4

The following day was April 11th, a Tuesday. Kei stood at the school gates as various Ashiharabashi High students walked past him. Morning homeroom was due to start in just around 10 minutes.

Kei had spent quite a bit of time the previous day researching Sera’s middle school years. He had called up several of her classmates, and even met with her homeroom teacher in person. He asked all kinds of questions about Sera Sawako’s student life. With all the info he had gotten, he felt confident in answering why Sera had used her ability.

As usual, he felt sleepy that morning. Holding back a yawn, he looked towards the school grounds. He held his index finger and thumb up to his face, holding a gap of around ¾ of an inch. He imagined a marble held in that gap, trying to think of how the scenery would have appeared to Sera Sawako just before using her ability.

Sky, trees, schoolyard. The school building, windows, and clock, all flipped upside-down and distorted. That was most likely what she had seen.

Yup, seems pretty likely to me. As the thought passed through his head, he heard a voice behind him.

“Morning, Kei.”

Kei turned around to find Haruki Misora holding a marble in her palm. He smiled. “Morning. Did you and Sera-san get along well?”

Nodding, Haruki answered, “Yep, that’s about how it went.”

Kei stared at Haruki’s expressionless face for a while, eventually tilting his head. “You’re talking differently now?”

“Sure am. Sera-san didn’t like how politely I talked with my own classmates.”

“Oh, okay.” Haruki’s new tone was an interesting change of pace, to say the least.

Sera’s voice echoed from inside the marble. “Are you seriously okay with this, Asai-kun?”

“You mean the way Haruki’s talking?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“I think it works just fine for her.” A more relaxed tone suited Haruki’s typical lack of facial expressions.

Haruki nodded sharply. “Thanks. Sera-san didn’t like it much. Said it was creepy and unnatural.”

“Aw, that’s too bad.”

Haruki gave a quick shake of her head. “I didn’t think it was that bad, but I figured I’d check with you just in case.”

“Hm. It’s not like you to worry about that kind of stuff.”

“Well, I was copying you anyway. Does it sound weird?”

“I wouldn’t say it sounds weird. I mean, it’s me.”

“Won’t that make us sound too similar, though?”

“Nah. Even if you talk the same way, your voice is different, so you’ll still make it your own.”

“But, if you had to choose, which one d’ya like more?”

“Hmm. They both have their own perks, but I guess your normal way would be more relaxing for me.”

Haruki nodded one more time. “Understood. In that case, I shall resume my usual manner of speech.”

Sera Sawako spoke up from inside the marble, a hint of panic in her voice. “Look, however you talk is fine, but let’s get a move on, alright? Homeroom’s starting any minute now.”

With a smile, Kei shook his head. “Oh, that won’t be a problem.”

“Why?”

“‘Cause we’re skipping out today.”

Sera Sawako squeaked out a tiny, “Huh?”

Kei didn’t really have a destination in mind, so he wandered around the city for a while, ending up at a small park. He felt awkward sticking around the school, of course, so he didn’t really care where they went as long as it wasn’t there.

Kei and Haruki sat down together on a park bench. It was a red bench. The paint had been peeling off of it in the past, but it was repainted some two years ago, making it look much better.

Kei was now holding the marble with Sera inside. She was speaking quietly, almost as if to herself. “Is this okay?”

“What do you mean?”

“School. We’re playing hooky.”

“Ah, it’s just the day after the entrance ceremony, it’s nothing special.” Official classes would still have yet to start. They were probably only going to be appointing the class representatives. On top of that, their soon-coming reset would essentially rewind time, and he would make sure to attend class the next time. Focusing on Sera’s problem was the biggest priority in the present.

“Are you fine with it, Misora?” Sera asked. Evidently, she was already using her first name. They really had gotten closer.

Haruki nodded. “Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because Kei decided it.”

“And that’s good enough for you?”

“That it is.”

Kei rested his back into the bench as he listened to the girls talk. The sky was clear and bright. Perhaps if the current weather had been more common, the sakura petals would still be on their trees.

Sera’s small voice echoed from the marble. “It’s my fault that you’re doing this, isn’t it?”

After thinking for a while, Kei responded, “This was my own decision. Us doing this isn’t your fault at all. I did think you could use the down time, though.” He was lying, of course. Their current escapade had nothing to do with giving Sera a break, but he also thought it would be worth seeing how a guilty conscience affected her.

Sera’s upside-down gaze dropped to the sky. She took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I’ll figure out how to get out of here on my own. Just go back to school.”

Kei looked at Sera, commenting, “Since when do you care about school so much? You were the one skipping out on the entrance ceremony.”

She shook her head. “That’s not the same. I needed that for myself.”

“What does that even mean?”

Sera didn’t say anything for a while.

