The Deceiving

by Jin (Shizen no Teki-P)

  Seto was a quiet child—in a more literal way, not like Kido and her eternally crabby moods. But, perhaps in order to cheer me up while Kido continued to ignore me, he began to open up after a little while, and we started to chat about all kinds of things.

  As he put it, he had been in this facility since right after he was born.

  He had no friends, to the point where he was bullied by his previous roommates.

  His only real companion, a dog named Hanako, died last year…and so on. All these tales, usually told through tears, didn’t exactly cheer me up much.

  But, as I attempted to calm him down with repeated assurances of “It’s all right, it’s all right,” I suppose Seto and I managed to establish what you could call a “bond” with each other.

  I guess that made our relationship much more friendshiplike than what I had with Friend Number One, who never even spoke to me.

  That was about when Seto officially became Friend Number Two in my mind.

  It wasn’t because of the way that, when he asked me, “I guess we’re friends now, right?” his eyes were giving me the message, “If you say no, I’m gonna die.”

  It purely came down to the fact that I found the time I spent with him to be…fun.

  And as more time passed and Kido gradually began joining the conversation as well, the three of us began to get along like old friends. A few awkward patches here and there, but…

  …Okay, a lot of awkward patches.

  In fact, more hitches than nonhitches, really.

  If this bed we lay on were a boat, it’d be one with the sails torn apart, the mast smashed to splinters, and a massive tidal wave menacing fifty feet in the air behind it.

  Which is why we were having this postmortem.

  To be frank, having residents in the other rooms—the facility staff, too—call us monsters and freaks all day was really starting to wear thin on us.

  I was sick of going to Room 107 and seeing a Post-it with MONSTER HOUSE written on it stuck to the door. We had to do something to improve our image, the sooner the better.

  M-monsters…Freaks…

  “Hey, uh, I really wish you’d stop that…Wait, huh?”

  I didn’t say monster or freak out loud just now. All I did was think the words in my mind.

  Why did he react to that? How was he able to?

  I sat up and looked toward Seto. He, in turn, lifted his face from the pillow and returned the gaze with a teary-eyed one of his own.

  Both of them were tinted a bright, mesmerizing shade of crimson.

  After a pause, I said, “Oh,” and closed my eyes, thinking a little.

  (…Can you hear what I’m thinking again?)

  I focused on the question in my mind.

  “S-sorry. Yeah.”

  He sounded remorseful about it, burying his face once more into the pillow—just low enough so his eyes popped out above it.

  So that’s what it was.

  (That hasn’t happened so much lately,) I thought. (Crazy how that always just happens to you out of the blue, Seto.)

  He lifted his head up slightly, mouth still covered. “I think it’ll go away in a little bit,” he said apologetically.

  * * *

  As I grinned at his reply, I felt Kido shifting positions on the bed. Fearing the worst, I gingerly turned toward her. She was staring at Seto like she couldn’t stand another moment of breathing the same air as him.

  I then shifted my gaze to Seto. He looked like a mouse caught in the sights of a cobra.

  He waved his hands wildly in the air. “Ahhh!” he said, presumably in reply to her own internal voice. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to apologize like…Huh? N-no! No, I’m not doing it on purpose!”

  That habit couldn’t have been more deep-rooted within him.

  Kido, in response, unwound the cat’s cradle she was working on. “How many times do I have to tell you,” she said as she got on her knees, made a fist with her right hand, and began drawing near Seto.

  The terror was too much for him to bear. He began sobbing on the spot, pathetically whining “Ahhh…! Ahhh…!” as he did.

  It was probably time for me to do something.

  I cut in between Seto and Kido, arms outstretched toward the latter.

  “Whoa! Stop, stop, stop! Kido, you’re getting a little too angry, all right?”

  I tried giving her as natural a smile as I could (if a little strained) as I said it, but Kido glared at me instead, as if to say, “I’ll kill you, too, if you don’t move.”

