Real World Read online

  It was kind of a snide remark, but Worm didn’t seem to care. Instead, he asked, “Hey, tell me something. How come you talk like a guy? I thought it was weird when we talked on the phone yesterday. But when I met you today, you’re kind of cute—although you dress like a guy. What’s up with that?”

  This was out of the blue, and I didn’t know what to say. I never really thought about why. I went to a girls’ school and was told I was kind of mannish, so as a kind of gag I started talking like a guy and then it became natural. Dahmer and Boku-chan also always used the rough word ore for “I,” and I think it’s the first-person pronoun that fits best. When I’m thinking about something or feeling something inside of me, I use the feminine word atashi, but someday I’m sure this will change to ore, too. Worm’s pointed question made me remember that incident—the one when the transvestite grabbed my chest, yelled at me, and roughed me up. This curbed the secret feeling of closeness I was starting to have for him. So he’s a guy, after all. The kind who hates women dressed as guys, who denounces them. Did that make him my enemy? I sullenly stayed quiet, but Worm went on.

  “A while ago I saw the evening paper at the convenience store. An article about me. I wanted to see, like, what the world’s thinking about it. It didn’t seem real. It was like I was dreaming. I looked up and there on the TV was the front of my house and some reporter babbling away. ‘What sort of ominous thing dwells in this suburban neighborhood? What happened to this boy who’s disappeared? Is the same darkness in this boy hidden in this seemingly quiet neighborhood?’ It felt so weird.”

  “D’ya feel like you wanna go back to the real world?”

  “I can’t,” Worm said coolly. “This is my reality now.”

  “So why’d you make a reality like that happen? It’s you who made things that way, right?”

  I was a little irritated. I suffered more than anyone else because my mom died, and because I’m gay—but I wasn’t responsible for these things. And now here was this guy who, just the day before, had created a new reality, one where he’d killed his mother.

  “I don’t know.”

  Worm didn’t want to talk about it. Just like when I’d met him.

  “I’d like you to pull yourself together and tell me about it.”

  “Why? Why do I have to tell somebody else? It’s personal,” he said.

  “I want to know.”

  “How come?”

  “I want to believe that if I’d been you, I’d have killed her, too.”

  Worm didn’t say anything. Silence continued for a long time. I looked at the windowpane, the curtain still open. My blank face, cell phone pressed against it, was reflected in the glass. The glass was perfect, not a scratch on it.

  * * *

  The first time Worm called my cell phone was after dinner, when my dad and I were in the middle of a fight. Dad was so upset he could barely speak, all because I told him I wasn’t going to take the college entrance exams.

  “Then what do you plan to do with your life?”

  How should I know? If I had to give a quick answer, all I could think of was working behind the counter of the Bettina, or else learning to be a transvestite. If I said that, my father would definitely cry. Dad’s proud of working in the media, but he’s actually a boring guy who’s pretty conservative.

  “So you’re going to be like Winnie the Pooh, huh? Knock it off!” He was really pissed. “It might sound good right now, but what about later? Stop acting like a baby.”

  I wasn’t acting like a baby. I really didn’t have a clue what I should do. After I went into high school and my sexual orientation became clearer to me, I was faced with two choices: either deceive everybody, or come out of the closet. But I still hadn’t decided which route to take, and so I had no energy to think about college. Those were the times when I was glad Mom wasn’t alive anymore. I didn’t say anything and Dad started in with one of his sermons. Grandma brought out some peaches she’d peeled and stealthily crept back to her room. I could sense that Dad was choosing his words carefully, aware that my grandparents were eavesdropping.

  “If you don’t go to college, you’ll regret it. I’ve known a lot of young people who didn’t go, so I know what I’m talking about. Once they go out into the world they finally realize how blessed they’d been and regret having thrown away the chance. The girl who’s my assistant is like that. She told me she doesn’t know why she didn’t go to the photography department at the Japan Academy of Arts. She failed the exam once and never took it again. But I admire her. She got a job and is doing her best. She’s found her own path in life, wanting to be a photographer. You don’t even have that. You haven’t gone out in the world. Once you do, you’ll be sorry you didn’t take this opportunity. But then it’ll be too late.”

  It’s not too late. I’m already out in what you call the world. A world of emotions that’s different from what my old man’s talking about. I wanted to tell him this, but that would mean revealing I was gay, and I wasn’t ready for that. Irritated, all I could do was pretend to sulk.

  “Anyway, you like the arts, so you should go somewhere where you can study that field.”

  “It’s too late,” I said, attempting a compromise. Saying it was too late was my way of buying time. I hated myself for it. Dad’s face suddenly lit up.

  “It’s not too late! You can go to a cram school. I’ll find out which one’s good.”

  From the next room my grandpa cleared his throat in relief. It wasn’t easy living there. After Mom died, even if Dad had wanted to move out and be free, he couldn’t. He has a twenty-year mortgage and had built a house for two families to live in. Even if Grandpa and Grandma passed away, the land would most likely go to the immediate heir: me. If it came to that, I might kick Dad out, a thought that made me feel a whole lot better. Just then my cell phone rang from in the pocket of my shorts and my father pointed to it.

  “Your cell phone’s ringing.”

  The screen said the caller was Toshi.

  “It’s from Toshi.”

  Looking somewhat tired and unhappy, Dad reached for his cigarettes. He seemed relieved it wasn’t a guy.

  “Hey. What’s up?”

  “Sorry to bother you.”

  I was surprised to find it was a guy. Phone pressed to my ear, I slowly eased my way upstairs. Downstairs, my grandparents had come out and I could hear Dad explaining things to them. “Senior year in high school is a tough age,” he was saying. “Hard to tell if they’re adults or still kids.”

  “Who the heck are you?” I asked the guy on the phone. “And what’re you doing with Toshi’s phone?” I waited until I was safely back in my room.

  “You’re Kiyomi, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  Instinctively, I knew the guy had picked up Toshi’s phone somewhere and was randomly dialing all the girls’ names on it. My voice is so low hardly anyone ever guesses on the phone that I’m a girl. Besides, the name Kiyomi could work for either guys or girls. The guy apologized weakly and was about to hang up.

  “Hold on a sec, pal,” I said. “I’m a girl. But how’d ya get hold of that phone?”

  “I found it and thought I’d return it.”

  I told him all he had to do was dial the number under Home. “Got it,” he said, and then said this: “Hey—if you’re a girl how come you talk all rough like that?”

  This pissed me off, so I asked him, “How the hell old are ya?”

  “Seventeen. I’m a senior in high school.”

  “You’re a real loser, you know that?”

  I was just about to hang up when he said this:

  “I, ah—killed my mother today.”

  I thought this was a great joke, so I played along.

  “Yeah? I killed my mom three years ago.”

  This wasn’t a lie. I might not have done it with my own hands, but inside it felt like I had.

  * * *

  They found out Mom had ovarian cancer just when I entered jun