Hanako Duty

[Torgen]

Chapter 1

 “Okay everyone, it’s time to draw for today’s Hanako Duty,” Morisawa-sensei said as he entered class 5-A ten minutes before the official start of homeroom carrying a small fish bowl with three scraps of paper in it, and a mostly opaque plastic convenience store shopping bag tied shut by the handles. Unlike every other class in school, this was our class’s unofficial start time, because whoever had Hanako Duty needed the time to get there and back. “Remember,” he added, “there are only three names left, so tomorrow we’ll refill the bowl, and some of you will have two chances to have your names drawn.”

 I hadn’t been in the fourth-grade class that had Hanako Duty last year, but I had heard that they had tried scheduling everyone’s day in advance, and a lot of students had called in sick on their scheduled days, which is why this year they were drawing names randomly and refilling the bowl before it was totally empty. I was surprised that anyone would go so far as to miss school to get out of Hanako Duty,  although I was hoping for the two out of three chance of my name not being drawn, even if it meant I didn’t have to do any other classroom chores that day.

 “Ready?” Morisawa-sensei asked nobody in particular. A few students hadn’t arrived yet, but everyone knew their names weren’t in the bowl, so there was no sense waiting for them. He reached into the bowl and tossed the few crumpled up scraps a few times to make things as random as he could before pulling one out and unfolding it. “Suzuhara Takeshi-kun,” he read.

 I slumped involuntarily for a moment at my bad luck, then stood up and made my way to the door, taking the bag from Morisawa-sensei on my way past.

 I went straight to the east-side third-floor girls’ washroom and knocked three times on the door. “Hanako-san, are you in there?”

 “I am. Come on in,” came a muffled reply.

 “I’m a boy,” I added nervously. 

 A girl’s translucent face phased through the door. “Don’t worry, nobody else ever uses this washroom.” She retreated as I pushed the door open, and the image of a girl about my age wearing a yellow sweater with a flower appliqué and a slightly too short red skirt hovered in front of me. She would have been a little shorter than me if she had been standing on the ground, but hovering like this our eyes were level. I recognized her as Hanako from my classmates’ days having Hanako Duty, right down to the outfit. “You’re Takeshi-kun, right? Or would you rather I call you Suzuhara-kun?” she asked.

 She had been in class for attendance every day, but we had never interacted, so I was impressed that she remembered my name. “Do you want me to call you by your family name?” I asked in response.

 “I don’t know what my family name was,” she replied.

 “Well if I have to call you by your given name, it’s only fair that you do the same to me,” I concluded.

 “Then Takeshi-kun, I’ll be counting on you today,” she announced.

 “Yeah,” I replied.

 It was my first time in a girls’ washroom and I felt disoriented by the absence of urinals, but I wasn’t here to use the toilets for obvious reasons. so I stepped out of my shoes and into a set of bathroom slippers, hurried to the third stall, and locked the door. This washroom still had floor toilets; they hadn’t replaced them with western-style seat toilets when they renovated the rest of the school’s washrooms because of the haunting situation, and they hadn’t gone back and finished the job after Hanako Duty started.

 I put the plastic bag on the floor, straddled the fixture, removed my trousers and underwear, and hung them on the hook on the door. As I reached down to the plastic bag again, Hanako’s face phased through the door. “Which color of paper would you like—red or blue?” she asked.

 I covered my crotch with my hands as fast as I could. “What’s wrong with you?” I asked, but she just stared into the middle distance. For a moment it seemed like she was getting smaller and younger, until she shook her head and returned to the size she had been when I first entered the washroom.

 “Sorry, what’s the problem?” she asked.

 “A little privacy, please!” I demanded.

 “Oh, well the thing is, you know how I can move through these walls?” She waved her hand through the stall’s side wall to demonstrate, even as most of her was still on the other side of the door. “It works that way with seeing too. I know things are there, like walls, clothes, or your hands, but they don’t stop me from seeing what’s on the other side.”

 I felt myself blush. ”For living people it matters that someone isn’t looking at us while we’re naked,” I retorted. “Don’t you remember that from being alive?”

 “I don’t remember anything from being alive,” she replied. “I don’t even know if Hanako was my name. I think they just called me that because there’s a flower on my shirt.”

 “Then I’m telling you now, we don’t like it,” I said. “Maybe knowing that will help you remember other things.”

 “Whatever,” she said, and returned outside.

 I untied the knot in the plastic bag and took out one of the two “Bigger-than-Big” size underwear-style paper diapers from inside. Thankfully it had a plain design, other than saying which side was the front and back and having a vertical tape at the rear to hold it closed for disposal. I stepped into the leg holes and pulled it up over my crotch, then opened the stall door where Hanako was hovering with her back to me.

 “There,” I said, ignoring that she had just told me that the door didn’t stop her from seeing, and she turned toward me again. “All I have to do is wear this, right?”

 “Yeah,” she said, sounding a little unsure.

 I took my underwear from the hook on the door and put it in the bag, then unhooked my trousers and pulled them up over the diaper. “Okay, let’s go,” I said, picked up the bag, and marched toward the door, pausing only to switch back from slippers to my own shoes.

 She hovered a step behind me as I opened the door and exited into the hallway, but ten meters down the hall I heard her say, “Takeshi-kun,” from the washroom door. I looked back, and she was beckoning me toward her with her face and hand halfway through the door and the rest of her still behind it.

 I walked back to her. “What’s the problem?” I asked.

 “The thing is, nobody ever told me what the rules are for being a ghost. I had to figure them out myself. I don’t know why I’m stuck in this washroom, and I don’t know why I can leave when I’m with someone who’s wearing… one of those…” She blushed.

 “Diapers?” I whispered.

 “Yeah. I think it’s because it’s like a portable toilet, and maybe I can haunt any toilet, but when you asked if all you had to do was wear it, it made me think you just going to wear it and not use it, and if you don’t use it, it isn’t a toilet, it’s just underwear, and I can’t haunt underwear.”

 “I’ll use it later then,” I lied.

 “If I could make myself believe something I thought wasn’t true, I could probably leave this washroom whenever I wanted.”

 “Then what do I have to do to convince you?”

 “If you wet it a little right now, it will definitely be a toilet, and then I’ll be able to haunt you.”

 She was right that I hadn’t been planning to use it at all. I assumed the rest of my classmates hadn’t used their diapers when it was their turn; after all, what ten year old would want to use a diaper? But if I didn’t come back to class with Hanako then I wouldn’t get credit for Hanako Duty, and if she didn’t come to class she’d get lonely, and bored, and frustrated, and that would lead to all the spooky haunting behavior that was why nobody still wanted to use the third floor girls’ washroom. So I had to try. Even though I didn’t feel like I had to pee at all, and my years of toilet training fought against me, I pushed as hard as I could, trying to get something to come out, thinking about faucets and waterfalls and bridges over rapids. After about thirty seconds I managed to produce a little spurt, probably no more than a teaspoon.

 I gasped for breath. “Sorry, that’s all I could do,” I said, but as I said it she floated out of the door and wrapped her arms around my right bicep.

 “Thank you, Takeshi-kun,” she whispered. I looked at her face hovering over my shoulder, and she was smiling broadly, and actually pretty cute. I couldn’t even feel anything different about the diaper, but if peeing in it that little could make a cute girl smile at me like that, maybe having Hanako Duty for a day wouldn’t be that bad.

[Torgen]

Chapter 2

 Of course as I walked back toward class, it became clear that she wasn’t actually holding on to my arm, she was just hovering in position near me. I tried to keep the arm still so she wouldn’t phase through my body too much, although I wasn’t sure whether it would have any effect on me or her. As we got to the stairwell, she got that blank look in her eyes again, her age started to fluctuate, and she asked, “Which color of paper would you like—red or blue?” 

 I stopped at the top of the stairs. “Do you mean toilet paper? I don’t care what color it is. I’m just going to flush it anyway,” I replied.

 She scrunched up her face like my answer didn’t make sense, and then shook her head and returned to her original age. “Why did you stop?” she asked.

 “Because you asked me that question again about what kind of paper I wanted, and it seems like you’re a little out of it afterwards.”

 “I did? Again? You mean I did it more than once? Sorry, people have told me I do that, but I never remember.”

 I realized stopping meant I was at risk of being late back to class, so I started down the stairs and she continued hovering with me. “I wonder if it has something to do with how you died.”

 “Why would choosing between colors of paper have anything to do with dying?”

 “I don’t know, maybe there’s a killer who asks his victims that question, and if you say red he cuts your throat, and if you say blue he strangles you until your face turns blue.”

 “It seems like if there was a killer like that, someone would have heard of him, and they’d know how I ended up haunting the third floor toilet of a school I must not have gone to because nobody recognizes or remembers me.”

 “You seem pretty smart for a fifth grader,” I observed.

 “I must have been in third grade when I died, but I’ve haunted that washroom for a long time,” she replied. “At least twenty years? It blends together. I was lonely for a lot of it. I had a lot of time to think, but I didn’t remember anything.”

 We got to the second floor and turned toward our classroom. “I suppose it’s hard to get new information when you’re trapped in a washroom,” I said. As we got close to our classroom door, I added, “But there is a piece of information we don’t have: Which color of paper would you like—red or blue?”

 In a snap she shrank to the size of an eight-year-old, but her eyes were glowing red, her hair floated in every direction, and the hallway lights started flickering. “You’re awful! I hate you!” she screamed. For all the trouble I’d had a few minutes ago producing a teaspoon of liquid, I definitely peed my diaper more than that.

 “I’m sorry, I’m sorry! Calm down, please calm down, everything’s fine,” I soothed, and after a few moments her hair settled, the lights stabilized, and she grew back to her former size, her clothes remaining the same size leaving her skirt too short again. A few heads peeked out of other classrooms to see what was going on, but they ducked back in when they realized the show was over.

 “What just happened?” she asked.

 The bell rang for the start of homeroom. “I’ll explain later,” I said, and entered the classroom.

 Our room had an extra chair, and my classmates had set it up next to my desk so Hanako would have somewhere to float in a seated position during the day’s lessons, so I walked quickly toward it with Hanako hovering behind me. I was more aware of the thickness of the diaper as I passed my classmates than I had been when hurrying in the hallway, but I remembered that it was probably not as noticeable to them from outside my clothes since I hadn’t noticed theirs on their days, and anyways almost all of them had taken their turn over the first seven weeks of the school year. There was a chance of whoever had Hanako Duty getting a snide comment from someone in another class who hadn’t noticed the literal ghost hovering nearby waiting to come to your defense, but within my own class the risk was near zero, especially because Morisawa-sensei had made clear that there would be zero tolerance for such bullying, and all of our parents had stamped the permission form for us to be in the class with Hanako this year.

 We had barely reached my desk and hung the bag with my underwear and the extra paper diaper from the hook for my backpack when the class president instructed us all to stand and bow to Morisawa-sensei to mark the start of homeroom, even though he had entered the room ten minutes earlier. Sensei took attendance in surname order, with each student responding when their name was called. When he got to the end, since she didn’t have a surname that we knew of and wasn’t actually on the attendance list, he added, “Hanako-san.”

 “Here!” she cheerfully replied.

 Although Hanako couldn’t hand in homework or write tests, she paid close attention to Morisawa-sensei during the first period Japanese lesson, and she never interrupted the class to ask confusing questions about paper colors. A few times she even raised her hand to answer a question, or volunteered to read a passage from the textbook, which meant she hovered around standing height and I held the book up for her to read from. I wondered if that was necessary—she said she could see things while also seeing through them, but was that precise enough to read the middle pages of a closed book? I didn’t notice any books in her washroom, but maybe nobody had thought of leaving her one. I decided I’d ask later if she wanted me to check a book out from the school library for her.

 At the end of first period, Morisawa-sensei left and we had a few minutes until Kawaguchi-sensei arrived for math class.

 “Hanako-san,” I started, planning to offer what I’d thought of earlier.

 “Excuse me for a moment, Takeshi-kun,” she interrupted, and floated around me to have a quick chat with Hikari, my desk neighbor in class and my next-door neighbor at home. Hikari had been my lifelong friend, and we had walked to school together that morning, but in class she had a clique of female friends, and I’d seen Hanako have lunch with them (to the extent she did) on previous days. I wasn’t too bothered. Regardless of who had Hanako Duty on any given day, it made sense for her to have a consistent group of friends, and Hikari would be a fine one; also my question didn’t need to be answered now, and I was sure I’d have another chance to ask. On top of that, I had to pee a little. It was nothing too urgent, and if I didn’t have Hanako Duty I wouldn’t have bothered trying to make it to the washroom during the interval between periods, but since I had already wet my diaper a little bit, I figured there was no reason not to wet it a little more and eliminate the distraction. Even though I was sitting in my school desk chair, I found it much easier to relieve myself now than I had when I needed to prove I would so that Hanako could haunt me.

 Kawaguchi-sensei entered the class and asked us to pass our math homework forward, which those of us with bodies did. She collected the papers as Hanako returned to the seat beside me.

 Math class proceeded very similarly to Japanese class, with Hanako eagerly raising her hand whenever she could, but Kawaguchi-sensei never called on her. I began to suspect that was intentional, so one time when Hanako raised her hand, I raised mine, and Kawaguchi-sensei called on me immediately. Hanako followed me to the blackboard, and I whispered to her, “What do you want to write?”

 “Takeshi-kun, don’t you know the answer?” she asked.

 “I do, but you wanted a chance too, didn’t you?” I said. She smiled and quietly told me how she would have answered the question, which was the same way I would have, and when Kawaguchi-sensei praised me for being correct, Hanako smiled even more since she knew the praise was really for her.

 As the end of the period neared, Kawaguchi-sensei gave a stack of papers to the student at the front of each file to pass back. When I got what was left of the stack, I counted them and the number of students behind me, then put up my hand. “Sensei, there’s not enough here for Hanako-san!”

 “Suzuhara-kun, obviously Hanako-chan can’t do the homework,” Kawaguchi-sensei replied.

 “She can’t turn it in, but she could do the questions in her head. Or maybe Hanako Duty should include helping her write her answers.”

 There was some rabble from the living students because I was volunteering to add responsibilities to a chore they already didn’t want, but Hanako silenced them by saying, “Please, sensei! School is all I have.”

 Kawaguchi-sensei reached into her briefcase for one more copy of the assignment. “I’ll have to make another copy before my next class,” she said as left it at the front of the file of desks, as though that would make me change my mind. Everyone in front passed it to me, and I took it and a copy for myself and handed the rest back.

 “I’ll hold onto it for you,” I told Hanako as I opened my backpack and put the two sheets inside.

 “Thank you, Takeshi-kun,” Hanako said with that smile I was starting to enjoy seeing.

[Torgen]

Some Quick Notes About Japan

While I'm not from Japan, I've studied Japanese language and culture for a while, and since the story is set there I'm trying to be as true to the location as I can. Since many of you aren't from there you might be missing a few of the references or confused by a few details, so I'll give a few quick notes. 

• Floor toilets, aka squat toilets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squat_toilet). Less common now, but sometimes you'll see one in a public washroom in a clearly signed stall where the rest are seat toilets. Hotels and homes usually have seat toilets nowadays, especially because toilets with built-in bidets got popular.
• Japanese public schools tend to have pools, and swimming lessons are part of the regular phys-ed curriculum. 
• Japanese schools don't have janitors. The students are responsible for cleaning the school, which both teaches them responsibility and encourages them not to mess it up in the first place. Students have rotating chore assignments, which can also include serving the centrally-prepared lunch to their classmates, although it is cooked by professionals.
• The school year starts in April, immediately after the end of the previous school year. There's a summer break where students are given a big packet of homework so they don't forget everything, and also a winter break.
• The school Athletics festival is in October. Classes are assigned either to the White or Red team and compete against each other in a bunch of events in front of the students' parents.
• The cultural festival is in November, which is kind of an open house where the students show off what they've been learning. In high school each class will decide for itself what its open house will be, and does all the work to assemble and run it. Things like Cafe and Haunted House are the trope choices.
• Rather than "signing" your name, you'll use a stamp with the Kanji of your family name in situations where you would sign. Often you'll have a cheap mass-produced stamp for things like deliveries that you keep by the door, and a more expensive unique hand-carved stamp for important things like getting married.
• The Japanese term for disposable diapers is "paper diapers" (紙おむつ); cloth diapers are still called cloth diapers (布おむつ).
• Pretty much every juvenile diaper brand that sells in Japan has a size that goes up to 35kg, which should be big enough to fit a 5th grader. Different brands have different names for the size. Some call it XXXL, and some have a 25kg size called (the English word) Big, and their 35kg size is called either Super Big, or Bigger-than-Big.
• "Hanako-san" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanako-san) is a common urban legend about a ghost haunting the third floor girl's bathroom of whatever school they're in, which means it's probably meant as a hoax of exposure. The "red or blue paper" question comes from a different toilet-themed ghost, Aka Manto (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aka_Manto).

Chapter 3

 Our next period was Physical Education. Students with Hanako Duty weren’t allowed to participate on days when our class was scheduled for swimming, since that would require wearing a diaper in the pool, but today our class was scheduled for distance running, so the rules said I had my choice of whether to participate or not. It wasn’t clear that anybody had thought through how it would work. Would I change in Hanako’s washroom and catch up with everyone? Would I have to bring Hanako into the boys’ change room with the male students from every other fifth grade class? All of my classmates had resolved the question when it was their turn by opting out of Phys Ed class that day. So as my classmates took their gym clothes from their backpacks, it was clear that I would be sitting on the bleachers with Hanako watching them.

 And yet.

 “Do you want to do Phys Ed with me?” I asked Hanako softly.

 “I don’t have a body. I can’t exercise,” she answered. “All I can do is float next to you while you do.”

 “Do you want to float next to me while I exercise?” I asked.

 “Nobody else asked me that,” she said.

 “I’m asking you now,” I reiterated.

 “Why are you being so nice to me?” she asked.

 “If I had blackboard duty, I’d do a good job cleaning the blackboards. If I had sweeping duty, I’d do a good job sweeping the floors,” I replied. Morisawa-sensei arrived to take us to the change rooms, and my classmates started to file out the door after him. “You’d have to stay near me and the other boys instead of the girls, and I won’t make you if you don’t want to, but you’d better decide soon—”

 “I want to! Please, Takeshi-kun, I want to do gym class!” she pleaded. I grabbed the bag with my gym clothes from inside my backpack and joined the end of the line of students with Hanako hovering close behind me.

 “Sensei!” I called out. I wanted to get his attention since it would be better if I changed into my gym clothes in Hanako’s washroom on the third floor instead of the changing room on the first floor for multiple reasons, but the lines of students from the other fifth grade classes meant our teachers couldn’t tell which one of them was being called for, and even though being at the front didn’t get you anything sooner than being at the back, I couldn't just cut in line! So I followed my classmates to the stairs.

 “Which color of paper would you like—red or blue?” Hanako asked.

 With so many people around, this probably wasn’t the best time to repeat her answer back to her, at least if I was going to match her volume and tone, but I didn’t have a plan for what else I would answer. “Whichever you think is best,” was the best I could come up with.

 She paused for a few seconds, then said, “I’m not the one using them.”

 It was all I could do not to stop in my tracks. I looked at her and she didn’t have the empty stare this time. “Do you remember asking?”

 “I came in at the end. It’s weird, I know your answer was wrong, but it’s the right kind of wrong. Like if I ask, ‘what’s two plus two,’ five is the right kind of wrong. Everyone else’s answers were like they said ‘Sekigahara’. I don’t know how I know that.”

 That was a lot to think about, including how she remembered what Sekigahara is but not anything about her own life, but we had reached the dry change rooms where Morisawa-sensei and the other fifth grade homeroom teachers whose classes weren’t scheduled to use the pool were waiting, each holding a clipboard to record their students’ eventual performance. “Sensei,” I repeated when I finally reached him, “Hanako and I have to go back upstairs to her washroom on the third floor.”

