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Catherine Kuo
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“What the hell is wrong, why do you guys keep avoiding me?” Naomichi shouted.
His friends hesitated mid-motion, feet on pedals, about to bolt. School had been canceled partway through the day for some reason, but Naomichi hadn’t listened to the rest of the PA announcement in his haste to catch up with his fleeing comrades.
“You joking?” said Shoji. The others mirrored his face, each a mask of contempt.
It had been a week since people started treating Naomichi differently. As far as he was concerned, he was an average high schooler with average friends and an average family. He studied well, but not too hard, and he read comics, watched television, played sports and video games like all the other fifteen-year-old boys. And yet, over those few days, his friends grew distant and whispered to each other whenever they saw him. His teachers flashed odd, furtive looks his way during class and the other students never made eye contact with him. Instead, they always stared at a spot on the ground just a meter or so behind him, as if he had stepped in crap and left a brown trail behind.
“No, I’m not joking! What, did I do something wrong? Just tell me!” he pleaded. His friends glanced at each other, engaging in silent debate before Atsuo spoke up.
“What’s coming out of your bookbag then?”
“My bookbag?” Naomichi whipped his bag off his shoulders and examined it. There was nothing unusual about it. “This isn’t funny, guys,” he said, but his friends had darted away, leaving him standing in front of the bike racks as the other students flooded around him, rushing to leave.
When he returned home, he asked his mother, “Do you see anything?”
“What am I supposed to see?” she asked, adjusting her glasses and squinting. “By the way, that’s a terrible thing that happened to your classmate. Rin-something? The news said they found her dead in the closet of one of your school’s classrooms. Did you see it? The body, I mean.”
“No, I didn’t know,” he replied, making his way upstairs.
His sister met him in front of his room, as if she’d been listening in the whole time. “Didn’t that girl write you a looove letter?”
“Shut up, who cares,” he snapped, dashing into his room and throwing the door shut.
He decided to call his best friend, Fujii. “Don’t hang up, don’t hang up, don’t hang up!” he begged as soon as Fujii answered the phone. “Come on, dude, what’s going on? Do you guys hate me or something?”
“We don’t hate you, Nao, we told you, there’s something seriously wrong with whatever’s in your bookbag.”
“But there’s nothing in my bookbag! I’ve checked a thousand times and there’s nothing weird! What are you guys seeing exactly?”
“If you keep denying it, what’s the point of telling you?”
“I’m not denying it, I just don’t understand!”
A few seconds of heavy silence passed as Fujii selected his words.
“It’s like,” he said slowly. “It’s like there’s...slime.”
“Slime?” said Naomichi with as much incredulity as he could muster.
“Yeah, like...kind of greenish slime? It’s just bubbling and leaking out of your bookbag all the time.”
“How long are you guys going to carry on with this stupid prank, I thought you would’ve come up with a more believable story by now. Just say you hate me already!”
“It’s the truth, I don’t have to prove it to you,” said Fujii, half-defensive, half-hurt. “I’m just telling you what I see. I don’t have any reason to lie to you, Nao.”
Naomichi pursed his lips and considered his options.
“Can you meet me at Symphony Park in ten minutes?”
Another moment of silence.
“All right,” said Fujii.
“Bring your phone.”
* * *
The afternoon sun beat mercilessly down on the pavement of their Kumamoto suburb as Naomichi dashed toward the park. He regretted not changing out of his school uniform as sweat drenched the starchy fabric. Canopies of trees speckled the park, and Naomichi sought shelter under their dense foliage to escape the sun’s rays, though it did nothing to ease the sweltering humidity.
Ten minutes later, Fujii arrived as promised, one hand clenched around his phone as he eyed the offending bookbag. He stopped about two meters from Naomichi, one foot behind the other as if preparing to make a run for it. Several passing housewives ushered their toddlers along to the other side of the playground, casting apprehensive looks his way.
“Do you still see it?” asked Naomichi. Fujii nodded, tight-lipped.
“Can you see it through your phone camera?”
Fujii fumbled with his phone and held it up with shaking hands.
“I see it,” he gulped.
