六

I am aware.

None of these people around me move quite like they’re supposed to.

The girl sitting to my right flicks her hair back over her shoulder as she’s want to do, but over her right shoulder. She’s left-handed, so always flicks it over her left shoulder with her free hand when writing.

The boy to my left curls the hair from his fringe around his index finger when he should be entwining it with the end of his pencil instead.

Behind me, I can hear Maiko tapping her foot against the floor in rhythm. 

Tap tap. Tap tap. Tap tap. 

This is what alarms me most. Maiko religiously switches things up on the third repetition, only tapping her foot a single time before starting from the beginning again. She says it’s to avoid it becoming monotonous, I’ve always thought that she was doing it to annoy me, but that’s why I remember.

Everyone is just a little off. It’s as if they’re all subjects of a painting brushstroked from memory. The painting looks fine by itself, the mistakes imperceivable in isolation, but compared to the original they become apparent.

Something else has been thrust onto this canvas though, like soup strewn across it in some sort of protest. This ‘Miyamura-sensei’ is a mistake, nothing like what she's supposed to be. I should have been tipped off by the dyed hair, not only is it out of character but the principal simply would never allow something like that; white is nowhere close to a natural colour. She isn’t wearing the glasses she always does, and looks about 30 years younger than she should. In fact, she looks kind of familiar.

“You-”

‘Miyamura-sensei’ cuts across my lips with her index finger and purses her lips together to shush me without making a sound. Her eyes slowly pan from left to right at the people around me. ‘Don’t let them know you know’ they say without having to.

“I have no tolerance for disruptions,” the woman announces, somewhat theatrically, as she rises to her feet once more, “finish your test and then meet me in the staff room after class. I’d like to have a word with you.”

***

I did not finish my test, not that I was truly being expected to. The white-haired woman merely wanted me to give the appearance of effort, to not draw the attention of those around me, so I slowly flipped the pages and wrote the alphabet out in the answer margins.

While I was waiting for the exam to end, I tried to recall why the girl with the white hair seemed so familiar and that unfortunately led me to recall everything surrounding that. I had met her at the crosswalks on the last ‘normal’(ish) day I can remember, she told me I would die if I followed Keisuke home. I followed Keisuke home. Does that mean I’m dead?

I certainly don’t feel dead. If I am, then death is a way sweeter deal than I was giving it credit for, just life through a blurry filter. That’s how I can be certain I’m not dead, there's no way it would feel good for even a second.

If I’m not dead, then where am I? The last thing I remember is being swallowed by Keisuke’s house. Where did I arrive to school from this morning?

Feeling like I’m not equipped to answer these questions myself, I decide to table them until I can talk to the white girl. There’s something wrong with her, she definitely has an idea what's been going on.

***

As I arrive at the faculty room, I find the white girl waiting outside, trying her best to stand professionally. She’s failing.

“Yo,” I say.

Instead of a normal answer, the woman simply points to the girls' bathroom across the hallway. Noticing my raised eyebrows, she picks up the initiative herself and walks over to it, disappearing inside. Seeing no other choice, I follow her against my best instincts.

As soon as I enter, I’m met with a shocking sight. There are no bathroom stalls, no washbasins, no windows, no walls, nothing at all. I have stepped into a completely white void that seems to stretch on to infinity. It’s like the complete opposite of where I was earlier.

In the middle of it, the girl resides, not putting on any airs now. Her hands are firmly entrenched in her pockets and she stands with her right knee slightly bent.

“Step away from the entrance a bit more,” she says, “we can talk freely in here.”

“Where is… ‘here’ exactly?”

“Why don’t you start by telling me what you remember and what you know.”

“I remember meeting you before while crossing the road with… somebody. You told me I’d die if I followed them and…”

“And, what? Too embarrassed to tell me you went home with him? There’re no secrets here, I was following him too.”

“You were following us?”

“Yeah, it’s kind of my job”

“So…”

“Stop!”

As I’m about to ask another of what I think are many reasonable questions, the girl raises her hand and demands that I shut up.

“You have lots of questions, that’s fine but you don’t have time to waste so I’m going to expedite this.”

