Work Text:
Touko picks her way through the grey sidewalk slush and the snow drifts down half-heartedly, settling on her coat, melting down through her cuffs, seeping in beneath her collar. The remembrance service was compulsory, and dull, and the possibility that Tachibana-san – who stood beside her with the stoniest expression, clutching his single white candle and squeezing back his tears – might have accidentally dripped hot wax on her bare wrist the only remotely interesting part.
She shucks her shoes off inside the door and trudges through to the kitchen.
“You’re leaving rather a trail,” says her mother, who is standing at the window with a water glass in hand. Her silhouette is smooth and dark against the cold grey skies outside.
Touko looks back. Her socks and the tails of her braids have been dripping; little murky puddles trace all the way back down the dim hall. “I-if you’re just trying to, to tell me you want all tangible manifestations of my f-filth erased from, um – erased from the world, then you can j-just say…”
“Oh, no,” says her other mother, who is peeling and coring and dicing apples at the table in a slow, methodical fashion, “we’d never want that.”
“Just think of the havoc it would play with your royalties,” says her mother, and she tilts her head, just so, till light winks from the silver studs in her ears in the most elegant, infuriating manner.
Touko hovers in the doorway, chewing the side of her thumb in profound agitation. Her mother at the window has turned back to contemplation of the dim snow-blown garden, her bob precise in silhouette. Her mother at the table polishes another apple on the hem of her blouse and sets it on the chopping board. The kitchen lights glimmer very brightly on the chromium sink.
“You don’t – want me here anyway, y-you agreed with me so I’d – leave faster, so I wouldn’t have anything to, uh – t-to complain about,” says Touko.
“If you insist,” says her mother.
“I don’t need to insist when it’s the – the truth,” says Touko.
“Well, if you’re sure,” says her other mother.
“You’re j-just doing it again!”
The juicer judders to life on the tabletop with an aggressive whurrurrurr. Touko hovers anxiously in the doorway a moment longer; and then she turns, and bolts for the stairs.
---
Touko rolls over far enough to hit her elbow on the bedside table, and after one hazy moment she’s awake: her duvet’s slipped half-off her bed, and her feet are numb from cold, and her nightdress is rucked round her waist and uncomfortable, and her tongue is – is –
She lurches upright, grabs at her jaw: but the feeling’s gone. Her alarm rings for five AM and she slams it off, distracted, and when she presses her hands to the cold sides of her sink thirty seconds later and stretches out her tongue for the mirror, it doesn’t even reach her chin.
She is so sure she woke up to feel it lolling on the floorboards.
---
“I don’t have time for television, I don’t have time for anything th-that isn’t – isn’t working for my public – and homework, and exams, and term papers and –”
“Just look at this,” says her father, again, so she scowls and pushes back the door.
“– way to soccer practice, but his journey was cut as tragically short as his life –”
“If you think i-it’s funny to, to waste my time,” Touko says, glowering at the sleek and neatly groomed newsreader on screen, “if – if you think m-my time is that worthless –”
“Oh, Touko,” says her father, “get a grip,” and he stretches himself back across the couch. The couch is pale cream velour and when her parents go upstairs at night they pull a protective sheet down over it. She clutches the strap of her satchel and doesn’t sit down.
“All he wanted was a Filet-O-Fish. Instead, this young star found death.” A photo fades up onto the screen: bleached spiked hair, regrettable overbite, carefully tended yearbook smirk. Her satchel hits the floor with a heavy carpet-muffled thud. Textbooks slither out. “The principal of Kurosawa High School has announced a second remembrance service to be –”
“That’s – th-that’s Honda-senpai, that’s – I know him –”
“Knew him,” corrects her father, and laughs his wheezy laugh. “Your school again, isn’t it? Thought you might.”
“He’s been – wh-what happened, he’s been murdered too? Honda-senpai?”
