Thomas Randall - The Waking

Through the open window, they could all hear the teachers’ voices now, shouting and calling to the girl on the roof.

“Can you see who it is?” Miho asked.

But Maiko didn’t need to reply. The teachers began to call out a name, and they all knew, then.

“Hana, no!” they shouted. And, “Hana, wait!”

Though she wasn’t a boarding student, Hana was one of Ume’s friends-one of the soccer girls.

Maiko drew back inside the classroom, one hand over her mouth. She backed up until she stumbled over her own desk and sat hard on her chair. Her eyes were rimmed with red and she looked ill, but her sickly appearance wasn’t new. Maiko had already admitted that the nightmares were making her fall apart. This could only make it worse.

The girl looked right at Kara, returned her stare. Then Maiko gave an awful, brittle little laugh.

“Am I awake?” she asked, her voice very small.

What terrified Kara was the look on the girl’s face. Maiko really didn’t know.

More shouting drifted in from the open window. Kara leaned against the glass, looking out at the teachers. Even at this distance, she saw the sudden change in their faces.

Mr. Matsui actually screamed.

Hana plummeted, without any screams of her own, and when she struck the pavement, she crumpled like a discarded rag doll, bones giving way.

There were shrieks inside the classroom. Miho reached out and took Kara’s hand and they stood together. Ren turned from the window, wiping tears from his eyes.

Everyone looked at Maiko.

Who gazed out the window, not seeing any of them, expression entirely blank.

“I wonder how she got up there,” Maiko said quietly, in a tone that suggested not horror but envy.

“When I decided to come to Japan to teach, I never imagined anything like this,” Rob Harper said. “I know bullying is an epidemic here, but this kind of ugly stuff feels so American to me. I guess I figured I was leaving it behind.”

Kara sat on the floor just outside the closed door of her father’s classroom, knees drawn up beneath her. Inside, he and Miss Aritomo were talking quietly, and though it was obvious they thought otherwise, she could hear almost every word.

“I wish I could disagree, but suicide has become more common here in recent years,” Miss Aritomo said.

Mr. Matsui appeared from his classroom down the hall, glanced up and down and caught sight of Kara. He gave a bow of his head and she returned the gesture. Mr. Matsui walked toward her but turned to go downstairs, no doubt to some kind of gathering of teachers and administrators.

Otherwise, the upper floor seemed deserted. There were police in the building, and there must be plenty of them outside, and the faculty were scattered all over the place, but the students were gone. They had been kept in their classrooms for nearly two hours-through lunch, though no one in Kara’s room seemed to have much of an appetite-and then they had all been dismissed. The boarding students had been the first to be allowed to leave. Only when they had departed, in an orderly fashion, of course, did the day students get the go-ahead to leave.

There would be no o-soji. And the homeroom teachers informed their classes that school had been canceled for the following day, which was Friday.

Kara wanted to go home. And not to the small house she and her father had rented near the school. Home.

Instead, she was the only student still at the school.

Her thoughts drifted, her mind numb, and she wouldn’t even allow herself to think about Sakura or Akane or Jiro-any of it. She rocked a little, impatient, wishing her father could leave now.

Hana had been nothing to her except another sour-faced, jeering girl who took Ume’s lead and sneered at the little gaijin bonsai. But the idea of anyone throwing themselves off the roof, hitting the pavement so hard that their bones gave way in an instant, collapsing like a house of cards… The idea was hideous.

She couldn’t stop wondering why Hana had done it. Maiko had said that she was falling apart because of the nightmares and her inability to sleep. Had the same things driven Hana off the roof?

Kara pushed her palms against her forehead. No more.

In her father’s homeroom, he and Miss Aritomo lowered their voices. Kara listened harder. The only reason for them to quiet down would be if they didn’t want to be overheard. She should have granted them some privacy, but curiosity beat courtesy, and she put her ear close to the sliding door.

“How can you be so certain there’s no connection between Hana and the boy who was killed this weekend?” Rob Harper asked.

“There can’t be,” Miss Aritomo said. “They knew each other from school, of course. But the school isn’t very big; it makes sense that they would know each other. Hana killed herself, Rob. No one pushed her. Half of the teachers saw her jump.”

“And that boy, Jiro, drowned. Two suicides, by students who knew each other? It could have been some kind of lovers’ quarrel.”

Miss Aritomo did not reply at first. Kara could feel the weight of her silence, even through the door.

“What is it?” her father asked.

“Jiro may not have committed suicide.”

“That’s not what I was told.”

“Probably because your daughter is a student here,” Miss Aritomo said. “They wouldn’t risk the other students finding out the truth.. . or worse, their parents.”

“Or they didn’t tell me because I’m a gaijin.”

“That’s possible, too.”

Her father sighed. “So the boy was murdered?”

“The police have not been able to say for certain,” Miss Aritomo replied.

“That’s why they’re still saying he drowned?”

“Jiro did drown, but from what I’ve heard, that isn’t the only reason he died,” Miss Aritomo said. “When they found him, he had been

… most of his blood was gone.”

Kara flinched, trying to process that. She stared at the door.

“How is that possible?” her father asked.

“The police are suggesting that he might have been bleeding into the water,” Miss Aritomo said.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Kara’s father said. “That much blood doesn’t just leak out. He’d have to have been dead before he went into the bay, but that doesn’t work, either, because Jiro couldn’t have swallowed water if he was already dead. Drowning wouldn’t have been part of the cause of death, unless whoever did it had some way to drain his blood-or pump it out, or something-while he was in the bay. That’s insane.”

“Yes. I do not understand how it is possible. But now you see there can’t be any connection between Jiro’s death and Hana’s suicide, unless she was in love with him and killed herself in grief.”

Kara couldn’t listen anymore. Head spinning, she stood and knocked on the door, cutting off the conversation inside.

“Come in,” her father called.

She slid the door open. Her dad and Miss Aritomo looked at her with a mixture of guilt and suspicion, as though they’d been caught in something illicit. That look made Kara think back to a moment she’d barely noticed in their conversation. The art teacher had called her father by his first name, sort of an intimate thing in Japan for a man and woman who were only colleagues.

“Hi, honey. Sorry to keep you waiting,” her father said. “Actually, it’s good that you knocked. We’re supposed to be downstairs by now, I think.”

“I saw Matsui-sensei going down,” Kara said. She glanced at Miss Aritomo and gave her a small bow. “I don’t want to be any trouble. I know there’s a lot going on. But I’d really rather not sit around an empty school waiting, and I know you don’t want me going home alone. Would it be all right if I go over to the dorm and hung around with Miho and Sakura until you can leave?”