can still picture Toshi’s surprised look. She was in shock about the woman next door getting murdered, plus her bike and cell phone being stolen. I’m sure she never imagined I’d help out Worm that much. Well—I guess I’m pretty surprised myself.

Toshi acts all laid-back and careless, but she’s built a Great Wall around her heart. It looks like you can get inside but it’s not easy. That’s ’cause she’s much more fragile than other people. She’s been hurt a lot in the past. But that’s what I like about her. She’s timid, but she manages to take care of herself. I think she’s actually the toughest out of the four of us. So when I told her about what I’d done and she gave me this sort of what-are-you-talking-about look, I felt uneasy. Like because of this whole incident I’ve been expelled to some universe far away from the world Toshi lives in. It’s not like I feel alienated from her or anything. It’s more like from this point on, the two of us were going to walk down very different paths.

With all these worries running through my head, I hurried down the dark road. The neighborhood was quiet. I was afraid there might be cops staking out Worm’s house, but there were only a few office types coming from the station. The trees that hung over the road gave off a heavy dampness, like when rain has just let up. The ground was still midsummer hot, and I felt like my body was slicing through the wet air.

In earth sciences class we learned that only fifty percent of the sun’s energy reaches the surface of the earth. Our teacher printed up two graphs on his computer to explain it to us. “This one’s the breast of a young woman, this one, that of an old granny,” he explained, a serious look on his face. The young woman graph was supposed to show how the heat energy accumulates a lot around the equator, while the old woman graph was flat and showed solar energy radiating away. How dumb can you get, I thought, but there were only five of us in the class so we all had to pretend it was funny. The teacher himself said that explaining things like that might constitute sexual harassment. Like I cared. What a loser.

He went on, saying, “At the equator the amount of heat absorbed is more than the heat radiated away, so it’s a heat source. The polar regions are the opposite—they’re cold sources.” A cold source. The vague thought crossed my mind then that that’s exactly what I’d been back then. By then I mean my mom’s death and one other thing that happened. I was just radiating away heat, like the poles, and in my whole life I’d never be warm. That made me sad, and I got depressed.

Toshi, Terauchi, and Kirarin all have both parents and pretty affluent families, and I doubt whether they have the kind of worries I have. After my mother died I was left with my pain-in-the-butt dad, and grandparents who worry over everything. I doubt they have any idea how I really feel.

Sometimes my friends will start to say something about their mothers, then notice my expression and get all flustered. Before this happens, though, I try to say something, something stupid like my teacher said. Or even dumber. Or else fill in the gap by asking something about their mothers, like, “Hey, Kirarin, is your mom coming to the school festival or what?” Is there any other high school student who has to be walking on ice like this all the time? What a joke.

I feel so alone. And there’s a good reason for this. Mom’s death only made me lonelier, lonelier than anybody. Worm felt a little lonely and killed his mom, perfecting his solitude. I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I want to perfect mine, too. Maybe life would be easier then. I’ve only talked about this with Terauchi—not because she’s so gloomy, but because her gloominess and mine are similar. Toshi and Kirarin are too gentle and kind to talk to about this. I figure being gentle means you must be happy. Terauchi, though, is more edgy. I like the edgy, risky types, and feel closer to her. But I haven’t told her yet about Worm. I’m not sure why.

The cell phone in my pack buzzed against my back. I stopped, took it out, and saw that I had a text message.

Thanks for the bike and phone. I’ve come to Iruma, but got tired so I stopped at a convenience store. I’ll rest for an hour and then take off again.

It was from Worm. I lied when I told Toshi I’d given Worm my cell phone. She’ll find out someday, but she looked so astonished I couldn’t tell her the truth. Actually, I bought him a new cell phone. But lending him my bike—that part’s true. Don’t worry about it, I told him, you can get rid of it anytime you like. Otherwise people will find out I helped him.

I was thinking I’d phone Worm, and glanced at my watch. It was past ten fifteen p.m. I had to get back home or Dad would have a fit. Ever since that incident last summer, he’s started to meddle in everything I do. I keep telling myself just to hang in there until I graduate from high school. I figured I’d call Worm after I got home, so for the time being I sent him a text message.

I gave the phone and bike back to Toshi. Call her to apologize, okay? Take care of yourself.

