#111: Classic / ep.2
The note entrusted to Mikoto by the Iimori-Kuze couple gave the address of a children’s home on the outskirts of Utsunomiya, Tochigi — a city known for gyoza and its ties to Tokugawa Ieyasu.
The residential childcare facility, Kodomo no Ie (“The Children’s House”).
Having gone straight from a camping trip with her sister-in-law’s wife-to-be — say that within earshot of Rinko and there’d be hell to pay — to Maverick, and now on a lightning round trip further north into the Kanto region, Mikoto’s body was thoroughly battered. With her head heavy and sluggish, she’d only managed to secure the appointment itself, without explaining any of the actual circumstances.
“I actually came…”
From the courtyard of Kodomo no Ie, roughly the size of a large kindergarten, came the cheerful sound of children’s laughter.
“What if this gets horribly misread…”
Mikoto’s feet stopped moving.
Barely any makeup, and dressed in the same rumpled, casual camping clothes from before. A woman in her early thirties, single, body and heart both battered and worn down, showing up at a children’s residential facility.
They might think I’m a kidnapper. Or that I’m the one who needs protecting, honestly.
Growing more anxious by the second, pacing back and forth in front of the gate, she caught the eye of an elderly teacher playing with the children in the courtyard. Returning an awkward, obliging smile for the time being, she watched the woman start walking her way.
What if she reports me as suspicious?
Reflexively looking for somewhere to hide, then realising hiding would only make her look more suspicious still — she’d made the appointment properly, surely she could just carry herself with confidence — Mikoto ended up simply standing there with a fixed, awkward smile, waiting for the elderly teacher to speak first.
Absolutely no backbone whatsoever. Defeating Ashiya Chie was still a distant dream at this rate.
“Are you Kurosu-san, who contacted us?”
The elderly teacher — Sugie-sensei, as Mikoto would learn later — smiled warmly, her words carrying a lovely, refined gentleness. The laugh lines around her eyes seemed to carry the mark of a lifetime spent never letting her smile fade, and it eased Mikoto’s nerves, if only slightly.
“S-sorry, for the sudden contact… I’m Kurosu Mikoto, I called earlier…”
“There’s no need to be nervous. Everyone feels anxious at first, and it’s not as though you’ll suddenly become a mother today.”
“…Mother?”
“Oh, weren’t you interested in becoming a foster parent?”
She’d caused the single largest misunderstanding imaginable.
Given that Kodomo no Ie was a children’s residential home, it was, perhaps, only natural.
“Ah, no, that’s not… um, well…”
Even so, flatly denying it outright felt wrong somehow. Rather rude, even — to the children living here, of all people. Struggling over how to explain herself, Sugie-sensei simply chuckled.
“I’ve already heard, from her. Please, come in.”
Sugie-sensei clearly already knew the whole situation. After a beat of delay, Mikoto realised she’d just been teased.
“If you already knew, you could have just said so…”
“Fufu, my apologies.”
That way of speaking. That smile. And that same mischievous, playful, faintly mocking attitude. That alone made her identity perfectly clear.
This was the place. Where that woman had once lived.
“I stand in for their parents, you see, so I do end up worrying about all sorts of things. Just an old woman’s meddling.”
Sugie-sensei, disarmingly unguarded to the point of being almost exasperating, carried an air remarkably similar to Shandy’s own.
Dear Grandma and Grandpa growing mikan out in Yawatahama.
I’m really happy you keep sending mikan but I can’t finish them all. Koto-nee doesn’t eat mikan, and Rinko-san absolutely hates oranges, so they just pile up. So I’m gonna have to rely on Miko-nee, or more specifically Shandy-san, who I stayed with a while back.
“Something you need from me?”
“Yes. It’s a favour only Aoi-chan could possibly manage.”
Midnight, once even the scandal-hungry reporters had gone to sleep. I’d just gotten quietly back to the Yokohama apartment and was feeding Setoka and the others when Shandy-san called. Her voice sounded calm as ever, none of that scary edge from when she collapsed in Kyodo. So that’s a relief. A relief, but still.
“Okay, but are you okay for real? You sounded real bad, so I’m worried.”
“Thank you for the concern. On that note, I’ve decided to get a thorough medical checkup done.”
“Ah, I’ve heard of that! A bridal check!”
“Something along those lines.”
A bridal check means Miko-nee and Shandy-san’s wedding must be right around the corner. Aw, wonderful. Perfect match. Even my family, surrounded by nothing but fellow Japanese folks left and right, is finally catching the wave of globalisation.
Grandma, Grandpa, your future granddaughter-in-law is a beautiful and clever foreign lady, you know.
“Whoaaa, congrats! I’ll cover the wedding gift!”
“Fufu. Then in place of a wedding gift, would you take on a favour for me instead?”
