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one clinically observed things as they died.
    Following the teacher’s instructions, I lifted boxes down from the tops of shelves and checked what was in the bottles of chemicals inside.
    Meanwhile, he took a can of compressed air and blew the dust out of the computer keyboard—a very finicky man, apparently. The whole time we were cleaning, he was working right next to me, and there would never have been time to look through the trash.
    When we were finished, the two of us went into the lecture hall, carrying a big pile of garbage.
    “You hardly ever see girls with long black hair like her anymore. Everyone gets it dyed these days,” the teacher said, glancing at Morino. That was how black and beautiful her hair was. I told him my sister’s hair was much the same.
    Morino’s slender, pale hands turned a page in her book. In the dimly lit lecture hall, they were so pale that they seemed to glow, the images burning themselves into my retinas.
    The teacher and I carried the trash to the incinerator, and then we went our separate ways. I quickly headed back to the lecture hall; I had about ten minutes before afternoon classes started.
    By the time I reached the hall, Morino was already gone, presumably headed to class. This was ideal for my purposes.
    I pulled out the wastebasket I had hidden under the desk and rifled through it, keeping one eye out in case someone came in. Unfortunately, what I had been looking for was nowhere to be found.
    Instead, I found something carefully wrapped in layer after layer of paper. I opened the package and found a doll—with the tips of its arms cut off.
    It was a cloth doll, small enough to fit in the palm of my hand. The feet had not been damaged. From the design of the doll, it seemed safe to assume the severed hands had not had any fingers. It was a very simple thing, but the doll with no hands reminded me of something—the Wrist-Cut Case that was all over TV.
    People of various ages and genders had, when walking alone, been knocked unconscious—and then their hands had been chopped off. Dogs and cats had also been found with missing front paws, and this was believed to be the work of the same person. All such incidents had happened not far from here.
    Had the chemistry teacher, Mr. Shinohara, cut off the doll’s hands? What for—some kind of game? No, I thought it was much more likely that he was the man behind the Wrist-Cut Case. I knew this was quite a leap from finding a doll with no hands, but the person who had cut all those hands off must be somewhere, and it was not all that unlikely that he was nearby. And when I considered the reasons why the chemistry teacher might have cut off a doll’s hands, I could not deny the strong possibility that it was simply an extension of his enthusiasm.
    †
    After I found the handless doll, I thought about the Wrist-Cut Case every day in class. Midterms were coming up fast, but I hardly noticed. Out of all the gruesome incidents the news had covered lately, this was the most fascinating. Pondering the culprit’s terrifying fixation with hands was exactly the kind of thing I liked to do. And I believed … that he was just like me. Obviously, the particulars were different, but I still felt a connection to the man behind the gruesome wrist cuttings.
    After that, I often made my way to the lecture hall during breaks so that I could brush past Mr. Shinohara. He remembered me and would wave when he saw me. He was a young man, thin, with short hair. I spent a lot of time wondering if he was really the man behind the Wrist-Cut Case.
    I once came across Mr. Shinohara talking to Morino outside the lecture hall. He had seen the book Morino was carrying and was telling her he had a copy of the follow-up. It was a nonfiction book about dealing with the mentally unstable. Morino simply replied, “Do you?” her usual blank expression never faltering.
    In class, I continued to function largely through pretense. It was easy to live as an ordinary