Book Girl and the Famished Spirit (5 page)

As I was hurrying away through the school yard, a girl who had been in my class last year came running up to me with some other girls, looking pleased. “Konoha! There you are!”

Huh? What was this?

“There’s a
super
-hot guy looking for you. Hurry up!”

Surrounded by the giggling group of girls, I was hurried off without any explanation. We passed Kotobuki on the way, and she watched me go by, wide-eyed.

When we reached the school gates, the guy Tohko had hit and knocked to the ground the night before was standing there.

“What’s up. Remember me?”

“You’re Tohko’s—”

“Ryuto Sakurai. Pleased to meet ya, Konoha.”

He bent his giant body to greet me and then tossed a grin to the girls. “Muchas gracias for bringin’ him. See ya around.”

He gave the girls a wink; then he grabbed my arm and started walking off. “Let’s go somewhere quieter.”

I heard the girls sighing longingly behind us and hurried to speak up. “H-hold on, you’re—”

“Call me Ryuto. You’re older than me and all.”

“I am?”

Now that he mentioned it, I realized that he’d been wearing street clothes last night, but today he was wearing a school uniform.
The insignia was for a boys’ school nearby. And if he was younger than me, that meant…

“You’re a first-year?!”

“Sure am. I managed to pass last year.”

He’d been in middle school until last year—with a body like that?! And now that he was a first-year in high school, he was three-timing and having lovers’ quarrels on the street at night? Who
was
this guy?

“Do you need something from me? How do you know my name?”

“Tohko talks about you at home. Today Konoha wrote me such and such a story; he wrote me that; it was sweet; it was spicy; it was bitter; it was salty. All of that.”

I caught my breath and not just in embarrassment that Tohko talked about me so much.

“You know that Tohko eats stories?”

Ryuto looked at me and a corner of his mouth twitched up.

“Yeah, I do. We
do
live together. Every morning for breakfast she eats kids’ books like
Guri and Gura
or
The Children of Noisy Village.
She tells us everything about it, then rips through it in total glee.”

When I heard that, I felt as if some nameless indignation had pierced my heart. It didn’t really matter… So what if someone else knew Tohko’s secret? So what if he knew her better than I did? But for some reason my stomach knotted.

I carefully removed my arm from his grasp.

“Do you eat books, too?”

“What do
you
think?”

His sculpted, masculine lips curled into another smile. His eyes were like a carnivore’s, and when I looked into them, I felt my heart and body shrinking. It was sort of similar to how Maki made me feel.

“In any case, you want to go get something to eat? Then you’ll know if I’m like Tohko or not.”

The place he chose was a fast-food restaurant decorated to look like a Western saloon. The tables and chairs were made of dark brown wood, and a dartboard hung on the wall.

Once there, Ryuto ordered a hamburger at least six inches thick piled with bacon, lettuce, mushrooms, and cheese; a mountain of french fries sprinkled with basil; and a large soda.

“There you go, Ryu.”

“ ’Preciate it, Harumi.”

An older girl he seemed to know brought his hamburger out, and he turned on the charm. Then he dug into his food.

He opened his mouth wide, smearing red ketchup on the corners of his mouth, and swallowed ravenously before shoveling French fries as big around as his thumb into his mouth.

Leaving the French toast and herbal tea I’d ordered untouched on the table, I just stared at Ryuto as he ate.

Tohko was capable of eating the same things we ate. She could take a bite of food and swallow it, but she had told me that it had no taste whatsoever, just like if we tried to eat paper.

Tohko’s concepts of “sweetness” and “spiciness” were not strictly the same as ours, because she had no idea what shortcake or apple pie tasted like. She simply used her imagination to draw parallels between the foods we ate and what she tasted in books so that she could gush about them.

Mm. This must be what a warm apple pie with whipped cream tastes like.

So the fact that Ryuto was devouring his hamburger with such zeal didn’t mean he was an ordinary human being. It could have been just an act.

But…

“Aren’t you gonna eat? It’s a lot better when it’s still warm.”

“… You set me up.”

He was just a normal human being like the rest of us who ate bread and drank water after all. He had led me on, and I had gone along with it completely.

“That’s not very nice. All I did was ask if you wanted to get somethin’ to eat.”

He really was a lot like Maki—like how he could have a smile on his face and something totally different up his sleeve.

I couldn’t believe that in trying to escape Tohko I’d gotten snatched up by the son of the family she lived with. I had a bad feeling I was about to get wrapped up in some kind of trouble.

I stuck a fork into a piece of my French toast and asked grumpily, “So? What did you want? Is this about Tohko?”

“Nah, this has nothing to do with her. Actually, you need to keep it quiet from her.”

He wiped the ketchup off his mouth with a thumb and then licked it off.

“There’s a girl I like at your school. Do you think you could help me out?”

How had things turned out this way? He had removed all of the people in his way and was finally about to claim her—and now this. Why?

Everything had been proceeding according to plan. He had employed every possible means to restore the dollhouse she had annihilated, and he had not feared even to dip his hands in blood or to commit sacrilege against God.

