Confessions (15 page)

She smiled and I gave her a big smile back.

Since my sister isn’t here anymore, it occurred to me that this was the only chocolate I’d be getting. But then when I got to school I ran into Mizuki and she gave me a little box of chocolate, too—though I guess she had to, since my sister had been nice to her. Not that I was going to turn it down.

“Did you see the newspaper?” she asked me all of a sudden, and I nearly dropped the box. I managed to say something about how terrible it was. When I got to class, that was all anybody was talking about.

Apparently the kids who had stayed late after school were all put to work searching for Moriguchi’s little girl. It was Hoshino from our class who had found her, but some other kids had seen the body, too. Everybody was pretty worked up. A few girls were crying, but mostly they seemed kind of excited. At first, they were just trying to figure out what had happened, adding little bits of information, but then it turned into a competition, with everybody bragging about what they’d seen or done.

I was watching all this from the doorway when somebody grabbed my arms from behind and dragged me out in the hall. Watanabe.

“What did you do?” he said, sticking his face right in mine. But somehow I wasn’t scared of him. In fact, I suddenly wanted to laugh. I didn’t, but I brushed his hand away.

“Don’t talk to me,” I told him. “We’re not friends, remember? And about yesterday? I’m not going to tell anybody. If you want to, go ahead.”

I turned around and went back in the class. I sat down, but I didn’t join in all the boasting and bragging. I just opened a book, an old mystery novel that Uncle K
ō
ji had given me. I was different now, not the same me I’d been before.

I had succeeded where Watanabe had failed. But unlike him, I wasn’t going to tell everybody about it. Moriguchi’s little girl died in an accident; and even if they found out it was murder, Watanabe was the one who did it. Anyway, I’d seen how much he’d wanted to do it. If the police showed up at school, he’d probably confess right away.

What an idiot. He had blown the whole thing and he didn’t even know it.

Moriguchi took a week off and then showed up at school again. She didn’t say anything about what had happened—just apologized in homeroom for having been gone so long. Like she’d had a cold or something.

If I died, my mom would probably turn into an invalid. Or go crazy. She might even kill herself. Moriguchi acted so normal she didn’t even seem sad. But that only served to make us realize how depressed she really was.

I was pretty sure Watanabe could tell that she was totally messed up, and that he’d be laughing to himself every time he saw her—and that made
me
laugh that much harder. At least that was how it was supposed to go.

Classes were pretty nice for a while. The teachers pretended to go on treating us as they always had, calling on everybody equally, but it was just a show. I’m not sure whether they didn’t want to embarrass anybody or whether they just wanted to avoid any trouble in class, but for once they made sure to give the hardest problems to the smart kids.

Watanabe never had to struggle no matter how tough the question was, and when the teacher praised him, he pretended he didn’t care. But now I could laugh at him when he acted all big like that.

You could see it on his face—
you think that stupid problem is going to stump me; I’ve done something much harder than that
. The stupid kid, he didn’t even know he hadn’t done it—but that I had.

The problems they gave to Watanabe even started to seem easier to me. We had a quiz on Chinese characters last week and I got all the hard readings. The teacher was impressed.

And why shouldn’t he be? It might not happen for these next final exams, but before long I’d probably be getting better grades than Watanabe. When I realized that, the kids in class started to look totally dumb.

It was really hard not to laugh in their faces.

Moriguchi was coming to our house. I was already home when I got a call from her on my cell phone a little after noon on the last day of finals. She said she wanted to meet me at the pool to talk about something.

She knows
,
I thought.
That must be why she wants to meet at the pool
. My hand started to shake as I held the phone, and my heart was pounding.
Stay calm. Stay calm….

Watanabe’s the murderer. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to keep cool at the pool, so I asked her to come to our house. I decided to risk a question before hanging up.

“What about Watanabe?” I asked.

“I’ve just been speaking with him,” she said, her voice all low and calm. I could feel myself relaxing. Everything was going to be okay. Watanabe was the murderer, and he had pulled me in against my will.

