Chapter 12

Yuki narriates that she was planning on hiding her identity in high school. If nobody knows that she's a demi, nobody will approach her out of curiosity. And if people stay away from her, nobody will get hurt from her coldness. But one day in April, during P.E., she fell victim to the heat.

As she sits facing a wall, a boy reaches out to her, asking if she's okay. Knowing he was about to touch her body, without thinking, she quickly tells him that she's a snow woman and that she'll be fine, she just needs to cool down. But in the end, she collapsed and got carried to the nurse.

In his office, Tetsuo stares at her as she sits in front of him. He finally asks if she's been hiding the fact that she was a snow woman all this time even before high school. She says that before now she had been open about it. She lived in a snowy rural area before high school. So back then, she didn't need to worry about her snow woman traits. She says that her body was just a little colder than others. And time to time, she would produce ice-droplets and cold mist. They were insignificant enough to not affect other people. He finishes that she's saying something happened. That since she moved here and entered high school. She says that soon after she moved there, she was incredibily stressed at the time. She normally doesn't think too hard in the bath, but she was worried about her new life. She was seperated from her old friends, moved from the countryside to the city, she was not sure if she could do well. She felt like it would be easier if she could just melt in the bath and disappear. Then she got a strange feeling. She looked down to find ice in the water.

She says that it really gave her the chills. The ice quickly melted away but if it's true that she had become cold enough to freeze the bath water, that would be terrifying. She wondered what would happen if that coldness ended up hurting someone and before she got a chance to sort everything out, high school started. She thought it would be find if she kept her distance from everyone, so she started avoiding people. She tells him that she's scared because she doesn't know how dangerous she might be. If she knew that, she can let people know, and she would be able to say that she's a snow woman with a smile on her face.

He marvels about how she could freeze the bath water. He asks how she normally takes her baths. She is taken back and looks embarrassed. He clarifies that he means the temperature or if she dies with any family members. She blushes and looks away, saying that the temperature is around 50 degrees, but her family says that she takes really short baths, because she;s weak against heat. He asks if when she got out of the bath, if the water cooled down more than usual. She says that she doesn't think so. He thinks to himself that with the cold her body emitted, she produced ice, but did so without cooling the bath water. He wonders if something like that is possible. He wonders if perhaps they were frozen tears, but then thinks that, since she hadn't considered that posibility means that she wasn't crying at the time. He asks if it could have been her sweat that froze before she got in the bath. She says that she's unable to sweat, she produce a lot less sweat glands than others. She says that she has very few sweat glands.

Tetsuo things that it's said that the number of sweat glands someone has varies geavily depending on the climate. That number reflects your ability to regulate your body temerature. It's no surprise that a snow woman who is weak to heat to have very few sweat glands. He says to her that that doesn't mean she doesn't sweat at all and asks what the chances are that it was sweat. She says that she doesn't know, and agrees that she probably does sweat a little. She says that she's never seen frozen sweat in her life, so it's weird for it to freeze only at that time. Because tears always freeze. He thinks about her words before turning around in his chair and flipping through a book. She asks what he's doing and he says that he tends to read his notes whenever he's deep in thought.

He says that they're his compiled notes on snow women taken from books and the internet. He says that Snow woman stories are all more or less similar. A beautiful woman in white with black hair, though some portray an old woman. The stories themselves follow a pattern too. In most cases, she approaches a man, hiding her identity, then either asks the man for something, and punisheshim if he refuses or she becomes close to the man, but due to an unfortunate event, she disappears. Peaple say she's a ghost, or a youkai, depending on the region. He says all the stories have tragic endings. She doesn't respond, but he apologizes.

Suddenly, he's surprised and asks if her feet get cold when she's nervous. She says that they do, and asks if it's natural. He says that he sees before standing up and leaving, with her sitting confused in the room alone.

Appearances

 * Yuki Kusakabe (Page 1)
 * Tetsuo Takahashi (Page 3)