...Phrased like that, it sounds like I got swept up in some massive incident. But if I just recount the facts of what happened, it was undeniably a trivial, not-even-funny kind of event. Even so, for me, it was a monumental incident, one that truly changed my life.

You never know how life will turn out.

No matter how tiny the event, it can hold enough influence to sway the rest of your life.

It all started with a Jenga set that someone had brought in and abandoned on the shelf at the back of the classroom.

After school, my classmates Madoka and Emiri, plus myself—the three of us were aimlessly hanging around, playing with that Jenga set. It was mid-December, and final exams were starting next week, so what exactly were we doing? We were all thinking it, but no one dared say it out loud. Only the sound of wooden blocks being silently pulled out and stacked echoed in the classroom. That silence spread a pleasant sense of tension across the room, and we were actually enjoying the game in our own way.

But that was only at the beginning.

We played seriously the first round, mixed in silly chatter the second round, but since Jenga is such a simple game, by the third round we were bored, and the conversation became the main focus. Above all, that clattering sound of the wooden blocks collapsing instantly shattered our concentration. Anyway, we sluggishly kept pulling out blocks and stacking them until, eventually, we reached a point where we didn't even know who the loser was.

Just as that third round ended,

"Since we're doing this, let's have a penalty game for the loser."

Who was it that suggested that?

Was it Madoka, or Emiri?

Or maybe, it might have been me.

Anyway, with the addition of a penalty game, the fourth round of Jenga was surprisingly exciting. But the ironclad rule of these kinds of games is that the higher the tension, the faster they end.

The anticipation and tension stacked up alongside the wooden blocks crumbled away in a flash, all due to a momentary tremble of a hand.

"Alright, Miyuki loses."

Madoka's ruthless death sentence vibrated against my eardrums.

The girl who prematurely toppled the tower was me, a weakling under pressure.

"Well then, we will go decide on the contents of your penalty game."

With an elegant smile, Emiri dragged Madoka over to the seats by the hallway and started whispering. They kept glancing at the clock, so I was prompted to check the time too. It was 6:30 PM.

The world, which would welcome the winter solstice the week after next, was already pitch black, wrapped in a deep indigo outside.

When I touched the condensation on the window, it was as cold as ice. Dragging my finger across the surface left a trail, drawing a line. I remembered how, when I was little, I used to get frostbite from obsessively doodling on windows.

If I do say so myself, I was a stupid kid.

Now, I had no pictures I wanted to draw, no words I wanted to write, and I couldn't even remember what I had been so obsessed with. As a high school student, just drawing a few lines seemed to be all I could manage. My technique should be better now than it was back then, but too many unnecessary things had piled up, turning into fetters. Shame, pride—those sorts of things probably get in the way of creating something.

I let out a sigh.

The sigh hitting the window erased the lines I had drawn.

Thinking it was about time they finished discussing, I looked toward the hallway seats, but for some reason, the two of them had vanished. The seats where they had been sitting just moments ago were completely empty. Huh? Wait, did they seriously leave me behind and go home? Is a penalty game actually just this kind of passive-aggressive bullying?

Just as I was thinking that, my phone chimed with a LINE notification.

Reading Madoka's message displayed on the lock screen, I understood everything.

“Go take a picture of the clock in the music room at 19:00 with the lights off.”

That message presented the details of my penalty game.

"Ah... I see. So that's how it is."

They knew full well that I hated scary things, yet they made me do this kind of penalty game anyway. Well, I know that's exactly why it's a penalty game, but I still think this exquisite level of tuning is in terrible taste. Specifying the location and the time, and making me take a photo so I couldn't fake it—they really have nasty personalities.

Also, it was annoying how they targeted the exact borderline of what even a scaredy-cat like me could just barely manage to accomplish. If they had made a slightly more unreasonable demand, I could have flat-out rejected it, saying, "There's no way!"

While I was grumbling about this in my head, it turned 6:45 PM.

If I was going to complete the penalty game, I'd better start heading to the music room. It seemed stupid to go back and forth between the music room and our classroom multiple times, so I decided to pack up all my things to go home before setting off.

Putting on my winter armor—a duffel coat—made me feel just a little bit stronger.

In all likelihood, it was just my imagination.

The music room was in a different building from the one with our regular classrooms, so I had to use the connecting corridor. The classroom building still had its lights on even at this hour, but beyond the connecting corridor, it was pitch black. Because heating bills pile up in the winter, only the bare minimum of lighting is kept on after school.

What a nuisance.