I stared at the message. I was helping a guy escape—a guy who had killed his mother. I have no idea what made him do it, but I wanted him to run away and never get caught. I don’t really know how to put it, but it was like I didn’t want him to come back to stupid, boring reality, but instead create a new reality all his own.

I heard this sticky sound of footsteps like something being crushed underfoot, and I shoved my cell phone into my pocket. The tip of a cigarette glowed in the dark like a firefly. I was a little tense but then saw that it was just a young office-type girl in mule sandals. The weird sound as she walked came from her bare feet sticking, then unpeeling, from the sandals. As the girl passed by me, she flicked her cigarette butt aside. My nose was hit by the strong stink of nicotine.

“Don’t throw your butt away like that!”

I said this without thinking and the woman turned around and glared at me. She was a hefty girl, about five-seven. She had on green phosphorescent

eye shadow, and a blue camisole that barely fit her broad shoulders. One of your sulky, penniless Office Ladies. She looked like an unpopular, down-on-his luck transvestite. I suddenly remembered the shock I felt last year when a transvestite in the Shinjuku 2-chome entertainment district roughed me up, and I held my breath.

“Don’t preach to me, you bitch,” the woman said in a shrill voice and briskly walked off. I stood stock-still under the streetlight and remembered that night last summer in Shinjuku, when I was in my second year of high school.

In the 2-chome district there are several small bars that cater to only women.

I’d heard that the Bettina was the most radical, the one that turned away anyone who’s straight.

I’d found it on the Internet and went to check out the place during summer vacation. I had a pretty good idea before I went what the bar would be like, but I just wanted to find out what sort of people went there. I guess I wanted to make sure I wasn’t the only one who was like me.

The place was what I expected, a tiny, cheap bar that could seat barely ten people. The owner was a middle-aged woman who looked like a sushi chef—white shirt with the collar turned up, short neatly combed coarse hair with a sprinkling of gray. Most of the customers were disagreeable career hags on the lookout for young girls to snag. There were a couple of people like me who were curiously, nervously looking around. We all sported short haircuts, T-shirts, shorts, day packs, and sneakers—girls dressed just like your typical high school boy. They were junior and senior high school girls who had also found the bar on the Internet and had come to check it out during their summer break. The bar was well aware that summer vacation meant more junior and senior high school girls coming by, and they were nice enough to allow them to hang out till morning, like it was a onetime summer experience for them, for the price of a can of beer.

I got to know two girls there. One, named Boku-chan, had come to Tokyo from Kochi and was planning to stay as long as she could. The other, named Dahmer, was from Saitama, where she was a top student in an elite high school. All of us went by our pseudonyms, so it took a while before I learned their real names and where they came from.

Boku-chan was trying her best to become a guy. She was a dummy who thought that as long as she acted rough and squared her shoulders she’d look like a guy. Her dream was to make a living as a transvestite in the infamous Kabuki-cho district. She made it was obvious she was looking for a rich older woman. But really, age didn’t matter—she’d have taken an elderly woman, someone middle-aged, or even a young hooker. Boku-chan had the simple fixed idea that, since she liked women, she wanted to become a nice man; and that in order to become one, she needed to act manly. Which to her meant frowning as you held your cigarette between thumb and forefinger, putting your arm around a girl’s shoulder and lifting her chin with your finger, speaking in a deep, threatening voice, adopting all the poses and actions of hunky actors in movies. She was tall, had studied karate, and was muscular, so she had the mannerisms down, but somehow when she did it, it all came off as a joke. On top of that, she wasn’t the brightest bulb in the box. Dahmer and I talked once about how if she actually did become a transvestite she’d run out of topics to talk about and customers would find her boring.

Boku-chan didn’t have any money, so she slept on the street or hung out at Dahmer’s, spending most nights during summer vacation in the 2-chome district before she went home to Tosa Yamada in Kochi. My dad wouldn’t allow her to stay in our house but that never seemed to bother her. Even now I get e-mails from her sometimes. Her e-mails are full of happy-go-lucky stuff like, I just bought a purple suit in the shopping district. They had only a double-breasted one so I bought that, but I think single-breasted looks better on me.

Dahmer, on the other hand, was a more complicated character, like me. She took her nickname from the serial killer in America. She was interested in cruel murders and dead bodies—kind of a death obsession. Since my mother died in the fall of my last year in junior high, I hate that kind of thing. I told Dahmer how I felt once, that people who are afraid of death and are the farthest from it are the most obsessed by it. She just shrugged. I think Dahmer felt the same kind of alienation from me that Toshi did when I told her about helping Worm. That was the only time we talked about death, and I never mentioned my mom again. I’ve packed away the pain so deep inside me that I can’t even draw it out myself, and my body just continues to function like nothing had ever happened.

