Brave Story by Miyuki Miyabe Page B

graduated from some sort of comedy boot camp and now, in overdrive, his brain crackled at super speed, turning over snappy oneliners in his head, considering and discarding one every thousandth of every millisecond.
    What is this? National Good-Looking Boys & Girls Week? He abandoned the line as soon as it occurred to him. Too smug. Then he noticed the name tag on the black sweatshirt: “Mitsuru Ashikawa.”
    “…Mitsuru Ashikawa. He grew up overseas, you know…”
    It’s him! The transfer student!
    Before Wataru could think of something clever to say, Ashikawa slipped past him into the classroom. He moved so swiftly that Wataru stood staring at the blank space where he had been standing for a full two seconds before he realized the boy was gone. When he finally turned around to look back into the room behind him, most of the students were seated at their desks, and the period bell (actually a computer-generated tone) tolled over the P.A. system for the last time, its final synthesized note shimmering and fading into silence.
    Wataru sprinted back to his own classroom. His heart was racing.
     
    After school, Wataru walked home, and then headed back out to cram school a bit earlier than usual. He knew that Yutaro often came early as well, and could be found quietly studying in a corner.
    Kasuga Seminars was a five-minute bike ride away, and occupied the entire third floor of a four-story building. It was divided into three classrooms, and Wataru’s fifth-grade class met three times a week in the northernmost corner room. He attended a two-hour class focusing on Japanese and math.
    He arrived to find Yutaro sitting by himself, as expected, in his favorite place in the corner of the classroom. He was looking at a textbook, with his handwritten notes on pieces of paper spread out in a strange pattern on the desk around him. It looked like he was studying math.
    In the Miyahara household, Yutaro was the oldest of three children. Their father ran a gasoline stand. Yutaro’s younger brother was in preschool, and his sister was still in diapers. Miyahara’s mother had divorced his father some time ago, and his siblings were children from his mother’s second marriage.
    Yutaro was studying at cram school because it was too noisy at his house to get any work done. The instructor understood his dilemma, and let him use the room prior to classes. He got special treatment not because he had younger siblings—plenty of other students were in the same boat—but because Yutaro was the only one among them who would actually go out of his way to study. Everyone else just used noisy brothers and sisters as an excuse to goof off.
    Wataru walked into the classroom, and Yutaro looked up. He twitched and glanced at the clock on the wall. He must’ve thought it was time for class to begin already.
    Wataru waved and made his way over to the other side of the room. “Do you have a second to talk?” he asked.
    “Sure. What is it?” Yutaro said, bluntly.
    Wataru paused. Now that he was here, he realized he couldn’t just blurt out that he had come to ask him about the picture of the ghost. That would sound too childish. Still, after a bit of small talk, he managed to get around to the topic at hand.
    “Oh, that!” Yutaro said, his face brightening. “It’s the talk of the school these days, I hear.”
    “So was it really a ghost in the picture?”
    “Nah,” Yutaro leaned back in his chair and ran his fingers through his perfectly combed hair. He was still smiling. “Sure, there was something that looked kind of like a face above this one particular azalea. But it could’ve been anything. We all acted like it was a ghost and had a good laugh about it, but I don’t think anyone really believes it.”
    “You know the rumors that the half-built building next to the Mihashi Shrine is haunted, right?”
    “Sure, everybody knows that.”
    “You think there’s a connection?”
    “A connection between a rumored supernatural