Her father taps the remote control to his lips; his gaze is on the television. She winds one braid round and round and round her hand and tugs till it burns and the newsreader reappears on screen to say: “In a suburb still shaken from the murder of seventeen-year-old Satono Takefumi-shi two days ago, the brutal death of another young boy so soon after has not been –”
“W-was it the same?” demands Touko, “with the, the writing? A-and – scissors?” but then she’s seized by a sudden, all-consuming revulsion at how prurient her curiosity must seem – so cheap! so tawdry! so much the territory of the tasteless hordes the news report is aimed at! – and says, abruptly despondent: “If Honda-senpai w-was in trouble he, he could have t-told me…”
The daylight is grey and strained. “District police remain silent, for now, on suggestions the two murders may be linked. Coming up next –” the soft background music veers wildly up and out into a jingle that’s all edges, “– could you be Japan’s next breakout surfing star? We answer this question and many –”
“I’d gladly h-have sacrificed m-my miserable life,” says Touko, “if I knew it could, c-could have prolonged his existence…”
“Jesus Christ,” says her father, “cheer up,” and he turns his head to raise an eyebrow at her that she misses, because she’s crouching, scrabbling her textbooks back into her arms.
---
She hurls herself into her room and slams the door, drops her satchel on the floor and her coat on the bed and herself to her knees before the desk. The key to the bottom drawer isn’t where she left it, zipped inside the back pocket of her purse. She fumbles through her skirt pockets and it’s not there either.
Sheaves of paper topple from the desk. It’s not in her schoolwork. One after the other she shakes out notepads: a hardware store receipt for ten rolls of sandpaper and two square meters of sheet steel flutters out, but no key. In her tin of hair ties – behind her lamp – she upturns a cup full of pencils and they clatter out across the desk and there’s no key, there’s no key! – Touko drags her satchel over and empties it on the dully polished floorboards and paws through the contents – nothing, nothing, she’ll need to learn to lockpick – the world doesn’t want to see her suffer, it just doesn’t care if she does! – abruptly she shoves herself back to her feet and flips up the laptop’s lid.
And there it is, on the touchpad: a little copper key.
The drawer slams out. Tidily arranged top-to-toe inside are five fresh pairs of silver scissors, shining bright and reflective in the pale light from the window. She shoves them aside and pulls up the dishtowel they rest on and rummages at the back, behind the belt sander she never bought and the small stack of square-cut sharp-edged sheet metal panels she never bought either: but those are the only scissors in there.
“There were ten,” she says, to herself, “ten pairs, there w-were ten,” and it’s no more reassuring to hear it aloud. Five pairs gleam up at her; five pairs have been left for her. A blowdryer whirs quietly in her mothers’ room next door.
There’s a yellow sticky note crumpled at the bottom of the drawer. She stops chewing at her thumb and picks it up and smoothes it out.
you’re probably gonna want to keep that key in a safer place from now on!!! ;) love touko xxx
“I’m Touko,” says Touko. It doesn’t sound convincing. She chews on her thumb a few moments more and then she folds the dishcloth up over the remaining scissors and shuts the drawer and locks it.
---
The ice is melting and the road grit is sloshing through the gutters, and rising up behind grey rows of houses the city’s foothills are a dingy, misty winter brown. Touko’s trudging past the tall barred fence of the soccer field right up till there’s a pressure in her head like breath held way too long and then she’s not: she’s losing her balance in a room that smells like sweat and blood and hair spray.
She stumbles and hits a wall of lockers that shakes and clangs against itself – it’s warm, and the floor she skids down onto is tiled and muddy in the cracks. In the far corner, one stray shinpad lies unbuckled.
“If th-this is a kidnapping,” she says, and clambers unsteadily back up, “I j-just want to let you know I’ll – I’ll w-willingly – submit… to w-whatever depravities you have in, in mind…”
The pegs along the wall across from her are empty; there’s a yellow sports shirt wadded up on the bench. Behind the lockers, something drips.
“Unless you d-don’t want the, the s-services of a girl as ugly a-as me,” says Touko, when no answer comes, and she waits for a moment but there’s still no answer, so she drags at her braids and scowls. “Or you c-can keep i-ignoring me, I know what th-that feels like…”
Her loafers only squeak out one step before she stops. There’s something heavy beneath her skirt. She sends a quick and shifty glare behind her and then she hitches it, all the way up: and there’s a leather band round her thigh where there wasn’t one before, its leather tie tied tight and a thin leather pocket on the side.
Its edges are rough, its stitches are crude; there’s a single pair of scissors tucked inside.
The room crowds close around Touko and then it veers very far away. She scrabbles for the clasp on her satchel and drops the scissors in.
Behind the lockers: drip drip drip.
