Confessions (20 page)

Drowns? I went on to the article, certain there must have been a mistake.

Accidental? Worse still, there was no mention of electrocution. She had drowned.

What had happened? As I was trying to sort things out, Miyuki let out a gasp.

“Why, this is your school, isn’t it? And Y
ū
ko Moriguchi…is your teacher! Her little girl died!”

As I write this now, I can see myself at that moment and remember that I knew Miyuki was saying something important, but somehow nothing was getting through to me. It was only slowly dawning on me that Shitamura must have done something that made a mess of things. I hurried off to school to find out what had really happened.

Up to that point I had thought that the word “failure” had nothing to do with me or my life. I was supposed to know how to avoid it, which mainly meant not getting involved with idiots. But I had completely forgotten this lesson in choosing my witness.

School was buzzing with talk of the girl’s death. The body had been discovered by Hoshino, one of the boys in our class, and he was telling anyone who would listen how he’d found it floating in the pool. The pool had nothing to do with it, I told myself. I wanted to tell those idiots that she was killed by Sh
ū
yaWatanabe’s prizewinning invention…so why didn’t I?

The answer was simple. They didn’t think it was a murder at all. Everyone was convinced it was an accident. The plan had been a massive failure. Not wanting to be seen as my accomplice, that coward Shitamura had thrown her in the pool to make it look as though she had drowned.

I was furious. But even more so when he showed up at school looking cool and calm, as though he hadn’t done anything—hadn’t ruined my plan.

I dragged him out to the hall and demanded an explanation.

“Leave me alone,” he hissed. “‘We’ve never been friends,’ remember? But you should know that I’m not going to tell anybody about yesterday. If you want to, go ahead.”

That was when I realized he hadn’t thrown the body in the pool because he was frightened; he’d done it expressly to spoil my plan.

But why? The answer was simple: to get back at me for what I’d said as I walked away. I’d underestimated him. A cornered rat will bite the cat, and there were idiots all over Japan doing unimaginable things simply because someone had pushed them too far. It was my own fault. I had given in to my emotions for one moment and provoked this idiot.

But in the end it didn’t matter. I’d lost nothing. Nothing had changed. I could go back to being a model student for the time being while I worked on a new plan.

That ought to have been the end of it.

But it wasn’t. The victim’s mother, Moriguchi, found out the truth. About a month later, she called me to the science room and showed me the rabbit pouch, which was now dirty but intact. My wonderful invention, my murder weapon! I had succeeded after all! I wanted to shout for joy!

I confessed everything. I had wanted to kill someone with my invention, to attract even more attention than the Lunacy girl. But Shitamura, my witness, had lost his nerve and had thrown the body in the pool. I told her how sorry I was that no one had found out.

To be honest, I did everything I could to provoke her that day—so much so that I’m surprised, looking back on it, that she didn’t kill me right on the spot. But I really didn’t have much choice. It was my one chance to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. But she just listened to the whole thing and then announced that she wasn’t going to tell the police. She wasn’t going to “give me the satisfaction of starring in my own horror show.”

But why? Why? Why did all these idiots insist on getting in my way? Why all the recalcitrant pieces and parts?

Whatever the reason, she did as she’d said and kept quiet about the whole thing.

Then, on the last day of the school year, she announced that she was retiring from teaching, and as her parting message to us she began explaining exactly what had happened to her daughter. I wasn’t sure why she was telling all those idiots when she hadn’t said anything to the police, but at the very least it wasn’t a boring good-bye. She overacted a bit in places, but on the whole it made a pretty gripping story.

As she got closer to revealing the identity of her daughter’s killer, the other kids in the class started craning around to look at me. Their stares filled me with a deep feeling of satisfaction. There were worse ways of getting this started than having the rumor run through the school that I was a murderer. But then one of the idiots asked her why she hadn’t gone to the authorities—whether she would feel responsible if A killed again. Her answer came as a shock.

“But you misunderstand when you worry about A killing ‘again.’…” I knew every detail of the incident, but I have to admit at that moment I had no idea what she was saying. “The purse was incapable of stopping the heart of an old person with coronary disease, or even that of a four-year-old child.”

She was saying that my invention hadn’t worked, that Shitamura had killed the girl instead of me. I had simply rendered her unconscious; she had died when that idiot dropped her in the pool under the mistaken impression that he needed to cover up what we’d done. At that instant, every eye in the room turned toward Shitamura.

How utterly humiliating. Nothing could be worse. I wanted to bite off my tongue and die on the spot. But there was one more detail in Moriguchi’s story—an especially interesting one: she had mixed the blood of an AIDS patient into the milk Shitamura and I had just drunk. If I’d been as much of an idiot as my partner in crime, I might have stood up from my desk and yelled, “Bravo!”

From the moment I first realized I was holding my mother back, I had contemplated suicide any number of times. But I’d been too young to come up with the right way to do it. I recalled praying over and over for exactly this: Please let me get sick.

Now I’d been granted my wish—in a most unexpected fashion. It was beyond anything I could have imagined, a complete success. If my mother would have come running to help a son accused of murder, she was even more likely to come for one who had AIDS. I was jumping for joy on the inside, as cliché as that might seem.

I wanted to run right to the doctor to get certification that I was HIV-positive and then send it off to the university where my mother was working, but I knew the virus could take three months to show up in my system, so I would have to wait to be tested.

As frustrating as it was, that was all I could do. In reality, however, I don’t think I’d known such a peaceful period since my mother left. Under normal circumstances, my father would probably not have approved of my seeing my mother, but if I were ill, he would have no choice. I might even be allowed to live out my last days with her.

The incubation period for AIDS can be five or even ten years. We could develop a joint research project at her university. What kind of amazing things could the two of us do together? Then, when I was too sick to carry on with the research, she would nurse me on my deathbed.

