Extra Handout

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(Translated and arranged by Saya)

I heard this story from an old friend of 20 years when I met him recently.

My friend (I will call him Akira) taught English at an all-girls high school.
Akira used to print handouts for students using a copier in the school office.
He taught four classes in each grade, so he had a lot to print out.

If he had printed handouts for all four classes in one go, it would have taken so much time and papers would have run out quickly; so he preferred to print them out for one class at a time, before each class began.

However, a strange thing kept happening with one of those classes.
There were 32 students in that class, but somehow, he always ended up printing out 33 copies instead of 32.

At first, Akira thought it was because he typed in wrong numbers.
But when he noticed it happened every time he used the copier, and only for this one particular class, he started feeling uneasy.

Akira would always hand the copies over to the students who sat in the front row and ask them to pass them to other students, but inevitably one left-over copy would be returned to him.

Once, one of the students asked him, "why do you always have one copy left over?"
He replied, "this is for me."
But he knew very well that he didn't do it for that reason.
He already had his own copy in his file.
 
Akira began to think there was something wrong with his mind, and decided to count the copies as they came out of the copier.
He typed in "31" (31 plus the original copy, so 32 altogether) and pressed the OK button.
One, two, three... Akira never took his eyes off the copies as they came out of the copier one after the other.
Just as he counted 31, the copier stopped printing.
He added the original copy to the pile, and counted them again, and made sure there were only 32 copies in his hand.

But when he took those copies to the class, and handed them out to the students, one copy was again left over and returned to him.
It was at this point that Akira started feeling scared.
He counted students in the class. There were 32 of them. No student was absent.
There shouldn't have been a left-over paper; but there it was, in his own hand.

Akira was utterly bewildered.
"We have only 32 students in this class, am I correct?" He asked the students.
A wave of chuckles washed across the classroom.
"Haven't you had enough sleep, Sensei**?" One of them jeered.

Akira ignored that and persisted in asking, "are you sure we don't have 33 students in this class?" The look on his face was so dead serious that it began to cause agitation in the students too.
"Please stop asking that!" "Are you only joking?" Soon the whole classroom was thrown into noisy confusion.

Oh no! What am I doing? I have to calm them down!
He was about to say "I am sorry I probably got mixed up," but as soon as he opened his mouth:


"HOW DID YOU KNOW!? HOW DID YOU KNOW!?
HOW DID YOU KNOW!? HOW DID YOU KNOW!?"


someone started screaming those words at the top of their lungs.

This struck so much terror in Akira that he fainted.
When he came to, he was lying on a sofa in the headmaster's office.

Anyway, he quit the school soon after that, and he is not even teaching anymore.
To cut a long story short, he lost the job and came back to our hometown.

Right after he came back, I asked him why he left his teaching job, but at first he didn't want to talk about it.
It was only when we went out for drinking the other day that he finally told me the reason.

So this is the scariest part of the story:
When it was decided that Akira would quit and leave the school, he cornered one of the students from that class, and asked him why all the students from it had been avoiding him.
The student told him that it was because on that day, the person who was screaming out "HOW DID YOU KNOW!?" was none other than Akira himself.

Akira told me that although he clearly heard those words being shouted, he didn't remember shouting them himself.
I wonder if there is really something wrong with Akira. I am quite worried about him.

 

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**Sensei --- A form of addressing a teacher in Japanese. (See nihongo master)

Click the following links below to view more stories under the same category:
(Inexplicable)
(Inexplicable #2)
(Inexplicable #3)