Chapter 7: Needle in a haystack

Wednesday, 30 April, 20XX - Part 2

Yui gave me the address of a station outside the city. Actually, it was a little station close to where we lived.

It was the very station we walked past on the way to school.

We went through so much trouble to get away. Why did Yui immediately want to go back to our neighborhood?

“It was impossible for me to pack my things at home without my parents noticing. I had to find a different way to pack.”

We arrived at the station. I parked the car by the roadside. Technically, that wasn’t allowed, but it was for only a little while, and there was no one around at this time of night.

Yui walked into the station, towards one of the coin lockers.

“They wouldn’t let me go to school, but they’d still send me out to buy things in the evening.”

“Why would they send you out to buy things if they were punishing you for running away?”

Yui sighed through her nose.

“They are lazy. My mother only gave me just enough money to buy what she wanted me to buy. It was never enough for me to run away, and I always had to give back every yen of change.”

Yui opened the coin locker. It was filled with plastic bags containing all sorts of things.

“Every time I was sent out to buy something, I’d hide clothes and supplies in the shopping bag and drop them off at a coin locker. The staff here only check the lockers once a week.”

W-Wow.

Yui had smuggled her things out of her room, one plastic bag load at a time. Since it was on the way to the supermarket, her parents wouldn’t suspect her of doing anything. And because it was at the station, no one would think it was where she hid her things.

She was hiding a needle in a haystack, right under her parents’ noses.

I helped her take her things out of two different coin lockers she had stuffed to the brim. The plastic bags contained everything from clothes, food to toiletries and an envelope of money.

“Didn’t your parents take your money?”

“They took almost all of it. That’s why I had the backup buried in the park. But I hid another 100,000yen between the pages of some books in my room. I taped the money to the pages so they wouldn’t fly out even when my stepfather threw all of my books to the ground.”

Altogether, she was able to save ten 10,000yen notes like this.

For a high schooler, this was an unbelievable amount of money. She must’ve worked herself to the bone.

“Ah, there is one more thing,” Yui said.

She went back to the coin lockers. She opened a third one. Inside was a metal box – the kind that required a key to open it.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“This is where my mother keeps important things like passports, health insurance cards, birth certificates, and so on. Those two took away almost all of my money, so I thought it’s only fair for me to take something valuable from them.”

The box was relatively light despite its size. When I asked her how she managed to get something so big and important out of the house without her parents noticing, she winked and said, “That’s a secret~ I will tell you later.”

Once we were back in the car, I handed her the box I dug up from the park.

“Thank you, Haruto.” She hugged the box, as if it was the most important thing in the world.

“Yui, can I ask you a question?”

“Mh, sure.”

“How did you get foreign currency like that? There’s US dollars in there.”

“Oh, it’s not only that! I got some Korean Won and Chinese Yuan in here too.”

“Huh?”

She opened the box, dug deep and got out two envelopes.

“I got some foreign currency, just in case I need it.”

How many scenarios had she planned in advance?

“How did you get foreign currency? Us teenagers can’t go to banks and ask them to exchange it.”

“Erm…” She averted her eyes. “Well…banks aren’t the only way to get your hands on foreign currency, right? It’s all a question of who you know.”

“R-Right…”

In other words, her methods of currency exchange were legally grey – at best.

After we had packed everything into the back, we drove out of the city, into the night.

Thursday, 1 May, 20XX - Part 1

We woke up at dawn. After fleeing Tokyo in the middle of the night, we had driven North-West, deep into Gunma prefecture. We wanted to get as far from the city as possible, before potential chaos broke out.

May 1, around 4pm, was scheduled to be the day when the traffic lights went out for a while. Some Internet users dubbed it, ‘D-Day,’ named after the American landing in Normandy during World War II.

Last night, we parked behind what looked like an abandoned building and slept in the car.

Today, I woke up with muscle pains all over my body.

Actually, come to think of it, this was the first time in my life I didn’t sleep on my bed. No matter how bad things got, my mother always made sure that we had a roof over our heads.

Groaning, I got out of the car.

“Haruto?” Yui sounded from the back.

I said nothing.

Before anything else, there was something I had to do.

I got out some incense sticks from the back along with a picture of my mother I always carried in my wallet. I lit the incense sticks, stuck them into the ground, put the portrait picture of her in front of them and prayed.

Behind me, Yui silently observed me. She spoke after I was done.

“Is that your mother?”

“Yeah.”

“You look just like her.”

“I guess.”

“She is beautiful. She has kind eyes.”

I felt a lump in my throat.

“She worked so hard.”

That was the only thing I managed to say.

I clapped my hands together.

“Okay! Let’s get started!”

“I really need to use the bathroom,” Yui said.

“Me too.”

We got in the car and drove to the next convenience store. While the convenience store bathroom had no shower, it had a western style toilet and running water, which was enough for now.

Yui went in first. After she was done, I freshened myself up.

We bought breakfast at the convenience store. Two pork buns and two coffees. Unlike the convenience stores in Tokyo, the convenience stores here had an area where we could sit and enjoy our meal.

“I haven’t been on a trip like this in ages!” Yui said.

“Oh. When was the last time you went on a trip?”

“Erm…before my mother married that scumbag. My mother and I went on a hiking trip. I forgot where it was, but it was really nice and green and super hot. It must’ve been during the summer. Back then we also had breakfast at a convenience store in the countryside.”

“That sounds nice.” It was the only thing I said, but I meant it. It was a beautiful memory.

People were really strange.

I always thought Yui’s mother was a bad parent, but it seemed that in her childhood, there were a few bright spots.

“What about you, Haruto?”

“Hmm…my mother and I never went hiking, but she took me fishing once in primary school.”

“Fishing?!”

“Back then, I was obsessed with fish, so she thought it might be a good idea.”

In retrospect, she might’ve been trying to fill the shoes of a father.

Yui laughed. “That sounds like a lot of fun! Most people would take their child to the aquarium.”

I couldn’t help but smile. She was right.

After breakfast, we went back to the car.

There were eight more hours until the traffic lights were scheduled to go out worldwide. Until then, we had some time to organize ourselves after rushing out of the city in the middle of the night.

It was time to break open the metal box Yui had stolen from her parents.