The next day, I went to school earlier than usual.
The school that I go to, Shinyo Academy, has that something a lot of other schools don't. Every student has an ID card, and every time we go in or out of the building, we have to slide it through a gate checker, like one of those ticket readers at the train station. They call it the Campus Advanced Information Administration System (or CAIAS, for short).
Supposedly, it helps the staff to keep track of the exact number of students that attend, since the student population has started to decline as of late. But in actual practice, it doesn't really change anything.
Despite the grand design, this year, there have already been several students who have run away from home, or worse, simply vanished. The system they're so proud of is really powerless when it comes to stopping students from doing whatever they like once they're off school grounds. It's what free will is all about.
Anyway, our school is up in the mountains, so we have to walk up long, steep, green roads just to get there.
On this particular morning, there was hardly anybody out on the road. The sports team had long since started morning practice, but the rest of the student body had not yet started to arrive.
"Yoohoo! Keiji!" came a cheerful girl's voice from behind.
I turned around to find a girl from my class, Kamikishiro Naoko, walking towards me.
This girl had a habit of over-pronouncing people's names, like she was sight-reading a word in some other language.
Plus, she was always chirpy.
"Now, now. Why so gloomy on such a beautiful morning?" she said, running to catch up, and thumping me hard on the back.
Both Kamikishiro and I were breaking the school rules against dating. You could say that it gave us a certain connection; a certain ease to our interaction. A sort of sympathy that we couldn't expect to get from friends of the same gender. We always joked around together, but today I was hardly in the mood.
"You're early," I said curtly. "Not going for your usual dramatic entrance?"
Kamikishiro was almost compulsively late and she always insisted that it was due to low blood pressure. If a teacher tried to chew her out of it, she would apologize dramatically and quite flirtatiously, I might add, which generally left the male teachers flustered, but it always seemed to do the trick, getting her off the hook. A powerful technique, indeed.
"Yeah, well, had some stuff to take care of today. But spill already! How was your date yesterday?"
"F-forget about it."
"You have a fight or something?" she asked, peering closely at my face with interest.
She had a tendency to express her emotions a bit too obviously. She was very pretty, but had an open, loud laugh. This seemed to make some people think badly of her, no matter how good a person she was at heart.
"A fight? I wish we could have," I sighed.
"Wait, what? That sounds serious!"
"Whatever."
Another student passed us on a bicycle, so we fell quite.
As always, there was a committee member posted at the gates, like a train station guard, making sure the cards went through the gate check smoothly.
"Oh, Takeda-senpai, you're early," said today's guard, Niitoki Kei. She was the discipline committee president.
Despite the ominous title, she was a tiny, cute girl with a childish face.
"D-ditto," I said, waving.
We'd been on the health board together last year as well, so we had seen each other regularly for two years.
"Mornin', Kei!" said Kamikishiro.
Although they were friends already, Niitoki had ignored Kamikishiro's dates on several occasions, and this had brought them even closer together.
"My, my, are you two together now?" Niitoki said, eyes wide.
"That's scary, coming from you," Kamikishiro laughed.
"I didn't mean it that way, really. Even if it were true, my lips are sealed."
"Trying to earn a favor, eh? Looks expensive."
"It is," the committee president laughed.
If she knew that Kamikishiro had both a second and first year student in her saddle, I doubt she could have been so blasé about it. She was pretty serious, and she would probably get so angry that steam would shoot out of her ears.
We put our cards through the gate check and went inside.
"Senpai, don't forget the meeting today!" she said as I waved in acknowledgement.
Kamikishiro giggled. "She's so cute."
"Who?"
"Kei. You know she's got a crush on you, right? Puppy love..."
"You're one to talk."
Every relationship she had ended up like a war zone. I'm amazed she could still joke about it.
"So what was it? Fuji-chan dump you?"
Who knows why Kamikishiro always called Touka by a different reading of the kanji in her name, but here she was doing it again.
"She stood me up."
