Book Girl and the Famished Spirit by Mizuki Nomura Read Free Book Online Page B

happily.
    But that day, there was such hatred in Miu’s eyes as she looked at me that it instantly eradicated everything that had come before.
    Why had Miu looked at me that way? Did she hate me?
    Whenever I remembered Miu, my heart always clamped tight, and the pain made it hard to breathe.
    I couldn’t think about Miu right now. I couldn’t remember those eyes.
    Desperately, I banished Miu’s phantom. I could almost hear her breathing in my ears. I tried to focus on what Ryuto was saying.
    “You date a bunch of girls at once because you want them to hate you?” I asked in a voice that threatened to crack if I wasn’t careful, and I knit my numb fingers together tightly.
    Ryuto murmured, “Yeah. I love it when they’re jealous or possessive. But Hotaru is different. We’re dating, but she’s not even a tiny bit obsessed with me. She’s kind of vacant, like her mind is somewhere else. She’s always been like that.”
    “How did you meet her?”
    “It was about a month ago in a park. It was raining and superwindy, and she was riding on the swings in the middle of the night. She was wearing an old-style sailor suit, and even though lightning was cracking overhead and her hair and clothes were totally soaked, she was swinging fanatically, standing up on the swing. When I saw that, I thought she was amazing.”
    Swinging in the middle of a storm, Amemiya slipped and was thrown to the ground. Ryuto had run over to her and lifted her up, and that was how the two of them started going out.
    Ryuto leaned forward and grinned like a little kid.
    “I guess I was inspired? I had this feeling that I had finally met the ideal woman, or like she would be someone important to me. Hotaru is definitely the kind of girl who doesn’t worry about what she has to do in order to get what she wants or how it looks. If a guy gets jumpy, she’ll chase him and chase him and then devour him in order to be together. I always felt like if I could meet a girl like that, she’s all I would ever need.”
    His story was all over the place, but Ryuto looked innocently happy as he spoke of her.
    For the first time, he looked like a high school boy, just like me.



When I was in middle school, I had thought that Miu was special and different from all the other girls.
    Miu was the epitome of what a girl should be for me.
    There was Miu, and there was me. I thought things would go on that way forever.
    “I asked if she would go out with me, and she said yeah, so I’m pretty sure she realizes we’re dating. But she’s not into me at all. She doesn’t see me, but she’s still going out with me. We go on dates even. And she doesn’t run away when I kiss her even. Weird, right? Like, why is she with me? I started thinking maybe she had some kind of problem she was dealing with, and it started to bug me. And ever since Hotaru and I started going out, strange stuff keeps happening.”
    “Like what?”
    I remembered what Maki had told us in the school yard: Anyone who got close to Hotaru Amemiya was cursed.
    “A menacing guy in sunglasses follows us all the time. He might’ve been about forty? He was wearing a suit, and his hair was dyed a light color. He wasn’t dressed bad or anything, but there was something sinister about him, like he was dead even though he was alive or something… He was like an angel of death.
    “Whenever I meet up with Hotaru, eventually I notice him staring at us from a little ways off. I think Hotaru notices, too, and whenever he’s there, she holds on to my arm and shakes and begs me not to look back and not to leave her. It sounds like she’s going to cry. But even after I ask her who he is, she won’t answer.
    “And that’s not all. When I’m walking at night, Long John Silver and his gang—or at least some meathead guys who look like that—show up and start pounding on me and telling me to stay away from Hotaru, or they chase me through the streets or almost run me over with a car. All kinds of