The final note from my lips hung in the air, a perfect, crystalline thing, before it faded into the hum of the amplifiers. I held the microphone, my knuckles white, my eyes still closed, bracing for the impact. The silence that followed was different from any that had come before. It wasn't confusion or shock. It was heavy, breathless, like the air after a lightning strike.
I slowly opened my eyes.
Mio was staring at me from behind her drum kit, her mouth slightly agape, her usual scowl completely gone, replaced by a look of pure, unadulterated awe. Kaito had lowered his bass, his fingers hovering over the strings as if he'd forgotten what they were for. He just shook his head slowly, a single, disbelieving syllable escaping his lips. "Whoa."
I had won. I had proven that I was a professional, a machine of perfect sound. The ghost of Hoshiko had silenced the room. I looked at Ren, expecting... something. Annoyance? Grudging respect? A flicker of acknowledgement that I was not the stumbling, weak-voiced girl from the first practice?
He gave me nothing. He was just looking at his guitar, his thumb resting on the strings to mute them. His face was a blank wall, completely unreadable, his expression closed off. He hadn't been watching me. He had been listening to the song.
He finally looked up, and his eyes met mine. There was no praise in them. There was no anger. There was just a quiet, profound disappointment that was a thousand times more devastating than any insult.
"That was perfect," he said, his voice flat. "There wasn't a single mistake." He paused, letting the words hang in the air. "It was also completely empty."
The fortress I had built around myself crumbled to dust. He had seen right through it. He had heard the lie. The victory was hollow, a mouthful of ash.
The tension in the room was thick enough to choke on. Kaito and Mio exchanged a nervous glance, caught between their awe at the skill and their loyalty to Ren's vision. I felt my throat tighten, the shame hot and suffocating.
Ren let out a slow breath, a sound of deep, internal frustration. Then he did something I never would have predicted. He unplugged the cable from his guitar with a sharp thunk and began to coil it with neat, efficient motions.
"Practice is over," he announced to the silent room. He slung his guitar into its case. "I'm hungry. Let's go get ramen."
Mio and Kaito stared at him as if he had just started speaking a foreign language. "Ramen?" Mio finally squeaked. "With... her?"
"She's the vocalist, isn't she?" Ren said without looking at me. "The vocalist eats. Let's go."
The walk to the small, shabby noodle shop near the train station was an exercise in awkward silence. I trailed a few feet behind the three of them, feeling like a ghost being escorted by its confused captors. But as we pushed aside the grimy noren curtain and stepped inside, the world changed.
The shop was a blast of heat, steam, and glorious, chaotic noise. The air was thick with the smell of pork broth and chili oil. A grizzled old man shouted orders from behind the counter, his voice a gravelly counterpoint to the cheerful slurping of the customers packed shoulder-to-shoulder. It wasn't glamorous. It wasn't cool. It was just... alive.
We crammed ourselves into a small booth. Kaito and Mio immediately started bickering over whether to get gyoza. Ren just grunted his order to the waitress. I had never been in a place like this in my life. My meals had been catered, served on pristine white plates in silent, sterile hotel rooms. The sheer, messy humanity of this place was overwhelming.
I watched them. I watched the way Kaito stole a piece of naruto from Mio's bowl and she slapped his hand away. I watched the way Ren focused on his noodles with a single-minded intensity, completely ignoring the world around him. They talked about a math test. They complained about a teacher. They laughed at a stupid joke.
And I realized, with a clarity that was like a physical blow, that I had never done this before. Not once. I had never sat in a noisy, crowded room with people my own age after working on something and just... existed. This was it. This was the "normal life" I had been mourning. It wasn't a grand, cinematic dream. It was a cheap bowl of ramen. It was arguing about dumplings. It was the simple, unglamorous, and utterly beautiful act of sharing a meal.
Ryouko had given me a life of polished perfection, a life with no alarms and no surprises. And in doing so, she had stolen all of this. All the small, messy, unimportant moments that, I was beginning to understand, were the only things that mattered at all.
My bowl of ramen arrived, a steaming, fragrant universe of noodles, broth, and toppings. I picked up my chopsticks, my movements stiff and uncertain. Across from me, Ren was already halfway through his, a silent, efficient eating machine. Mio and Kaito were still engaged in a low-level war over the last piece of gyoza. The energy was chaotic, messy, and so far removed from my old life it felt like I was on a different planet.