Right, that. I got so caught up celebrating on my own I nearly forgot to actually hear what Shandy-san wanted. Right now I’m basically the genie from Aladdin’s lamp for her. Plus I owe her for putting me up that one time. I’ll grant whatever she wishes.
“I’ll do literally anything for Miko-nee and Shandy-san!”
“…You said anything, didn’t you.”
“Yeah, anything!”
“Then, first, a question. Aoi-chan’s height, and shoe size?”
Why would she need to know that? No idea.
“163 centimetres, and my shoes are like, 23-ish?”
“You’ll do nicely. Then let’s meet tomorrow morning, in the women’s toilets at Ochanomizu Station.”
“Eh? Why the toilets?”
“Fufu. It’s a mystery tour, you see.”
The call ended. Shandy-san’s as full of mystery as ever. Ochanomizu, home to a ton of hospitals — I’ve gotten pretty good with Tokyo geography this past year, ahem — makes sense, but why meet in the women’s toilets instead of at the ticket gates?
A total mystery. I sat there, phone in hand, groaning to myself.
“…Shandy-san?”
“Yep. Hey, Hifumin. Do city folks always meet up in bathrooms?”
I asked Hifumin, who’d come out of her room, but she didn’t answer. Not a twitch. That’s her spaced-out, deep-thought face.
After a while, seeming to have landed on something, Hifumin murmured slowly, as if whispering.
“Locked room, two women. Something’s bound to happen…”
“Like what?”
“…I’m worried about Aoi.”
Not really sure what she’s worried about, but since she came closer, I hugged her anyway. It’s Shandy-san we’re talking about, no need to worry about anything.
“Dunno what you mean but it’s gonna be fine.”
“………..”
All I could tell was that silent Hifumin looked uneasy. Probably just her worrywart nature. I patted her a bunch, saying “nothing to worry about,” and turned in for the night, ready for tomorrow.
At the time, I had no idea.
No way I could’ve guessed — what was actually about to happen.
The reception room of Kodomo no Ie was covered wall to wall with children’s photographs and drawings.
Bundles of crayon artwork on construction paper, decorated with origami flowers and messages of “Thank you, sensei.” Family photos too — surely from children who’d found adoptive families — decorated the walls.
All of it left behind by children who’d once grown up and moved on from here.
Kodomo no Ie served as a cradle, sheltering children carrying fates too complicated to sum up in a single word, until the day each of them found a new destiny of their own.
Letting her thoughts drift selfishly over the expressions captured in each photo, the brushstrokes of each portrait, Mikoto felt her heart stir.
It wasn’t age making her this teary-eyed. It was thinking of the boys and girls who’d once grown up and left this place, carrying the same kind of fate as the woman she loved.
“Did you find her? That girl?”
“…I’m sorry, for poking around uninvited like this.”
Apologising to Sugie-sensei, who’d stepped back into the reception room carrying tea, Mikoto returned to the sofa she’d been asked to sit on.
An unfamiliar side of the woman she loved. Knowing was frightening, in its own way, but curiosity won out, leaving her too unsettled to fully relax. Distracted and restless, she found it difficult even to find an opening to start the conversation, since diving in abruptly felt somehow rude.
“Ah, this photo. How nostalgic…”
Mikoto was grateful for how deftly Sugie-sensei steered the conversation exactly where she’d hoped it would go.
At the very edge of a group photo of a dozen-odd children stood a blonde girl, turned pointedly away from the camera. As the old saying goes, the soul at three stays the same at a hundred. The defiant, footloose spirit, the girl who’d go on to hide her past so thoroughly — the resemblance was unmistakable, even here.
Shandy — Charlotte Gabriel — had, without question, once really lived here.
At last, some of the weight on her shoulders seemed to lift, just slightly.
“Everyone remembers her, but she really was something else.”
“Charlotte Gabriel-san, you mean.”
Sugie-sensei chuckled softly.
“Yes, that’s correct. Shall we sit and talk? Standing tires me out these days.”
“Ah, of course!”
Even with the teacher going out of her way like this, Mikoto had been too wrapped up in her own worries to notice. Bowing apologetically over and over, she settled back onto the reception room sofa. Through the window, the sound of children laughing carried no trace at all of whatever unfortunate circumstances they carried.
“To some degree or another, every person lives carrying a kind of loneliness. It’s because we can’t help comparing ourselves to others, even when there’s no need to. For the children here, for instance, comparing themselves to the ordinary children raised by their own parents.”
“I understand… though I can’t say I’ve truly experienced anything like it myself, but I can imagine it.”
Both of Mikoto’s parents were alive and well, and the Kurosu household had always been an ordinary, peaceful family, never once on the brink of divorce. Whenever waves rippled through the household, it was invariably her similarly headstrong mother clashing with Kotone, while Mikoto and her equally mild-mannered father fretted helplessly on the sidelines.
