My Modern Kaidan: Meibatsu

Chapter 6

Hideo

I didn't always want to be an artist. My parents tolerated my fascination with cars because they thought it would lead to a career in engineering or robotics or some kind of profession they found honorable. I still drew, but always in secret.

My sister and Sachi became best friends in their third year of high school. I had always thought Sachi was pretty but for months I could never say anything more to her than hello. Even when, as the school year progressed, she began coming over to our house to study.

One evening, both of them had fallen asleep at the table, their heads pressed against their books. I had left a school book of my own on that table, and when I bent down to get it, the scent of Sachi's hair seemed to fill my entire head. I knew it was the same strawberry shampoo that my sister used, but the way it mixed with Sachi's own chemistry became intoxicating to me.

Soon, I began to always leave something I needed on the table just to have an excuse to bend down and smell Sachi's hair. It didn't occur to me that anyone had ever noticed.

Late one evening, I came out of my room and found Sachi asleep at the table again. Her hair was tucked behind her ear and her face looked so peaceful next to the only small lamp lit in the entire house that I took a moment just to look at her.

"Hideo-chan," Auntie's voice cut through the darkness. I froze as I realized she had been sitting in the next room.

"Oneesan," I said. "What are you doing?"

She stepped into view. "I know what you have been doing."

"Nanda. . ." My words trailed off as I saw the scissors in my sister's hand.

Her steps were slow and deliberate as she approached Sachi, raising the scissors up as she moved. Before I knew what was happening, she snipped a small portion of Sachi's hair and offered it to me.

"Here," she said, placing it into my hand.

I was nervous Sachi would wake up and see me with her hair so I rushed back to my room and put the hair into a vial I was supposed to use for samples for my biology class. Ironic, ne?

It was only later that night as I drifted to sleep, after the distraction of having something of Sachi's had waned and I had opened and closed the vial over and over, that I became distracted by another thought. How my sister could have known I would come out of my room that night, and if it was really about me at all. I couldn't forget the image of her watching Sachi from the darkness, with the scissors in her hands.