Read Slum Online for Free Online Page B

staring up at the fluorescent lights.
    Seven minutes before the end of class, a girl in the front row stood up. She’d been sitting smack dab in the middle of the row. She set her quiz on the podium and left without breaking her stride. The sort of people who voluntarily sat front and center were usually the ones who looked over their answers again and again before turning them in, even when they knew they were perfect. Guess you never can tell.
    I watched the girl as she walked toward the door. She had on a moss-green jacket and a pair of soft-looking denim jeans. The bag slung over her shoulder was about three times the size of mine. Her neatly trimmed, shoulder-length hair bounced as she walked, alternately revealing and concealing the white nape of her neck. She wasn’t wearing her glasses today.
    As she walked past my desk, she dropped a notebook into the empty chair beside me. A name was written across the front. Fumiko something or other. An obvious reading for the kanji didn’t come to mind.
    Page after college-ruled page of letter perfect calligraphic text flashed before my eyes as I flipped through the notebook. Next to my sad loose-leaf sheets, Fumiko’s notes looked as though they’d been shot out of a laser printer.
    Why would she leave me her notes? What was in it for her? What was the catch? A dozen questions raced through my head, but I set them aside and got down to the business of copying answers from the page Fumiko had dog-eared.
    More sound FX heralded the end of class. I turned in my quiz and left the room.
    Fumiko stood in a patch of shade beside the door, resting her back against the rose-gray wall. I walked over to her.
    “Thanks for the notes.”
    “Sure thing.” That anime-saccharine voice. “Etsuro, right?”
    “That’s me.”
    “You only come to the classes they take attendance in.”
    “Looks like.”
    “I’m Fumiko Nagihara. A lot of people have trouble with the last name.”
    “Oh yeah?”
    “It’s kind of an unusual reading for those kanji, don’t you think?”
    “I guess.”
    “Right…So, you just showed up for the quiz today?”
    “Not really. It was just a coincidence.”
    “Just a coincidence you happened to be here the one day we have a quiz?”
    “That’s right.”
    “That’s quite a superpower you got there.” Fumiko smiled her hamburger-shop smile.
    I gave a noncommittal grunt, which she took as a cue to further mock my less-than-stellar attendance record. At least she went to the trouble of leavening her rude comments with another smile.
    It turned out Fumiko and I had the same major. She claimed to have been there at orientation and the freshman party, but I couldn’t recall seeing her. Then again, I was pretty bad when it came to remembering faces. In my best virtual scorekeeping mode, I told her this made us even at one win apiece. Fumiko headed off for her next class.

     
    A hazy moon hung in the narrow sky over Shinjuku. Beneath, neon lights bathed the streets in garish reds, blues, and greens. My cheeks were flushed with heat, and the warm wind blowing out of the south wasn’t helping.
    It was 7:57 in the evening in Kabuki-chō Itchōme. The streets were aglow in synthetic light. After the lecture, some people from my class had invited me out, and we’d made a beeline for the bars.
    By June, everyone had more or less sorted out who they were going to be friends with, and who they weren’t. The people I would have called my friends were ghosts who attended the university in name and name alone. Just because people joined the same department when they started university didn’t mean they had assigned seats next to each other like in junior high, and it was no guarantee they’d even end up taking the same classes. We all just happened to have more or less the same academic aptitude, and we’d all applied to and been accepted by the same university. So I might have known my classmates, but that didn’t necessarily make them my friends. The brutal