Book Girl and the Corrupted Angel Page 4

  Tomorrow at 4, wait at the main gate to the Shirafuji high school. A crazy good-looking girl’s gonna come meet ya.

  And so the next day after school, Kotobuki and I waited with a touch of nerves in front of the impressive stone gate for Ryuto’s friend to appear.

  Ever since the beginning of December, the sun had been going down earlier and earlier, so the school building was painted in the burgundy light of the setting sun. A sharp north wind was blowing, making Kotobuki’s shoulders tremble.

  “Are you cold?” I asked.

  “I…I’m fine!” she answered awkwardly, shifting her gaze all over the place. I guess she was embarrassed about sobbing in front of me yesterday. She hadn’t gotten a text from Mito today, either, so that made three days’ interruption. That must have been making her frantic, too.

  It was already ten minutes past the time we were supposed to meet this person. Any number of girls passed by us wearing coats over uniforms styled like ladylike dresses, but no one who looked right appeared. Ryuto had said she’d be “crazy good-looking” in his message, but I was starting to regret not asking her name when—

  “Are you Inoue?”

  Out of nowhere, a sensuous voice tickled down my spine, and I spun around.

  “Looks like that’s a yes. Sorry I’m late. I’m Ryu’s friend, Shoko Kagami.”

  Her bright red lips lifted into a smile—a beautiful woman dressed in a close-fitting blouse, pants, and a long coat.

  “Mind if I smoke?” she asked as soon as we’d gone into a nearby café and settled on a sofa.

  “Uh…”

  I looked over at Kotobuki, and she nodded.

  “Go ahead.”

  Shoko’s eyes crinkled indulgently when she saw that exchange.

  “Thanks. I know they’re bad for your throat, but I can’t quit.”

  She put a slim, light-brand cigarette in her mouth and lit it with a silver lighter. Her movements were practiced, like a model’s. She was absolutely an amazing beauty. Where had Ryuto met her?

  Shoko was a voice teacher, and she knew Mito. She told us, frowning, how Mito had been out of school for a long time.

  “It’ll be ten days soon. Apparently she hasn’t been back to the dorms, either. I’ve been worried about her, too.”

  “Yuka’s staying in the dorms?” Kotobuki asked, her jaw tightening.

  “Yes. Her parents moved this fall.”

  She told us with pain evident in her voice about how Mito’s father had cosigned a loan for a friend, how the collectors had even barged into his office so he could no longer work.

  The whole time, Kotobuki’s face was pale, and her eyes were wide.

  “Mito is supposed to be playing the lead in Turandot in this month’s recital. She seems to have gotten a good teacher somehow, and her voice has changed dramatically since the summer. Until then, her singing was awful, as if it were crushing her throat, and she was stagnating. I was interested to know what studio her instructor was with or if it was a professional singer. When I asked her about singing though, Mito dodged the question and wouldn’t tell me. She told me, ‘My teacher is an angel of music.’ I thought she was joking.”

  Kotobuki’s shoulders jerked. Fear came into her eyes, as if she’d heard something baleful.

  “What’s wrong, Kotobuki?”

  “It…it’s nothing.”

  She forced out her reply in a pained voice, gripping the hem of her skirt tightly. It didn’t look like it was nothing…

  “She’d been cast as the lead, so she really had everything ahead of her. She even had the power to be a pro.”

  Shoko stubbed out the cigarette in disgust.

  “I’m sorry. I need to get back. Let me see your phone, Inoue.”

  “Oh, sure.”

  I held it out to her, and she pressed the buttons like someone who’d had long practice; then she passed it back to me.

  “I put in my number and e-mail address. If you find out anything about Mito, please get in touch. I’ll do the same.”

  “Thank you. Um, I’d also like to talk to Mito’s classmates if that’s possible.”

  “All right. Can you come back to this café tomorrow?”

