17

Ultimately, rather than making any phone calls, I decided to just wait for U‘s parents to come home. In the meantime, my eyes had completely adjusted to the dark, so I got to looking around. It didn’t take long for me to find several tools that could be useful for escaping, which only made it more obvious how poorly the closet served as a captive space. I found some carpentry tools in what I assumed was a toolbox, including a hammer and saw that would be enough to take down any normal house door. It made me feel like I was some sort of monkey being experimented on for what it would do to get a banana. Not that I’m intimately familiar with how monkeys feel when they’re experimented on.

With all that discovered, I realized that even if I called the police, it would be hard for them to establish a case for kidnapping. It’d be asking a lot for them to buy that I was really kidnapped, abducted and held captive when the place I was locked in was so easy to escape from.

Of course, since I had my cell phone I was under no obligation to use anything lying around the house, but if I used the hammer in an improper way, then all I’d be doing was strengthening possible breaking and entering charges. I didn’t know anything about the house, so I couldn’t just go around doing whatever I wanted.

I just had to make like the old Japanese proverb: “Don’t straighten your cap under a plum tree”. Of course, the idea behind the saying is to avoid looking like you’re stealing the plums, so I had to avoid looking like a burglar.

I just needed to take it easy, sit quietly, and wait for the adults to return home.

In the modern era, I could have killed time reading an e-book on my phone, or whiled away the hours on a game, but phones a decade ago were sorely lacking in time-wasting functionality, and even so, it wasn’t the time to be relaxing and playing on my phone. Not to mention how much of a waste of battery it would have been.

I couldn’t afford to miss out on the window when U’s parents got home. Best case scenario, I could get to them before she did. The person who talked to them first could easily sway their overall opinion. Maybe I was playing it a little too cautiously, but it couldn’t hurt to stay on the safe side.

I leaned back, putting the weight of my back against the door, closed my eyes, and quietly listened. I waited on standby for even the slightest pin drop.

I never wore a watch before entering the work force, so I didn’t have one on either wrist back then, but I was able to use my phone to check the time. Once I learned that it was 7:30 PM, I shut the phone off. I could go into standby, but even in sleep mode a phone would still use battery, and there was also the remote chance that I would receive a phone call (maybe from a publisher?). If my phone was discovered, then it would definitely be taken away… Well, I would probably be able to call for help before that happened, but that would only make the situation super messy and even more difficult to resolve peaceably.

I wanted to avoid the worst-case scenario. That was my main concern as U‘s “senpai”. Of course, it was rather brash of me to consider myself the senpai of someone I didn’t know very well, and I would eventually discover just how delusional that consideration was.

But it was 7:30 PM, and nobody had come home yet. Maybe U‘s parents worked a lot of overtime? With that much overtime, they likely didn’t have an average day job… and they must’ve both been working. Maybe that extra income was what afforded them such a wealthy house. More time slipped away as I mused at the possibilities.

But it was probably a bad idea to keep my eyes closed.

I fell asleep.