Kei waited patiently for her reply as he enjoyed the gentle April sunshine. He got the feeling that it wasn’t so bad to skip school every now and then. The classroom and a blue sky had different things to teach you, but neither was inherently more valuable than the other. It all came down to what you were willing to learn.

Finally, Sera began speaking again, her voice heavy with resignation. “My teacher told me that little kids who have something lovely inside of them automatically like lovely things.”

“Your teacher?”

“Mhm. My homeroom teacher back in my third year of elementary school.”

“Okay. What about it?”

“She said when you have something lovely inside you, you can look out into the world and find other lovely things to like about it. When you compare what’s lovely inside you, and you look hard, the entire world becomes lovely. That’s what she told me, anyway.”

Kei nodded. It sounded like a basic lesson in ethics to him. Replacing the word “lovely” with the word “just” or “right” clarified its purpose. It was a story designed to make you think about how to do the right thing, but simplified for a more universal approach. Kei thought it was a great way to get the message across to elementary schoolers.

Sera continued, “I believed her. I really did. So I took my student life very seriously. I thought being serious was a more lovely trait than the alternative.”

“You had a really good teacher.”

“Mhm. Well, I don’t know if I’d go as far as great or admirable or anything. But I think she was very concerned with doing what was right. I guess that only makes sense, being an elementary school teacher and all.”

A sprinkle of negativity suddenly mixed into her words. It wasn’t aggressive, like anger or irritation. Perhaps it could be described as sadness, or loneliness. Whatever it was, it was subtle and quiet.

“I think it’s just fine for an elementary schooler to believe what their elementary school teacher tells them. Problem was, even when I became a middle schooler, I still bought it.”

“That was a problem?”

“Of course it was. The whole time I was in middle school, I never skipped class, or was late, or anything, not one single time.”

“That’s very admirable of you.”

“Save it. I don’t need your half-assed praise.” Her voice cut like a knife before immediately petering back down. She mumbled, “Sorry,” then continued on.

“Perfect attendance just gets you a single piece of cardstock. You force yourself to go everyday, even if you’re sleepy, even if you feel a little sick, and they just give you some dumb certificate. You could print one out any day with a computer. People who skip when it makes sense to them, now they’re the clever ones.”

Kei was about to disagree, but stopped himself. In his opinion, the value of a certificate could only be determined by its recipient. But in that case, if the recipient called it worthless, it became so.

“As it turned out, growing into a middle schooler is all about learning those kinds of clever workarounds,” Sera stated.

“So, you skipped out on the entrance ceremony to be more clever?”

“Well, missing the bus was a complete accident. But I kinda wondered what would happen if I didn’t go to school. So I wandered around the shopping district and a couple parks.”

“Did you have a good time?”

She hesitated, eventually shaking her head. “Not really. I didn’t think my behavior was very lovely. Honestly, I just felt guilty the whole time. I hated it.”

“So you regretted skipping out?”

“No, not that. I hated how serious I was being about the whole thing, forcing myself to feel guilty. I was supposed to be living more sensibly than that.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I mean, if I had to guess, that’s how I ended up in the marble. So I could skip school for real. I could stay in this distorted and backwards scenery, where everything is making fun of me.”

Kei had considered that possibility. There was a hypothetical in which she escaped into the marble as a means of abandoning her serious nature. But that didn’t seem to be a natural conclusion from the evidence Kei had gathered.

“I’m not too sure that’s right,” Kei interjected.

Sera’s eyes widened. She probably hadn’t expected any pushback.

“I took some time to talk with your old middle school classmates yesterday,” Kei began.

“You what?”

“I didn’t mean to go behind your back or anything, but it seemed like it would be necessary.”

Sera didn’t respond, simply staring at Kei.

He continued, “I heard all sorts of things.”

Sera Sawako spaced out a lot, ate her lunch late, was really bad at English, spoke with a slight lisp, said she wanted to be a nursery school teacher, was surprisingly skilled at playing piano, and really enjoyed Chupa Chups.

All sorts of people had all kinds of things to say. But there was always one connecting factor. One thing that defined Sera Sawako.

“They all called you by the same name.”

Whether they were acquaintances, close friends, or anything in between.

Sera’s reply was strangely calm, with the ambience of casually tossing something aside. “Yeah. I know.”

✽

Sera Sawako’s nickname was the Public Morals Committee.

It sounded like a real title, but her middle school didn’t actually have a Public Morals Committee. She was a member in name only. A certain classmate coined the name during her first year of middle school.

At first, Sera was quite pleased with the nickname. She felt it was proof that she was doing what was right.

It’s better to keep the rules than to break them.

And of course she thought that way. That ideology was the core of her thoughts and actions.

For example, uniforms looked far more lovely when they were worn correctly instead of incorrectly. Being on time to school was far more lovely than running late. And if someone else was breaking the rules, it was far lovelier to take note of it than to ignore it. She believed in that with all her heart. Sera found it absolutely horrifying to think of breaking the rules herself, let alone to allow someone else to.