  She picked up the check and stood. Then as if she’d suddenly remembered something, she said, “Oh, you’re at Seijoh, aren’t you, Inoue? How’s Marmar doing?”

  “Do you know Mr. Mariya?”

  Shoko’s face broke into a smile.

  “He was my underclassman in college. He was our rising star. Him and his pure, lighthearted tenor. They said he could be a symbol of Japanese opera.”

  “Mr. Mariya’s doing good. He seems to be enjoying himself. He was just telling me, ‘So long as I have a cup of chai, life is wonderful.’”

  “Same as ever, then. While he was studying abroad in Paris, he went away somewhere out of the blue, then came back a year later with a blasé grin on his face. His hair was shaggy, and he’d been tanned dark brown. He laughed and said he’d traveled all over, but he was back now and whatever. It caused quite a stir.”

  Her face was kind and placid as she spoke.

  “I wish Mito would come back with a smile just like he did,” Shoko murmured, and then she left the café.

  Outside, a north wind blew.

  Goods decorated with red and gold ribbons and white cotton were displayed in the windows along the road. It would be Christmas soon.

  “Kotobuki, do you know what she meant by ‘angel of music’?” I asked, holding my scarf down securely with one hand so the wind blowing into our faces wouldn’t send it flying.

  After showing some signs of hesitation, Kotobuki, who walked bent forward for the same reason, stuttered out an answer. “…I think she means Phantom of the Opera.”

  “You mean the musical?”

  I recalled the image of a man in black clothes wearing a white mask to hide his face, which I’d seen on TV commercials.

  Kotobuki nodded yes with some difficulty.

  “Yuka was a fan of the musical, and she’d read the play tons of times. She’s even lent it to me before. In the story, there’s an ‘Angel of Music’ who gives lessons to the heroine, who’s a singer. Yuka always said how she wished she could have an Angel of Music of her own.”

  Kotobuki buried the lower half of her face in her scarf and shivered.

  “And then…”

  The way she spoke with her voice hushed, it seemed like she was afraid of the Angel of Music.

  “During summer break this year, I got a weird e-mail from her. It said, ‘Nanase, I’ve met my Angel of Music.”

  The sharp wind streamed past our ears. The frigid sound of the wind was like the distant howling of a beast, and it tore up Kotobuki’s words.

  “After that, whenever she talked about the angel, she was always really high-strung and would say stuff like ‘My angel makes me sing like an instrument’ or ‘My angel will lead me to heaven’…It was like she was drunk. It wasn’t normal.”

  “Did she tell you the person’s name?”

  Kotobuki shook her head. “No.”

  She pressed her lips together, and a sudden rage flared in her eyes. Then she said harshly, “But I think Yuka might be with this angel.”

  My angel makes me sing like the best masterpiece instruments.

  Ever since that night we first met, it’s always been that way.

  Until that day, I’d thought of myself as a broken instrument.

  As a piece of junk that would only wheeze, even if you blew into it with all you had.

  But now it’s different.

  A coloratura like a clear, tumbling bead, a shining bel canto that stretches high and wide as far as it can go. A joyous voice. A rising voice. A twinkling voice. A voice like the wind, like light.

  I sang every song imaginable with total ease and melted away to become one with the sky.

  My angel unleashed the songs that had been shut away inside me, huddled there.

  The more I sang, the clearer my heart and soul beca
me; the more my head ached, the lighter my body grew. I was able to forget everything.

  I am ecstatic, as if standing in the center of the stage illuminated by a pure white light, singing an aria. I am happy, and even so—it’s terrifying.

  If all of this is a dream and I was to wake up and it all faded like mist, I couldn’t go on living.

  Why had Mito chosen to stay behind here all alone, away from her family?

  Did she want to continue singing that much?

  But then, why had she disappeared after being chosen to play the lead in the recital?

  As I lay in bed thinking these things over after I got home, I began reading the copy of Phantom of the Opera that I’d picked up at a bookstore on the way home.

