Mom didn’t scream.
I’d thought, if she ever saw, that she would scream.
She came out onto the balcony and knelt down in front of me between the pots of shiso, in her work fleece, and took my face in both her hands. Her hands were cold and shaking. She held my face and looked at it, at the gold eyes and the long pale hair, as if she were reading something written very small.
“Haruto,” she said.
The light let go.
It went in one go, the way it hadn’t been able to in the gym. It went out of me like breath, and the staff on the shiso went with it. I was kneeling on the balcony in my school uniform with my short hair and my own face, and Mom was holding it. She made a sound I had never heard her make before, a sort of broken cough, and pulled me against her and held on.
She held on. I could feel her heart going. I could smell the fish counter on her fleece, and the shampoo she uses, and her sweat.
“The school called me,” she said into my hair. “They said you were missing. They said there’d been an attack, and three people were dead, and they couldn’t find you. Your shoes were under your desk.” Her voice cracked. “Your shoes were under your desk and you weren’t in them.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Mom, I’m sorry.”
She didn’t let go.
Kohaku sat on the balcony rail above us, very small and very still, and watched.
* * *
For three days Mom was frightened.
She didn’t go to work. I’d never known her not go to work. She called the supermarket on Tuesday morning and said she was sick, and then she sat at the kitchen table with her laptop and watched everything. Every clip. Every news report. The crab at Ofuna. The block at Katase. The fish at Yuigahama. The school. She watched the clips from the school over and over, the shaky phone footage from a second-floor window of the field, the ridge in the sand, the small figure in red and white hanging by the bell, the bell going over.
She watched me do all of it, and she didn’t say anything, and she didn’t stop watching.
On Tuesday afternoon she shouted at Kohaku.
Kohaku had shown herself to her the night before, as a cat, sitting on the kitchen table. Mom had looked at her for a long moment and said, “Is this it? Is this the thing?” and Kohaku had said, “I’m the cat, mostly,” and Mom had sat down hard on a kitchen chair.
On Tuesday afternoon, after the fourth time through the school footage, Mom got up from the table and turned around to where Kohaku was sitting on top of the fridge.
“You,” she said.
Kohaku looked at her.
“You brought this into my house,” said Mom. Her voice was low at first. It got louder. “You found my son on a mountain and put that thing on him. You sent him out to fight those, those things, on his own, sixteen years old. You didn’t tell anyone. You didn’t tell me. He could have died. He could have died at Katase. He could have died at that beach. Three people died at his school yesterday. He was in the middle of it, and I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything. I’m his mother.”
“Yes,” said Kohaku.
“Is that all you’ve got to say?”
“Yes,” said Kohaku. She didn’t move. She didn’t look away. “All of that’s true. You should be angry. I’d be angry.”
Mom stood there in the middle of the kitchen with her hands shaking. Then she sat back down at the table and put her face in her hands.
Kohaku stayed on top of the fridge all afternoon.
She didn’t go anywhere. She just sat, and let herself be there to be shouted at, and when Mom finally looked up, two hours later, Kohaku was still there.
* * *
Mio came home on Tuesday at seven.
She’d been away overnight with her course, at a bridal show in Osaka, and Mom had only reached her late on Monday, on the phone, to say I was safe.
She came into the kitchen and saw Mom at the table with the laptop, and me sitting across from her, and Kohaku on the fridge, visible. She stopped in the doorway with her bag still on her shoulder.
“Oh,” she said.
Mom looked at her. She looked at Kohaku, and at me, and back at Mio, at Mio’s face, and I saw her see it.
I saw her see that Mio wasn’t surprised.
“You knew,” said Mom.
Mio said nothing.
“You knew.” Mom stood up. “How long?”
“Two weeks.”
“Two weeks.” Mom said it as if it were a number in a foreign language. “Two weeks. You knew about this for two weeks, and you didn’t tell me. You let me go to work. You let him go to school.”
“It wasn’t mine to tell.”
“It wasn’t yours to tell?” Mom’s voice went up. “He’s sixteen. He’s a child. He’s fighting monsters. His sister knew and his mother didn’t. Three people died yesterday at his school, and you didn’t think that was yours to tell?”
“He didn’t want anyone to know!”
“I’m not anyone! I’m his mother!”
“I know you’re his mother!” Mio threw her bag on the floor. “I know! Do you think I didn’t want to tell you? I wanted to tell you every single day! But it’s his! It’s his thing! It’s his body, his life, his, his whatever this is. It wasn’t my place to go behind his back and…”
“Your place…”
They went on.