 He cupped his hand to his mouth. “Did you use your diaper?” he asked quietly. Hanako blushed.

 “No!” I replied. “Well, a little. I mean to change into my gym clothes.”

 “You don’t have to change into your gym clothes,” he said, “You have Hanako Duty.”

 “I don’t have to, but I can, right?” I asked. “The form my parents stamped said it was my choice.”

 “Let’s see, up two flights of stairs, then over there, then back… you’d miss the first half of stretching, and it would be too disruptive. I admire your commitment, Suzuhara-kun, but you should sit out today. Maybe if you’d let me know sooner.” He walked a few meters down the hall toward the door to the athletics field so the students coming out of the change rooms would know where to line up. I imagine he thought he was being fair to me, but without meaning to, he had been unfair to Hanako.

 “Thanks for trying, Takeshi-kun. That’s more than anybody else did,” Hanako said.

 “Can you close your eyes?” I asked.

 She squinted her eyes closed. “I can look like it. It doesn’t stop me from seeing.”

 “Who knows that besides me?”

 “Nobody else cared enough to ask,” she replied. She’d already said that clothes didn’t block her vision, so she wouldn’t see anything in the change room that she couldn’t see the rest of the time. All that mattered was that nobody knew she could. “Takeshi-kun, are you planning to… everyone will see your… that you used… that!” I couldn’t tell if she was blushing anew or if it was the same blush as earlier.

 “Cover your eyes with both hands,” I commanded. “Pretend you can’t see. Follow my voice.” I pushed open the door to the boys’ change room, and I thought I heard the slap of her hands covering her eye sockets, but I must have imagined it. “This way, this way, this way,” I guided until I reached the left turn into the main area of the change room and went around the corner. “Forward, forward, stop. Turn left. Forward.” She hovered into the room, matching my instructions perfectly.

 “What do you think you’re doing?” One of the other boys asked.

 “Where am I supposed to change?” I asked back.

 “Am I still going forward?” Hanako asked as she floated straight ahead at a uniform rate.

 “Three more meters… and stop.” She came to a halt a few centimeters from the wall in a space a boy had been in, but he had moved aside when he saw her coming. I went to the other side, sat on the bench that ran around the room, and kicked off my shoes. I had started a little behind everyone else, so if I didn’t want to hold up the group I’d have to make up time. I pulled down my trousers and realized the diaper I was wearing had a wetness indicator. I hadn’t noticed it when I put it on because the pale yellow blended in with the white of the cover, but now part of it had turned a distinct blue. I thought I heard a few snickers that nobody would dare make in front of Morisawa-sensei, but I ignored them and unthreaded my legs from the sleeves of my trousers and reached into my bag for the school-issued gym shorts. When I pulled them up, the top of the diaper peeked over the waistband. Hurriedly, I took off my own shirt, then took the gym shirt from the bag, pulled it onto my torso, and tucked it into my shorts, making sure not to tuck it into the diaper. I put the clothes I had taken off into the bag, and noticed that the last other boy was leaving. I had made up a bit of time, but I was still last. “You can stop pretending,” I said to Hanako as I sat down on the bench and pulled my shoes back on.

 “I wasn’t pretending,” Hanako said, removing her hands from her eyes and turning toward me. “I decided not to see, and then I didn’t see. I had to focus on it, but it worked. I didn’t know I could do that. I never had a reason to before.”

 “Wow, that’s interesting that you can turn your senses on and off.” I finished putting my shoes on, grabbed my bag of street clothes and ran toward the door. Hanako followed me.

 “Also, right now I can’t see through your clothes. Since you said people wouldn’t like that, I tried to not see through things and it worked. But I don’t have to focus on that.”

 When we exited the change room, the lines of boys and girls from my class were following Morisawa-sensei out the door. I didn’t want to get scolded for running in the hall, so I did my best speed-walk to catch up to them.

 “I won’t tell anybody about before, but you should always not see through clothes unless you have a good reason,” I said quietly, assuming the distance and my footsteps would stop the classmates in front of me from hearing.

 “I mean, I’ve already seen everything, but okay,” she said. Weirdly, this didn’t make her blush.

[Torgen]

Chapter 4

 Morisawa-sensei led us to the running track, where we gathered around him in a semicircle for instructions. “We’ll start with some stretching,” he said, pausing in distraction for a moment when he noticed me wearing my gym clothes, “then warm up our muscles by jogging a lap of the track, then we’ll alternate heats of boys and girls for the rest of the period."

 Morisawa-sensei took his suit jacket off, placed it on the bleachers next to the track with his clipboard and a stopwatch, and demonstrated some stretches, though he was still wearing the suit pants and a dress shirt so he couldn’t go as deep as he would if he really needed to stretch. Hanako moved in front of me, lowered herself so the bottoms of her feet were level with the ground (though the ground wouldn’t have offered any resistance if she had tried to go lower) and moved the image of her body as though she was actually stretching. I didn’t need to see her face to know she was smiling. I put my bag of clothes on the ground and stretched as well, with one move or another occasionally reminding me that I was wearing a slightly wet paper diaper. I wondered how much I would notice it when I was running. 

 Once we had stretched for a while, he said, “alright, everyone take a warm-up lap around the track,” then before I could get going, came over to me. “Suzuhara-kun, I thought I said you should sit out Phys Ed class today,” he said quietly, trying not to make a scene.

 “I’m sorry, Sensei, I must have misunderstood. I thought you meant that if I needed to change in Hanako’s washroom, I should sit out because I would be late for stretching and it would be disruptive. Since I decided I could change in the regular change room, I arrived on time for stretching. Was that not what you meant? Because I did bring my clothes with me if you want me to leave early to use her washroom to change back.”

 “He brought Hanako in with him!” one of the boys nearby said before starting his warmup lap.

 “I kept my eyes closed! I didn’t see anything!” Hanako yelled back in a way where if she was human you would think that the second was the result of the first, but in her case they were separate claims. “Sensei, I didn’t see anything,” she reiterated directly to Morisawa-sensei.

 “As important as Hanako Duty is, we don’t mean for you to humiliate yourself,” he replied to me.

 I took a deep breath and adopted the cadence of reading a report in front of the class. “In social studies we learned that Japan has a rapidly aging population, and many elderly or disabled people use mobility aids like wheelchairs or canes. I don’t think someone who uses a mobility aid should be embarrassed about it. Do you, Sensei?” I asked.

 “No, of course not,” Morisawa-sensei replied, not sure where I was going with this.

 “Hanako is deceased, which is a disability, and my diaper is her mobility aid,” I continued. Hanako blushed.  “Do you think either of us should be embarrassed that she needs one?”

 He considered this briefly. “Well, you’re wearing the right clothes for it, Suzuhara-kun. You may as well catch up to your classmates.”

 “Yes, sensei,” I said. I was glad he wasn’t upset, because I had pulled that whole thing out of thin air. I hadn’t misunderstood anything! I knew he had told me to sit out of gym class, and I had brazenly defied him and then politely talked my way out of trouble. And whether I thought I should have been embarrassed about wearing Hanako’s mobility aid, I had been; you can’t just talk yourself out of being embarrassed.

 I picked up the bag with my street clothes, ran over to the bleachers where Morisawa-sensei had left his jacket and put the bag near it, then started jogging around the track in the same direction as my classmates had run. Hanako was trying to mime jogging too, but since I was bouncing higher than I had when I walked and her position was always relative to me, she was shaking up and down trying to imitate the height that she should have when she jumped off.

 “Do you think you’re in trouble?” she asked.

 “You think I’m doing a good job, right?” I asked back.

 “Of course!” she said.

 “Well then if I get in trouble for it, get mad at the school to defend me. And do some spooky ghost things, like make your hair float around and flicker the lights.”

 “I can’t do things like that!” she gasped. I looked at her and she seemed to be serious. She definitely didn’t remember what happened when I asked her question back to her.

 “I’m more worried the rest of the class won’t like that I’m raising the bar for what you have to do when you have Hanako Duty.”

 “Do you think they don’t like me?” she asked sadly.

 Shoot, that was a bad thing to have said, even if I thought it was true. “I think they focus on the diapers and not on being helpful.” I had no idea if they all thought that, but that’s what I had thought before I saw how happy class made her, so it was a fair guess. “Plus, Hikari-chan and them seem to like you, right? If you have a few close friends, that’s the most important thing.” 

 “I didn’t pick the rules,” she complained, blushing.

 By the time we caught up to the rest of the class around the 200 meter mark she had given up on jogging at her own rhythm and had matched mine, but the result was pretty convincing—sometimes you’d notice that her foot was passing through the ground, or didn’t really have traction against it, but you had to look closely.

 When we finished the warm-up lap, Morasawa-sensei gathered us around again. “Now that you have an idea what the distance is like, I’ll tell you that for adults and middle- and high-schoolers, 400 meters is a difficult distance. It’s between a sprint and a long distance run. For your age, treat it as a distance run. You’ll have to pace yourselves. The first heat will be Inoue-chan, Kanemoto-chan, Shirakawa-chan, Suzuki-chan, Takata-chan, and Masuda-chan. You’ll start in two minutes. The rest of you, get ready to cheer on your classmates from the bleachers, and I’ll let you know when to get ready.”

 The six named girls walked around a bit to stay stretched out while the rest of us went to the bleachers on the outside of the track. I sat at the end next to my bag of street clothes, and Hanako sat to the inside of me. My diaper was only wet, and I wasn’t sure if anyone would be able to tell, but if they assumed worse then they might not want to sit directly next to me, whereas there was no reason someone shouldn’t want to sit next to Hanako. I thought Hikari might take those spots with the member of her clique who wasn’t in the first heat, but they sat together on the other side, one row up. My own male friends from class noticed the vacant spots near us and filled them in, but left a half seat space between them and Hanako.

 The girls lined up at the start line, and Morisawa-sensei readied the stopwatch, then yelled, “Go!” and started it. The girls started running, and Hanako cheered enthusiastically for each of them in turn as they started toward the first corner, and continued even when they were on the other side and probably couldn’t hear us anymore. As the girls reached the halfway point, Morisawa-sensei said, “Iida-kun, Suzuhara-kun, Kawakami-kun, Toyotomi-kun, Narui-kun, Yasuda-kun, and of course Hanako-chan, you’ll be up next. You’ll have time after the girls finish, so you don’t have to get ready yet.”

 About 30 seconds later the girls came back around to the finish line, and Hanako cheerfully congratulated them all for their hard work. Myself, Hanako, and the other five boys did a little jogging in place and some minor stretching to get warmed up again. I felt like I had to pee a little, so I let it out to stop it from being a distraction. I had no idea what the capacity of the diaper was, but it didn’t feel particularly heavy, even though I could tell it was thicker now than when I had put it on.

 The other five boys and I lined up on the start line in an athletic crouch, since this was an endurance race. Hanako bent way down to the ground like this was a sprint and she was in the starting blocks. I wondered if she had seen a classmate do that when she was watching Phys Ed class from the sidelines, or if she learned it when she was alive but didn’t remember when she learned it. Morisawa-sensei yelled, “Go!” and she sprang forward into the lead, as the rest of us started running normally.

 I didn’t think of myself as being a particularly fast runner, but my plan for this race was whenever I saw someone out of the corner of my eye, I ran a little faster. To someone watching it probably looked like I was trying to keep up with Hanako, but of course that was impossible. She was haunting me, so if I ran faster or slower she would match my speed. In fact it was the opposite. I knew she had never got to do gym class before, and depending on whether my classmates decided to participate, she might not get to again until my next time having Hanako Duty. (I was already taking it for granted that I wouldn’t sit out next time as long as we weren’t swimming.) For her first time, I wanted her to cross the finish line first.

 After about a hundred meters I never saw someone out of the corner of my eye. I let off my pace a little to make sure I’d finish and still seemed to be ahead of the pack. I could feel the thickness of the diaper as I was running, but it was soft enough that it didn’t impede me, although I wondered if I was tearing up the padding. The other one was still in the bag hanging from the side of my desk. I wasn’t sure yet whether Sensei would let me use Hanako’s washroom to change back to my street clothes and I’d have a chance to grab it on the way, or if he’d expect us to use the change room. I didn’t think he’d make me take Hanako in the room where the boys were undressing again since he’d assumed I wouldn’t do it the first time, but I couldn’t be sure.

 I put that out of my mind and focused on Hanako. For someone who hadn’t actually run in probably at least twenty years and didn’t have the feeling of the ground for feedback, she had decent technique. I wondered if she had always remembered how to do it and hadn’t bothered because she could hover, or if she had regained the memory just in time, or if she was a quick study and had learned to do it just now by watching everyone else. It was another thing I’d have to remember to ask her when I had a chance.

 As we came around the final turn I regretted my pace a little. There was no way I was going to look backwards to see where the rest of the heat was. Maybe Hanako could see them without turning her head since her eyes weren’t real, but I couldn’t spare the breath to ask her. The best I could do on the home stretch was listen for the footsteps of the pack catching up with me and adjust my pace if they got close.

 But they never got close. I heard the cheering of my classmates, some of it for me, some of it for Hanako. Two girls were huddled on either side of Morisawa-sensei, watching the number on the stopwatch, as Hanako threw up her arms and crossed the finish line, with me following a moment later. They oohed in amazement, as I put my hands on my knees and crouched down, gasping for breath. I had done it: I had won the race for Hanako.

 Then a moment later I realized it might look to my classmates like I was using my diaper.

 Then another moment later I realized none of the rest of the pack had crossed the line yet.

 Then they all caught up to me, with a few of them laughing and patting me on the back on their way to take a cool-down walk.

 “Sensei,” one of my classmates on the bleachers asked, “can Suzuhara-san have Hanako Duty during the Athletics Festival?”

 “Yeah, our team would definitely win!” someone else added.

 “We don’t assign Hanako Duty to particular students in advance because of some things that happened,” Sensei replied, “but if a student volunteered to take Hanako Duty on a particular day, I’m sure you would all be happy to allow that instead of leaving it up to random chance.”

 I looked up a bit, and Hanako looked back plaintively. “Please, Takeshi-kun?” she asked.

 “We’ll see,” I gasped, stumbling back to my spot on the bleachers to make way for the next heat of girls. Hanako walked beside me and took the inside seat again, then gave me a quick hug.

 “Thank you, Takeshi-kun,” she said, and there must have been a gust of wind at that exact moment, because I felt a little chill and some pressure from the same direction.

 As Morisawa-sensei sent the heat of girls (including Hikari) on their way and Hanako cheered for Hikari in particular instead of the group in general, I realized I may have sounded like I was rejecting her. I didn’t mean to dismiss the idea out of hand, but it was months until the Athletics Festival so it was a bit early to commit to it. Also, many of the events were divided by sex, and everyone’s parents would be watching, so it might be better if Hanako haunted a girl that day, as long as one was willing to participate while wearing a diaper. Hikari seemed like a good candidate, since she and Hanako were getting along well; I’d have to suggest that to them when the festival was a little closer.

 The races continued, and by the time the third heat of boys set off I had mostly caught my breath again, just in time for Morisawa-sensei to say, “Suzuhara-kun, Hanako-chan, if you’d like to use the third floor washroom to get dressed, you can leave now to get a head start.”

 “Thank you, Sensei,” I said. I grabbed my bag of clothes and walked back toward the school building, with Hanako walking beside me.

[Torgen]

Chapter 5

 “So, you’re walking now,” I noted to Hanako when we were close to the building.

 “What?” she asked.

 “You were hovering until Phys Ed class. Now you’re walking.”

 “Oh! I guess once I worked out the rhythm for jogging and running I just kept doing it. I can stop if you want.”

 “I don’t want one or the other,” I said as we reached the double doors to the school. I pulled one side open and held it for her. “It does make you seem more like a person.”

 “Maybe it’s because you treat me like a person,” she said, phasing through the other door unimpeded. “I still know I’m not one, though,” she added.

 I followed her through the door I had opened. “Yeah, being see-through does give it away,” I remarked. “Sorry if this question is treating you like a ghost, but,” I lowered my voice, “do I need to change my diaper? You’ve seen more of them than me, and we’d have to go back to the classroom to get the second one if I do. You can look through my clothes if you need to.”

 She stopped, turned, and looked at my abdomen, and I stopped as well to make it easier for her. “No, it’s still fine,” she said softly, and waited until I caught up to her before she continued towards the stairs. “I can tell you used it a bit more, but it’s not the wettest anyone’s has been by this time of day and they didn’t leak.” 

 “I wasn’t sure if the running broke up the material,” I clarified.

 “It’s bunched up a bit, but they always bunch up. You should be able to make it through lunch,” she replied.

 “Oh, good, that’ll save some time.” We started climbing the stairs side by side, not too quickly since I was a bit fatigued from my run. “So did you remember how to walk and jog and run from when you were alive, or did you just figure it out as you went along?”

 “And how to climb stairs? I guess I remembered them, except it felt weird because I expected gravity to work on me, and it only works on you.”

 “I wondered how your memories worked when you started school. It was third grade, right?”

 “Yeah, during the Cultural Festival, some other student’s mother had her baby with her and she needed to… clean him up, and she didn’t know about my washroom, so she brought him in. Once she was done I had a weird feeling and I haunted him, all the way down the hall. She asked me to stop following her, but she was too far from the washroom so I couldn’t. Then she went to the principal to complain about me, but he said, ‘she’s not a student here,’ and I asked, ‘can I be?’ They brought someone in from the Prefectural Exorcism Department who thought it was a great idea, they did some experiments with student volunteers to make sure it worked consistently, then they started sending me to class.”

 Since I was going to ask about that later (and it was a more detailed version of rumors I had heard), I decided not to directly mention that it wasn’t what I meant by my question. “So if you started in the middle of the school year, you must have remembered all of grade two math and Japanese, and enough of grade three math and Japanese that you didn’t fall behind.”

 We reached the third floor and turned toward her washroom. “Who’s to say I didn’t fall behind? They never tested me.”

 “They could have, if the tests were multiple choice. Just point at which one you think is right and have someone mark it down for you.”

 “They’d need someone who wasn’t in my class to take Hanako Duty, since the rest of the class would be writing the test at the same time.”

 “They could do it if they cared about your education.”

 “At least at first, I think they cared about getting their washroom back. It sounded like they thought I’d ‘find peace’ if I finished the year. Instead I got visibly older, so they clearly had to move me up to fourth grade.”

 “It sounds like according to whatever your rules are, you didn’t fall behind.” We reached her washroom door, and I knocked. “Anyone in there?”

 “There’s never anyone in there,” she asserted.

 “I’m a boy. I feel like I should always check.” I opened the door and swapped my shoes for bathroom slippers. “If nobody comes in here I could change out in the open.” I looked at her and she didn’t visibly have an opinion. “Yeah, I’m going to use a stall.” I returned to the same stall I had used in the morning and closed the door. “How did you know about Sekigahara, though? Did they used to teach that in second grade?” I asked as I pulled down my trousers. More of the wetness indicator on my diaper was blue now; I had peed a little more, but I wondered if it was also from sweat. “Because they definitely don’t now, so maybe you remembered it from watching anime, or reading manga—”

 “—or having a samurai nerd in my fourth grade class?” she suggested.

 “Oh, Yeah, that would do it.”

 As I was a bit ashamed to have not thought of such an obvious way of her knowing something like that (an odd thing to feel while wearing a wet paper diaper), I continued changing in silence, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when the silence was broken by the question, “Which color of paper would you like—red or blue?” At least this time she didn’t stick her head through the stall door to ask it.

 This was a much better situation than the last time to try giving Hanako’s own answer back to her: we were alone, with thick bathroom walls between us and anyone who might hear. The lights might even have been on another circuit from the other rooms, in case a flickering thing happened again. So I took a deep breath and confidently yelled back, “You’re awful! I hate you!” I immediately regretted it: her response was a wail of the deepest sadness I had ever heard. I threw open the door to the stall still half-dressed and blurted, “I’m so sorry, Hanako-san, I don’t hate you, you’re not awful, I was just repeating what you said—” but I stopped as I noticed that while tears were pouring from her now eight-year-old eyes, she wasn’t tracking me with them. The sadness was the response to what she had said.

