Chapter Text
Warnings: Please read and heed the warning tags. Violence committed against a child. Death of a major character. Ghost children and hauntings. Many, many references to child neglect, alcoholism, and suicidal thoughts by adult characters. PLEASE ENGAGE WITH CARE.
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Sonoko had fallen in love with Umeda Toji three weeks ago. She falls in love with someone twice a month and typically spends the second week doodling her wedding dress in the margins of her schoolwork. Last week it’d been Isogai Tadase and Ran had had to sit through long and detailed descriptions of Sonoko’s plans to visit Bali and maybe Bolivia if the weather is nice and if Toji would like to maybe see Venice they could do that too, which is nice this time of year, and they should probably just take the yacht over so they can bring their own boat to the channels.
This is the first time wedding plans have stretched into a third week, which in the language of third grade means things have gotten serious. Ran etches flowers in the dirt under her shoe as Sonoko twines the swingset chains around her into a knot. “I want green flowers,” Sonoko decides for the eighth time. “They have to exist somewhere.”
“I don’t think they do.”
“Well I want them. And blue ones next to them. And I want there to be so many it looks like the ocean.”
“We can do what we did in first grade with the daisies, where we put them in water with the dye and they sucked up the colors.” It’s crushingly hot and Ran wishes summer would give up the fight and show its belly to autumn. Her fingers slide a bit with sweat and she readjusts her grip on the chains of her own swing. “They won’t last long but they’ll still be pretty. And they’ll be green.”
Sonoko leans back so far in her swing she’s nearly horizontal. She sways back and forth and for a moment it looks like she’s powered down. Ran has wondered in the past where she gets her energy and she thinks maybe this is where it happens: Sonoko flopping in random sunlit places, recharging like a loud thirsty plant. “He said something to me the other day that really made me mad,” Sonoko says abruptly. “Do you know what he said? ‘I bet you’ve never even had ice-cream at a real ice-cream shop. I bet your cook just makes it for you whenever you want it’.”
“Why do you like him again?” Ran feels these are relevant questions. “If he’s so mean to you, why do you want to marry him?”
“I think he’s just trying to act tough when his friends are around. When we were partners for science he was a lot nicer. I think he’s just one of those guys who acts tough but is totally soft on the inside. Like the bad boy, right?” Sonoko plants her feet and winds up again. She spins out with muted violence. “But like, I’ve traveled to Europe. But I haven’t gone to the ice-cream place so he thinks I’m the one who never goes anywhere?”
“I think he’s just trying to say that you’re sheltered.”
“If he’s such big time, he should try stepping out of Japan,” Sonoko says. “Ugh, he makes me mad. It’s so frustrating. He thinks he knows all about me and he doesn’t know anything. I don’t even know what ice-cream place he’s talking about.”
“It’s Fuji Chu. It’s the one in Beika-Minami.”
“Wait, you know it? Have you been there?”
“My parents took me out that way when I was in kindergarten. They let me have a kiddie cone there.”
Sonoko looks betrayed. It’s kind of funny. Ran loyally keeps a straight face. “I could take you on the train,” she offers lamely, anticipating refusal, but Sonoko immediately watts up with delight. “I mean, I don’t have much money, but—”
“Oh don’t be stupid, I’ll pay.” Sonoko is already breathless with spite. “Oh, this is perfect. I’ll show him. When can we go? Today? I want to shove it in his face as soon as possible. Actually, you know what, we can just have my driver take us. It’s faster.”
“It actually… might be better if he doesn’t. If Toji’s making fun of you for being spoiled, it’s probably just going to make things worse. And he might see your limousine there. He’s just going to say meaner things.”
Sonoko settles back in her seat, disgruntled. “I should dump him.”
You should, Ran thinks, but not very loudly. She sketches a dandelion with her toe and gifts it a leaf. Time and short attention spans always take care of these things before she has to. Also Sonoko isn’t actually dating anyone, Toji included, so that takes care of things even faster. “So how do you think we should get there?” Sonoko asks.
“I mean, we could always take the train, I guess.”
“You mean public transportation?”
“Sure. It’s how I get to school when you don’t drive me. And most of the class takes it, so you’ll probably have a better chance of him seeing you on the train if you don’t… you know, drive there.”
Sonoko considers this. She untwirls herself and then weaves herself back up, chains clinking until they creak with torque. “Sounds dangerous,” she says at last. “Okay, count me in. But we can’t tell Daddy.”
“Does he really care that much?”
“He always says I’m going to be kidnapped for ransom. It’s like never even sort of happened. But I guess I’ll go in disguise or something. Ooh.” She jerks to Ran abruptly, dragging her toes across the woodchips to keep from spinning out. “Should we both go in disguise? Like detectives or something? We could pretend we’re chasing a criminal.”
“I don’t have anything to wear,” Ran hedges, though she has to admit it sounds pretty exciting when Sonoko puts it that way. “I think people would still recognize me.”