It was Kaito who finally broke the larger silence. Perhaps he sensed my alienation, or perhaps he was just tired of Ren's disapproval hanging over the table.
"So, Abe-san," he said, pushing his glasses up his nose. "What was your old school like? Was it bigger than ours?"
The question was a landmine. My mind went blank with a surge of pure panic. I had no history. Hotaru Abe had no past. I had to invent one, right here, in the middle of this loud, steamy ramen shop. I swallowed a mouthful of noodles that suddenly tasted like cardboard.
"It was... average," I said, the lie feeling clumsy and foreign on my tongue. "In Shizuoka. Just a normal school. Nothing special." I pictured a generic school building from a TV drama. "The uniforms were uglier than ours."
It was a pathetic, flimsy detail, but it was enough. Mio snorted. "Not hard. These uniforms make us look like potatoes."
"Hey! I look good in this uniform," Kaito protested, puffing out his chest in mock pride. "My mom says I look very scholarly."
"Your mom also thinks your bass playing sounds 'like a cool thunderstorm'," Mio shot back, rolling her eyes. "She's not an objective source."
They started sharing stories of their middle school days, tales of embarrassing festival performances, strict teachers, and failed class projects. I listened, completely captivated. It was like listening to a broadcast from another world, a world of shared, mundane experiences that formed the bedrock of a normal life. They were building a bridge of common ground, and I was on the other side of a chasm, with nothing but lies to build with.
But I wanted to be on their side so badly. So I added to my flimsy fiction. I talked about a grumpy janitor that didn't exist and a school trip to Kyoto that never happened. With every lie, a part of me cringed, but another, larger part felt a strange, thrilling sense of belonging. I was participating. I was one of them.
Mio, in the middle of a story about getting stuck in a supply closet, told a joke. It was a terrible, groan-inducing pun about a teacher's bad haircut. Kaito let out an exaggerated groan, slapping his forehead. And then, a sound I hadn't heard in years escaped my lips: a real laugh. Not Hoshiko's practiced, musical giggle, but a short, sharp, genuine bark of amusement.
The sound was so alien it startled all of us into silence. Kaito and Mio stared at me, their own smiles frozen on their faces. I saw the corner of Ren's mouth twitch, a barely perceptible upward tick that he immediately suppressed by taking a large gulp of broth. For a single, perfect moment, we weren't a collection of disparate, angsty teenagers. We were a band. We were four kids laughing at a stupid joke in a noodle shop. The ice hadn't just been broken; it had melted away into the steam.
The moment passed as quickly as it came. Ren placed his chopsticks down with a quiet click. He had finished his entire bowl while the rest of us were barely halfway through. He stood up, pulling his wallet out.
"I have to go," he said, his voice as flat as ever. "Work."
He tossed some bills onto the table, more than enough to cover his share, and without another word, he pushed past the curtain and was gone, leaving a void of surprised silence in his wake.
The three of us sat there for a moment. The warmth of our shared laugh was already fading, replaced by the familiar chill of his mystery.
"Work?" I finally asked, looking at the other two. "At this time of night? What kind of work does he do?"
Mio and Kaito exchanged a look, one I was beginning to recognize. It was a mixture of resignation and shared ignorance.
"Who knows," Kaito sighed, poking at his last ramen noodle. "He's been like that since we met him in the first year. He just... disappears sometimes. Says he has 'work' and that's it."
"My guess is a late-night shift at a convenience store or maybe a delivery job," Mio added, her voice uncharacteristically serious. "But he's so secretive about it. It's weird, right? It's like he's living a whole other life that has nothing to do with school. Or us."
I looked out through the grimy window, at the dark street where Ren had vanished. A whole other life. It was a thought that resonated with me more than they could possibly know.
We lingered in the warm, steamy haven of the noodle shop for a little while longer after Ren left. Mio and Kaito, with the main source of tension gone, seemed to relax completely, their bickering becoming lighter, funnier. I found myself smiling, a real, small smile, as they debated the merits of different anime theme songs. For the first time, I felt like I was on the inside of a private world, not just observing it from a distance.
But eventually, the old man behind the counter started pointedly wiping down tables, and we took the hint. We stepped out into the cool night air, our bellies full and a fragile, new camaraderie hanging between us.
