by Eto Mori
’Twas the season and all, so the conversation gradually turned in the direction of the entrance exams.
According to Sawada, what really counted when it came to getting into high school was everything up to the second term of ninth grade. It wasn’t just your exam results they looked at. There was apparently this sort of synthesized score that meshed together stuff like your attitude in class, your attendance, and the number of reports and essays you submitted. Makoto had gotten basically the worst score in the first term. Sawada didn’t come right out and say it, but I got the sense that “worst” here was exactly what it sounded like, the lowest of everyone in the class.
All of which meant his back was to the wall. Makoto had to do whatever it took to turn things around in the second half of the term.
“That’s where we’re at here.” Sawada shook his head, almost hopelessly. “So what’s it going to be, Kobayashi? Keep this up, and your only shot’s going to be focusing on a single private school.”
“A single private school?”
“If you really buckle down and study like your life depends on it, we’re looking at a different story. Then we might have a hope of you pulling off a decent score on the entrance exam itself. But it’s risky to bet the farm on the exam when you’ve got this synthesized score hanging around your neck. You want a rock solid way forward; you’re looking at applying to just one school with a referral. I know requirements for referrals have gotten looser at public schools lately, but still, your best bet’s to apply for early decision to just one private school.”
“So even I could make it if I focus on applying to just one school?”
He nodded. “If you don’t care what school it is.”
Just one school. I didn’t understand much of this, but I decided right then and there that that’s what I’d do.
“Okay, that sounds good.”
“What?”
“I’ve decided to just apply to one private school.”
“Decided? Look, don’t make up your mind right away—”
“I don’t care what high school I go to.”
“But the level you’re at now could only get you into . . .”
“It’s fine,” I declared. “I’m fine with my level.”
I figured that was the end of the conversation, so I stood up from my chair. I guess there wasn’t anything to get worked up about here.
“So you’re the coasting type, huh?” Sawada cocked his head to one side. He lowered his voice so that none of the other teachers would hear him. “Lot of you lately. Applying to high school with basically zero drive. No fighting spirit. Well, sure. Why not? But you still got some time. I want you to really think it over. And talk to your parents about this.”
He grabbed my shoulder with his meaty hand and pushed me back into the chair. “How’ve you been anyway? You know.”
“Know what?”
“You know, that, um, you know. The, uh . . .” Sawada mumbled, awkwardly. “Ah, you know, that whole thing. Your mom asked me not to mention it for a while, but I’m just . . . concerned, you know?”
“Ohh.” I suddenly understood what he was getting at. “You mean the suicide?”
“H-hey,” he hissed. “You don’t just say it.”
“Well, if that’s what you’re talking about, I’m fine now. I wasn’t thinking straight. I won’t do it again.” I gave him a very “everything’s all right” smile.
Sawada leaned in close. “You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“You wanna bet on it?”
“I won’t bet on it.”
“Stingy.”
“I could say the same about you, Mr. Sawada.”
“Yeah, I do feel like you’ve had some kind of breakthrough lately.” He stared at me hard, his gorilla face firm. “But you tell me right away if you run into any trouble in class or anything. I’ll help. You know my help’s amaaaaazing.”
This was apparently no lie. According to Prapura, Sawada really had a way with his students and worked to keep them safe. He was always saying, “I catch you bullying anyone, I’ll knock you into next week. Then I’ll hear what you have to say.” Getting this man as his homeroom teacher was maybe one of the few—near-zero—bits of good luck Makoto had had.
Lost in thought, I bowed to him lightly and left the teachers’ room.
That night, I announced to Makoto’s mother, “I’m going to focus on a single private high school. Just one entrance exam.”
Personally, I was just hoping to put the issue of cram school to bed. Makoto hadn’t attended since his suicide, and I wanted to quit. As long as I didn’t have any lofty aspirations, I’d manage to get into high school with whatever academic abilities I happened to have now. “What? Really? You already decided?” She seemed upset by my sudden declaration. “Did you discuss this with your teacher?”
“Yeah.”
“And he said this is what you should do?”
“Mm.”
“I see . . .” She fell into deep thought.
I, too, was preoccupied with something other than her reaction to my big news. It was seven p.m., the time we usually had supper. And yet this evening, the only people around the living room table were the mother and me. Why was it so quiet?
Mitsuru was one thing, since he went to cram school pretty much every night. But this was the first time since I’d gotten out of the hospital that the father wasn’t sitting here like a lump.
“Dad’s going to go back to working overtime again.” The mother turned her eyes toward the father’s empty seat, as if seeing the unspoken question written on my face. “I’m sure you understand, Makoto. The company’s going through some tough times right now. They’re really having to work to get back the public trust after the corruption scandal. Dad insisted that you were more important, though, and arranged it so he could come home early for the last while. But it’s getting a bit tricky for him to keep doing that. You’re doing pretty well now, so he decided to roll up his sleeves and get back to work.”
“Huh.” I snorted. “Must be rough being the manager.”
“It is.” She nodded, serious. Too dense to catch the sarcasm, apparently. “He has a lot of new things to learn.”