Sugie-sensei’s expression softened, reassured by Mikoto’s answer.
“Shirley was especially conscious of how others saw her. Given the circumstances of her birth, that’s only natural. Children don’t yet know how to wrap their words in tact.”
“You mean, because of how she looked, that…”
Sugie-sensei nodded slowly.
The young Charlotte must have been an achingly lovely little girl, like a Western porcelain doll come to life. If a proper, front-facing photograph of her still existed somewhere, Mikoto felt confident just one glance would be enough to blind her with adoration.
But that reaction was uniquely Mikoto’s own.
Anything that stands out as different from ordinary gets excluded.
“She was a clever child, so she’d talk with us readily enough. But there was a line she absolutely never let anyone cross past. She’d lie, or deliberately exaggerate to deflect, never revealing her true feelings.”
“She once told me she couldn’t trust others.”
“That’s because she couldn’t trust herself. Unable to trust anyone else was simply the natural consequence.”
Sugie-sensei’s assessment struck home. The more Mikoto learned of Shandy’s past, the clearer it became what exactly she’d been trying to hide behind that shroud of mystery.
What she’d wanted to hide wasn’t the past itself.
It was the version of herself that past had shaped.
“There were teachers who’d scold her, telling her to at least trust us, if no one else.”
Sugie-sensei let out a sigh, gazing down and off to the side, lost in thought.
“But I could never bring myself to do that. Telling a child to ‘open your heart’ only teaches them to fake having opened it. It’s practically teaching them how frightening it is to reveal their true feelings.”
For someone with no experience raising children herself, understanding the words of a teacher who’d devoted her whole career to it, however imperfectly, was difficult.
But applying it to the young Shandy, it wasn’t hard to picture at all.
Alice, unable to fit in, unable to blend in with those around her, forever floating adrift in that world, pitied by everyone.
Alice, who could never accept nor be accepted by the other students — the rabbits — or the owls who stood in as teachers at the facility and school, living out her days in isolation.
Akutagawa Alice, the ghost still haunting the stage, unable to reveal her true self to anyone, still dragging around the persona she’d built as an actress even now.
“What could I possibly have done—”
She stopped, realising only then that she was crying.
In place of the words that had failed her, Sugie-sensei laid a hand gently on her shoulder. Mikoto’s own pitiful heart felt soothed by that warm touch.
“You need only act as you feel is right. You’re already a wonderful adult, capable of wishing for Shirley’s happiness as though it were your own.”
“But I’m… still practically a child myself…”
“And what’s wrong with that? Being a child means you’re still capable of growing, rather than settling for how things stand now.”
She couldn’t remember what she’d answered. What came out was little more than a shuddering, half-sobbed groan, wrung out of her whole trembling body.
I want to become someone worthy of standing beside her.
I want to become an adult who can stand shoulder to shoulder with the woman who embraced me and helped me grow.
That’s why she’d wanted to fix the things she disliked about herself. That pathetic, childish inability to show her own weaknesses, always stretching to look taller than she really was, covering it over with strained effort.
But—
Straining to look bigger than you are is simply a reflection of wanting to appear well. The flip side of not being satisfied with where you currently stand.
And that itself is something only a child does.
And proof, uniquely a child’s own, of continuing to grow.
“…What exactly does it mean, to be an adult?”
She wondered, even as she asked it, why she was even posing the question — and to Sugie-sensei of all people, someone she’d only just met. This was Shandy’s teacher, not her own.
Sugie-sensei let out a small, quiet laugh.
“To keep wondering what it means to be an adult — that itself may be exactly what it means to be an adult. Perhaps it also means being a child, still.”
There was no clear answer in Sugie-sensei’s deliberately vague words. Right after the silence that followed, Sugie-sensei spoke again, pen already moving.
“Speaking of which, a certain young lady stopped by here earlier, without so much as a word of notice, after a full ten years’ absence. Quite the unfilial daughter, that one.”
The note she wrote gave directions to a shared cemetery not far from Kodomo no Ie.
“Why don’t you go meet her, and think together about what it means to be an adult? I’m sure she’s searching for her own answer too.”
Her mind was made up. Taking the note, Mikoto set off, following the map.
Please, still be there.
I don’t want to keep missing each other, any longer than this.
Even that childish wish no longer felt embarrassing to hold.
She’d do it because she wanted to. And if doing it would help Shandy too, all the better.
Her walk sped into a brisk pace, then a full run. Grateful, for once, to be dressed for easy movement, she pushed through the fatigue of travel without a second thought.
Knock, kn-knock-knock. The toilet door was rapped rhythmically. So I knocked back, the same way.