  The way this girl stares at you…It really gets to you. If she had a role in a kids’ action-rangers-style show, she’d definitely play a villain.

  “Ha-ha,” Seto said behind me. “Yeah, a villain.”

  (What’re you laughing about?! I’m literally putting my body on the line against Kido for you!)

  “I-I’m sorry!” Seto yelped.

  Seto could be so careless like that. Now was absolutely not the time to start apologizing again. The aura of rage surrounding Kido grew noticeably more intense before my eyes.

  “Not again…And you said something to him just now, didn’t you, Kano?”

  Her voice was soft, but every syllable had a dagger looming behind it.

  “H-huh?! What do you mean? I didn’t say anything! Did I, Seto?”

  “N-no! No! He didn’t call you a villain or anything!”

  At the next instant, Kido landed a well-aimed body blow to my solar plexus.

  “Gennhh!”

  I was slammed down into the bedsheets. It was a perfectly clean knockout. I could hear a bell ringing somewhere.

  “Hyaahh!” Seto pathetically shouted.

  Withstanding the pain from my stomach, I groggily looked up toward Kido…only to find her sobbing, too. She must’ve crashed down from the apex of her anger.

  As if reacting to it, Seto, naturally, began crying, too.

  Now, as I stayed down for the count, I was surrounded by a stereo symphony of wailing.

  …What is with us tonight?

  Shouldn’t I be the one who’s crying here?

  Amid my conflicting feelings, the sobbing that surrounded me began to ratchet up in volume.

  “Oh, crap, if I don’t…”

  Suddenly realizing something, I turned to Kido. Just as I thought, her eyes gradually reddened as she began to disappear into nothingness before me.

  For whatever reason, whenever Kido was angry, crying, lonely, or otherwise stressed, she would literally vanish…or, as she put it, other people would stop picking up on her presence. Assuming you don’t actually touch her, though—otherwise, you’d see her again. That condition didn’t make much sense to me, but there you go.

  It was one thing if you could grab her hand or feel around in the air for her in time, but if she left the room in that invisible state, that was serious trouble.

  She did that more than once in the past—so taken by whatever mood made her invisible that she just had to flee somewhere else. Seto and I had to spend hours searching for her during one episode, and as shameful as it was, I cried so hard then that I made Seto look like an amateur.

  In the end, we searched until morning to no avail, only to return to our room and find Kido sleeping like a baby in her bed. So it worked out, but it wasn’t an experience I wanted to repeat anytime soon.

  If I didn’t step up to put an end to this crying jag, I could have some serious clean-up work to do afterward.

  So I conjured up an image in my mind. Another weapon in my arsenal, one I hadn’t shown either of them yet. The shape, the voice, the scent…

  The moment I opened my eyes, both of them cried out loud in unison. Just the reaction I was hoping for. I felt oddly proud of myself as I jumped down to the floor and waved at them.

  They were both shocked at first, but as I beckoned, their tear-stained faces instantly transformed into bubbly smiles.

  “You can do a cat?”

  I could. Just for such an occasion, I had been spending my f
ree time observing the strays around the facility in an attempt to memorize everything I could about them.

  In the several months we knew each other, I discovered that Seto liked animals and Kido enjoyed cute things in general. Thus, I concluded that a black cat would be the perfect thing to distract both of them at once.

  And it worked. Immediately, all their attention was focused on me.

  Kido sat up out of bed, her breathing a bit ragged as she clapped her hands at me. “C’mere!” she said. “Come on, kitty, come ’ere!” Seto joined her, motioning at me with both hands.

  The crimson quickly drained from their eyes as I watched. Kido finally, blessedly came back into full view.

  Hee-hee-hee. Cute of her.

  I bet she’d just love for me to jump into her lap. But let’s string this out a little more.

  I gingerly began to approach her, then suddenly reared back and kept my distance. I then repeated this a few times. Revenge was mine.

  The mood of my audience swung from one extreme to the other every time I went through the cycle. They began attempting more and more flamboyant ways to curry my favor.

