Sometimes I imagine I’m an omnipotent being.

  I picture what it would be like to watch someone’s entire life in real time. Pause and rewind. Compile clips of the best moments. Delete the bad ones.

  Then I wonder if a being like that did exist, would my own life even be interesting enough to view at all?

  I go from home to the train station, to school, and back again.

  Well… that’s not entirely true. Sometimes I visit her grave, but only when I can’t stand the pain any longer.

  And if that all-seeing being were to tune in right now and saw me curled up on the shower floor, would they instantly change the channel? Surely an omnipotent being would be bored shitless watching some naked loser feeling sorry for himself.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and willed myself to become that being, even just for a second. All I would need is an instant to rewind back to that day and change the outcome.

  But nothing happened. I could still feel the lukewarm water pattering on my head. My lower body was cold, and my legs were starting to cramp.

  Try as I might, I couldn’t change the past. And all I succeeded in doing was remembering the moment I found her body. The moment the world crashed down on my head.

  ***

  I packed up my books and headed out of the classroom. It was just turning dusk, and the school was closing for the day. Fluorescent lights buzzed to life above me as I made my way down the long corridor of senior-year classrooms.

  I was alone.

  All the other students had long since gone home or to their after-school activities. She was long gone, too. Probably playing Animal Crossing in her messy room or doom-scrolling TikTok by now. I smiled to myself at the thought as I rounded the corner and made my way to the elevators.

  Our school, to be frank, was for rich kids. And not just the ordinary kind. I mean rich rich. The type of families that throw clothes away after wearing them once. The kind that have separate on-site accommodation for their live-in housekeepers and chefs.

  I wasn’t one of those kids myself. I was a scholarship student. Only here because the school needed to fill a quota or have their government funding pulled. Not that they particularly needed it.

  I was well aware of that. I wasn’t bitter about it, quite the contrary. I was grateful to have the opportunity to be a student alongside future political leaders and CEOs. Easier to get a decent job that way, I figured.

  If someone watched a lot of dramas or read a lot of young adult fiction, they’d be forgiven for thinking I must be the victim of bullying for being a “poor” kid. But tropes like that exist only in fiction for a reason.

  Everyone was pretty nice here, all things considered. A lot of the students were snobs, true, but they knew better than to bully or put down others. Well… to their face, at least.

  A lot of the time, bullies have an underlying reason for their behavior. It just so happens that the biggest reason is usually poor or abusive parenting. Funnily enough, educated and wealthy parents didn’t seem to produce children like that. Mostly.

  Don’t get me wrong, there were a few bullies in our school. You are bound to get a few bad eggs when over 600 kids are gathered together in one place.

  But they didn’t bother me. I was just the scholarship kid. Worthy of as much notice as their housekeeper. Or the chauffeur who picked them up at the gilded school gate.

  There was one person who paid attention to me, though. My only friend here. The girl who was always stuck to me like a fly to flypaper.

  Hanako.

  She was the daughter of a tech CEO. I think the kind that make TVs… or maybe computers… I don’t know, she didn’t talk about her father much.

  She was, by all accounts, the most beautiful human being I’d ever met. And for some reason, she’d taken a liking to me on my very first day here.

  I pressed the down button on the elevator, but nothing happened. The button didn’t illuminate like it usually did, the doors stayed shut, and I didn’t hear the telltale whirring that signalled an elevator moving up to meet me.

  Weird. Must be out of service.

  I shrugged and pushed open the emergency stairwell door next to the elevator. I made it down one flight of stairs and was just rounding a landing when I saw it.

  I remember my science teacher saying that the average pressure the molecules around us exert on our bodies at any given time is about 1013 hectopascals. At that moment, it felt like 1 million.

  There she lay. Beautiful Hanako, neck twisted at an unnatural angle, long jet black hair in disarray, and a crimson gash across the front of her white blouse.

  A broken doll. Discarded like an unwanted toy. Dead.

  ***

  I opened my eyes. My whole body was freezing. Now-cold water pelted my naked body. My head was resting on the tiled shower floor.