There was no God in this world, anyway. The devil was already laughing at his side, and that was the most reliable ally of all.

No, he had made no mistakes. But when he had come here, everything had been headed toward ruin.

There was no time.

He had to go back.

He needed to go back in time to the day that he met her.

If it would grant his wish, he would give the devil his soul or anything else.

There was no time.

He felt light-headed, and a strangled cry escaped his throat. His stomach twisted painfully and nausea rose up in him.

Would she be taken again? Would she betray him again? Would she mock his dreams and run from him?

He would not allow it!

He would reach his hands out to her small face, wavering like a mirage, and he would crush it like a tomato.

He would not allow it! He would not allow it! He would not allow it! He would not allow it! He would not allow it!

The next day after first period ended, Tohko came to my classroom with a deep frown on her face.

“Why did you leave yesterday, Konoha? I waited soooo long for you. I’d checked
The Long Goodbye
by Raymond Chandler out of the library, so I started reading it, and I actually finished the whole thing.”

“Um, well… I’m glad you could have a nice, relaxing read outside.”

I tried to smile when I said it, but Tohko slapped her hand down on my desk and leaned in toward me.

Oh god—everyone was looking at me. Kotobuki was glaring.

“That’s not all! Do you have any idea the kind of fear I experienced after you left yesterday?”

“N-no, I don’t. Did something happen?”

As soon as I asked, Tohko looked like she was about to cry. Her lip was trembling feebly.

“S-since you never came back, I went to the club room to look for you, and there was a bouquet of black lilies on the table.”

“Are you sure it wasn’t a birthday present from one of your fans?”

“My birthday is a long ways away. And don’t black lilies make you think of anything, Konoha?”

“Not really.”

“Black lilies mean ‘cursed.’ ”

“So you’re saying you were cursed?”

Tohko covered her ears with both hands and shook her head desperately. Her long braids danced through the air together.

“No! Don’t say it! I refuse to accept it! But… you know…” She looked at me, her eyes timid once again. “I would be even more cursed if I threw them out, so I got a beaker from the chem lab to put them in, and I heard a girl crying outside. But when I opened the door, no one was there. I was sure I was just imagining things, so I closed the door. But then I heard her sobbing again. This time I walked really quietly and tried to open the door slooowly… but there was still no one there. I thought I must be so tired that I was hearing things, so I decided to go home. And on my way—”

I gulped, and Tohko looked at me forlornly. “
Three
black cats crossed my path!”

I nearly buried my head on my desk.

“There’s more. A flock of crows flew by overhead, too!”

“Because it was nighttime and the crows were going home, too.”

“And then this morning, this was in my locker.”

Tohko showed me a white envelope.

“A love letter?”

“No.”

She pulled a letter out and unfolded it; then she held it out to me. It was a chain letter. One of those things that said you had to
send the same thing to five different people in a week or you would have bad luck.

“I’ve never seen a real chain letter before.”

“I haven’t, either, not since elementary school when they were trendy for a little while. L-look at who it’s from, Konoha.”

Tohko trembled as she pointed at the signature. It read, “Sincerely, The Ghost.”

This looked more like a prank than an actual curse…

“And then? This morning there was another note inside the mailbox. And that’s stepped way up, toooooo!”

Tohko showed me the stepped-up note.

“Hmm.”

It certainly had been stepped up: The note looked like brush writing on singed and yellowed paper and mentioned disturbing things like a “herd of possessed swine,” “I’m come home,” and “I shall make you swallow the carving knife.”

“We have to do something about this right away or else the book club is going to get attacked by a herd of possessed pigs! I’m going to get a butcher knife with a ribbon around it instead of a bouquet of black lilies. The book club is facing a threat to its very existence, Konoha.”

“We’ve been standing on that precipice for a while, in my opinion.”

We did have only two members, after all. That didn’t quite rise to the level of an actual club.

Tohko glared at me sharply.

“Try to be serious about this, Konoha. Listen, come to the club room as soon as school lets out today. We have to work out our strategy. Promise?”

The bell announcing the end of break rang, and after making doubly and triply sure, Tohko scrambled off.

Kotobuki had been glowering at me the entire time.

Geez.

I felt bad for Tohko, but I had plans after school.

During class, I gazed out the window and thought back over what Ryuto had told me the day before.

“There’s a girl I like at your school. She’s a second-year like you. Name’s Hotaru Amemiya… You know her, Konoha?”

Did I know her? Wasn’t that the girl Tohko and I had carried to the nurse’s office? I was flabbergasted.

“Actually, we’re already going out, but something seems off. It’s not going well, I guess.”

Ryuto just kept saying one astonishing thing after another.

“What?! But don’t you have other girlfriends? Three of them?”

“Oh yeah, I’m going out with them, too. There’s two or three others. Or is it four or five? They change so fast, I can’t keep track.”

I stared wide-eyed at Ryuto, but he laughed it off without the slightest sign of guilt.

“If you’ve got that many girls, who cares if it’s not going well with one of them? I mean, do you actually like Amemiya?”

“Well, to be honest, it’s more like I think I’ll like her a whole lot
soon
.”