“Take a picture.”
Fujii obeyed and snapped several.
“Show me.” He dropped his bookbag on the ground and joined Fujii, peering at the screen.
He may not have been able to discern the general shape if Fujii hadn’t described it earlier, but something vague and translucent indeed flowed from the inside of his bookbag and onto the ground.
“Can you still see it in the picture?”
“Yeah.”
“Clearly?”
“Yeah.”
“What the hell. Then why can’t I? Why me? And what’s it doing in my bookbag?”
“Maybe it’s a ghost?” offered Fujii.
Naomichi’s gut reaction was to dismiss his suggestion, but he couldn’t think of a better explanation. “Even if it was, what could I do?”
“I guess you could throw the bag away?” said Fujii.
Naomichi stared at his bookbag. It hadn’t been cheap and it was still in good shape, but if getting rid of it meant getting his friends back, then a few thousand of his parents’ yen was worth it.
On his way home, he crammed the bag into a convenience store trashcan when no one was looking and later told his parents that it had been stolen. They bought him a new bag promptly and without a fuss, and Naomichi felt like he could finally breathe again. Or he did, until he went to school the next day.
* * *
Nothing had changed in the mildly disgusted faces of his peers and teachers as they stared at his new bookbag.
Unable to come up with a better solution, Naomichi and Fujii gave in and scoured the internet over the next few days for locals who claimed to be well-versed in the supernatural. Three people answered their phone calls and had openings available.
The first was a psychic whose main schtick was organizing seances with the dead, and although Fujii ended up having a pleasant chat with his deceased maternal grandmother, the psychic could not tell Naomichi anything about the slime in his bookbag.
The second was a Shinto priest who could see the slime, which he deemed unpleasant yet harmless, but he only suggested that they set up a shrine in Naomichi’s home and pray to the gods to purify the household. Fujii later agreed he wasn’t entirely sold on the idea of simply praying away the slime, and hoped that their last contact could provide a second opinion.
“I should’ve asked the psychic about Rin,” mused Fujii on their way to the third consultant.
“Who?”
“What do you mean ‘who?’ The girl who wrote you the love letter! Didn’t you hear? The police said she killed herself in one of the closets at school. Didn’t leave a suicide note or anything though. What if it was murder? Maybe the psychic could’ve told us.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Naomichi laughed. “And anyway, are you really that surprised? That girl was a pushover. The upperclassmen bullied her all the time, it was probably that. She was too sensitive, she just cared way too much.”
“I remember you told her that once, out by the bike rack when you forgot your notebook and she brought it to you. You were so annoyed, you just wanted her off your tail.”
“How do you remember that?”
“Girls don’t even run after me in my dreams, dude! You’re lucky enough to have it happen to you in real life and you forget about it? Jeez, can we trade places?”
“Yeah, yeah, we’re here so be quiet about it for a sec.”
They had arrived in front of a stained yellow door on the second floor of a rundown apartment complex. The slot where the nameplate should have been was empty, but the rusted metal numbers indicated they were at the right place. Naomichi rapped his knuckles lightly on the door and a lean man covered in tattoos opened it, the sweet smell of something both smokey and earthy clinging to his clothes and breath. The boys inched closer together.
“Oh, hello, we’ve been expecting you. Come in,” said the man with a friendly smile. His teeth were crooked and matched the color of the door.
The man led them down a narrow gray hallway and deeper into the dim, hazy apartment. It was barely cooler inside than outside, and the faraway shrieks of small children playing in the parking lot drifted through the open windows. Naomichi and Fujii passed through a beaded entryway and into a small dining room coated with a sheen of condensation.
“Customers’re here,” the man said to a thin, middle-aged woman sitting at the table. She had one leg pulled up onto her rickety wooden chair and her hair was tied back in a loose bun with a bright-pink children’s scrunchy. The makeup covering her greasy face had been applied haphazardly and she wore a tank top and shorts that seemed one size too large. A cigarette dangled from her cracked lips.
“You’re Naomichi?” she said.
“Yes,” he squeaked.
“Come here.”
He scooted forward, heels dragging on the gray tile floor.
