YOBANASHI DECEIVE 3

The air felt heavy within the car.

The heater ensured we were kept at a comfortable temperature, but there was no lively conversation, no particular sense of comfort.

The rhythmical beat of light and dark from the passing streetlights brought the car the only sense of life it had.

I sighed, lightly, so that my aunt wouldn’t notice.

I was never that good in cars, anyway. I was bad. Really bad.

Really, any kind of rideable object. Seesaws and stuff were fine, but when it got up to cars and trains, I faced serious digestive trouble.

My lack of experience riding in them might have something to do with it. But there must’ve been something wrong with my inner-ear canals or something. My sense of balance was incredibly weak, and that made me sick to my stomach.

I remember how my mother got the insane idea to put me on a roller coaster once. That was one thing I could never quite forgive her for. It was awful. So fast, so shaky, all spinny and dazzly…It made no sense to me why anyone would enjoy that.

By the time I felt the contents of my stomach make a dash for my esophagus, I was prepared to kill myself right there. If I was going to debase myself in public, might as well go all the way, I thought.

I managed to avoid the worst-case scenario, luckily. But I had zero desire to repeat that experience again.

Regardless, we left home about forty minutes ago.

The car was headed for a special-care facility that would be my next home.

Why did this happen? There were several reasons I could think of. But that particular incident—the day I discovered my powers—probably sealed my fate.

Ever since that first day I fully awoke to my abilities, my aunt began to make clear and obvious efforts to avoid me whenever possible.

I never discussed my freaky new abilities with her, of course, and nobody ever found out about them in the end.

Or so I surmised, at least. But my aunt must have assumed the worst-case scenario. The next day, our elegant manor was visited by a string of self-styled exorcists, or spirit dispellers, or something like that.

These guys were all clearly frauds to any impartial observer, but my aunt seemed to like all of them, swallowing up everything they said about orbs and auras and electrostatic levels and so on.

That was the beginning of the end for me. It turned out I, as it went, was the cause of all this terror and eeriness. You can guess the rest.

I was planning to leave the whole time, of course, if I was getting in the way. It’s not like I was going to miss the place much, either.

If there was anything I did regret, it was the way I never made up for any of it. And how could I? How could a kid like me make up for triggering as much chaos as I did back there?

I wanted to, somehow, if I could. But right now, I couldn’t think of a single way.

Just as I let out another sigh, the car lumbered to a halt.

“We’re here,” my aunt said, exiting the car as I checked out the surroundings. “Time to get out.”

The light-brown building on the other side of the windshield must have been the “facility” my aunt was talking about.

The way she put it, it was a home for kids like me with no close relatives to turn to.

“I figured,” my aunt said with an awkward smile as she tried to sell me on it, “it’d be best if you were together with more kids your age.”

There was nothing more annoying in my life than other kids my age.

To someone like me, who had yet to make a single friend his entire life, the house before my eyes seemed like little more than a zoo.

After locking the car, my aunt looked at her watch.

“Wait here a moment, okay? I need to talk to the staff inside.”

“Huh? Um, okay.”

My aunt disappeared behind the front door, leaving me alone. My body, warmed by the heat of the car, began to shiver in the northerly winds.

The experience made me feel a little sentimental. Which was crazy. I never got that way.

But I didn’t have long to enjoy it. The wind began to kick up, howling, chilling my bones with astonishing force.

“Eesh, this is cold! How long’s she gonna make me wait out here…?”

Not being particularly stout of frame, the blustering wind made my body shiver.

I wouldn’t have minded so much if she was in and out in a couple of minutes. When that grew to ten or twenty or so, though, that was a different story.

C’mon, lady, why’d you have to take me out of the car if you were going in by yourself first? Didn’t you think at all? And you even locked the door so I couldn’t go back inside. Thanks a lot. I’m going to freeze out here, waiting by the door.