  This was glorious. I was having so much fun, I could barely keep myself from rolling on my side and laughing. There was no stopping me now.

  So, what next? How about a little dance? Yeah, that sounded nice.

  Stepping up the intensity a bit, I hopped up on the table and began to bop around on two legs a bit. My audience grabbed their stomachs and howled in laughter.

  So much fun. This is the most fun night I’ve had in ages.

  It’s been a long time since I’ve felt this good, actually. So this is what being a cat was like. I dug it. It might become a bad habit of mine.

  As I continued doing a jig on the table, I heard an unexpected whump from nearby the door.

  I didn’t appreciate this interruption very much, but since the blood was quickly draining from the faces of my audience, I finally turned around for a look.

  All the laughter made me fail to notice, but somewhere along the line, the door had been opened.

  Right at the frame between our room and the hallway, one of the staffers—out on night patrol, probably—was lying on the floor.

  I had trouble parsing the situation at first. What was this guy doing, all crumpled up on our doorstep? After another moment, though, it was clear as day.

  Putting a halt to my performance, I felt my blood chill to freezing from head to claw.

  “Uh…Hey, cat, what’re we…?”

  Even Kido was being uncharacteristically hesitant.

  “Meow,” I replied. That was the question I wanted to ask her, really. I sure as hell didn’t have any bright ideas.

  …The story, as I heard it later, was that as the staffer was doing his night rounds, he heard loud noises coming from Room 107, opened the door to warn the occupants, then claimed he saw a black cat hip-hop dancing on the table. The experience caused him to have a nervous breakdown, and he wound up being transferred to another facility.

  This did nothing to improve our reputation, of course. In fact, it pretty much solidified Room 107’s alternate name of Monster House for all time. Oh well.

  So here we were once more, Room 107 at the far end of the first-floor dormitory hall.

  On top of my dingy bed, the bottom bunk of one of the room’s two bunk bed setups, we were engaged in yet another mind-achingly uncomfortable postmortem session.

  The theme of today’s meeting: “We’re now officially ‘monsters’ in the eyes of this facility…and if this keeps up, we’re screwed.”

  It was frightening, actually, this string of bad luck we were dealing with.

  In fact, our reputation was getting worse and worse every day. From every corner of the building, all sorts of rumors were beginning to fly around about us.

  One example:

  “Every night, at the stall farthest away from the door in the first-floor girls’ room, you can hear a ghostly voice sobbing to itself. No matter how hard you look, you’ll never find anyone…but the voice is still there.”

  Apparently, this ghost made frequent visits to our room, as the prevailing theory went. I have no idea how the story got started. I mean, frequent visits? She lives here, dude.

  I tried broaching the subject delicately with Kido. “I’m gonna punch whoever started that,” came the aggravated reply. Guess it rang a bell with her. I refrained from further questioning.

  Here’s another one:

  “One of the kids from Room 107 whispered something to a staffer, and then the guy disappeared the next day. Maybe it’s the son of the Devil!”

  I had no clue what could’ve been the seed for that tall tale. At first.

  “Actually,” Seto then said, “there was this one guy who was going around wearing girls’ underwear under his uniform, and I told him, ‘You shouldn’t be doing that,’ and then I never saw him again.”

  Well, chalk that one up to us as well, I suppose.

  Why was the staffer doing something like that? Why did he stop coming to the facility afterward? How could we have known? We were all still too young for all that.

  How about one more to make it a solid trio?:

  There was another story about “some guy who hangs out behind the dorms and keeps sniffing at stray cats.” Yes, that was me. I wanted to die when I heard that one.

  These dark rumors about us seemed to inflate and exaggerate themselves on a daily basis. It was like a never-ending merry-go-round for me.

  Not for the other two. They never cared very much about the rest of society, anyway, it seemed like. Just me.

  Now I was in the middle of relaying a few of these latest rumors about us to them, ending each one with, “So what do you guys think?”