 After a moment she grew back to ten-year-old size, looked around, and asked, “Why am I crying?” Before I could decide how to explain, she added, “Did you ask me my own question, and then give my own answer back to me?”

 “You remembered?” I asked.

 “I remembered what happened the last time someone did that. You’re not the only person to try it. You should have told me what you had planned; I could have saved you some trouble.”

 “Sorry,” I said, meaning both for not checking and for making her cry. I closed the stall door again and hastily finished changing back into my street clothes. When I opened the door again her eyes were dry. 

 “Ready to go back to class?” she asked.

 “Yeah,” I said.

 I swapped the bathroom slippers for my shoes again and we started walking down the hallway toward the stairwell. I noticed we were making the kind of silence she tended to fill with her question, so I broke it by saying, “I really am sorry for making you cry, Hanako-san.”

 “I’m not the one who was sad,” she replied. “It was someone in the past. Someone I don’t remember.”

 “I guess,” I said. My murder theory was always an outside shot, but it seemed even less likely now. That wasn’t a cry of physical pain, or being upset at being called awful and hated. It had to have been someone who loved Hanako finding out she was dead, and if that person had been there when she died, they would have been there for the red-paper-blue-paper question and there probably would have been some record of it for someone else who Hanako asked the question of to have found. Probably whoever asked the question was the one who was sad, but that question, that answer, and Hanako dying didn’t seem to fit together. There had to be something missing.

 As we reached the stairwell and started descending, it was Hanako’s turn to break the silence to head off her own question. “The thing is, Takeshi-kun, I don’t want to be a nuisance to anyone. I want everyone to be happy to have me come to class, so if you can figure out the answer to my question so I can stop asking it, I’d really appreciate it. But maybe next time you have an idea, let me know what it is first so I can save you the trouble if someone already tried it.”

 “If I think of one in time, I will,” I replied. “Maybe there should be a ‘Hanako’s Mystery’ club where students can team up to share our ideas and keep track of which answers we’ve tried.” I was already a member of a club, but it only met once a week—that afternoon, in fact. I could join another. “We’d need a teacher’s support, though, and there’s a minimum membership for official clubs. Do you think enough students who had Hanako Duty would be interested in joining?”

 “There might be a few. The bigger problem is unless you plan to meet in the washroom, someone would have to take extra Hanako Duty after school so I could attend.”

 Uh oh. If this was my idea, had I automatically volunteered?

[rienrien]

I wonder how much potty training Takeshi's going to have left when all's said and done.

[Torgen]

Chapter 6

 As we reached the second floor landing from above, the queue of my classmates was arriving from below, so we joined at the end and followed them back to the classroom. Morisawa-sensei guided us inside, then left to teach another Japanese class. Shortly after we were back at our desks with our gym clothes returned to our backpacks, Miller-sensei, our English teacher from Canada, arrived, and we all took our completed homework from our backpacks and passed it forward to be collected.

 The class proceeded largely as the previous ones had, except that it was conducted in English. Hanako was of course quick to raise her hand, and Miller-sensei called on her. Hanako’s diction was, from what I could tell, as good as a native speaker’s. As a ghost, could she make the sounds that English had and Japanese didn’t because she didn’t need to use a mouth to speak? Had she learned how to say them from a classmate like the Sekigahara thing? Did she remember them from her life without knowing how she learned them? If she was of mixed heritage or had spent time overseas, those could be clues the soon-to-be-formed Hanako’s Mystery Club could use to figure out who she was when she was alive. Or maybe as a ghost she didn’t make sounds at all and the idea of what she wanted to say came into our heads directly. Another thing I had to ask her when I had a moment.

 When the lesson was over, Miller-sensei took a bundle of homework printouts from his bag and started counting pages and putting a small stack at each front desk. At the front of my file, he looked at Hanako and I and deliberately counted out one extra sheet. When the stack reached me, I counted the pages, and there were enough for me to take an extra copy for Hanako and still have enough for everyone behind me. I wonder if he’d overheard Yamaguchi-sensei griping about having to do it and realized he should too. “Thank you, Miller-sensei,” Hanako said in her perfect English. He nodded and smiled as he left to supervise his own homeroom for lunch.

 Before Morisawa-sensei even made it back to watch us, the students on Lunch Duty left to go to the school’s kitchen, and soon returned with the trolley with our class’s food and dishes. They announced the menu of soup, vegetables, and meat, including where in the country the key ingredients came from, while the rest of us lined up to be served. Since I had Hanako Duty, Hanako and I went to the back of the line, for good reason. I took the chance to trickle a little more pee into my diaper while we waited our turn. 

 The Lunch Duty crew were making an efficient assembly line of serving the food, with one scooping the rice into a rice bowl, another spooning soup into the soup bowl, one for the vegetables, one for the meat, and one placing the dishes on the tray with a milk carton and chopsticks giving it to the next person in line. It only took a few minutes before I reached the front, and they handed me my tray, which I pressed against my abdomen with my right hand. Then after they made up portions for themselves and Morisawa-sensei, they brought out a smaller tray and dishes set, the size the first graders use, and scraped out the dregs of each pot to prepare a miniature portion, which I took with my left hand.

 I turned to where my friends Kenta and Yuuji had pushed their desks together and brought Hanako’s and my chairs over from my desk, when Hanako said, “Actually, Takeshi-kun, I was going to have lunch with Hikari-chan today.”

 Hanako’s range while haunting me wasn’t far enough to reach  from Kenta and Yuuji’s desks to the group of desks where Hikari and her other friends were eating. “Sorry, guys, it’s just for one day,” I said, and maneuvered around the desks where my classmates were already eating to reach Hikari’s makeshift table, where she and her friends Yuka and Naoko had started eating and hadn’t left a space. “Here, it’s Hanako’s,” I said, and they looked at each other and shifted a little to make room. I put her tray down, then took my own in both hands and put it on my own desk.

 For their part, Kenta and Yuuji had sprung into action. Kenta brought my and Hanako’s chairs back and put hers in the spot at Hikari’s table and mine at my own desk. While Hanako took her seat, Yuuji negotiated a temporary desk trade with the student in front of me. Then both of them went back for their food and one more chair, until we had arranged the three of us at two desks with me back to back with Hanako.

 The problem with Hanako not sitting with me was that I had only seen what was about to happen from afar. I twisted my seat a bit to try to get a good angle to watch as Hanako reached out to pick up the chopsticks on her tray. Of course the chopsticks remained on the tray afterwards, because they’re physical and she’s not, but now she was holding in her hands a ghostly set of chopsticks, which she positioned in her fingers, then used to reach into the rice bowl. When she pulled them out, all the rice was still in the bowl, but there was a clump of ghostly rice pinched between the ghostly chopsticks, and she put it in her ghostly mouth, and made yummy noises as she chewed it.

 I had been on Lunch Duty the first week of the school year, and the food and nutrition teacher had explained what Hanako’s fourth grade class had discovered. They felt awkward about eating in front of her and her just watching them, so one time they scrounged together a little bit from everyone’s plate just so she’d have something in front of her, and to their surprise she was actually able to eat it, sort of. Every day after that they put a little extra in the pots for her class so they could give her a place setting. They didn’t give her a full portion because they didn’t want it to go to waste, although if it made her happy then it wasn’t a waste even if it was thrown in the garbage after. The most important thing, though, was she had to have her own serving, and after she “ate” it, nobody else could actually eat it. Someone tried sneaking the food off her plate once and Hanako reported feeling weird the rest of the day, which was significant for a ghost who you wouldn’t expect to feel anything.

 We ate our lunches between bursts of typical fifth grade conversation: what happened in an anime we all watched, or movies we were looking forward to. I was pleased that Kenta and Yuuji didn’t seem put off by my wearing a diaper, and would have been willing to include Hanako at our table. They had both had Hanako Duty the first week of class while I was on Lunch Duty, so we hadn’t formed our clique until after they were done with their first round. I’m ashamed to admit that I don’t know that I would have treated them the same if their turns had been later, considering how unhappy I had been at my own selection that morning. I was worried that wearing a diaper would make me feel like a baby, but the diaper didn’t have a babyish design, the elastic waistband meant it felt pretty much like underwear, and Hanako making me use it right away meant I wasn’t so self conscious about using it later. Plus, wearing it meant I got to sit with one of the smartest kids in class, which was the least babyish thing you can think of.

 And then, as we stacked our empty bowls and trays in the middle of the desk, I felt an urge. I looked over to Hanako, whose tray had as much food as ever, but she seemed to be done “eating” from it as she was listening in on the conversation between Hikari and her clique. I couldn’t tap her on the shoulder to get her attention, so I leaned in and whispered in her ear, “I need to talk to you in the hallway.”

 “We’re still talking. Can’t it wait until the chore period?” she asked. Probably by her own rules, it couldn’t, but rather than try to convince her of that, I excused myself to Kenta and Yuuji and started walking toward the classroom door. When I reached her haunting range limit she was dragged through her seat, and she hovered over everyone’s heads to avoid phasing through them until she could reorient herself and stomp after me. I assume she was stomping, anyways, since I was facing away from her, but I’m sure I heard the noise, which she must have made specifically so I’d know she was upset. I opened the classroom door, exited into the hall, and held it open while she joined me before closing it. “What’s so important that you can’t wait a few minutes?” she asked angrily.

 “I have to poop and I didn’t want to do it in the classroom,” I replied. 

 Her expression turned sheepish. “You could have just said that.”

 “I didn’t want to say it in class either.”

 “Do you think nobody else in class pooped while they had Hanako Duty?”

 “They didn’t poop in the classroom.”

 “Didn’t, or you didn’t notice?”

 I didn’t really feel like embarrassing anyone by asking her who, if anyone, had done it, since I wouldn’t want her to tell anyone what I was about to do, so I dropped that and concentrated on what I needed to do, in a place I was quite unaccustomed to doing it. “There’s no way I could poop in the toilet where you’d still be able to haunt me because you know I’d still wet the diaper, is there?” I asked.

 “One of my fourth grade classmates had that idea. He didn’t ask first, though. He just walked into the boys’ washroom and I got dragged in behind him. And it hurt, like I knew down to my soul that I shouldn’t be in there. What pain is must be one of those things I learned when I was alive without remembering how I learned it, but I had never felt it as a ghost until that moment. It was agony, and I cried, and when I realized what he was doing I begged him not to use the toilet, because if he did I didn’t think I’d be able to haunt him anymore, which meant I’d be stuck in the boys’ washroom in constant pain until someone else rescued me, if someone else ever rescued me. ‘Please don’t strand me here like this,’ I said, over and over.” Her eyes were starting to water.

 “What did he do?”

 “He didn’t use the toilet, but I think afterward he told other kids what happened, because the next day was the first time someone faked being sick to get out of Hanako Duty.”

 That settled things. I tried to decide how I should stand to make what I was doing less obvious when I had a worrying thought. “Going into the boys’ change room didn’t hurt like that, did it?”

 “I kept my eyes closed,” she replied. “I would have told you,” she added.

 Relieved, I decided that while my first thought had been to have my back toward the wall, the seat of my diaper would be hidden by my trousers, so I faced the wall so nobody passing by would see my expression. Then I immediately adopted a crouch that made it not matter because someone would definitely know what I was doing from the pose. I felt my poop get close to coming out, then my toilet training kicked in and tried to hold it back, but I kept pushing, confident that I was wearing a diaper, this is what it was for, and I had to do this for Hanako, and I was able to overcome my training and get the poop to emerge, where it quickly reached the liner of the diaper, pushing it out slightly, but mostly spreading forward and back, forming a sticky, slimy wedge that held my buttocks apart. Of course some pee came out at the same time, but the diaper had enough absorbency left to contain that, and the leg elastics kept the solid waste in place. I gave a last push to make sure everything was out of me, then stood up straight and came to a conclusion.

 I hated this. This felt really awful. It made sense that babies cried when they did this. When I was upset at getting picked for Hanako Duty that morning, I had worried about the emotional and social aspects of wearing a diaper because I had falsely assumed that I wouldn’t need to use it, and when Hanako insisted that I do, it was only pee, which I could barely feel, so I didn’t think about this at all. If I had, I would have been even more upset. I completely understood why people pretended to be sick to get out of Hanako Duty. I looked toward Hanako, expecting her to be smiling at me because at least I had done the thing I needed to do to let her stay in class, as though that would make it better, but she was blushing and distracted, fussing with the back of her skirt. Well, whatever. The only good thing I could say about this was that I was finished, which meant I could change—

 “Oh shoot,” I said, “I left the extra diaper in the bag at my desk.”

[kerry]

Torgen,

I generally don't read stories set in Japan because they always seem to be based on anime with which I am unfamiliar. I did, in fact, think this was one of them, which is why I had not read it until now. (I read "Too Late Magical Girl" a long time ago, and liked it, but others I've started reading have relied too much on tropes.) I am happy, though, that not only is your story not that at all, but the story and the narrative voice are both compelling in their own right. I'm enjoying this one a lot.

[Torgen]

Chapter 7

 “You won’t need it,” Hanako said, tugging down the back of her skirt while looking back at me. “If you soil yourself, you have to get cleaned up by Itou-sensei.” She was the school nurse.

 “I don’t remember it saying anything about that in the permission form,” I interjected.

 “This isn’t a Hanako Duty rule, it’s a general school rule,” she explained. “There was actually a Hanako Duty exception to it at first, but some of my third grade classmates did a bad job cleaning themselves, so they took the exception away.”

 “Then why do they even give us the second diaper?”

 “Some students make it through the day without pooping. If you only wet yourself you can use it. You might not even have to, but people felt more comfortable already having it instead of having to ask for another when they needed it.”

 I realized that I didn’t have time to discuss this. After lunch was a half-length chore period where all the students would do their assigned chores. The group from each class with Lunch Duty would be out soon to take the trolley of used dishes back to the kitchen to wash them, and students from every class would follow to go to their assigned hallways to sweep, or washrooms to clean. Since my only responsibility was chaperoning Hanako, the best thing I could do for them was stay out of their way, and the best thing I could do for myself was not let them see (or smell) me wearing a dirty diaper. As much as I didn’t want an adult changing me, students weren’t responsible for cleaning the nurse’s office, so it was a safe place to go. I started walking—well, more like waddling—toward the stairs, and Hanako followed, still walking but keeping her hands folded behind her back instead of swinging them.

 “I’m sorry you had to do that,” Hanako said as we started descending.

 I admit I wasn’t the best version of myself at that moment, but for some reason that set me off. “If you’re sorry, then what are you going to do differently?”

 “What?”

 “What are you sorry you did? Did you commit suicide so you could come back as a ghost and make primary schoolers wear diapers?”

 “I don’t remember being alive, so—no! No, there’s no way I could have done that!”

 We reached the bottom of the stairs and turned toward the nurse’s office as the bell rang for the end of lunch and the start of the chore period. Since the classrooms were all on higher floors and the ground floor only had things like offices and change rooms, we were probably safe from any students catching up to us before I got changed.

 “Then what decision do you regret making that caused me to poop my diaper?”

 She was flustered. “I— I mean— I wanted to go to class, but—”

 “And are you going to stop?”

 “Stop… going to class?” She started sounding sad. “It’s so boring in there on evenings and weekends and breaks. If I didn’t get to come out for class—if I never do anything then I might as well have stayed dead!”

 “Then it sounds like you’re not sorry.”

 “Do you want me to stop?”

 “Do I wish you had stayed dead so I wouldn’t have to poop my pants? Do you think I’m that petty? Do you think I’m that cruel?”

 “Then what do you want?” Now she was frustrated.

 What did I want? I wanted to not have a lump of poop pressing against my bum! But I was on the way to deal with that. I wanted her to talk to me instead of Hikari! That wasn’t anything to do with this conversation. I wanted her to feel what I felt right now, to suffer the cost of attending class instead of me! Maybe I was petty and cruel.

 “I want you to be honest. Don’t say you’re sorry if you’re not going to change anything, because that means you’re not sorry. You might feel bad, but you’re not sorry.”

 We arrived at the nurse’s office, where the door was open, and I took a deep breath and said, “excuse us,” as we entered. The office had two twin-sized beds each surrounded by a retractable privacy curtain hanging from the ceiling, a sink with cupboards, and a desk, where Itou-sensei sat wearing a doctor’s coat over her blouse and skirt.

 “Ah, Hanako-chan. And you’re… Suzu… hara-kun?” she replied. I had only been to the nurse’s office twice in my school career: once in second grade when I threw up, and once in fourth grade when I skinned my knee, so I was surprised she’d remember me so quickly. “If you’re here, I assume you’ve accomplished big things?” she asked.

 “Big and small,” I replied, catching her drift.

 “Get behind the curtain and undress,” she said. 

 “There’s no way I could change myself instead of having you do it, is there?”

 “If you wore diapers all the time, I’d give you the chance to convince me you were good enough at cleaning yourself,” she said over her shoulder as she stood up and headed to the sink. “Since it’s going to be at most seven times all year, it’s better if an expert does it so we don’t get any complaints from your classmates or parents.” I slumped my shoulders. Hanako and I went to the bed nearer to the sink and I kicked off my shoes, then pulled down my trousers as Itou-sensei opened a cupboard under the counter and took out a plastic changing mat, brought it over to the bed I had chosen, and spread it out. “Lie down on here, please,” she said and returned to the sink. “Of course if someone your age did wear diapers all the time, we’d probably ask them to escort Hanako-chan around every day, since it wouldn’t be any extra trouble,” she added. As she started putting on a pair of latex gloves, I peeked into the cupboard she had opened and saw it contained a few tubs of wet wipes and an opened package of “Super Big”-size tape closure paper diapers. I draped my trousers over the rail at the foot of the bed, then tried to figure out how to lie down without sitting on the mass of poop in the seat of my diaper. Eventually I laid on my stomach, then barrel-rolled onto my back. I pulled my shirt up as Itou-sensei returned wearing the gloves and carrying one of the tubs of wipes and a diaper. “Other side of the curtain please, Hanako-chan,” she said.

 “Okay,” Hanako replied and stepped around the curtain rather than phasing directly through it, which apparently was unusual enough that Itou-sensei gave it a second look, before drawing the curtain all the way to the foot of the bed. Since Hanako said nobody had ever asked, Itou-sensei probably didn’t know that today was the first time Hanako wouldn’t see through the curtain. It seemed like Hanako was now further from me than she had been able to be in the classroom or hallway; I wondered whether her rules considered the nurse’s office a washroom because it’s a place where diaper changes take place, or if instructions from an authority figure can bend her rules a little.

 Itou-sensei sat on the edge of the bed, put the tub of wipes next to me, then unfolded and flattened out the clean diaper and set it off to the side. “May I open you up?” she asked, putting her hands on one of the elastic sides of the diaper I was wearing, then pausing.

 “Okay,” I said, and she tore open the elastic, then moved her hands to the other side, tore that elastic as well, and pulled the front of the diaper open.

 “Oh good, you managed to avoid mushing it into yourself too bad. This shouldn’t take long. Lift up a bit, please.” I put my feet on the bed far to the sides to make sure they weren’t close to the mess in my diaper and lifted my bum up and she pulled the diaper a few centimeters away from me so there was room to work without the poop being in the way. “Lower, please,” she said, and I rested myself on the back of the diaper, but kept my feet in place until she put her gloved hand on the bottom of my thighs and pushed them back, then popped open the lid of the tub of wipes, pulled one out, and set to work wiping the poop off me.

 I didn’t feel much like talking and Itou-sensei didn’t press the issue, and that meant there was a silence that was soon filled by Hanako asking, “Which color of paper would you like—red or blue?”

 “They stopped making colored toilet paper because the dyes were carcinogenic,” Itou-sensei replied.