  I groaned and sat up, rubbing water from my eyes.

  I must have used up all the hot water. Koyuri would be pissed. I didn’t even care.

  I dragged my stiff limbs out of the shower and dried myself with a towel. I’d been too lazy to prepare fresh clothes, so I just put the dirty ones back on again.

  I caught a glimpse of myself in the foggy mirror. My eyes looked sunken, as if I were minutes from death. My brown hair was getting a bit long and messy, but I couldn’t muster the energy to get it cut.

  What’s the point anyway? The only person who acknowledged my existence at school was Hanako, and she’s dead.

  I opened the door and stepped out into our apartment hallway. It was cramped and simple, much like the apartment itself.

  It was just barely big enough to fit two people, but it was all Koyuri could afford. That was my mother. I called her that because she said calling her “mum” or “mother” made her sound old.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  It was just the two of us, since my father wasn’t around. It wasn’t some tragic backstory or anything like that. He wasn’t dead, and he didn’t abandon us in a dramatic fashion. Koyuri got pregnant at a young age by mistake, and he didn’t want to impact his life by adding a child to it.

  I’d met him a few times, but it was like meeting a stranger, and Koyuri never talked about him anyway.

  She never dated anyone else after that. She said it was because she never met any men she liked, but I knew it was because of me. She didn’t want to disrupt my life.

  I opened the door to my room and stepped inside. In the dim light from the street lights outside, I could just barely make out the contours of my desk and bed.

  I didn’t bother turning on the light. As was now custom for the last few weeks, I plopped down on my bed, fully clothed, and closed my eyes.

  Better to be asleep sooner than to have to exist in a world without her. My lethargic mind wandered back to the aftermath of that moment.

  ***

  Two cops sat across from me, staring me down.

  We were in an interrogation room. The table was metal and a large down light buzzed incessantly above it. A large clock on the wall ticked annoyingly loud.

  There weren’t any windows, and apart from the clock, the rustling of clothes and audible breaths of the officers, there weren’t any other sounds.

  It was a room designed for maximum irritation.

  But I wasn’t irritated. I was somewhere else. I was still in the stairwell, staring down at Hanako’s lifeless body. Unable to move. Unable to speak. Unable to believe what I was seeing.

  The Makoto sitting in the uncomfortable chair in a police station, a few blocks from my school, was someone else.

  A projection. A mindless body. Like the holograms in Star Wars.

  I suddenly realized I’d been asked a question.

  “...Well?”

  “S-sorry, can you repeat that?”

  “I said,” the officer with the big head and beady eyes said in annoyance. “Did you see anyone else when you left the classroom?”

  “Just Hanako,” I replied emotionlessly.

  “Apart from her. Think hard, son, this is very important,” the other officer said gently.

  He was completely bald and had a wrinkled face, likely much older than the other one.

  I always thought the good cop-bad cop routine was something only reserved for movies and TV shows. But here I was, having it used on me.

  If I was guilty, it’d probably make me nervous. But at that moment, I just felt… nothing.

  “No.”

  The beady-eyed cop sighed loudly and scratched his head.

  Just then, there was a knock at the door. The older cop got up and opened it just a crack. I could hear someone whispering something to him before he closed the door again and sat back down.

  “Looks like you’re free to go. But before you do, can you tell us anything else that you thought was unusual? Any little detail will help.”

  “The… elevator.”

  “What about it?”

  “It wasn’t working, not even the light on the button.”

  The beady-eyed officer scribbled something down.

  “Anything else?”

  “No…”

  The older officer piped up again.

  “Okay, last question. What was your relationship with Hanako Mashimoto?”

  I thought for a moment. It was a good question. We weren’t just friends, but we also weren’t a couple. We were something ambiguous. In between.

  “Friends.”

  But it didn’t matter anymore. Defining it was useless. She was dead.

  Realizing that, the pain of loss finally seized my throat. It felt like a tennis ball was working its way up my oesophagus.

  I was led out of the interrogation room. We passed the station’s holding cells, whose only occupant right now looked to be a snoring homeless man.

