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“Push him off the roof!” suggests Tsukasa.
Nene gives a little scream of surprise. Then she gives another, because Tsukasa is extremely close behind her; then another, because Tsukasa seizes her waist and demonstrates: he gives her a push. “No!” Nene cries, when she’s finished her escalating sequence of little screams, and she grabs at the railing for safety. Far below, the school’s grounds are a pleasant purple in the twilight. “No! I’m not giving anyone a—”
“All you’ve got to do,” says Tsukasa’s confidential voice in her ear, “is go running over like you’re gonna give Amane a great big hug, but really you give him a great big push! Off the roof! Splat! No one’ll know you did it on purpose, Nene-chan! Only me – and I won’t mind. I’ll be really impressed, if you push Amane off the roof! Go on! Get him! He’s right over there!”
“No!” Nene cries. On principle, she gives another little scream.
And from the excitable bustle of activity around the telescopes, Amane hears her. “Tsukasa!” he yells. “Stop teasing Yashiro-san! Leave her alone!”
“Now’s your chance!” Tsukasa says encouragingly. “You go racing over to say thank you to Amane for telling me off, and you run straight into him ‘cause you’re so happy you could just sweep him off his feet! Right off his feet! Right over the side! And then—”
“No!” says Nene, and flees.
+++
She waits at the gates after school. Tsukasa waits beside her. He’s not waiting with her, because that would suggest they’re waiting together, and that this is a cooperative activity, and that Nene had any say in Tsukasa’s decision to stand very close beside her while both of them wait: and she didn’t. They’re waiting side by side at the gates; they’re waiting separately. They’re waiting, separately, for Amane.
“Cars go pretty fast,” remarks Tsukasa. He’s gazing out into the street.
“I suppose they do,” says Nene.
“Amane wouldn’t stand a chance,” says Tsukasa, “if you tripped him up on the way home and he fell in the road and a bunch of fast cars went over him and squashed him and squashed him and squashed him and all the stuff inside him got squashed out of him.”
Nene crosses to the other side of the path. They continue waiting for Amane, now with the width of the gates between them.
Another fast car goes by.
“Whoosh!” says Tsukasa, and looks at her significantly.
+++
“You and Amane are going to the cinema!”
“Please don’t sneak up on me like that!” cries Nene, once she’s finished screaming.
“The cinema’s good,” Tsukasa says intently. His hand is on Nene’s back, to keep her drawn into conspiratorial proximity. They’re in their gym kits: all of the first-year high school classes are flooding out into the midday sunshine for an enormous game of baseball, which is the sort of merrily carefree school event that happens on a regular basis in this world, instead of studying maths. “The cinema’s dark, and no one’s gonna be looking! You want my advice, Nene-chan—”
“No! Absolutely not!”
“—you get some snacks and a really really big drink to take in with you and then, when a noisy bit happens, like if a train explodes, or everyone in the film’s playing a trumpet, you just grab Amane’s nose. You pinch his nose! And...” Like a first-aid trainer demonstrating the principles of CPR on an invisible dummy, Tsukasa acts it out with energy: one hand to pinch shut Amane’s nose, to force back Amane’s head; one hand to tip the really big drink into Amane’s mouth... and to pour, and pour, and pour. “Nice and natural! Like an accident! Amane’s a messy eater, he always gets food on him. Everyone’ll just think he drowned himself by mistake! And you won’t have to share the snacks with him, if you murder him right after the film starts!—ah, Amane! Amane!”
Amane unpeels Tsukasa’s hand from Nene’s back. He unpeels Tsukasa’s hand from his own back – and then from his stomach, and then from his shoulder; he attempts to unpeel Tsukasa’s hand from the top of his head, but Tsukasa has a fistful of Amane’s hair: he’s using it like a handhold in a climbing wall. The rest of Amane is the rest of the climbing wall.
“Was he saying weird stuff to you?” Amane asks Nene, staggering under the weight of Tsukasa.
“He—”
“We were talking about your date!” Tsukasa cuts in. “Nene-chan’s got big plans! Right, Nene-chan? You got all sorts of big exciting plans about what you wanna do to Amane in the cinema when it’s dark and you’re all alone with him and no one’s looking!”
“I do not,” says Nene. “Amane-kun, you have to believe me! I don’t have any plans of that sort at all! At the very most, I have some ideas. I have... an awareness of the possibilities! I have certain options in mind! Daydreams! Harmless ones!”
“Harmless ones!” Tsukasa says in passionate echo. Then he winks at Nene over Amane’s head, where Amane won’t see.
+++
“Look at this!” Tsukasa says, grabbing Nene’s elbow. Out of habit, Nene gives a little scream; the skirt of her dress whirls out around her like a tutu as she’s yanked off course into an empty classroom. “Look!”