“I could bring you clothes. Better yet, let me dress you up.” Sonoko flails excitedly for Ran’s chain to rattle it around. “Ohmygosh I have been waiting to do this forever. I’ll bring spy clothes to school tomorrow. We can pick stuff out after class. What do you think? Yes. Say yes. That’s a yes.”
“I’d have to ask my dad first.”
“But he’ll say yes, right?”
“I don’t know. I think so.”
“Ohmygosh.” Sonoko is busy. She lifts her toe and sends herself on a tailspin. Her short hair flies and Ran smells coconut through the tornado. Sonoko muses through the nosebleed-inducing spin, “I wonder what flavor I should get.”
Ran stays after school to tend to her desk, which has gotten messy enough that Takako-sensei has threatened to keep her in during lunch to clean it out. She is busy trying to decide if her artwork should head to the recycling chute or onto the refrigerator when Sonoko reappears in the doorway, backpack on her back and a covered container in her hand. “I forgot to give you this.”
Ran straightens to accept it, blinking at her. “Our cook made mini pies last night,” Sonoko says. “I took a blueberry one for you. Sorry if it got a little smushed around in there. It should still taste the same.”
“For me?” Ran is delighted. She cracks back the lid and the buttery scent that hits her nearly takes her to her knees. “Really?”
“It’s the least I can do to pay you back for tomorrow.” Sonoko crooks her fingers over her shoulder. She’s already jogging back across the room towards the door. “Sorry, I have to go, my driver’s waiting. See you.”
“See you.” She can hear the choir club practicing from their opened windows on the third floor. When she’s sure Sonoko is gone, she thumbs a small piece of the crust from the pie and rolls it around her tongue for a while. It breaks apart and the tang of blueberries clinging to it slaps her cheek from the inside. She massages up one more small glorious piece from the edge before putting the lid back on, but she thinks about it as she gathers up the rest of her artwork to pack away, she thinks about it on the way to the station and she thinks about it as her stomach growls in her seat on the train. She keeps the tub clutched firmly in her hands. By the time she’s on her street she’s not thinking about anything at all, which is usually the best way to deal with all the things she can’t have. She thinks about nothing at all a lot.
~^~
In the privacy of her own head where she’s allowed to say and be disrespectful things, she calls her father ‘Kogoro’. It’s the same way she’s ‘daughter’ and ‘Ran’ and how coins have two faces that don’t separate no matter how much she rattles them around in her hand. Papa is hers but so is Kogoro, because to Ran’s knowledge no one else in his life calls him by his first name. Mother calls him anata which was probably nice once but now slaps like rocks against a windshield. In the office he is tantei-san. Kimi and Mouri-kun is how Megure addresses him, which Ran has always secretly thought was the nicest. It sounds proprietary but in a good way, like Megure cares if her father gets drunk on a street corner or looks down at the water under tall bridges much longer than he really needs to be looking at the water under tall bridges.
‘Kogoro’ is hers. She can clap it off on her hands like the rhythm exercises her class does with their music teacher. It’s prickly cat claws and alleycat yawns in her head. It naps in sunbeams and paces, paces at night in the office through clouds of cigarette smoke when she’s trying to sleep upstairs. The kanji ‘ro’ is too complicated for her hand but she can write the ‘go’ and has always been curious what the five referred to. Five of what. She’s asked him countless times and he never gives her a straight answer. Five what. Octopus legs, he says. Where are the other three? Your mother ate them.
Sometimes, creasing together little origami dinosaurs in the corner of the sofa and listening to her parents scream at each other over the phone, Ran wonders if maybe Mother left because she’d forgotten how to love both sides of his coin. The same ugly little humanizing moments that had driven Mother away are the ones Ran has come to love the most. Otousan who makes origami dinosaurs with her and cooks dinner and sprays away monsters. Kogoro who yells the wrong answers at game show hosts on the TV and had stood in the agency’s window to watch Mother walk away and is so deeply, deeply terrified that sometimes she can see his hands shake as he shovels reheated rice out onto her plate. It wakes something horrible in her. She wants to spray the fears out of his head the same way he sprays the monsters out of her room. She wonders if maybe it might’ve been better if he could go back in time and stay Kogoro instead of ‘anata’ or ‘kimi’ or ‘otousan’ or ‘tantei-san’. Maybe everything would’ve been easier to handle if he’d hadn’t had to be so many things.
That night she makes sticky rice with him and pretends not to pay attention to how thin he dices the green onion for the sauce. It’s their last one and the way he’s chopping it artfully makes it look like it’s not their last one. “Sonoko gave me a mini pie today,” she says.
Kogoro’s fumble takes a little divot out of his thumb. She doesn’t like to see him hurt but it’s always hilarious when this happens. She eases herself off her stool and onto the countertop to watch him have a scripted meltdown ending with a dramatic grisly death on the floor between the kitchen chairs. “It’s blueberry,” she says. “I saved it all so we can share it after dinner.”
“You’re my favorite,” Kogoro’s corpse says from the floor. And because even his corpse is mercenary, “You couldn’t chisel two from her?”