I caught myself thinking, Why am I honestly going through with this penalty game like an idiot?... but it couldn't be helped; it was just my nature. I think I'm just a strangely earnest person in weird ways. Even though I never study.

"I'm not scared of ghosts," I told myself as I advanced down the dark corridor.

Looking outside through the windows lining the hallway, snow was falling quietly, and the light from the streetlamps reflected off the snow in the sky, making it look purple.

Except for my own footsteps, I couldn't hear a thing.

Even if the regular students had gone home, the ones in clubs should still be around.

...Wait. Now that I think about it, we're right before exams, so aren't club activities suspended?

"That's why the school is so quiet."

"We're in deep trouble if we don't study too."

"At the very least, we shouldn't be playing Jenga right now."

I felt like we had just had a conversation exactly like that earlier.

Right. Then it made sense why the school was unnervingly quiet.

Knowing it wasn't some paranormal phenomenon put my mind at ease.

I made it past the obstacle that was the connecting corridor and arrived in front of the music room.

...Wait, is the music room even unlocked in the first place?

Come to think of it, it was right before the final dismissal time. Most classrooms should be locked, and there was no logical reason for the music room to be open. After all, our school didn't even have a brass band or a choir club. Even if we did, as I just mentioned, it was the exam period, so there was absolutely no reason for it to be open.

Realizing that standing in front of the door worrying about it was pointless, I grabbed the knob and tried turning it.

"See? It's lock—"

—It wasn't locked.

The door opened without any resistance.

The music room welcomed me with a cruel, ruthless darkness.

Well, if it's open, it's open. That makes things simple.

I just have to wait until the right time, take the picture, and it'll all be over.

"...I just need to take a picture, that's all."

Just to be safe, I checked left and right down the hallway before stepping into the music room.

I checked my watch; it was 6:57 PM. It would be a pain if Madoka made up some weird excuse to complain like, "I told you to take it right at seven, didn't I?" so I decided I could wait in the music room for three minutes.

It had desks and chairs lined up just like a regular classroom, so I decided to sit down at a desk in the front row.

There was a grand piano at the front, musical staff lines drawn on the blackboard, and the podium was split into three tiers, probably for choir practice—that was about all that was worth mentioning. At our school, music was an elective, and since I had chosen calligraphy instead, it was my first time coming into the music room. It didn't look much different from the music room we used in junior high, though, so it didn't feel particularly novel.

The second hand on the clock went round and round, approaching 7:00. Nothing happened at all, making me feel almost let down. I mean, obviously, it was best if nothing happened, but still.

...Alright. Preparations complete.

I unlocked my phone to take the picture and started to stand up.

However, my body, half-risen, froze in an unnatural position. My entire body's muscles stiffened from tension, my five senses became hyper-sharp, and I was in a state where I was overreacting to even the faintest noise.

"Eek..."

In the music room, which should have been filled with absolute silence, the muffled sound of a piano could be heard.

I looked at the piano, but of course, there was no one playing it. Yet, the sound continued to resonate. Moreover, it was an incredibly eerie performance that seemed to scratch at my heart with terror and sorrow.

I was seized by the urge to claw at my chest, where a crawling, insect-like anxiety ran rampant.

And in the next moment, a different—and much more realistic—terror struck me.

"Whoa, ah, w-w-wait!"

Because of my unstable posture from trying to get down from the desk, I ended up tumbling backward. I got tangled with the desk behind me, slammed my back against its corner, and folded into a V-shape. It hurt like crazy.

"Ah, guuh..."

The pain was so intense I saw stars.

And that intense pain made me forget my fear, staining me instead with an unreasonable anger. If this stupid penalty game had never happened, I wouldn't have gone through this! It's all their fault for finding that Jenga set! I'll never forgive them! ...Or so I raged. Then, after thinking about it for a bit, I remembered that I was the one who had found the Jenga set. It was an inconvenient reality, so I had immediately forgotten it. Writhing in pain, I spent a while just lying on my back on the floor. I waited out the dozens of seconds it took for the pain to subside, and by the time my tears receded, I finally gathered the energy to stand up.

All that remained inside me was a misdirected emptiness.

"Sigh... Anyway, what was up with that piano sound just n—"

Just like my intense pain, there had to be some sort of reason and cause for the piano sound. But my resolve to find out its true identity was, in an instant, blown away far too easily.

In fact, my heart must have actually stopped for a second.

It was because of the face of the long-haired woman that appeared right before my eyes.

A hollow eye peering through the gaps in her bangs grabbed me and refused to let go.