 Hanako didn’t respond. “I don’t think that’s the answer she was looking for,” I said.

 “Yeah, but you say red, you say blue, you say white, she doesn’t like it. Has to be something else. If you died of bum cancer from toxic toilet paper, you’d haunt a washroom, wouldn’t you?”

 “Or the company that made it,” I offered.

 “Hey, did you notice Hanako pooped her pants when you pooped your diaper?” she asked.

 “Sensei!” Hanako cried, mortified.

 “Oh, you’re back! I thought I had longer.” Then to me, “Maybe Hanako’s the one who should be wearing diapers.”

 “You shouldn’t bully a student like that,” Hanako said, incensed.

 “I’m not saying anything I wouldn’t tell your parents if you were alive,” Itou-sensei reasoned.  “Plus, it’s consistent with my bum cancer theory.” While I appreciated the out-of-the-box thinking, her idea didn’t seem to fit with Hanako’s answer to her own question, or with the wail of sorrow. I wasn’t sure whether Itou-sensei knew about those. 

 “Does that mean you have to clean her up when you’re done with me?” I asked.

 “It seems like cleaning you cleans her for free. I’m not sure what I’d do if it didn’t,” she replied. “Lift up,” she directed me, apparently finished wiping. The obvious feeling of anything slimy was replaced by the cool moisture left behind by the wipes. I put my feet out to the side and lifted my hips up, and she slid the dirty diaper out of the way and the clean one into position under me. “Lower,” she said again, and I put my bum on the back panel of the clean diaper.

 “I bet you didn’t think you’d be changing fifth-graders’ diapers when you took this job,” I said with a chuckle.

 “Well after third graders two years ago and fourth graders last year, I could see which way things were going,” she replied as she rolled up my dirty diaper and used the vertical tape at the rear to secure it closed. “Plus, the way I see it, there’s a girl with a medical condition that stops her from going to school.” She turned back to me and pulled the front panel of the diaper through my legs and over my crotch. “Now, there’s a way that she can go to class and have fun with her friends, but it means I have to wipe a bum every day or two,” she continued as she unstuck the left side tape from its backing and fastened it to the tape panel. “If I think that’s a bad trade, primary school nurse was the wrong job for me.” She repeated the process on the right side. “At that point, it doesn’t matter whether the bum belongs to the girl or someone else. All done,” she said, pressing the tapes firmly against the panel to ensure they were well stuck. She took the used diaper back to the sink and opened another cupboard which had a garbage pail in it, which she threw the diaper into.

 I swung my legs over the side of the bed, stood up, and looked down at myself. The diaper was white other than the colorful tape panel, but at least it had a geometric pattern, rather than something obviously childish like animals, toys, or anime characters. I took my trousers back from the foot of the bed and pulled them over my diaper, then slipped my shoes back on.

 “Excuse me, Itou-sensei?” Hanako said. Itou-sensei had taken her gloves off and thrown them in the garbage pail with the diaper, and was in the middle of washing her hands. She looked toward Hanako, who bowed deeply. “Thank you for always taking such good care of the students I haunt.”

 “You’re quite welcome, and thank you for letting me be a part of such an interesting student’s education,” Itou-sensei said, returning the bow.

 At a loss for a flowery way of saying it, I added, “Thank you for changing my diaper, Sensei,” with a bow of my own.

 “You’re welcome,” she said. “I suppose now that they’re assigning Hanako Duty by random draw, there’s no way to know the next time I’ll see you—It could be tomorrow, or two months from now. But I’ll be here whenever you need me.”

[Torgen]

Chapter 8

 “How do you feel?” Hanako asked as we left the nurse’s office and walked down the freshly-swept hallway toward the stairwell.

 I considered the things I had thought about wanting earlier. Unlike the underwear-style diaper with its elastic waistband, there was no give in the waist of the tape closure diaper I was now wearing, and therefore it was impossible to forget that I was wearing a diaper, but at least it was clean. The diaper change itself wasn’t as bad as I had expected. Itou-sensei hadn’t made me feel babyish; she was quite professional toward me. Oddly, she was somewhat unprofessional toward Hanako, I didn’t know their relationship. Hanako was talking to me, as she was when I was upset that she talked to Hikari instead of me. And Hanako had felt the same thing I had, which is probably what that fidgeting with her skirt was about, but instead of complaining about it she tried to make me feel better about what I was feeling. In summary, I felt like a jerk.

 “I’m sorry for getting mad earlier,” I said. “I know it’s a figure of speech to say ‘I’m sorry’ when you mean ‘I feel bad for you’.”

 “It’s okay, I thought you might be cranky.”

 What a word to choose. “Do a lot of kids have that reaction?” I asked.

 “Not as many as in third grade, but everyone deals with it differently. You get used to it after a while.” Said from experience, clearly. “The thing is, you were right. I made a choice that put you in that position, and I wouldn’t make that choice differently, so I shouldn’t have apologized.”

 “You shouldn’t feel guilty about choosing to go to class,” I insisted. “The law says everyone has to complete primary and middle school, so if anyone complains, you just tell them it’s the law.”

 We reached the stairs and started climbing. “I don’t think they could punish me for not going to class. Except they could exorcise me. I don’t think they’d exorcise me just for that. And that’s not the reason I want to go to school.”

 “Are you sure? I don’t need to be told I’d be punished for stealing to know I shouldn’t do it. If you believe something is right, you’ll enforce the rule against yourself without having to think about it. Maybe that’s why you stopped growing between when you died and when you started third grade again—so you wouldn’t be breaking the law by missing any school.”

 “I think I didn’t grow physically because I didn’t grow mentally, and my mind is all I am,” she said. That was an interesting theory. “And my most important rule should be to recognize what other people do for me, so what I should have said was, thank you for not using the toilet.”

 “There was no way I could after you told me what happened before.”

 “Which I only did because you cared enough to ask,” she pointed out.

 “I had a thought about what Itou-sensei said,” I segued. She started blushing in expectation. “Suppose she’s right.”

 “She is not right,” Hanako insisted, “it’s just nobody can tell because nobody uses my washroom as a washroom any more.”

 It took me a moment to figure out what that meant. “Oh, you poop when anyone poops!”

 “Yeah. For some reason it doesn’t happen with pee. It was only an issue when all the stalls were in use, but that happened enough that nobody wanted to take the risk anymore.”

 “Even so, If you wore a diaper, could you haunt yourself?”

 “I can’t change any of my clothes,” she replied, flustered. “I wish I could! This skirt is way too short, and I don’t know how it still fits around me.”

 “How do you know you can’t?”

 “I tried. Last year a girl took her clothes off while she was changing in my washroom in the morning, and she tried holding them around me, but I was still wearing the sweater and skirt.”

 We reached the second floor and turned toward the classroom. “Oh,” I said disappointedly, “that’s what I would have suggested.”

 “Speaking of Itou-sensei, you said clubs need the support of a teacher. Does it have to be a teacher-teacher, or could Itou-sensei do it as a staff member? She seems interested in answering my question, so she might support the Hanako’s Mystery Club.”

 I stopped, and she took two steps in place before she realized it and turned to face me. “Look, up until lunch, this was one of my best days at school ever. As of right now, it’s the worst. Worse than the time I threw up in class. You saw what I was like when I pooped the diaper. I don’t think I can take any extra Hanako Duty.” She tried to pretend she was okay with what I had just said, but I could tell she was disappointed. “I won’t try to get out of it when it’s my turn,” I continued, “and I won’t drag you into the boys’ toilet. I wouldn’t even mind coming to your washroom early every morning to help you fill in your homework, because I think that would need to be finished before homeroom. I hope you’ll still think of me as a friend. But unless the club can meet in your washroom… I’m sorry I offered something I didn’t know I couldn’t give.”

 She tried to smile, but I knew what her real smile looked like and it wasn’t that. “It’s okay. If Hanako Duty was fun, they wouldn’t let you get out of doing the other classroom chores when you had it. Maybe if you get used to it later in the year, we can try then.”

 “We’ll see,” I said, but as we returned to the classroom I was sure it would never happen.

 We had to wait outside the door briefly as the students cleaning the classroom finished up, then returned to my desk. Hikari was part of the classroom group, and Hanako went over to talk to her as usual while we waited for the classmates whose chores were outside the room to return. Once the chore period was over, Hanako returned to her chair, smiling in her familiar manner. I couldn’t feel jealous of Hikari at this point—as much as I would have liked that relationship with Hanako, it was reasonable for her to want to be friends with someone who could tolerate Hanako Duty better than me, and it seemed like Hikari was just such a someone. I still did my best at the classroom portion of Hanako Duty for the rest of the day. Morisawa-sensei took us to the art room, and since Hanako obviously couldn’t paint for herself, I did my best to follow her instructions. Then we came back to our homeroom for social studies, and she tried to participate as much as usual, though spending all her time at the school meant she was out of touch with current events. I wet my diaper lightly once in each class, since I was stuck wearing it anyways and I did have to admit it was convenient. And finally Morisawa-sensei returned for the end of day homeroom.

 Since he knew he’d see us again at the end of the day, Morisawa-sensei didn’t hand out homework during his own class, because he used his spare period to mark our assignment and gave back those papers and the new homework together during dismissal. Typically he distributed them like the other teachers had, by leaving a stack with the front row students to pass back, but today he took two stacks of paper from his briefcase and walked down the file of desks by the doors, taking a sheet from each stack and placing them on each student’s desk.

 “As you all know, today is the last day of the first cycle of Hanako Duty,” he said clearly for all to hear. “None of you would be in this class if your parents hadn’t given permission at the end of last year, and we would hope that they asked your opinion before making that decision, but ultimately that choice was up to them. So I would like to thank each of you for your contribution.” He reached the end of the file and started backwards up the next. “Of course on behalf of Hanako-san, but also all the other teachers at this school. We wouldn’t have this job if we didn’t have a passion for education, and it pained all of us to find out that there was a child who spent all her time at the school and wanted to go to class, but was unable to.

 “I’m sure you had concerns about what having Hanako Duty would be like, and I hope you found them to be unwarranted.” He turned around and continued down the file next to mine. “Every other student and every teacher at this school knows that it doesn’t represent a failing on your part—in fact it represents a virtue, and there’s no shame in helping someone. And if any student tried to make you feel ashamed, I hope you reported it to a teacher so that student could be corrected.”

 Ironically the concerns I had weren’t the ones I should have had. Hanako had said that the initial tests had been with students, and I think it would have been problematic to have her haunt a teacher, but I doubted that Morisawa-sensei had worn and used a diaper at some point and had someone change him so that he would know what we were going to experience.

 “Unlike the other chores, the work of Hanako Duty is spread throughout the day.” Instead of turning forward, he zig-zagged across the rest of the back ranks. “You don’t have a floor, or a washroom, or a blackboard to look at and ask yourself, ‘Could I have done better?’ You may look at what your classmates have done and say, ‘I don’t need to do more than them, because it’s just for one day.’ You may hear that you can sit out from Phys Ed class and say, ‘If I can, I will, because it’s just for one day.’ She may want to sit in a particular place, but you have her sit with you, just for one day.” Now he worked his way around the remaining desks on the window side of the room. “But all of Hanako’s days are someone’s ‘just one day’, and if everyone makes the choice to do the minimum for their day, then Hanako gets the minimum school experience. So as you each have Hanako Duty for what will for most of you be the second time, I would like you to challenge yourself to do the most for her you can. For you it might be a little extra trouble, but together you can help her have a better every day.”

 And as he said that he arrived at my desk, placing my marked homework and today’s blank assignment in front of me, then putting the remaining blank page in front of Hanako. “If you can get someone to help you fill it out, I’ll mark it for you,” he said to her. “If you can’t, at least you can practice for yourself. I’m sorry I didn’t think of it before.”

 “Thank you, Sensei,” Hanako said.

 “Thank you, Sensei,” I repeated, though I wasn’t sure if he would realize why. I was no longer worried that my classmates would resent me for raising the standard they would be held to for Hanako Duty, because Morisawa-sensei had asked them to hold themselves to a higher standard without mentioning me. I wondered if he had been planning to give this talk all along, but he probably wouldn’t have discouraged me from participating in Phys Ed class if he had, and the “just for one day” line echoed what I had said at lunch. Ironically, if that was when he made the decision, he would have had no way of knowing that I needed to hear that speech as much as them. Pooping myself may have dulled my enthusiasm for having Hanako Duty, but the reminder of how much it meant to Hanako meant that I wouldn’t take my distaste out on her.

 As I took my two pages and Hanako’s one and put them into my backpack, the bell rang, signaling the end of the school day.

[Torgen]

Chapter 9

 “I know Hanako Duty technically ends with the bell, but every Thursday after school the Visual Literature club meets—that’s our fancy name for talking about the manga we’ve been reading,” I said to Hanako. “I know you haven’t been reading any manga, but sometimes people bring what they read, or else you could get an idea of what you might like to read from what they talk about. Do you want to come?”

 “I thought you couldn’t take any extra Hanako Duty,” she remarked, understandably suspicious after my earlier confession.

 “I probably won’t have to poop again in the next hour and a half,” I said.

 “That does sound interesting, and I really appreciate the invitation, but actually Hikari-chan, Yuka-chan, and Naoko-chan are going to the shopping center at the train station, and they asked if I’d like to go with them,” she replied.

 The train station didn’t have what you’d call a fully-fledged mall, since it had to fit under the platforms and tracks. It was only two levels and maybe fifty stores, but it was within walking distance of the school and the shops seemed not to mind having us pre-teens around.

 “That’s very kind of them,” I said. “If you’re interested in my club, maybe if I don’t get my name drawn in the next week, I could volunteer to take Hanako Duty next Thursday. I’m sure everyone would let me take it, just like Sensei suggested during Phys Ed class, and that way it wouldn’t be extra, it would just be early.” I wasn’t sure if I should mention it to her, but based on what she and Itou-sensei said, if I needed to poop while on Hanako Duty I had to use my diaper, but if I didn’t need to poop it wasn’t a problem. If I knew I was going to volunteer for Hanako Duty on a particular day, I could use a suppository that morning to make sure I wouldn’t need to poop while I was at school, which meant there’d be nothing about Hanako Duty I wouldn’t like.

 “That sounds really nice, Takeshi-kun,” she said. “Ooh, I’m so excited to go shopping! I guess I won’t be shopping though, since I can’t hold money. You know this will be my first time leaving the school? Do you think I should tell the principal? Or my case worker at the Prefectural Exorcism Department? I guess I can’t tell him but I could get someone to tell him.”

 “It will only be an hour or so, right? And you’re not a prisoner here,” I reasoned. “At least, not their prisoner.” I stood up and took the bag with the unused paper diaper and my underwear to Hikari’s desk, where Yuka and Naoko had already gathered. “If you’re taking Hanako-san with you, then one of you will need this, right?” I asked.

 Hikari raised her hand, and I reached into the bag. “Just… wait until we’re in the washroom,” Hikari interrupted. Fair enough, my underwear was also in the bag so I was still going to need to carry it.

 We put our backpacks on and marched as a group to the east side third floor girls’ washroom, with Hanako and I in the lead. When we got there I knocked on the door and asked, “Anyone in there?” Hikari walked right past me and opened the door—of course, because she’s a girl, she didn’t need to ask. Hanako followed her in, since we were close enough that she could transfer her haunt from me to the washroom. They didn’t give any sign that anyone else was inside, so I followed them.

 I swapped my shoes for the washroom slippers, put my backpack on the ground, and took the spare diaper from the bag and gave it to Hikari. She went to the second stall and closed the door, and I went to the third stall and did likewise. I slipped my trousers off, then pulled open the tapes of my lightly-wet diaper with the characteristic ripping sound, rolled it up, and taped it to itself. Then I took my underwear out of the bag and pulled them up my legs. They felt so thin after having the diapers on, and I hoped the difference in thickness would help me to remember that I couldn’t trickle into them every time I felt a little pee coming anymore. I pulled my trousers back on and opened the stall door, expecting Hikari and Hanako to have left already, but they were waiting for me, with Hikari wearing her backpack.

 “Before we left, I just wanted to thank you for all you did for me today,” Hanako said with a bow.

 “You’re very welcome,” I replied, bowing back.

 “Later,” Hikari said with a little wave and turned for the door, and Hanako followed her out. I could barely tell that Hikari was wearing the diaper under her clothes, and probably only because I’d been wearing one myself all day.

 I started to put my backpack on, then remembered the homework. I opened the flap, took out a copy of each of the day’s blank assignments, and balanced them on the sinks so Hanako would be able to look at them when she came back. Then I shouldered the bag and went to the room where my club met.

---

 I arrived at the door to Hanako’s washroom carrying a 400 page monthly girl’s manga magazine under my arm. One of the fourth graders in the Visual Literature club had a subscription, and since she was finished with the issue she had brought it to the club in case anyone else wanted to read it, and was more than happy to give it to Hanako. Of course all the series in it were in the middle of their runs, but it could give her an idea of which ones she might want to read from the start in collected volumes. I realized I had never ended up asking her if she could control how far through a book she could see; she might not even know, but she would certainly have the chance to find out. In the worst case I could always tear the pages out and spread them out for her.

 I knocked on the washroom door. “Hanako-san, are you in there?” No reply. That was odd. I knocked again. “Is anyone in there?” Still nothing. I pushed the door open. Two of the homework pages were balanced on the sinks where I had left them; the third must have been blown off by the gust from the door, as it was on the floor.

 I had assumed that Hikari would have brought Hanako back by now. It wasn’t impossible that they could still be at the station, but they would be cutting it pretty close, since the school would be locking up soon. But Hikari would have to know that. Had something happened to one or all of them? I dared not to think that—all I could do was assume they were running late and would get here before they locked the gate. I picked up the homework page from the floor and used the magazine as a paperweight, holding the three homework pages in place with all their text visible, then left.

---

 When I got back home, instead of going into my own house, I knocked on Hikari’s door. Her mother answered. “Oh, Tacchan,” she said, using the extra-diminutive version of my name like everyone in the neighborhood, “what’s going on?”

 “Is Hikari-chan home yet?” I asked.

 “Of course! Just a moment.” She turned to the stairs. “Hikari-chan! Tacchan is here!”

 Hikari clambered down the stairs and took her mother’s place at the door. If I had to guess, I’d have said she wasn’t wearing the diaper anymore. “Hey, what’s up?” she asked.

 “I just came from school,” I said. “Hanako-san wasn’t in her washroom when I left, and there’s no way you could have passed me. What happened to her?”

 Hikari snickered. “Oh, Hanako-chan. She’s such a bore, isn’t she? She never goes anywhere, or does anything, or reads anything, or watches anything, or listens to anything, so she never has anything to talk about except school.” First of all, I didn’t think that was true, but also, weren’t Hikari and Hanako friends? That didn’t sound like the way you’d talk about your friend.

 “So you bought her a radio?” I asked, fairly sure Hikari hadn’t bought Hanako a radio.

 “No. We did show her a fun time at least. We started out by getting ice cream cones. We got her free samples to not waste too much. Do you think she can actually taste different flavors, or does she just say they’re all delicious because she thinks they should be delicious? Then we tried on some clothes, but as soon as we put an outfit back on the rack she changed back to her skirt and sweater.” Wait, did that mean that Hanako could change clothes, even temporarily? That was a huge discovery! “And then Yuka-chan and Naoko-chan pretended they both needed to pee at the same time, so we all went to the washroom together, I took my diaper off, and now Hanako haunts the train station. Or the first baby to get their diaper changed there. Either way, nobody ever has to suffer through Hanako Duty again. And we could only do it because you didn’t need the second diaper, so thanks for your hard work!”

 I stared at her in silence for a moment. “You did the cruelest thing possible to someone who was completely defenseless. I can’t believe I ever thought you were worth being friends with.”

 “Tacchan?” she asked as I backed away from her, then ran to my own door.

 “Mom, I’m home!” I yelled to my mother as I entered and kicked off my shoes.

