February 26, 2007.
High school smells the same everywhere.
Chalk dust, floor wax, the institutional smell of cafeteria food that has been reheated one too many times, and underneath all of that, very faintly, inescapably, the accumulated anxiety of several hundred young people being told that these are the best years of their lives.
I have my doubts about that assessment.
Kyoetsu High, third year, class 2-B. I had been attending this school for two years and had formed exactly zero meaningful friendships, not because I was disliked, I wasn't, particularly, but because friendship requires a degree of investment I had never quite been able to justify.
It's not that I disliked people.
I want to be clear about that.
It's that people were complicated, and complications had a way of becoming losses, and losses had a way of leaving holes that didn't fill back in. I had learned this at age eight and had structured my life accordingly ever since.
So I occupied my space in 2-B with a kind of studied neutrality. Present. Minimally engaged. Not unfriendly enough to attract the wrong kind of attention, not friendly enough to attract the kind that would require reciprocation.
It worked fine.
Most days.
"Ririku-kun, morning!"
A girl I knew vaguely, Yamamoto, I thought, first row, president of the home economics club, waved at me from the doorway with an energy that I found genuinely impressive at seven-forty in the morning. My hand rose automatically. A half-wave. The minimum viable acknowledgment.
She beamed as if I'd agreed to be her emergency contact.
I walked past her to my seat.
"You look tired," said the boy who sat behind me. Okada, decent enough, had once lent me an eraser without making it a whole thing, which I respected.
"I always look tired," I said.
"More than usual."
"Then I'm tired more than usual. Thanks for the update."
He laughed. I didn't.
The teacher arrived. I arranged my expression into something that would pass for attentiveness and spent the first twenty minutes of first period thinking about shadows in a cemetery and a name whispered in a cafeteria.
Daigo Ren.
"Ririku." The teacher's voice, Matsuda-sensei, history, had a habit of calling on people who were clearly not paying attention. "Are you with us?"
"Yes," I said.
"Then what was the answer?"
I had not heard the question.
"I'm still working through the implications," I said.
The class snickered. Matsuda-sensei sighed in a way that suggested she had been sighing at students like me for most of her professional life and had made her peace with it.
I returned to my thoughts.
---
The thing about gossip is that it follows a pattern.
It starts vague, something's happening somewhere, and gets more specific as it spreads, picking up details like lint, until by the time it reaches you it's been through enough hands that you can't verify any single piece of it.
Grave robbers was vague.
Daigo Ren was specific.
A name attached to a rumor was a different category of information. Names meant faces. Faces meant real people making real decisions to do real things. The abstraction collapsed.
I had not looked into the name. I told myself this was because I didn't care, which was partially true. The fuller truth was that I had learned what happened when curiosity led you around corners into alleyways.
Nothing good and nothing explainable and a hole that didn't fill back in.
So I sat in class and listened to the teacher explain something I had no memory of afterward, and I kept my curiosity exactly where I had always kept it, at a careful, manageable distance.
This lasted until Saturday, March 25th.
The closing ceremony. The official end of the school year's third trimester, which meant spring break started the following day.
Which meant I had walked aimlessly around the school grounds for an hour after dismissal because I had no particular reason to go home quickly and going home quickly had started to feel like a small surrender to the expectation that I should always be somewhere purposeful.
I wasn't purposeful. I was killing time.
A lot of people were in the middle of their club activities.
I don't like people who try too hard, but I do respect it. Well, it's not like the students at my school are that enthusiastic about their
clubs. The only real exception was the girls' basketball team after this
monstrously huge rookie joined as the result of some sort of mistake.
Most of the other clubs, even the sports teams, were the kinds of teams that were
actually happy to receive participation trophies.
That's why (well, there's not any actual reason why) after aimlessly
circling around the school a few times, I had begun to think that yeah, it really is
about time for me to pick up my bike from inside the school and head home─I'm hungry, after all.