Liora knelt right in front of him. Her face was completely serious. Her blue eyes narrowed into sharp, dangerous slits. She raised both of her hands. She clamped her small palms flat against both sides of his face. She gripped his cheeks hard.
"Why are you ignoring me, Onii-chan?"
Her breath hit his nose. It smelled like the buttered popcorn they ate an hour ago. Zenjiro stayed entirely frozen. The television continued to blast the loud idol music behind her back, but the sound felt distant.
The flashing laser lights cast shifting colors over her blonde hair. She was incredibly close. Her nose was just an inch away from his. He could see the tiny, faint freckles dusted across the bridge of her nose.
He blinked. He needed a diversion. He searched his memory for an immediate, high-priority problem. He found one.
"I'm sorry," Zenjiro said. The pressure on his cheeks warped his voice. "I was just spacing out thinking about the homework we have. We did not started making it yet."
Liora froze. The dangerous glare in her blue eyes shattered. Pure panic replaced it instantly.
She pressed her palms much harder against his cheeks. Her fingernails dug slightly into his skin.
"What should we do, Onii-chan?" Liora asked while holding his cheeks. Her voice hitched. "The deadline is tomorrow."
"Let's make it now," Zenjiro said.
It was a big blunder that he actually forgot about the assignment. He usually finished his schoolwork on Friday afternoons. But that exact blunder happened to save him from Liora's intense interrogation about the television show. The trade-off was highly acceptable.
Liora let go of his face. She scrambled backward off the tatami mat. She ran down the hallway to their shared bedroom. She returned ten seconds later. She dragged two heavy black leather backpacks across the floor.
She dropped them onto the low wooden coffee table, then she pulled out her crumpled worksheets and a handful of dull pencils. Zenjiro shifted his position. He sat next to her. They spent the next two hours adding and subtracting large numbers. The idol on the television was entirely forgotten.
Time passed in a slow, linear crawl. The calendar flipped forward. They entered the fifth grade. They turned ten years old.
The school administration separated them for the first time. The class rosters placed Zenjiro in Class 4-A and Liora in Class 4-C. They still walked to the school gates together every morning. They still walked back to the house together every afternoon. But the middle of the day belonged solely to him. He had his own space again.
Class 4-A had a new homeroom instructor. Her name was Miss Shiratori. She was a young woman. She was likely fresh out of a university program. She was short and she always wore soft, pastel-colored skirts. She smiled at everything. She spoke in a very quiet, gentle tone. She handed out small foil-wrapped candies when a student answered a difficult question on the blackboard.
She was cute and sweet. Zenjiro thought she seemed like a very nice person. She lacked the loud, aggressive edge of the older teachers.
It was a warm Tuesday afternoon. The loud bell signaled the start of the lunch break. Thirty children scrambled out of their wooden desks. They formed loud, chaotic groups. They pushed their tables together and unpacked their plastic bento boxes. The noise level in the room spiked instantly.
Zenjiro did not like the loud noise. He stood up and grabbed his dark blue lunch box and he walked out of the classroom. He wandered down the empty hallway without any specific direction. He just wanted a quiet place to eat his rolled eggs.
He walked past the busy cafeteria. He walked past the noisy faculty room. He reached the far end of the eastern school wing. An old, heavy metal door stood slightly open. It led to an isolated storage room for the physical education classes.
He pushed the metal door. The hinges squeaked. He stepped inside. The air smelled like dry dust and old rubber.
He saw her immediately.
Miss Shiratori was in the room. She sat on the hard wooden floor against the far back wall. She was completely asleep.
Her sleeping position was completely unguarded. Her back slumped heavily against a tall stack of thick blue gym mats. Her head tilted sharply to the right. Her chin rested on her shoulder. A thin, wet line of drool leaked from the corner of her open mouth and dripped onto the collar of her white blouse.
Both of her legs stretched straight out in front of her. Her body posture was completely relaxed. But the awkward angle of her legs pulled her light pink skirt up high. The fabric rode up past her knees. It bunched heavily around her upper thighs.
Zenjiro walked closer. His rubber shoes made no sound on the dusty floorboards. He stopped two feet away from her resting feet.
He looked down. He accidentally looked directly between her legs.
Below the bunched pink skirt, he saw a patch of white fabric.
His ten-year-old brain did not process the visual information with any adult context. He did not think about biology. He did not feel a rush of blood to his cheeks. He simply observed a piece of clothing with a print on it.