 “Welcome back,” she said from the kitchen.

 I scrambled upstairs, entered my room, and took my backpack off. I knew I had to go to the station to help Hanako, and the backpack would slow me down, but I wasn’t sure what I would do when I got there. Then I realized there was only one option. I grabbed some of my allowance money and stuffed it in my pocket, then hurried back downstairs. “Sorry mom, I have to go somewhere. I’ll be back soon,” I said, putting my shoes back on and leaving without waiting for a response.

 As I turned toward the station, I heard Hikari’s voice behind me. “Tacchan, are you choosing a ghost over me? I did this for you too!” But I ignored her and ran as fast as I could.

[kerry]

Wow. Didn't see this coming. Girls can be so thoughtless and cruel. (Boys can too, but I'm addressing this specific case.)

 

[Torgen]

22 hours ago, kerry said:

Wow. Didn't see this coming. Girls can be so thoughtless and cruel. (Boys can too, but I'm addressing this specific case.)

 

Did it seem in retrospect like Hanako was more invested in the relationship than Hikari? I tried to foreshadow it a little bit, like them not sitting near her during gym and not leaving a place for her at lunch.

[kerry]

I admit I missed the foreshadowing, but that might be on me. 

[Torgen]

Chapter 10

 When I first started running toward the train station, I hoped that nobody had even realized that Hanako was stuck in the washroom, or at least that nobody cared, so I could slip in and rescue her without being noticed. As I approached, I saw two signs that my hope would not be fulfilled. First, from a distance, I saw a train on the inner pair of elevated tracks pass through the station without stopping. Normally rapid and express trains that were bypassing the station used the outer tracks for safety, as it meant the trains weren’t close to the platform while travelling at full speed. If a local train was passing through the station, that meant the station was closed, which would be a major issue since we were close to commute time. As I got closer, I saw the second, more obvious sign, which was that the patch of tarmac in the middle of the station’s bus terminal was full of people. It seemed that not only was the station out of service, but the entire shopping center had been evacuated as well.

 Nobody took much notice of me at first as I passed through the crowd, but when I reached for the door, someone yelled, “Hey kid, the station’s haunted!” at me.

 “Yeah, that’s why I’m here,” I said, and entered the ground floor of the shopping center. The lights inside were dim and flickering, and every few seconds one bank or another blacked out completely. The overhead boards that displayed the schedule of upcoming trains showed everything as passing through, until one of the blackouts happened, when the pixels scrambled for a moment. Occasionally a wail of rage was broadcast over the public address speakers. If I hadn’t known Hanako was responsible, I would have found it spooky. Instead I felt bad for her, and I wished she knew help was on the way.

 I reached my first destination: the pharmacy, which was locked. Of course it was locked; If they had evacuated the customers, it’s natural that they would evacuate the staff too. I jogged all the way back to the entrance I had come in through, stood near the crowd in the bus depot, and yelled, “Does anyone here work at the drug store?”

 “You think someone’s going in there with a ghost?” someone yelled back. “Forget it, kid, we already called the Prefectural Exorcism Department. They’ll be here soon.”

 “Then someone had better let me into the pharmacy before they get here!” I replied angrily. I took a deep breath and tried to calm down: I needed someone’s help, and I wasn’t going to get it by being combative. “Please. She’s my friend. She’s not dangerous, she’s just upset. I know I can help her. I just need something from the pharmacy.”

 I wondered what I would do if nobody stepped forward. Would I break into the drug store to get what I needed, when it would be obvious that I was the one who had done it? If I wanted to save Hanako, the answer was clearly yes, but thankfully I didn’t have to make that decision, as a young man wearing a uniform apron stepped forward. I held the door for him, then followed him through the shopping arcade as the wailing and the power flickers continued. As we walked, I decided that I wouldn’t tell Hanako that the exorcists were on the way unless I absolutely had to. I would do whatever it took to rescue her, but I would rather she didn’t feel forced into coming with me, even if I wasn’t the one doing the forcing.

 The young man took a key from his apron and unlocked the glass doors around the entrance to the pharmacy. As soon as he slid them far enough open I slipped past him and ran to the back of the store while he went to the register. I found what I was looking for quickly and took the package to the front. “I guess ghosts are pretty scary,” he said as he scanned it with the handheld barcode reader, but before he could finalize the purchase, the store’s power blacked out and the register rebooted. “This is why we had to close down,” he said. “It’ll take a moment to start up.”

 I took two thousand-yen notes from my pocket and dumped them in the payment tray. “Keep the change,” I said, grabbed my purchase by its built-in handle, and ran out the door.

 Hikari had said they went to the washroom right after trying on clothes, and the clothing stores were all on the upper level of the shopping center, so I went up the escalator, almost losing my balance a few times as it sped up and slowed down with the power flickers, then followed the signs to the ladies’ room. I took a deep breath and knocked on the door. “Hanako-san, are you in there?” I asked.

 “You’re awful! I hate you!” she yelled from inside.

 I pushed the door open. The eight-year-old version of Hanako was standing in the middle of the washroom, eyes red and hair blowing around like she was standing in a typhoon, the lights above dim and occasionally flickering. “Hey. You and I both trusted Hikari-chan, and I guess we were both wrong,” I said. “But look what I brought.” I held up my purchase: a package of “Super Big”-size tape-closure paper diapers. I hadn’t realized how much diapers cost, and all the underwear-style diapers the store had in their respective brand’s name for the XXXL size all came in large packages that cost more than I had brought, so these would have to do. “I’ll put one of these on, and we can get you out of here.”

 “You’re awful! I hate you!” she repeated.

 It was a good thing I knew that was a quote and not a feeling she was directing toward me, but it would be hard to tell if she was responding to what I said if that was all she could say. “Listen,” I said, “You’re not angry about dying right now, are you? You’re angry about Hikari-chan betraying you, and that happened to the older version of you. Can I talk to her?”

 She scowled for a moment, then closed her eyes and aged two years in front of me. “Everyone hates me,” Hanako said.

 “Everyone does not hate you,” I replied, putting the package of diapers on the floor, tearing it open, and taking one of them out.

 “Everyone thinks I’m a burden,” she said.

 The washroom had a fold-down diaper changing table. I was glad it had something so I didn’t need to use the floor, but I had hoped it would have a fixed table on the counter, because I had no idea whether the folding one would take my weight. I lowered the table, put the diaper on top, placed my hands on the changing surface, and slowly lifted myself off the ground. It seemed sturdy enough. This took a few seconds which I had not used to refute Hanako’s last claim, and unfortunately the time had not helped me come up with a way to do it. “That doesn’t mean they hate you,” I said.

 “It was so obvious. They even call spending time with me ‘Hanako Duty’,” she continued.

 “It’s the teachers who called it that, because to them it’s just another responsibility to assign,” I said. I unfolded the diaper and pressed it flat against the changing table. Had Itou-sensei done something special to stand up the leg gathers? That seemed like a good thing to do, so I did it.

 “It’s not just the teachers who think that, is it?” she insisted. “Would students pretend to be sick to get out of ‘Hanako Privilege’?”

  I slipped off my shoes. “You’ve never been in a class that had a pet, have you?” I asked. “My second grade class had a pet hamster named Iberico. Every day someone’s job was cleaning her cage and refilling her water and food, and we called that ‘Iberico Duty’. And yes, it was a chore, but we loved that hamster.” I pulled down my trousers and underwear in one motion, and realized it was probably a good thing the station had been evacuated, because right now would be a terrible time for a woman to walk into the washroom. I rolled the trousers up to use them as a pillow and put them at the head of the changing table. My underwear fell out and landed on the floor.

 “So now I’m a pet?” she asked.

 “No, you’re a person,” I said, not even thinking to use the word ghost, because in my mind now a ghost was just a kind of person. I rolled onto the changing table from the side and positioned myself on the back of the diaper. From this angle I could see that Hanako’s face was red, but it was probably more from being angry than having a full view of all of me. “But there is a responsibility that comes with you, and that responsibility has your name because you’re a person. Calling it anything else would be treating you less like a person.” I pulled the front of the diaper through my thighs and over my crotch, then unstuck one of the tapes from its backing and fastened it against the colorful tape panel.

 “A responsibility nobody likes or wants. Especially not you,” she hissed.

 “Yes, I did say that, and I wasn’t lying or being dramatic,” I said, hastily fastening the remaining tape and sliding off the end of the changing table to stand on my shoes, “but also, I just bought diapers with my own money and put one on myself, so let me get my trousers back on and we’ll get out of here.”

 “Why?”

 “So… you can go to school?”

 “Until someone decides they don’t want the responsibility and ditches me again.”

 “You don’t think I’m going to ditch you, do you?” Uncommonly for Japan, the washroom had a garbage can, probably so people could throw out diapers after using the changing table. I grabbed my underwear from the floor and threw it in the garbage. “There, now you know I can’t ditch you.” Would mom be mad that I had done that? She probably wouldn’t notice a particular pair of underwear going missing. “But why would I come get you if I was going to abandon you somewhere else?”

 “I don’t know, but you’re wasting your time,” she said with resignation. “I should thank Hikari-chan. She didn’t take away the only thing I had, she just showed me that I never had it to begin with.”

 This was bad. If Hanako had given up on going to school, which she thought was the whole reason she had come back as a ghost, then the threat of being exorcised wasn’t going to change her mind. “There are lots of things people choose to do even though they’re burdens,” I said. “When you have a hobby, there are parts of it that are a burden, but you do them to get to the fun part.” That was a bad example—Hanako couldn’t have hobbies because she didn’t have a body and couldn’t leave her washroom. “I’m a burden to my parents. I know that. But if something happened to me, they’d do anything to get that burden back.” Was this another bad example? She didn’t remember her parents, but she must remember the idea of having parents. “Having me made them happy, and me being born means I can be happy, and making happiness is the only point of anything. Your parents probably felt the same way, and if they didn’t, then they didn’t deserve you.” She seemed unmoved. “You love going to school. I saw how you smiled when you knew you’d be able to come to class this morning, and every time a teacher called on you. Going to class makes you happy, and if you stay here that happiness will never exist. It’ll be gone forever, and I don’t want that to happen, because the happiness is worth the burden.”

 “It wasn’t worth it to Hikari-chan.”

 “I don’t care.”

 “Or Naoko-chan.”

 “It doesn’t matter.”

 “Or Yuka-chan.”

 “It doesn’t matter!”

 “How can it not matter?” she roared. “The next time it’s their turn, all they have to do is leave me somewhere else and not tell you!”

 “I won’t let them.”

 “How will you stop them? Follow them around all day? Pick them up after class and drag them back to my washroom to make sure they don’t go somewhere else?”

 “They’ll never have Hanako Duty again, because I’m going to take all of it from now on! Okay? I’ll wear diapers forever if it means you can smile every day the way you smiled at me this morning!” I felt like I wanted to say more, but I was starting to tear up, so I left it at that.

 She seemed to be shocked into silence at what I had offered, and as so often happened, silence was an opportunity for young Hanako to ask her question. She shrank back to eight-year-old size and asked, “Which color of paper would you like—red or blue?”

 Only this time I could see her and the package I had left on the floor at the same time, with the kanji for “paper” followed by the hiragana for “diapers”, and it struck me: not once had Hanako said the word “diaper”—she called it “that”, or phrased her sentence so she didn’t need to. She blushed when someone else said “diaper”—ghosts don’t have blood, so that response must have come from when she was alive. She pooped her pants when someone near her pooped—a ghost shouldn’t need to poop at all, so she must not have had control over her bowels. Itou-sensei had been right after all: Hanako was the one who needed to wear diapers, and she was so embarrassed about it that she couldn’t say the word, not even when she was repeating the last thing she heard before she died.

 But so what? The question was about colors, and answering with those colors didn’t help. Unless there was something about a diaper being that color that was different than toilet paper. I looked down at myself and tried to imagine the diaper I was wearing being red or blue and what that would mean, but all I could think about was how bad a job I had done putting it on myself. Itou-sensei had been correct not to let me do this. The front panel was off center and the tapes were uneven. I wished I had brought enough money to be able to get the underwear-style… oh!

 “Can’t we get white ones?” I replied,” They’d look more like underwear.”

 And the air conditioning whirred to life and the lights turned back on. One bank of fluorescent bulbs blinked with an audible “ting-ting-ting” before stabilizing at its regular brightness. Hanako’s eyes darted all around, and she seemed to be muttering to herself. All I could think is that both versions of her had had a tough experience, and she could probably use a hug, so I stepped toward her and wrapped my arms around her shoulders. I intended it to be just a gesture, like when she had clutched her arms around my bicep in the morning, but to my surprise when my skin reached her I could feel her—cold and weightless, maybe, but undeniably there, and I squoze her as tight as I could until I felt her growing back to ten-year-old size in my arms.

 “Forever?” she asked, looking up at me, “Do you promise?”

 And I realized that forever wasn’t something I could promise to a ghost. “For as long as you need me to,” I said, and maybe I couldn’t promise that either, but it was the best I could do. “C’mon, let’s go home.”

 “Back to the school?”

 “No, to my house. More interesting than some old bathroom, right?”

[Torgen]

Chapter 11

 After straightening my diaper and putting my trousers and shoes back on, I took the package of diapers by its handle and Hanako and I proudly walked through the now well-lit shopping center and into the bus terminal. Sure, even if someone couldn’t tell from looking at me that I was wearing a diaper now (and why would they be looking at a ten-year-old’s crotch?), it would be pretty obvious from the opened package that I hadn’t had when I went in, but what did I care what they thought? What right did they have to judge me? They had a problem that they tried to solve with violence, and a mere ten-year-old had solved it with kindness and hygiene products. If anything, they were the ones who should be ashamed.

 That was what I decided I should feel as we walked toward the terminal, but as we reached the door my heart started to flutter. I couldn’t break stride, of course—I had to go outside to get home, and it would be pretty impolite not to tell them they could use the station again—but as I had noticed earlier, you can’t decide not to be embarrassed.

 As soon as we got into the open air, Hanako rushed up to the people waiting nearest the door and apologized to each of them individually with a deep bow. Again she was further from me than it had seemed like her limit had been for most of the day, but whatever rule governed that distance, apologizing to those you’ve wronged was clearly a more important one.

 The people she apologized to didn’t verbally accept the apology, but they did walk back into the station to continue their business. The clerk from the pharmacy came up to me and gave me the change from the diapers before going inside. Other than that, nobody acknowledged me at all. Eventually people stopped waiting for Hanako to apologize individually, and she stood next to me by the door bowing continuously at them as they passed until they had all gone inside. We didn’t see anyone from the Prefectural Exorcism Department. We couldn’t tell whether they hadn’t arrived yet, had left when they realized the problem was taken care of, or hadn’t actually been on their way to begin with, but I was sure nothing good could come from waiting for them, so Hanako wrapped her arms around the bicep of my hand that was holding the diapers, which I could feel this time, and we started walking home.

---

 I wasn’t sure why neither of us said anything for a while. Maybe it was because earlier our time had been limited—by the gap between periods, by the length of the walk to wherever we were going, by the end of the day and my release from Hanako Duty—so we had to talk about things when we had the chance, and now we had all the time in the world. Maybe it was because those conversations weren’t very important, and they couldn’t hold up to how important what we spoke about in the station washroom was. Maybe we were just emotionally exhausted from what both of us had been through. In any event, just as nature abhors a vacuum, Young Hanako abhors a silence, so I wasn’t too surprised when she asked, “Which color of paper… wait, you said, didn’t you? White like underwear?” Okay, I was surprised by the second part.

 “You remembered?”

 “Barely. I feel like my memories are behind a wall, and I thought the question was a crack in the wall, but now it seems like there’s a door that’s locked from the other side, and when you gave that answer the door opened, but whatever happened while it was open went back through the door.”

 “Does that mean it’s the right kind of wrong?”

 “I feel like it’s wrong, but it should be right. It’s more right than the right answer, even though I don’t know what the right answer is. Maybe that’s why the door opened.”

 “But that didn’t stop you from asking.”

 “I’m more worried that I don’t understand what’s right about it. People told me they tried saying ‘white’ before and that was wrong, so I don’t know why underwear makes it more right. What does underwear have to do with paper? But you must have some idea, right, Takeshi-kun? You said it, after all.”

 “I have a theory,” I said, “but I have to do some research before I tell you. I don’t want to open the door until I’m sure I can help you with what’s on the other side.” I didn’t intend to keep it from her forever, maybe not even another day, but I definitely didn’t know enough yet.

 “Okay,” she said, and clutched me a little tighter. “I trust you.”

---

 Dad’s car was in the driveway when we made it back to my house—luckily for him he didn’t commute by train. I stepped through the door with Hanako on my arm and said, “Mom, Dad, I’m home!”

 “Sorry for intruding,” Hanako added.

 Mom came through the kitchen door into the hallway. “Tacchan, where have you been? Who’s this girl? Why is her skirt so short? Why do you have diapers?”

 “Those are all great questions,” I replied. “Let’s talk about it in the kitchen.” I slipped my shoes off and stepped onto the wooden floor. Hanako moved to step up with me, and I interrupted her quietly. “Hanako, your shoes.”

 “I can’t take them off,” she replied.

 “Have you ever tried?” I asked. She thought deeply about it. I had noticed she wore her shoes in the washroom, not slippers, so she had probably been wearing them when she became a ghost, and since she hadn’t had to change footwear to follow the mother and son out of her washroom the first time, she wasn’t in the habit of changing out of them when she came back. Plus, she mostly hovered until today. I think she realized the same thing. She stepped on the heel of her left shoe with the inner arch of her right and pulled her foot free. She looked at me in amazement, then repeated the process with the other foot and stepped up onto the hallway floor in her stocking feet. I noticed that the shoes vanished behind her as soon as she wasn’t touching them anymore, and I hoped I hadn’t made a mistake, but Hikari had said Hanako had been able to try on clothes, but the outfit she was wearing had come back. I was confident that the shoes would come back later when she needed them.

 I left the package of diapers at the foot of the stairs and we walked together to the living-dining-kitchen area at the back of the house. Mom had left the doorway to keep tending to the food, and dad was sitting at the dining table sipping a can of beer. Thankfully we had a four seat dining set despite there only being three of us, just in case a guest visited.

 “I don’t mind if you want to bring a friend home, but you have to let me know sooner so I know how much to make,” Mom said. “Do her parents know she’s here?”

 “They couldn’t possibly,” I replied. “Mom, can you put the stove on low so we can talk? I’ll answer all those questions, but this is something we should talk about face-to-face.”

 “If her parents don’t know she’s here, we’d better call them,” she insisted. “What’s their number?”

 “It is absolutely impossible to call them,” I replied. “Mom, please, this is serious.”

 “Honey, we always told him if he has something important he needs to talk about, we’d be here for him,” Dad interjected. “If he says it’s serious, we can let the food get a little cold.”

 Mom took a deep breath, turned off the burners and the fish broiler, then took her seat next to Dad, still eyeing Hanako a bit suspiciously. I held the seat that was usually spare for Hanako, pushed her in once she was seated, then took my own usual chair. “Mom, Dad, do you remember that permission form the school sent home at the end of last year for whether you’d let me be in the class with the ghost that haunts the school? Well, this is the ghost. This is Hanako-san.”

 “It’s nice to meet you,” Hanako said with an abbreviated bow.

 “She’s a ghost? Because I’d expect a ghost to float around and be transparent,” Mom said. I peeked at Hanako, and she was more opaque than she’d been earlier in the day. It must have been gradual so I didn’t notice at the time. She demonstrated reaching her hand directly through the tabletop, and Mom jerked back startled. “Okay, she’s a ghost.”

 “Yes. Today was my first day hosting her during the school day, and as a result of some events that happened, I have lost confidence in my classmates’ ability to do a good job at it, so starting tomorrow I’m going to tell my teacher that I plan to host her on a permanent basis. That means I would have to wear diapers at school every day.” Since Hanako was the one wronged by Hikari, I was going to leave it up to her how to deal with the consequences of that; me tattling on Hikari now wouldn’t make a difference to what I was telling my parents.

