37

I started with the washing machine. My clothes were by far the nastiest in the house, but there was a massive pile of all the laundry U had used in the past two weeks just tossed into the laundry bin. It was too much to wash in one load, so it would need a few batches. It would take around half a day, but there was enough time to get it all done, even the bath towels, before U got home from school. It offered the perfect amount of spare time to clean up the living room and my own closet space that had both become such a wreck.

It made me think of the old Japanese proverb that, “The bird doesn’t dirty the nest it’s about to leave”, teaching common sense about cleaning up after yourself. Or wait, would that be more like the one about a crane always returning a favor? Well, they’re both still birds… and the place was already a wreck to begin with, and U didn’t do me any favors anyway, so neither of those apply. I guess I was just thinking about them.

I’ve already mentioned that my own apartment was rather messy. However, that’s not because I’m bad at cleaning, but rather because I’m good at making a mess. I can actually clean pretty well, but being good at cleaning and having cleaning as an ingrained personal habit are two very separate traits.

It only took me around two hours to fix up the living room, actually… It was just an elementary schooler making the mess, and it hadn’t been going on for long. After that, I was able to clean up the closet (which consisted of taking out the trash, mostly) just as the first load of laundry finished.

The machine was a dual washing and drying version, which was really uncommon at the time, meaning I didn’t have to go out in the yard to hang all the laundry to dry. That was a relief, because the last thing I wanted to be seen doing was drying a little girl’s underwear outside. I chucked the rest of the laundry in the drum, added detergent, and started it, taking the newly cleaned clothes and towels into the living room to fold. Unfortunately, folding laundry is something I’m bad at, but I could still do it if I tried. I was at least lucky that nothing needed ironing… Then again, it’d be pretty weird to see an elementary school girl in a stiff button-up shirt. But maybe there are some blouses that would need it? Not like I’m any expert on children’s fashion.

I gotta say, given how terribly U was abused by her parents, she sure had a lot of clothes… several times more than I did at least, and I was a college student. Going off the number of clothes alone, an outsider would assume she was spoiled… I didn’t know what to make of it. I had originally assumed both her parents were in on it, but maybe one of them was the abuser and the other one, perhaps another victim of the abuse, doted on her… Either way, that didn’t change the situation, nor did it change my desire to leave the U household.

But it only took the first load of laundry to clean up the first floor. I took a look at the other rooms, but it didn’t seem like U had used any of the guest rooms, because they were all fairly clean.

That left me with another two hours for the second round of laundry to finish… so I decided to finally head up to the second floor. I expected a study and the parents’ bedroom to be on that second floor… along with U‘s room.

I’d been in the house for a current total of six days, but had never set foot up the stairs. The first step actually took quite a bit of willpower, like there was an invisible barrier around the stairs, but the knowledge that I’d be leaving anyway made me thrust out my foot in desperation, and I found myself on the second floor. When I made it up, I found a second floor. It was just the second level of a residential home, not some kind of hell or demon realm.

I felt a bit of relief. I can’t even count how many times my little dips of relief had screwed me over by that point… and another reversal was soon on the way.

I should’ve been able to feel the dense, foreboding presence.

I was such a numbskull.

There were three doors lining the second floor. Well, four if you counted the one that clearly led into a bathroom. They all opened inwards.

Without thinking too hard about it, I went up to the door at the end of the hall, the one farthest from the stairs. I was gonna look in all of them anyway, so I figured I’d start from the back to be efficient… kinda like checking a chest of drawers from the bottom up? Then again, in that situation it kinda felt like it’d make no difference what order I checked, unlike a chest of drawers.

I can’t claim to have had some brilliant premonition, especially after having just described my own stupidity. It was just a coincidence. Only a coincidence… that the first door I checked opened into U‘s room.

There’s a weird way that you can just tell a child’s room at a glance. My room looked almost exactly the same, desk and all, but the furniture and decor was just… smaller, somehow?

Incidentally, since I knew U‘s room was on the second floor, I had figured I’d clean it just like the other rooms. But to my surprise, U‘s room was very tidy. More than tidy, actually, it had a well-ordered discipline to it.

But the sight of such a spotless room did not impress me. I actually took an immediate step back. I think most other people would do the same… There was something about a perfectly clean child’s room that just didn’t fit, like finding an abandoned cruise ship in the middle of the ocean.

More to the point, why would U keep her own room so neat and clean if she was fine with trashing the living room? I gathered up my courage and stepped back into the room, discovering that even the trash can was clean. It looked like a hotel room. Like a hotel room waiting for its next guest… I’d never seen anything like it before, and I haven’t seen anything like it since, but I have heard of some luxury hotel suites with attached mini rooms for kids. That’s the closest thing I can think of compared to the room that I saw.

So what was going on?

Maybe U didn’t use the room much? That would at least offer some kind of explanation… but the room was even cleaner than the guest rooms downstairs, so it wasn’t entirely satisfactory.

I couldn’t understand what I was seeing, so I began walking around the room. My main mission on the second floor had been learning about U‘s parents, and my side quest to clean her room had been an invasion of privacy in the first place, not to mention probably annoying for a girl, and it was just then exposed to be unnecessary anyway. I should’ve just left and moved on, but I couldn’t let myself do that. If U was really some kind of germaphobe, then that didn’t mesh with the state of the living room… I found myself wandering around, searching for the answer to the contradiction.

And then I found it. The answer.

It lay on top of U‘s desk.