“Daddy, no. She was nice enough to bring me one.”
“I raised you better than this.”
“You didn’t even raise me to share.” Ran bats her heels very gently back against the lower bank of cabinets. She watches her father sincerely think about falling asleep and then sincerely begin to fall asleep all in the span of about forty seconds. He’s always this way. He can sleep on a bed of gasoline and livewires. It’s staying asleep that’s hard for him. “I want to go somewhere tomorrow with her. Can I?”
“No.”
“Daddy.”
“Where.”
“We want to go to the ice-cream place by Hanamiya Park. All the kids in class keep talking about it. It has a chocolate fountain and everything.”
He squiggles around like an inchworm to fix her with an eyeball. “And who exactly would be paying for this?”
“Sonoko. She said it was okay,” Ran preempts when he opens his mouth. “She really really wants to go but she gets scared taking the train, so she said it’d be fair if I took her there and she paid for it. It’s a trade.”
“Sounds like a pain. Just have her driver drag you over there.”
“But she doesn’t want to do it that way. She wants to do it like normal kids do. And I figured since you taught me how to ride the train and be responsible, and you said I could ride the blue line by myself now, I would be able to take Sonoko.”
Kogoro rolls over with a sloppy grunt to yawn against the floor. She wonders if he’s still bleeding and the answer is yes, probably, so she slides off the counter and runs to the bathroom to give him time to process her request. She comes back with their battered medical tin and pokes him in various spots of his spine until he groans and shifts his corpse up for her. He whines pathetically as she cleans his wound of misery and shame and dies at least twice more from agony while she bandages it. “All fixed,” she reports, replacing the supplies. “So can I go?”
“You know what, fine,” Kogoro says. He’s waggling his thumb experimentally. He’ll complain about the crippling pain for at least two weeks. “You caught me in a good mood. I, the great detective Mouri Kogoro, devastatingly handsome savior of women and orphans, officially grant your request.”
“… but?”
“But nothing. I’m a generous god.”
“So you don’t want anything?”
“Who says I didn’t want anything? Of course you have to bring me something. Those are just house rules.”
She stifles a sigh. “She didn’t say she’d pay for you.”
“No, I’m saying she’ll pay for you and me,” Kogoro says. “You think I have any problem chiseling a seven year-old out of her parents’ cash? Get real. She’s loaded. Turn on the charm and bring your old man back a giant cookie or something.”
She’d honestly already been planning on it but gives him a reproachful look for his greed. It’s scripted. He hooks her hair out of her eye and behind her ear and flicks her forehead to get the expression off her face and the warm predictability of it all makes her jumpy stomach settle. “I’ll set the table while you finish chopping,” she offers, climbing to her feet. “And I’ll do dishes afterwards.”
“Brown-noser.” Kogoro flops back down on the tile and rolls onto his back, curling his hands over his eyes. He really will sleep there if she lets him, so she steps onto his stomach and presses until the breath wooshes out of his lungs in surrender. “Don’t keep handing over collateral when you already got what you want. Save some ammo for later.”
“Okay, I won’t do dishes,” she says cheerfully, and kicks extra hard off his stomach to leave him fish-gasping on the tile before she runs to the place the call to Sonoko.
Later that night, when she’s full and he probably isn’t, he skimps the bedtime story but lets her stay up an extra half hour to watch excruciatingly boring drama reruns with him. After he’s drunk himself into a quiet acceptance, she stirs from him, gives him a peck on the cheek he’s too sleepy to dodge, and tucks herself into bed. When she climbs out of bed after midnight to get herself a glass of water, she goes to peel him off the sofa and pushes him towards his own bed while he complains and this too is scripted. It fades in the background with all the other reruns.
~^~
Sonoko doesn’t come to school the next day. Ran is breathless with guilt as she slips a precious ten yen into the payphone after school to phone the mansion. She sways on creaking toes atop the bench under the receiver and prays it will go through. “Sonoko-sama is ill today, but we think it’s a minor cold,” the maid tells her. “She should be feeling better in a few days. Should I tell her you called?”
“It’s okay.” She’s horrified to feel a flash of resentment at her lost coin and squashes it the best she can. Sonoko would be a better friend and worry about Ran before thinking about money. “I mean, sure. Tell her I hope she feels better. Um, please.”
“Were you counting on her for a ride, Ran-chan? Ishida- can come and pick you up.”
“It’s okay. I promise. I’m just going to take the train like I always do. Um, bye.”
“Do you need us to call your father for you?”
“No, I’m okay. Bye-bye.” Ran hangs up before the maid can get any more invested. She climbs down from the bench and wonders what to do. Kogoro doesn’t expect her back until later and while she doesn’t like to mislead him, she can’t find it within herself to give up her freedom so easily. Without Sonoko’s money she won’t be able to afford ice-cream, but her student ID card makes traveling the blue line free. She can probably justify swinging out to most of the stops along the route as long as she doesn’t stray too far away from home.