 “Well if you just have to wear them, that’s not too bad, is it?” Dad asked.

 “I feel like whoever wrote the permission form may have thought it was implied, but while I’m wearing them, I do have to use them,” I replied. “For everything.”

 “I don’t think I would have given permission if I had known that,” Mom said. 

 “Because of when the events took place, I wouldn’t have been able to take Hanako-san back to the school before they locked the gate,” I continued, “so my only choice was to bring her home for tonight. That’s why I bought the diapers you saw in the hallway, and it’s why I’m wearing one now. Since I’m always going to be hosting her at school, I thought that it would be nice for her to get some of the experiences that a living child would have by spending nights and weekends and holidays with us. That would require me to wear and use diapers all of the time.” Hanako looked at me in surprise. Did she think ‘forever’ just meant the end point? Because I had intended it to mean continuously until then. “Because she doesn’t have a physical body you can’t really stop me from bringing her home, but you could discipline me for it, so I would like your approval.”

 “You want us to change your dirty diapers so you can have a ghost girl stay with you?” Mom asked dubiously.

 “No, I don’t want you to change my diapers any more than you do!” I insisted. “I’d take care of all of that myself. If it were my choice, the only way you’d know I was wearing diapers at all is there wouldn’t be underwear in the laundry. Except, up until now the school has supplied the diapers because nobody knew until that morning that they would need them. If it’s always going to be me, they may expect me to provide my own. I’ll have to find that out tomorrow, but if so, since they’re essentially clothes, I’d hope that you’d buy them, and pay me back for the ones I already brought. If you disapprove, I guess I’ll have to buy them with my allowance. I may need you to increase my allowance.” And I might not have any money left for manga, but so it goes.

 “Do you know how much they’d cost for the rest of the year?” Dad asked.

 “It would be this year, next year, middle school, high school, maybe university. If she finds peace, or gets reincarnated, or meets someone else she’d rather haunt, I could stop, but I’m prepared for this to be for the rest of my life.”

 “Tacchan, you’re way too young to be making decisions that affect your whole life,” Mom opined.

 “Children make decisions that affect their whole life all the time,” Hanako said, staring straight at Dad—or was it into the middle distance? “Like whether to cross the road safely.” Her eyes focused, and she flitted them back and forth between Mom and Dad. “I’m sorry, it wasn’t my place to speak.”

 “Hmm,” Dad said. “Are you doing this because you like her?” he asked me.

 “If I hated her, I would have done the same thing. It was the right thing to do, and I was the only one who could do it.” I hoped I was a good enough person that that was true.

 “But what are people going to think?” Mom asked.

 “They’re going to think I’m haunted,” I said, matter-of-factly.

 “I mean what are they going to think about the diapers?” She asked like she thought I was being facetious.

 I remembered leaving the shopping center at the station, when I was so worried that everyone would realize I was wearing a diaper based on me carrying the opened package, and everyone focused on Hanako and her apologies instead. “They’re not going to think about the diapers. They’ll be too busy thinking about how I’m haunted,” I said. “And if they ask, I’ll tell them the truth. I have nothing to be ashamed of.” Maybe if I kept telling myself that, it would eventually become true.

 “Well, like you said, the school gate is locked, so for tonight she’s our guest,” Dad said. “Hanako-san, it’s very nice to meet you. As for the rest, I think we’re going to have to talk about it before we come to any conclusions, but this was important and I’m glad we were able to discuss it as a family. Darling, I think we can continue with dinner now.”

 Mom stood up and returned to the stove. “I suppose if she’s a ghost that means she doesn’t need to eat.”

 I looked at Hanako and got a sense that she was going to try not to impose. “She doesn’t need to, but she can. It doesn’t have to be a full portion—just a little sample of everything is fine, but it has to be hers. Think of it like an offering.”

 She already had three sets of bowls, trays, and chopsticks on the counter, so she got a fourth set from the cupboard and drawer, then took out a kitchen knife and trimmed a bit from two of the three fish fillets she’d been broiling, and soon she had trays ready for each of us, with a rectangular plate of fish in the middle surrounded by bowls of rice, soup, and two kinds of vegetables. She brought over Dad’s full serving first, then her own and my curtailed portions, and finally placed the tray with the trimmings in front of Hanako. “There you go, dear,” she said.

 “Thanks, Mom,” Hanako said, then realized what she had said. “I mean Suzuhara-san! I’m sorry, I don’t even remember my mother! I don’t know why I said that!” Mom actually seemed slightly less upset as she returned to her seat, and we thanked her for the food and started eating. After a moment Hanako said, “Sorry to interrupt. I don’t remember watching television, but I feel like I know what a television set should look like.” She pointed at the 40” flat panel in the living area that you could get from any electronics store for 40,000 yen. “Is that a television? It’s so big, and so flat. Are you incredibly rich?”

[Haku]

Cute story, I approve.

 

[Torgen]

More Japan Things

• Most of the pencilboards I've seen have been promotional items for anime or manga, so I have no idea if they're used anywhere other than Japan. Basically they're a semi-rigid thin piece of plastic, and when you're writing in a notebook or on a pad of paper, you put it under the page you're writing on so you don't leave impressions of the pages underneath. It's not as thick or as rigid as a clipboard, but it's smooth enough that you could use it as a writing surface on your lap, or on a bed.
• In Japanese houses, usually the bathroom does not have a toilet in it. It's common for there to be a door between the sink/vanity and the bath part (the wet area). Also, shower over tub is rare. Instead you have a standalone tub, and a thermostatic faucet with a detachable shower head, often at sitting height rather than standing height, with a floor drain. You're supposed to wash yourself first, and then when you're clean you get in the tub just for soaking. Because you're already clean when you get in the tub, the entire household can reuse the same bathwater. Some tubs have a heater in them to keep the water warm through everyone's bath. Also note that apartments and hotels may have a shower-over-tub depending on how limited the space is, and really small apartments will have no bathroom at all, especially if there's a public bathhouse nearby. It works generally the same at public baths and hot springs, except the bath is big enough for lots of people to fit in at once and there are rows of washing stalls on the walls for people to use.

Chapter 12

 “You don’t have to let me stay with you all the time,” Hanako said quietly, once my parents couldn’t hear her and take her up on it.

 Since Mom had cooked and Dad had been at work all day, my chore was cleaning up after dinner, so I was washing the cookware. It would have been really nice if Hanako was physically able to dry them while she was hanging around, but I couldn’t hold that against her. Upstairs I heard Mom drawing the bath. As the breadwinner, Dad would obviously use it first. I had offered to go last; I hadn’t said that the reason was because I was wearing a diaper, because I had told Mom she shouldn’t be able to tell that I was wearing them, but I’m sure she realized it and would have insisted if I hadn’t offered. The sound of the kitchen sink followed by the bathtub inspired in me an urge to pee, and I released it into my diaper immediately. I figured there was now no reason to even try to hold it, and I didn’t want to risk Hanako coming to believe I wouldn’t use it when there was no longer someone else she could count on.

 “I may not have to, but I should if I can,” I replied.

 “You said you hate soiling yourself,” she said.

 “You said you hate being alone in your washroom, and that’s more of the day than it takes me to get my diaper changed,” I countered as I put the last pot on the drying rack.

 “When you said ‘every day’ that didn’t have to mean ‘all day’ too,” she offered.

 “That’s true now, but what about middle school? Do you think they’ll let you haunt their washroom? You already thought our school wanted you to give yours back. And if it’ll be all day then, I need to get used to it now, if I can,” I said, starting to load tableware into the dishwasher.

 “Do you think your parents will let me stay here? Now, I mean, but also, for that long?”

 “I think Dad was leaning yes and Mom was a hard no, which is not a good average, but that was before you called her Mom. This is a three bedroom house, but it’s just Mom, Dad, and me, so we use the other one for storage. Seems like they thought they might have another kid when they bought it. Not sure why they didn’t—maybe Mom had enough of changing diapers? But if they wish they had, you might have scored some points with that.”

 “Maybe if they don’t agree to every day, you could talk them into a few nights a week, or just the weekends. That would be better for you too, to have some time… alone.” I felt like that was a particularly strained way of avoiding saying the word ‘diaper’.

 “I’ll get you as much time outside that washroom as I can. After all, you’ll fall behind in social studies if you keep not being part of the society we’re studying.”

 “Do you like me?” she asked. This wasn’t exactly a segue, considering my insistence. “I know you don’t hate me because you said ‘if’, but you could have said yes when your father asked and you didn’t, so I’m not sure.” I heard the bath finish running upstairs, followed by the sound of the shower wand as Dad started cleaning himself off before immersing himself in the warm bathwater.

 “I thought what he wanted to know was if this was a boyfriend-girlfriend thing, and I didn’t answer because I didn’t know if you wanted it to be a brother-sister thing,” I said.

 “I don’t know what either of those are.”

 “Neither do I, but we can figure out what it is and then figure out what it’s called.”

 “Okay. But you didn’t answer,” she insisted.

 “I like what I know about you, which isn’t much,” I said.

 “I don’t know much about myself,” she admitted. “Or there just isn’t anything to know.”

 “Then we should make sure you learn things. The more time you spend outside your washroom, the more interesting you’ll be.” I closed the dishwasher and started it running, then grabbed a garbage bag from under the sink. “We’ll have a bit of time before it’s my turn in the bath. We should use it to get started on our homework,” I said. 

 Hanako nodded and followed me down the hall to the stairs next to the front door, where I guess I had technically already failed to have Mom not be able to tell I was wearing diapers since the opened package was still here from earlier, although she had seen it already and it didn’t actually prove I had one on. I picked it up on my way up the stairs and noticed it had instructions on it, although after a quick read they were clearly not meant for the use of the wearer and wouldn’t have helped me put it on any better on my first try.

 When we reached my room, I put the diapers and the empty garbage bag in the closet where Mom wouldn’t have to see them, then opened my backpack, took out my blank assignment pages, a pen, and a pencil board, and sat at the head of my bed, spreading the pages out facing away from me. Hanako sat at the foot of the bed. “I left your copies in your washroom, so we’ll both have to work from my set for now,” I said. “Figure out what your answers will be, then I’ll write mine down without showing you, and in the morning we can go early and fill out yours.”

 “Okay,” she replied, and started looking at the Japanese homework. I turned the math assignment around to face me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her tracing a kanji character with her finger once in a while. We both worked on our pages in silence for a few minutes, but she never asked her question. I wasn’t sure if the ‘underwear’ answer was good enough to let her suppress it even if she didn’t understand it, or if she only asked when silence was combined with boredom, and thinking about the assignment was interesting enough. That reminded me that I had something to search online regarding Hanako’s question, but while it would have been a good use of time to have her look at homework while I was searching, I didn’t actually know how long it would take, I wasn’t sure I wanted to do it now when I knew I would get interrupted, and I had a particular reason to not want to use my chair.

 “I think I’m ready,” Hanako said after a little while. I thought it was a bit long to spend on a Japanese assignment, but she had to memorize her answers so I could write them down in the morning, and she hadn’t done homework since she was alive, which she didn’t remember, so I was willing to cut her a little slack. I put the English assignment in front of her, then took the Japanese homework and my pencil and pencil board and started writing my name and answers.

 Down the hall I heard the door to the bathroom open, followed closely by Mom starting the shower. “Sorry,” I said, putting the paper and pencil down on the blanket.

 “Mmm? For what?” Hanako asked, not looking up from her page.

 I slid off the bed, took a slight squat, and pushed a load of poop into my diaper. I had less trouble overcoming my training this time, as though the experience from this afternoon had taught me that a diaper was a place I was allowed to do it. “That,” I said.

 “Oh,” she gasped, shifting so her bottom wasn’t directly on the bedspread, even though the poop in her underwear wasn’t real.

 “I was worried I already held it too long. I guess you don’t know exactly what your rules are.”

 “You can’t hold it until Hanako Duty is over, but you can try to be considerate,” she said. “The longest anybody held it was the boy who tried to use the toilet. Everybody else did leave the classroom first. I was upset at being pulled out of a conversation I just realized I wasn’t part of.”

 She must have been referring to what we talked after lunch when she got snippy at me about not waiting for her. I wondered how sure she was on the timing of when the pain started and stopped when she got dragged into the boys’ washroom. Was it actually going into the washroom that caused the pain, or was that just when she knew he was holding it for too long? “Tell me if you ever think I’m breaking a rule and I’ll stop,” I said.

 “Okay,” she said, looking up from the homework briefly.

 I laid on the bed on my stomach with my thighs hanging over the edge and my toes touching the floor so I didn’t put any pressure on the lump I had just made, then continued the assignment. I was glad I had to poop before my bath. After would have been much worse, since I didn’t have any kind of wet wipes. I wasn’t sure if using the washlet to clean up after using a diaper was okay. During might also have been bad, but it sounded like I could have got out, put my diaper back on, pooped in it, taken it off, washed myself again, then got back in. A bit convoluted, but better than polluting the bathwater.

 I finished the page at around the same time Hanako was done memorizing her answers to the English homework, and I thought I heard the splashing of Mom getting out of the bath. “Can you wait here, and do you want to?” I asked.

 “Why would I be able to?” she countered.

 “If I put the diaper I’m going to change into after the bath on the bed, can you haunt it because it’s going to be my toilet?” I clarified.

 “If that worked, I’d be able to haunt the teacher’s lounge, or the nurse’s office,” she replied. “Although there would be good reasons not to haunt the nurse’s office.”

 “The way Itou-sensei treats you?” I asked.

 “The privacy of other students,” she said. “She tells everyone about my pooping their first time so they don’t feel as bad. She doesn’t really tease me that much.”

 I stood up and went to the closet to get a diaper from the package, and she followed me instead of getting dragged by her distance limit. Then I opened a dresser drawer and took out a pair of pajamas, and sandwiched the diaper between the top and the bottom. Maybe that was pointless—if Mom saw me, her seeing my clean diaper was less of a concern than her smelling my dirty one.

 I heard the bathroom door open, and Mom called down the hall, “Tacchan, the bath is open.”

 “I’ll be there in a second,” I said. I waited until I heard her bedroom door close before opening my own and waddling down the hall to the bathroom. This time Hanako waddled beside me, and didn’t try to cover her accident with her skirt. 

 When we were in the bathroom, I locked the door, then took off all my washable clothes and dumped them in the laundry hamper, leaving me wearing only my soiled diaper. Hanako looked away while I undressed, which I thought was a bit silly, although maybe the strange part was my willingness to get naked in front of her. I figured in the washroom at the station I didn’t have time to be shy because the exorcists were on the way, and since she’d seen everything then, there was nothing to hide now.

 I opened the sliding door to the wet area. “Should I wait here?” she asked.

 “It might be too far,” I replied. “Don’t you want to try having a bath? That’s something living people do.”

 “The water won’t know I’m there,” she said.

 “But you will. It feels really good. If you don’t try it, you’ll never know.”

 She considered it for a moment, then followed me into the wet area, still averting her eyes. I knelt near the shower faucet with my feet splayed out to the side so the seat of my diaper was just above the tile floor, then undid the tapes. The diaper flopped to the ground, but my poop remained stuck to me. I jiggled my buttocks a bit to get the poop to detach, then rolled up the diaper, taped it closed, and set it at the far corner away from the bath and shower so it wouldn't get water on it. I realized that might mean Hanako would also be stuck there since that was my most recent toilet, but I’d move it closer if that turned out to be true, and we’d learn something about her rules.

 I returned to the faucet, took the detachable shower head in one hand, pressed the lever to turn on the water flow with the other, and pointed it straight at my bum, and only when the water running off me into the floor drain was clear did I sit down on the plastic stool and start washing my hair and the rest of my body. Hanako still faced away from me, even though my sitting meant she wouldn’t be able to see the most important part of my nakedness, but it also meant I could see that her accident had indeed disappeared when I cleaned myself up. It also seemed like she was still stuck to me, not the diaper, even though the bathroom didn’t have a toilet in it. I suppose the rules knew even someone who wears diapers needs to bathe.

 “Okay, your turn,” I said when I was done washing.

 “I can’t be dirty,” she said.

 “That’s how baths work. You have to wash before you get in.”

 “I know how baths work,” she insisted. “Somehow.”

 She sat on the plastic stool and I stood behind her and held the shower head over her, and of course the water passed right through her onto the stool. Then I pointed it aside as she reached out to the shampoo pump, and a dollop of ghostly shampoo appeared in her hand. She rubbed her hands together and made a lather which she rubbed into her hair, then I brought the shower head back and it rinsed away and vanished, even as the water audibly splashed onto the stool again. She rubbed her body with her hands as though she was scrubbing it, and I considered suggesting that she take her clothes off since that’s what you normally do in a bath, but she was so shy about my nudity that I assumed she’d be even shyer about her own. Also, I wasn’t completely sure she was going to be able to get her shoes back, and if I was wrong then I didn’t want to have to explain to my teachers and classmates why she was permanently naked.

 “I’m ready,” she announced, and I turned the water off and hung the shower head on its hook. I considered offering her the first chance to bathe, but in certain positions we could both fit in the tub at once, and being underwater was a better way to mask my nudity than most of the alternatives, so I stepped into the bath, got my waist below the surface, then went to the far end and faced her with my knees clutched to my chest. She stepped in hesitantly. “It’s warm,” she said.

 “That’s the idea,” I replied.

 “I don’t usually feel things being warm,” she clarified. “Your hug earlier was warm.”

 She brought her other leg into the tub, then sat in the same pose as me, and seemed to enjoy the bath for a little while. Then she did something strange: she turned around and started leaning toward me. The bath wasn’t wide enough for us to fit side by side, so my only choice was to spread my legs to make room for her. She slid her bum in front of my lap—not on top of it, thankfully—and leaned against me, and I felt a cool spot where her back touched my chest, but not cold like before. My only thought was, siblings can bathe together, right? Ten might be a bit old, but I was sure a family bath was a thing I had seen in a famous anime movie. Because in my heart, even if we were the same age, even if she was technically twenty-something years older than me, what was leaning against me was a little sister who needed my help with things, and I was a big brother who would always look out for her. That’s what this was. That’s what this was going to be. That’s what I was going to talk my parents into.

 And when she shifted and her bare shoulders slid across my chest, I realized her sweater had disappeared. I didn’t check if the rest of her clothes were gone—she was my sister, after all!—but if they were, as her big brother, I would help her deal with it. And at least it wasn’t my fault.

[Torgen]

Chapter 13

 Hanako’s clothes came back the moment she started standing up, which was a relief to me, both directly and in terms of what it meant for her shoes. I did close my eyes to avoid looking up her skirt, although I had to guess when she was out of the tub to know when I could follow her. After drying off and collecting my used diaper, we returned to the dressing area. Once I was sitting on the fresh diaper with the front panel covering my crotch, I asked for her help making sure I had the tapes even, since she had a better angle on it than me. She was a little embarrassed by it, but considering not having a body meant she couldn’t do any chores,  this was a thing she could help with which would make her feel like she wasn’t just a burden. After putting my pajamas on, we stopped at the toilet on the way back to my room, where I opened up my used diaper, dumped the poop in the bowl, and flushed it away, because the instructions on the package of diapers had been very clear that I should do that. It seemed like a good idea, since it would keep the diaper from stinking up my room as much until burnable garbage day.

 When we got to my room I put the diaper in the garbage bag in my closet, then collected the two unfinished assignments from my bed and spread them on the edge of my desk. “I want to look something up on the internet,” I told her, so she hovered (like humans do, not like ghosts do) over the edge of the desk looking at the pages while I sat at my computer and searched for ‘red and blue paper diapers’. The text results weren’t very interesting, but one of the images caught my eye: two packages of training pants, one blue for boys and the other pink for girls. Pink wasn’t red, but it’s related to red. I thought back to a hot spring vacation we had taken a while back, when the curtain on the women’s bath and change room had been red. Was it possible that was what the question was about? Thinking of hot springs made me realize a trip like that was less likely to happen now that I was wearing diapers. I did remember a child wearing a swim diaper in the bath, but I wasn’t sure the resort approved of that, I wasn’t sure they’d approve of a ten-year-old wearing one, and I wasn’t sure if they came in my size.

