In Japan, even though it’s summer vacation, many high schoolers like myself still come to school. It’s either for taking makeup classes, or for club activities. For me, it’s obviously the latter. I may not be a genius, but I usually get decent enough results that my parents don’t nag me over it.
Like I mentioned before, I’m a member of the Community Service Club (CSC for short). And just like in the name, my club’s main activity is community service. We go around helping out other clubs when they’re short on people or could use extra hands, and we’ve done volunteer work all over town, like picking up trash by the river. I do take part in those kinds of things, but today, club was just an excuse to get me out of the house and away from my parents’ nagging. Except for helping out other clubs, the volunteer work we do happens around once a week, so the rest of the time, we use the clubroom as a sort of lounge to relax in.
“Hey,” a girl’s voice spoke.
I tore my eyes off the video I was watching on my phone to see Omoyo staring at me with bemused eyes.
“Yeah?” I asked my senior. By the way, I’m still a first year student while Omoyo’s a second year.
“Why are you muttering Buddhist sutras for exorcizing ghosts?” Omoyo asked. “Did you get influenced by a comic book or something?”
I frowned in dismay. “No,” I said. “I’m not like Mirai.”
At the mention of his name, Mirai, another second year, and president and founder of the CSC looked up and said, “Hm? What’s this? Could it be, Mr. Human Shield, you awakened to a new power, one that allows you to contact the Spirit World?”
For the last half hour, he was stroking the back of a realistic-looking bear carved out of wood.
“Please don’t call me that,” I said. “That nickname’s almost as bad as when you used to call me Underling. And yeah, actually, I think I have.”
Mirai’s goofy face fell.
“You serious?” he said. “I was only joking. Don’t tell me you saw an actual ghost!”
“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “I spotted one yesterday when me and Yuna went to visit her parents’ grave. It was a creepy-looking girl around our age, and she was staring at Yuna with some really haunting eyes.”
Yuna scowled.
“Please stop,” her phone’s robotic voice said. “I don’t want a nightmare like that hanging over my head. Is that why you did that Shinto exorcism ritual on me last night? You know, the one where you slash the air nine times with your finger?”
“You saw that?” I asked. “Anyway, yeah.”
“My, my,” said Aika Isaneko, mine and Yuna’s fellow first year in the club. “Sounds like you’ve got an evil spirit attached to you, dear little Yuna.”
She was sitting at a corner of the room reading a book. Said book was floating in the air right in front of her face, no strings or anything, with the pages flipping on their own every time she wagged her finger. You can tell from that, that her superpower is telekinesis, meaning she can move things with her mind.
Smiling, she added, “You better be careful. You never know when one night, the ghost will show up and pluck out your soul.”
And then she cackled a little. Despite looking like a prim and proper princess, Isaneko had the heart of a wicked witch.
“Cut it out, Aika,” Omoyo said, frowning at Isaneko. “It’s not funny how you’re scaring Yuna like that.”
“I’m only joking,” Isaneko said. “It’s not like ghosts are real.”
“Really?” I said, blinking in surprise. “Even though psychic powers like telekinesis, psychokinesis, and future sight are?”
“At the very least, I’ve never seen one before myself,” Isaneko said. “And even if there are people who can really see ghosts, it’ll be incredibly hard for them to prove their powers are real, much harder than proving you have future sight or other forms of clairvoyance.”
“How come?” I asked.
“Ain’t it obvious?” said Omoyo, leaning back while draping one arm over her chair’s back. She’s always had a bit of a rough demeanor. “It’s because they’re the only ones who can see ghosts, so there’s no way anyone who can’t will be able to tell if they’re telling the truth or not. And whatever they’d learn from ghosts could be found out by other kinds of psychic power.”
“But I did see a girl clear as day,” I insisted. “But she disappeared in the blink of an eye like a ghost would do.”
But no matter how many times I said it, I’m sure the others wouldn’t believe me, so I quickly dropped the subject and decided to just forget about the whole thing. Whoever or whatever that ghost was, she’s all the way at another town. I’ll probably never see her again.
At least that’s what I thought.
So why, I wondered as my right eye twitched, is she here?
When it was time to go home, we all grabbed our stuff and locked up the clubroom. We headed towards the school’s front gate and there she was, the creepy ghost girl from the other day, waiting right outside the threshold. She stood in plain view, just staring at us.
Normally, a girl wearing another school’s uniform would have garnered some attention, but I saw that not one student going out the gate paid her any attention. It was as if they couldn’t see her.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, I thought. What the hell is she doing here? Did she follow me and Yuna all the way from that graveyard? Why? What did she want with us?
Noticing that something was wrong, Omoyo asked me, “Is something wrong, Oota?”
“Say, Omoyo?” I said. “You didn’t happen to see a girl from another school waiting by the gate, did you?”
Omoyo glanced at the gate where the ghost girl was, again, in plain view, and then faced me again, shaking her head.
“No,” she said. “Were you expecting a friend or something?”
“No,” I replied in a rather high voice. “It’s nothing. Forget about it.”
The others looked at me curiously but I ignored them. It became a concrete fact that I was the only one who could see the girl.
As we approached the gate, I swallowed and steeled my nerves. I braced myself to walk past the ghost, and after we all did, I decided to take my phone out of my pocket, pretended to look at the time and then used the phone’s reflective black screen to spy on the ghost behind me. Blue faced, I could see her walking right behind us.
Oh man, I thought. She’s following us. She’s totally following us!
She followed us down the roads we trekked and the different paths we took. After reaching a fork in the road, me and the rest of the club went our separate ways. But even then, the girl still followed me and Yuna on our way home. And no one else ever noticed her.
The whole time, she was engrossed with just staring at me and Yuna. I tried not to look at her, but it was hard to resist. I’m not ashamed to admit that I was scared out of my mind.
“Ow!”
I glanced back and saw the ghost crouched down, pressing her hands on her forehead. It looked like she accidentally walked into a utility pole and got a bump on her head for it.
I was sort of surprised. I didn’t think ghosts could walk into things and get hurt. There were even tears welling up from her eyes.
And then a computer lady voice spoke behind me.
“What’s wrong, Hisao?” it asked.
I turned around to see Yuna looking at me. I hesitated to answer, but knowing my silence would just make things worse for me, I lied and said I saw a cat. Yuna seemed to have bought it because she turned around without saying another word.
I took the chance to peek at the ghost. She still had her hand on the head bump, but she had otherwise recovered and was focused once again on following us.
Ah, what do I do? I wondered. At this rate, she’ll follow us home, and I didn’t like the idea of my house becoming haunted.
But just as I wondered if I should just run away and drag Yuna with me, I felt a tug on my sleeve and jumped.
“Yikes!” I cried out. “That scared me! What is it, Yuna?”
Yuna had been the one who tugged on my sleeve.
She was frantically pointing at something with one hand while wildly waving the other. Puzzled over my cousin’s panic, I turned around and to my horror, I saw smoke rising from the direction of our house.
I forgot all about the ghost stalking us and instantly broke into a run.
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