  I was led through a security door which the beady-eyed officer opened with a swipe card, and back out into the lobby.

  Koyuri was waiting there, a worried look in her almond-shaped eyes. Her short brown hair looked like it needed a brush.

  The older officer said something to her before he and the beady-eyed one left us to it.

  In one of the private offices to my left, I could see a well-dressed man animatedly berating a police officer. From the little I could see of his face through the blinds, I thought he looked a bit like Hanako.

  “...Ma-kun, are you okay?”

  I stood there limply as Koyuri hugged me.

  I didn’t answer her. I couldn’t muster the energy to form the syllables.

  She led me by the hand out the station’s electronic doors into the parking lot. We got into her little Suzuki K-car.

  On the drive back to our apartment, she explained that the officers had let me go because the school’s security cameras had recorded me sitting in the classroom at the time of Hanako’s death. The school had cameras everywhere. Everywhere—except the emergency stairwell.

  I didn’t respond and simply half-listened to Koyuri speak.

  Toward the end of the drive, she started crying, but I still couldn’t muster any energy to comfort her.

  It was all so pointless.

  ***

  A knock on my door startled me awake. It was pitch black in my room now.

  I lay there for a minute or so as Koyuri continued to knock and call my name.

  Realizing she wouldn’t give up and leave me alone this time, I reached over and flicked on my desk light.

  It illuminated a small room with light green walls. The only furniture was the desk—which was covered in books and school work—a chair, a small wardrobe, and a bedside table. There was a single poster from an anime I liked above the desk. A framed picture of Hanako and I—which she’d given me—lay face down on the bedside table. I couldn’t bear to look at it, but I also couldn’t bring myself to throw it away.

  I got up and made my way towards the door, kicking aside discarded clothes on the floor as I went.

  I opened the door and was greeted by a smiling Koyuri. The smile was forced, sure, but she was trying to be her usual cheerful self.

  Props to her, because there’s no way I could do the same right now.

  She thrust something towards me. A train ticket?

  “Since you’re taking a break from school starting next week, I thought it’d be nice to spend some time with your grandma.”

  Koyuri’s voice sounded shaky and uncertain.

  The only other time in my life she’d been like this was when my grandfather died. The rest of the time she was always extremely sure of herself. As solid and reliable as a rock.

  What had happened to Hanako and its effect on me had clearly affected her a lot as well. But once again, I found it hard to care.

  Nothing matters.

  “Fine,” I said, snatching the ticket from her hand and closing the door again.

  I heard a shaky “Ma-kun, I love you” from the other side, followed by her footsteps receding down the hallway.

  I knew what she was doing. She wanted me to get out of the city and spend some time away for a while. Away from thoughts of Hanako.

  If I were honest, the thought was appealing to me anyway. Anywhere away from this wretched city and its constant reminders of Hanako sounded good to me.

  Besides, sleeping all day here or at my grandma’s house didn’t make any difference. As long as I was unconscious.

  ***

  The next morning, I packed a few things into a backpack. I hesitated for a second before shoving the photo of Hanako and I in there as well.

  I hurried out of my room and down the hallway to the entryway. It was early, so Koyuri was still asleep. I didn’t bother waking her up.

  She probably has work later anyway.

  I slipped on my shoes, stepped out into the corridor, and took the two flights of stairs down to the ground floor of our old apartment building.

  It was an early Sunday morning, and the streets of Fukuoka were already alive with street vendors and foot traffic.

  I passed a crepe stand, and was flooded with memories of Hanako’s laughing, cream-covered face.

  I passed a man sitting cross-legged playing a shakuhachi, and was flooded with memories of Hanako in music class murdering notes on her own shakuhachi.

  I passed a pair of girls dressed in lolita clothing, and was flooded with memories of my first outing with Hanako. She’d worn something similar. That was the day I truly understood what people meant when they said a girl looked “doll-like”.

  The image of her delicate, doll-like body lying broken on the stairwell flashed through my mind once again.

  I hurried down the stairs to the train station.

  The sooner I was on the bullet train and away from this place, the better.