‘Well, no, I guess not.’ Yuichi shrugged.
Kikuchi stood and left his desk. Talking time was over.
Yuichi watched him go, a mix of emotions in his chest. Then he felt someone else’s eyes on him. He turned and saw Ryo looking at him. The boy’s cold, calculating stare gave Yuichi a chill.
It was over a moment later. Ryo looked back down at his desk and started reading a book. There was a patchwork bag on the desk next to his book, embroidered with the initials ‘RK.’
Yuichi was walking home from school that afternoon when someone ran up and grabbed him on the shoulder. He looked around to see Muta glaring at him, rage in his eyes. Two of his friends were behind him. They all had the same look on their faces.
‘Come on,’ Muta growled in a low voice that made Yuichi feel like his heart was being squeezed out of his chest.
They dragged Yuichi into a narrow alleyway. Muta stood directly in front of him with his two cronies holding Yuichi on either side. Muta grabbed Yuichi by his collar, lifting him up until Yuichi had to stand on tiptoe.
‘You sold me out,’ Muta said.
Yuichi shook his head furiously. His face was drawn tight with fear.
‘You squealed.’ Muta bared his teeth as he brought his face closer to Yuichi’s. ‘You’re the only one who could have.’
Yuichi kept shaking his head. ‘I didn’t say anything. Honest!’
‘Liar,’ the boy to his left said. ‘We’re going to fuck you up.’
‘Tell the truth!’ Muta gave Yuichi a violent shake.
Yuichi felt his back pressed up against the wall, the coolness of the concrete through his shirt.
‘Honest. It’s not a lie! I didn’t say a word.’
‘Really?’
‘Really!’ Yuichi pleaded.
Muta glared at him for a moment, then suddenly released him. The boy to his right swore under his breath.
Yuichi put a hand to his own throat and swallowed. That was close.
But the next moment, Muta’s face twisted into a wicked grin. There was no time to react, not even time to shout. With the first hit, Yuichi was down on all fours.
He could feel the side of his face stinging and belatedly realised he’d been punched.
‘It was you!’ Muta shouted, and Yuichi felt something enter his mouth. He was already lying with his back on the ground by the time he understood it had been the tip of Muta’s shoe.
There was a cut in his mouth, and he tasted blood. Tastes like sucking on a coin, he thought, as a staggering pain washed over him. Yuichi put his face in his hands and curled into a ball as the boys kicked him in the ribs, over and over.
THREE
Tomohiko Sonomura opened the door to a loud ringing of bells over his head. The café he’d been told to go was a tiny place, with a small bar and two dinky tables, one of which only sat two.
He looked around, hesitating a moment before taking a seat at the smaller table – the other table being occupied. They’d never spoken, but Tomohiko recognised him as Murashita from Class 3. He was rail-thin, and his high cheekbones gave him an almost foreign look. It was the kind of face Tomohiko imagined girls went for. His hair was long and wavy, too. He wouldn’t have seemed out of place in a band. He was wearing a black leather waistcoat over a grey shirt, and tight jeans as if to show off his long, skinny legs.
Murashita was reading a copy of Shonen Jump. He looked up once when Tomohiko walked in but quickly went back to his manga. He might have been there waiting for someone but clearly it wasn’t Tomohiko. There was a coffee cup and a red ashtray on the table. Smoke drifted up from a lit cigarette in the ashtray. He didn’t seem to be worried that the guidance counsellor would find him all the way out here. It was two stops away on the subway from the station closest to their high school.
There was no waitress, just a greying man who came out from behind the counter and put a glass of water on Tomohiko’s table. The man smiled but didn’t say a word.
Tomohiko asked for coffee without even looking at the menu. The man nodded and went back behind the counter.
Tomohiko took a sip of water and glanced back at Murashita, who was still reading his manga. When the radio on the counter switched from playing Olivia Newton-John to the theme song to Galaxy Express 999, he frowned. Apparently Murashita preferred Western music to local fare.
It occurred to Tomohiko that Murashita might actually be waiting for the same person he was.
Tomohiko looked around the café. Usually places like this had a Space Invaders game in the corner, but there was nothing of the kind here. Tomohiko didn’t mind. He was already sick of Space Invaders. The rhythms of the game – when to shoot, how to score big – were already ingrained in his fingers. Put him in any arcade and he was confident he’d be at the top of the scoreboards in no time. If anything still interested him about Space Invaders, it was the code that made the game run but he’d almost finished learning all there was to know about that, too.
Out of boredom he opened the menu. He realised that this was, in fact, a speciality coffee shop. There were dozens of brands listed, some he’d even heard of. He was glad he hadn’t looked at the menu before ordering, otherwise he never would’ve had the balls to just order coffee. No, he would have ended up getting the Colombian, or the mocha, and spending an extra fifty or a hundred yen. Even little outlays like that hurt, these days.
The jacket had clearly been a mistake, maybe the worst yet, Tomohiko thought. He and a friend had gone into a men’s boutique shop to shoplift when the guy at the register caught them. His technique was simple: he pretended to be trying on a pair of jeans so he could stuff the jacket he’d brought into the changing room into his own bag. But when he brought the jeans back to the shelf and tried to leave, the guy at the register headed them off at the door. He remembered feeling like his heart had stopped.
Thankfully, the guy was more interested in making a sale than turning young punks over to the authorities. He treated Tomohiko as a customer who’d ‘mistakenly placed an object for purchase in his personal bag’. No police were called and their parents and the school didn’t hear about it, but he had to pay for the jacket to the tune of twenty-three thousand yen. Of course he didn’t have that much money on him, so the employee took his student ID and told him to go and get the money from home. Tomohiko ran home and scraped together all the money in his room, fifteen thousand yen, and borrowed another eight from his friend to pay for the jacket.
Of course, he’d come out of the whole thing with a trendy new jacket, so he couldn’t really call it a total loss. Except for the fact that the jacket wasn’t something he would have actually paid money for. He’d just grabbed it off the shelf when he thought no one was looking. Since then he’d regretted not having that twenty-three thousand at least a hundred times. He could have gone on a shopping spree. He could have gone to see a movie. But now, except for the money his mom gave him for lunch every day, his personal funds had been reduced to zero. Worse than that, he still owed his friend eight thousand.
Tomohiko took a sip of the two-hundred-yen coffee the man had brought him. It was good.
I hope this isn’t a waste of time, he thought, looking up at the clock on the wall. He’d come here to hear about a ‘job opportunity’. That was how Ryo Kirihara had described it.
It was five o’clock on the dot when Ryo showed up.
Ryo looked at Tomohiko first when he walked in. Then his eyes went to Murashita and he snorted. ‘Why aren’t you guys sitting together?’