Brave Story (12 page)

“So you were half asleep twice, then.” Mitsuru flipped another page. The next page was blank. Perhaps he had reached the end of a chapter. Mitsuru sighed and looked up. “You’ll step on them.”

“What?” Wataru’s brow furrowed.
What is it this time?

“Your pictures. They’re right in front of your feet.”

He was right. The tip of Wataru’s right shoe was already stepping on the corner of one of the zoo pictures. He looked down at it. Wataru and his mother were smiling and standing in front of the elephant cage. A zookeeper had just given the elephant an apple.

“I didn’t take a picture of a ghost,” said Mitsuru as Wataru squatted down to retrieve his photographs from the gravel. It was as though he had been waiting for Wataru to look away to speak. “I took a blurry picture of an azalea. Everyone freaked out and got excited because it’s more fun that way. That’s all.”

“But you said …”

“I said people shouldn’t make a fuss about such things. You agreed with me, didn’t you? I heard you say so just now.” Mitsuru looked a little angry now. His eyes gleamed. “You know, if that’s the way you really feel, it’s a little weird trying to take pictures of a fairy. Pretty hypocritical.”

Now it felt like he was being scolded.

“Look, I know it sounds strange, but I swear I heard a girl’s voice and there was nobody around but me.” Wataru raised his voice to be more assertive, but it seemed like every sentence came out weaker than the next.

“Like I said, you were dreaming. I wouldn’t waste my time taking any more pictures, if I were you,” Mitsuru said, cocking his head slightly. “You say people shouldn’t make a fuss, and here you are making a fuss all on your own. You’re kind of contradicting yourself, don’t you think?”

Wataru wracked his brain for a choice retort. He knew he had to come up with something soon, or he felt like he might burst into tears. Quite suddenly he felt a need to use the bathroom.

What was with this boy? Talking to him was like talking to an adult, but worse.

“If you ask me, there’s a much bigger problem here than a missing fairy,” Mitsuru said, his voice perfectly measured.

Wataru carefully blinked to keep the tears back. His eyes searched Mitsuru’s face. “What kind of problem?”

“That depends on your point of view,” Mitsuru replied calmly. He raised his book vertically, nestled a bookmark in between the pages, and slammed it shut. Then he tucked the hefty tome under his arm and stood up. A chill went down Wataru’s spine.
Is our conversation going to end like this?

“You’re saying I have a problem?”

“I don’t recall saying that.”

“Yes, you did!” Wataru shouted. Once again he felt like crying.
Now I’m angry.

Mitsuru cocked his head again, studying Wataru as if he were preparing to dissect some strange creature. “Do you have a father?” he asked, neither his eyes nor his expression changing in the slightest. Only his lips moved.

“What?” Wataru replied in shock.

“A father. Do you have one?”

“O-of course I do!”

Mitsuru blinked. “Does he like having his picture taken?” Mitsuru’s questions were getting weirder and weirder.

“What do you care?”

Mitsuru indicated the pictures in Wataru’s hands with a jut of his smoothly cleft chin. “Those pictures—your dad’s not in a single one.”

Wataru looked down. He hadn’t noticed if he was or wasn’t.

“Check them out yourself after you go home, or you can take my word for it: he’s nowhere to be seen. They’re all of you and your mom.”

Wataru said the first thing that came to mind. “So my dad likes taking pictures. That’s all.”

“Sure,” Mitsuru said smugly, “if you say so.” No sooner had the words left his mouth than Mitsuru turned and began walking away. Wataru stood in silence until Mitsuru reached the shrine’s red torii gate. He wasn’t done with this conversation by far, but Mitsuru kept walking.

“What’s your problem?” Wataru called after him. “Why do you have to act like such a jerk?”

Mitsuru disappeared down the street without slowing down. Silence descended over the shrine grounds. Somewhere, a bird began to chirp.

Who does that guy think he is?