"I can see why you got chest pains then! Ah ha ha!"
I suspected that she, too, stood up many a man.
"What are girls thinking when they do that?" I asked. "It sure as hell isn't about their boyfriend."
"That's not an easy thing to answer. Hmm... It all depends, really. I know that it's not always because don't want to see you, though. You know, stuff just sort of comes up."
"So what if they stand you up and dress like a man?"
"Huh? What are you talking about?! What's that supposed to mean?" Kamikishiro's eyes widened.
Understandably, I didn't know the answer either.
"Nevermind. Must have been seeing things."
"I don't really get it... But you've got a lot of time on your hands, so you really ought to start taking love more seriously, ya hear?" she said in a sing-song voice.
"What?" I replied, scowling, and she burst into a song.
"Life is brief, young maiden, fall in love;
before the crimson bloom fades from your lips,
before the tides of passion cool within your hips,
for those of you who know no tomorrow."
"You're in a good mood. You in love again?"
"Kinda. Tee hee hee."
"For crying out loud, how many is this now?"
Before we hit the halls, we smoothly shifted to a more standoffish attitude. We weren't going out, but it was never a good idea to start any rumors.
I let my feet carry me to Touka's class.
Once there, it wasn't like I could actually talk to her, so I wasn't exactly sure why I was going, but I couldn't seem to help myself.
Touka's room was year two, class C, and it was still empty.
Feeling suddenly tired, I flopped down on a chair inside.
Once again, the cloaked figure's words ran through my mind, 'Do you think to do nothing when you see a fellow human crying?!'
I paused for a moment.
Was that really Touka?
A twin brother, perhaps.
No, she'd never mentioned one before.
I heard someone coming, so I quickly got up and left the room.
I stood as inconspicuously as I could in the covered passage, a few yards away from the room, and kept watch.
The more I watched, the more pathetic I felt.
(Aw, hell...)
Touka was about the twentieth student to arrive.
She was the same as always. There was no sign of any strange hat.
But for some reason, she had an enormous Spalding bag in addition to her usual school bag. The sort that people generally keep sneakers or gym clothes in.
Then, she noticed me.
She shot me a quizzical, innocent glance.
I found myself grinning and nodding.
She smiled softly and nodded back.
Nothing different than usual.
She didn't seem at all bothered about having stood me up either.
So as not to get noticed, we hardly ever spoke to each other at school. But words weren't necessary.
We had worked out our own sort of sign language that only the two of us knew.
So I made one of those signs, putting my index finger up. This sign meant back of the garden after school.
She made the same gesture, showing consent.
Yeah, it was just like nothing had happened.
Feeling like I was surrounded by a heavy smoke cloud, I drifted back to my own classroom.
Kamikishiro wasn't there yet. Probably still 'taking care of stuff.' Same as me.
The discipline committee meeting was during lunch.
"Ehem, I expect that all of you have noticed, but this year, discipline has become rather slack. There are now four girls, students here, who appear to have run away."
They called it a meeting, but we hardly ever spoke at all.
The teacher in charge would be the one to drone on and on at us the whole time.
Frankly, we may have been called the discipline committee, but not one of us was operating under the illusion we could actually control anybody. Most of us were, like me, breaking those rules ourselves.
The boy I met in town yesterday, Saotome, was the secretary. He took minutes in a notebook. Despite double dating on the side, he melted right into the atmosphere here, like a model committee member.
"If any of you happen to hear about anything like that, then please, come running to me. One of their friends might be able to get in touch with them."
We made no response. We never did. The teacher never seemed to notice.
"Incidentally, the infamous Kirima Nagi failed to arrive this morning. Make sure to keep an eye on her, hear? No telling what that girl's plotting in the shadows."
He glanced sharply around the room.
We remained silent.
The only sound was the scratching of Saotome's pen, jotting down absurdly complete minutes.
Suddenly, the PA system crackled to life.
"Miyashita Touka, second year, Class C. Please, return to the infirmary at once. Miyashita Touka, second year, class C..."
