Children

When people spoke to me, they looked down at me. When they reached out to touch me, their first choice was to pat my head. Even when they crouched down to meet my eyes at the same level, their first words were always, "Have you been listening to your mommy and daddy, little one?"

I was a child, and yet I wasn't.

(1)

"So you're all Nanamin?"

"No, we're all Nanami."

His older cousin casually took off his hat, and the young boy named Kento Nanami solemnly corrected the paramedic's pronunciation.

Nanami-that was how Qihai was pronounced in Japanese. A soft, fluffy sound, like sponge cake melting in your mouth. Say it a little too quickly, and it was easy to get it wrong and turn it into Nanamin.

I couldn't blame the young paramedic for stumbling over it. There were four Nanamis here, after all.

"Sorry, little one. Let me check again: Kunii Nanami, Miwako Nanami, Ayato Nanami, and Kento Nanami. Is that right?"

The blond boy nodded. His small face, with features distinctly unlike an Asian's, was surprisingly serious. "And there's her, too."

He pointed at me and added, "She needs medical attention, too."

I quickly shook my head, both to prove I was perfectly healthy and to distance myself from the whole affair.

If saving "Ryosuke" counted as my business, then I had absolutely nothing to do with everything that happened afterward.

After I saved Ayato Nanami-the director, "Ryosuke"-the elderly couple finally fainted from sheer relief.

Naturally, I wasn't the one who reacted quickly and called 120, either. That was the young boy trying to mend his family ties.

He was mature. I meant for his age. Every step he took afterward was so mature that I couldn't help admiring him.

He calmly called for an ambulance while pulling his dazed older cousin back to the café entrance. After hanging up, he didn't move the elderly couple on his own initiative. Instead, he found two soft cushions in the café and slipped them beneath them.

After doing all that, he even managed to withstand the pressure from Toji, who had appeared beside me at some point, and take my hands to check them for injuries.

He had practically recreated the code of conduct I'd followed several lifetimes ago.

Just as I was about to believe he was actually trapped in a child's body like me, the trembling of his hands as he held mine betrayed his true fear.

Kento Nanami was luckier than me. He really was a child. But that also meant he had to face the cruelty of adults without any mental preparation.

"Did you do all this, little one? Great job!" The paramedic patted his head, looking down at him.

For a child with a child's heart, an adult's praise was the best verbal gift imaginable. But Kento Nanami, who had a little adult living inside him, chose to hide his discomfort behind a slight frown.

"I'm already in middle school. I'm not a little kid."

I heard his quiet protest. Unfortunately, no one else did.

After assuring both Toji and the doctor that there was absolutely nothing wrong with me, I wanted to go home with Toji, only to be stopped by the police officers who had hurried up the mountain.

No one here had done anything wrong. The only culprit, the "Curse," had already been destroyed by me. So why were the police stopping us?

Kento Nanami, standing not far away, gave me the answer.

He had called the police, hoping they would arrest the "Curse" I'd destroyed. They stopped me because I was a witness.

"Officer, there really was a monster trying to kill my cousin. My cousin and that girl both saw it." Kento Nanami did his best to sound utterly objective and calm.

The middle-aged officer ignored me and scrutinized Ayato Nanami, who still looked dazed, from head to toe. "Forgive me for asking, Mr. Ayato Nanami, but have you received treatment at a hospital recently?"

As though waking from a dream, Ayato Nanami blinked and answered slowly, "Yes."

"Which department?"

"Neurology and psychiatry."

Ayato Nanami's answer turned the boy's supposedly objective account into a joke.

"But... but... there really was a monster." Kento Nanami, who had stayed calm all this time, began to panic.

The middle-aged officer didn't believe him, nor did he approach me, the only other witness, for questioning. He merely gave the boy an indifferent look. With that single glance, I watched the boy swallow his ability to tell the truth.

He lowered his head and his eyes, like a scolded puppy staring helplessly at its little paws when it hadn't dirtied any carpet at all.

The price of being too mature was that he had to question himself to make sense of the adults' disbelief.

I wondered whether, if the person standing here today had been an impeccably groomed adult man in a crisp suit, someone who looked utterly dependable, the officer might still have had doubts but given his words more credibility.

What a damned world, judging people by their age.

(2)

The sun was high in the sky as Toji and I slowly made our way down the mountain.

"Yuanli, what exactly happened?" Toji asked as he walked beside me.

"Nothing." I kept it from him.

"Oh." Toji asked no more questions.

I didn't tell him the truth because I was worried about the different ways it might affect him. I knew Toji could see "Curses," too. That worm was the best proof. But I wasn't sure what he thought about being able to "see."

Was "seeing" good or bad? Was it normal, exceptional, or freakish? And by the same token, what about "not seeing"?

I wasn't simply a child. Several lifetimes of reincarnation had taught me that, no matter the world, people decided whether a "special ability" was good or bad, and even whether it existed at all.

