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  At first I thought, Serves him right, as I listened to this, but Worm went on and on and it started to creep me out. Signaling him we should hang up, I grabbed away the phone and found Wataru had hung up a long time ago. What an ass.

  “He hung up. Redial it.”

  I punched in the number. At this point I didn’t care whether they traced the call or he reported us to the police or whatever. No matter how much I let it ring, though, Wataru didn’t pick up. Damn—I started to feel really upset and took it out on Worm.

  “It’s all your fault,” I said. “You got me involved and it’s made me twisted. You’re the root of all evil, you know that? You’re the cause of all this trouble. I’ve had it. I’m going home. Back to the ordinary world you’ll never be able to return to.”

  “The world I can’t return to?” he said. “You mean I’ve been kicked out?”

  Worm raised his head and gave me a hard look. In the dark, his eyes glittered.

  “But you’re the one who decided to leave that world,” I said.

  Worm sighed. “I’m—frightened,” he said. “Please—I need you to stay with me.”

  This was the second time Worm had surrendered. What a wimp. How could I not feel superior? Worm was weak, and I was strong—it was as simple as that. This night had been a turning point that had really changed me. I felt victorious, like I’d defeated an enemy. But still I was kind of uneasy. Maybe I’d entered Worm’s world after all. Maybe that’s why I’d made that threatening call to Wataru. But—was this really me? Was I really such an awful person?

  * * *

  I was just about finished eating, but Worm was still slumped over his bowl of ramen.

  “I just realized I don’t have an appetite.”

  “’Cause you’re thinking about your mother, I bet,” I said sarcastically, in a low voice. “You regret what you did and it scares you.”

  Worm was facing me, but his eyes were elsewhere.

  “I wonder. I—don’t know.”

  “I don’t really care one way or the other,” I said, “but what happened to all the military talk?”

  “Too much trouble.”

  Adrenaline surged through me. “I’ll take that,” I said, and switched my empty ramen bowl with his full one. This was the first time in my life I’d grabbed someone else’s food. My parents always led a pretty well-off life, so good table manners were a kind of duty I’d been brought up with. Eat all your meat, don’t leave any carrots. You know the drill. Mom always trimmed all the fat from our beef and pork and removed the skin from chicken. Snacks were homemade cookies or pudding, and she always made a homemade lunch for me to take to school. I didn’t like egg yolks, so Mom always made me special fried eggs using just the whites. But right now, I was a total brat. I held on to the bowl of ramen Worm hadn’t touched and thought, Yes! A strange idea came to me: Is this the kind of girl I really am? Meaning what happened last night, too.

  With nothing else to occupy him, Worm sat there, engrossed in the TV. A program was on featuring NaiNai. A commercial for Geos came on next, with Okamura speaking English, but Worm still stared at the screen, like he was fascinated by it. I could understand what he was feeling. Like he was watching a world that he had no connection with anymore. The greasy TV set itself sat on top of this tacky colored box, the kind you could pick up in a supermarket. The cabinet was stuffed with dog-eared manga magazines that the other customers—young guys, truck drivers by the look of them, and the older guy, an outdoorsy type who looked like he ran the local motel—picked up and took back to their seats.

  “Something’s wrong with you, you know that?” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s like you’ve totally lost your confidence.”

  “No way.”

  Worm acted all tough, but when it came to breaking into a cottage he made a mess of it. He’s the one who suggested that we sneak into a vacant cottage and stay there for a while, but I was the one who actually picked it out. I picked a pretty one with a nice red roof. But just when we broke the window of the bathroom with a rock, this earsplitting siren went off and a caretaker showed up in a four-wheel-drive car. How was I to know that cottages in the mountains had security systems?

  We raced back down the mountain road in the dark. We finally came out on the highway but had nowhere to go to. We only had about ten thousand yen left and didn’t want to spend it on a love hotel again, and using a vacant cottage hadn’t worked out. That’s when Worm started acting like all his batteries had given out. He stopped that stupid pretending-to-be-a-soldier routine, and his eyes got all vacant. You’ve got to eat something, I told him, and tried to comfort him by offering to pay for dinner. No matter what spin I might put on it, the reason I didn’t take off for home right then and there was ’cause I found it interesting to watch Worm’s steady decline. Or maybe I should say I enjoyed twisting Worm around my little finger. I never realized I had this streak of cruelty in me. Maybe what I really regretted about my relationship with Wataru was that I wouldn’t have him under my thumb. So there was this side of me I never knew about before. And I was starting to think that maybe I liked it. A Kirarin who’s stronger than anybody else. Stronger than Toshi, than Yuzan, than Terauchi. A woman who was bad. Maybe I’d finally discovered my real identity.

  “As soon as you’re done, let’s get out of here.” Worm poked me in the side with his elbow. His elbow grazed my breast, and I frowned.

  “Knock it off, you pervert. I don’t want anything to do with you.”

  “Sorry,” he apologized meekly.

  “Where’re we going when we leave?” I asked.

  “To a convenience store. I like them.”

  Worm looked uncomfortably around the interior of the ramen shop. We paid for the food, and when we went outside the sky was full of stars. We hadn’t noticed before, maybe because it was still a little light out. I gazed up at the night sky, a mountain in my peripheral vision. It was Mount Asama. I couldn’t see the whole mountain—it was like some huge monster crouching there, melting into the dark. A mountain like that at night is awful. It reminded me of Worm last night, crouched by the bed, his eyes glittering in the darkness. The guy is definitely weird, I thought, and shuddered. Deep down, I wanted to get away from him.

  “Do you think I should kill my dad?” Worm asked me as we trudged along the highway, heading toward a convenience store we could see lit up in the distance.

  “If you wanna kill him, then why not? It’s got nothing to do with me. You have to do it, otherwise you won’t feel like you got back at him, right?”

  “Yeah, I suppose. Yeah, I guess you’re right. But I don’t understand why I have to murder to settle a score. Why do you think that is?”

  Worm had become totally introspective and moody. And I’d turned arrogant. Go figure.

  “Don’t ask me. It’s something you have to settle yourself. So why did you kill your mother? She’s the one who gave birth to you. So you didn’t want to be anybody’s child anymore?”

  Worm came to a halt and let out a deep breath. His loneliness came to me like a vibration in the air, but I turned away from him to show him I wasn’t buying it. Worm, in his own world. Everybody else is still in my world. Everybody except Wataru, that is. Last night I was sure I was in Worm’s world, but I was wrong. I hadn’t killed anybody. I felt kind of relieved. In the dark I could hear Worm muttering.

  “You’re exactly right, Kirarin. Maybe what I want is to cut all ties with everybody. The thread or something that keeps me connected to the world, the worthless proof that I exist.”

  The instant I heard him say my name I had a weird feeling. An uneasy sense. This side—the other side. Which one was I on? As I walked along in the darkness of this plateau, hemmed in by mountains, I wasn’t sure.

  All of a sudden my cell rang. The orange display lit up the sender’s name: Wataru. Maybe he realized it was me calling last night. Worm, up ahead, turned around and shot me a suspicious look. Trying to keep my hea