Shizuku transferred to Yoru Kita Junior High School at the end of the month. Just a few days later, a new month began, and the class welcomed another transfer student.
Only this one was a boy.
His name was Koichi Sakakibara, an ordinary-looking teenager. Apparently, he had been meant to transfer in before Shizuku, but he had been hospitalized due to illness and had only made it to school now.
Just as they had with Shizuku, the students of Class 3-3 gave Koichi Sakakibara an enthusiastic welcome. On the surface, the class seemed very friendly, with nothing particularly unusual about it.
But Shizuku knew that was not the case.
She had been at this school for a week now. Shizuku could sense that although everything in Class 3-3 seemed normal on the surface, that normality was actually an act. In other words, it was not that Class 3-3 was truly normal; the students wanted it to be normal. So, they laughed and chatted as usual, no different from ordinary third-year junior high students. But a closer look revealed that everyone was very careful to avoid the subject of the curse. And aside from close friends, they all seemed somewhat tense around one another.
That was hardly surprising. Rumor had it that Class 3-3 students would die for all sorts of reasons, so these students were like the protagonists of Final Destination, worrying every day about whether they might meet an accidental death. It made them live extremely cautiously. Honestly, if someone stayed in that kind of environment for too long, the pressure might really drive them to collapse.
Unlike the classmates gathered around Koichi Sakakibara's desk, trying hard to play the part of "enthusiastic, friendly, normal students," Shizuku quietly sat at her seat reading. The eighties had this one downside: