After snatching the diary, Mother looked at Uzuki’s entries with a gluttonous gaze.
In the dummy diary originally meant to fool her mother, Uzuki had been deeply pessimistic about the future, speaking lightly of death while simultaneously fearing it, enduring relentless bullying at school. Walking down the street, people recoiled from her tattoos and kept their distance. She was convinced she would remain forever alone, dying in solitude.
But now, the real diary also included casual doodles Uzuki had drawn with a ballpoint pen.
Tsukiyuki Fumiko paged through her daughter’s writings, trying to grasp the emotions Uzuki had felt while recording those events.
The diary was filled with all sorts of bizarre sketchings.
In those drawings, people often appeared twisted and distorted.
In one illustration, a girl’s mouth had been entirely scribbled over with a tangled mass of black lines. In another, the sky was decorated with blood-red streaks.
An angel’s feathers transformed into bloodstained blades.
A corner of a floral wreath was replaced by a skull.
Beneath a setting sun, a mother smiled with gentle kindness as she plunged a knife into the heart of an innocent, unknowing girl.
From a towering skyscraper, a girl leaped, shaking hands in reconciliation with a black-robed Shinigami clutching a scythe.
Every picture was deeply warped, saturated with Uzuki’s inner agony.
The human figures were crooked and askew. Their eyes, faces, and mouths were all smeared with eerie colors and chaotic lines.
Such illustrations could only be described as grotesque.
Looking at these drawings, Mother’s smile became exceptionally radiant—so radiant it sent chills down one’s spine. For as she leafed through these pages, Fumiko realized her daughter was inching closer and closer to a breakdown, her psyche twisting more and more. Only by enduring the same suffering as her mother could her daughter ever truly understand the depth of a mother’s good intentions.
“Wonderful… wonderful. Why didn’t you share such a splendid diary with Mom earlier, you child…”
Uzuki had never seen her mother so overjoyed.
Back then, she truly had been very twisted.
Until that day, when she was crying in the toilet and nearly falling apart—she met her…
Fumiko’s hand, turning the pages, suddenly stopped mid-air, as if someone had pressed pause.
Two months ago, the artistic style of Uzuki’s diary had changed dramatically.
The sun was no longer a distorted, purplish mess, and people regained their ordinary faces.
Gentle lines and compositions depicted the beauty of the world. Fumiko’s gaze fell upon that particular illustration.
Two girls, hand in hand, smiling brightly as they faced the setting sun.
—I made a friend.
The dark scenes had vanished entirely.
Now, there was only endless, boundless light. The cool-toned style had become warm.
—I walk home from school with my friend.
The two girls walked side by side, far from the crowd.
But they didn’t care at all.
—Today Mom said my smile looked disgusting. It’s okay, though. My friend is always by my side.
A ponytailed girl who looked just like an older sister gently patted the other girl’s shoulder.
It seemed like she was comforting her.
—Mom isn’t home again tonight. I’m sleeping with my friend, feeling so safe.
The quilt printed with cartoon bears looked exceptionally cozy.
Two small, delicate figures snuggled together within, sharing warmth.
The warped Uzuki of the past was nowhere to be seen.
In her place was an Uzuki growing ever more radiant and healthy. What Fumiko found utterly unacceptable was that Uzuki had actually begun to harbor hope for the future.
In the diary, she had even written in detail about the image of her future Prince Charming: she hoped he would be an ordinary person, yet someone who would treat her with sincerity.
Reading Uzuki’s real diary, veins bulged across Tsukiyuki Fumiko’s forehead. Her knuckles turned ghastly white, and she looked as savage as a wild beast.
“Uzuki.”
As the diary was shut, Uzuki squeezed her eyes shut and clenched her teeth, expecting her mother to slap her. But Mother, for once, did not.
She simply looked at Uzuki calmly, her smile icy.
“Mom… aren’t you going to hit me?”
Mother shook her head, then stared fixedly at Uzuki.
“You betrayed Mom. You went off in search of happiness all by yourself. You’re a traitor—a bad child. But Uzuki… Mom will give you a chance to atone.”
“What is this chance to atone?”
“Kill your friend.”
The icy words crawled into Uzuki’s ears, making Uzuki think for a split second that she had misheard.
Kill that friend?
How would she kill her?
“Mom, she’s just a figment of my imagination.”
“Then kill her inside that imagined world.”
Tsukiyuki Fumiko’s bloodshot eyes bore into Uzuki’s face with an expression that seemed to crave devouring her.
“Kill her.”
Uzuki saw her friend sitting beside a chair looking at her with a sorrowful face.
Did she have to kill her friend?
Everything about her friend felt so real.
Sometimes, Uzuki actually felt her friend was nothing more than an imagined self-rescue measure her mind had conjured to save her.
But her friend’s words, her friend’s warmth, even the faint scent on her friend’s body—it was all utterly genuine.
“I…”
“Uzuki, kill me. I’d be happy to be killed by you.”
The ponytailed girl stepped forward.
Uzuki shook her head desperately.
“Won’t you listen to Mom?”
Fumiko’s voice was shrill, exactly like a resentful female ghost.
“I can’t kill my friend. Even if she is imaginary…” Uzuki mustered every ounce of her courage to defy her mother for the very first time.
“Is that so, Uzuki.”
Mother smiled with maternal tenderness.
“You’ve grown up.”
“Mom?”
For an instant, Uzuki believed that her mother had only been testing her all along—that the ceaseless torment was meant to strengthen her spirit.
That her mother really did love her.
Unfortunately, once again, Uzuki was wrong.
“Mom doesn’t need a disobedient child. And Mom knows Uzuki is a child who fears pain. Don’t worry, Mom won’t let Uzuki die too quickly. I had wanted to torment you for a lifetime, but since you’ve developed resistance toward Mom… I’ll just kill you right here.”
Her mother had never possessed any love for her. Though Uzuki carried half of her mother’s blood, she also carried the blood of that man.
Compared to love, her mother harbored far more hatred for her.
She swung an iron hammer toward Uzuki’s head.
If it landed, Uzuki imagined her brains would splatter everywhere. She closed her eyes and accepted her fate.
She could never defeat her mother.
But her mother’s iron hammer never struck her skull. Uzuki opened her eyes and saw that her mother’s hand had been tightly seized by her friend.
Her friend’s eyes turned as red as fresh blood. Her friend’s mouth became a chaotic, pitch-black tangle of lines. Her friend’s body twisted beyond recognition.
Her friend wrested the iron hammer from Tsukiyuki Fumiko.
Then, that small iron hammer transformed into a massive sledgehammer and smashed down onto Mother’s leg.
With a single strike, Mother’s leg was reduced to mangled flesh…