“Open the bookbag.”
He obeyed, though he didn’t recall ever mentioning anything about his bookbag over the phone.
“Hmm,” said the woman, raising her penciled-in eyebrows. She clamped her lips around her cigarette and cupped her hands, slowly bringing them toward the edge of the bookbag’s open flap.
“Oh, there, there, there, you poor thing,” she cooed as she brought her cupped hands back toward herself. “What are you doing hanging around this boy, huh?”
Everything went silent. Naomichi glanced over at Fujii, who had started taking pictures with his phone.
“I see,” the woman said to her hands. As if she were cradling a baby chick, she slowly brought her hands to the lip of the bookbag and made a gentle tipping motion. When she finished, she sat back and looked up at Naomichi with a cold expression.
“She wants you to see her,” she scowled.
“She?”
“You don’t know her name?”
“No, I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“Do you remember saying ‘you care too much’ to anybody?”
“No?” Naomichi said and heard Fujii let out a small gasp behind him.
The woman glared at Naomichi.
“Think.”
“I honestly don’t know!”
Suddenly, a horrible scream rang throughout the apartment, rattling the dishes on the kitchen countertop. It was hoarse, inhuman, and it came from Naomichi’s bookbag.
Seconds later, the scream subsided.
The woman shook her head. “You’re heartless,” she sighed.
“What do you mean? I haven’t done anything to anyone!” shouted Naomichi, more out of fear than anger. He turned to Fujii, who had gone pale and retreated behind the tattooed man.
The woman waved Naomichi away. “You don’t have anything to worry about anymore.”
“Could you see it? What was it? Why can other people see it but I can’t?”
“Because you’re blind,” she said, her tone steely. “Good day. Keep your money and don’t come back here again.”
Without another word, they were led out of the apartment, and Naomichi didn’t speak up until they were well away.
“What did you see?” he stammered.
“Here.” Fujii handed him his phone without looking at it.
Fujii had taken the photos in bursts, and Naomichi felt as if he were flipping through frames of animation. The slime was clearer this time, snot-colored and pale. It pooled itself in the woman’s hands and something formed out of the mass she held. A face, its mouth hanging open in agony. The slime still dripping from his bookbag had reached the floor and its dangling tendrils took on the vague shapes of hands, arms, and breasts. The woman returned the face to the bookbag, where it swayed above the opening. It then extended itself upward, what might have been its neck stretching toward the ceiling and its mouth contorting into what was no doubt the scream they had heard. It twisted and writhed, and then sank back into the bag, from which it did not emerge again.
Naomichi took off his bookbag and opened it. Empty.
“Fujii, do you see anything?” he said, holding it out to him.
“No. No, there’s nothing,” Fujii replied, his voice wavering. “It’s gone. Nao, didn’t that thing look...didn’t that thing look kind of like Rin?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. After she gave me that stupid letter, I just tried to ignore her after that, I don’t really remember what she looked like,” he mumbled. “It wasn’t my fault.”
“Y-Yeah, I’m sure it wasn’t,” said Fujii. “You barely even talked to her, I’m sure it had to do with the bullying.”
“That’s right,” said Naomichi, nodding. “I hardly even remember her, how could I have had any impact on her?”
Fujii didn’t say anything else.
* * *
When Naomichi returned home, he sat in his room, staring blankly at the wall. A sudden thought flashed through his mind and he overturned his bookbag, searching through each pocket until his fingers found the crumpled love letter deep inside the crevice of an interior pocket alongside hardened crumbs and broken pencil lead. Hands trembling, he unfolded it.
Dear Naomichi,
I know we haven’t really talked much, but I wanted you to know that I really admire you as a person. You’re amazing at school and you have so many talents and hobbies. Not only that, you’ve inspired me to work hard to become a better person.
I hope that we can get to know each other better and that maybe we can even become friends one day. Maybe even more.
I love you. I know it’s a pretty heavy word, but that’s the only way to describe how I feel. I will always believe in you and I will always be proud of everything you do and everything you will accomplish.
Thank you for reading this. If nothing else, I’ll see you in class tomorrow.
Rin