Her palms are getting sweaty and her hands are getting shaky, so she wipes them down her skirt and seizes her braids back up before she takes a breath and peers, anxiously, round the end of the lockers.
Once her father threw a jar of tomato sauce and when it smashed it smeared all down the kitchen wall, red and lumpy and studded with glass; and it looked hardly anything like the bloodstains soaked and glistening through the scene before her now, but her breath is coming out rapid and whistling, and Takeda Erio-san’s arms are pinned out against the wall with glinting silver scissors splayed through his wrists, and his throat is cross-sectioned and wide and his head lolls back at no natural angle and his soccer uniform sags dark and sodden from his frame, and it’s far easier to draw one crass comparison than consider – to think about her father than – to remember a, a –
Below the flickering neon lights laid into the ceiling of the locker room, the wide wet blood puddle on the tiles below his body gleams black. Jubilant red strokes across the wall behind him – a slogan she’s not going to dignify with reading – though she’s seen it in the papers and the news and the forums and she knows just what it is and what it means and who it –
From his wrists, and his throat, and his torso: drip. drip. drip.
Touko feels the weight in her head double and triple and crush her and
she opens her eyes on a narrow road just off the high street, under a sky that’s a dead and clouded white. Her satchel feels heavier than it did: she stumbles to the nearest garbage bin and vomits, and vomits again, and then she wipes her mouth on her sleeve and unclasps it to scrutinize its contents. Her textbooks; and her laptop; and the spare pair of scissors fished from below her skirt, gleaming where the shadows of the late afternoon light don’t hit them; and a fat red roll of brand new sandpaper that she knows for a fact wasn’t there the last time she looked.
Touko dumps the sandpaper in the garbage bin and slams the lid down with a raucous echoing clang.
---
Water drums on the walls and Touko’s scooping up one sodden twist of hair above her head to rinse it out when she notices: a brief stinging in her thigh, and she squints down through short-sightedness and the hot hiss of the shower to see what’s there. It’s – scratches? grazing, maybe? – but without her glasses the world looks like someone smudged it as it went to press, and she can’t make out a thing, so she sits down on the floor of the shower and crouches as low as she can get.
Her hair curls and coils darkly around her towards the drain; the shower’s streaming and blurring over her eyes; she can hardly see. It looks like a tally, or a countdown – she squints harder – no, a tally – scratched onto the very topmost part of her leg, where she’s the only person to have ever been and likely the only one who ever will – five of something? –
And then abruptly she’s remembering the last night she showered: a while, maybe a week – more than a week – in fact she knows exactly, because it was the night Satono-san was murdered, and she sat at her desk, watching the live news feed, rebraiding her damp hair – it’s been eight days and five murders, and a tally of five, and Touko lurches to her feet and skids on the smooth base of the shower. She doesn’t shut the door behind her as she stumbles out and the water drums on, loudly; her hair tangles round her knees and she swipes it agitatedly back. She snatches up her glasses from the top of the cistern to slip them on: and there is almost no question that someone has been using her thigh as a handy place to keep count of – something.
A smell like sweet potato roasting curls in round the edges of the shut-tight door, up from downstairs; her father and her other mother are laughing together in a low, unremarkable manner. Touko dresses rapidly and doesn’t look at herself in the mirror.
---
She blacks out in the middle of math class and comes to with her forehead propped on the door of a train toilet, the floor vibrating beneath her feet and the view – once she stops hyperventilating and pushes back the latch to the carriage – trundling past on an uneven rhythm. The view is roofs and the grey backs of warehouses, faded advertisement sidings tilted up at opportune angles on the train’s embankments, scratchy thin trees lining the tracks and nothing at all that she recognizes; but when the ticket inspector comes she rummages in her skirt pockets and finds a ticket all the same. She offers it up, hot-faced, and he stamps it and returns it. It’s a children’s month pass and it’s made out to Fukawa Touko, but Touko knows she didn’t buy it.
There’s the first patter of rain on the train windows. The patter persists, and then the sky clouds over grey and it’s hammering down, the rattle of wheels on the tracks and rain drumming on the roof, close and unrelenting. She curls her feet up under her and leans her forehead on the window. She doesn’t have her satchel with her, so she can’t work; she doesn’t have her satchel with her, and it’s five in the evening, so she’s going to need to stop by the school to fetch it before she can work, because she needs to work. She always needs to work. The rain drums down and the sky grows greyer, and Touko finds her cell phone tucked inside her bra, where she has never kept it in her life.