She clicks her fingers and a volume of manga appears in her hand, which she tosses over to me.

“Flick through the first few pages there, don’t go any further.”

Warily, I do as instructed and instantly wish I hadn’t. Depicted within are several panels of Keisuke dragging me through the streets of Tokyo. Then it shows me getting swallowed up by his home. This is all stuff I’ve seen before.

“Keep going,” she commands.

I turn the page and see something disturbing. Keisuke is in his apartment but everything is covered by a layer of darkness. He’s walking around doing normal stuff, cooking dinner, washing clothes and a handful of other errands. At the end of one page, he bumps his foot on something. Turning to the next reveals that what he hit was my body, lying on the floor. Next to me are the bodies of his parents. Keisuke isn’t bothered by this and simply steps over me.

“What the hell are you showing me?!” I ask as I throw the manga back at her. She catches it between two fingers with ease.

“That’s what’s happening in the real world. Right now your unconscious body is wasting away lying on that boy’s living room floor. I’m meant to be a teacher right now… how long can the human body survive without water?” she asks me.

“I don’t know, like a week?”

“The answer is three days, girlie. Guess she wasn’t a great teacher.”

“She taught history…” I manage to get my quip in before that info hits me. I don’t know where I am right now but I know I’ve been through three days here. My chest tightens up and I feel a panic attack setting in as I drop to my knees.

“Hey, stop that,” the girl says, “you're not dead yet. Each repetition only lasts about 12 hours, so you’ve been here for just over a day so far.”

That calms me down a bit and I manage to normalize my breathing. When I look up, the girl is looming over me.

“People don’t survive in here, the fact that you have means that you’ve decided to live, right?” she says.

“Absolutely,” I say as I stand up to meet her gaze.

The speed of my response shocks me. That’s not a question I would’ve wanted to be asked, let alone answer, before. But now I know, more than wanting to, that I have to live. Whatever not living is is too scary to think about.

“Good. But the fight doesn’t end when you make that choice, that’s where it begins. What’s your name, I saw it on the class roll but I can’t read kanji.”

“You can’t read kanji?”

“No time for questions from you!”

“It’s Ruri.”

“Just Ruri?”

“Just Ruri.”

“Suit yourself. I'm Kai.”

I suppose 'Just Kai?' would qualify as a question. Anyway, I have more important things to find out.

“Tell me where we are.”

“I said no questions.”

“It wasn’t a question.”

Instead of getting annoyed at me, I swear I see her smile for the briefest moment. It’s like I just passed some kind of test. Either way, she decides to fill me in.

“God, explaining this to someone who doesn’t just know is such a pain. Sigh. The most comprehensible way to put it is that we’re inside your friend’s soul.”

“What?”

“Or its remnants really, you can’t normally enter a soul like this.”

She says these crazy things so casually, as if there’d be no reason to lie about them. Even if I’m open to the idea of the soul's existence (the Jumping Day opened us all up to the idea of the supernatural) the idea of being inside someone else’s soul wouldn’t even fly in a conversation between schizophrenics.

Besides, this doesn’t look like the inside of a soul, even though I don’t know what that should look like. If Keisuke’s soul looks like our school, what does mine look like? A manga cafe?

While I’m thinking through all of this I notice Kai staring at me with a very impatient look on her face.

“You don’t get it?” she asks.

“I don’t get it,” I reply.

She scratches the back of her head and clicks her tongue, as if she’s disappointed in me for not instantly grasping the concept.

“I’ve never had to… OK, you like stars? Nah, you don’t look like a horoscope girl…”

“Stars are fine.”

“Great! I hate horoscopes too, neither here nor there on the stars,” she manifests a whiteboard while she’s talking and starts drawing illustrations to help explain herself, “What we might call the human soul operates much like a star. It pops into existence at some point between your parents having sex and when you learn your first swear word. A body forms around it, it burns brightly for a period and then it slowly dies off. This is what happens to most stars, most people, when they die; their soul goes with them leaving behind only a body.”

Kai fills up the first whiteboard with crude drawings of stars and human bodies as she conjures up a second one to continue her ‘lesson’.