Did this mean supper was basically going to be me and her from now on? The mere thought of it depressed me. I mean, any kid was going to be put off by the idea of having dinner alone with his mom, and it wasn’t even my mother here. A depraved old lady, a total stranger. A married adulteress. None of this actually had anything to do with me, but still, a visceral discomfort with the whole mess sort of exploded up from the pit of my stomach sometimes and made me horribly cruel.
“Y’know, eating supper just the two of us?” Yup, like this, for example. I shot a look of laser-focused contempt at the mother’s nervous eyes. “I dunno. Makes me wanna vomit.” I dropped my chopsticks and returned to my room on quick feet.
After that, her eyes would be red and teary whenever I passed by her going to the bathroom or something, and it did make me feel bad in a way. But she was the one in the wrong in the first place. Why should I get stuck with these twitchy pangs of conscience? So then I would get twice as angry. I despised these tears of hers, I was sure they were just for show.
They were nothing more than a simple host family, just a temporary place to rest my head, and yet I was always on edge in the Kobayashi house. At times like this, I would think about Hiroka Kuwabara, a soothing magic to calm my raging heart.
Her round face, her syrupy voice cast a spell, comforting me. I spent more and more of each passing day daydreaming about her, although I still didn’t know if it was what you’d call love. Sometimes, on sleepless nights, I’d even fantasize about her while I satisfied the needs of Makoto’s body. This guy was annoyingly high maintenance.
After spending a number of days like this, I started to have doubts about the memories in Prapura’s guidebook. Simply put, I started to feel like the whole thing was a misunderstanding on Makoto’s part.
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br /> The way I saw it, the middle-aged man with Hiroka must have been her father. Makoto had just jumped to the wrong conclusion, like how people always did on TV or in manga. He’d fallen into the most common of traps. Of course. That was obviously what happened . . . But then why a love hotel, of all places?
Oh! Her father collapsed! Yes, right. He was walking around with Hiroka and he suddenly got very sick. Hiroka looked around for a place where he could lie down, but there was nowhere. She had no other choice but to rent a love hotel room for two hours so he could rest. Happens all the time. I’ve seen it happen myself. You could even say it’s an everyday occurrence—as if.
As if. No way.
“Um, I wanted to ask you something.” I turned to Prapura one night, too tangled up in my own thoughts to come to any real answers about anything. “So I’m in the body of Makoto Kobayashi, but I’m really just a soul, right? A soul, that’s a spirit. It’s light and invisible and can basically fly all free wherever it wants, right?”
“If,” Prapura replied, curtly. “If you wanted to fly ‘all free’ to Hiroka Kuwabara’s room and peep while she changes, you’d best abandon that idea immediately.”
“Eep!” I was taken aback. “How’d you know?”
“Men always ask me that.” The angel’s voice was cold; he was apparently sick of this line of questioning. “Every Tom, Dick, and Harry thinks a soul is a ghost or an invisible man. They just lump them all together into the same box. But I am sorry to inform you that you are not free like a ghost, and you don’t have any special talents like invisibility. You’re nothing more than a soul without a shell. Plus, you’re bound to Makoto Kobayashi’s flesh now, so you can’t come and go as you please. If you absolutely must see Hiroka Kuwabara changing, you’ll have to go in through the front door like everyone else.”
“Hngh!” I threw myself back on the bed, crestfallen.
“Hey!” Prapura snapped, his voice even colder now. “You didn’t actually call me here just to discuss your baser instincts, did you?”
Pouting, I sat up and looked at the angel by the window. He was wearing his usual poker face, but his eyes were as cold as his voice. He looked upset.
I leaped off the bed and pulled the cards of out my desk drawer. “How about we go for round seven?” I grinned up at him.
Prapura pointed to the desk chair without returning my smile. “Sit a minute.”
“Huh?”
“Just sit.”
“Uh-huh.” At an impasse, I sat.
“Now, look.” Prapura was on me immediately, lecturing me with enough force to strip the guts out of my body, like he was cleaning a fish he’d just pulled out of the water. “I’ve wanted to ask you this for a while now, but are you—how can I put this—are you aware of the fact that you’re here for a do-over? You do know that this is a place for you to find new discipline and get stronger, yes? If I didn’t actually stand up and say something, how long would you drift along like this?”
It’d been about a month since the start of my homestay. And apparently, Prapura was not pleased with my way of being Makoto Kobayashi.
“Given that this is a do-over, a certain amount of doing is indeed required here,” he said, his tone unusually severe.
I’d failed in my previous life in this world, and now I was supposed to somehow work my soul hard enough that it reached the level where I qualified for rebirth once again. With verve! Gusto! Guts! And yet here I was, without even a single one of those exclamation points attached to any of my actions. Although Prapura thought highly of my enthusiasm for oil painting, I wasn’t doing anything but oil painting, and the only thing in my head was Hiroka Kuwabara. And now that I’d defaulted to the easiest option for the entrance exams, it was clear that there wasn’t much in the way of discipline or training happening in this life of mine. But if I didn’t train, my soul would be stuck at the same level. And I could only remember the mistake I’d made in my past life when my soul leveled up. As long as I continued along this path, Prapura doubted that would ever happen.