She checks her emails; she checks her Amazon rankings; she checks the headlines. She looks out the window at the pylons reaching up across the tracks and the murky sky behind them, and she definitely doesn’t think about the unusual lightness of the weight below her skirt, like perhaps something that was strapped to her thigh this morning has since disappeared. She checks the headlines; she checks them again. The woman beside her is playing Sudoku on an iPad, entirely absorbed, glossed nails tapping out numbers on the screen. Touko huffs at the gloss – cheap, vain, slutty – and turns away.
It’s more than half an hour before anything shows up, and then it’s a deluge. Victim, 21 – champion debater, stabbed – Komatsu-chi, 21, celebrating after the semi-finals – the young victim, Taro-kun – a now distressingly familiar message left beside – in nine days, six young lives snatched away – a killer the media is calling ‘Genocider Syo’ –
But that’s a new one: Syo with the kanji for writer, Genocider as in – as in the kind of person who might kill six men in nine days. Touko tugs anxiously at the ribbon of her collar for a moment, and then she takes her hand away and chews her thumb and searches it.
Thousands of hits scroll up the screen. The murderer reporters have called ‘Genocider Syo’ – known to the public as ‘Genocider Syo’ – ‘Genocider Syo’, the nickname given to – individual suspected to be – the recent spate of brutal killings, linked back to one ‘Genocider Syo’ – ‘Genocider Syo’, Genocider Syo, Syo, Syo –
“Excuse me,” says the woman beside her, and Touko jerks round, startled and suspicious, “could you keep an eye on my seat for a minute?”
She shoves her cell down into the pocket of her skirt. “Don’t – don’t you think anyone w-would want to sit by me once you’re gone?”
“I’m sorry?”
“I knew there was a, a reason y-you sat by me –” it never feels any less awful to be validated! It never feels any less awful to find out she’s been right about someone, all along! “I know how women like you think, selfish women like y-you – you thought no one else would possibly want to sit by me, so you ch-chose me, you knew I’d keep your seat free –”
“I’m just.” The door to the compartment opens with a soft whump of compressed air. “I’m just going to run to the bathroom.”
Touko says, viciously: “You j-just want what you can – what you can get from me –”
“I didn’t mean to offend you,” says the woman, and shifts to the edge of her seat.
“B-but you’d still rather urinate than, than th-think about how I feel,” she says, “that’s f-fine, that’s – I’m used to that – go and have your, y-your piss – I’ll stay here and keep everyone a-away, like usual –”
The door whumps quietly closed behind her. Across the carriage, a small girl is watching with interest, ribbons in her pigtails and a lollipop clutched tight in one sticky fist. “I can s-see you staring, you know,” snaps Touko, and presses her forehead back to the cold glass of the window.
---
dear editor,
hey!! the nickname’s something i can really get down with – when [NAME REDACTED]-chan begged for it so desperately last night, genocider syo’s the name i gave him. it’s fucking awesome to get recognition for my work!!!
i’ll be in [LOCATION REDACTED] this evening, mister. this one’s for you!!!! think of it as me saying hi, so we can get to know each other later…… maybe get to know each other MUCH better, get what i mean????? ;)
best wishes,
genocider syo (whoohoo i’ll get bored with killing before i get bored of signing off like that!!!!! genocider genocider GENOCIDER)
xxx
p.s. needs more than nine for a genocide, don’t you think?? ;P
The chime of glass on glass echoes up from downstairs and she can hear her mother laughing, hear her other mother’s voice low and confidential as her father huffs out one great snort of laughter. The letter has been printed twice; once, unremarkably, on the usual letter page, and once on the third page, in a double spread featuring a scan of the huge deliriously mishmashed pieced-together letter itself, beside an extended editorial opinion and color photos of the dead boys smart in school uniforms and smiling. There’s a splash on the front cover: GENOCIDER SYO OPENS UP?
“Oh, you’re a little devil –!” roars her father, and a fusillade of high hard laughter ricochets up the stairs towards her closed door.
Touko folds the newspaper, and then she folds it again and shoves it right to the back of her desk’s bottom drawer, behind the belt sander and the glossy slithering stack of chopped-to-pieces magazines and the glue bottle. The drawer currently holds eight pairs of shined and polished scissors. The last time she checked, there were five; but she’s pretty sure she didn’t sleep last night.