“But what we’re dealing with now is a soul gone wrong. Stars of sufficient mass explode sometimes, when something deep inside them stops working and collapses. Souls are similar, if they are of sufficient merit, they too are likely to expand outward rapidly should they collapse, engulfing that which is around them. And that’s where we are now, in the middle of a soul gone supernova.”

This can’t be real, I must be dead. Sure, I can understand what she’s trying to say, stars exploding and souls being like them. But supernovae are real and-

“And whatever this is isn’t,” Kai says, finishing a sentence she shouldn’t know the beginning of.

My expression must betray me quickly because she instantly points directly above my head where I can see my thoughts written in kana floating out of my head like steam.

“Now try thinking in German! Ahahahah!” she laughs.

“Stop this!”

“Or what?”

I know she sees it, because I thought it but instead of reacting appropriately she smiles.

“Is that so? I think I’ve figured out why you’re here then.”

She clicks her fingers and my thoughts disappear, from outside my head anyway. She’s scary, it feels like she could just as easily make them disappear from inside too.

“How far are you willing to go to not die?”

“I’ll do anything.”

“Good. I’m gonna teach you how to kill this thing.”

Kai clicks her fingers and the void changes from white to black. Planets and stars and time all whiz past me as it becomes apparent what she is showing me is the vast expanse of space. We start slowing down as we approach a red star which comes to rest in her hand. It looks so tiny compared to us right now but from what I know of stars it has to be several hundred times larger than the Sun, if not thousands.

“Let’s clear the desk.”

Everything that was orbiting the star before is sent off into space by a wave of her arm. I’m sure that nothing she’s showing me is real, but if it is, I just witnessed a crime for which we do not yet have words.

“OK, let’s speed things up a bit.”

Suddenly the star begins expanding rapidly and becoming much brighter.

“There’s a lot of different things that can happen at the end of a star, just like a soul.”

“Stars and souls seem to share more than their fair few similarities.”

“Ain’t it funny?”

Without any further explanation, she returns her focus to the star.

“When a star is about to go supernova its outer layers expand and collapse inwards as the core ceases to function. As the outer layers rush inwards, they reignite the core,” as she says this the star shrinks rapidly and suddenly explodes, “and the resulting explosion shreds the outer layers to pieces, flinging them across space.”

There’s a moment of blinding light and then suddenly we are both standing in a cloud of stardust so thick that I can barely see her. Quickly though, she blows away the dust in front of her face.

“Now this type of supernova, one resulting from a collapse of a core like this, leaves one of two things behind, called a remnant. The first type of remnant is a neutron star, that’s not important right now, we’re interested in the second type.”

She waves her left hand over her right to dissipate the dust, revealing this second type of remnant.

There’s nothing there. We are currently standing in the void of space but what is resting above her hand is an entirely different kind of nothing.

“A black hole…”

“Exactly. Left alone, it will consume anything that gets close. Right now, we are at the event horizon, we need to destroy the ‘black hole’ if you want to escape. Does that make sense?”

“Sounds like a load of bullshit.”

“So does language until you get a taste for it.”

Kai snaps her fingers a final time and the white void returns.

“So what do we do, how do we save Keisuke?”

“There’s no ‘saving him’. We’re not vaccinating a puppy, we’re putting down a dog with rabies.”

It takes all of my strength to not react. Just from this conversation alone, I can tell that she enjoys being callous with her words, I’m sure she’d enjoy me saying something back.

“Can’t you just snap your fingers and make this whole thing disappear???”

“I probably could, but he’d still die and you’d die too. I thought you just decided you wanted to live?”

“I did.”

“Then do what I tell you, I’m your only friend in here.”

“Tell me what to do,” I say, my growing frustration evident.

“I had a look through your memories, and it’s clear that this regret you’re trapped in revolves around you.”

“You did what???”

Kai continues without breaking her cadence.

“He wants to talk to you, then talk to him. Give him whatever he wants, if you do you’ll destroy this regret and your soul should return to your body. Just be careful not to tip anyone off to the fact that you know, otherwise we’ll have issues.”