Dahmer’s parents had gotten divorced and, like me, she was an only child. It was just her mom and her now, and her mom, she said, did all kinds of jobs and wasn’t home very much. That person—that’s how she referred to her mother. That person’s fairly good-looking, she’d say. That person’s a slacker. That person’s got her own life to live. There was something similar about my mother’s death and the way Dahmer referred to her mother. With both there’s a sense of distance from the reality we live in. Like they’re people who live in some far-off other country. No matter whether they’re dead or alive.

Dahmer was in love with her female math teacher in high school. The woman was twenty-six, a graduate of a scientific university, a smart aleck who made fun of anyone who was less than a mathematical genius. Dahmer liked the woman’s arrogance. She was always saying she wanted to be better than that woman, so she wouldn’t be made fun of, otherwise she’d die. Once, when her grades fell below the class average, she got drunk and felt so humiliated she slashed her wrist with a knife. I saw it once, that thin scar on her arm. She was always lugging around a math textbook, but with Boku-chan hanging out at her place, she moaned and groaned about not being able to get much studying done. She loaned Boku-chan money, even let her borrow her T-shirts and shorts. If Boku-chan was too much for her, I figured she should just kick her out, but Dahmer was the type who couldn’t say no. An idiot like Boku-chan was too much for her, but Dahmer had a weak point: she was also impressed by someone this dumb, knowing she couldn’t act like that. Maybe this was the same sort of weakness that made her say that if people made fun of her, she’d die. I don’t know.

I have my own weaknesses, and Dahmer and I share the same sense of despair, since we’d like to live a cool life but can’t as long as we’re burdened down with all these problems. I can’t let on to my dad that I’m a lesbian, I can’t seem to manage relations with people in high school, and I’m sure I’ll never be able to do so. These are burdens I’ll carry around the rest of my life. I get so scared thinking about the future it drives me crazy. Still, I just want my friends at school to think I’m a slightly mannish type of girl, nothing more, and I never, ever want the girls I’m friends with, Toshi, Kirarin, or Terauchi, to know that I’m a lesbian. Because of my issues, my life’s pretty complicated and I feel constrained, like I have to keep a tight lid on who I really am.

I was happy to meet Dahmer, because I think she understood all that. I think she was the same way. On days when she didn’t e-mail, I felt really down. Like lovers, we tried to tell each other what was going on every day. At the end of last year, though, I suddenly couldn’t get in touch with her anymore. When I called her mother, she said, “That person’s gone off to study in Canada. I’m sure once she settles in she’ll e-mail you.” Her voice was strangely high-pitched and cheerful. I thought it was funny that they both referred to each other the same way, but there was something odd about her mother’s cheerfulness. I was wondering whether Dahmer had actually failed her math teacher by not getting her grades up and if she had died. I didn’t ask anything more. And that was the last I heard of her.

The incident I keep mentioning took place at night, three days before the end of summer vacation. The same sort of muggy night as tonight.

Boku-chan had announced she was going home to Kochi, so the three of us had a going-away party at Bettina. We had a few drinks but the party just didn’t get going. We hardly said a word and avoided looking at one another. “This looks more like a funeral than a going-away party,” the owner of the bar joked.

Boku-chan wound up spending a total of twenty-five days basically wandering around Tokyo. She hated getting all smelly sleeping on the streets, so the last half of her stay she slept over at Dahmer’s, which made their relationship go from bad to worse. The reason being that Boku-chan was a slovenly “guy”—and she was also an impolite country hick. She’d sleep past noon, eat whatever she could find in Dahmer’s fridge, leave the room a mess, and borrow Dahmer’s clothes without asking. When she took a shower, she’d just leave it running forever and forget to put away the shampoo and soap. Dahmer typically did the cleaning and wash

ing for her mom, as well as shopping for dinner, and she hit the roof. I think also, like me, she felt vaguely irritated and sad knowing that when this summer vacation was over, so was her childhood. We sat at the counter, sipping our beer and listening to Tracy Chapman singing “Fast Car.” The owner liked the song but I thought it sucked.

