I looked at my hands. For a decade, these hands had been in constant For a week, I breathed. For a week, the quiet was a balm, a gentle hand on a feverish brow. But peace, I was beginning to learn, could be its own kind of poison when you didn't believe you deserved it.
The second week, the quiet began to change. It was no longer peaceful; it was empty. The silence in the house didn't feel like a comfort, it felt like an accusation. The simple tasks Chiyo gave me—mending a shirt, weeding a small patch of the garden—were finished too quickly, leaving hours of unfilled space.
And in that space, the old voices began to creep back in.
What are you doing now? Ryouko's voice, sharp and clinical, echoed in the stillness of my small room. There's nothing to do.motion: hours of piano practice until my fingers bled, dance rehearsals until my muscles screamed, microphone drills, autograph sessions. Now, they just lay in my lap, pale and useless.
I'm a lazy bum now, I thought, the words tasting like acid. I beg for people's kindness now.
The thought was a physical blow. Hoshiko was a product, a commodity, but she was never a charity case. She earned her keep. Hotaru did nothing. She ate their food, slept under their roof, and offered nothing of value in return. The kindness that had felt like a life raft a week ago now felt like a crushing weight of debt.
The anxiety was a familiar sickness, a cold knot tightening in my stomach. The stage fright I felt before a show was nothing compared to this. That was a fear of failure. This was the fear of being nothing at all.
Tears pricked my eyes, hot and shameful. I crawled to the window of my room, which looked out over the narrow, winding road that led away from the cove. I pressed my forehead against the cool glass, my breath fogging a small circle on the pane.
What am I doing? The question was a desperate, silent scream into the void. What am I supposed to be doing now?
And then, I saw them.
A small group of them, maybe four or five, walking up the road from the direction of the town. Their laughter, thin and bright, reached me even before I could make them out clearly. They wore uniforms—crisp white shirts, dark skirts and trousers. Their bags were slung carelessly over their shoulders. They were high schoolers, coming home from school.
My breath caught in my throat.
School.
A place I had only ever seen in movies. A world I had been told was beneath me, a distraction from my 'destiny'. "Your fans are your classmates, Hoshiko," Ryouko had said once, a cold smile on her face. "The stage is your classroom."
I watched them, transfixed. One of the girls playfully shoved a boy, and he stumbled, laughing. Another was pointing at something out toward the ocean, her face animated. They were loud and clumsy and so incredibly, painfully normal. They weren't performing. They were just… living. They had a place to go every day. They had friends. They had tests to complain about and futures to worry over. They had a life that wasn't scripted.
The tears that had been threatening to fall now streamed down my face, silent and hot. It was a grief so profound it felt like a part of my body was being physically carved out. I wasn't just mourning the life I'd lost, the one filled with screaming crowds and blinding lights. I was mourning the life I never had a chance to even imagine.
The girl who cried in that room wasn't Hoshiko, the fallen idol. She was a nameless sixteen-year-old, looking out a window at the one thing in the world she wanted more than anything: a chance to be nobody at all.
The image of them burned behind my eyelids long after they had disappeared down the road. High school students. A species I'd only ever observed from a distance, like a zoo animal watching the visitors on the other side of the glass. The grief that had hollowed me out began to change, crystallizing from a shapeless despair into a single, sharp point. A desire so fierce and so impossible that it felt like swallowing fire.
I didn't move from the window for what felt like hours. I just replayed the scene: the easy laughter, the careless way they carried their bags, the simple, uncomplicated fact of their existence. It wasn't fame or adoration I had been mourning. It was that. The chance to be a footnote in someone else's day.
That evening, the knot of anxiety in my stomach had a new name: resolve. It was a terrifying feeling. Resolve meant action. Resolve meant asking for something, not just passively receiving.
Dinner was the same quiet ritual it had become. The clink of chopsticks against ceramic bowls, the soft bubbling of the stew on the portable stove, the distant sigh of the waves. Chiyo spoke a little about her garden, about a stubborn weed that kept returning. Akira grunted in response, his focus entirely on his food. My own food was tasteless in my mouth. I kept rehearsing the words, but they felt foreign and heavy on my tongue. You are a guest. You are a burden. Do not ask for more. Ryouko's training was a cage built deep inside me.
I waited until the meal was over, until Akira was gathering the dishes with his usual quiet efficiency. My heart was a frantic drum against my ribs. It was now or never.
