Free Brave Story by Miyuki Miyabe Page A

his tongue tingle with excitement. The sensation was like an exotic spice. Once he got the idea, he couldn’t stop. He would probably lie more often if he wasn’t so afraid of it becoming a habit.
    But this time nothing stopped him. As predicted, Katchan gobbled it up. “What’s that? He actually got a picture of a ghost?”
    Wataru explained, piling lie upon lie. Katchan hadn’t heard about this latest development at all, and every twist and turn of the story elicited fresh squeals of excitement.
    “Cool! I gotta see it!”
    “I wouldn’t,” Wataru advised. “The more people that get all excited about it, the bigger that Mitsuru’s head is going to swell.”
    “Yeah, but my old lady says if you don’t see a ghost by the time you’re twenty, you’ll never see one at all.”
    “Then you’re in luck. You can avoid the whole thing if you just hang on for a few more years.”
    “No way! I wanna see a ghost before I’m twenty! Man, how boring would that be to go through your whole life without seeing one.”
    This was classic Katchan-style logic. One, you only have until twenty to see a ghost. Two, to avoid leading a boring life, you must see a ghost. Ergo, time was short. Wataru felt like telling him that seeing a ghost wasn’t exactly a requirement for living the good life, but he swallowed his words. Saying that would just incite Katchan to wax even more poetic about the ghost, and for some reason everything was getting under Wataru’s skin tonight.
    “Look, I gotta take a bath and get to bed.”
    Katchan was still talking when Wataru hung up the phone. Kuniko asked him what the call had been about, and Wataru made something up. He went back to his room and closed the door, breathing a deep sigh of relief.
    “Liar.”
    The girl’s voice echoed through the room. In his chair, Wataru froze.

Chapter 4
The Invisible Girl
     
    Wataru was hearing voices again.
    It was the same phenomenon he had experienced the night he met Mr. Daimatsu. His mouth felt strangely dry.
    “So you’re a liar.”
    Sure, it sounded like a girl’s voice, but Wataru knew it was an echo or something, probably coming from the neighbor’s TV. That was it. His neighbors were watching some television show with the volume cranked too loud. His father had complained when they moved in that the walls in this building were thinner than had been advertised.
    “Ignoring me won’t make me go away.”
    Now she was sulking. It must be a soap opera.
    “Why did you lie to your friend? Is that the kind of person you are? Was I wrong about you?”
    Definitely a soap opera. Wataru hesitantly looked around the room, but nothing appeared to be out of the ordinary. His mother had changed the comforter on his bed. The old one had a blue check pattern, but this one was yellow. The spines of the books were aligned neatly on his bookshelf as usual. The shelf below them held the volumes of the Children’s Illustrated Encyclopedia that his grandmother in Chiba had given him as a present for being accepted into his elementary school. He couldn’t believe it when he had heard the set cost something like ¥200,000. If she was going to spend that kind of money, he wished she would have bought him a computer instead! When he pointed this out to her she had snapped and said the set of encyclopedias was just fine for a kid in grade school. He could buy himself a computer when he grew up, she said. Adding insult to injury, the volumes took up a huge amount of space on his bookshelf.
    He scanned the familiar scene: calendar on the wall, rug on the floor, eraser shavings on his desktop, light fixture on the ceiling.
    Wataru hunched over and peered beneath his desk, the movement accidentally causing his chair to scoot back several inches. No one hiding under there, of course.
    He swung around sharply and took a look under the bed. He felt like a special agent searching a criminal’s hideout. All he needed was a windbreaker with the big FBI logo on the back, a