I sat at the table between them. I’d never heard them shout like that. Mom doesn’t shout. Mio shouts, but not at Mom, not like this, standing up, both of them, with their faces red and their hands moving. Kohaku sat on the fridge with her ears flat and her tail around her paws.
I kept quiet. I didn’t know what I would say. Every word they shouted was about me, and none of it was anything I could stop.
Mom went into hers and shut it without a sound.
I sat in the kitchen.
* * *
At midnight Mom came out again.
She didn’t look at me. She went to the fridge and took out a fish, a horse mackerel, one from the counter, and salted it and put it under the grill. The kitchen filled with the smell of it. She stood at the stove with her arms folded, watching it.
Mio’s door opened. She came out in her pajamas and stood in the kitchen doorway.
Mom didn’t turn around. “Are you hungry?”
“No.”
“Neither am I.”
She took the fish out from under the grill and put it on a plate and put the plate on the table. Then she sat down at one side of the table, and after a moment Mio came and sat down at the other, and they both looked at the fish.
Neither of them touched it.
“I’m sorry I shouted,” said Mio.
“I’m sorry I shouted.”
“I should have told you.”
“No,” said Mom. She looked at the fish. “You were right. It wasn’t yours.” She was quiet. “I hate that you were right.”
They sat there. The fish went cold between them. I stood in the doorway of my room in the dark and watched them not eat it.
Around one o’clock Mio reached over and put her hand on top of Mom’s on the table.
Mom turned her hand over and held it.
* * *
On Wednesday Mom was up at half past four, the way she always is, even though she wasn’t going to work.
I heard her alarm, and the kettle, and then I heard her knock on my door, which she never does at that time. When I came out, she’d made breakfast. Rice, miso soup, a grilled fish, an egg and pickles, all of it on the table at five in the morning with the sky still gray outside.
I sat down. She sat down across from me. She didn’t eat. She watched me eat.
“What do you need?” she said.
I stopped with the chopsticks halfway to my mouth.
“What do you need,” she said again. Not a question this time. She put her hands flat on the table. “Tell me what you need, and I’ll get it. That’s what I can do. I can’t fight those things. I can’t fly. I can’t do anything about the bracelet. But I can get you what you need. So tell me.”
I put the chopsticks down.
I thought about it properly. The field came first, and the gym, and Saki’s shoes at the edge of the hole, side by side. Then I pictured walking back into that school, up those stairs, past the place where the bell had been, and sitting down at my desk by the window.
“I don’t want to go back to school,” I said.
Mom nodded once, as if I’d asked for more rice.
“All right,” she said.
* * *
She went to the school on Thursday.
She went in her good coat, the black one she wears to funerals and to the bank, with her hair pinned up, and I went with her. She said I should be there. We sat in the principal’s office across a big desk from the principal and the homeroom teacher in his gray cardigan, and Mom did the talking.
She said I had a medical condition. She said it had been getting worse since the spring. She said the bracelet was part of it, a medical device that couldn’t be removed. She put a letter on the desk that she’d written herself the night before, at our kitchen table, in her small neat writing, explaining that. She said the events of Monday had made it much worse. She said she was withdrawing me on health grounds, for the time being, and that I would sit the high school equivalency exam when I was well.
High school isn’t compulsory. They can’t make you stay.
The principal read the letter. He looked at me, at my hair tied back now in Saki’s hair tie, at my face and the eyebrows Mio had done. He looked, and kept looking. I don’t know what he saw.
“Of course,” he said. “Of course, Asakura-san. Whatever’s best for him.”
On the way out, the homeroom teacher walked us to the gate. He was silent until we got there. Then he shook my hand, which teachers never do.
“Look after yourself, Asakura,” he said. “Please.”
I went back in on my own to clear my locker.
The corridor was empty. Somebody had put flowers on Saki’s desk, white lilies in a glass, with a photograph of her, a can of the lemon tea she liked and a stack of cards. I stood in the doorway of our classroom and looked at the flowers for a while.
Then I emptied my locker into a bag and left.
* * *
Shun was waiting at Kamakura station.
He was standing by the ticket gates with his bag over his shoulder, the Miko-chan keychain hanging off the strap, and his hands in his pockets. He’d heard. Everyone had heard.
“You’re leaving,” he said.
“For a bit.”
“Because of Monday.”
“Because of a lot of things.”
He nodded. He looked at me properly, the way Mio had looked at me on the bed that night with the hand cream, at my hair tied back and my face and my eyebrows and the sweatband on my wrist. Follow the newest chapters on novelping.com.
“You look different, man,” he said.
I didn’t know what to say. He didn’t seem to want me to say anything. He just looked at me a moment longer, and then he took a folded piece of paper out of his pocket and gave it to me, and went through the gates without looking back.