Moriguchi’s sudden visit surprised my mother. I said I wanted her to stay with us while we talked. I was sure she’d want to know the whole story anyway, so it was better to have her there. I knew she’d believe me and try to help.

Moriguchi started with a really general question. “What sort of experience have you had at middle school?” she asked. This obviously had nothing to do with the accident, but I had decided I would tell the truth, no matter what she asked. So I told her about Tennis Club, and cram school, about my run-in with the high school kids at the game center, and how it felt when she didn’t come to bail me out. I told her about being a victim but getting punished anyway—about every miserable thing that had happened.

She listened to all this, beginning to end, without saying a word. Then, just as I was taking a break to have a sip of tea, she asked her next question in this quiet, strangled voice that still seemed to echo through the living room.

“Naoki,” she said. “What did you do to Manami?”

I put my cup down really slowly, but my mother practically screamed. She didn’t know anything about it or whether I was involved, but she was already upset, and pretty mad. I knew I had to convince them that Watanabe had used me, that I was a victim, too.

So I told Moriguchi what had happened. From the time Watanabe had stopped me on the way home from school to the moment I was standing by the pool holding her daughter in my arms. I told her everything: the truth, down to the last detail. Watanabe had led me on and then double-crossed me. I never intended for anybody to get hurt. I told the truth, except for the very end. Just one little lie to wrap it up.

I was pretty sure my version would agree with what she’d heard from Watanabe. She hadn’t interrupted me once the whole time I was talking, and even when I was done, she didn’t say anything. She just stared down at the table and clutched her knees. But I could tell how mad she was. Poor, dumb lady. My mother didn’t say anything, either.

We sat there for five minutes, and then Moriguchi finally turned to look at Mother.

“To be frank, as a mother, I feel as though I want to kill both your son and Watanabe. But I am also a teacher, and that leaves me with a dilemma. My duty as an adult and as a citizen is to report what the boys have done to the police, but my duty as a teacher is to protect my students. Since the police have ruled Manami’s death an accident, however, I have decided to leave it at that. I will not be causing you trouble.”

What? She wasn’t going to the cops? My mother took a few seconds to take this in, but at last she bowed her head really low. “I don’t know how to thank you,” she said. I bowed, too. So, it was all going to work out.

We saw her to the door. The whole time she was there, she never once looked at me—I suppose because she was so mad—but I didn’t really care.

The last day of the school year. After milk time, Moriguchi told us she was retiring. I have to admit, I was happy to hear it. I’d managed to get her to believe that Watanabe had killed her daughter, but I’d been nervous coming to school like this, wondering whether it would all come out and I’d be accused of being his accomplice.

“Are you quitting because of what happened?” Mizuki asked her.

I shot her a look, wondering why she had to bring it up, but Moriguchi didn’t seem to mind. She started in on this long story, as though she’d been meaning all along to tell us what was on her mind.

She told us why she became a teacher in the first place. Then she talked about Sakuranomi-sensei and all the stuff he’d done. I didn’t really care, I just wanted her to get finished and shut up.

Then she started talking about mutual trust between student and teacher and about getting texts—sometimes fake ones—from students asking her to come meet them or help them or something. She said the school had started a policy that when a call comes about a boy in a class where the teacher is a woman, they send the male teacher from another class, and vice versa. So that’s why she didn’t come when I got in trouble at the game center! It’s a little late to be finding that out now.

She talked about being a single mother, then something about AIDS, and then about her daughter falling in the pool—and the whole time I felt like someone was tightening a noose around my neck.

“Mr. Shitamura happened to appear from somewhere.…” Suddenly, she mentioned my name and I nearly choked, like the milk I’d just drunk was coming back up. She went on talking, and I was just managing to calm down when it came.

“Because Manami’s death wasn’t an accident. She was murdered by some of the students in this very class.”