“Man—this isn’t what I expected when I said I’m going home,” Boku-chan finally complained, but Dahmer and I kept quiet. We had long since gotten sick of this idiot.

“Next time I come I’m not getting in touch with you guys.”

“Fine by me,” Dahmer said, and glanced at her watch. “Almost time for the last train. I’m out of here.”

Surprised, I looked up. Dahmer usually stayed out all night and took the first morning train home, but on this last night together she was acting cold. She whipped out her purse and paid. Her hair hung down on her forehead, but through it, her eyes were gloomy and grown-up-looking. Boku-chan shot Dahmer a quick glance and said, all smart-alecky, “Hey, Dahmer—guess you want to go back to being a straight-arrow high school student? No big deal, huh?”

“You got that right,” Dahmer said lightly, and looked at me. “You want to, too, right?” Yep, I do, my look told her. And that was my honest intention. If I could be a self-respecting high school student again, then yes, that’s what I wanted to be. But I knew that none of us could ever be an ordinary serious student again. Because we were girls who liked other girls. Boku-chan sat there, silent, toying with a box of Salem Lights.

“Well, Boku-chan. See ya. It was fun.” Dahmer beamed at her and waved good-bye. Her slim white arm was girlish, and I watched it sadly.

“How cold can you get,” Boku-chan grumbled, and, pushing off from the counter with both hands like some old guy, stood up. “I’m going out to drink by myself. Just can’t take it otherwise.”

I didn’t feel like chasing after either of them, so I just sat at the counter. The owner stood there, unconcerned, a cigarette dangling from her lips as she scanned the jacket of a bossa nova CD. I waited until the trains weren’t running anymore and left. This is the last time, I thought. I planned to walk all the way home from Shinjuku to my house, which was in Soshigaya in Setagaya-ku. I decided this would be the last time during summer vacation I’d come home at dawn and make my dad go ballistic. I still felt sorry for my old man for losing his wife, and I was trying my best to live up to his expectations. I felt relieved to have a made a friend like Dahmer, but having spent time with a trashy girl like Boku-chan made me disappointed in the whole 2-chome scene. As I left the bar I felt I’d moved on in life, and then I felt both lonely and a bit proud of myself. I walked down the stairs and was heading down an alley when this huge woman abruptly stepped out from the shadows.

“Hey, you! C’mere.”

It was a man’s deep voice with a Kansai accent. He had on a black camisole and a formfitting tight white skirt. He had on ridiculously high silver mule sandals, and this made his whole body lean forward. His panty line was visible on his skirt. He had an oversize squarish butt, and a jet-black head of hair that was obviously a wig. Only his nails were gorgeous, painted with a green design. Overall he was a shabby, cheap transvestite. If you wonder why I remember all these details so clearly it’s because the guy grabbed me by the sleeve of my T-shirt and wouldn’t let me go, so I had time to take it all in.

“Whatya want?” I asked.

“You’re kind of obnoxious, aren’t ya?”

He smacked me next to my ear with a clenched fist, and my left ear went deaf. I started to fall to the ground but the transvestite held on tightly to my T-shirt and wouldn’t let me fall as he continued to pound me.

“What’re ya thinking, coming to a man’s part of town like this? You’re a woman, pretending to be some cool-looking guy, but you’re the type who gives us a bad name. If you want a woman, leave it up to a man. You’re an idiot. Just plain dumb. So it’s okay for a guy to rough you up, don’t ya think?”

The transvestite roughly grabbed my breast. No guy had ever touched me there before and it was a total shock.

“You got a pair like this yet you try to act like a guy. What a jerk! Bet you wish you had a cock, huh? You’re worse than our crap. So go ’head and try some.”

He pushed me onto a pile of garbage. My nose was bleeding, so I couldn’t smell anything. The owner of Bettina heard the commotion and ran out to help me. I was bleeding a lot, but not really hurt, and she thought she couldn’t just leave me, since I was just a high school student, so she put me in a taxi. I was conscious but covered in dirt and blood as I stumbled into my house. My face was swollen for a while and I didn’t go to school the first week of the second semester. When he saw me all beaten up, my father was dumbfounded, and was scared I’d been raped. He asked if somebody had done something to me. As I listened to his worried footsteps pacing around the house, I lay on the floor and laughed. It was something much worse than rape, Dad, what happened to your daughter. You have no idea.