"Chiyo-san."
My voice was a tremor, barely a whisper. Both of them stopped. It was the first time I had initiated a conversation about anything other than a simple "thank you" or "good morning."
Chiyo turned to me, her eyes kind and patient. Akira paused, his back still to me, his hands full of bowls.
I took a breath, forcing the air into my lungs. "Today… I saw some students coming home from school."
Chiyo simply nodded, waiting. The silence stretched, and I felt my courage begin to fray.
"I…" I swallowed, my throat tight. "I want to go. To school."
The words hung in the air, fragile and impossibly loud.
Akira's shoulders tensed. He didn't turn around, but I could feel the wall of his disapproval go up instantly. The silence from him was no longer calm; it was heavy, like a gathering storm.
Chiyo's expression didn't change. She just looked at me, her gaze deep and searching, as if she were trying to see the shape of the words themselves. Finally, she gave a small, slow nod. "I see."
"It's too dangerous," Akira said, his voice low and flat. He finally turned, his dark eyes fixed on me. It wasn't anger in his gaze, but something harder to face: stark, pragmatic concern. "Someone would recognize you. Your face, your hair… it's not exactly common."
He was right. The silver hair that Ryouko had called my "brand" was a beacon. "I can dye it," I said, the words tumbling out in a rush. "I can wear a mask. I'll be careful. I won't talk to anyone if I don't have to. I just want to… to sit in a classroom. I want to learn things from a book, not from a teleprompter."
My voice cracked on the last words. The desperation I felt was a raw, open wound. This wasn't a whim. It was a plea for a life.
"Hiding here forever isn't living," I whispered, looking from his guarded face to Chiyo's calm one. "It's just… waiting. I don't want to be Hoshiko anymore, but I don't know how to be anyone else. Maybe… maybe school is where you learn how."
Akira looked at his grandmother, his expression a silent question.
Chiyo was quiet for a long time, her gaze distant. "A person is not a boat to be hidden away in a cove forever," she said, her voice soft but firm. "They need a harbor, but they also need a sea to sail on."
She turned her eyes back to me. "It is not a simple thing, Hotaru-chan. You have no name here. No history." She paused. "But nothing worth doing ever is."
She looked at her grandson, a silent message passing between them. He let out a slow breath, the tension leaving his shoulders in a quiet admission of defeat. He still thought it was a terrible idea—I could see it in his eyes—but he would not stand in the way.
"I will make some calls tomorrow," Chiyo said to me, her voice sealing the decision. "We will see what can be done."
I could only nod, a wave of dizziness washing over me. It wasn't a yes. It was a maybe. But it was the first maybe I had ever been given, and it felt more real and more terrifying than a thousand standing ovations.
The next morning, the air in the house was different. It was charged with the weight of the promise Chiyo had made. The usual comfortable silence now felt like the held breath before a plunge into icy water. I ate my breakfast mechanically, my stomach a nest of writhing eels. A 'maybe' was a dream. A 'we will see' was a fragile hope. But the practical steps that followed were terrifyingly real.
Akira was the one who brought the reality back from town. He returned mid-morning, not with fish, but with a small, plain plastic bag. He set it on the kitchen table without a word. Inside was a single box. On it, a picture of a smiling woman with glossy, jet-black hair.
My breath hitched. It was an executioner's tools and a key to freedom, all in one cheap cardboard box.
"The bathroom," was all he said, his voice flat. He wouldn't meet my eyes. He disapproved, and this was his silent, final protest.
The small, tiled bathroom felt like an operating theater. Akira draped a thin, old towel over my shoulders, his movements stiff and reluctant. I sat on a low wooden stool, staring at the stranger in the small, clouded mirror. My hair, my beautiful, cursed silver hair, cascaded over my shoulders. It had been professionally cared for every single day of my life. Trimmed, treated, styled. It was the single most recognizable thing about me.
Akira mixed the chemicals in a plastic bowl, the sharp, acrid smell filling the tiny room. He put on the flimsy plastic gloves with a grimace. I expected his touch to be rough, impatient. But when his fingers made contact with my hair, they were surprisingly gentle, almost hesitant. He worked the thick, dark paste into the strands with a methodical focus, section by section, from root to tip. I watched in the mirror as the silver vanished, strand by strand, consumed by the starless black. It felt like watching myself disappear.