She waffles between guilt and excitement as she boards the train. She nearly folds as her stop approaches, but she white-knuckles the rail and forces her body to stay in the seat until the doors safely close. The learned panic of a missed stop immediately hits her and she clamps down on her lip to concentrate, keeping her eyes fixed on the scenery outside the opposite window until the instinct to turn back fades. She sort of wishes she’s in anything but her school uniform but it’s too late to change course now.
She gets off at Beika-Minami inside a flood of unfamiliar foot traffic, hefting her backpack higher up on her shoulders and blinking in the slant of sunlight. She wonders how adults do this every day: get off on strange new stops by themselves, navigate their daily hiccups without anyone telling them how to fix them or where to go. She looks up at the towering crosswalk signs and the sea of legs and she feels crushed and small. You’ll grow, Mother always says, tweaking her widow’s peak. Wistful. Faster than you’ll know, faster than I’d like, you’ll grow.
Ran tries to grow. She takes a few steps, first ceding to traffic and then tentatively charting her own way. She eventually makes it to the ice-cream shop and doesn’t see any Teitan uniforms, but she lingers just in case, dutiful, seeing if she’ll spot Toji in the crowd. Eventually some elementary schoolers do come in with their parents, but she doesn’t recognize the uniforms. The ice-cream looks really good and again Ran’s traitorous stomach growls. She considers indulging herself and eating the other half of her lunch she’d saved earlier, but her own agenda ultimately pushes her onward. Eye on the angle of the sun, Ran presses on, sticking to well-traveled roads. The cicadas are deafening in the tree line and she feels smears of sweat start to collect under the weight of her backpack. It’s both more boring and more exhilarating than she thought it’d be. She waits obediently at the crosswalks and keeps an eye on businesses she can run into for help.
By the time she reaches the entrance to Hanamiya Park she’s starting to get footsore and disillusioned. Crinkling her toes to release some of the tension in her arch, Ran considers the welcome sign and wonders if she shouldn’t just give in and go home. She knows better than to assume Kogoro doesn’t have his eye on the clock and he’ll probably appreciate an early return so he can unhook his brain from the issue.
In the end necessity moves her feet for her. She can feel her stomach squirming with the strain of the heat and she’s not thrilled with the prospect of throwing up in anything but toilet water, so a walk in the shaded park will help cool her down. After that she can leave.
She keeps going. There are a few groups in the grassy expanse of the front area, one family with two small children and a picnic basket and a trio of teenagers by the fountain eating convenience store snacks. The path is well-tended and curves into the wooded area. She follows it until the voices behind her fade, until the sun finally retreats behind the canopy and leaves her a little winded but overall feeling better. Hanamiya isn’t one of the more popular parks and doesn’t tend to be a big draw for families wanting playground equipment. There are a few scattered signs to guide hikers, but for the most part it twines until it bottoms out into a national preserve, pushing back all the way to the mountains and bordering the lake that had once been open to the public for fishing.
Ran doesn’t intend to get lost. She follows the paved trail until it softens into gravel, then dirt, then flattened weeds. She vaguely knows where the sun is and which direction to head if she wants to get home, but it’s not until she’s been following a deer trail for at least ten minutes that she realizes she’s been off the main path for some time.
She stops right where she is. For a while she forces herself to listen to anything else but the sudden roar of her heartbeat. There’s some kind of ground squirrel off to her right and sparrows gossiping over her in the canopy. The cicadas have waned as she walks by them and then close her in from behind as they start singing in her wake. I’m okay. Her hands tighten bloodlessly on the straps of her backpack. She thinks of the saved half of her lunch. I’m not in that deep. It won’t get cold tonight. I have food. I’m okay.
She turns around and swallows fresh panic when she realizes her coping mechanism has stolen her sense of direction from her. The canopy here folds over her like a fist. She steps a foot into a splotch of sunlight and then turns her face up to it, trying to slow her breathing without success. I’m okay.
She walks, then jogs, then runs. She trips over an upraised root and barks her knee off a trunk and she doesn’t burst into tears. She scrambles up and tries running through a bush and sucks in a breath when unexpected thorns drag her down by her backpack. She flails them off her and one bites between her third and fourth finger and she still doesn’t burst into tears, she gulps them down with her panic as she frees herself and then lurches back to her throbbing feet. Sun and shadow weave in and out of her peripherals.
She scrambles down through a ditch and plunges in up to her right ankle. She claws through the soft soil on the other side and crests it and keeps going. The forest spills out into an unexpectedly sunny clearing wreathed by trees and a frayed ribbon of a stream to her right.
She knows it’s nowhere at all but the bright burst of light sucks the momentum out of her. She slows to a stop and sinks to her knees, hiccupping, swiping snot away from her mouth with clay-caked fingers. She drags her backpack off her shoulders and unzips it to get to her bento.
She eats six slivers of carrots carefully, making sure to concentrate on each one. There’s plenty left when she tucks it away. She eases herself into a restorative ball, setting her forehead against her sore knees until the last of her hiccups fade. The sun warms the sweat off the back of her head until it prickles with salt.