"KYAAAAAAAHHHH!"

Simultaneous with my heart restarting, a maximum-volume scream erupted from my mouth. I grabbed my school bag off the floor and bolted from the music room at full speed. I was too terrified to even look back, just moving my legs in a frantic blur.

My feet tangled together, my clumsy, uneven, and frantic footsteps echoing down the hallway.

—Crap, crap, crap! I just have to get away from the music room! This is bad!

With a vocabulary-deprived mind, acting purely on animal instinct, I ran like crazy toward the student entrance.

—But in times like this, you usually can never reach the exit, right!?

In horror tropes, it's standard to have an infinitely looping corridor, or an illusion where you run around the same place forever—no matter how much you run, you never reach the exit. It wasn't exactly a morbid curiosity, but precisely because I felt fear so strongly, I was well-versed in horror. If that was the case, I had to find a solution or I might not make it out alive. Perhaps due to the terror, and contrary to my vanishing vocabulary, my brain started spinning at unprecedented speeds. However, rendering my imagination pointless, my feet easily reached the entrance.

"Th-The exit!"

Feeling a bit anticlimactic, I frantically swapped my indoor shoes for my boots and flew out the front doors.

And by sheer luck, I leapt onto a bus parked in front of the school gates without even checking its destination. The bus stop in front of the school was deserted, and I certainly didn't have the luxury to sit around leisurely waiting for a bus.

"Hah... hah, ha... hah... ha, ha, hah..."

I collapsed into the very back seat and tried to steady my breathing. My heart was throbbing as if it might explode, my throat was burning so hot it felt scorched, and I forcefully squeezed shut my eyes, which had been locked wide open in terror and confusion.

My eyes and head quickly cooled down, and my overheating thoughts relaxed.

Gaining a tiny bit of composure, I looked up at the bus fare board. Strangely enough, it was the exact bus I always took. Wait, really? Could there really be such a convenient coincidence? Don't tell me getting on this bus was part of that woman's plot all along—the moment that thought crossed my mind, her face resurrected in my brain. The face hidden by overgrown bangs, the single eye peeking through, the eyeball glaring fiercely at me, the hand reaching out to grab me... all of it was pure terror. Despite the bus's effective heating, a chilling shudder ran down my spine. Could it be that, while I was distracted by something, she would appear in the seat right next to me...? Or maybe the bus would start driving a different route than usual, and when I went to complain, the driver's face would be that woman's face—all these typical horror developments kept popping into my head, only to pop and vanish like bubbles. And then, betraying my delusions, the bus stopped at the usual stop right near my house.

Furthermore, when I got home, my parents and a warm meal were there to welcome me.

Seeing my everyday life without a single trace of being violated, I finally managed to regain my peace of mind.

...What an awful experience.

All of this was because of Madoka and Emiri coming up with that stupid penalty game.

I failed to take the picture, but I had suffered an ordeal that couldn't even compare to such a thing.

"Actually, wait, wasn't this whole thing set up by them in the first place?"

Thinking it over carefully, that was the most likely and natural possibility. They disappeared first so they could prep the prank to scare me, meaning the woman who showed up was just Madoka wearing a wig. Or it was a simple trick of the eye. I might have just mistaken a teacher on patrol for a ghost. Either way, the fault lay with me for running away without checking properly. But the one thing I was certain of was that this was all those two's fault. Unable to let it go without giving them at least a piece of my mind, I reached for my phone. But it wasn't in my uniform pocket. Did I leave it in my coat? I checked there, and desperately searched my bag, but the result was the same.

My phone was nowhere to be found.

That's when a cold sweat ran down my spine.

"...I dropped it back then."

When I took out my phone to take a picture of the clock, I heard the piano, and because of that sound, I lost my balance and fell over. When I got up, that woman appeared, and I fled in a blind panic.

It was a stroke of luck that I managed to snatch up my bag on reflex, but my phone hadn't even crossed my mind.

...This is the worst.

For a high school girl, a smartphone is nothing less than a sacred artifact, equal in weight to her very life. Especially tonight, without my smartphone as my time-killing partner, I wouldn't be able to stop thinking about that woman from earlier.

In desperation, I shifted my gaze to the bookshelf sitting in the corner of my room.

It was packed with a massive amount of paperbacks.

I reached out for one of them, but stopped myself.

Doing that would only fuel my melancholy. Rather than losing myself in the gloom packed into those pages, mentally facing off against the ghost woman somehow felt slightly better.

My heart had grown weak enough that I was on the verge of asking my mom to sleep in the same room as me.