Curses and Will Chapter 5: Chapter 5 - The Burning Horizon

Read chapter 5 of Curses and Will by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

I fell asleep in class sometime during third period, the board a gray blur in front of me, the day already stretching out longer than I had patience for. When the bell finally rang, I ran. To Gekko Bridge. To the trees. To the place I'd started thinking of as ours after one single afternoon. She wasn't there. I waited until the light went orange, then gray, then gone. I swung across the rope by myself, the motion feeling wrong without her laughing on the other side. I walked through the dandelion field with no one standing in the middle of it. No one came. The sky had been heavy with cloud since morning, the kind of gray that promises something and takes its time deciding what. I told myself she was sick. I went to her house to check. I couldn't get past the gate. It wasn't her house. Not really. It was her parents' house, and I had no claim to knock on that door, not yet, not after one day. I turned around and went home instead. Lay on the bed. Eventually the dark took me under. The alarm went off at six fifty five. I got up into a morning that felt hot despite the clouds sitting low over everything. I dressed fast, skipped breakfast, and headed for school faster than usual, telling myself today would be the day she came back. My pulse climbed the entire walk there, just from imagining her voice again. Then I saw it. A poster, taped to a lamppost. Her face on it, smiling the same smile she'd given me in the dandelion field, printed in flat black and white under one word. MISSING. Everything stopped at once. Every memory of her arrived in my head simultaneously, all at the same volume, and something in my chest cracked clean down the middle. I don't know how long I stood there. Long enough that the school bell had already rung somewhere far away by the time I noticed the sound again. I took the poster down and folded it into my bag. The bag felt heavier walking home than it had any reason to. The yokai didn't scare me on the way back. Nothing did, that day. At home, the hunched red-eyed thing sat in its corner like it always had. I could see my own face reflected in its flat, lightless eyes. I lay down. When I sat up again, it was already seven at night. The silence pressed in heavier than usual. Every memory of her kept circling back. Her hand in mine. The fireflies. The warmth of her palm against my chest. I wanted to cry and couldn't quite let myself. Some stubborn part of me kept insisting she was fine. That she'd turn up tomorrow with some ridiculous excuse and laugh at how worried I'd looked. I stood up and decided I'd find her myself. I changed out of my uniform into whatever clothes I had left that weren't falling apart. The bread sat untouched on the table. I wasn't hungry. I didn't have room left for hunger. I searched for four days straight. I ran the length of the riverside more times than I could count, crossed Gekko Bridge so often the wood there probably knew my footsteps by now. My lungs gave out more than once. My legs went past aching into something closer to stone. I fell more than once too, knees hitting dirt, breath coming out in pale clouds in the cold morning air. Each time I wiped my face, got back up, and kept going. I missed four days of school. The bread on the table stayed exactly where I'd left it. On the fifth day, a holiday, I was getting ready to head back out when someone knocked. It was Mrs. Kouya. She stood at the door in a black dress, a thin white necklace at her throat, holding sweet bread and a carton of milk like she'd come prepared for exactly this. Her voice came out soft. "Are you alright? You haven't come to school in four days. Are you sick?" No one had ever come to check on me before. Not once, not in thirteen years, not even when I'd missed two days at my worst. This was four. My house wasn't fit for visitors, but I let her in anyway. She stepped inside, her voice carrying that particular weight mothers seem to carry without trying. "You haven't been eating or sleeping properly, h