Chapter 4: Or Not To be
The smell of burnt toast was now a ghost that haunted the space between sleep and waking. Mio’s eyes opened, dry and aching, to the same grey ceiling. Her body felt hollowed out, a vessel still trembling from a violation that had left no physical mark. She lay perfectly still, waiting for the memory to solidify, but it was sand running through her fingers—only the residue of terror remained, a sour taste at the back of her throat. And a singular, urgent impulse: See Ishida.She didn’t question it. The impulse felt older than the morning, a root growing through her.She rolled over and pulled the journal from under the mattress. The leather was cool, the tear a definitive crack in the world’s wallpaper. She flipped past pages of neat, past entries, her own handwriting a chronicle of humiliations she only vaguely recalled. Then she found a blank page.Without understanding why, her hand moved.Woke up. Must see Mr.Ishida.Before school.Don’t be late.She stared at the words. They were not a memory; they were a command she had issued to herself.
The normal routine that followed felt like she was puppeting her own body through a dense fog. The burnt slice in the sink, Koji’s sneer, the silent walk—it all happened around her, but she was a spectator tucked inside her own skull, watching from a great distance. The only thing real was the weight of the journal in her bag and the directive pounding behind her eyes: See Ishida.
She didn’t go to her classroom. She turned down a quieter hallway, the sound of gathering students fading behind her, and stopped at the door to the teachers’ office. She knocked, a soft, brittle sound.Mr. Ishida opened it, a piece of buttered toast in his other hand.He looked surprised, then concerned.“Miss Suzuki?Is everything alright? Class doesn’t start for another twenty minutes.”
The sight of him—his kind, lined face, the faded cardigan, the smell of mild soap and old paper—unlocked a floodgate. The hollow feeling inside her filled with a crushing pressure. All the unspoken words, all the swallowed screams, the loneliness that was a stone in her gut—it surged up, a tidal wave seeking a single crack in the dam.“I… I need help,” she whispered.Then her voice broke. A sob, raw and ugly, ripped from her chest. Tears she didn’t know she had left spilled hot and fast down her cheeks.“Please.I don’t know what to do. It keeps happening.It won’t stop.”
Alarm flashed across his face. He stepped fully into the hallway, pulling the door closed behind him.“Mio, shhh, it’s alright. What keeps happening? Tell me.”
But she couldn’t articulate the loops, the dying, the journal. She could only feel the overwhelming, desperate need for an anchor, for someone to pull her from the drowning current. She stepped forward, her hands coming up, not to grab but to plead, and in her blurred, hysterical state, she stumbled. He reacted instinctively, catching her by the shoulders to steady her.From a distance, it could have looked like an embrace.
From a specific angle, down the hall where Suki Tanaka had just rounded the corner, late herself and seething, it looked like something else entirely.Suki stopped dead. Her eyes, sharp with a perpetual malice, widened.She didn’t say a word. She just faded back around the corner, a predator withdrawing into the grass.“Mio, you have to calm down,” Mr. Ishida was saying, his voice gentle but firm, his hands now holding her upper arms, setting her gently back. “Take a breath.Tell me what’s wrong. Is it at home?”
She tried to gulp air, to form sentences, but the words were tangled in the sobs. “They hate me.Everyone. And I… I keep… I think I’m losing my mind.”
“You’re not losing your mind,” he said, his brow deeply furrowed. “But we need to talk properly.Privately.Not here. Let’s go to the counseling office after first period. Can you hold on until then?”
She nodded, a frantic, bird-like motion, clinging to the promise of ‘after.’ He gave her shoulders a final, reassuring squeeze before letting go. “Go wash your face.I’ll see you in class. It will be alright.”
It wasn’t alright. By the end of first period, a vice-principal, her face a mask of stern disapproval, entered and asked Mr.Ishida to step outside.He didn’t return. Ten minutes later, the same vice-principal came for Mio.
The small administrative office was airless. The vice-principal, a woman with a tight, permanent frown, sat across from Mio, while a stern-faced male administrator loomed near the door.
“Miss Suzuki,” the vice-principal began, her voice dripping with icy civility. “A student reported seeing you and Mr.Ishida in a… compromising embrace before school.Is this true?”
“What? No!He was just—I was upset, I fell—”
“He was holding you. In the hallway.Before school hours.”
“I was crying! He was helping me!”
The male administrator spoke, his tone flat. “A young girl, emotionally distressed, alone with a male teacher in an empty hallway. It presents an… unfortunate perception.”
The word perception hung in the room, heavier than any truth.Mio’s plea dissolved into a horrified silence. She tried to explain her fear, her desperation, but her words came out as a tangled, unconvincing jumble. Their eyes held not concern, but a quiet, final judgment. The facts, as they saw them, were inescapable: the creepy old man and the beautiful, troubled girl. A story too convenient not to be true.Mr.Ishida was placed on immediate administrative leave pending investigation. Mio was suspended for three days for “conduct inappropriate to the school environment.” They called her foster parents.
The walk home was a funeral procession of one. When she entered the apartment, her foster father was waiting, the school’s call still vibrating in the air.His face was a thundercloud.
“You embarrass us,” he hissed, the words barely audible.“Suspended? For whoring yourself out to a teacher?”
“I didn’t—”
The first slap was explanation enough. It snapped her head to the side, a white flash behind her eyes. The second, a closed fist to the stomach, drove the air from her lungs in a pained wheeze. She crumpled to the linoleum, and he didn’t stop. The kicks were methodical, practiced—to the ribs, the back, the legs. Her foster mother watched from the kitchen doorway, her arms crossed, a silent sanction. Koji peered from his room, a faint smile on his lips.“Filthy,” her foster father grunted with each impact.“Ungrateful. Little. Bitch.”
The world narrowed to the pain, a symphony of sharp fractures and deep, blooming aches.She didn’t lose consciousness, not fully. She drifted in a shallow, shocky sea, aware of being dragged by an ankle down the too-long hallway, the peeling wallpaper a blur. Her door clicked shut.Time seeped away. The pain in her side grew sharper, a stabbing heat with every shallow breath.A deep, sickening wrongness settled in her abdomen. She was cold, so cold, despite the stuffy heat of the tiny room.She thought of Mr. Ishida’s kind, ruined face. She thought of the journal, which would be there tomorrow, waiting.A final, grim understanding settled over her, a blanket as heavy as the darkness. Her attempt to reach for help had been the very thing that snapped the trap shut. There was no reaching out.There was only the loop, and the deepening cold. She bled internally, quietly, into the lonely dark, until the cold was all there was.
Then there the smell of burnt toast.