I paced around a little, trying to stave off the cold. The effort was a failure, all the heat in the world actively avoiding my presence. Time passed.

“…Argh, I can’t do this! It’s too cold! I’m gonna die out here!”

I scoped out my surroundings one more time as I complained to myself. I didn’t know what I had been expecting. There certainly wasn’t a space heater nearby.

This is what I get for slapping on whatever was lying around my room this morning. I knew I should’ve worn another layer or two.

I’m not asking for a fancy padded ski jacket or anything. Just some gloves, at least…

As I contemplated this, I suddenly saw a scarf thrust in front of me.

Sure. That’ll do. Any port in a storm.

It was right when I breathed a sigh of relief, smiled serenely, and reached out to pick it up that I realized what was strange about this.

Just an instant before—the blink of an eye—there was nobody else here. Now there was, like nothing could be more typical.

I reared back with an ugly-sounding “Agghh!”

As I did, I noticed the person offering me the scarf was a girl, one around the same age I was.

She had a pair of large purple earmuffs and a heavy, warm-looking coat on. It all looked nice on her, but her hair was a mess, going off in all directions and sticking out into the air in spots.

I almost thought she was a boy at first, but given the skirt she was wearing, it seemed safe to assume otherwise.

My shocked reaction made the girl flinch a bit. Then she sheepishly glared at me.

“I’m trying to give this to you, you know.”

“Uh…”

My hesitance was starting to annoy her.

“It’d be weird for someone right next to me to die, all right? So I thought I’d give this to you!”

“Agh! Um…oh. Well, thanks! Ha-ha! Guess I might as well…”

I reached for the scarf. “That’s what you should’ve been doing all along,” she snorted.

Maybe it was just my imagination. It really did seem like she popped up out of nowhere.

I still had my concerns about that, but at a time like this, it’d probably be better to just shut up and take it.

Just like the rest of the short-haired girl’s outfit, the scarf was perhaps a little too fancy to be kids’ wear.

A quick examination revealed a label that prominently featured a major brand.

My mother had a watch from that same brand.

I remembered how rarely she actually wore it. It was so expensive—or expensive-looking, at least—that it spent most of its life deep in a drawer somewhere.

“I, um, I dunno if I should take this from you…”

I tried to smile politely. The short-haired girl clearly didn’t appreciate the gesture.

“I’m trying to help you…”

“Oh, no! I really appreciate it! Really! But this is a really nice scarf, isn’t it? You shouldn’t just be giving it to people like this.”

The girl gave me a confused gaze.

“What, this is…expensive, or…?”

“Oh! Didn’t you know? Umm…well, look, I’m fine, okay?”

I pushed the scarf back at the girl. She wordlessly accepted it, the frustrated dejection written clearly on her face. Her eyes focused on it for a moment…and then on me, as she began to wrap it around my neck herself.

“Whoa!”

“I’ll let you borrow it anyway. You look really cold. I’ve been watching you for a while.”

A lot more obstinate than I thought she’d be.

I wasn’t much in the mood for it, but it wasn’t like I was going to indignantly strip it off my head in front of her.

From the neck down, I could feel my body warm up a little. Then, in a few short moments, you couldn’t have paid me enough money to give the scarf back.

“Aw…Well, thanks. This is really good.”

That’s what buying brand name gets you. It was shockingly warm.

I didn’t have much of a grasp of how much things cost in general, but I reasoned that the scarf must’ve been worth shelling out for a little.

But I was left in my reverie of cozy warmth for just a few scant moments before the meaning behind the words “watching you for a while” finally registered in my mind.

“Say, uh, where were you watching me from, though?”

“Huh? What do you mean, where? I was right next to you…”

The short-haired girl reached that point in her reply before something dawned on her. Her face grimaced, a soft moan escaping her lips.

“Um…I’m sorry, did I say something I shouldn’t have?”

I asked it carefully, worried that I was hitting a sore point of some kind with her. “Not really,” she gruffly replied. “People’ve said that a lot lately. Like, ‘since when were you there,’ kind of thing.”

