“Why’s there a doll on my bed?” he asked nobody in particular as his brain struggled to catch up.

Yumeji walked over to his futon and picked up the unexpected visitor. He didn’t know much about dolls, almost nothing, really, besides that his little sister used to play with them when she was younger. But even he could tell that this thing was well made. It had a handcrafted look to it, more refined than the sort of thing that you could buy at a department store. The attention to detail was what impressed him the most. The natural way that its hair fell, the facial features, even the clothing seemed so realistic that he wondered if a set of normal clothes had been shot by a shrink ray and placed on this tiny frame.

Yumeji was twenty-years-old at this point. He had had two girlfriends in his life, one in high school back in Niigata, and one briefly during his freshman year of college. Things with his first girlfriend never progressed beyond kissing and a little light groping, but he had had sex with his second girlfriend a couple of times. Needless to say, it wasn’t like he was completely inexperienced with girls or anything. He wasn’t sexually retarded. He wasn’t a weirdo. He did, however, have an overwhelming urge to look under the doll’s skirt. Just to see how accurate it is, he told himself. This is purely academic, a fact finding mission, he told himself. Even he wasn’t buying it. This was immature, childlike curiosity plain and simple, and Yumeji was no more able to resist it than a grade schooler would be.

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Surprisingly accurate, he thought as he finished inspecting the doll. But where did it come from? A moment of paranoia hit him like an assassin’s bullet, he couldn’t help but worry that someone had broken into his apartment while he was at school. What if they’re still here, he wondered. After checking every room and possible point of entry, there weren’t many in his studio apartment, he returned to his futon and sat down. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. No signs of forced entry, everything was just as he’d left it, except for that weird doll. Could it have been something that his sister had left here after the last time that she came to visit him? Unlikely, he thought, as she hadn’t been over in a while and he would have noticed it before now.

Then he got a notification on Line. He checked his phone and saw that his friends were about to play some new shooter that they had all talked about earlier in class. He put the doll down and opened up his laptop. It was a problem for another day, he reasoned.