‘Darling,’ her mother interjected. ‘That’s too much for her. You don’t feel comfortable going out during the day and bumping into your friends from school, right? Isn’t that so?’

‘Um …’

Frown lines formed between her mother’s eyebrows. ‘Kokoro,’ she said. ‘I’ve said this before, but if there’s a reason you don’t want to go to school, you can talk to me about it anytime.’

‘OK.’ Kokoro stared downwards, and lightly bit on the tips of her chopsticks.

At some point, her mother had stopped urging her to go to the alternative School. Kokoro sensed, though, that she and the teachers there were still keeping in touch. Kokoro didn’t dare broach it with her mother, since she didn’t want her to start urging her to go again.

But her mother’s feelings had changed. Instead of hinting that her daughter was simply being apathetic, now she was more likely to ask, in a roundabout way, if something had happened to make her stop going to school.

Before the summer holidays started, her parents were trying to persuade her to attend a special summer session at a private juku.

Not one nearby, they said, but one some distance away. ‘You could commute from your grandma’s place, maybe. A juku where nobody knows you. You could catch up on all you missed in the first semester. What do you think?’ That night, Kokoro’s stomach started to feel terribly heavy, and she couldn’t sleep.

The junior high school textbooks she’d stuffed into a drawer had barely been cracked open. The other students had spent a whole semester ploughing through all that material, but Kokoro hadn’t done a thing. She was convinced she’d never catch up.

She never wanted to go to school again, yet here she was, worried she’d never catch up.

She tried to imagine herself attending a juku summer session, but like the idea of going to the alternative School, it just didn’t sit well with her.

‘If you don’t want to go, that’s fine,’ her mother had said.

HER HOMEROOM TEACHER, MR IDA, had come so often to see her at the beginning of the school year. He didn’t visit much any more. Perhaps he’d given up on her, Kokoro thought.

Satsuki-chan, her friend from elementary school days, had regularly delivered school handouts to her house instead of Tojo-san, but now she too had stopped. There were times when Kokoro regretted not catching a glimpse of her when she came by, but her relief outweighed the regret.

What made her happiest, and most relieved, was if they all left her alone.

But she still wondered if it was going to be like this for ever.

‘I KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE to feel panicked when you can’t keep up with schoolwork.’

She was in the dining room at the castle the next day, and Fuka was speaking quietly.