I’m okay. She repeats it to herself. She concentrates on the comfort of food in her belly. The cicadas wrap a full-throated cocoon of sound around her. Her skin stings where the thorns had gnawed her and she tries not to touch them, knowing her hands are dirty and it’ll only make them feel worse. She thinks about what direction the sun sets in when she’s looking out from the agency’s window. She needs to go opposite of that. East. She just needs to figure out which direction the sun is setting now.
When she finally uncoils it’s excruciating. Her feet complain as she works her weight onto them and her head pounds from the aftermath of her panic. East. She mouths it to herself, recalling the laminated directional cards in her classroom. Away from the setting sun.
She shades her eyes. The canopy isn’t fully open but there are enough gaps for her to get a decent view of the sky. She’s been accidentally running in the right direction. She has no idea how much farther she has to go but she knows the forests in Beika-Minami aren’t big enough to swallow her. If she keeps going she’ll hit civilization whether she wants to or not.
She tightens her throbbing hands over her backpack straps and tries to convince herself to start walking. She’ll follow the stream for a while as long as it bends more or less east. This way she at least knows she has an emergency water supply if she gets overheated. I’m okay. She floods her body with fresh air and lets it out slowly, readying herself to take the first step. I’m okay.
The ghost boy next to her says, “I wasn’t going to say anything, but seriously, you are really bad at directions.”
~^~
By the time Ran has stopped screaming, every last bird has shot up from its hiding place in the canopy and the squirrels have given up trying to scold her. The ghost boy sits through it all with consternation, nearly unblinking on her from where he squats in the center of the clearing. “Stay away from me,” Ran sobs. She scoots back in a trembling crab walk. “Don’t c-come any closer.”
“Okay,” the boy says.
“I mean it, you’re not real, I d-don’t believe in ghosts, you’re n-not here, stay away from me.”
“Well which is it.” The boy is exasperated. “If I’m not real and you don’t believe in me, why are you making all that fuss? It’s hurting my ears.”
“You don’t have ears, you’re not real.”
“My ears are real and they hurt real bad. Look, if I disappear will you stop screaming? If I’d known you were going to freak out like this I wouldn’t have shown up. I just thought you could use some help.”
“No!”
“Fine.” The boy disappears.
Ran shudders with rage and terror against the ground, gripping handfuls of grass as she weeps for breath. The sun has started to cop more of an angle through the canopy, still bright and hot but indirectly now. The shadows on the side of the clearing are beginning to crawl towards the center. Ran curls her knees towards her chest and forces air in and out of her body manually. Daddy. She can’t help it. She covers her face. Daddy, help.
The ghost boy says, invisibly, “If you want, I can always point you in the right direction.”
“Go away!” she shrieks.
The boy rematerializes on an overhead branch with a snapping pop that smells like a summer storm. He looks extremely irritated. “Look, however you slice it, you’re in my clearing and I’m trying to practice. I can’t concentrate with you bawling like that. Either go away or let me help you.”
It’s not here. Ran concentrates fiercely against her palms. I’m hot and sick and tired, it’s not here. She opens her eyes and the boy is still frowning down at her. To her panic she can see the outline of the tree trunk through him. “Why are you here, anyway,” the boy says abruptly. “No one ever comes out this far. Not since they closed the lake to let the fish repopulate.”
“You’re not real.”
“Well neither is your sense of direction. Seriously, this is pitiful,” the boy says. “How stupid can you be to get lost when you still have the sun overhead to guide you? You know which way you came from, right? Just retrace your steps. You act like you’re on another planet.”
“I’m not stupid!”
“You’re sure acting stupid.”
She drags herself to her knees. The boy watches her, oversized sneakers swinging in tandem. He looks like an old photograph exposed to too much sunlight. “You’re not real,” Ran enunciates. “And I’m not stupid.”
“Fine. I’m not real and you’re not stupid,” he says. “So how about you not-stupidly find your way out of here so I can practice for real. I’m losing light.”
She climbs to her feet. “And in case you wanted to double-check your not-stupid internal compass, ‘out’ is that way.” The boy points. “Just keep following the stream. When it forks, follow the left fork. It’ll bring you back close enough to the entrance that you’ll be able to hear your way out from there.”
“I don’t need your help. My dad taught me how to find my way home if I get lost.”
“Mine did too. He dropped me off in the middle of a forest in Hawaii with a sundial, good walking shoes, a backpack with food and water, and a thermal blanket if I didn’t make it out before sundown. I know not to get all panicked and weepy in a forest. Maybe you could do everybody’s ears a favor and start doing the same.” And then to her astonishment he smiles at her. It’s not a very nice smile, but it’s better than a frown. “I can lead you out,” he offers. “If you’re not sure you can make it.”
Ran manages to shake her head. She takes a tremulous step away from him and then another, then turns her back resolutely to start walking on her own. “Follow the stream,” the boy calls after her. “Left fork. It’ll go on for a while so don’t doubt yourself. Just keep telling yourself to walk until the fork.”