I jerked in my seat, and it made a screeching sound on the floor.
"Mm? Something the matter?" The teacher glared at me balefully.
"I, uh, feel dizzy," I said to excuse my actions, but in fact my head was reeling.
"Are you okay, senpai?" the president asked. "You look pale."
"Third year? You go back to class."
Seniors had exams to study for and didn't really play a major role on the committee. Heck, they didn't even need to come to the meetings in the first place. Of course, I wasn't taking exams, but the teacher hadn't bothered to remember that, apparently.
"Okay."
I stood up, and the president followed suit.
"Sensei, I'll take him to infirmary."
The teacher made a face, but then simply ordered her to hurry back.
"That okay?" I asked Niitoki.
"Are you okay?" She whispered back.
I said nothing else, but rushed to the infirmary.
There was no one there.
I let out a huge sigh of relief.
The announcement had asked Touka to 'return,' so she must have been there before, but gone out again.
(No, she was supposed to go home, but she must still be on campus. Her card hasn't been swiped through the gate...)
Thinking furiously, I slumped down on the bench beside me.
"You're worried about her?" Niitoki asked.
"Yeah, a little."
I looked up, and she spoke quickly, stiffly, "I thought as much. I'm in the same class as her."
I gaped at her, but she kept talking.
"She's been a little off recently. Like she can't sit still. Glaring outside during class. The teacher yells at her about it a lot. I thought she might be having trouble with you or something."
I had no answer.
"I like you too, you know. But-"
"..."
"But it looks like you like her more than me."
She was glaring at me now.
I couldn't think of any way to respond.
"I'm going back now," she snapped, and bolted out of the infirmary.
Needless to say, I was out of it for pretty much the rest of the day.
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After class, I went to the place where we had agreed to meet, but Touka wasn't there.
Sunlight barely filtered down to the deserted rear of the building, so it was quite dark around me.
I threw my back on the ground, shoved my hands in my pockets, and leaned against the wall.
I couldn't figure out what to do next, so I stared aimlessly up at the sky.
The edge of the school roof made a clear straight line cutting the sky in half.
But there was a shadow jutting over that line.
I gasped in shock.
It was the silhouette of a person. A person with a flat, pipe-like protrusion on their head, wrapped in what seemed like a cape.
At that moment, I knew it was him. It was the mysterious cloaked figure.
When he saw me, he spun around and pulled away.
I yelled towards him, "W-wait!"
Right beside me, there was an old fire escape. It was connected to windows on each floor and went all the way to the roof.
I vaulted the locked gate at the bottom and raced up the stairs to the roof - in clear violation of school policy.
When I hit the roof, I yelled, "Miyashita! Is that you?!"
The cloaked figure slowly emerged from the shadows. He stared directly at me again.
"You... Know Miyashita Touka?" he asked in Touka's voice.
It was a little deeper, more male sounding, but if you listened to it, it was clearly hers.
"I see. We met yesterday, didn't we? I have done you wrong. I ignored you, and for that... I apologize."
I rushed over to him and grabbed him by the shoulders.
"What the hell are you talking about?!"
Suddenly, my body was wafting through the air, and then came crashing down upon the concrete with a hard thud.
"Ah..." I screamed in pain.
Had he swept my legs out from under me? The pain raced through my entire body before I figured it out.
"What... What's going on?" I cried.
"I should state clearly that I am not Miyashita Touka. Currently, I am Boogiepop," the cloaked figure whispered.
"C-currently?"
So, it had been her this morning? Is that what he meant?
"I'm sure you've heard the idea before. Simply put, it resembles the concept of the split personality. Understand me so far?" this 'Boogiepop' continued.
"S-split-?"
"None of you have noticed yet, but danger is hovering above this school... And all mankind. That is why I have emerged."
I couldn't quite decide if I really should be referring to Boogiepop as 'he' or not, but I could tell from his expression that he was deadly serious.