That last was Kazami. He pushed the bridge of his silver-rimmed glasses back up his nose with a furrowed brow.
God, what now?
What were these two trying to get at? I was starting to get kind of a bad feeling about them after all and my pace quickened.
“What’s that?” I turned back around to look at them, pointing at a building that had come into view just then on the other side of Building B. “Is that another school building?”
“That’s Building Zero. That’s what everyone calls it,” Kazami answered.
“Building Zero?”
“Because it’s so old. Until about ten years ago, the third-year classes were in there. There are a lot of reasons they stopped using it, but…the number of students dropped, so the number of classes dropped, too. Apparently Building A and all the others got their names later on, so that’s why people call the old building Building Zero…”
That “old building” certainly did look older than any of the other buildings I’d seen on campus today.
It was a two-story structure of massive red bricks. But the bricks in its walls were incredibly faded and, after a closer look, I saw that cracks had formed in places. All the windows to the original classrooms that marched around the second floor were shut tight. In places, boards had been put up, probably to replace broken glass.
Given the turn of the conversation up till now, this struck me as a perfect spot to generate fodder for whispered rumors of the supernatural, about ghosts or spirits or the “Seven Mysteries.”
“So it’s not being used for anything now?” I asked, taking a careful step forward.
“Not as regular classrooms, anyway,” Kazami replied as he walked beside me. “The second floor is as good as abandoned, so no one’s allowed up there. The secondary library and art room are on the first floor, and the culture club.”
“You guys have a secondary library?”
“Hardly anyone uses it. Usually everyone goes to the main library in Building A. I’ve only ever been in there once.”
“What kind of books do they have there?”
“Documents about local history and antique books that alums have donated. It’s got a truly remarkable number of things like that, apparently. It’s more like a storage room for books than a library.”
“Huh.”
I wouldn’t mind taking a look at least once. My interest was piqued.
“This school has an art club, right?” I asked, having a sudden thought.
After a dragging delay, Kazami answered, “Yeah. Now we do.”
“‘Now you do’? What does that mean?”
“Extracurricular activities were suspended last year. They started up again in April.”
Teshigawara was the one who replied.
“Just FYI, the lovely Ms. Mikami is the sponsor. If I had any talent in that area, I’d be swearing how much I wanted in on the club, too. You gonna join or something, Sakakibara?”
I stopped walking and turned back to look at the bleached bobble-head, then shrugged my shoulders rather exaggeratedly. Teshigawara didn’t seem to take it badly, his eyes flashing with a grin.
“Hey, Sakakibara…”
I’d started walking again when Teshigawara spoke, as if trying to pull me back.
“There’s actually something we—”
But just then, I let out a surprised “Oh!” which served to interrupt whatever Teshigawara had been about to say. The sound had escaped me after an inadvertent tightening of my throat.
Magnificent flowerbeds had been set up in the yard between Building Zero and Building B, where we were headed. A few among them were resplendent with yellow roses in bloom. And just then, beyond the clusters of flowers bobbing in the placid spring breeze, I saw her—Mei Misaki.
Without a second to spare for thought, I started heading straight toward her.
“H-hey! Sakakibara!”
“What are you doing, Sakakibara?”
I heard the dismayed tone in Teshigawara’s and Kazami’s voices, but I ignored it. I hurried over, and even broke into a slight jog.
Mei Misaki—she was by herself, sitting on a bench in the shade of a tree on the far side of a flowerbed. There was no one else in sight.
“H-hey there,” I called out to her.
She was staring into space, as if sunk in contemplation, but she reacted to my voice. Her eyes—though the white eye patch hid her left one—turned to me and halted.
“Hey.”
I tried to act nonchalant and raised a hand casually.
“The name’s Misaki, right?”
I walked up to the bench where she sat. My heart was beating faster than it had this morning when I spoke in front of the entire class. I felt as if my breathing was getting more strained, too.
“We’re in the same class, huh? Third years, Class 3. I, uh, I transferred here today…”
“…Why?”
Her lips moved only slightly. The same tone of voice I’d heard in the elevator at the hospital, the same cool, detached way of talking.
“Why?” she repeated. “Are you sure about this?”
“Wha?”
I didn’t understand her questions. “Why?” “Are you sure about this?” I didn’t have the faintest idea what she was asking me in either case and could only stand there, shaken.
“Um-m-m, what I meant was…”
I scrambled for some way to keep the conversation going, but she turned her eyes from me and stood up from the bench in silence. That was when I got a clear look at the name tag hanging from her blazer.
It was a light purple card, indicating that she was a third-year. While I may have been imagining how very dirty and beat-up the paper looked, her name was written there quite clearly: “Misaki,” viewing the cliffs…Mei “Misaki.”
My mouth flopped, fishlike. I tried to tell her, “I saw you at the hospital the other day,” but the words wouldn’t come together. I was still trying when she said simply, “You should be careful.”
Then she quietly turned her back to me.
“W-wait,” I called out in a rush to try and stop her, but she kept her back to me.
“You…should be careful. It might have started already.”
Then Mei Misaki left me, as I stood rooted half in shock, and departed the shadow of the tree where the bench stood.
I watched her go.
She moved toward the entrance to Building Zero, then disappeared inside the aging building. As if melting away in the lingering gloom…
The bell announcing the end of lunch began to peal, releasing the frozen moment. I looked around me, feeling as if I had been jerked back to my senses.
“Hey! What’re you doing, Sakakibara?”
Teshigawara’s shout reached me.
“We’ve got gym next. The locker room is next to the gymnasium. We better hurry if we’re gonna be on time.”
When I turned around, Teshigawara’s lips were pursed so far out he might have been whistling. Beside him, Kazami was shaking his head incessantly over something, his face pale and bowed.