A boy I knew confessed he had feelings for me, and I didn't feel the same, so I told him that. A classmate of mine had feelings for this boy, and she didn't like that I'd hurt him like that, so she put a curse on me and told me the next day what she'd done ...

I took it seriously, so I started looking up ways to lift the curse, and started trying to get rid of it.

I learned later that it shouldn't have worked ... the curse shouldn't have worked. But because there was an excess of oddities at the shrine where I was trying to lift the curse, I inadvertently made it work. There was an invisible snake constricting my body, and if it got to my neck, it would suffocate me. It constricted me so much that there were marks on my skin, like snake scales ...

[ she shivers; she really didn't come out of that liking snakes at all. ]

Koyomi-oniichan ... he's like a big brother to me. I knew his sisters when I was really young. He found me trying to lift the curse, and consulted Oshino-san on how to get rid of it. It had become so bad at that point that I would have been dead if we'd waited another day. That night, we went back to the shrine with a charm Oshino-san had given us, so that we could get rid of the curse. Koyomi-oniichan told me to hold onto the charm and pray, and it ... was painful, but it started to work. But we found out soon after that there were two snakes ... the boy who confessed to me, he cursed me, too. We didn't expect this, so we didn't have any way of getting the second one off of me. It started trying to suffocate me ...

Koyomi-oniichan ran forward and tried to grab it off of me. He succeeded, but the snake went back to the boy who had placed the curse on me.

[ needless to say, the boy wasn't quite so lucky as she had been, but she wasn't going to mention that. ]