I'm posting from my mobile phone. This is an experience that remains a mystery to me to this very day.
When I was in junior high school, my house was flooded with 300 to 400 prank calls. My mother was driven almost to a nervous breakdown, so we consulted the police. Back then, the word "stalker" wasn't commonly used yet, and Caller ID didn't exist. The police wouldn't take us seriously, and NTT (the phone company) told us they couldn't disclose the caller's number.
We requested a phone number change, but NTT instead recommended a "Prank Call Prevention Service" for about 600 yen a month. The way it worked was: whenever a prank call came in, we had to call NTT, and they would block just that specific number. When blocked, the caller would usually hear an automated message saying, "Due to the customer's request, calls from this number cannot be accepted."
However, it was completely useless. After protesting to NTT, the issue was finally resolved by changing our home number. When my mother once or twice scolded the person during the endless silent calls, the caller said, "I called a dial-a-date line and got this number from a girl." We guessed that a girl had just blurted out a random number, and it happened to be ours.
Around the same time, also back when I was in junior high, I used to commute to school by bicycle. However, a friend I had become close with walked to school, so I started walking home with her while pushing my bike. Only when walking home with that friend would I take a different route and go on foot.
We were walking home together as usual. I had been taught the traffic rule that my bicycle should be closest to the road, but for some reason, on that day, the arrangement was: the road, then me, then my bicycle, and then my friend.
A few hundred meters past a railroad crossing, as a car was passing us in the opposite direction, I heard the sound of breaking glass and felt a sharp pain in my left arm. The car didn't stop and drove away, but judging by the situation, we figured that the car's left side mirror had collided with my left arm, completely shattering the mirror. However, I wasn't injured, and the pain subsided immediately.
When I got home and told my mother, she said, "In times like that, you should report it to the police and try to remember the license plate." For a while after that, whenever I walked home with that friend, we would practice trying to memorize the license plates of oncoming cars.
Time passed, and I was now a high school sophomore. One day, a friend from the same junior high school whom I had met in high school said to me with a smirk, "You got into some kind of accident in the past, didn't you?"
For a while, nothing came to mind, but then I suddenly thought of the side mirror incident I mentioned earlier. But the police weren't even involved—could that really be called an "accident"??
However, my friend kept talking about it. She said that a woman working part-time at her workplace—a certain family restaurant—was the one who caused that accident. What's more, the story the woman told was completely different from my memory.
According to the woman: At the time of the accident, I was riding my bicycle alone down a slope at high speed, and I smashed into her windshield. First of all, when I walked home alone, I didn't even take that road. And "a slope"? You mean that gentle incline by the railroad crossing?? If I hit a windshield and shattered it, I would have been severely injured... or rather, even if I was run over, wouldn't it be impossible to completely wreck a windshield...??? The stories just didn't add up at all.
Furthermore, the woman claimed that she had reported it herself and that I had gone to the police to apologize. By my second year of high school, I had never once set foot in a police station. On top of that, she claimed my mother had stormed into the police station with a man (my mother and I lived in a single-parent household).
On the day I heard this, I asked my mother about it, but she had no idea what I was talking about. I asked my friend, "I want you to let me meet that woman," but she replied, "I promised to keep it a secret, so I can't." Just as I was wondering whether to storm into the restaurant myself, I heard that the woman had quit almost immediately.
Even more baffling was that the woman claimed she had called our house to apologize, but I hadn't answered. When I pressed my friend for details, she said, "She mentioned that an automated message played saying, 'Due to the customer's request...'"
Judging by the timeline, that was the "Prank Call Prevention Service" I mentioned at the beginning. That message doesn't play unless you're making a prank call... My mother was creeped out, saying, "How on earth does that woman even know what high school I transferred to??" Apparently, the woman's ex-boyfriend knew, but whether that person even existed is another mystery.
Maybe it's just anticlimactic when put into writing, despite how long it is... None of the individual events are that big a deal, but the fact that they're all connected feels deeply unsettling.
Even if that woman really did get into an accident at that location, how on earth did she figure out that the victim was me? My accident wasn't reported to the police, and the car just drove off without stopping. She even claimed she called our house to apologize—did she target me from the beginning and deliberately hit me with her side mirror? I don't know her age, but do you have any idea who might hold a grudge against you (even if it's an unreasonable one)? What about your mother?
Or maybe the woman didn't know the victim's name, but while talking about the accident with her part-time coworkers, she realized the victim was coincidentally her old classmate. Refusing to back down, she might have just fabricated a story to cover herself. Or could your high school friend be... trustworthy? Is it possible she heard your accident story and made up a prank to mess with you? If it's just a prank, that's almost a relief, but please be careful from now on.
Even if she just made up the story to cover her tracks, she somehow knew our old home phone number before it was changed, as well as my hairstyle and the color of my gym uniform from when I was in junior high. If there is any grudge to speak of, my mother used to work in the nightlife industry, so it might be related to one of her customers.
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