Chapter Text
“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, and 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 originally been.
“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 XXXL-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 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 beckoned 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 probably why nobody still wanted to use this 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.
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.