 I was distracted from my distraction by a knock. “Tacchan, are you decent?” Mom asked.

 I changed tabs in my browser—if mom shouldn’t be able to tell I was wearing diapers, she shouldn’t see that I was searching for them. “Yep, come in,” I said, turning the chair toward the door, and she opened it.

 She was holding a set of pajamas in her arms. “I don’t know how clothes work for ghosts, but I looked through the storage room and found these pajamas you outgrew. She’s a little smaller than you, and I thought since she’s spending the night… Her skirt is so short… Maybe I’m being silly, she went right through the table, but she held the chopsticks…”

 “Thanks Mom, that’s great, I’ll give them to her,” I said, standing up and stepping to the door. She gave me an odd look. Had I crinkled? Was my bum puffy? Did it matter? Even if she didn’t notice, she knew. I took the pajamas from her.

 “Your father and I are going to watch some television,” she said.

 “We have to finish our homework. We’ll be down afterwards,” I replied.

 “Good boy.” She closed the door.

 “You could have told her I can’t change clothes,” Hanako said, not looking up from the papers. It seemed like her haunting range might have stretched a bit since she was still in the same place by the desk.

 “I think there are rules about changing your clothes, but none of them says you can’t,” I said.

 “Based on what?”

 “You said that you were surprised your skirt still fit around you, but you didn’t mention your shoes. I saw you grow from eight years old to ten in front of me, and your shoes grew with you.”

 She looked at her feet. “What does that matter? I don’t have them anymore.”

 “You still do, you’re just not wearing them right now.”

 She looked up at me. “Then where are they?”

 “Wherever your clothes went when you tried on outfits with Hikari-chan. Or when you were in the bath.” She blushed a shade of red from outside space and time. “I didn’t look,” I added.

 She lifted one foot off the ground, balancing over the other as though gravity held sway over her, and stared at it. Then her eyes unfocused, like she was mentally somewhere else. Maybe near the wall? And then faster than a blink, her foot had a shoe on it. She looked up at me in surprise, then dismissed the shoe before putting her foot back on the ground. “I was happy when it seemed like I was wearing the clothes in the store, but then they went away.”

 “When she hung them back on the rack, right? You couldn’t wear those clothes out of the store if nobody bought them for you. That would be stealing.”

 “But the store would still have the clothes.”

 “They wouldn’t if you were alive. And when your classmate took her clothes off in the washroom and tried to put them on you, you couldn’t wear those clothes, because she was going to wear them.”

 “But she still would have been able to wear them.”

 “Not if you were alive. And when you eat food, it has to be your food, and even if it’s still there when you’re done, nobody else can eat it.”

 “Because they wouldn’t be able to if I was alive?” More of a realization than a question.

 “You refused to accept being dead, so the rules you think should apply to you are the ones you would follow if you were alive. If you believe something is the rule, then you don’t need anyone to enforce it. And you can’t convince yourself of something you don’t believe to be true.” I realized I should distract her before she applied that logic to her other rules and came to a realization I wasn’t ready to help her through yet. “Hanako-chan, these pajamas used to be mine, but they don’t fit me anymore. I’m giving them to you. You can wear them whenever you want, and I’ll put them somewhere so you know nobody else will. C’mon, let’s try them on.”

 I put the top on the chair and stretched out the waistband of the bottom with both hands, then held it open on the floor with my hands lined up with the foot holes. She stepped into the leg sleeves, and I pulled the waistband up, careful to keep looking down so as to not accidentally peek up her skirt. When I had the waistband at her waist, I slipped my hands out of the elastic, and the waistband snapped back to size as the pajama bottoms fell to the floor at her feet, leaving her wearing an identical pair of bottoms, and no skirt. We looked each other in the eye, then I grabbed the top from the chair and put my arms the wrong way through the sleeves to hold them in place. She threaded her arms through the sleeves, and when I felt her hands touch mine I pulled my arms out. When it fell on the floor she was wearing the top too, and no sweater. And it was unbuttoned. She turned around for a moment while she did it up. 

 When she was done, she turned back toward me. “How do I look?” she asked.

 “Good,” I said. A little boyish, maybe, but definitely a better post-bath ensemble.

 “Thank you for the pajamas, Takeshi-kun,” she said as I picked them off the floor and folded them up. But where to put them? Of course! I opened my underwear drawer and pushed its contents to the side, putting the nightwear in the vacated space. I figured I could move all of them to the storage room and make this into Hanako's drawer, since she would need more clothes if she didn’t want to wear that skirt anymore. 

 “You know, since you’re going to be staying here, we can be a little less formal,” I said. I had already switched to ‘-chan’ and she hadn’t complained. “You could call me Tacchan like everyone else does. Or else, maybe… ‘big bro’?”

 “Then thank you, Tacchan,” she said. It was worth a shot. “Did you find what you were looking for on the inter-net?” It was weird how she lengthened it—they had the internet twenty years ago, right?

 “I think I found a clue,” I replied. She went back to the homework and I went back to my search tab.

 I realized it being so long since she died meant I should add terms like ‘old’ or ‘retro’ to my search. I found packages of different brands that were blue or red, but that didn’t make sense—if she had an opinion about a brand somehow, she would give it by name, not by color. The boys and girls thing seemed more promising. I looked up when those first came out. It seemed that in the late 1980s they made diapers with extra absorbency where boys or girls needed it. After a few years they just put the extra absorbency everywhere and went back to unisex diapers for a while, and any boys or girls diapers that came out later were just cosmetic. I even found pictures of the packages for the first ones, which were tape-style from a foreign brand—on an auction site, at an oddly high price considering they were obsolete, but I suppose there can be collectors for anything—and the boys’ package was pale blue with a big tan stripe in the middle, while the girls’ package was pink with a big red stripe. If you pointed at those and asked me to grab the red one, I would know you meant the girls’, but I would think it weird that you said red instead of pink.

 Then I found one of their domestic competitors, which were underwear-style. The boys’ package was a solid, dark blue, and the girls’ diapers were pink, but they came in a red package. That had to be it. It had a few problems. The smaller one was that Hanako thought she had spent twenty years in the washroom, and these were more than thirty years old, but she said she lost track of time, and maybe it took a few years for her mind to reassemble itself after dying. The bigger one was that there was no point in asking the question, because there was a right answer. Nowadays if you’re a boy who likes butterflies, fine, wear the pink ones, but back then it made a difference to how well they worked. Even in an extreme case, like if she were intersex, where the pee comes out told you which ones you should get.

 Hanako must have finished the assignments and got bored, because at that moment she asked, “Which color of paper would you like—red or blue?”

 If it was wrong, I could find out now. Remembering that the question was asked to Hanako so I had to answer like her, I said, “Well, I’m a girl, so I should get the pink ones.”

 She scrunched her face up so much I was sure it meant that was the wrongest kind of wrong, until she said, “Tacchan, you’re not a girl!”

 “You are,” I pointed out.

 “But I like blue.” Her eyes widened. “Tacchan, I like blue!”

 Whoever asked the question was right and I was wrong. Of course—she poops, but she doesn’t pee, so the absorbency didn’t matter. “Okay, so next time you ask—”

 “Tacchan, I’ve never understood why someone would care about the color before. I didn’t care. But now I care. I like blue. I think I liked blue when I was alive. This is the closest thing to a memory I’ve ever had.”

 “So now we know the right answer? Except white like underwear is righter?” I quipped.

 “You know more than that, don’t you?” she asked, starting to tear up. “All this time, not knowing anything, not doing anything. I felt like I was barely someone. You said it yourself. I couldn’t accept dying. I wanted to be alive. I used to be alive. I used to be someone, and my memories of who I was are on the other side of that door. If you know how to get it open, please, help me be someone again!”

 And I did know. I’d proved it twice. I’d found the extra info I was hoping to find. Even if I thought she now had the chance to decide what kind of someone she could be, I hadn’t spent twenty or thirty years bored in a washroom. This was what she wanted, and I had no right to keep it from her.

 I didn’t know her real name, if it wasn’t really Hanako. I couldn’t know the exact words that were said. I had to trust that those didn’t matter, and all that counted was getting the right idea. “Hanako-chan, look at the cute new products that just came in,” I said in my most motherly tone. “Which color of paper diapers would you like—red or blue?”

 “Mom, how could you humiliate me like that?” Hanako shrieked, now eight years old, back in her sweater and skirt. “You’re awful! I hate you!” Her eyes were red. Her hair was a little blustery. The power was not too flickery. Not scary to me at all at this point. Hopefully Mom and Dad wouldn’t notice. “And then I ran out of the store and got hit by a car,” she added.

[Torgen]

Chapter 14

 “I had been having diarrhea off and on for months,” Hanako said, oscillating between her older and younger forms. “The doctor said it was probably a reaction to something I was eating, but we’d tried avoiding different foods and hadn’t figured out what the trigger was. I was a tomboy—I hated skirts, but I had started wearing them because they had a better chance of not showing an accident than trousers. I soiled myself so many times that whenever I went somewhere, I was paranoid that I knew where the nearest washroom was. I didn’t want to go out with my friends, or to a movie, or on a vacation.

 “I still loved school, so my parents got them to transfer me to the classroom closest to the washrooms, and to sit me next to the door. The teachers knew not to stop me if I ran out of the room. Then one time I pooped myself on the way to school. I didn’t even go to class that day. I just waited in the girls’ washroom. They found me in there during chores, and then everybody knew. After that I didn’t want to leave home for anything.

 “Mom knew it wasn’t my fault, it was a medical issue. She was the one who suggested that if I wore…” she paused there for a while.

 “You don’t have to be embarrassed to say it in front of me,” I said, pulling down the waistband of my pajama bottoms to remind her what was underneath. “C’mon, we’ll say it together. Di-a—”

 “D-d-d-diapers! …then if I had an accident I could just throw it away and nobody would know. It didn’t make me a baby. A baby wouldn’t have a choice, and I was a big girl who was smart enough to make a tough decision.

 “I had her take me two stations away on the train so we wouldn’t see anyone we knew. That was a big risk for me, but if I had an accident on the way there then I’d just wear a d-d-d-diaper on the way back. And then we got to the store,” she seethed, getting younger and her eyes getting redder, “and we saw the display…”

 “She humiliated you,” I said calmly, hoping to keep her from getting too excited.

 “She betrayed me!” It hadn’t worked. “Of course I yelled at her!” Older again. “Then I ran out of the store in tears. I never even saw the car. I didn’t mean to die.” Younger again. “But it serves her right!” Older again. “Then the last thing I heard was her scream when she saw my body.” She might have died in front of the pharmacy I bought the diapers from earlier that day. It didn’t have a direct exit to outside the station now, but who knows thirty years ago. Maybe they closed it off because of her. “Tacchan, I’m sorry. I know I asked for your help remembering, but I shouldn’t have. I’m the one who made the wall.”

 “What?” I blurted.

 “I had all of these memories, all of this anger, all of this sadness. That was why girls didn’t like my washroom. Not the pooping. Not the old fixtures. The teachers must not have believed I was there until the work crew came to put new toilets in, but they didn’t have to work in a haunted area, so they called the Prefectural Exorcism Department. They sent a case worker—the same one I have now—and he talked to me for a while, and said that since I was aware of my surroundings and the school had other washrooms, it would be drastic to exorcise me unless I became a nuisance or dangerous.

 “I knew I couldn’t give them an excuse. I had no idea I would ever get the things I missed from life—the cultural festival was years later—but I couldn’t let them kill me again. So I took every memory that might make me sad or angry—every event from my life—and I put them behind a wall, and then I put the memory of how I made the wall behind it too so I wouldn’t have a clue. And that’s her. And it left me with a smile and a third grade education and nothing else, but I guess people remembered not liking how sad I was, so they didn’t come by to find out I’d changed. And I was bored for years, while she spent that time stewing in that anger and sadness with nothing to do about it, until she made a little door. And now that door is wide open, and she’s trying to merge us back together.”

 “So you’ll have your memories and be a little moody?”

 “You don’t understand. The reason the right answers are wrong is because the answer she wants is something that will make Mom even sadder, but I was the one who had the words. All she wants is revenge, and she doesn’t know who to take it against, because names were the only thing I never remembered, so who knows who she’ll hurt?”

 “But you have the same memories now and you don’t want revenge.”

 “Being a ghost isn’t so bad. I still get to go to school. My accidents are easier to clean up. But Mom doesn’t know that! I made her watch me die! How could I want to hurt her any more than that?” She sobbed. “I’m sorry, all I am is feelings, and the other me’s feelings are stronger. I’m only holding on by thinking about how much today meant to me, and it’s not enough. Please, big bro, I don’t know what to do!”

 I thought as fast as I could. Young Hanako blamed her mother for her death and was sad for herself. Old Hanako blamed herself for her death and was sad for her mom. From my point of view, they were both right. But what good was that? I could probably talk old Hanako into agreeing because she seemed reasonable, but that wouldn’t matter in a moment, and the only way to bring young Hanako to the front before it was too late was by asking the question, and the question was the entire problem.

 Check that: It wasn’t the question that was the problem.

 I cupped my hand around my mouth, took on my motherly tone again, and whispered, “Hanako-chan, look at the cute new products that just came in. Which color of paper diapers would you like—red or blue?”

 And in front of me again was young Hanako in the clothes she died in, but there were no red eyes, no blustery hair, no flickering lights. No anger. What was there to be angry about? There was no reason to be humiliated. Nobody but her could have heard what I just asked. So finally, after all these years, she had to think about the real answer to the question. A question that could only have been asked by someone who loved her, and cared about what would make her happy. And I was sure, maybe only because she was haunting me, that there was a negotiation happening behind the scenes, because old Hanako had the words to answer with, and she was making sure young Hanako knew that the question had no malice in it. And after a while young Hanako cupped her hand back at me and whispered, “Let’s see. The blue ones are cuter. I don’t wet myself, so I don’t care where the protection is. Can’t we just get white ones? They’d look more like underwear.”

 “Of course,” I whispered back. “Let’s go with white ones then.”

 The pajamas came back first, but she was too small for them. She seemed to be growing gradually, and staring into space. I had a thought and stepped past her into the closet to take a diaper from the package. I opened it up and spread it on the floor in front of her just as she was reaching ten-year-old size again.

 “What are you doing?” she asked.

 “Hey. How do you feel?”

 “About what?”

 “About everything.” Or more specifically, which set of feelings were in charge?

 “Mom and I both made a mistake, and we both suffered. I do miss my body—even if it had some problems, there were advantages to being alive. I have overlapping memories for the past several years, so that’s weird. I’m not angry, I don’t think, but I am sad. Really sad. But also, excited to go to school tomorrow?”

 “Sounds like a human amount of sad, then. Do you remember the promise I made?”

 “For as long as I need you to?”

 “Then you’re still you, and it’s still in effect.”

 “What are you doing?” she repeated.

 “Well if you had answered your mother like that, she would have bought you diapers, and you would have worn them, and you would have been able to go further from a toilet, so I thought, now that we know you can change clothes, we should find out if you can haunt yourself.”

 “It’s embarrassing,” she said, looking away.

 “Believe me, I’ve been dealing with that all day—”

 “Because you’re a boy,” she added.

 Now I felt like I was the one blushing a shade of red from outside space and time. I overlapped my hands over my eyes. “Just tell me when you’re ready,” I said.

 It would have been nice if she had a body that would make sounds so I would have a hint as to when she would be ready, or if she was actually making progress. I thought she might tell me not to bother after a while, but I never peeked, and after about a minute, I heard her say, “I’m ready.”

 “I’m going to have to open my eyes,” I reminded her.

 “Mine are closed.”

 I took my hands away, and she was naked from the waist down on top of the back of the diaper with her pajama top pulled up a bit and her hands covering her eyes. I pulled the front panel over her crotch carefully, since there was no weight holding the back in place. I could touch her and the diaper couldn’t, so I had to put one hand inside the waistband while I used the other to ready the tape and stick it to the panel, before repeating on the other side. When both sides were fastened, I held the diaper in its shape around her. “It’s on,” I said.

 She opened her eyes, and I let go of the diaper. It fell through her body, leaving the image of a diaper behind. She sat up and gazed down at herself. “It doesn’t look very much like underwear,” she said.

 “If someone caught a glimpse they might be fooled, but not if they see the tape panel.” I tugged the real diaper out from under her as if there were any weight holding it in place and opened my underwear drawer to put it with her pajamas. I was about to take her pajama bottoms out to help her put them back on when I noticed she had already manifested them over the diaper. Apparently they went to the same place as her shoes.

 She turned around to look at herself, and I got a good look as well. Having seen her wear the pajamas without a diaper underneath, I could tell something was different, because the rear center seam no longer sat between her buttocks. Mom would probably be able to tell. Satisfied by what she saw, Hanako walked toward the window. She didn’t hit a limit on the way there, and when she reached it she started hovering, phased straight through the glass, and floated off into the sky.

 I wondered how long she would have to be gone before I knew if she was completely free. Maybe half an hour? Surely she’d still come back for meals and to experience being a family. If it was longer, did that mean she’d found peace? It would be embarrassing to explain to Mom and Dad that everything I’d asked about before dinner no longer applied, but it would be more embarrassing to poop my diapers in public, so I’d deal with it. But I was sure that wouldn’t happen. Not until she finished middle school, at least. There was a rule, after all.

 In the meantime I returned to my seat at the desk and started filling in my answers to the homework. I was just finishing fifteen or so minutes later when she floated back through the window. “I can go about a kilometer in every direction, including up,” she said.

 “I was hoping you’d be able to go anywhere on earth,” I said, a little disappointed.

 “Tacchan, a kilometer is so far! I could try joining different clubs! I can take gym class with the other girls! I can have the teacher fill out my test cards!”

 “They could put us in different homerooms.”

 “But who would turn in my homework?”

 “True. Hey, you can wait outside the boys’ room while I clean myself up.”

 “A girl can go into the men’s washroom if she’s getting her d-d-diaper changed, right?” she asked with a smile, and I wasn’t sure whether it was a joke. Then she ran over to me and hugged me, still sitting in the chair. “Thank you for everything, big bro. It’s almost as good as being alive.”

 And as I hugged her back, I could feel her body against my skin. And it was warm.

[kerry]

I love this more and more with every chapter!

[Torgen]

Epilogue

 “Excuse me,” I asked through the slotted window to the stationmaster on duty, who was sitting at a desk in his uniform and official-looking hat, “do I have to buy a ticket for a ghost?”

 He looked up and recognized Hanako. “You!” he said angrily and stormed toward the window.

 “I’m sorry about the commotion I caused earlier,” Hanako said, bowing deeply. “I was upset, but I let my emotions get the better of me. I promise to do a better job of keeping them under control in the future.” It was an apology she had made a few times over the past week.

 “They should have exorcised you for that!” The stationmaster continued, not satisfied at all.

 “Her case worker at Exorcisms said they consider the matter closed,” I said. That was true—as soon as we told the school on Monday that Hanako would be moving in with me, they informed the Prefectural Exorcism Department, then booked a work crew to install seat toilets in her washroom. The case worker visited our house after school. He was always going to have to file a report on the station incident, but when he heard about Hikari’s betrayal he was quite sympathetic. Hanako asked for the matter to stay private, as she would forgive Hikari if she apologized. Of course Exorcisms has no jurisdiction over the living, so he updated Hanako’s location and abilities in her file, and since she can flicker the power, asked us to avoid hospitals.

 “Well the rail company doesn’t,” the stationmaster said. “Don’t be surprised if you get a bill for the replacement buses we had to run.” If there were consequences for what Hikari did, we wouldn’t be able to keep it as a private matter, but she’d only have herself to blame.