Ran manages to keep upright as she nears the stream. It’s a clean clear rinse over the colorful stones and the sound unexpectedly soothes her. When she looks over her shoulder to check if the boy is stalking her, he’s disappeared again. This time he doesn’t come back.
She walks until she feels a blister split open on her big toe, then the arch of her foot. She nearly chickens out twice when the woods around her continue to darken and it feels like she’s been walking too long, but in the end holds steady until she can feel the canopy thin out, until patchwork sunset comes down to illuminate a twisting fork in the water.
She takes the left fork. It’s another ten minutes before her ears finally pick up the faint hum of traffic. Choking back a sob, she quickens her pace, nearly tripping over her own feet as she tangles with underbrush. By the time she bursts out into the main clearing of the park, afternoon is long gone and so are the families in the park. She breathes in desperate gulps of city air, blinking at the sky, wavering on her feet.
At home Kogoro only has to take one look at the sorry state of her before she bursts into tears. She’s always been a bad liar. “Can’t say you didn’t have it coming,” he sighs after her bath, a little tense around the mouth but otherwise too tired for more scolding apparently. He bandages up her feet while she miserably snots on him. “I’d ground you but I’m guessing you’ve already figured out what you did was stupid.”
“I’m not s-stupid.”
He palms her freshly-bandaged blisters with a sudden brusqueness that makes her squirm. “Stupid usually hurts,” Kogoro says. “The worse the stupid, the worse the hurt. Does it hurt?”
She nods quickly through her sobs. She’s humiliated. “Then unless you’re looking for more of it, let the hurt teach you something,” Kogoro says. “Same as in karate. You don’t like getting hit, learn how not to get hit. You don’t like how stupid feels, don’t be stupid.”
“Are you mad?” Ran instinctively anchors herself on his shoulder when he hoists her up to his hip. “That I lied to you?”
“I don’t know.”
He’s also a bad liar. It’s where she got it from. He’s not lying now. She watches him genuinely parse whether he’s angry or not as he carries her up the stairs and settles her down on her bed. In the end she thinks he’s just too tired for it. He brings her dinner and sits backwards on her desk chair to watch her eat with clumsy hands. “How did you find your way out?” he asks eventually.
“I just kept walking away from the sun until I made it back to the road.”
“So you got lucky, is what you’re saying.”
“It wasn’t lucky, it was smart. I walked away from the sun because away from the sun is east, and that’s where we live. I’m not stupid.”
“You’re picking some pretty weird battles with me right now, kid,” Kogoro says.
She wishes suddenly, desperately, that he’d hug her. It would help her brain shut up but ultimately it just isn’t his way. Hugs, pats on the shoulder, holding hands – affectionate physical contact makes him skittish. Her mother had taught her from toddlerhood not to take it personally. “I’m not stupid.”
Kogoro’s eyes cling to the ceiling a moment. He stands, takes the empty soup bowl from her and turns to leave.
She lunges at him from the edge of the bed to catch him on his blind spot. She can feel every muscle in his body startle nearly to snapping but he settles quickly, and even puts his spare arm around her to rub her back resignedly. “I was really scared,” she whispers. “I tried to be brave.”
“I didn’t say you weren’t brave. Just stupid.”
“I tried to stay calm but it was really hard.”
“Do you need me to go beat up the forest for you?”
She snorts out a snotty laugh. He’ll probably have to wash his shirt. “No, Daddy.”
“Do you want me to cut down the trees and throw them in jail?”
“No.”
“You sure? I still have handcuffs. I can collar at least two branches.”
She shakes her head. “Quit doing this thing you’re doing,” Kogoro says. “You’re not some princess who’s never thrown a punch. You’re the daughter of the world-famous Judo Kid, private eye and master marksman, defender of women and children, handsome vigilante of justice. And also some random witch, but we don’t talk about her.”
“Daddy.”
“Look, you didn’t die. You didn’t even break anything. You won your fight. Start acting like it.”
She breathes against him for a while. Her hands and feet smart but not as badly under the salve and bandages. The thorn bites still sting but will likely fade overnight. The rest—
The rest, she realizes, feeling it all finally surface from the oppressive weight in her head, is brave, isn’t it? Riding to the ice-cream shop on her own. Exploring the streets. Walking through a forest. All things she wouldn’t have dared to do last year.
She swallows the rest down. She comes to a decision. “Okay.”
“Are you going to do this again?”
She shakes her head. “Neat.” Kogoro picks up her bowl and leaves. She hears, “You’re grounded or whatever, go to sleep, no TV,” float back somewhere from the kitchen, as though he hasn’t left her light blazing and the TV bellowing in the living room.
She gets up, turns the volume down, and goes to brush her teeth. She walks back to her room to shut off her own light and tucks herself in. She’ll be ungrounded tomorrow. In the meantime she sits in the semi-darkness and thinks about see-through smiles and red sneakers. The way the boy had swung his legs reminds Ran of the way Sonoko sits on the climbing bars when she’s gossiping. There’s a windless, swooping sensation in Ran’s stomach that breathing can’t reach.