Wataru was exhausted. Holding the pictures carefully, he walked back to the bench Mitsuru had just occupied and sat down. He looked up, aware that he was seeing the world as Mitsuru had seen it just moments before. It meant nothing to him. The azaleas had already bloomed and faded. Their petals lay scattered across the ground. Wataru was all alone in Mihashi Shrine.

One by one he checked the pictures, starting with the ones of his room. As he expected, none of them revealed anything about the girl with the voice like honey. He glanced through the photos from the zoo. Wataru mugging for the camera in front of a flock of flamingoes. Kuniko tossing the pigeons some popcorn. It was a bright, sunny day—Kuniko and Wataru were squinting and smiling.

And Akira Mitani was nowhere to be seen, just like Mitsuru had said.

Chapter 5
The Incident

This is just my unlucky month.

That was the only explanation for it. Clearly, nothing good would come of this June, no matter how hard Wataru tried. How could so many things happen in one month to make him feel so miserable?

I’ve just got to lie low until summer vacation starts.

Wataru hated June more than any other month. For one thing, it rained constantly in Tokyo, and the temperature would drop unexpectedly, making his nose run. Then, after that, he was forced to endure an endless stretch of steamy, sweaty nights. He was never sure if he should wear short sleeves or long sleeves, and the humidity meant his favorite clothes took forever to dry after they came out of the wash. To this day it was a mystery to him why his mom never bought a clothes dryer. Since their place faced south, she figured she could hang laundry outside to dry. Wataru reminded her many times that it didn’t matter which way the apartment faced. If the sun didn’t come out, the clothes wouldn’t dry. And he hated having wet laundry hanging inside the house. It felt so…tacky.

“We don’t need one,” she would patiently explain. “Even during the rainy season, there are sunny days every once in a while.”

And so June passed by somberly and, more often than not, soggily. Yes, just letting June mosey on by was the safest strategy. He would just have to retreat into his shell and become even more subdued than usual.

Wataru no longer heard rumors about the haunted building because he had stopped paying attention to them. People tired of such things quickly. He never saw anyone from the Daimatsu family again, and neither did Katchan. Construction on the building had stopped completely.

Mitsuru continued to prove what a good student he was, both at school and at Kasuga Seminars. When they took the bi-monthly performance tests to gauge their academic progress, he easily scored higher than even Yutaro.

Thankfully, as it came closer to the end of the month, Wataru had something better than Mitsuru Ashikawa and haunted buildings to think about. He would be spending the entire month of August at his grandmother’s house near the ocean in Chiba. Since he started elementary school, it had become tradition for him to spend the end of July and the first week of August—prime beach time—with his grandmother. Akira wasn’t able to get much time off from work, and Kuniko didn’t feel right about leaving her husband to fend for himself, so Wataru inevitably went alone. He had been doing this since he was in kindergarten, so it wasn’t a big deal. Not once had he gotten homesick, or cried for his mother. “My little beach bum,” Uncle Lou would proudly call him.

This year, for the first time, they were letting him spend the entire month of August there. Of course, because he was going to be there so long, he couldn’t just loaf about like a guest. He would be helping out at his grandmother’s store, at the beach-house vending stall, with Uncle Lou’s work, and however else he could.

“You do good work and I’ll pay you a fitting salary,” his uncle had promised, making Wataru jump up and down with glee.
A salary!
The word was like magic to Wataru’s ears.

After
Eldritch Stone Saga III
came out, another must-have game called
Bionic Road
was due for release sometime in mid-November. It was an action game, not an RPG, but the magazine coverage made it look great. It promised to be just the kind of game that he loved best—a complex, science fictionbased story line, full of mystery, with a cool main character. It would be coming out in a two-disc set. Estimated sale price: ¥7,200.

