Authors: Kanae Minato
That’s how it came to be entered in the Science Fair. The judges were mostly professors with impressive titles from technical universities, and A fully expected these experts to be appalled by his lethal entry and to label it—and him—a menace. In this way he would have attracted the attention he so desperately wanted. But he hadn’t wanted his project to be rejected on these grounds in the local, preliminary rounds, so he had crafted the accompanying materials to suggest that a childish—that is, age-appropriate—sense of justice motivated the booby-trapped purse. But he had apparently done his job too well, and both he and his invention were seen as perfectly wholesome right through to the national finals.
One of the judges at the national level, a well-known professor who has appeared on TV quiz shows, came up to A as he was standing by his exhibit in the hall and told him how impressed he was. “I couldn’t have put together something like that myself,” he apparently told him. The crime-stopping Shocking Purse had attracted attention as something a bit different in a sea of robot helpers of one sort or another.
But A misunderstood again. He thought he was being praised for his technical skills, an understandable misapprehension for a child to have. He still wasn’t being recognized for the dangerous villain he wanted to be, but he took some satisfaction in being interviewed by the local newspapers. When I saw his picture and read about his success, I was somewhat relieved myself. I felt that he had only wanted a little recognition and attention, and that now that he’d gotten it, he might develop in a more positive direction. I decided that I had been unnecessarily concerned and that everything had worked out in the end.
One day late last summer, the local newspaper printed a long article about A’s project and the science fair. But that same day the Lunacy Incident broke and the front pages were filled with the story. In the days that followed, the TV and the weekly magazines talked about almost nothing else. A’s achievement was acknowledged in front of the whole school at the opening ceremony for the second quarter, but the fact that he had been praised by the famous professor and that the newspaper had written about him was hardly mentioned. The Lunacy Incident was all anyone could talk about. What did A care that they had said good things about him? No one had even noticed. And what was so great about the Lunacy thing? Potassium cyanide? It wasn’t as though she had discovered it—who couldn’t use a deadly poison to kill people? A had invented his own murder weapon. Shouldn’t that get a lot more attention? But the more the media made a fuss over Lunacy, the more jealous A became, and the more he threw himself into developing his Execution Machine.
From the time he first entered school, B was a friendly, sociable child. He was pleasant and mild-mannered, exactly what one might expect of someone who had been carefully raised by his parents and two sisters, who were quite a bit older. When I had finished my interview with A, I called B to try to get him to meet me at the pool. Of course, from the meeting place itself he must have guessed my intention, and I was asked to come to his home instead. When I arrived, B said he wanted his mother to join us. She seemed surprised by my sudden appearance, from which I guessed that she had no idea what her son had done. I agreed that she could be present, and we began talking about B’s experiences since he had first started middle school.
He had joined Tennis Club during his first quarter. He’d been interested in trying a sport, and tennis had struck him as “cool.” But once the club had started, he discovered that it was already unfairly stratified. The kids who had played tennis in elementary school were almost immediately allowed to play on the courts, but those who had never played were relegated to a course of fitness training, and even after several weeks had gone by they still had never so much as touched a racket. B was in the latter group, but since it included more than half the kids, he hadn’t been particularly upset. After a couple of months of practice, he was allowed to actually play, and he had started to like the way he looked carrying the racket case back and forth to school.
At the start of summer vacation, their coach, Mr. Tokura, divided them into skills groups again and posted a practice regime for each. The groups included “Offensive skills,” “Defensive skills,” and the like, but B found himself once again grouped with the kids who were assigned to work on “Fitness skills.” Worse still, while each of the other groups had six members, there were just two others in B’s “Fitness” group: D, who stopped coming to practice almost immediately after the groups were posted, and E, a small, slender, pale boy who was known by the unflattering nickname “Kathy.”
