A terrible feeling came over her.
Sakura, she thought.
Kara turned to find Miho watching her, just a few desks away, and she knew the concern in the other girl’s eyes was reflected in her own. Joken-sensei looked the part of the venerable old professor, with his white hair and bushy eyebrows and narrow glasses, and he clearly had a position of great respect among the faculty. If Sakura were about to be expelled or disciplined in some way, it made sense that he’d be called away.
But what about Matsui-sensei?
Kara shook her head at Miho. She didn’t think this was about Sakura after all.
Other guesses were discussed in low tones. Kara glanced around, then her gaze landed on the door. She wondered where her father was, and if he’d been pulled out of his class as well.
“Do you think there’s a fire or something?” a boy asked.
Ren turned toward the kid, rolling his eyes. “Don’t be stupid. They’d evacuate us, not close us in here.”
“Definitely,” Kara said. “Seems to me they don’t want us going anywhere.”
Most of the class looked at her then.
“You think something’s going on they don’t want us to…,” Miho began, but her words trailed off as understanding dawned on her face, followed by sadness.
Ren swore. “Do you think they found someone else?”
That silenced everyone. Nobody wanted to believe it. The grief of Jiro’s death was still very fresh, but it was awful enough as an isolated incident. If they were being kept in class because another student had been killed…
Kara stood and went to the door.
“What are you doing?” someone snapped.
“Sit down,” a boy named Goto said, angry. “We’ll all get in trouble.”
Kara took a breath and slid the door open a few inches. No one shouted at her from the hall; as far as she could tell, there was nobody in the corridor to notice her. Off to the right, she heard voices from the direction of the stairwell, and heavy footfalls, but not coming toward her.
She slid the door further open and looked out into the hall. At the eastern end of the corridor, Miss Aritomo leaned against a window, looking down. When the art teacher began to turn to scan the hall for activity, Kara pulled back into the classroom and shut the door.
“Something’s going on outside,” she said.
Several students got up and headed for the windows. Maiko, who sat in the front corner, was the first one against the glass. Half a dozen others followed, and then Miho, Ren, Kara, and both Soras joined them.
“You idiots,” Goto chided them. “What are you doing?”
Nobody answered him.
From her seat, a girl asked, “Do you see anything?”
At first, Kara didn’t. The field behind the school and the dorm off to the right of the property and the trees in the distance were undisturbed. But then she noticed movement in her peripheral vision and looked down and to the right. At the far corner of the building, several teachers stood on the pavement of the parking area, necks craned as they stared up at something.
“Oh, no,” she started to say.
“The teachers are down there,” Ren said at the same time.
Maiko fumbled with a latch and slid open the window in front of her. For once, Goto said nothing. When Kara glanced back at him, she even thought he had shifted in his chair, as if he wanted to get up and join them but didn’t dare.
“Someone’s up on the roof,” Maiko said. “A girl.”
That got them all standing, rushing to the window in a clatter of desks and chairs and falling books. Kara was jostled and nudged and she nudged in return, feeling a little sick even as she did so, hating that they were all so desperate to watch the spectacle unfold. Was it horror or fascination or excitement that made them all so determined to see? She didn’t want to know the answer.
Maiko hung halfway out the window, with a couple of girls holding onto her so that she didn’t fall. She twisted around, looking up at the far corner, trying to get a glimpse of whoever stood at the edge of the roof.
Through the open window, they could all hear the teachers’ voices now, shouting and calling to the girl on the roof.
“Can you see who it is?” Miho asked.
But Maiko didn’t need to reply. The teachers began to call out a name, and they all knew, then.
“Hana, no!” they shouted. And, “Hana, wait!”
Though she wasn’t a boarding student, Hana was one of Ume’s friends-one of the soccer girls.
Maiko drew back inside the classroom, one hand over her mouth. She backed up until she stumbled over her own desk and sat hard on her chair. Her eyes were rimmed with red and she looked ill, but her sickly appearance wasn’t new. Maiko had already admitted that the nightmares were making her fall apart. This could only make it worse.
The girl looked right at Kara, returned her stare. Then Maiko gave an awful, brittle little laugh.
“Am I awake?” she asked, her voice very small.
What terrified Kara was the look on the girl’s face. Maiko really didn’t know.
More shouting drifted in from the open window. Kara leaned against the glass, looking out at the teachers. Even at this distance, she saw the sudden change in their faces.
Mr. Matsui actually screamed.
Hana plummeted, without any screams of her own, and when she struck the pavement, she crumpled like a discarded rag doll, bones giving way.
There were shrieks inside the classroom. Miho reached out and took Kara’s hand and they stood together. Ren turned from the window, wiping tears from his eyes.
Everyone looked at Maiko.
Who gazed out the window, not seeing any of them, expression entirely blank.
“I wonder how she got up there,” Maiko said quietly, in a tone that suggested not horror but envy.
“When I decided to come to Japan to teach, I never imagined anything like this,” Rob Harper said. “I know bullying is an epidemic here, but this kind of ugly stuff feels so American to me. I guess I figured I was leaving it behind.”
Kara sat on the floor just outside the closed door of her father’s classroom, knees drawn up beneath her. Inside, he and Miss Aritomo were talking quietly, and though it was obvious they thought otherwise, she could hear almost every word.
“I wish I could disagree, but suicide has become more common here in recent years,” Miss Aritomo said.
Mr. Matsui appeared from his classroom down the hall, glanced up and down and caught sight of Kara. He gave a bow of his head and she returned the gesture. Mr. Matsui walked toward her but turned to go downstairs, no doubt to some kind of gathering of teachers and administrators.
Otherwise, the upper floor seemed deserted. There were police in the building, and there must be plenty of them outside, and the faculty were scattered all over the place, but the students were gone. They had been kept in their classrooms for nearly two hours-through lunch, though no one in Kara’s room seemed to have much of an appetite-and then they had all been dismissed. The boarding students had been the first to be allowed to leave. Only when they had departed, in an orderly fashion, of course, did the day students get the go-ahead to leave.
There would be no o-soji. And the homeroom teachers informed their classes that school had been canceled for the following day, which was Friday.
Kara wanted to go home. And not to the small house she and her father had rented near the school. Home.
Instead, she was the only student still at the school.
Her thoughts drifted, her mind numb, and she wouldn’t even allow herself to think about Sakura or Akane or Jiro-any of it. She rocked a little, impatient, wishing her father could leave now.
Hana had been nothing to her except another sour-faced, jeering girl who took Ume’s lead and sneered at the little gaijin bonsai. But the idea of anyone throwing themselves off the roof, hitting the pavement so hard that their bones gave way in an instant, collapsing like a house of cards… The idea was hideous.