30

As previously stated, I had no idea where the nearest convenience store was, so I also had no idea what kind of time frame U would need for shopping.

I doubted I had time to case the house or figure anything out about U‘s parents, in any case. Of course, my questions could be easily answered by asking U, but that would be difficult, to say the least. I doubted she would answer them, and asking could create an irreparable rift in the fragile trust my good behavior had created between us. The trust not unlike Stockholm Syndrome.

I did take the opportunity to use the restroom, though. U remembered to lock the closet door before leaving, but I just took the door off the rails in the same manner as the day before. To be honest, I was worried about putting it back in time given all the trouble it had taken the day before, but my second attempt proved much smoother than my first. Not that I thought my increasing skill at putting a closet door back on its railings would ever come back to help me in the future.

U was gone for over an hour.

Back then, I was suspicious about how long she was taking, and wondered if she was going on detours. What a horrible thing to think. Like I mentioned earlier, U was dealing with very heavy shopping bags, and would have needed to stop for breaks.

My past self better spend some time reflecting on his actions.

I guess if it’s fair game to demand my past self reflect on his actions, then I should take more of his actions into account… fortunately, U made it home without any major issues.

Part of me worried that she might have been caught in a traffic accident, but that was a needless concern. Then there was the part of me worried that she was possibly taken away by a bad adult… how incredibly ironic.

“I am home,” announced U‘s return, and I responded in kind. I waited for her to unlock the closet door, then congratulated her on a job well done.

With me locked away in the closet, I felt like a mother sending their shut-in of a son out to buy the groceries. It gave me this really misplaced sense of self-loathing. I don’t really know how else to put it.

I took all the items out of the plastic store bags she had brought home, spreading everything out on the floor. There was more than one day’s food this time, of course. I selected and sorted through the various frozen foods, breads, drinks, instant foods, and snacks.

It probably wouldn’t last for an entire week, but $100 worth of food was a sight for sore eyes in my situation.

It brings to mind a famous old samurai story about Takeda Shingen and Uesugi Kenshin. The story goes that they were bitter rivals, but when Takeda Shingen was under siege, Uesugi Kenshin sent salt to him without hesitation. That’s the origin of the Japanese saying, “Sending salt to your enemies”, about showing humanity to even your worst enemies. Takeda Shingen expressed a level of gratitude so deep that it surprised even Uesugi Kenshin.

“No, no, this level of gratitude is far too much for simply sending some salt. You must have been terribly hungry, Shingen.”

“On the contrary, Uesugi, you’re the hungry one.”

Well, before this turns into an unrelated short story, the point I was making is the contrast between the uncertainty of having no food and the comfort of having food to spare, with a hero from the Warring States era as my clincher.

Anyways, I divided the food into four categories for U: things for the freezer, things for the fridge, things for the pantry, and food for today.

Given the empty fridge, I was half-worried that U wouldn’t understand that things could be stored in the fridge, or if she even knew the fridge as a place for food, but she didn’t have any problem understanding the order.

Thinking back, it would have been smart to keep some food stored with me in the closet, but that didn’t occur to me at the time. I guess I subconsciously trusted U to share the food with me. But also, now that I could leave my prison at any time, I was losing my sense of danger.

Back to the point at hand, U had no trouble storing everything away where it belonged (and don’t even bother saying I should have done it myself. I wasn’t about to leave that closet in front of U). We did run into a problem, though… well, strictly speaking it wasn’t a problem, but our exchange ground to a halt as I offered to eat with U, stating that the food for today was for the both of us to eat together.

I’m not sure I can describe just how surprised U was at that moment.

I couldn’t have really identified her as dead or alive up to that point, but right then, she was most definitely “alive”.

But was it really that shocking? We had already shared lunch the day before, so I thought eating together wasn’t all that big a deal… Granted, a kidnapper eating with her victim is kind of a big deal. I almost thought I might end up with another knife thrown at me, but I greatly misunderstood U‘s shock.

As I listened to her explain, it became clear that U was shocked because she had bought the food with my money, so it wasn’t hers to eat. And sure, I had paid for it, but who did she think I was that I would buy all that food and hog it for myself in that scenario? I wouldn’t even be human at that point.

I had to spend a lot of time working U over to convince her that even though the food was bought with my money, it was okay for her to eat. U had very strict parameters around borrowing and lending money, so it was really hard to convince her, but I eventually won her over by claiming that it was my way of repaying her for taking care of me. A pretty good excuse for someone held captive.

That would make for an incredible joke.

Under normal circumstances, I doubt U would have ever caved, but I think her stomach ultimately won the battle that time around.

“Thank you for this meal,” U announced, before voraciously tearing into her food with both hands. The quiet, listless girl was gone, replaced with a terrifying carnivore.

Her manners were pretty bad, to be honest.

But it wouldn’t have been fair to expect U to act all prim and proper in that moment. She was literally a starving child. Besides, though I wasn’t nearly as bad off as U, I was still hungry, so I was hardly paying attention to etiquette myself.

You know, I think that was the first time that my anger became directed at U‘s parents. Anger? Yeah, I guess that fits. I think calling it resentment would be more appropriate, but at the time I thought it was wrong to have that kind of self-righteous disgust towards other people’s parents, so I more or less perceived it as anger.

I had to wonder where her parents had “gone” off to, leaving their child to starve like that.

The whole time, I had been looking to them as saviors who would rescue me from my plight, but that expectation was beginning to buckle with the information I was getting. After all, when a child is behaving strangely, that reflects more on the parents…

My general awareness of my status as a kidnapping victim had put other people entirely out of my mind, but that Saturday, my paradigms of what was important began to shift. Not that the kidnapping had become less important, but that U‘s parents were starting to take on a new level of importance.

I hadn’t been able to nail down what U had meant by saying they were “gone”. Well, more to the point, I had just glossed over it for the past few days. But put in adult terminology, had they “disappeared”? Not like on a vacation, or a business trip, or any extension of everyday life, but rather… “My parents disappeared.”

I couldn’t handle the weight of that possibility.

It wasn’t a problem that an ordinary university student and aspiring author could solve… In fact, being only an aspiring author made it harder.

“I am finished eating,” U announced after she was done eating. “It was delicious.”

Her statement squeezed my heart like a vice. It hurt to be thanked for something that should have been ordinary.