I’ve never told anybody about this. I couldn’t tell Toshi or Kirarin, or even Terauchi. Not even Boku-chan or Dahmer. I don’t know why. I never set foot in the 2-chome district again. It wasn’t so much that I was afraid of the place itself, but I was afraid of the creatures who masqueraded as people. And I became afraid of myself for stirring up such hatred in others. I knew I liked girls and couldn’t figure out who I was, yet that transvestite, grabbing my breasts, made me realize I’m also a woman. That summer I totally lost my confidence. Maybe that’s why it wasn’t such a shock when Dahmer suddenly disappeared.

* * *

It was exactly eleven when I got home. Dad was waiting outside for me, looking unhappy. He had on a loose-fitting green T-shirt, chino shorts, and Nike sandals, and was smoking. My old man is a freelance photographer. When Mom was still alive he was hardly ever at home, always out “on location,” or so he said. But after she died he announced that he would work at his Tokyo studio. He didn’t go out drinking so much, and never came home later than eleven. His income went down, which he complained about. To me this was a pain. I just wanted him to leave me alone, but ever since I got beat up he couldn’t tell the difference between keeping an eye on me and standing guard.

“Hey, where’s your bike?”

“I lent it to Toshi.”

“How come?’

“Hers got stolen. It’s just for the summer, so she can go to her cram school.”

I slipped past him and went inside. Our Maltese, Teddy, ran over and started jumping on my legs. Teddy, my mom’s dog, is our family treasure. I picked him up and started to go upstairs. I didn’t see Grandpa and Grandma. They must have gone to sleep a long time before. Or maybe they were holding their breath, monitoring the conversation between me and Dad. Since they’re my mom’s parents they don’t really care much about Dad. Their hopes and sympathies are all directed at me. Which is a royal pain, too, and kind of disgusting. Every night I said a little prayer that they might die soon.

“Toshi’s the one who lives next door to the boy who killed his mother, right? You know him, don’t you?”

Dad was obviously curious. He was the kind of guy who followed the news closely and picked up on things. I hated that, too.

“Nah, I don’t know him.”

“What do you mean, ‘Nah, I don’t know him’? That’s how you should talk to your father? I really don’t like the way young people talk these days.”

“Sorry…”

I knew that if this went on too long, Dad would blow a fuse, so I meekly apologized. I also wanted to talk to Worm while he was taking a break.

Resignedly, Dad said, “Go to bed soon.”

“Um.”

I went upstairs, put Teddy down, went into my room, and locked the door. I listened and heard Dad go into his bedroom. I lay down on my bed and took out my cell phone. Worm picked up after one ring.

“Hello. It’s me.”

Worm breathed a sigh of relief.

“Are you still at the conven

ience store?”

“No, I stood out too much. I’m lying in the parking lot out in back. I can see tons of stars.”

“Are you tired?”

“Um,” he said, sounding like a child.

“Text messaging’s pretty convenient, isn’t it?”

Worm had never had a cell phone up till now.

“Yeah, it sure is,” he agreed, and stopped. “But this one’s an old model and you can only send a hundred and twenty-eight letters at a time.”

“Yeah, guess so.”

Which is why the phone was cheap. I was a little annoyed, though Worm didn’t seem to pick up on this.

“It’s okay, you’re the only one I’m gonna text.”

“But you talked to Kirarin, too, didn’t ya?”

“Who’s that?”

“One of my pals. She’s totally hot.”

“Really,” Worm said, not terribly interested.

“Going to Tachikawa and back in one day made me worn out. Good exercise, though.”

I’d gone out to Tachikawa to meet up with Worm, then pedaled all the way over to Suginami to Toshi’s, an incredible distance.

It was kind of a snide remark, but Worm didn’t seem to care. Instead, he asked, “Hey, tell me something. How come you talk like a guy? I thought it was weird when we talked on the phone yesterday. But when I met you today, you’re kind of cute—although you dress like a guy. What’s up with that?”

This was out of the blue, and I didn’t know what to say. I never really thought about why. I went to a girls’ school and was told I was kind of mannish, so as a kind of gag I started talking like a guy and then it became natural. Dahmer and Boku-chan also always used the rough word ore for “I,” and I think it’s the first-person pronoun that fits best. When I’m thinking about something or feeling something inside of me, I use the feminine word atashi, but someday I’m sure this will change to ore, too. Worm’s pointed question made me remember that incident—the one when the transvestite grabbed my chest, yelled at me, and roughed me up. This curbed the secret feeling of closeness I was starting to have for him. So he’s a guy, after all. The kind who hates women dressed as guys, who denounces them. Did that make him my enemy? I sullenly stayed quiet, but Worm went on.

