As days turned into weeks, the peculiarities of my altered life settled into a strange new
normal. The people around me remained subtly changed—their behaviours, their warmth, their
willingness to engage with me noticeably different from how I remembered them being. I
navigated through this transformed reality with a mixture of cautious optimism and ongoing
bewilderment, keeping my eyes open for signs of whatever the wishing tree had meant when it
told me to prepare myself.
[In School]
The announcement of the mid-term examination results was, as always at Nadu High
School, treated with the reverence of a state ceremony. Students sat in rigid silence as the
teacher moved down the list from first place to last, each name met with a corresponding ripple
of reaction throughout the room.
When my name was called—second place, Sakura Chiba, 94.7 percent—I heard it with the
same sense of dislocation one feels upon discovering a large sum of money in an old coat
pocket. Pleasure, certainly. But also a nagging sense that it somehow belonged to someone else.
Yua, who had placed fifteenth, shot me a look of theatrical betrayal across the aisle. Haruto
Masaki had secured fourth place, and I caught his quiet, satisfied smile before he schooled his
expression back into neutrality.
And then: first place. Ren Fujihara. Again.
It was not the result itself that caught my attention—Ren had occupied the top position for
as long as anyone at Nadu could remember. What caught my attention was the way the
announcement rippled through the room, the way students glanced at him sideways, the way he
himself received the news: completely and utterly unmoved, as though first place were as
unremarkable as the weather.
Yua materialised at my elbow the moment the teacher dismissed us. "He's done it again,"
she murmured, nodding in Ren's direction.
"He always does," I replied, watching him gather his books with quiet, efficient movements.
There was something about Ren Fujihara that I had always found difficult to categorise. He
was not unfriendly—exactly. He simply existed at a slight remove from everything around him,
as though he were watching the world through glass that no one else could see. He was present
in every class, participated when called upon, and never gave anyone a reason to dislike him.
He also never gave anyone a reason to feel that they knew him.
To celebrate the end of exams, Yua dragged me to our favourite café on the high street—a
cheerful, slightly chaotic place renowned for its enormous hamburgers and its complete
disregard for the concept of reasonable portion sizes.
We had barely settled into our seats when Ren Fujihara walked past the café window.
He did not look in. He did not slow down. He simply moved past on the pavement outside,
hands in his pockets, expression neutral, apparently heading somewhere with the quiet
purposefulness that characterised his every movement.
"Yua," I said slowly, watching him until he disappeared from view, "do you know anything
about him? About his family?"
Yua considered this with genuine effort, which for Yua meant staring at the ceiling and
chewing a large bite of burger simultaneously. "Not really," she said finally. "Nobody does. I
don't think anyone from our school has ever been to his house, or met his parents, or even
knows where he lives. He shows up, he demolishes every exam, and then he goes—" she
gestured vaguely toward the window "—wherever it is he goes."
"That's unusual."
"That's Ren Fujihara." Yua shrugged. "Some people are just private."
I nodded slowly, though private felt like an insufficient word for what I observed in him.
Private suggested a choice to keep things to oneself. What I saw in Ren was something else—a
separateness that felt less like preference and more like necessity. As though being known was
something he could not afford.
The thought stayed with me long after Yua and I had parted ways and I had returned home.
I sat at my desk with my textbooks open in front of me and my eyes fixed on absolutely
nothing, turning the puzzle of Ren Fujihara over in my mind.
The wishing tree had told me to prepare for what was coming. I had no idea yet what that
meant. But something in the way Ren moved through the world—untouchable, watchful,
carrying some invisible weight—made me wonder, with the instinct of someone who has
recently learned that the world contains significantly more magic than previously advertised, whether his mystery and my mission were perhaps not entirely unconnected.