Day after day, B and Kathy ran laps around the school. Convinced that his own level of fitness was no worse than the kids in the other groups, B felt himself growing more and more frustrated. One day a girl from another club asked him why he was running all the time if he was in Tennis Club. Thoroughly humiliated, B went to Coach Tokura and asked to be moved to another group. The coach asked him whether he objected to the running itself or to being seen running with Kathy. It was, of course, the latter, but B couldn’t tell the coach how he felt. “If you’re always worrying about what other people think, you’ll never get any tougher. Stick it out,” the coach told him. “We’ll be finishing group practices in another week.” But the next day B’s mother phoned the school to say he was quitting tennis, and soon after that he started attending an extremely competitive cram school all the way in town.
B’s grades had never been better than simply average, but by the time we started the second quarter, he had moved quite a bit higher in the class rankings. His scores on the midterms were nearly fifteen points higher than those in the first quarter, and at the cram school as well, where the levels were divided by class standing, in two months he had jumped from the lowest group, Class 5, to Class 2, second from the top. F, whose grades were roughly the same as B’s, started going to the same cram school in November. F started in Class 4.
Puberty is a time when a child’s abilities—whether in academics or sports or the arts—may suddenly begin to develop at a rapid pace. Seeing these successes, the child may then develop a certain self-confidence in that field, which in turn encourages increased effort—and increased success. Of course, it also happens in many cases that the child overestimates his abilities—or, like an athlete who encounters a slump, the child often develops rapidly only to reach a plateau where the rate of increase tapers off drastically.
It’s what happens next that really matters. Some children, convinced that they’ve reached the full extent of their abilities, stop trying and allow themselves to follow a downward curve to mediocrity. Others calmly continue to make the effort, regardless of results, and manage to maintain themselves at that level. But still others dig in and overcome the obstacle and eventually manage to move up to the next level. Those of us who serve as homeroom teachers for students preparing for the high school entrance exams are used to hearing parents tell us that their child could succeed if he would “just try.” But more often than not, the child they’re speaking of has reached this juncture and followed the downward curve. It’s not so much that he hasn’t tried; he’s simply no longer even in the game.
B, too, arrived at this moment in his development.
By the time we were ready to go on winter break, his grades were no longer improving and had even begun to go down a bit. At the start of the third quarter, he was subjected to a pep talk by his cram school teacher in front of the whole class—something right out of a TV commercial. “You let yourself celebrate
waaay
too soon! A few As and you started to relax and it’s right back to the old Bs and Cs!” B found the whole experience humiliating. What right did the man have to belittle him in front of everybody just because his grades had gone down a bit? But that wasn’t the worst of it. When the teacher announced the new class assignments, B was still in the second level, while F had moved up to the top group. He was furious, and when the lessons were over that afternoon, he went straight to the game center to work off his anger and spend the money he had received for New Year’s.
He was completely absorbed in a game when he suddenly realized he was surrounded by a group of high school students. They tried to take his wallet, he resisted, and when a patrol officer happened by and noticed the scuffle, he was taken into protective custody. As I remember it, the police called my house that night some time after eleven o’clock. I immediately called Mr. Tokura, the tennis coach. No doubt B was shocked to see him show up instead of me, his homeroom teacher and advisor. He asked Tokura why I hadn’t come, and was apparently told that it was because I was “a woman.” B took this to mean that my situation at home made it impossible for me to be there for him—he assumed that I hadn’t come because I’m a single mother and my own child took priority over my students.
In the car, on the way back to B’s home, Mr. Tokura apparently continued the criticism of B that he’d begun during tennis practice. “So the cram school teacher embarrassed you in front of the class and you went off to that game center. You worry too much about what other people think. When you get out of school, you’re going to have to learn to put up with a lot worse than a little scolding.” B’s reaction—that the coach had verbally abused him—was typically childish, but I was impressed by the way Mr. Tokura sized up the situation and offered B the appropriate advice.
As he was telling his story there in the living room, B’s mother had been sighing and murmuring sympathetically about the trials and tribulations of her “poor boy.” I couldn’t help being disgusted by her stupidity, but I also found myself becoming terribly jealous that she still had a child upon whom to pour all of this misplaced affection. At any rate, though B had been in some sense the victim in this incident, our school strictly forbids students to go to the game center under any circumstances. As punishment for his infraction, B was assigned to clean the pool deck and the changing room after school for a week.