It was like somebody had pushed me into that cold, dirty pool. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t see. My arms and legs were flailing around, but there was nothing to hang on to.

Everything seemed to be going black, but somehow I knew it wasn’t the time to be passing out. How much was she planning to say? I took a deep breath, trying to calm myself down.

That’s when I was finally able to focus on what was going on in the room—and I realized that everybody was staring at Moriguchi. A minute ago they had all looked bored and were barely listening, but now they were all ears.

But instead of getting to the point, she launched into all this stuff about the Juvenile Law and that thing they call the Lunacy Incident. I had no idea what she was trying to say. She paused for a moment, and I was praying she might be finished, but then she went on, talking about her daughter’s funeral. The next part was pretty surprising: She said that the girl’s father was Sakuranomi-sensei, but that she’d decided not to marry him because he had AIDS.

I remember thinking that it was weird that Sakuranomi was going to die soon—because of AIDS—and being surprised that I could think about anything other than what was going to happen to me. I guess that was when I started rubbing my hands on my desk trying to make the feeling go away—the feeling that they were still holding the girl. If she had AIDS, then maybe I’d caught it, too.

We could hear chairs scraping on the floor in the next room. They must be done. Moriguchi seemed to have heard them, and I was hoping she’d let us go. And she did. She said anybody who wanted to could leave. My prayers were answered! But no one moved. If anyone—anyone at all—had gotten up, I could have sneaked out, but you could tell right away that no one was going to leave.

She looked at us for a minute, like she was making sure we weren’t going anywhere, and then she started in again.

She said that she wasn’t going to use names—that she was going to call the killers A and B. But that didn’t mean anything, because as soon as she started talking about A, you could tell right away that it was Watanabe. I think she meant for everybody to know, to get them interested—and it worked: Everybody started turning around to look at him.

Then it was B’s turn. The story was pretty much what I’d told her that day she came to the house. She’d sat there listening and not saying anything, but when she repeated back everything I’d said, she added these little comments that made me look stupid. Like I didn’t do it because I was smart and wanted to prove something; I did it because I was dumb and couldn’t do anything else. But what was the point of getting mad at her now. The game was over.

Now they were all looking at me. Some kids were laughing, but some were shooting me looks like they really hated me.

I was going to get killed! I knew it.

It was all pretty simple: I went off to the game center—first bad move—and got punished; I was convinced my teacher was ignoring me; and so I became an accomplice to murder. Who wouldn’t want to kill me? But it was really Watanabe’s fault. I’m actually a victim. He’s a murderer; I’m a victim. A = murderer; B = victim. A = murderer; B = victim. I repeated the formula over and over to myself.

Ogawa had another question for Moriguchi: “What if Wata…I mean, what if A kills somebody else?” he said. He seemed really into it.

“But you’re mistaken. A didn’t kill anyone in the first place,” Moriguchi said. “It was B who killed Manami.” I could feel myself being pulled down deep, to the bottom of the pool. She said the shock wasn’t strong enough to kill; that Manami had only been unconscious.

They knew. She came to our house to find out, and now she knew. She still wasn’t sure I’d done it on purpose, but that didn’t matter anymore. It didn’t change the fact that I’d killed her little girl.

Everybody was looking at me. I wondered what Watanabe was thinking, what kind of expression he had on his face, but I couldn’t look. I was convinced the police would be coming soon to take me away. But then I realized Moriguchi was saying she wasn’t going to trust the law to punish us. What did that mean?

Everything was getting dim around me. I’d fallen into something, but not a pool. Some sort of thick swamp was swallowing me up, leaving only Moriguchi’s quiet voice whispering in my ears.

“I added some blood to the cartons that went to A and B this morning,” she was saying. “Not my blood—the blood of the most noble man I know, Manami’s father, Saint Sakuranomi.”

Sakuranomi-sensei’s blood—AIDS blood—in the milk? The carton I’d drained to the last drop? I might be dumb, but even I could figure out what that meant.