It made sense, as I gauged her gruff, annoyed-looking demeanor. She didn’t act like she particularly enjoyed conversation. Maybe she just didn’t stand out much.

“Yeah…I mean, you kind of surprised me because it seemed like you appeared out of thin air, kinda. I thought you were a ghost or something for a sec.”

It was a joke. But in hindsight, I wasn’t sure that intention came across. I added a strained “ah-ha-ha” at the end, but the girl still reddened before my eyes.

“Ngh…”

Tears began to come out. It was, of course, the first time I ever made a girl cry in my life.

“Ahhhh!! I’m sorry! I’m just kidding! I’m kidding, okay?! I didn’t feel that way at all, all right?!”

It was a commendable effort on my part, I thought, but it was already too late.

The girl stood there, sniffling to herself, interjecting little attacks on me as she did—“You’re not kidding,” “I’ll get you back for that,” “I swear,” and so on.

Great. I screwed everything up yet again.

I recalled how my mother warned me about girls. “Watch out,” she had said. “They can be pretty delicate creatures.” I didn’t realize this was what she meant.

“Umm…umm…”

This is going to be my home starting today. What am I doing, here in front of it?

If someone saw me right now, I might start getting treated like a problem child before I even made it through the door. I whirled my head around, checking for eyewitnesses. Once to the right, once to the left—and then, just as I was about to look right again, something startled me.

The short-haired girl, sobbing in front of me a moment ago, had vanished without a trace.

“Huh?! When did she…?!”

It was even more of a shock to me than when she first appeared.

If I offended her to the point where she couldn’t take it anymore and ran off, she still would’ve been visible in the distance somewhere. And unless she was wearing spongy slippers or something, I should’ve been hearing some footsteps.

But no matter where I looked, I couldn’t find any evidence of her.

It was weird. That short-haired girl just up and disappeared without any warning. It happened too fast to describe it in any other way.

“You’re kidding me…”

I rubbed my eyes, unable to believe what just happened.

“You’re kidding me!”

The voice startled me all over again.

In the second or two I was rubbing my eyes, the short-haired girl was right back where she was standing before.

Normally, this experience would’ve made me scream out loud. The only reason I didn’t was because it happened so suddenly, my mind couldn’t wrap itself around it.

It was a good thing I didn’t. If I raised my voice in front of this girl, still crying her heart out in front of me, I’d probably get slapped for it.

But as I contemplated this, I was greeted by an even more incredible sight, one that made my jaw clamp down in self-defense.

The short-haired girl’s body, from her feet to the bottom of her knees just below where her skirt ended, was gradually fading away from existence.

That was enough to make even me gasp a little. I meant it as a joke, but maybe I was right—she could be a ghost after all.

…Wait a minute.

Could she really be something like that?

I had a near-death experience of my own, not too long ago. Maybe she started talking to me because she thought I was one of her kind…or something.

“You probably think I’m a ghost, don’t you?”

She was going to make me break down in tears if she kept that line of questioning up.

I was paralyzed, shivers shooting up and down my spine as I scrambled to keep myself together.

“Ah…Ha! Ha-ha-ha! Oh, come onnnn! I don’t think anything like that at all! C’mon, we’re all friends here, right?!”

As I expected, I wasn’t capable of much coherent speech.

My legs began to tremble. I couldn’t blame her if she noticed how petrified I was.

“Friends…?”

She continued to sniffle a bit.

“Y-yeah! I mean…We’re both kinda the same, aren’t we? Like…uh…”

How were we the same? At least I had both of my legs intact. She was floating wispily in the air. I am such an idiot.

The girl looked less than convinced as she stared at me.

Great. She’s gonna kill me. I’ll be cursed and buried alive or burned to ashes or something.

If I had known this was going to happen, I would’ve borrowed a “magic amulet” or two from one of my aunt’s fraudulent exorcists.