He saw a picture printed directly on the white fabric under her skirt. It was a brown teddy bear.
Zenjiro tilted his head. He recognized the shape. It was not just a generic, anonymous teddy bear. It was a specific cartoon character. He watched that exact bear on a morning television program when he was six years old. The bear solved simple puzzles in a magic forest. He hadn't seen that character in years.
A sudden wave of intense curiosity hit him. He wanted to verify his deduction. He wanted to read the small blue text printed right below the bear's yellow hat to confirm the name.
He leaned his upper body forward. He narrowed his eyes. The lighting in the dusty storage room was terrible. Only a single, weak fluorescent bulb flickered on the ceiling. Thick shadows covered the floor. He could not see the small text clearly. The fabric of her skirt blocked the overhead light.
He needed a better angle.
He dropped to his knees. He placed his blue lunch box on the wooden floor. He reached out with both of his small hands. He touched the teacher's two bare thighs.
The skin felt incredibly soft and strangely warm. He did not think about the tactile sensation. It was just a physical barrier in his way. He gripped her legs firmly. He pushed his hands outward. He spread her thighs wide open.
The light from the ceiling finally hit the white fabric perfectly.
Zenjiro leaned in much closer. His face was only inches away. He focused his eyes on the small blue text. He read the letters slowly in his head.
He was currently touching both of her thighs with his bare hands. He was still actively watching the brown teddy bear printed on the white fabric.
Miss Shiratori shifted her weight. Her head rolled off her shoulder. She took a sharp, sudden breath. Her eyes snapped open.
She woke up.
She looked straight down. She saw a ten-year-old boy kneeling directly between her spread legs. She saw his hands gripping her bare thighs. She saw his face hovering right in front of her underwear.
A crushing, heavy silence slammed into the dusty room.
Zenjiro blinked. He looked up from the teddy bear. He met his teacher's eyes. Her pupils shrank into tiny black dots. Her mouth hung open.
Zenjiro did not move his hands. He did not know that what he was doing was considered a wrong action. He was just inspecting a cartoon character. He waited for her to say good afternoon.
She did not say good afternoon.
Miss Shiratori lunged forward. She moved with violent, terrifying speed. She grabbed both of his small wrists. Her fingernails bit painfully deep into his skin. Her grip was like a heavy iron vise. She yanked his hands completely off her legs. She slammed her knees together. She pulled her pink skirt down to her ankles in a single, frantic, desperate motion.
The sweet and cute image of the young teacher vanished completely. It evaporated into thin air.
A terrifying, dark glare replaced her gentle smile. Her face turned a violent shade of dark red. Her chest heaved up and down. She bared her teeth like a cornered animal.
"What are you doing?!" she hissed. Her voice was not soft anymore. It was sharp and venomous.
Then, the scolding began.
It was a brutal, relentless verbal assault. It lasted for about twenty unbroken minutes. She dragged him up from the floor by his wrists. She backed him into the dusty corner of the storage room. She stood over him. She yelled at him in harsh, hushed whispers so the people in the hallway wouldn't hear her panic.
She called his actions highly inappropriate. She called him a bad child. She threatened to call his parents. She threatened to drag him directly to the principal's office. She demanded an apology. She demanded a full explanation for his deviant behavior.
Zenjiro just stood there. He kept his face completely blank. His wrists throbbed with dull pain from her tight grip. He listened to the stream of angry words. He heard the words, but they didn't make any sense to him. The sound hit his ears and just stayed there, refusing to turn into an actual thought.
He was told what he did was extremely bad. He accepted that as a new rule, but he truly did not understand what was fundamentally wrong about just looking at a picture of a cartoon teddy bear to verify his deduction.
It was a children's television character. Why was the location of the picture so important? He shoved the memory into a corner of his head, labeling it as something that he did not understand.
A loud electronic chime echoed through the quiet school building. The bell signaled the end of the lunch break.
Miss Shiratori stopped yelling mid-sentence. Her shoulders dropped. The violent red color faded slowly from her face. Deep exhaustion replaced the furious anger in her eyes. She let go of his wrists. She rubbed her forehead with two trembling fingers.
She let out a long, heavy, defeated sigh.
"Just..." Miss Shiratori said. Her voice cracked. She sounded entirely broken. "Do not do it again, Zenjiro-kun."
"I understand," Zenjiro said. He picked up his untouched blue lunch box from the floor. He turned around and walked out of the dusty storage room. He did not look back.