She thinks back to the forest, extremely belatedly, with an irritation that amazes her, leave you alone so you can practice what.
~^~
Sonoko is back in school two days later with a chapped nose and no appetite. Ran considers telling her. She nearly caves before school and then again during lunch, when Sonoko asks how she got the collection of paper-thin cuts on her wrist and chin. Both times her tongue freezes over the words. She knows Sonoko might believe her and that’s the problem: Ran can’t quite decide yet if she wants to be believed.
She knows better than to push her luck for a few days. As she’d suspected, she’s not actually grounded: Kogoro has zero interest in enforcement. She is on thin ice, so she doesn’t put her foot down on anything too breakable until the weekend, when she asks to go on the blue line again to visit the library downtown. “Just go to the one a few blocks down,” Kogoro yawns. There’s two bottles next to him and that’s a suspiciously light dose for this late in the morning. She wonders where the other bottles are or if he’s actually moderating for once. “What do you need to hike all the way to Minami for?”
“Their library is bigger. I want to get a card there. They have audiobooks too. The ones on CDs.”
“We don’t have a CD player.”
“I’m going to borrow Sonoko’s old one. She said it was okay.”
To her surprise, Kogoro bestirs himself with a muffled groan to fish up his shoes. She’s torn between the pleasure of him being willing to accompany her somewhere for once and the incredibly ill-timed inconvenience of his random good parenting. She needs him to be a bad parent.
She cajoles him into also getting a library card of his own, hoping some audiobooks might help calm his pacing at night. Afterwards she steers them towards Hanamiya Park, leading them not-very-accidentally past a vending machine she knows sells alcohol. Fifteen minutes later they are on a warm bench under the sprawl of mid-afternoon sunlight: she with her new books, Kogoro with two cans of beer he’s tucked in his coat.
She pretends to read and waits for the combination of alcohol and sunlight to do its work. Once he’s starfished into an outrageously sloppy doze on the bench, she covers him with her windbreaker, leaves her stack of books beside him to let him know she hasn’t abandoned him, and shoulders her backpack to take off into the woods.
This time she walks with purpose, occasionally breaking out into a jog where the path clears. At first she feels a thread of panic when she loses sight of the trail, but then she picks up the telltale marks of the deer run and on instinct follows it. It ends in a collection of empty deer beds.
Turn yourself around. It’s a strange tactic to replay her panic but she does her best. She closes her eyes, turns around, and picked a direction that isn’t straight back to the entrance. She jogs until she finds the root she’d tripped over, the thorn bush that she’d sliced her skin to ribbons on.
By the time she reaches the clearing, the sun has slid behind a shallow bank of clouds and she’s straddling the edge of panic. Embarrassed but relieved enough to cry, Ran plunks herself down in the center where the light is the strongest and focuses on breathing for a while. There’s grass pollen climbing up her nose with tickling little feet, so she digs around for a tissue and keeps her eyes open on the ring of shadows around her as she blows.
She waits a long time. The sun eventually reemerges from the bank of clouds and pushes the shadows back far enough that her anxiety eases. Her hairline tingles with sunbaked dust and sweat. She scrubs the itch away, not taking her eyes off the branches, watching for any and every movement.
She’s about to give up and try a different location when the boy says behind her, “I didn’t think you’d come back.”
Terror is instant. Ran scrabbles for her backpack and unzips it blindly, closing her hand around the can of monster spray. “Did you get lost again?” the boy asks.
She tries to keep her voice steady. “How long have you been here?”
“I’m always here. But here here? A couple of minutes. I thought you’d go away but you’re not, so I figured maybe you were waiting for me.”
“Who are you?”
“Someone trying to practice,” the boy says. “Can you move? You’re in the way.”
Ran’s incredulous. She loosens her hand on the can of monster spray but doesn’t remove her hand from her backpack. “You don’t seem like you had a hard time in the woods today,” the boy adds unprompted. “You’re not covered with scratches this time. And your hair isn’t messed up as bad. Except for that point.”
“It’s a widow’s peak. It’s there all the time.”
“It makes you look like a rhinoceros.”
“I didn’t ask you,” Ran snaps, absurdly stung. “And you don’t have much of a right to be making fun of the way other people look. Nobody wears bowties anymore.”
“Who says?”
“Everybody says. Not even grown-ups wear them. They wear ties.”
“Bowties are fun,” the boy shrugs. “The joke ones squirt water. Some of them spin and light up. Suspenders, same thing. They have all kinds of uses. I like to be prepared.”
Ran tries to even out her breathing. The boy is perched on the log with the blank-eyed curiosity of a little sparrow. He cocks his head a bit at her silence. “I really do want to practice,” he says. “And you really are sort of in my way.”
“What are you trying to practice?”
“Soccer. I use this clearing to do drills.”
“You—” Ran’s really not sure why she’s surprised. It’s not like she had any basis of comparison. “Soccer?”