“I have somewhere I urgently need to be, Tsukasa-kun!”
“I know! You’re gonna have a picnic with Amane, you’re gonna sit under a tree and gaze into his eyes and flirt with him all lunchbreak. Gross,” Tsukasa says cheerfully, and he kicks the door shut. “Look at this!”
Nene looks. It’s a plain bread roll, with a hole jabbed raggedly through from top to bottom and marked, in places, by a few stray scribbles of black ink. “That looks like... a bread roll you stabbed with a pen.”
“Yeah, but if you put a bit of paint on it it’ll look like a doughnut,” says Tsukasa, “and then Amane’ll eat it, and he won’t realise you’ve put poison in it. And he’ll eat the poison! And get poisoned! And die!”
“But I haven’t put poison in it!”
“Yet!”
“I don’t want to! That’s a horrible plan! I don’t even know where you imagine I’d find poison!”
“In a shop!”
“A shop? A poison shop?”
“Well, you’re not gonna find it in a bookshop, are you?” Tsukasa says pragmatically.
“I’m not going to find poison anywhere,” says Nene, “because I’m not going to poison Amane-kun!”
“You’re so hard to please!” Tsukasa laments. He tosses the mutilated bread roll aside and sits down on the floor; he pats the space beside him, in invitation. Nene backs stealthily towards the door instead. Tsukasa throws open his school bag and turns it upside down. A cascade of papers comes slithering out across the floorboards. “Picky Nene-chan, come and look at these! Tell me what you like!”
What Nene likes is Amane, and the prospect of having a picnic under a tree with Amane. In the secret depths of her heart, Nene is also remarkably partial to the prospect of gazing into Amane’s eyes and flirting with him all lunchbreak. But before she can ardently declare as much, one of Tsukasa’s papers catches her eye.
Nene sits down. “Is this Amane-kun?” she asks.
“Yeah!”
She moves her finger hesitantly across the page. “Is... this Amane-kun, too?”
“Yeah! Yeah, that’s his head. And that’s most of the rest of him. You’d have to time that one just right, though – just when you slam the window shut – otherwise he’d only get a bump on the head. Not even a bad one! And you want his head to come off!”
“I want his head to stay on!” Nene objects.
But she can’t help herself: she’s transfixed, raptly revolted. She shuffles through Tsukasa’s illustrations. He favours a markedly red colour scheme. His enthusiasm for his subject material vastly outweighs any interest he might possess for colouring within the lines. Here and there, he’s scrawled helpful labels to clarify some of the finer details: AMANE!!!!! AMANE’S LEG. NENE-CHAN. 2 MOUSETRAPS (BIG ONES). BLOOD. AMANE!!!!!!!!!! AMANE’S BLOOD. MORE BLOOD. A HUNGRY BEAR. MITSUBA’S SKELETON. BITS OF AMANE (DOESN’T MATTER WHICH BITS). ME WITH A CAMERA. AMANE!!!!!!!!
Nene touches a mystifying tangle of squiggles. “Is this... a snake pit?”
“No! A map! To our house! And I’d make sure Amane couldn’t escape before you got there,” Tsukasa reassures her. “I’d tie him up or something! Give him a nice big bump on the head. Sing him to sleep. Handcuffs. This is the next step,” he adds, and passes Nene another crumpled sheet of paper: scribbled frenetically in orange, red, yellow. The skeletal outline of a house is visible beneath the flames. In the corner, a lopsided stick figure in a skirt, smiling enormously: NENE-CHAN. In her hand, a shapeless lump: FIREBOMB.
“I’d hardly be smiling if I’d just burned Amane-kun alive!” says Nene.
“It’s just a rough plan! We can work the details out later. You can cry instead, if you want! You can do any face you like! ...Yeah, that’s one’s nice and easy,” Tsukasa says approvingly, when Nene’s attention is gripped by another very red page. “Good for beginners! You just stab him. Just put a knife in him! Amane’d probably like that one, too. Nostalgic!”
Nene sifts through more crayoned plans. Amane is drowning in the school pool - knocked flat by a rolling pin swung with passion - wearing his PE kit as he drinks from a water bottle labelled BLEACH... “Tsukasa-kun, these are all completely horrible! Why have you been thinking about murdering Amane-kun so much?!”
“Why haven’t you?”
Nene looks up sharply. Tsukasa’s watching her with a nice friendly smile. He’s a normal human boy with no idea that this world is fake and that even he himself isn’t real and that Nene’s been granted knowledge of the worst possible and most murderous escape key; he is. He can’t be anything else.
“I’m very sorry,” Nene blurts, scrambling to her feet and hurrying for the door, “but I’ve got to go! I’m extremely late for my picnic with Amane-kun!”
“If his food gets stuck, don’t help him!” Tsukasa calls after her. “Let him choke! Watch him die! Have fun!”