Touko peels off her socks, and unbuttons her skirt, and folds it over her chair and unzips the back of her shirt, and pulls her nightgown on over her flat white training bra. The threeway dinner party downstairs smells like fish, and she’s certain she never heard a nickname so tacky – so tasteless! so contrived – as the one the letter’s signed with.
---
Her agent forwards her a list of questions from a British journalist who wants to run an interview so she deletes the message, seething, because any agent who’d deliberately set his client up to face the mocking laughter of a whole new demographic is clearly an agent who finds the very idea of supporting his client ludicrous, which she’s always suspected, from the moment he first bowed and said pleased to meet you – pleased to meet you! like she believes anyone would ever say that to her and mean it…
She’s locked in a cubicle in the second floor toilets, her laptop balanced precariously on her knees, her satchel hanging from the coat hook on the door. Half an egg sandwich sits forgotten on the cistern behind her, in a little plastic lunch pot that’s gone unwashed for weeks. There’s only one unread message left: no subject and no username, and she clicks it despondently, ready for the jeers and ridicule every fan finds a way to code between their compliments, but it’s –
hey touko-chan!!
– not fan mail, it’s not fan mail –
it’s kinda CRAZY we’re so up close and personal but we’ve never met, huh??? if you’re reading this then that means i’m basically INSIDE you RIGHT THIS MINUTE – we got physically intimate before even finding out each other’s names, touko you naughty girl you!!!!!
“Basically i-inside you,” Touko mumbles, “oh God,” and the gossip of the girls at the sinks outside falls quiet for a moment.
“Fukawa-san?” says someone. Footsteps approach the cubicle. “That you? Are you talking to yourself in there?”
yeah no i’m kidding about that, you seem pretty lame to be honest :/ i could slice some cutie’s leg right off his body and make him walk and you’d STILL be lamer than him!! whatever it’s not like we’ve got a choice, so let’s look on the bright side – you’re soooo lame no one will EVER suspect us!!!! hahahahaha :D :D
“Us,” she says, and looks down at her own pale and clammy hands in horror, upturned on the keyboard, “s-suspect us!”
“Fukawa-san?”
anyway i made you a little something, go check out your video files (i put some bits and pieces for me in there too, you can just ignore all that)
here’s to a looooong and mutually tolerable partnership touko-chan!!!!!!!!!
love,
syo xoxox
p.s. you can call me genocider if you like but just for you i won’t insist on it!!! why stand on formalities when we’re already so close, that’s what i say ;D
Abruptly she grabs down her satchel – shuts the laptop, shoves it inside, tries to clap the lid back onto her lunch pot but her hands are shaking so she drops it instead and slams open the cubicle door with such a bang the girls crowded round it flinch back. Touko keeps her head down and hurries past them for the exit; it’s just as well she barely ate, because she can feel her stomach churning.
“Fukawa-san, there’s a sandwich on the floor in here –”
“Ugh, why’d you eat in the toilets –”
“Gross –”
“Eat it y-yourself, you – you malnourished bitch –”
“Fukawa-san!” but the bathroom door slams behind her.
---
Half past midnight and the textbooks stacked around her laptop cast long warped black shadows in the light of her desk lamp, a bright white glare that drills right through to ache on the other side of her eyeballs. One thousand words, another thousand to go, and then she can start the second draft revisions… and there’s the proofread, the typeset copy to run through, looking for mistakes because her editor doesn’t care enough about her reputation to do it himself… and the history assignment due the day after, four pages on eighteenth century imperialism… and math sets, English translation…
Touko drinks water on her late nights (every night) to keep her thinking clear and she takes a sip, sets the cup back down, hands shaking. The words are blurring, doubling… From her mothers’ room next door come the sounds of panting – a stifled moan, an unstifled moan – a heavy drawn-out groan she hopes indicates orgasm and the end of their – their coupling… ‘His hands like rough-carved oak, dark and coarse from a career spent at the heart of the construction industry, thick knuckles like knots in the wood’ – ridiculous! Knots are whorled, she’s never seen a whorled knuckle… she reads the line again, and again, but the words slide about before her and refuse to take shape. If anyone knew – if anyone knew how her work crushes her, would they care? Would they! – she’s a machine to them, feed in deadlines get back words, and no one cares how a machine’s doing – not her teachers, not her publishers, not her parents –
A door opens: heavy feet in the hall outside her room, and another door opens – and then her mothers’ bed gives one sudden creak and there’s breathy laughter and a gasp and then it’s oh – oh – ohh, oh, oh and her father matching it with uh – uh – uhnn, uh – uh, and the beating of the bedframe on the wall against her desk. Two meters away – perhaps one! – doing it – screwing – fucking, like any noisy little slutty street-corner girls –
Rapidly she clicks down through her documents. The draft, the revisions, the assignments, gone gone gone and she opens up her folders and dives in past Schoolwork then Supplementary Courses then Geography then Erosion and there’s the file she wants – another grunt from her mothers’ room and Touko chokes on a sob, claps her hand to her mouth so they aren’t stirred from their lust by her own suspect noises. She knows how to act when she’s not wanted – she’s never had to act any other way! The file loads; she scrolls twenty-eight pages to where the most recent fragment begins, props her elbows on the desk and knots her hands into her hair, and reads.