  The book was thick and stuffed with fine print. It looked like it would take some work to read it in one night…

  The story began in an occult setting.

  It was set at the end of the nineteenth century. There were rumors that a ghost had taken up residence in the Paris Opera House.

  The ghost was called the “Phantom of the Opera,” and he made various demands on the owners.

  To pay him 240,000 francs a year, for example.

  To leave the fifth box on the second floor open for him at every performance.

  To put Christine Daaé onstage as a stand-in for the prima donna, Carlotta.

  Christine had been only a lowly chorus girl, but she garnered an amazing success on that stage. The audience was intoxicated by her miraculous voice and erupted in applause.

  In fact, Christine had been receiving secret instruction from an unidentified voice that she called the “Angel of Music.”

  The innocent young man who has loved Christine since they were children, Viscount Raoul de Chagny, listens in on her talking to the Angel of Music.

  He feels a strident jealousy at her devotion to her instructor, the Angel of Music.

  Christine loved the Angel of Music. He was seducing her, trying to lure her away!

  Raoul’s feelings were described in detail—his heart burning, toying with a simmering impulse, nearly frantic. Before I realized it, I was so absorbed in the story that my palms were sweating, and I felt an unease that seemed to press down on my chest.

  That other Christine—Yuka Mito—was she all right?

  Mito was taking lessons from an Angel of Music, too. She’d talked as if intoxicated about how the angel was taking her higher. And Mito’s voice, like Christine’s, had made amazing progress. But Mito hadn’t revealed the name or true nature of her angel even to her best friend, Kotobuki.

  Why was that? Because the angel had stopped her?

  Or did Mito herself not know the truth about the angel?

  Who could Mito’s angel possibly be? And then, who is Mito’s Raoul?

  I recalled something Kotobuki had said on the way home.

  “I think Yuka might be with the angel. Ever since she met the angel, Yuka’s started turning me down a lot when I text her to go do stuff, and it seemed like it was because she wanted to sing with the angel as long as she absolutely could every day. When I told her it was like she’d gotten wrapped up in some weird religion, she got really upset and didn’t text me for three whole days. I think she believes everything the angel tells her, and I think if he ordered her to do something, she would. No matter what it was…”

  My heart skipped at the word religion. In Mito’s eyes, the angel had the place of an infallible religious leader, and apparently Kotobuki had been concerned about her attachment to him this whole time. She may have also felt jealous that her best friend had been swept up in something that she didn’t understand.

  “You said Mito has a boyfriend, right? Are he and the angel the same person?” I thought I remembered her shouting something like that when Mr. Mariya invited her to that concert.

  “No, Yuka started dating her boyfriend last fall, so he’s different. He’s from our school, and Yuka said she met him at the culture fair, but…”

  Her voice broke off.

  “Yuka wouldn’t tell me his name. She would just play it off and promise to tell me about him after I got a boyfriend, and then laugh…I pushed it pretty hard, and eventually she gave me hints, but I didn’t really understand them.”

  “What were they?”

  “There were three of them. She told me there are nine people in his family, when he’s thinking about something he has a habit of walking restlessly around his desk, and he really likes coffee.”

  Those were definitely tough. He liked coffee—well, there were a ton of people like that, and a person wouldn’t notice the habit of walking around his desk unless he or she was pretty close to him. Families of nine were rare nowadays, but it would still be tough to sift through all the people at school for that information.

  Kotobuki looked like she was flagging, too. But after a blank look crossed her face momentarily, it seemed that she had remembered something vital and she spoke up.

  “Actually, the last time I talked to Yuka on the phone, she said her boyfriend was with her.”

  “When was the last time you talked to her?”

  “Maybe…ten days ago?”

  “Right about the time that she started having unexcused absences from school.”