We didn't speak. The only sounds were the squelch of the dye, his quiet breathing, and the frantic pounding of my own heart. He was so close, his face a mask of concentration. I could see the flecks of sea salt in his dark eyebrows. This was the most intimate any human being had been with me in years, and it wasn't an act of affection. It was an act of erasure.
When he was done, my head was covered in the dark, heavy goo. "Wait forty minutes," he mumbled, already turning to wash the black stains from his hands. "Then rinse." He left without another word, closing the door quietly behind him.
I stared at the monstrous version of myself in the mirror, a girl with a tar-covered head. Hoshiko was being murdered in this small, damp bathroom. But I didn't know who, or what, would be left when she was gone.
While I waited, Chiyo came back from the post office, where the town's only public phone was. She found me sitting at the kitchen table, the towel still around my neck. She didn't comment on my hair. She just poured two cups of tea, her movements calm and deliberate.
"I spoke with my old friend, Tanaka-san," she said, her voice a gentle counterpoint to the storm in my soul. "He is the principal at the local high school."
I looked up, my heart stopping.
"Your name is Hotaru Abe," she said, as if stating a simple fact. "You are my sister's granddaughter. Your mother is unwell, so you have come from Chiba to live with me and finish your schooling here."
It was a story as thin as rice paper, but it was a story. A history. My first one.
"He will need to meet you, of course. But the school year has already begun. You can start tomorrow as a provisional transfer student." She took a slow sip of her tea. "There will be paperwork. But for now… it is enough."
Tomorrow. The word hit me like a physical blow.
When the forty minutes were up, I washed the dye out in the shower. The water ran black for what felt like an eternity. When I finally dared to look at my reflection, a ghost stared back. The girl in the mirror had my face, my eyes, but she was a stranger. Her hair was a flat, unnatural black, a void where starlight used to be. It was shorter now, the ends ragged and uneven from my own frantic haircut. She looked plain. She looked anonymous. She looked like nobody.
It was the most beautiful I had ever felt.
When I came out, a neatly folded pile of clothes was sitting on my futon. It wasn't a gift. It was a loan. But it felt like one. A dark skirt, a white blouse with a faint blue sailor-style collar, and a red ribbon. A school uniform.
I picked it up, the fabric soft and worn under my fingers. It was real. This was real. I was holding a piece of the life I had only ever watched from a window. The eels of anxiety in my stomach were still there, but now, tangled with them, was a feeling so new and fragile I could barely identify it.
It felt like hope.
I stood before the small, clouded mirror in my room, fully dressed. The borrowed uniform hung on my frame, a little loose at the shoulders. The girl who stared back was a stranger, a collection of borrowed parts. Chiyo's sister's granddaughter's uniform. Akira's reluctant handiwork in her hair. A name, Hotaru Abe, plucked from the air. She was a fiction, a ghost assembled to haunt a new life.
And as I stared into her eyes—my eyes—the reflection wavered.
For a split second, a phantom flickered over the glass. A flash of impossible silver, the ghost of a perfectly crafted smile, eyes that knew how to hold the attention of ten thousand people. It was Hoshiko. And she was looking at me from behind the stranger's eyes with sheer, unadulterated terror.
Then I heard her. Not with my ears, but in the deepest, most silent part of my mind. A scream. Not of anger, but of desperate, pleading panic.
Help me. Please, don't leave me here. Don't kill me.
It was the part of me that had been born on a stage. The part that had learned to equate the roar of a crowd with the feeling of being alive. The part that had been starved and molded and polished until all it knew was the performance. To that part of me, this silence, this anonymity, wasn't freedom. It was death. The ghost in the mirror wasn't just a memory; she was a terrified child, banging on the inside of a coffin lid.
My hands flew to my chest, my knuckles pressing hard against my sternum. I squeezed my eyes shut, a wave of nausea rolling through me. She was me. I was her. But to survive, one of us had to be locked away.
It's okay, I thought, the words a desperate, silent prayer. You can rest now. You're so tired. Just sleep. Please, just go to sleep.
I imagined her, small and glittering, curled up inside my heart. I gently wrapped her in layers and layers of quiet, dark velvet, tucking her away into a place where the stage lights couldn't reach, where the sound of applause was just a dull, distant echo. I wasn't killing her. I was putting her to sleep. A long, deep, necessary sleep.
The effort was immense, a physical strain that left me breathless. When I finally dared to open my eyes again, the reflection was stable. It was just a girl. A plain girl with dark, ragged hair and haunted eyes. Hotaru Abe. Her face was pale, and she looked exhausted.