“Get down there,” he commands, as he seizes one fistful of her fine hair in his strong unforgiving grasp, and she sinks weakly down, helpless before the sheer masculine authority of his forceful lilac gaze. “Down where you belong.”
Wet sounds from the next room. It might be kissing; it might not be kissing. Touko rearranges herself on the deskchair so one of her feet is folded up below her, just so – just the right place to rock forward onto, to apply a little pressure – there’s more here than she remembers writing, and it’s a well-hidden file she’s never told a soul about so no alarm bells ring and she reads on:
“I don’t care if you can’t breathe!” he utters aggressively. “You can choke on it and die for all I care – you are trash to me.”
and then suddenly she gives his dick a good hard (lol!!) bite with her razor sharp teeth and when he starts crying and bleeding she shoves him over on his back and slices just a tiiiiiny little bit off his ear – just to give him a taste of fun to come!!! – and it’s 100% hot hot HOT when he snivels up at her like the pathetic little uke he is
Next door: ugh – ugh – ughh – ughhh and it’s picking up speed against her wall.
and she whips out one of her knives from under the bed cos that’s where she keeps them for when she lures the pretty boys home and sloooooowly sloooowly she carves her name in his chest and when the blood starts dripping so does she!!! because it’s suuuch a turn on she’s wet AT ONCE
hahahahaha that’s me done for now ;D
your turn touko-chan!!!!!!
There’s murder, and then there’s sabotage, and flushing hot and sick and shivery from fury she scrolls back up to reread – not even the slightest sign of literary competence, words strung in a roughly comprehensible order but no style – the most gratuitous lewdness – the most insane lewdness! slices a tiny bit off his ear? – so she shoves back her sweaty bangs and deletes it all.
---
What she finds in her video files when she finally works up the nerve to look, days later, is yaoi – dozens of films saved with dozens of exclamation marks in their titles, little frozen display pictures of effeminate men – barely men! – weepy-eyed boys, tied in anatomically implausible ways, losing inconceivable amounts of blood – of blood and, and – and of seed – it’s disgusting, it disgusts her, and for one long revolted moment she wars with herself over whether she should open one and play it, whether the little something she’s been left is in fact just this base, misguided filth… To think she expected anything else! to think Touko felt, even for a moment, that the insane, frivolous psychopath inhabiting her body might leave her anything of value –
– but she scrolls down, even as she feels her insides char and blacken from the way her loathing burns her, and there’s one single solitary file free of exclamations and bodily fluids: just for touko, and the frozen display picture looks a great deal like the view from her desk in her bedroom.
Touko flicks a suspicious gaze all around the classroom, which is empty at lunch break save for a small huddle of dark heads crowded at the teacher’s desk, hurriedly sharing answers to last night’s math sets. Nothing: so she pulls her own rickety desk nearer, and slips in her earphones, and takes a breath and double-clicks the video to play.
