Now she watched idly as the figure in school uniform, a shirt with a blue-green collar and a dark red scarf, appeared. The same uniform she herself had worn in April.

Kokoro felt relieved at least that Tojo-san came by alone on her errand, probably because the other girls lived elsewhere.

Her teacher had probably told Tojo-san to stop by and see Kokoro, and Kokoro decided not to think about the possibility that Tojo-san was intentionally ignoring these instructions.

The mailbox clanged shut and Moé-chan left.

THERE WAS A FULL-LENGTH MIRROR in Kokoro’s room.

She had got her parents to put it up as soon as she had chosen her room – an oval-shaped mirror with a pink stone frame. When she looked at herself in it now, she looked sickly, and she felt like crying. She couldn’t stand to look at it any more.

She quietly lifted a corner of the curtain to make sure that Tojo-san had left, then collapsed in slow motion back on her bed. With the sound down, the glow from the TV struck her as overpoweringly bright.

She thought about how, now that she’d stopped going to school, her father had taken away her video game console.

‘If she doesn’t go to school but still has video games, she’ll never do any studying,’ he’d said to her mother. It looked like the next step was to take away her TV as well, but her mother had cut him short.

‘Let’s just wait and see,’ was her verdict.

At that moment, Kokoro had hated him, but now she wasn’t so sure. She had the feeling he might be right – that if she did have video games to hand, that would be all she did all day. She certainly wasn’t doing any studying at this point.

Keeping up with schoolwork in this new school – junior high – wasn’t going to be easy. She felt lost, not knowing what to do.

The glow in her room was becoming really bright.

She casually raised her head from her pillow, thinking she should switch off the TV, and gasped.

The TV was not on.

She must have turned it off without realizing.

The light was coming from the full-length mirror near the door.

‘What the—?’

She got off her bed and walked over to it without really thinking. Light seemed to be radiating from inside the mirror; it had become so blinding she could barely look.

She reached out a hand to touch it.

She realized a beat later that it might be hot, but the surface was still cool to the touch. With a flat palm, she pushed a little harder.

‘Oh my god!’ she screamed to herself.

Her palm was being sucked right into the mirror. The surface was soft, as if she were pushing against water. She was being dragged to the other side of the mirror.