothing standing out or seeming out of place. Essentially, she was easy on the eyes. It was the sort of face you could gaze at for hours on end without finding any flaws or wanting to look away.
That wasn’t why Tobi ended up with his eyes trained on Shiratama, though it might have been one factor. Rather, it felt like he’d ended up in an impromptu staring contest with her. He couldn’t tear his gaze from her, and, frankly, he was starting to feel a little embarrassed. You’d think that would motivate him to look away, but for no clear reason, he couldn’t.
What is this, exactly? What’s happening right now?
“Hey, you!” a voice rang out in the distance—the school janitor again. “Get off the gate this instant! Wait— Is that you, Otogiri?! Are you at it again already…?!”
Whatever spell had been keeping Tobi in place was undone by the janitor’s shout. He glanced over his shoulder and found the man standing in front of the school’s entrance, brandishing a broom.
“My bad,” Tobi called out with a quick bow.
The janitor looked hopping mad. “Didn’t Mr. Harimoto just finish telling you to shape up?! You’re not even pretending to take his advice!”
“I said I was sorry…”
Tobi jumped from the gate. The janitor looked ready to chase him down, so Tobi set off at a sprint, only slowing his pace after rounding two corners and making sure nobody was following him.
“That janitor’s such a pain…,” Tobi grumbled.
“Guy’s got his eye on you, and that’s a fact,” Baku commented with an amused chuckle.
Tobi scowled. “Wish he’d just leave me alone.”
“Well, no point whining to me. You’re gonna have to tell him that to his face.”
“What would I say, though?”
“Yeah, that’s the hard part. How ’bout you spin yourself as a sad, pitiable little orphan who’s just doing his best to make it through the eighth grade without causing any trouble, and ask him to turn a blind eye to your little slipups?”
“I don’t think I’m sad or pitiable, though.”
“Like I said, it’s all about the spin! Not having a family’s already enough to score you major pity points, y’know?”
“That’s not even true. I do have a family.”
“Oh yeah?”
“I have my brother.”
When Tobi brought up his brother, Baku tended to shut his mouth. Baku had never met the other Otogiri sibling. After all, the two of them had been separated before Tobi and Baku first met.
Tobi checked his watch. It was four forty, and although the institute’s curfew was at half past five, as long as he got back before the cutoff—even if it was only by a few seconds—he wouldn’t get in trouble. Since he had time, he decided to make a detour.
Tobi’s detours weren’t all that purposeful. He mostly just walked around aimlessly. He made a point of not spending money when he didn’t have to, and he didn’t have much money to waste in the first place. The institute where he lived provided its middle school occupants with an allowance of three thousand yen a month. Tobi didn’t have a solid grasp on whether that was a large or small sum, as far as allowances went. But he did know that his occasional bus rides cost 220 yen each way, making a round trip 440 yen.
That was expensive enough to eat through his allowance in no time at all, and Tobi had no intention of winding up broke and unable to pay when he needed to. That was why he did his best to avoid spending money whenever he could. He’d never stopped by a hamburger or donut shop on the way back from school, and he did his best to avoid convenience stores, too, since they always had a way of tempting him to waste money.
Tobi never minded walking. He always had someone to talk to thanks to Baku, though only when no one was around to hear him. At the very least, he was never bored during his strolls.
“Well, I get bored, y’know?” Baku commented, almost as if he’d read Tobi’s mind. “I’m just getting carried around the whole time.”
“Would you rather I throw you?”
“Oh, don’t even think about it, pal!”
“Are you sure? Flying might be more fun than you think.”
“Okay. Look. Flying and getting thrown are two very different things! C’mon, Tobi, your name means ‘to fly’! How do you not even know the word’s definition? Let’s look it up in the dictionary sometime soon, ’kay? Actually, let’s look it up today! Trust me, you’re not gonna find anything about throwing people in the definition for ‘flying’!”
Tobi veered off into an alleyway, then immediately turned again onto the first street it crossed. He usually made a point of taking turns he couldn’t remember having taken before, but in this case, he was mistaken—the road he found himself on was familiar. That wasn’t too surprising, considering he’d been walking in the vicinity of his school for over a year now. There were probably very few streets left that he hadn’t already been down.
Tobi’s middle school was located in a district called Ourai, while the institute he lived in was one district over in a place called Asakawa. The name Asakawa meant “shallow river,” which was appropriate, seeing as a shallow river really did run through the town. It was wide, but aside from the odd occasion when rainfall raised the water level, it was low enough to easily cross on foot if you felt like it.
“Okay, but seriously, Tobi—isn’t that name a little basic? You’ve got a shallow river, so you name the place shallow river? Come on, right?”
“What’s wrong with having a name that’s easy to understand?”
“It’s an aesthetic thing, y’know? It needs more feeling!”
Tobi’s backpack kept chattering away as he walked along the path by the riverbank. Nearby was another feature of Asakawa: a tent city that sat in the floodplain between the river and its bank. Although it was called a tent city, very few of the structures were the sort of tents used for camping. Most of the dwellings were small, makeshift shacks constructed from plastic sheets and salvaged materials.
The locals called this the Asakawa Den, and children were regularly cautioned to keep their distance from it. Tobi had been told to stay away repeatedly by the adults at his elementary school, his middle school, and the institute alike. They’d told him that it was dangerous there.
Tobi had never ventured into the Den itself, but every once in a while, he stood up on the river’s embankment and looked down into it. It had never struck him as a particularly scary place. Its inhabitants certainly weren’t well-off, and a few of them seemed somewhat out of sorts, but others appeared perfectly respectable.
Once, when Tobi broke curfew to walk around at night, he’d ended up in the Den’s vicinity and had witnessed some of its residents gathered around a fire they’d lit in an old oil drum. Tobi didn’t know the first thing about their lifestyle, but he could hear them chatting and laughing with one another. They’d seemed to be cooking something, and were eating, drinking, and making merry.
Tobi wasn’t very comfortable around people having a good time. Sitting at a distance and watching them suited him just fine, but he never felt the urge to approach them.
“Y’know, Tobi, you’re terrible at talking to people. You really gotta work on your social skills.”
“It’s not that I’m bad at it, really.”
“You can’t possibly be serious, right?”
“Being around people just sort of tires me out, that’s all.”
“Well, tiring or not, humans are social animals! You can’t get by all alone forever. You just gotta learn to be more patient with folks.”
“You actually sound reasonable for once…”
“Hey, even I can be reasonable when I feel like it! I’m one hell of an all-purpose backpack!”
“Well, you’ve sure got one hell of a mouth…”
The Asakawa River ran from north to south, and as Tobi turned his back to the setting sun, his gaze fell on a bridge that stretched across its waters. The road across the bridge was packed with cars, but the footpath that ran next to it was abandoned. Tobi stepped onto the bridge and immediately hopped up on the railing.
“Oh, for the— Again? Really…?” Baku sighed.