Sleep didn't come that night. I lay on my futon, listening to the ancient house breathe around me. Every creak of the floorboards, every sigh of the wind outside the shoji screen, was the sound of Ryouko's footsteps coming down the hall. Every distant crash of a wave was the roar of a crowd I could no longer face.
I was a spy, a pretender about to walk into enemy territory. My mission: to flawlessly perform the role of a normal sixteen-year-old girl. But the ghost I had just tucked away deep in my heart was a saboteur, waiting for a single moment of weakness to claw her way back to the surface.
The walk to the school was the longest ten minutes of my life. The sun was bright, the sky a painful, cloudless blue. The sea breeze, usually a comfort, felt like an accomplice, trying to whip my dark, unfamiliar hair into a frenzy and reveal the fraud underneath. I walked with my head down, focusing on the cracked asphalt of the road, my hands clenched so tightly around the straps of my borrowed school bag that my knuckles were white.
Chiyo walked beside me, her pace steady and unhurried, a picture of calm. Akira trailed a few steps behind us, a silent, brooding bodyguard. He hadn't said a word to me all morning, but his presence was a heavy cloak of disapproval. He thought this was a mistake, a reckless gamble, and every silent footstep behind me was a reminder.
We rounded a final bend, and the school came into view. It was an old, two-story building, its white paint weathered by the salt and sun. It looked nothing like the sleek, modern skyscrapers of Tokyo. It looked real. The sounds hit me first—the rhythmic thud of a basketball on pavement, shouts from a sports field, the distant, chaotic melody of a brass band warming up. It was the sound of normal life, a symphony I had never been allowed to join.
And then we stepped through the main gate, and the symphony stuttered to a halt.
It started with a few students, then a few more. Heads turned. Conversations quieted. The basketball stopped bouncing. In a matter of seconds, it felt like every eye on the school grounds was fixed on me. On us. The old woman, the grim-faced young man, and the strange, pale girl with ragged black hair who was clearly not from around here.
My blood ran cold. My training, etched into my very bones, screamed at me. Shoulders back. Chin up. Smile. Engage. You are Hoshiko. You are an object of affection. Own their attention. My spine straightened automatically, the ghost of Hoshiko rising to the surface, ready to perform.
But I wasn't Hoshiko. I was Hotaru Abe, a nervous transfer student.
With a will I didn't know I possessed, I fought the instinct. I forced my shoulders to slump just a little. I let my gaze stay fixed on the ground in front of me, projecting shyness, not confidence. This was a new kind of performance, harder than any concert. I wasn't trying to capture their attention; I was trying to deflect it. Every stare felt like a physical touch, a prodding finger searching for the cracks in my disguise. They weren't looking at me with adoration. They were looking with simple, sharp curiosity, the kind that dissects a new insect found in the grass.
"Tanaka-san is expecting us," Chiyo said, her voice calm and even, cutting through the heavy silence. She guided me toward the main entrance, her quiet dignity a shield against the sea of eyes.
The principal's office was a small room filled with books, the scent of old paper, and green tea. Principal Tanaka was an older man with kind, crinkling eyes and a warm smile. He bowed deeply to Chiyo, treating her with a respect that seemed to go back years.
"Chiyo-san, it is good to see you," he said, before turning his gentle gaze to me. "And you must be Hotaru-chan. Welcome."
I bowed so low my forehead almost touched my knees. "It is a pleasure to meet you, sir. Thank you for having me." The words were Hoshiko's—polished, polite, perfect.
He asked a few gentle questions, his eyes never leaving my face. He spoke of my "mother's illness" with sympathy, asked about my journey from Chiba, and mentioned that it must be a big change to move to such a quiet town. I answered in soft, rehearsed monotones, giving nothing away. The entire conversation was a lie, a fragile house of cards we were all carefully building together.
Finally, he stamped a piece of paper with a decisive thud. "Well, Abe-san, everything seems to be in order. Welcome to Minato Harbor High School."
He handed me a student ID card. On it was a picture Akira had taken of me yesterday against a white wall. The girl in the photo was a stranger, her face pale, her black hair stark, her eyes wide with a quiet terror. Underneath it was my new name. Hotaru Abe.
It was official. Hoshiko was dead. And I, her terrified ghost, was now enrolled in high school.