“Yup. I’m a really good player. I’m aiming for the pros.”
“But how do you even play?”
“See those trees over there?”
She breaks their contest to reluctantly glance over her shoulder. “They’re the perfect space for a goal. Almost down to the centimeter,” the boy says. “The players are in my head. Half of soccer is mental anyway. It’s moving chess pieces, all the time. It’s on you to keep track of everything.”
“But you don’t even have a ball.”
“I don’t need one. It’s in my head.”
Ran wonders what’s in her head. She slowly withdraws her hand from the bag and instead pulls it into her lap. She doesn’t take her eyes off him. “I guess you decided not to scream today,” the boy says. “That’s good. I might be dead but my ears sure aren’t.”
She doesn’t dignify that. The boy’s actually smaller than she’d thought at first. He speaks as though he’s in junior high but his face is so round with baby fat that it looks like it shouldn’t be able to balance on his neck. She has no idea if he’s actually sitting or pretending to sit. She can see the darkness of the forest through him and his clothes don’t shift with the breeze like hers do. “What,” the boy says when the silence stretches.
“I…” Ran finds her voice. “I wanted to thank you.”
“What for?”
“For helping me last time. For telling me the right way to go. I would’ve figured it out,” she adds a little testily. “But if I’d gotten home any later my dad would’ve worried. And my food would’ve spoiled. So I… wanted to come back. To thank you.”
“Big of you,” the boy says. There’s no specific tone in his voice. “You sure I’m not some terrifying ghoul out to get you? You still look like you’re ready to kill me. Again.”
“I’m not a baby. I can protect myself.”
“Then can you protect yourself somewhere else? I want to practice.”
Ran stands. Without breaking eye contact, she reaches down and collects her backpack, sliding it unzipped back onto her shoulders. She steps backwards until she’s closer to the tree line. “Thanks.” The boy hops down, and somehow Ran loses track of him. He walks and he doesn’t walk: in between blinks his trajectory shudders and sunspots crowd the places his shadow is supposed to be. It hurts her brain to try to track him from one point to another. “Kudo Shinichi,” the boy says, and Ran recognizes a sports announcer’s cadence as he moves. “Eyes on the prize, utterly dominant in midfield. Passes to Ao who passes it to Shuya. Kudo takes his time. Dribbles it to – no, it’s the Cryuff Turn! The defender is off balance! He goes for the goal.”
Ran jumps when the boy suddenly drops to the ground and skids, foot up. “I missed,” he sighs, climbing up. He massages invisible grass stains. “I have to do the wind up better. The ball wasn’t in the right position.”
“I have to go,” Ran says. “I left my dad sleeping on a bench. He’ll be worried if he wakes up and I’m not there. I just wanted to say thank you. And sorry, I guess. For screaming. I’m… not used to seeing ghosts. Um, in real life.”
“You really didn’t have to come back,” the boy says. “It was enough for me to close the case. I don’t like leaving things open-ended.”
“What case?”
“The case of the missing girl, of course.”
“I wasn’t missing.”
“Your sense of direction was missing,” the boy says, and smiles before she can explode on him. It’s a small, sheepish smile that doesn’t match up with his tone.
The sight of it dismantles her. Ran deflates slowly, still suspicious but no longer angry. “I’m Kudo Shinichi,” the boy says. “I’m a famous soccer player and a detective. As you found out.”
“You’re just a kid like me.”
“I know. I just got to work sooner than most people.”
She steels herself to be polite in return. She had asked. “I’m—”
“Mouri Ran, of Teitan Elementary. Third grade.”
She freezes. “Your dad is going to get worried,” Kudo Shinichi says. He’s already resetting himself on the far end of the clearing, determined focus on the two trees standing in as goals. “You should go while there’s still lots of light. Remember to follow the stream.”
Dazed, Ran traipses her way back until she remembers her backpack is still hanging open. She situates the can of monster spray and takes a tissue from her tissue packet to blow her nose. Her hands are still shaking a little but she’s proud she hasn’t screamed.
Her father is still deep in a sunsoaked doze when she returns, several sparrows scattered around his feet to investigate some leftover crumbs from an earlier guest. They hop away from her when she approaches but not very far: they’re clearly used to people. Kogoro doesn’t wake when she settles next to him, so she decides to take advantage and snuggles against him on the bench to give herself time to think. She thumbs some grains from her granola bar and portions them out to watch the sparrows compete over the gift.
It’s another twenty minutes before she can feel Kogoro stir. She nudges him awake fully and begins gathering her books into her backpack for the trip home. “I know what you did,” Kogoro mumbles.
“I didn’t do anything.”
His fingers rummage around in her hair. He pulls out a wishbone V of dead pine needles and holds it in front of her eyes. “You played me.”
She’s a bad liar. “Yes,” she admits. “But at least you got beer out of it.”
His chest jumps in a startled laugh. He leans his head back far enough over the edge of the bench that she fears his neck will snap. “You’re grounded.”
She’s not though.