  “Yeah…that day there was something I wanted to talk to Yuka about, and I got her voice mail. Later she sent me a message saying she’d call that night since she needed to get to her job. But then it was after midnight. When I still hadn’t heard from her, I gave up and went to sleep. Whenever that happened before, Yuka would always send a message saying she couldn’t call, so I thought it was strange. Then, after two in the morning, I suddenly got this call from Yuka. I was surprised and picked it up. She was in a really good mood, and she said, ‘I’m with my boyfriend right now.’”

  The wind ruffled Kotobuki’s bangs, and she hunched her shoulders, looking cold.

  “She woke me up, so I don’t really remember that clearly, but she was rambling about how pretty the Christmas tree was and how warm she felt with her boyfriend’s arms around her and stuff like that. She was weirdly worked up, too, and I thought that was strange.”

  Raoul was at our school.

  Did Mito’s boyfriend know that his girlfriend was missing? According to Kotobuki, the two of them were together right before she went missing.

  In which case, wouldn’t that mean that Mito’s boyfriend was the one who knew where she was and not the angel?

  The other thing that stuck out at me was the fact that Mito had continued to send messages to Kotobuki even after she disappeared.

  The last time Kotobuki had received a phone call from Mito was ten days ago. From that day on, Mito had been absent from school. But even after that, the two of them kept sending text messages to each other like they always did. Was there some reason that Mito didn’t want Kotobuki to find out about her disappearance?

  And Mito’s messages had broken off three days ago…What was she up to now?

  My brain was strained to its limit. A roar started up in my ears, and I lay back on my bed. I rested the open book on my chest and let out a shallow breath.

  There was too much I didn’t understand.

  If Tohko were here…

  That nosy, thoughtless, slovenly, but still sensitive to odd stuff book girl with the kind eyes—I wondered how she would interpret this story.

  “Maybe I should call her.”

  I turned my head to the side and gazed at the cell phone on my desk, then felt an ache brush over me, deep in my heart.

  “I still haven’t told her my phone number or e-mail address…”

  Tohko didn’t have a cell phone. She was an incurable dud with machines, so even if I gave her my e-mail, she’d probably never use it.

  But that was an excuse, and right now I wanted to hear her warm, carefree voice more than anything.

  But no! Tohko was studying for her exams, so I couldn’t get her involved. This was Tohko, after all; obviously she would stick her nose in w
ay too far if I told her about it.

  My heart ached, and I tore my eyes from the phone, gripping my sheets tightly.

  That’s right—in the spring, Tohko would graduate and then leave…

  My phone suddenly rang, almost stopping my heart.

  It couldn’t be Tohko, could it?!

  I ran over to the desk and quickly checked who was calling. It was Akutagawa.

  “Hey, Inoue?”

  “Hey…what’s up?”

  “Oh, I’m just calling about Kotobuki. Things seemed pretty crazy so I was worried. Nothing’s bothering you?”

  That concern was typical of Akutagawa.

  My tension eased, and my voice naturally softened. I thought how glad I was I’d become friends with him.

  “Thanks. I’m fine. And I think Kotobuki made up with Mori and the others.”

  “Ah. If there’s anything I can do to help, let me know. Doesn’t matter how minor. Don’t hesitate.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  The next day when I saw Akutagawa in class, my eyes bugged out.

  “How’d you get those cuts?!”

  He had claw marks running down his right cheek and neck. The three lines on his neck looked pretty deep and had puffed up purple and painful looking.

  “It was just a cat…y’know.”

  Akutagawa smiled ruefully and looked away slightly.

  “That looks like it hurts a lot! You okay?”

  “Yeah. No big deal.”

  He turned his eyes away ever so slightly again.

  “That’s a pretty violent cat. But wait—does your family even have a cat?”

  I’d been to his house a couple times, but there had just been koi swimming in the garden pond. I hadn’t seen any cats…

  “No…it’s a neighbor’s cat. I guess I was too rough with it and ticked it off.”

  His gaze shifted around restlessly, and he spoke as if he was holding something clamped between his back teeth.