The man who called himself Sakamochi turned to the blackboard and wrote his name in large, vertical characters with the chalk—a riff on the name of a teacher on a long-running TV series. What kind of stupid name was that? An alias, maybe, given the situation. The class leader for the girls, Yukie Utsumi, stood suddenly and said, “I don’t understand.”
All eyes turned to her. Yukie’s long hair parted into two neat braids. Her expression was a little tense, but her voice was firm. Maybe she’d imagined up some scenario, impossible as it seemed, that had brought the students there, like they had all been knocked unconscious in a bus accident.
“What’s gong on?” Yukie asked. “We’d just left on our school trip. Isn’t that right, everyone?”
Yukie looked over her shoulders to her classmates all around. Her question had triggered an outburst, as nearly everyone was shouting over each other:
“Where are we?”
“Did you fall asleep too?”
“Hey, what time is it?”
“Was everyone sleeping?”
“Shit, I don’t have a watch!”
“Do you remember getting off the bus and coming here?”
“Who the hell is that guy?”
“No, I don’t remember anything.”
“I don’t like this. What’s going on? I’m scared.”
Shuya noted that Sakamochi had stopped his speech to listen. Silent himself, Shuya watched his classmates. A few were keeping quiet.
The first to catch his notice was kazoo Kiriyama, a little behind him and to the side, at the middle of the back row. Beneath his slicked-back hair, Kiriyama’s calm eyes were fixed on the man at the podium—watching, not glaring; his eyes were far too placid to call it that. Despite their attempts to get him to ay something, Kiriyama paid no attention to his lackeys seated around him: Ryuhei Sasagawa, Mitsuru Numai, Hiroshi Kuronaga (Boys #9), and Sho Tsukioka (Boys #14).
Then there was Mitsuko Souma, second seat from the front on the window row. You remember, that vaguely rough-around-the-edges girl. Her desk was separated from the other two in her clique (Hirono Shimizu and Yoshimi Yahagi), and none of the other girls—or boys, for that matter—tried to talk to her. (Hirono and Yoshimi were in adjacent seats to Shuya’s left and were saying something to each other.) Mitsuko had the captivating face of a pop idol, though it wore its usual vaguely listless expression. Arms folded, she stared at Sakamochi. (Hiroki Sugimura sat directly behind her and was talking with Tadakatsu Hatagami to his right.)
Next was Shogo Kawada, in the same window row, two seats from the back. He too silently stared at Sakamochi. As Shuya watched, Kawada took a piece of gum from his pocket and started to chew, his eyes fixed dead ahead as his jaw worked up and down.
Shuya faced the front of the class and noticed Noriko was still staring back at him. Her dark eyes trembled in fear. Shuya glanced at Yoshitoki in the seat ahead of her, but he was talking about something with Shinji Mimura in the next row. Quickly returning his eyes to Noriko, Shuya attempted a tiny nod. A little relief edged into her eyes.
Sakamochi clapped his hands a few times and admonished, “All right, all right, all right, quiet down, everyone!” The uproar quickly subsided, and he continued. “Okay, I’ll explain. We’ve had you come here for one and only reason.”
Then: “Today, you’re all going to kill each other.”
