Free 69 by Ryu Murakami

but when Masutabe found a slip in the corner of a bottom shelf, they all went apeshit and began a frantic search for other things that might have been left behind.
    It pissed me off that they weren’t obeying my rule about wearing gloves, and I conferred with Adama.
    “What are we going to do about fingerprints? They’re all over those shelves.”
    “Relax. The cops don’t have your prints on file unless you’ve got a record, right?” Adama kept his cool even in the midst of mayhem. “You think they’re going to dust for prints in the girls’ changing room, then check them against every kid in school? No way. It ’ s not like a murder or something.”
    “Ken-san...” Nakamura, one of the second-year students, stepped between us. “I’m sorry,” he said in a very small voice, “but... I’m done for.” He seemed on the verge of tears.
    “Done for?” Adama tensed up. “What do you mean?”
    “My fingerprints. I forgot my gloves, and my fingerprints are on those shelves.”
    “Don’t worry. They’re not gonna start poking around in a place like this. Even if they did, they wouldn’t know whose prints they were anyway.”
    “They, they’ll know mine. Our first year in junior high, we made salt, okay? As a science experiment. And I got sodium hydroxide on my fingers, and my fingerprints melted off. My brother said there’s probably nobody else in Japan with hands like mine, he said I should go on that TV show ‘To Tell the Truth.’ Almost everybody in my class knows about it. They call me ‘Unprintable.’ So I knew I had to wear gloves tonight, but when I touched that slip Masutabe found, I just forgot all about it, and now what am I gonna do?”
    We reached out and felt his fingertips. Sure enough, the pads were smooth, like scar tissue.
    “Amazing.”
    Eventually we stopped laughing, and Adama was able to persuade him there was nothing to worry about.
    I had slipped into a silent reverie, reflecting that Kazuko Matsui changed her clothes here, too, when Fuse the Lecher found a wallet. He announced his discovery and shone his flashlight on it, waving it for everyone to see.
    “You asshole!” I shouted, and even Adama the Cool clucked his tongue. A wallet was trouble. Whoever lost the thing was sure to report it, and somebody could end up searching the changing room. For all we knew, we might have left some clues behind: a piece of paper, footprints, hair. I told Fuse to put it back where he found it, but he just gaped at me with a moronic expression on his face and said he’d forgotten which shelf it was on. Otaki and Narushima said why bother, just rip it off, and Unprintable Nakamura suggested that if we found out who the owner was we could slip it in her locker later. We decided to look inside. It was your average girl’s wallet, plastic, with a picture of Snoopy on the front. Inside were a couple of thousand-yen bills, one five-hundred bill, and a bus pass. We read the name on the pass and burst out laughing: it belonged to the post-menopausal P.E. instructor I’d pushed into the pool two weeks before. She was an unmarried woman with great sagging buns and jutting cheekbones. Our pet name for her was Fumi-chan. Also inside the wallet were coins, a button, a wrinkled business card, a movie ticket stub, and a photograph. The photo was a black-and-white shot of Fumi-chan as a young woman, standing next to a man with a face like a cucumber in an old Imperial Navy uniform. We all sighed. What could be more pathetic than a dried-up, saggy-assed, war widow P.E. teacher with two thousand five hundred yen in her wallet? “Pick a shelf and put it back,” Adama said, and everybody nodded.

    “Smash the National Athletic Meet.”
    I wrote this on one pillar of the school’s front gate in blue paint, slapping it on hard so it would sink into the rough stone surface. On the other pillar Adama wrote “Fight the Good Fight.” I told him not to use corny crap like that, but Adama, cool as ever, said