 “We just want to follow the rules,” I said. I had built time into our schedule, but I didn’t want to use it all up now. “She takes up space, but she doesn’t add weight. Does she need a ticket?”

 He scowled, but answering that question was his job and suing for lost revenue wasn’t. “Until we have ticket machines they can use and fare gates they can’t avoid, ghosts ride free,” he said. “On long-distance trains, she has to use open-seating cars unless you pay for a seat reservation.”

 “No, we’re only going two stops,” I replied. “Thank you very much.”

---

 If Mom noticed that Hanako and I were both wearing diapers under our pajamas when we sat on the couch to watch television, she didn’t mention it, although I was careful to sit straight down and not slide into place so the friction from the couch didn’t tug my bottoms down and let the diaper peek above the waistband. We watched and laughed together as a family until my bedtime, and when we stood up to go to my room, Dad followed us and stopped us in the hall.

 “I’m proud of you for the sacrifice you made for her,” he told me, “so I’ll figure out how to be okay with what it requires. Your mom will take time too. The only way to convince her you don’t need her to change your diapers is by doing it yourself, so you should bring Hanako home this weekend to prove you can. I’ll take the blame for it.” I hugged him, then Hanako hugged him, which it seemed he wasn’t expecting to feel, then Hanako and I went upstairs.

 Hanako said she didn’t sleep, so I pulled the first volume of a manga series off my shelf and weighed down both covers to make the pages fan out so she could see between them without turning them. When I woke up in the morning, she was fast asleep on the bed beside me.

---

 I tapped my transit card on the reader on the fare gate, which was the bidirectional kind that only closes the barrier if you don’t pay, then walked through it. Hanako followed me, and the gate made no attempt to stop her. We had noticed machines don’t perceive ghosts when I tried to set up voice controls on my computer for her and it thought she was just moaning. It seemed her perfect English diction really was us humans hearing what she wanted us to hear.

 “Sorry about the delay,” she said as I tucked the card into a pocket of the shoulder bag I had got from Mom. “Maybe he wouldn’t have recognized me if I wore different clothes.”

 We stepped onto the escalator up to the platform, and I looked back at her. She had thought long and hard about the outfit she would wear today. Of course some options were easy to rule out—pajamas, gym clothes, school swimsuit with swim diaper underneath. She considered her sun dress, but settled on her flower appliqué sweater because it was recognizable, and her blue skirt. Even if she hated skirts when she was alive, wearing one for thirty years had softened her stance. “You could have changed when we got there since you don’t need to undress,” I said.

 “Living people can’t, so I shouldn’t,” she asserted. “I even use the change room to put my gym clothes on.” It was true, even if it only took a second. Once again, Hanako’s rules were what Hanako thought they should be.

---

 First thing in the morning, I took Hanako to the storage room to try on a tracksuit I had outgrown, then brought it back to my room and added it to her collection in my former underwear drawer. We left for school early; whether Hikari was still planning to walk with me in spite of what had happened the day before, we had enough to do that we couldn’t wait for her.

 We went to the teachers’ lounge first to tell Morisawa-sensei that I planned to take Hanako Duty permanently. He appreciated the advance warning, since he was cutting up an attendance sheet to refill the fishbowl. He also noticed Hanako’s clothes were different, so I asked if they had any girls’ gym clothes, and he found a set for her. Then we went to the nurse’s office to let Itou-sensei know that mine was the bum she’d be wiping every day or two until I convinced her that I could do the job myself. I also asked if we could use the pool if we wore swim diapers. She said she’d check the health department’s guidance; it wasn’t lost on her that I had said ‘we’.

 Next we went to Hanako’s washroom. She tried on her gym clothes, then swapped back to her tracksuit before we started filling out her homework. When we finished, I tucked the pages and the magazine into my backpack. As we left, she gave the washroom a bow, like it was not just a room, but a person who had looked after her all this time. I hoped she wouldn’t need to return.

 In the classroom, people were surprised that Hanako was there so early, and wearing different clothes, as I brought Hanako’s chair to its new place by our desk. When Morisawa-sensei came in at the regular homeroom start time and announced that I had offered to take Hanako Duty every day, everyone applauded except Hikari, Naoko, and Yuka. Since it meant I’d be excused from other chores, he asked if anyone objected. If any of the three girls had spoken up, we were ready to reveal what they had tried, but they kept their mouths shut and so did we.

 Hanako smiled extra hard during each class when I passed her homework forward. During one inter-period break, it seemed like Hikari was going to apologize, but I realized she was ‘sorry’ I had to wear diapers, not sorry for what she did to Hanako. I shut her down, and she walked off in a huff. If that meant I had lost a childhood friend, at least I had gained a sister.

 Our class was swimming during Phys Ed that day, so Hanako and I had to sit out. We changed into our gym clothes and wore them on the sidelines. Hanako cheered for almost everyone.

 During English class, I excused myself abruptly for a diaper change. To get back quicker I asked Itou-sensei to change me instead of practicing my technique, and she told me that we could use swim diapers if we left the pool immediately after pooping in them. That was fine by me; I was planning to leave the pool immediately before pooping in them. When I returned to class, I caught more stares than I expected. I apologized for leaving without permission, but Miller-sensei thanked me for being considerate. When I got to our desk, Hanako explained quietly: they were all surprised that she was able to stay behind when I left.

 Kenta and Yuuji were happy to have Hanako and I sit with them at lunch, and she was eager to discuss the manga she had read the night before and its comparison to ones she had read when she was alive, which were old enough that none of us had ever heard of them. They suggested we might have a new member at the Visual Literature club, but she couldn’t commit yet: there were so many other clubs to try. But more importantly, Kenta and Yuuji cared about what Hanako had to say. She had friends in our class after all; they just weren’t who she’d thought.

 And finally it was the chore period, and the main thing we would normally do while everyone else was doing chores was already done. At least for the rest of the school year, this was twenty minutes every day when we had no responsibility but to relax and stay out of everyone’s way.

 And yet.

 “Would you like to do a chore?” I asked Hanako.

 “It is part of the school experience,” she replied, so we returned to the room to help tidy up.

---

 When we reached the top of the escalator, I scanned the boarding positions and led Hanako to one with nobody in line. The train arrived shortly, and the only other occupants were at the other end of the car. I stood holding the pole by the seats since I couldn’t reach the overhead straps, and Hanako clung to me. As the train got up to speed, I nudged her as a warning, then acted like I was just supporting my weight from the pole when I was actually pooping my diaper.

 Unfortunately several passengers boarded at the first stop. Hanako tugged my arm to encourage me to get off and change, but even if she’d rat me out to Mom, waiting for another train would put us behind schedule, so when they sat in the seats in the middle, I moved to the end of the car as far from them as possible. When we stopped at the next station, I made sure to get off first, and Hanako and I rushed to stay out of everyone’s way.

---

 For much of the weekend it was like Hanako and I had switched places in a way: she could say the word ‘diaper’, though she always stuttered, while I felt like I couldn’t mention them in front of Mom. I told her Hanako and I needed new swimsuits for school, and she recognized that I meant swim diapers. When I asked if she had a shoulder bag I could use when my backpack was too big, she knew that I wanted a diaper bag. But she helped me order swim diapers online, and she found her old diaper bag in the storage room, and she didn’t seem upset about either.

 Hanako was charming, and appreciative, and good at finding mislaid items, and by Saturday night the only evidence I had diapers on was I ran the shower that morning to clean up after a change, so on Sunday Mom made it official: Hanako could stay. That meant we felt safe to do a test: If Hanako wore a diaper and I didn't, she could go anywhere in the house, but not leave it. I thought that meant I shouldn’t have to wear diapers in the house, but she remembered having accidents at home when someone was using the washroom. She thought I could use the toilet at home if I didn’t have to wait, but I should wear diapers in case I did, and if she thought that was the rule, then that was the rule. I was just happy not to have to poop myself as often.

 With that settled, Mom walked Hanako and I to the shopping center at the station. We went to a children’s clothing shop, where they recognized Hanako and she apologized for Thursday. Mom and Hanako picked out some items, and I offered to help Hanako in the dressing room, but Mom knew women’s clothing and insisted it be her. I worried about Mom seeing Hanako’s diaper, and it seemed like the door stayed closed longer than it would take Mom to hold the clothes over Hanako’s body. When she came out, I gave my thoughts on each thing she tried, and she settled on a sun dress, a solid blue and a tartan skirt, and a few girls’ cut shirts. Mom figured she could scrounge other tops from my hand-me-downs. I told Hanako she could wear any of them out of the store; she waited until Mom paid the cashier before manifesting the dress, which startled a few customers. She seemed to realize she shouldn’t do that anymore.

 After we left that store, Mom crouched down to my level and put a five thousand yen note in my hand. “This is to cover the ‘supplies’ you already bought, and whatever you need that you didn’t get then, okay?” I nodded; Hanako and I rushed down the escalator as Mom followed.

 The clerk from Thursday was working at the drug store and nodded in recognition, which Hanako took as a sign to repeat her apology, but he meant it for me. We started at the diaper aisle and looked at the packages of XXXL-size underwear-style diapers before taking the ones with the plainest design. I pooped myself while we picked up other supplies, like moist wipes, changing pads, and scented disposal bags, but I had no choice but to continue.

 I had enough money for everything, but I was in the red including the diapers I’d bought before. As the cashier rang me up, I suggested Hanako rejoin Mom outside; once she was gone I asked if the store had a direct exit to the street in the 1990’s, but that was before he or his manager was born. The diapers had a built-in handle, so he put everything else in a bag, and said I should use them right away. I took them with a blush; I felt more like Hanako every day.

 “Got everything you need?” Mom asked when I left the store.

 “Yep,” I said.

 “Good, then let’s get that dirty diaper changed.”

 I was shocked; I thought she wanted nothing to do with them. “I can do it myself,” I said.

 “There’s no shower in the station,” she countered.

 “...when we get home.” Not that I would be happy to walk that far in the used diaper.

 She crouched down. “Maybe people won’t think about your diapers when they’re clean,” she said quietly but sternly, “but when they’re dirty, they’ll think, ‘how can his mother let him walk around like that?’ and the answer is that I will not, so you will not. Understood?”

 “Yes, Mom,” I replied. Like Hanako, what Mom thought the rule should be was the rule.

 “Good, because someone here will tell me if you do.” She turned her head. “Hanako-chan, do you need your diaper changed as well?”

 “Yes, but it will happen on its own when you change Tacchan’s d-d-diaper,” Hanako answered.

 “How convenient!” Mom said.

 “But I would like to try on the underwear-style d-d-diapers we just bought,” Hanako added.

 “Certainly,” Mom said. And as she took my hand and pulled me toward the ladies’ room with Hanako cheerfully following, I wondered what exactly they’d talked about in the dressing room.

---

 The station had a multi-purpose washroom in the paid area, and luckily it was vacant and we got to it without annoying anyone with my smell. I put my diaper bag by the sink and took out wipes, then pulled my trousers down to my ankles and my underwear-style diaper down to my knees and started wiping. When the wipes came back clean I tore the sides of the diaper, dumped the poop but not the wipes in the toilet, then rolled the diaper up, taped it closed with its rear vertical tape, and stuffed it in a disposal bag, which I tied shut. Then I took a tape-style diaper from my bag, unfolded it, and pinned it between the wall and my bum. After pulling the front panel up, I asked Hanako to help me get the tapes straight, after which her eyes unfocused like they did when she changed clothes. I didn’t see a difference, so I assumed she had switched her diaper from underwear-style to tape-style. She seemed to prefer wearing the same kind of diaper I did. For that matter, I think she always wore a diaper, even if she didn’t plan on going past arm’s reach. I never asked why. It was her choice, and it wasn’t a mystery I needed to solve.

 I pulled my trousers up, put everything back in the diaper bag, flushed the toilet, washed my hands, and threw the bag over my shoulder. It was too bad Itou-sensei wasn’t there; she hadn’t approved me to change my diaper without her checking my work yet, but what she cared about was consistency. If my changes were all like that, I’d be unsupervised by the end of the week.

 As we headed to the fare gate, I was glad I pooped on the train. The rules were clear for using the toilet at home, but not someone else’s home; the rules for outdoors were clear too, and not in a good way. I didn’t want to arrive where we were going needing a diaper change.

---

 Knowing where, how, and roughly when Hanako died, plus that she lived two train stops away, it only took a few evenings of searching news archives online to find an article that matched her story. When I asked if her name might have been Hanazono Sakura, her eyes blurred, and she said it definitely had been. People probably called her Hanako because of the flower appliqué, and she accepted it because it was close to her family name, even if she didn’t remember it.

 We found a telephone listing matching her mother’s name, but not the address where they had lived. We worked out a script I would use, and nervously I called the number.

 “Hello, this is Hanazono,” came the voice of an elderly woman.

 “Ma’am, I apologize for how impertinent the questions I’m about to ask will seem, but I assure you I mean no disrespect,” I said. “Did your daughter die in a traffic accident in 1992?”

 “What do you want?” she asked angrily. Which she would only do if the answer were ‘yes’.

 “Had you taken her to buy diapers to deal with her digestive issues?”

 “What kind of… how could you…?” She was now angry and confused, which was another ‘yes’, but I was worried that the anger was going to win, so I had better skip ahead in the script.

 “Ma’am, your daughter’s ghost has haunted a washroom at my school for over thirty years.”

 “Listen, young man, if this is some kind of prank, then I don’t know how you found that out, but you must have better things to do than torture an old woman.”

 “Tell her about the zoo,” Hanako said. “We went to the zoo for my last birthday.”

 I heard a gasp from the phone. “Sakura-chan!” she said, and started to cry. “I know that voice! Sakura-chan, why can’t I understand you? Please, let me hear you one more time!”

 “She’s staying with me now,” I said. “She’s… her spirit is safe. I’d put her on, but microphones don’t pick up ghost voices properly. She’d like to see you face-to-face. Would that be alright?”

---

 And so on Saturday, just over a week after my first day of Hanako Duty, we followed her directions to a walk-up condominium building and stood outside a door with a buzzer that read ‘Hanazono’. “Are you ready?” I asked Hanako, and she took a symbolic breath and reached a finger to the door bell, as though it could do anything. I reached out with her, and our fingers pushed the button together. The bell rang, and soon a seventy-ish woman opened the door.

 “I’m back, Mom,” Hanako said sheepishly.

 “Welcome home, Sakura-chan,” Hanazono-san said with her arms wide. “Although this was never your home.” She covered her mouth for a moment. “Oh, look how you’ve grown!”

 “Not that much,” Hanako said. “I was paused for a long time.”

 “Well both of you, come inside,” Hanazono-san beckoned. Hanako and I entered. I slipped off my shoes in the entryway, then slid my diaper bag off my shoulder and left it near the door. Hanako dismissed her shoes one at a time as she stepped up onto the wood floor. “Young man,” she said to me, “I should know the name of the boy who brought my Sakura-chan back to me.”

 “I’m Suzuhara Takeshi,” I said with a bow.

 “Mom, about names,” Hanako said. “My own name was one of the last things I remembered. Before that, everyone called me Hanako. I remember being Sakura now, but I’ve been Hanako so much longer—longer than I was alive. Is that okay?”

 “It’s a reasonable name, even if I obviously wouldn’t have given it to you,” Hanazono-san said.

 “It’s the name all my friends at school call me,” Hanako added.

 Hanazono-san looked disappointed briefly, but she perked up. “I gave birth to a daughter, not a name,” she said. “You’re old enough to decide what you want to be called. If that’s ‘Hanako’, then I apologize if I slip up.” She turned to me. “Would you like some tea?” she asked.

 “Yes, please,” I said.

 “Yes, please,” Hanako said also.

 Hanazono-san looked at her in surprise. “Can ghosts drink tea?” she asked.

 “I can, in a way,” Hanako answered.

 “Then please, sit,” Hanazono-san said, gesturing at a low table in a tatami room. Hanako and I sat seiza-style at the table, which pressed my heels into my diaper. Hanazono-san went to the kitchen and returned with a tray with two yunomi tea cups and a pink clay pot. She knelt and put a cup in front of me, then walked over to Hanako and knelt to give her the other cup and the pot. “I thought you might want your remains,” she said. “They belong to you, in a sense.”

 Hanako prodded the urn cautiously, like she thought there was a ghost rule about what happens when your spirit touches your body but she didn’t know what it might be. It became clear that there wasn’t one. “You should keep it,” Hanako said, and Hanazono-san placed it in the middle of the table, then sat opposite us as Hanako and I took sips of our tea.

 “Now, Hanako-chan, Suzuhara-kun here said you wanted to meet face to face. Did you just want to see me again? Because it is wonderful for me to see you again.”

 Hanako put her spectral teacup back inside the physical one, shifted to the side of the table, and prostrated herself in front of her birth mother. “I’m sorry I said I hated you, and I’m sorry I died,” she said. “I seem to make bad decisions when I become emotional. I recently caused trouble for myself and others that way, and I will try my best to calm down before doing such rash things in the future, but that doesn’t undo the suffering I caused you.”

 This seemed to bring up old and complicated feelings in Hanazono-san, and she took a moment to gather her words. “We had narrowed down the food you were reacting to,” she said. “It was either rice or soy. We were going to try to avoid them, but it would have meant you couldn’t eat your favorite foods, or go to restaurants. You might not have been able to avoid them completely, so your problems may never have gone away. That’s why I suggested diapers. I would have told you when we got home, but you never—” she choked on that. “I could have done so many things differently. I could have bought the diapers without you. I could have offered them when your problems first started—even if you said ‘no’ then, you could have got used to the idea. I could have grabbed your arm, or spoken softly. You agreed to come to the store, and we went so far out of the way, so I thought you were okay with it. I didn’t realize it was so hard for you.” She slid out beside the table. “As your mother, I had one responsibility: to keep you safe.” She prostrated herself back at Hanako. “I apologize for failing in my duty.”

 “I forgive you,” Hanako said. It was like a weight was lifted from Hanazono-san’s shoulders.

 “I only wish your father was still here to see you. He missed you just as much.”

 Hanako’s expression turned grim. “Is Dad… gone?”

 “Five years ago,” Hanazono-san said. “Cancer. The old house was too big without him.”

 “Does that mean you’re all alone?” Hanako glanced at me, and I knew what she intended.

 Hanazono-san took a measured breath. “Of course your father and I were sad after you died. But we had to find a way to move on with our lives. We had another child—a son. He’s grown up now. He has his own family, but he calls and we visit each other. I may not live with anybody, but I’m not alone. But you would be.” Of course her mother understood what she meant. “You said you have friends at school. You couldn’t go to your school if you stayed here, could you?”

 “No,” Hanako said. Unless her mother wore diapers, but Hanako would be able to tell.

 “Thank you for wanting to make me happy. The thing that would make me happiest is to know that you’re happy. I’m already overjoyed to learn that you can feel things at all. If staying with this boy and his family makes you happiest, then just invite me to your school festivals, okay?”

 “Sure thing,” Hanako replied.

 “Young man,” Hanazono-san said, turning to me. “I have no right to ask this from you, but can I trouble you to continue looking after my daughter?”

 “Of course,” I said, peeking at Hanako, who smiled back. “For as long as she needs me to.”

The End

[Shotgun Diplomat]

This so badly needs an epilogue, or a sequel. It was wonderful to read. Thank you.

[Torgen]

On 7/29/2025 at 11:53 AM, kerry said:

I love this more and more with every chapter!

I had already written (but not edited) the epilogue when you posted this. Hopefully you felt like the last part did the characters justice. 

On 7/30/2025 at 7:53 AM, Shotgun Diplomat said:

This so badly needs an epilogue, or a sequel. It was wonderful to read. Thank you.

Of course their lives and afterlives will go on, but they'll be less exciting for a while as they settle into their new rhythms. I felt like I answered all the questions I asked, so it was a good time to stop. Thanks for reading.