“A while ago I saw the evening paper at the convenience store. An article about me. I wanted to see, like, what the world’s thinking about it. It didn’t seem real. It was like I was dreaming. I looked up and there on the TV was the front of my house and some reporter babbling away. ‘What sort of ominous thing dwells in this suburban neighborhood? What happened to this boy who’s disappeared? Is the same darkness in this boy hidden in this seemingly quiet neighborhood?’ It felt so weird.”

“D’ya feel like you wanna go back to the real world?”

“I can’t,” Worm said coolly. “This is my reality now.”

“So why’d you make a reality like that happen? It’s you who made things that way, right?”

I was a little irritated. I suffered more than anyone else because my mom died, and because I’m gay—but I wasn’t responsible for these things. And now here was this guy who, just the day before, had created a new reality, one where he’d killed his mother.

“I don’t know.”

Worm didn’t want to talk about it. Just like when I’d met him.

“I’d like you to pull yourself together and tell me about it.”

“Why? Why do I have to tell somebody else? It’s personal,” he said.

“I want to know.”

“How come?”

“I want to believe that if I’d been you, I’d have killed her, too.”

Worm didn’t say anything. Silence continued for a long time. I looked at the windowpane, the curtain still open. My blank face, cell phone pressed against it, was reflected in the glass. The glass was perfect, not a scratch on it.

* * *

The first time Worm called my cell phone was after dinner, when my dad and I were in the middle of a fight. Dad was so upset he could barely speak, all because I told him I wasn’t going to take the college entrance exams.

“Then what do you plan to do with your life?”

How should I know? If I had to give a quick answer, all I could think of was working behind the counter of the Bettina, or else learning to be a transvestite. If I said that, my father would definitely cry. Dad’s proud of working in the media, but he’s actually a boring guy who’s pretty conservative.

“So you’re going to be like Winnie the Pooh, huh? Knock it off!” He was really pissed. “It might sound good right now, but what about later? Stop acting like a baby.”

I wasn’t acting like a baby. I really didn’t have a clue what I should do. After I went into high school and my sexual orientation became clearer to me, I was faced with two choices: either deceive everybody, or come out of the closet. But I still hadn’t decided which route to take, and so I had no energy to think about college. Those were the times when I was glad Mom wasn’t alive anymore. I didn’t say anything and Dad started in with one of his sermons. Grandma brought out some peaches she’d peeled and stealthily crept back to her room. I could sense that Dad was choosing his words carefully, aware that my grandparents were eavesdropping.

“If you don’t go to college, you’ll regret it. I’ve known a lot of young people who didn’t go, so I know what I’m talking about. Once they go out into the world they finally realize how blessed they’d been and regret having thrown away the chance. The girl who’s my assistant is like that. She told me she doesn’t know why she didn’t go to the photography department at the Japan Academy of Arts. She failed the exam once and never took it again. But I admire her. She got a job and is doing her best. She’s found her own path in life, wanting to be a photographer. You don’t even have that. You haven’t gone out in the world. Once you do, you’ll be sorry you didn’t take this opportunity. But then it’ll be too late.”

It’s not too late. I’m already out in what you call the world. A world of emotions that’s different from what my old man’s talking about. I wanted to tell him this, but that would mean revealing I was gay, and I wasn’t ready for that. Irritated, all I could do was pretend to sulk.

“Anyway, you like the arts, so you should go somewhere where you can study that field.”

“It’s too late,” I said, attempting a compromise. Saying it was too late was my way of buying time. I hated myself for it. Dad’s face suddenly lit up.

“It’s not too late! You can go to a cram school. I’ll find out which one’s good.”

From the next room my grandpa cleared his throat in relief. It wasn’t easy living there. After Mom died, even if Dad had wanted to move out and be free, he couldn’t. He has a twenty-year mortgage and had built a house for two families to live in. Even if Grandpa and Grandma passed away, the land would most likely go to the immediate heir: me. If it came to that, I might kick Dad out, a thought that made me feel a whole lot better. Just then my cell phone rang from in the pocket of my shorts and my father pointed to it.

“Your cell phone’s ringing.”

The screen said the caller was Toshi.

“It’s from Toshi.”