  “I think you’re a freak, Kano.”

  Kido’s eyes unwaveringly bore down on me.

  “Huh? Uhhh…Huh?”

  The answer was merciless as it was to the point. It came so suddenly that I thought she was making some kind of metaphor at first.

  “I said you’re a freak.”

  All right. Not a metaphor, then. I tried my best to withstand the barrage, driving the topic back toward our traction session.

  “No, I…I wasn’t asking you what you thought about me picking up cats and sniffing at them. I’m talking about what we should do about…this…”

  “Hraa-a-a-aahh…”

  Kido, breathlessly disinterested in my attempt, yawned.

  I could feel the tears coming.

  Why do I have to sit here and have people call me a freak on my own bed? I’m trying to make things better for us.

  “You aren’t a freak at all,” Seto whispered into my ear, perhaps picking up on my despair. “I do it a lot, too.”

  …I’m sorry if this sounds mean, Seto, but at least I had a half-decent reason.

  “Hey, so how long’re we gonna do this, anyway?”

  Kido rubbed her eyes, her voice betraying her intense fatigue.

  “I mean, is there any point to it?”

  “Um…Well, uh, you know…”

  I didn’t exactly have a good reply to that question. I invited the two of them over here virtually every night for these “postmortems,” but up to now, there wasn’t even a whiff of an idea, much less an ace in the hole that would completely turn our reputations around and make life more decent for us.

  “…I mean, if things keep going like this around here, they might, like, seriously kick us out of here, wouldn’t they?”

  “Th-they’re gonna kick us out?!”

  My observation made Seto almost leap out of his position on the bed. I began to wonder what kind of mutant tear ducts he had in order to mass produce so much of the stuff on a moment’s notice.

  “Ugh, no crying, okay? No crying.”

  “I’m sorry…”

  He nodded and wiped them away as I rubbed his back. He had a knack for turning off the waterworks at a moment’s notice—one of his saving graces. Still cries too much, thoug
h.

  “I mean, I don’t think they’re gonna boot us out to the street tomorrow or anything. But I think some of the staff’s starting to get scared of us, so if we don’t make an effort to be more likable pretty soon…”

  “Likable…?”

  Not that there was any plan of action I could think of. Was it even possible, really, to raise our likability level from the bottomless pit it was hurtling down right now?

  I didn’t think there was much way we could be branded anything worse than “monsters.” But now that we were this far down, how were we ever gonna claw our way back up to “humans”?

  “…Pfft. She’s sleeping.”

  As I worried away to myself, Kido began lightly snoring, still sitting primly on her side of my bed. Aha. That would explain why she didn’t lunge at Seto for apologizing earlier.

  Not much purpose waking her up. That’d just rile her up again. I placed a hand on Kido’s back and carefully laid her down on my bed.

  “She’s really not that freaky a girl, though,” I said, giving her a light tap on the cheek. “Not as much as people think.”

  “If she doesn’t get angry,” Seto added, giggling to himself.

  “Nhh,” Kido said in her sleep.

  “Eeeee!!” Seto shouted, tumbling backward.

  If I could show these two people right now to the rest of the kids, they’d probably feel pretty stupid, freaking out so much over just a bunch of dumb children. But I didn’t have it in me to assert this in front of them strongly enough. Unless I interacted with people more—unless I talked to them more—they’d never learn the truth. They needed to if we were gonna get anywhere, but that was hard for us. It was hard, but if we could get them on our side, maybe we could all get along, then.

  The problem, though…

  “It’s these ‘eyes,’ aren’t they? Our problem.”

  Seto sat back up from his sprawled position on the bed. His eyes had morphed into blood red somewhere back there.

  “I’m sorry, I kind of heard you a little again.”

  I chuckled a little. (This is better anyway,) I thought. (Now we won’t wake up Kido.)

  “If you like,” Seto replied with a contented smile.

  (What is with these powers, though? I mean, for real. Are they some kind of occult superpowers, like on TV shows and stuff?)