-So, Toji, what would you think of a "special ability"?

I hoped that one day I could ask him that question aloud.

As we neared the halfway point, two people hurried after us.

"Little girl! Could you wait a moment?"

Ayato Nanami always seemed to call out to me only when I was leaving, but I wasn't obligated to keep turning back for him.

I quickened my pace and strode down the mountain. Just when I thought I'd finally shaken them off, they intercepted me at a little kiosk selling water at the foot of the mountain.

"You walk so fast." Ayato Nanami stood before me, panting, with his dispirited younger cousin behind him.

"Need something?" Toji stepped in front of me, an invisible pressure radiating from his entire body.

Ayato Nanami took a small step back in fear, but for some reason, he bravely stepped forward again and said to me, trembling, "I just wanted to ask you one question, little girl. I really don't mean anything else."

"Go ahead."

"Um... that line you said to me back then, little girl-what TV show or movie was it from...? I wanted to find it and watch it when I got home."

So that was it. He didn't believe a child like me could say something so deeply empathetic, did he? And here I'd thought adults' distrust wouldn't reach me.

"I don't remember."

"You really... don't remember anything at all? Could you try thinking about it again? What you said back then really meant a lot to me. I, I, I..." Ayato Nanami wouldn't give up. He edged closer again, but Toji's burly body blocked his way.

If he came any closer, Toji really would hit him. To avoid having to go to the police station to bail Toji out again, I answered Ayato Nanami.

"Director. Is that line really what matters?"

"Huh?"

I had done all I could for Ayato Nanami. He could work out the rest himself.

I patted Toji's arm, ready to leave, and reserved the last tiny scrap of goodwill I felt toward the name Nanami for Kento Nanami. After all, no matter what tone I used to say Nanami, it always felt like taking a bite of soft, fluffy cake.

As I passed the boy, I whispered in his ear, "Everything you saw was real. But you need to learn to tell the right people."

A child with a name as soft as cake, trapped in the same cold, hard predicament as me. Please, don't lose your ability to tell the truth again.

Because walking a road where you had a mouth but couldn't speak was terribly lonely.

(3)

He crouched down to meet my eyes, clasping his hands in a pose that looked suitably respectful, and introduced himself in a warm, friendly voice. Yet his eyes kept drifting toward Toji. Even when he said, "Would you like one, little girl?" the person he was truly asking was Toji.

This salesman didn't respect me at all.

"I don't need it," I said coldly, taking a step back.

The salesman's expression darkened. He stood up and looked down at me, then said, "Little girl, why don't you ask your father and see whether he needs it?"

This was what happened most often when you were trapped in a child's body.

When people asked whether I needed something, that "question" was never directed at me.

When they listened to me speak, that "listening" was always tinged with doubt.

I had to accept that the most painful part of being a child was losing the right to make my own choices and having no one believe me.

But in the past, however much my physical shell distressed me, I could endure it. Because I knew that even if everyone in the world treated me as a real child because of that shell, as long as Yuanyin was there, I could receive the respect and trust due an adult from her.

But what about now? The only person in this world who knew the truth was gone. Wearing the shell of an eight-year-old, who could I tell? Who would believe me and choose to respect the eighteen-year-old I truly was?

Toji?

He patted my head again, looking down at me just like the salesman.

He wouldn't, because he needed a daughter, a daughter he could pour his fatherly love into. Preferably one whose body was a little frail and whose heart was a little fragile. He needed someone to depend on him. And the real me wasn't the type to depend on him.

I couldn't tell him. If I did, this family bond that protected him would wither and die.

Then there was no one. No one who could know the truth about me.

That thought effortlessly destroyed the will to live I had rebuilt over the past few days. As loneliness descended once more, the desire to embrace death began to flourish in my heart.

I ducked away from the hands stroking my head and all but ran home. As I stepped through the door, the last person I expected to greet me was Megumi Zenin.

He wasn't asleep in the nursery. Instead, he sat by the entrance, waiting for someone I couldn't identify.

The two-year-old looked at me, his hair sticking up a little, then said indistinctly, "Don't cry."

Don't cry? Me?

I wiped my face. My hand wasn't wet.

"Are you talking to me?"

He gazed up at me without blinking and, in an incredibly affectionate tone, repeated the first words of his life: "Don't cry."

-Yuanyin, you wouldn't believe it. At that moment, even though I was standing over him and looking down, I felt an equality I hadn't felt even with people who met my eyes at my own level. The way he looked at me, it was as though eighteen-year-old Megumi Zenin's soul had crossed the vast torrent of time and landed in his two-year-old body, just to tell me, in that fleeting instant, "Don't cry."

The loneliness that belonged to me alone in all the world was somehow soothed by this child's gaze.

Lowering my tear-filled eyes, I made a decision in that moment.

If I could, I would stay in this world with this child for as long as heaven and earth endured.