Looking somewhat tired and unhappy, Dad reached for his cigarettes. He seemed relieved it wasn’t a guy.

“Hey. What’s up?”

“Sorry to bother you.”

I was surprised to find it was a guy. Phone pressed to my ear, I slowly eased my way upstairs. Downstairs, my grandparents had come out and I could hear Dad explaining things to them. “Senior year in high school is a tough age,” he was saying. “Hard to tell if they’re adults or still kids.”

“Who the heck are you?” I asked the guy on the phone. “And what’re you doing with Toshi’s phone?” I waited until I was safely back in my room.

“You’re Kiyomi, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

Instinctively, I knew the guy had picked up Toshi’s phone somewhere and was randomly dialing all the girls’ names on it. My voice is so low hardly anyone ever guesses on the phone that I’m a girl. Besides, the name Kiyomi could work for either guys or girls. The guy apologized weakly and was about to hang up.

“Hold on a sec, pal,” I said. “I’m a girl. But how’d ya get hold of that phone?”

“I found it and thought I’d return it.”

I told him all he had to do was dial the number under Home. “Got it,” he said, and then said this: “Hey—if you’re a girl how come you talk all rough like that?”

This pissed me off, so I asked him, “How the hell old are ya?”

“Seventeen. I’m a senior in high school.”

“You’re a real loser, you know that?”

I was just about to hang up when he said this:

“I, ah—killed my mother today.”

I thought this was a great joke, so I played along.

“Yeah? I killed my mom three years ago.”

This wasn’t a lie. I might not have done it with my own hands, but inside it felt like I had.

* * *

They found out Mom had ovarian cancer just when I entered junior high in April. She passed away in October of my third year in junior high, so it was like my whole junior high school days were occupied by my mom’s illness. Cancer takes a long time to kill you, so it’s really rough on your family. It wasn’t like she came to terms with it. There were some days when she did, I guess, seem calm about it, but other times she wailed about her fate like she was possessed by an evil spirit. She was only thirty-eight, and most of the time it was the latter. Dad was hardly ever at home—it made me think he might be having an affair—and Mom was so emotionally unstable that the rest of us didn’t know how to handle her. One day she’d suddenly hug me tight and apologize, the next she’d push me away. We had to deal with these violent mood swings. I recoiled from this. I was worn out and had no idea how to handle it. On top of this was my dawning realization that I was a lesbian. I realized my mom was too preoccupied with her illness to think about my troubles, and I grew lonely, sad, and totally depressed. After agonizing over it for a while, I finally decided to abandon her. I decided in my heart that the moment she became sick was the moment she died. The person in the bed was a living corpse and nothing else.

When my mother was close to death, my father came to get me, but I refused to come out of my room.

“Come on. Your mother wants to see you.”

“I’m not going,” I said.

I held Teddy to me and kept on shaking my head.

“I know you’re scared, but it’s okay. She’s dying and you should see her.”

Dad was almost in tears, but I wasn’t going to fall for that. Say I did go see her when she was dying and I had this phony smile like everything’s all right, would that be it? What about my feelings? All kinds of outrageous thoughts ran through my mind.

“But Mom will be sad,” Dad said.

“So what? Everybody’s sad.”

“Don’t you feel sorry for her that she’s dying? You’re her only daughter.”

Well, she’s my only mother, too, I wanted to tell him. I didn’t deserve this, either. I wasn’t aiming to get revenge, just to get my mother, at least in her final days, to think about her relationship with me. My father gave up and left the room, and soon after this I heard this ping at the window. There was a crack in the glass. A small pebble must have hit it. Teddy was frightened and was shivering. I opened the window and looked outside. The sun had long since set and the streetlights were lit. The street was deserted. Not long after this the phone rang with the news that my mother had died.

* * *

“So what you mean is that pebble was your mother?” this guy on the phone said after hearing my story.

“I don’t know. It sounds too much like a ghost story, so I never told anybody about it. You’re the first.”

“Why didn’t you tell anybody?” he asked.

“I didn’t want to. If I told them the truth, then—”

I stopped. Why in the world was I telling all this to some guy I’d never met?

“If you told the truth, then what? Tell me. I want to hear it.”

He’d told me his secrets, so maybe I should tell him mine. I searched for the right words.