“Hey! Hey, Touko – Tou-chan, is it you?” That’s her room, but that’s – that’s not her before the camera – “Have I got you? I’ve been checking out your room, Touko-chan! – our room, oh-oh-oh – no homo, Touko! – you strike me like kind of a loser? Is that right? Am I right? I am, I am, I can tell from the way you’ve got your own novels lined up in alphabetical order on the shelf, oh man!” and the blood-eyed vision on the screen who’s her but not quite her tosses back her head and lets loose a blast of wild, maniacal laughter. And then that’s all she hears – the girl on screen keeps talking, fast and careless with the inflections of the airheaded girls Touko hates, but she’s not listening – she couldn’t if she wanted to! hypnotized by the freakish waggle of that freakish tongue, in her mouth, on her webcam – is this the last thing Honda-senpai saw before he died, this monstrous version of her, running off at the mouth and laughing? – laughing, there’s laughing again, and Touko realizes she’s been pulling at the ribbon in her collar so hard it’s come undone.
“You wanna write,” says the girl on screen, suddenly, “and I wanna kill cute boys.” She’s abruptly, eerily calm; she rests her elbows on the desk and it brings that horrifying tongue closer to the camera. Touko knots her ribbon back up and watches, mistrustfully. “And neither of us is dumb, so let’s talk business – you do what you wanna do, and I’ll do what I wanna do, and this doesn’t have to cause problems for anyone –”
For anyone! – of course, not for anyone except –
“– except the cute boys!” says Syo, and winks. Touko has never winked in her entire life. “Think about it like this, though, Touko-chan – if you had a choice between living out your whole entire life in some dull office, living with your dull family and your dull wife and your dull dull dull hobbies and interests and friends and – ughh! it’s revolting even to consider – a choice between that or going out in a blaze of glory! As one part in the greatest, most artistic tableau this country will have ever seen – a cog in the machine and the machine is death, and the blood keeps the cogs greased and turning! – that’s how to think of it, if you’ve got a problem, which I’m sure you do because Tou-chan, you’re lame as hell –”
Touko huffs, offended.
“– so lame it probably pisses you off when I say it! Lame, lame, lame –” there’s a bright light of delirious happiness in her eyes that’s never been in Touko’s and it’s weird as her messy red irises, it’s sickening as that rippling tongue, “– grumpy, moody, gloomy –”
How is it fair that Touko’s dose of breezy, easy confidence went to her?
“Man, would it kill you to lighten the tone round here every once in a while?”
How is it fair that the quick comebacks and the sociability and the self-assurance went to a – to a yaoi-loving psychopath –
“Trust me, I’m the expert – it really wouldn’t!”
– and Touko was left with the barely-concealed contempt of a nation for her writing and a stutter – it’s not fair, it’s not fair in the slightest, and Touko shuts the video down even though the bar across the bottom says there’s still two minutes left of five and a half, and she packs her laptop up and fumes, and hurries out the classroom and through the corridors, still fuming. She’s going to go to the library, to the far end of the stacked wooden shelves, and she’s going to take the furthest seat at the furthest table, so no one can see her from the entranceway and laugh at her spending lunch break alone, and she’s going to get out her laptop again and surrounded by books on books on books and the old high shelves and dark oak floorboards she’s going to write, and – and Syo can go to hell! – Touko is going to write her novels and whatever parasitic psycho might be lodged inside her brain can just deal with it… She takes the corner and hurries for the stairs, smudged stainless steel handrails shining in the daylight, streaming in bright and clear from windows that stretch the whole height of the stairwell, all three stories of the school, and she clatters up the first flight towards a great wide open view of the whole pale sky – and Touko’s averse on principle to cliché, even within the privacy of her own internal monologue, but she just
uncrumples herself from a worn and scratchy carpet to see her elementary school math teacher leaking blood and the glisten of guts through the white work shirt he’s wearing, long and viciously sharpened scissors stuck right through his torso into the classroom wall behind him. Sometimes he used to mimic her stutter to the class, in a jovial attempt to humiliate her out of it.
The last few moments she snatches inside her own head, where the pressure is building and building up, she spends retching around the weird pain in the root of her tongue. Tsuji-sensei’s blood-smeared, blood-crusted mouth – and the poster pinned up behind his outstretched right arm, with a helpfully labeled selection of different kinds of quadrilateral shapes – and a board on the back wall covered with photos of his grinning, toothy seven-year-old homeroom class, and Syo’s catchphrase (a catchphrase! an affectation straight out the most juvenile of comics) drawn out in a series of gleeful, bloody flourishes across them… and maybe, just maybe, this is it: Touko has finally found someone she hates more than Touko.