It wasn’t the idea of death that scared me so much as how I had no idea what she’d do to me next.

Just when the panic was about to make me start bawling, my mind conjured up a brilliant idea.

“Oh! I know! Lemme show you this trick I’ve got! And once you see it, then…you know, we can be friends, then! Okay?”

“Huh?” the girl replied, edging back a little. “What’re you talking about?” It wasn’t the response I hoped for my teary-eyed pleadings. No turning back now, though. I kept going.

“J-just watch me, all right?! I promise you won’t regret it!”

The girl’s face indicated to me that she had no trust in me whatsoever. I paid it no mind as I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate.

Since that fateful day when I discovered my ability, I tried using it a handful of times, taking care not to have my family discover it.

Thinking about the rough outlines of someone—their voice, their scent, their shape—was enough to let me transform into them.

After a few test runs to satisfy my curiosity, I began to have a general picture of the ground rules. First, I couldn’t turn myself into inanimate objects. I tried turning into an airplane once—I figured it’d be fun to go on a little trip—but when I opened my eyes, the only thing I saw in the mirror was a demented boy with his arms outstretched in the air.

I’d never even seen a plane up close in person, much less taken a ride in one. It would have been a much bigger surprise if it actually worked. Plus—really, trying to become an airplane indoors? What was I thinking? How was I going to pay for the house I’d inevitably level in the process?

After a bit more experimentation, I came to the realization that I could only transform into living things I’ve (a) physically met before, and (b) could conjure a clear image of in my mind. Being able to transform didn’t mean I could engineer vast changes in terms of body size or musculature, either.

There was only so much I could do by myself, though, and there was a lot I still didn’t know. But now that I was in this situation, it was the only thing I could turn to.

Simply “recall” someone I thought this girl would enjoy seeing, and…

Sorry I keep relying on you, girl from the park.

When I opened my eyes, I saw the short-haired girl staring blankly at me, mouth wide open.

Hopefully that went over well. I began to sweat a little.

“Wh-what do you think? Neat, huh?”

The girl began quivering.

Whoops. Maybe not so much. It’s all over for me. I began reciting my final prayers in my mind when the girl finally spoke.

“Yeah…Pretty neat!”

Her eyes began to sparkle, just as mine did when I first used this ability. I called off the last rites and sighed to myself in relief.

“Y-you think so?! Whew…Great.”

“What is that, though…?”

“Um…How to put it? I guess you could say I can transform into anybody I want, maybe?”

“Wowww…!”

The astonishment in her voice was palpable.

Sweet. Now we’re back in business! That was a lot easier than I expected. If I can keep this up, maybe she’ll let me out of this alive.

“Can you show me anyone else?”

“…Um?”

The short-haired girl must’ve liked it more than I thought. She eagerly awaited my next transformation, eyes focused squarely on me.

“Uh, sure! Yeah! Okay, who should I do next…?”

I didn’t have many more tricks up my sleeve, though. In fact, the only other member of my repertoire I was confident I could break out at the drop of a hat was my mother.

Oof. My total lack of social relationships was really coming back to bite me now. I probably should’ve interacted some more with the kids in the park.

Becoming my mother was not at all something I wanted to do…but so be it.

Sorry, Mom. I just don’t want this ghost to kill me, that’s all. Just one more time…!

“…All right. Here goes.”

“Uh-huh…”

I shut my eyes and let it all enter my recall. Her shape, her voice, her scent…

Unlike the girl from the park, I had no problem remembering my mother at all. That was partly why this was so much more difficult for me. I opened my eyes.

“…What do you think?”

“Ooooh!”

The short-haired girl’s reaction was the brightest I had seen from her yet. She accentuated it with a few seconds of enthusiastic clapping. It made me a little self-conscious.

“Ha-ha-ha! Yeah, uh…thanks.”

…Well, look at that. She’s not so bad after all.