The meeting spot Shandy-san had chosen was the very last, cramped stall in the women’s toilets at Ochanomizu Station. Told to “go in first and wait,” I’d already grown bored staring at the plain white walls by the time it happened.
“Shandy-san?”
No answer, though. Just as I opened the door to check outside, a message came through on my phone from Shandy-san.
“Quietly. Open the door.”
I had absolutely no idea what was going on. Truly a mystery tour. Opening the door slowly like I’d been told, there stood Shandy-san, wearing the same sunglasses-and-mask combo from our hot spring trip that one time.
And immediately, she slipped straight into the stall and locked the door. Cramped in here. No wait, that’s not the point.
“What’s going on…?”
“Never mind that, please take off your clothes. I’ll be taking mine off too.”
“Wha—!?”
Faster than I could even react, Shandy-san started stripping off what she was wearing. Mask and sunglasses first, obviously, then the spring cardigan, the loose blouse, the long skirt — all removed without a shred of hesitation.
Hifumin’s words from last night flashed through my mind.
Locked room, two women. Something’s bound to happen.
Shandy-san likes women.
And me, Kurosu Aoi, well, technically, I’m a woman too.
Which means, in other words.
“Shandy-san’s got Miko-nee, y’know!?”
“There’s no time to waste, so please hurry. Shoes too.”
“I— I’ve never done anything like this before…”
“Oh my, that’s news. Shall I show you how, then?”
I let out a little “eek.” It’s not that I dislike Shandy-san or anything, I just, I’d never actually thought about it in that way before.
“Just teasing. I get hurt when you reject me so bluntly, you know.”
“No, that’s not it! It’s not that I hate Shandy-san or anything!”
By this point, Shandy-san was down to nothing but her underwear. Even someone as intoxicatingly grown-up as her wearing surprisingly innocent, sweet lace felt cute — no wait, not the point. Showing off my own underwear to gorgeous Shandy-san felt way more embarrassing than the other way around.
“I’m not going to do anything, so hurry up already!”
While I was still processing all that, I’d already been stripped bare in record time. Kurosu Aoi, forever shamed. And of all days, why did I have to wear such terrible underwear today—
“Right, let’s swap clothes. And here, put this on.”
And from her Boston bag, she pulled out a blonde wig.
Why a wig? Why a hairpiece? Why blonde?
“Why?”
“Today, Aoi-chan, you’re Shandy for the day. Once you’re changed, could you head over to the nearby hospital, please?”
“Why?”
“Hand this booking slip in at reception. I’ve already booked a bridal check under Aoi-chan’s name.”
“Whyyyy!?”
“Don’t worry, it’s already paid for. Do you have your insurance card?”
“What is even happening!?”
“I’ll explain once you arrive. For now, please just go for the checkup and hospital stay. I’m counting on you.”
Getting bowed to and asked so earnestly by Shandy-san — already wearing my own clothes by that point — left me with nothing but questions, but no room left to say anything back. I’d already told her I’d do anything, so there was no backing out now. I threaded my arms through the still-slightly-warm blouse.
I guess asking my height and shoe size was for this clothes swap. But why would a checkup and hospital stay need a wig and sunglasses on top of everything else? This basically counts as a disguise.
“…Dunno what’s going on but I just go to the hospital like this?”
Anyway, once changed, I’d become a pretty convincing Shandy-san. The high-waisted flared skirt is kind of tight, but “don’t loosen it” was Shandy-san’s specific instruction.
“Yes. And don’t worry, the enemy won’t try anything.”
“Enemy!? Am I being targeted!?”
“Just a figure of speech. Now, off you go.”
Practically shoved out of the stall, I caught my reflection in the mirror.
Borrowed outfit, face mostly hidden — at a glance, I looked exactly like Shandy-san. On top of that, we’d swapped bags too, so right now, I’m basically Shandy-san’s stand-in double.
Yeah. Cute. Not bad at all.
“…Fufu. Fufufu? I’m Shandy, you see.”
I tried the impression on myself in the mirror, but it didn’t come close to landing. Slinking away from the toilets in defeat, I passed through the ticket gates and headed to the hospital. And right around when they started explaining some confusing checkup-and-admission procedure exactly as instructed, a message came through from Shandy-san.
“Thanks to Aoi-chan, I managed to throw them off the scent. You can drop the disguise now. Well done, and thank you.”
No idea what any of that means, but I took the wig off back in the waiting room. And a patient sitting nearby suddenly went pale as a ghost and bolted away as fast as they could. What was that about? Mistaken identity?
Still, I have absolutely no idea what Shandy-san’s actual goal was. All I know for certain is—
“Right, Kurosu-san. Just going to draw some blood now, okay?”
“Eeeek…”
No wedding on the horizon whatsoever, and all I’ve got to show for it is an unwanted health checkup and the sting of a needle.