“I thought my mother was blaming me,” I began. “That she hated me. When you hate someone like that, your spirit still hangs around and you can’t properly pass on. That’s when I started to get scared. Not scared of my mother or her ghost or anything. Scared of how strong the bonds between people can be. So when I decided I’d abandon my mother it felt like I’d murdered her.”

“I know what you mean,” the boy agreed. “It’s the same with me.”

“Did your mother really die?”

“I already told you,” he yelled, irritated.

“Tell me how it happened.”

“I’ll tell you after I’ve got it all straight in my head. It’s hard to explain—it was like it just—happened. But I do remember this one weird thing. When I grabbed my mother by the hair, I thought, Wow, her hair’s just like a woman’s. I really felt like, Hey, she’s a woman. But the person in front of me was just this crabby, complaining old bitch who was talking nonsense. It was like I thought, Shut the hell up! and pushed the off button on a machine.”

A chill shot up my spine. His voice sounded like it was filtering up from some dark whirlpool. Even if he didn’t kill her, I thought, I bet he beat up his mother.

He was ending our conversation. “The guy’s making his rounds of the park.”

“Where are you?”

“At Tachikawa Park.”

“Can you stay overnight there?”

“If I hide I can,” he said. “But the mosquitoes are terrible.”

We agreed to meet the next day at the McDonald’s in Tachikawa Station. He hesitated a little, but I pushed him to agree. I had to hear the rest of his story.

I knew beforehand from Toshi’s phone call that what he said was true, but I’d felt right from the start that he was telling the truth. Otherwise, I never would have told him what I did.

When I actually met him the next day, he was sunburned, his red face all gloomy. He was skinny, too, like a string bean. His navy blue Nike T-shirt was kind of dirty, with bits of grass clinging to it. As he stood in the McDonald’s trying to find me, other people looked at him funny. ’Cause he stank. They’re gonna catch him any minute, I thought, and tried to think of how I could help him run far away.

“You’re just what I expected,” I told him. It was funny how Toshi’s description of him fit perfectly.

“What’d Toshi say?”

“She said you’re like a worm.”

“That’s awful!” He laughed. When he laughed, he was kind of cute.

“You smell bad,” I said. “You gotta change your clothes.”

“I’ve got only one change of clothes and don’t want to waste them. It’s so hot I thought I might as well just keep these on.”

“Makes sense.”

Worm didn’t seem to hear me. He was staring vacantly out the window. The sun was going down, but the asphalt was still scorching.

“Is it true you’re going to K High?”

Worm nodded, still gazing out the window.

“Aiming to get into Tokyo University?”

“I don’t think I can anymore.”

Don’t think you can anymore? You better believe it. They’re gonna run you through a ton of psychiatric tests, turn you into some guinea pig, then throw you into juvie. Society’s erased you from its board, pal. You can forget about entrance exams and Tokyo University. What a moron! Still, I felt sympathetic toward this guy who just didn’t get it.

“Have you got it all straight in your head now—about what happened?”

“Not yet,” he said, looking out the window again. “I haven’t really searched my conscience yet, so I guess I can’t.”

“Guess not.”

Worm startled me by suddenly bolting straight up in his chair.

“I gotta go. I don’t know why, but I feel like I’ve got to hurry.”

“Where’re ya going?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere. I just feel like I have to go somewhere, right now.”

“Then you’d better go. Leave your bike, though. I gotta get it back to Toshi. You can take mine.”

I motioned with my chin toward my bike parked outside. Worm looked kind of embarrassed.

“You rode it all the way here for me?”

I brought out a brand-new cell phone and laid it on the narrow little McDonald’s table.

“You can have this, too,” I said. “But give me back Toshi’s.”

Worm pulled out Toshi’s phone from the pocket of his dirty jeans and tilted his head.

“Thanks. But why’re you doing this?”

I had no idea. I was just waiting, and hoping, that he’d get his head together and let me in on something important, something I had to know.

“You better get going,” I said.

Worm shoved the new cell phone, manual, and charger into his backpack and stood up. He turned his sulky narrow eyes to me. Birds of a feather, I thought, and waved to him. Worm clumsily made his way out of the place, bumping into the tiny tables as he left.

I sipped my iced coffee and gazed out the window. Worm went over to where my silver bike was, let out the side brake, sat down, then raised the seat. He sat down again and turned in my direction. His eyes were desperate. I just feel like I have to go somewhere, right now. “I understand totally. Just don’t get caught,” I muttered, then slurped down the rest of my coffee.