Chapter XVII - Like I Was Never Born

I arrived home shortly after midnight with the earbud still warm in my pocket from being held too tightly for too long.

Throughout my walk back home, I kept mentally kicking myself for not returning the stolen piece to Minazuki-san... though that would require me to have mustered enough courage to admit to her that I was essentially a pervert in the worst way possible. Compound that with the fact that this was the only time we had a stable conversation, I couldn't risk the chance of losing that precious bond. Never.

My apartment was dark and silent except for the constant hum of the refrigerator—a noise so familiar that I only noticed it when everything else was quiet. The air hung heavy with stale cigarette smoke and something else, something distinctly male and unwashed.

There was no sign of my father.

He was either still at work, or—more likely—drinking at some hole-in-the-wall izakaya where the owner knew better than to cut him off. Or perhaps he'd gone gambling again. The possibilities were practically endless, with each more depressing than the last. I didn't bother turning on the lights. What was the point? There was nothing I wanted to see.

My bag slipped from my shoulder and landed with a soft thud on the floor of my bedroom. I collapsed onto my bed—school uniform and all—and was far too exhausted to even consider a shower. My shoes lay scattered where I'd kicked them off, one near the door and the other somewhere under my desk.

Unprompted, Minazuki-san's voice still echoed in my head in an incessant refrain. The way she'd sung that song, with such pain and longing, had struck something deep within me—a chord that had lain dormant until now.

My hand snaked into my pocket and retrieved the earbud I'd been holding onto throughout the entire evening. My talisman. A reminder of the luck of life—that I would have seriously died had it not been for the scarlet-haired girl who had saved me with her angelic voice. I pressed the earbud to my ear and closed my eyes.

I should have been mortified by our conversation. I'd bared my soul to her and admitted my darkest secret—that I'd been planning to jump, that her voice had been the only thing tethering me to this world.

But strangely, I felt lighter.

It was as if the admission had loosened something coiled too tightly inside me for years.

An eyelash, probably due to the last time I washed my face being more than 12 hours ago, had fallen out and now irritated my eye which forced me to reopen both of them. I rubbed it until the itch was gone, but in doing so, I stared at the bedroom ceiling once again. The ceiling above my bed had a water stain shaped vaguely like Hokkaido. I'd been staring at it since we moved here four years ago, watching it grow slightly larger with each rainy season.

Would anyone have noticed that if I were gone?

Would the stain still have grown without me here to witness it?

In the words of Sawabe-sensei, my physics teacher, particles are undefined before observation. Objects are made out of particles, so one can extrapolate that to conclude that objects are undefined until they are observed. It is, therefore, safe to assume that an object will only be defined as long as it is defined by the observer. This, in turn, means that if an observer were to die, everything he defined would also "die" before it is redefined by another observer, because his death would leave those particles and objects undefined once more.

If I had jumped, then the water stain on my ceiling would become undefined, because I would no longer be around to define it.

I didn't know why, but that thought made me smile.

...

A crash from the living room jolted me from my half-awake thoughts.

He was home.

I tried my best to lie perfectly still, hardly breathing, listening to the sounds of the husband of my mother stumbling through the apartment—the thud of shoes being kicked off, the rustle of a jacket dropping to the floor, the scrape of a chair being pulled out.

Perhaps if I stayed quiet enough, he'd pass out drunk before noticing I was home.

But morning came regardless of my wishes, with unforgiving sunlight filtering through the blinds I'd forgotten to close. I sat up, dazed, still in yesterday's uniform, now hopelessly wrinkled as I was sure to get a stern yelling at by Yoshida-san if I were to go to school like this. A cursory glance at the alarm clock on my desk revealed that I'd slept through the night and that it was now almost 8am. School was about to start, and I hadn't even taken a shower.

"Some class representative you are, Kagami."

"Seriously, Kagami? Is this the image you want to display at our esteemed institution?"

"Kagami, if you cannot perform this simple task, I will simply have someone else do it instead. In fact, why not do the same with your role as Class 2-A's Class Representative? I heard Takahashi is far more... enthusiastic to take on a bigger role in representing our school's conduct."

Seriously, as an administrative assistant, she really had the arrogance of a principal.

I crept out of bed and winced when my bedroom door creaked open. The door had been barely usable for the past two years now, but as always, that man replied with something along the lines of "deal with it yourself, I'm not a billionaire." As if we didn't live together, or rather, as if I didn't have to pitch in with household expenses.

I checked my phone. Right, it was a Sunday. No school. I breathed a sigh of relief and immediately collapsed back into bed.

But... I have work...

Thus, I forced myself to rise from my slumber once again and prepare myself for the day.

The sounds from the living room confirmed my suspicions. The soft wheeze of my that man's breathing, interspersed with occasional grunts—the sound of a man sleeping off a night of heavy drinking.

I quietly crept across the apartment, navigating the familiar obstacle course of discarded clothes and school materials. In the bathroom, I splashed cold water on my face and tried not to look too closely at my reflection. The circles under my eyes had darkened, and my skin had taken on the pallid, waxy look of someone who hadn't seen sunlight in months.

Our living room was a disaster zone, to be the most charitable. Empty bottles littered the coffee table, some tipped over, their dregs forming sticky puddles on the wood. Ashtrays overflowed with cigarette butts with ashes spilled across surfaces like grey snow.

And in the middle of it all, sprawled on the couch in a position that looked painful even in unconsciousness, was Kagami Hiroki.

My father.