It only took a month for the name Public Morals Committee to start spreading around. Before long, there wasn’t a single person left who called her Sera Sawako.

At that point, she began feeling uncomfortable. Thoughts that she had perhaps done something wrong began to creep in.

One day, Sera spotted a classmate wearing a red T-shirt under their school uniform. She couldn’t let it be. The school rules explicitly stated that only white undershirts were allowed, after all. As a matter of course, Sera warned that classmate that their shirt was in violation of school rules.

The classmate responded, If you say so, Public Morals Committee.

A nearby classmate shot out, Yeah, don’t even bother with her.

It was only then that Sera realized her nickname was derogatory.

Looking closer, it was obvious how much of an outcast she had become. Nobody talked to her during breaks, and nobody invited her to hang out outside of school.

I thought I was just choosing to be lovely.

But it was clear that nobody else was concerned with finding lovely things in the world.

Sera Sawako went through middle school alone, and graduated alone.

✽

Sera Sawako, the Public Morals Committee.

“Everyone agreed that your top trait was how serious you were,” Kei said.

Sera nodded. “Mhm. So priority number one is learning how to drop that.”

Kei shook his head. “I don’t think that’s what you really want, though.”

“And why’s that?”

“I meant it when I said I heard all sorts of things.”

She would report each and every rule infraction to the teachers, without fail. She even stood up to a teacher who was smoking in a non-smoking area. One day, she realized her skirt was just slightly longer than school regulations allowed, so she obtained permission to attend class in her gym clothes for the day.

To top it all off, there were the Chupa Chups.

“Three strawberry flavored, two ramune, and two grape.”

Seven suckers total. Sera had voluntarily handed them all over to her teacher, claiming she had brought them to school by mistake. Her middle school didn’t allow anyone to bring in outside food or drink.

“You were gonna eat them at school, weren’t you?”

Sera responded with a tiny nod. “Mhm.”

“So you were gonna break the rules?”

“Of course. It would’ve been clever, and definitely not something a serious person would do.”

“But you never did, in the end.”

“Well yeah, so I knew that in high school I–”

Kei shook his head. “You tried breaking the rules in middle school, failed, and still didn’t use your ability. But that’s not what happened yesterday. This time was different.”

Sera Sawako didn’t end up in the marble as an escape from her seriousness.

“You were late to the entrance ceremony. You had actually broken the rules, and then you used your ability.”

The whole situation was upside-down.

The girl who claimed to hate her own seriousness actually wanted to maintain it at all costs. But then, she was late. She only made it to the school gates after the entrance ceremony had already ended, marble in hand.

“I took a look around in the spot where you collapsed. I tried imagining what you would see through a marble from that position.”

Looking towards the schoolyard from the gates offered a broad view of the school building, with a large clock front and center. Sera was very late, after the entrance ceremony had already ended, and when she arrived at the school, the clock would have been right in plain sight. Then, she looked at it through the marble.

Everything was reversed in the marble world. Even the face of a clock. Up became down, left became right, and 11:30 would become 5:00.

“You stood at the school gates, late for the entrance ceremony. But in the inverted world of the marble, the clock showed that it was still only five in the morning.”

Of course, it was only appearances. It didn’t actually mean anything. No matter what the clock might seem to say, 11:30 was 11:30. Time waited for no one.

“But you preferred it that way, didn’t you? Even if it was a falsehood, it allowed you to live in a world where the entrance ceremony hadn’t started, and you weren’t running late.”

That was all there was to it. That simple yet powerful desire trapped Sera within the world of a marble. She wanted it so badly that her ability activated outside of her own recognition.

Sera remained silent for a long time. Kei eventually stopped waiting for her reply, and asked, “Do you prefer being inside of the marble?”

She gently shook her head. “Everything’s upside-down here. The school, the clock, and me. But if the clock is upside-down, and I’m upside-down, then neither of us are.”

“So being inside the marble is no different than being outside.”

It wasn’t her dream world after all.

“Nah. I was just late, and I thought this would be nice, but it sucks. I don’t feel clever at all.”

Kei stared at the marble. It was transparent, slightly blue, and had a lovely round shape. It glittered and sparkled in the light. “You should have been more careful to attend the entrance ceremony on time, Sera-san.”

The lovely object inside of her was so precious that she was willing to run away into the world of a marble to avoid the hurt of losing it. Even if she couldn’t become clever, and even if it required her to be a little selfish, Kei thought that object was worth protecting.

Sera shook her head. “It’s too late for that now.”

Looking her way, Kei smiled. “Not quite. You can still make it.” Watching the cheap marble shine, he spoke again. “Haruki, let’s reset.”

It was all for one girl, trapped inside a marble.

That was a cause worth letting the world crumble away.

But then, it would be rebuilt, and the world of the past could be remade.