At the beginning of February, A succeeded in tripling the voltage flowing to the zipper, and he was anxious to test it out. Around the same time, he noticed that B, who sat next to him in class, had been scribbling “Die! Die! Die!” in his notebook. He stopped B after school one day and asked whether he wanted to see a sex tape he’d managed to get hold of. B had heard about A’s tapes and immediately agreed. Very soon after the two of them began spending time together, A asked whether B had anybody he wanted to “punish.” B was naturally a bit puzzled, but A explained about his coin purse and the fact that he’d managed to increase its power. “I invented the thing to punish bad guys, so we need a bad guy to try it out on.”
B knew about the purse, of course, and about A’s success at the science fair. He’d been impressed, like everyone else in the class. But now that he was being given the chance to see how it worked, he mentioned the first name that came to mind: Mr. Tokura. A rejected the idea out of hand, however, showing what a coward he actually is. He would never act without hiding behind his inventions, and he refused to take on someone as strong as Tokura. B suggested me next—apparently out of lingering anger over my having sent his tennis coach to the police station instead of going myself. A rejected this idea, too—no doubt realizing that I wasn’t likely to be fooled twice by his little toy. But even worse, he knew I wasn’t going to make a fuss over it under any circumstances—which is, of course, exactly what he wanted.
At that point, B remembered that he’d seen Manami by the pool when he’d been cleaning the deck. “What about Moriguchi’s daughter?” he asked, and finally A agreed. A knew that I had been bringing Manami to school on Wednesday afternoons. B added important details: that Manami was coming to the pool by herself to feed the dog; and that she had pestered me for a Snuggly Bunny pouch at the mall but that I’d refused to buy it for her. The mention of the pouch got A’s attention.
The next Wednesday, when school had let out, A and B hid in the locker room by the pool and waited for Manami. They saw her come out on the pool deck, produce a piece of bread from under her jacket, and feed it to Muku through the fence. The boys approached her from behind, and B spoke first.
“Hello,” he said. “You’re Manami, aren’t you? We’re in your mother’s class, and I ran into you at Happy Town the other day.” Manami was cautious at first. A realized that she might be worried that they would tell me they’d seen her at the pool, and he spoke to her in a soothing voice.
“Do you like dogs? Well, so do we. That’s why we come here sometimes, to feed the pup.” When Manami heard that these big boys were coming to feed Muku, too, she relaxed and dropped her guard, and at that moment A produced the Snuggly Bunny pouch he’d had hidden behind his back. “Your momma didn’t get this for you, did she? Or did she get it for you later?” Manami shook her head. “The truth is, she asked us to go and buy it for you. So here it is, an early Valentine present from your mother.” A reached out and put the strap of the pouch around her neck, and Manami seemed elated at the gift. “Go ahead and open it,” A added. “There’s chocolate inside.” At the instant her hand touched the zipper, Manami collapsed to the ground and lay motionless. A satisfied smile spread over A’s face. B was in a state of shock, unable to believe what he’d just seen. “Gotcha!” he heard A whisper.
“What happened?” he said. His voice was breaking as he grabbed A’s shoulder. “What have you done? She’s not moving!”
“Then go and tell someone—tell everyone!” A said. He brushed B’s hand aside and walked away with a satisfied look on his face.
Left alone, B became convinced that Manami was dead. But he was shaking with fear and couldn’t bring himself to look at her body. He found himself staring instead into the eyes of Snuggly Bunny, whose head formed the fatal pouch. If they found out that this thing had killed her, then they’d find out he was an accomplice to murder. Averting his eyes, he pulled the pouch from Manami’s neck and threw it over the fence, as far away as he could. Then he thought of a plan. He could make it look as though she’d fallen into the pool. He picked up Manami’s body and threw it into the cold, dark water. Then he ran away as fast as his legs could carry him.