“I mean, you’re not even trying to recall your past life, are you? Have you forgotten what you’re here for? Believe me, it gives me no pleasure to sit you down like this, but being a guide starts to feel pretty meaningless when the person you’re supposed to be guiding doesn’t even make half an effort. Honestly. I’m jealous of the guides with souls who actually show up.” Prapura ended his lecture with this complaint, and then sighed as he sat down on the edge of the bed.
“You done?” I asked, but I got no reply. He was apparently done. “Okay then, just let me say this. I have thought about this mistake in my past life. Like, I must’ve screwed up pretty bad to end up in a placement like this. Maybe I killed someone. Maybe I stole a whole bunch of money. Maybe a hundred people got hurt because I messed up. But do you think it’s fun to think about that stuff? It’s a bummer. It’s seriously depressing.”
I crossed my legs and sat up straighter as I glared at him, resentfully.
“First of all, okay? Even if I did somehow remember this mistake of mine and manage to say farewell to this body, it’ll just be some other sucker next time. Say I’m reborn as—I dunno—Jun Komori or Shin Koyama, I’ve got no guarantee they’ll be any better than Makoto Kobayashi. I honestly doubt the next go-round’s for sure going to be a life of sunshine and roses, you know?”
“Or Yuko Koike or Yoko Kogawa, hm?” Prapura added, with a serious look. “You won’t necessarily be reborn as a man.”
“The thing here is that I might be different when I’m reborn, but the world I’m born into won’t. Maybe I’ll end up facing the same terrible situation in my next life that I did in my previous life. All the stuff that happened to Makoto Kobayashi could happen to Jun Komori or Yoko Koike, too.”
“In other words, the fact that the conditions are the same for everyone. No one is born with any sort of guarantee.”
“Just like a homestay placement, right? Hit or miss. You won’t know until you open the box.” I laughed, coldly. “Your boss sure likes the hard sell.”
Although I was just arguing for the sake of arguing at first, the more I talked, the more I felt sad for real. I was actually a lot more scared and anxious than I’d realized about all of this, about being born into some other strange family, about having to start life over from scratch and form new relationships in that new world.
Honestly. What had my past life been like?
Prapura placed a hand on my shoulder. I looked back with a wry smile and he returned it as he reached out toward the desk. His fingers wrapped around the cards. “How about it? Round seven?”
A do-over was so easy in a game.
4
The first Sunday in November, I cut Makoto’s mop of hair and pushed up the front with some hair mousse.
When I passed Hiroka in the hallway at school the next day, she cried out, “Makoto, you look so hot!” This compliment was the finest moment of my Makoto Kobayashi life.
I withdrew Makoto’s savings and bought some popular sneakers, and soon, all the guys in class were whispering in my ear. “Wow. How much did those cost?”
When I talked to the guys sitting near me these days, like “When’s the next gym period?” or “Lend me an eraser,” they didn’t jump like I was a pregnant alien anymore. My classmates were gradually getting used to my version of Makoto Kobayashi. All except for Shoko Sano, who continued to doggedly investigate the mystery of my transformation.
I was also making good headway—albeit slowly—on my work in progress. I had a real chance of finishing the whole painting before school let out for winter break.
Prapura had given me that big lecture about training, but now that I really thought about it, I was indeed making progress, just doing it in my own way, at my own pace. I still had zero interest in training to be reborn, but I could at least be a little creative and make my life as Makoto more comfortable. See how it makes me look taller with my bangs spiked up with the mousse?
“Don’t
let your guard down.” Prapura wagged a finger at me just when I was feeling a bit proud of myself, like I was finally getting the hang of this. “A homestay’s like driving a car. It’s most dangerous when you start to get used to it.”
He was exactly right.
Bad stuff has this way of just attacking out of the blue. It’s actually there all the time, though, carefully laying in wait on all sides, just out of sight.
Once I settled on a policy of “happily attending whatever high school would have me,” I put the entrance exams completely out of my head. I assumed everyone else had done the same. So when the father asked that I go to a public high school instead, one night in the middle of November when he joined us for supper for the first time in two weeks, it was a total bolt from the blue.
Why now?! I didn’t see the plot twist coming at all.
“Truth is, Mitsuru’s switched his major for college. He wants to go into medicine now.” The father tentatively broached the subject, looking extremely uncomfortable, as we faced each other over the heated kotatsu table that had recently appeared in the Kobayashi living room. “He’s been studying for the entrance exam every day morning till night. He’s really putting his heart into it, giving it everything he has. Your mom and I’d like to make that dream happen for him, but you know, the tuition for medical school is outrageously expensive, even for public ones. If we’re paying for your private school tuition on top of that, well, to be honest, for this family, it’s a little . . .” He trailed off, and the mother picked up where he left off.
“You know your dad’s company’s going through a rough patch right now. They’re still sorting everything out. The senior management’s all been replaced. And the company hasn’t managed to get their clients’ trust back yet. Dad did get promoted, but he might not get his bonus this year. And we don’t know what’s going to happen from now on, either.” She rambled on and on before pulling up abruptly. “Oh! But of course, this is just if you can get into a public school. Obviously, if you don’t pass the exam, that would be the end of that.”