Once Aki had mentioned how she and her boyfriend had been stopped by a truancy officer while they were out in town. Kokoro had thought it was because they looked as if they might have been about to cause trouble, but the real reason was that in Aki’s time they still had lessons every Saturday, and she should have been at school.

When it came to this, Aki and Subaru’s reactions were different.

‘What? Saturday is going to be a day off?’

‘Yes,’ Aki said, ‘that’s what they said – one Saturday a month would be off, but I haven’t been to school much so I wasn’t really thinking about it.’ She carried on thinking aloud. ‘So in the period you’re in, Kokoro, you never go to school on Saturdays? Wow – so we really are living in different times.’

‘Yeah,’ Kokoro nodded, and suddenly had a new thought. ‘For you people, are there still No. 2 and No. 4 junior highs in Minami Tokyo City?’

‘What do you mean?’

Fuka answered, ‘They aren’t there any more, because the number of children in the area has dropped.’

When Kokoro had made the visit to the alternative School, the teacher in charge there had said the same thing.

She’d said that after the cosy, relaxed atmosphere of elementary school, there were plenty of kids who had trouble fitting in when they started junior high. Especially with No. 5 Junior High, since it had grown so huge due to the reorganization and merging of schools.

Back when Aki had mentioned possibly repeating a year, Kokoro had asked if she planned to move to another nearby school. And Aki had said, You mean, like No. 4 Junior High? At the time it had struck Kokoro as odd, since there wasn’t a No. 4 school any more.

‘Seriously? Is that right,’ Ureshino unexpectedly chimed in. He was staring at them, eyes wide. ‘I always wondered why our school is called No. 5 when there’s no No. 4. Now I see. The schools all have odd numbers now, so I thought maybe even numbers were unlucky or something.’

‘Isn’t that an insult to all the even-numbered schools around the country?’

Aki let out a long sigh. ‘The whole thing is so weird,’ she said. ‘You guys are about the same age as me, and we’re all so alike, but Kokoro, you and Ureshino – everybody, in fact, apart from Subaru – you’re all from the future.’

‘It feels strange to me too, to think you’re from the past, Aki. I just can’t get my head around it.’

‘Come to think of it, though, you and Rion are from the same year,’ Subaru said suddenly.

He was right.

And now they knew the full story, it explained the uneasy feeling Kokoro had had earlier, that there were just too many dropouts from the same school.