In the back of her mind, she felt a spark of worry. What had upset Miho so much? But she still felt tired and sluggish and closed her eyes again.
“What time is it?” she asked.
“It doesn’t matter. Just wake up,” Miho said.
The urgency in her voice finally made Kara throw off the gauzy blanket that sleep had wrapped around her brain. She blinked rapidly and looked at the window again. Last time she’d awoken, it had barely been dawn. From the look of the sky, hours had passed.
It took her a moment to realize that she and Miho were alone in the room. Sakura had gone.
“What’s happening?” she asked.
Miho bit her lip, tucked a stray lock of her silky hair behind one ear, and shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. And then, in English: “Something bad. Something really bad.”
Footfalls raced past the room out in the corridor. Down the hall, someone shouted. Kara sat up and saw that the door stood open a few inches. Voices came to them from elsewhere on the floor, too many speaking for her to make out many specifics, but she heard something about a doctor and an ambulance.
And she heard weeping. Sobbing.
Two girls hurried past the door, whispering to each other.
“Miho, tell me,” Kara said, rising to her feet and reaching for her jeans. She slid them on and zipped them, then went to the door, but Miho didn’t follow.
“Chouku is dead.”
Kara caught her breath. Chouku was one of the girls on this floor-one of the soccer girls. The police could say all they wanted now about suicide or about how none of these things were related, and the school administration could try to pretend nothing really was wrong in order to save face, but nobody would believe that now.
“Is it murder?” she asked, her voice soft, cracking on the last word.
Miho nodded, gesturing toward the door. “Sakura is out there. I don’t want to see it again.”
From somewhere in the distance, beyond the walls of the dormitory, Kara could hear the high-pitched keening of an ambulance siren. She hesitated a moment, looking at the shattered Miho, and wondered what would become of her friends. Would this, at last, force Miho and Sakura’s parents to pay attention to them? To come and see their daughters, and maybe take them home? Selfishly, she feared such an outcome. But for their sake, she hoped so. Sakura had been crumbling for days, brittle from lack of sleep and her lingering grief over Akane. And now Miho seemed frayed to the point of breaking.
Kara pushed her hands through her blond hair, snatched a rubber band from Sakura’s desk, and tied her hair back in a ponytail. She pushed the door open and stepped out into the corridor.
Most of the doors on the floor were open, girls in pajamas and nightgowns standing, framed in their horror, looking further along the hall toward a cluster of students crowding outside a door four rooms down. Girls wept, some with their hands over their mouths. Others whispered to one another. One girl-Chouku’s roommate, Kara figured-sat on the tile floor, long legs drawn up beneath her. The sobbing Kara had heard before came from her. A statuesque, athletic-looking girl, she was only vaguely familiar to Kara. They did not share class or an after-school club, so she would only have seen her in the morning or during o-soji.
Another girl sat cross-legged in the corridor in front of her, holding the weeping girl’s hand in her own. Perhaps because she wore purple pajamas with butterflies on them and sat hunched over, hair falling across her face, it took Kara a moment to realize this was Ume.
Further along the hallway, at the top of the stairs, Sakura leaned against a balustrade and watched all of the shock, horror, and sorrow unfold. She had no tears and no fear. No, for her there’s only satisfaction, Kara thought.
She shivered, horrified at herself for even considering such a thing. And then she wondered why the thought had come to her, and if it had arisen because that truly was what she saw in Sakura’s face. Not for a moment did Kara believe Sakura wanted anyone to die, but the girl wouldn’t mourn, either.
Unseen, or at the least ignored, Kara made her way down the hall past the pale, drawn residents of the dorm until she came to Chouku’s room. Ume and Chouku’s roommate didn’t even look up at her.
“They’re all over her,” a voice said from inside the room, frantic and on edge. “Yes, everywhere. And I think she’s like the other one. So pale.”
Kara entered the room.
The only person alive in that small chamber was Miss Aritomo, the art teacher. She faced the window, her back to Kara, her cell phone clapped to her ear, and at first she didn’t notice that anyone had entered.
Chouku lay on her stomach on the bed, a sheet covering her up to her shoulders. Spots and streaks of blood marred the white sheet, but Kara saw no other sign of blood anywhere in the room. The girl lay totally inert and her flesh was a bluish-gray, verging on white, almost as though she-like Jiro-had been dredged up from the water. Yet she had died here, in this room, and only last night. For her to have gotten so pale, so quickly… there had to be another explanation.
I think she’s like the other one, Miss Aritomo had said.
Which made Kara think of the conversation she’d overheard between the art teacher and her father, about Jiro’s body being drained of blood.
“I don’t know what kind of animal, but I’m telling you, they look like bites to me,” Miss Aritomo said firmly to whoever listened on the other end of her phone call.
The teacher reached over, back still to Kara, and lifted the sheet, providing a quick glimpse of Chouku’s naked corpse. All over her body, from heel to calf to back to throat, there were hundreds of tiny punctures, arranged in half circles like the bite marks of a small animal. She had to have been bitten dozens of times, and yet the only blood in the room was smears on her pale flesh and spots on the white sheet.
Kara gasped.
Miss Aritomo turned, lowering the sheet, and her face grew stormy with anger.
“What are you doing? Get out of here!” she snapped.
Kara backed up quickly, bumping into the door frame, and stepped into the hall.
“And close the door behind you!” Miss Aritomo said.
Kara pulled it closed, glancing around to see that all of the girls in the corridor were staring at her now, including Ume and Chouku’s roommate.
“Sick freak,” Ume said, in clear English, her lip turning up in disgust. “What does she want from us?”
Kara stared, confused, and then realized Ume wasn’t talking about her. Slowly, she looked up. Sakura still stood by the stairs, arms crossed in defiance now, and she met Kara’s gaze with her own.
Burdened by the weight of the other girls’ attention, Kara focused straight ahead. She walked over to Sakura and bent to whisper in her ear.
“Can we go back into your room? We have to talk.”
Sakura narrowed her eyes and gave Kara a cautious look, as if trying to decide yet again whether she could be trusted.
Kara rolled her eyes. “Just come on.”
She turned and started back along the corridor, weaving through the gaggle of grieving, horrified girls. Sakura followed, and when she passed outside Chouku’s room, Ume spit on the floor by her feet. Surprisingly, Sakura made no attempt to retaliate or even speak to her.
Miho had shut the door, forcing Kara to knock.
“Who is it?”
“It’s us.”
The door opened quickly. Kara led Sakura into the room and Miho shut the door again behind them. Miho leaned against the door, arms crossed protectively over her chest, and chewed her lower lip expectantly. Sakura went to gaze out the window for a moment, perhaps listening to the escalating volume of the siren from the approaching ambulance, and then flopped onto her bed. Her eyes were unfocused, gazing at some bit of nothing in the middle of the room.
Seconds of awkward silence ticked away with Kara standing roughly between the roommates.
“You both saw her?” she asked.