It was a drawing.
It was Saki, in pencil, standing at a microphone in the PA room, very straight, with her hand on the switch. Underneath he’d written Everybody stand still.
* * *
Saki’s funeral was on Saturday, at a hall in Kamakura near the station.
I wore my school uniform, the boy’s one, the white summer shirt and the black pants. Everybody from our class was wearing theirs. I hadn’t worn it since Monday. It didn’t fit right anymore. The shirt was too wide across the shoulders, the pants hung wrong on my hips and dragged at the heel until I’d rolled them twice, and I stood in the line of our class in the hot hall in July and felt as if I were wearing someone else’s clothes.
Her mother was at the front, by the photograph. She was small and gray-haired and very straight, like Saki, and she bowed to every one of us as we went past.
When I got to her she looked at me, and at my name badge, and something moved in her face.
“Asakura-kun,” she said. “You’re Asakura-kun. From her class.”
“Yes.”
“She talked about you. She said you looked tired all the time.” She took my hand in both of hers. “The teachers told me you were the one who walked out of the classroom. When everyone was standing still. They said you went to try to help her.” She held my hand tighter. “Thank you for trying.”
I couldn’t say anything. I bowed.
Saki’s hair tie was on my wrist, next to the sweatband, black elastic on my skin, and her mother didn’t see it, and I didn’t show her.
* * *
“Did it come because I was there?” I asked Kohaku that night.
We were on the roof. It was the first time I’d been up there since Monday. I hadn’t changed. I was sitting on the warm concrete in my T-shirt, and Kohaku was sitting beside me, a cat, looking at the dark.
“I don’t know,” said Kohaku.
“You must know.”
“I don’t. They go where they go. Toward the brightest thing, mostly, the way lightning goes to the tallest tree.” She was quiet for a moment. “You were there. It came. That’s all I can tell you. I can’t tell you more than that, because I don’t know any more than that, and I won’t make it up.”
I sat there until the concrete went cold.
I decided it had. I decided it had come to me. I was the brightest thing for kilometers, and Saki had died because I was in that building. I decided it, sitting on the roof in the dark, and it settled into me like a stone into mud, and I didn’t take it out and look at it again for a long time.
* * *
Mom asked me once.
It was the next week. We were in the kitchen, the two of us, in the evening. She was washing rice at the sink and I was drying bowls. She didn’t look at me while she asked it. She kept her hands in the water.
“The changes,” she said. “Your hair. Your face. Mio says it’s been happening since spring. Since the bracelet.” She turned the rice over in the water, slowly. “Is it something you want?”
I stood there with a bowl in one hand and the cloth in the other.
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. Not no. Not yes either, though yes was the one that was there.
It was too big. It wouldn’t fit in my mouth.
I stood in the kitchen with the bowl, the cloth and my mouth open, and I couldn’t answer her.
Mom tipped the water out of the rice and ran more in.
“Then you don’t have to yet,” she said.
* * *
I stopped changing after that.
I didn’t decide to. Or I did, and didn’t tell myself. I didn’t go up to the roof. I didn’t take the sweatband off. I didn’t say the word. If I didn’t change, I wouldn’t have to find out what the answer to Mom’s question was, and that was most of the reason, and I knew it.
For nearly three weeks I didn’t transform at all.
And the change stopped too.
My hair stopped growing faster than it should. My skin stayed the way it was. My voice stayed where it had settled. Nothing went back. My lashes were still long and my jaw soft, and there was still no hair on my arms. But nothing more happened. It was as if the change were waiting, like water behind a closed faucet.
Mom considered a doctor.
I heard her talking to Mio about it one night through the wall. She said it out loud, the question, and went through it the way she goes through a delivery at the counter, item by item. A doctor would examine me. A doctor would write it down. A doctor would have to report it, probably, something like this, to somebody. There’d be records. And records meant the government, and the government was on the news every night now, the politician in the dark suit asking who she answered to.
“No,” said Mom, in the end. “No doctor. Not yet.”
* * *
A week after the fight, on a Tuesday afternoon, Mom came home from her first shift back at work with a paper parcel from the counter.
She unwrapped it on the board. It was a horse mackerel, a beautiful one, silver and blue, and she took out her knife and filleted it, quickly, the way she does.
Then she stopped before she’d finished, and left a little of it on the bone.
She put it on a saucer, and put the saucer on top of the fridge, where Kohaku was sitting.
Kohaku looked at the fish. She looked at Mom.
“Filleted,” said Mom, “but not too much.”
She went back to the board.
Kohaku looked at the saucer with her amber eyes wide. Then she bent her head and began, slowly and carefully, to eat.