As I played out this scenario in my head, vacation ended and the new school year started. Shitamura didn’t show up for class, and the rest of the idiots left me alone for fear of catching the virus, so all in all it was actually quite pleasant.

Gradually, however, the idiots began their little campaign of stupid pranks. They would shove milk cartons in my desk or shoe cupboard, or hide my gym clothes, or write “Die!” on my books. It wasn’t fun, but I have to admit I was almost impressed by their determination and sense of invention in coming up with the would-be indignities. At one point, when a carton of sour milk exploded in my desk, I had a passing desire to slaughter the lot of them, but even that I could forgive—or at least ignore—when I realized it was just a matter of time before I would be with my mother.

When the three months had finally passed, I went to a clinic in the next town to have blood drawn for the test. Then, a week after that, I had a run-in with the class clowns. They’re idiots, but even idiots can be dangerous in a group. As school was letting out, they grabbed me from behind and bound my hands and feet with tape. They had come prepared—with surgical masks and rubber gloves to avoid infection.

I thought they were going to kill me, and under other circumstances I might not have minded. But now I didn’t want to die—not yet, anyway. Not when my dream was just about to come true.

If I started crying and asked for forgiveness, they might let me go. If I got down on my knees and begged, I might escape with my life. I was so determined to live that I would have put up with any humiliation. But as it turned out, I wasn’t even the target that day. They were really after the class president, who was suspected of having squealed to Terada, the new homeroom teacher. They had a special treat worked out for her.

When she insisted she was innocent, they told her to prove it by throwing a milk carton at me. It hit me in the face and exploded in a magnificent shower—but the shock reminded me of something completely different. I could feel my mother’s hand on all those occasions when she slapped me. I don’t know what kind of expression I had on my face, but at that moment my eyes met the president’s—Mizuki’s—and I saw her mouth the words “I’m sorry.” Someone else must have seen her, too, because they declared her guilty and immediately passed sentence: a kiss. Apparently, that was why they had tied me up in the first place.

I had spent the walk home after this encounter wondering how there could be so many stupid human beings in the world, but those thoughts disappeared as I got to the door and saw an envelope from the clinic in the mailbox. At last! But the moment I ripped it open, I could feel myself tumbling into the abyss. It was negative.
I
was negative. I didn’t have AIDS. I had known that was possible, so why had I been so sure I’d test positive? I suppose because Moriguchi had been so convincing that day.

I began to regret that the idiots hadn’t just killed me earlier at school.

Late that evening, I sent a text to Mizuki asking her to meet me. I sent it because I had been unable to throw away the useless scrap of paper that had been waiting in the mailbox. It was useless to me, but it might be the difference between life and death for a girl who had been forced to kiss someone she was convinced had AIDS.

But to be honest, that was an afterthought. The truth is, I didn’t want to be alone, and there was something about her that had interested me—if only slightly—before any of this happened. It had something to do with the fact that I had seen her at the pharmacy trying to buy some chemicals. They had refused to sell them to her, even though she said she wanted them for some dye work she was doing. I realized I could have made a bomb from the stuff she had wanted, and I wondered whether she might have had the same thing in mind.

Was there someone she wanted dead? If so, I even imagined we might hit it off. But when she showed up for my little meeting and I held out the results of my blood test, her reaction was a surprise.

“I knew,” she said. But how could she have known my HIV status before I did myself? Maybe she meant she had read up on the transmission of the HIV virus and knew that the likelihood of infection from Moriguchi’s little trick was extremely low. But when I took her to the laboratory and we sat down to talk, she had a completely different explanation.

Apparently, Moriguchi had never put the blood in the cartons in the first place. Mizuki had been the last one in the classroom the day Moriguchi told us her good-bye story, and she had found my empty carton and Shitamura’s in the rack. She had taken them home and tested them with some chemicals she said she’d managed to get hold of. It seemed I had been under Moriguchi’s spell the whole time. I’d been living in a fantasy of my own devising.

But why had Moriguchi gone to such trouble and told such a complicated lie? In the end, she hadn’t turned us in or given us AIDS. What did her revenge amount to? Maybe she had only meant to torture us psychologically. If that were the case, I suppose you could say she’d hit a home run with Shitamura. I’ve forgotten to mention that he stabbed his mother to death and then went a little crazy. They say the police still haven’t been able to question him. But Moriguchi couldn’t have predicted that the day she gave her performance in front of the class.

The thing that surprises me, however, is that a momma’s boy like Shitamura never told his mother he’d been infected with HIV. I’d have guessed he’d go right home and tell her, tears in his eyes, and then they’d have made daily trips to the clinic while they were waiting for the test results.

If Moriguchi was gambling on driving him crazy instead of actually killing him, she knew what she was up to. But what about me? I suppose it’s true that Shitamura was the one who actually killed her daughter, but if I hadn’t made the plan, she’d still be alive. I can’t imagine she doesn’t hate me just as much as Shitamura. Nor can I believe that she was smart enough to realize how disappointed I’d be that I’m
not
HIV-positive.

At any rate, whatever she was thinking, it was all a failure. A big bore, like everything else. It’s boring to go on living, but just as boring to kill yourself.

I suddenly realized I needed some fun, a diversion of some sort. Maybe I should find a way to pay back all those idiots at school. First I needed to make sure they still believed I had AIDS.

The next day I staged a return engagement of the little drama they had scripted for the president and me the day before. It was all over in five minutes, and I found myself thanking Moriguchi for her parting gift to me.

So, you may be wondering at this point why I planted the bomb. I want to warn you against easy explanations, and you certainly shouldn’t assume that it had anything to do with Mizuki becoming my girlfriend or that I was trying to compensate for my mother’s love.