When he first saw the price tag, he gave up hope of ever owning it. Less than two months after
Saga III
came out? No way could he save up that much money.
Maybe Katchan could swing it.
He might be able to save enough from his allowance in two months to buy the game. His parents were always busy with work, and they gave him a big allowance in an attempt to make up for the time that they couldn’t spend with him. They were never overly vigilant about the content of the games that he bought either.

But there was one major hurdle to overcome. Katchan hated action games. RPGs were all he ever played.

“
Bionic Road
? Never heard of it. The hero’s a cyborg? You gotta fight alien invaders and save passengers stranded in a colony ship?” Katchan made it sound like a chore. Wataru had tried his best to sell his friend on the game, but it was like talking to a wall. “What, you can’t even use magic?” Katchan had asked, incredulously. When Wataru had admitted that, yes, you couldn’t, the discussion was over. As far as Katchan was concerned, a game without magic was like peanut butter without jelly. Wataru’s plot to convince Katsumi Komura to buy
Bionic Road
and let him borrow it or play it at his house seemed dead from the start.

I really need to get some money
, Wataru had brooded. It was just then that his uncle made him the offer: “Do you want to come here for all of August? If you can do some work, I can pay you for it.”

“Work? I can work!”

Wataru immediately launched a campaign to convince his parents to let him go. At first Akira and Kuniko had strong reservations about letting their son be away from home for so long. “A couple of weeks, maybe, but a whole month? I don’t know,” his father had said.

“Out of the question!” his mother chimed in. “If you spent your entire vacation playing at your grandmother’s, you’d never finish your summer homework.”

“I’ll finish all of my homework in July! It’s just a bunch of worksheets. And a journal, and an essay—but I can do those in Chiba.”

“What about growing those morning glories for your science class?”

“That’s even easier to do in Chiba! Mom, you said yourself that you don’t want them on our balcony ’cause of the caterpillars!”

That one gave her pause. Kuniko
did
hate caterpillars. In her mind, they were already creeping up the morning glory vines and shuffling over to the laundry that she would be hanging out on the balcony (because they didn’t have a dryer), leaving tiny caterpillar footprints wherever they went. Every summer that Wataru had to raise morning glories for science class there would be at least one incident in which his mother, having found one of the little critters getting comfortable in her sheets and pillowcases, would shriek loud enough to earn a few raised eyebrows from their neighbors.

His father was a tougher nut to crack.

“Even if it’s for family, I still think you’re too young to be working. You’re in elementary school! You need to wait…at least until middle school.”

“But Uncle Lou said I could!”

“And your father is saying you can’t. You’re still just a child and shouldn’t be working for money.”

It looked like a hopeless case. No matter what he said, no matter how much he begged, the answer was always the same.
You’re too young.
Wataru almost gave up hope. Each and every day, all he thought about was how to change his father’s mind, and what he might possibly say to help the situation. He even lost sleep obsessing over it.

And then, during a late-morning breakfast on the last Sunday in June, from behind his father’s newspaper came the answer he wanted: “Wataru, you can spend your summer vacation with your grandmother and uncle if you want.” Out of the blue, just like that. Not the bitter denouement of weeks of haggling and pleading, but a casual comment, as though he were asking Wataru to pass the salt. Wataru couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Maybe he was still half-asleep. He shot a glance at his mother.

“Honey, are you sure?” she asked, a vague smile on her face. “You know he’s talking about spending all of August in Chiba, right?”

“Fine by me.” Akira turned the page of his newspaper. “You could go too.”

“I can’t do that,” laughed Kuniko. “Why, it wouldn’t be right leaving you here alone while we went off to play on the beach.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t mind,” Akira responded nonchalantly, without even lifting his eyes from the paper. “I hardly see you two, our schedules being what they are. It wouldn’t be much different if you were gone. I practically live like a widower anyway.”

Wataru felt uneasy, as though there was something being left unsaid, some deeper meaning behind his words. The day before, a Saturday, Akira had been at the office all day, not getting home until late. Maybe something had gone wrong at work, or maybe he was just really tired. That would explain the foul mood.