The blunt hostility she greeted me with at first was now firmly in the past, at least. Maybe there were some decent ghosts out there after all. And a ghost like this, I really could be friends with, maybe.

“Huh?”

Taking a glance downward, I noticed that the bottoms of the girl’s legs had reappeared.

“Um…what? Is there something wrong with my legs?”

The girl gave me a questioning look.

“Uh…no. Not really.”

“Not ‘really’? You weirdo.”

She shrugged, apparently not paying it too much mind. I wanted to argue that we were both weirdoes in a way, but I resisted, not wanting to say the wrong thing and trample on her delicate heart again.

Then she brought her hand out to me.

“Okay, then…Yes.”

“Yes?”

“No, I mean…Friends! We’re friends, okay? So shake on it.”

She waved her hand a little bit closer to my midsection.

Ah. Right. I forgot about it in the midst of my wild panicking, but I did mention something about that, didn’t I?

“Oh, uh…Sure. Right. Um…”

I should have just taken her hand, but in my infinite intelligence, I hesitated. Instead, the girl grabbed my right hand and forced it into her own. Then she grinned.

“Good. Friends, then.”

Something about it intensely embarrassed me. I felt like my head was going to catch on fire. This is the first friend I’ve ever made, isn’t it? Even I can make one of them. The kind of friend you can play with together, like the kids in the park I resented so much.

“S-sure!”

I firmed up my grip a little and smiled as broadly as I could. It was a moment to remember—myself and my very first friend, the short-haired “ghost” girl.

“Hey, what’s your name, by the way?”

“Oh!”

I exclaimed my surprise out loud. I couldn’t go around proclaiming she was my friend if I didn’t even know her name. Her eyebrows arched downward.

“Also, how long are you gonna hold my hand?”

I flung my hand back out of embarrassment.

“Oh! Right! Ha-ha-ha! My name. Um, my name’s Shuuya. Shuuya Kano.”

“Hmm…”

The short-haired girl nodded to herself for a moment.

“Wh-what about you?”

“My name is Kido…”

“Yeaaaaaggghhhhh!!”

Just as the girl was giving her name, I heard a now-familiar scream from the front door.

I turned around in a flash. I knew what I’d see there, and I wasn’t disappointed—my aunt stood bolt upright, all but ready to foam at the mouth.

…Oh. Right. I was waiting on her.

“Wh-why’re you following me here?! You chased me here, didn’t you?! Didn’t you?! Aaaahhhhhh…”

My aunt’s machine gun–like delivery ended with a rapid descent to the ground.

Shouts along the lines of “What was that?!” and “I heard screaming!” echoed out from inside.

Awful. Absolutely awful.

“Hey, who’s that lady?”

Instead of answering the short-haired girl’s question, I hurriedly attempted to find a solution to this dilemma, sweat pouring down my brow.

In an instant, I thought up both the most innovative and the most painful of potential methods. It was the only way. The only way I had left. I grabbed the girl by the shoulders and attempted a friendly grin.

“Listen, can you punch me as hard as you can, like, right now?!”

“…Uh?”

The girl’s face rewound back to the hostility she originally greeted me with, her eyes throwing a baneful glare at me. It didn’t matter to me. I had to get back to normal, and I had to do it now.

The shouting grew louder inside, accompanied by footsteps. “Hey!” one of them said. “There’s someone collapsed on the floor out there!”

“Please! I mean it! Don’t hold anything back! Just punch me right now! Please!!”

The short-haired girl’s face was a stone mask of disbelief. No more smiles from her now.

But I didn’t care. I lightly shook her by the shoulders, and that was enough for her face to transform instantly.

The next moment, she gave me a look of naked, murderous rage.

Farewell, Friend Number One. It wasn’t for long, but it was really fulfilling.

A sharp smack! echoed against the building walls.

It was a moment to remember—the very first of what’d turn out to be the many, many times Kido punched me.