We walked together until we reached the main intersection, where our paths diverged. "See you tomorrow, Abe-san!" Kaito said with a cheerful wave. "Yeah, see ya," Mio added, giving me a small, almost shy nod. "That was... not terrible."
Coming from her, it felt like the highest praise. I watched them go, a warmth spreading through my chest that had nothing to do with the ramen. The feeling of having friends, even new and complicated ones, was a quiet, revolutionary joy.
My own walk home was solitary, but not lonely. The streets were quiet, the houses dark save for the blue flicker of televisions in their windows. I replayed the evening in my mind: the shared laughter, the lies I had to tell, the way Ren's mouth had almost, almost smiled. He was a puzzle wrapped in an enigma, and I found myself wanting to solve him. A whole other life. The thought didn't feel so isolating now. Maybe we all had them.
I turned onto a quiet residential street, a shortcut I'd started taking since Ren had pointed out the hidden path. The pools of light from the streetlamps were few and far between, leaving long stretches of inky darkness.
That's when I heard it. The low, approaching buzz of a motorcycle engine.
My body reacted before my mind did. Every muscle tensed. The memory of the alley, of being trapped, of a hand on my shoulder, was a visceral, sickening lurch in my stomach. I darted sideways without a second thought, pressing myself into the deep shadows of a hedge that ran alongside a garden wall. My heart was a frantic drum against my ribs. I held my breath, praying for the sound to pass.
The motorcycle slowed, its single headlight cutting a sharp, white cone through the darkness. It pulled to a stop at a house just a few doors down from where I was hiding. The engine idled for a moment before cutting out, plunging the street back into a heavy silence.
I peered through a gap in the hedge, my fear slowly giving way to a new, intense curiosity. A figure got off the bike—it looked more like a sturdy delivery scooter than a real motorcycle. The rider was wearing a dark, unmarked uniform and a helmet that obscured their face. They walked over to the front gate of the house, carrying a small, insulated delivery box.
The porch light flicked on, illuminating the scene. The rider handed the box to an elderly woman, bowed briefly, and turned to leave. As they walked back toward the scooter, they passed directly under a streetlamp. They reached up and pulled off the helmet, running a hand through their messy hair with a gesture of pure, bone-deep weariness.
It was Ren.
My breath caught in my throat. I watched, frozen, as he strapped the helmet back on, swung his leg over the scooter, and started the engine with a practiced kick. He was a delivery boy. The secret, the mystery, the "work" that pulled him away from everything, was this. Delivering food or medicine to people in the quiet of the night.
It was so… normal. So mundane.
And yet, it didn't fit. A simple delivery job? That couldn't be the reason for the walls he built around himself, for the profound exhaustion that seemed to cling to him like a second skin, or for the coiled, dangerous energy he had unleashed in the alley. I had seen him fight. It wasn't the tired frustration of a boy working a boring job. It was something else.
He was hiding something, and this was just the surface. This was the part he was willing to let the world see, if they happened to be looking.
I stayed hidden in the shadows as he drove away, the red dot of his taillight shrinking until it was swallowed by the night. I was no closer to solving the puzzle of Ren Takanashi. I had only found the cover. And I knew, with a certainty that was both frightening and exhilarating, that I wanted to read the rest of the book.
The image of Ren on his scooter, a fleeting figure illuminated by a single streetlamp, was burned into my mind. It played on a loop behind my eyes all night, a silent film that raised more questions than it answered. The mystery of him had shifted. It was no longer just about his secrecy; it was about the profound, bone-deep weariness I had seen in his posture.
The next day in school, I found myself watching him differently. The empty space he occupied by the window felt heavier, charged with the knowledge of his hidden, nocturnal life.
Our fifth period was Japanese Literature. I braced myself for another hour of incomprehensible grammar, but our teacher, a thoughtful woman named Sasaki-sensei, wrote a single word on the board.
心 (Kokoro)
"Today," she said, her voice soft but carrying a weight of significance, "we will begin our discussion of Natsume Sōseki's masterpiece, Kokoro."
She began to speak about the novel, about its themes of isolation and guilt in Meiji-era Japan. She spoke of the main characters: a young, naive student, and the enigmatic man he calls "Sensei." She described Sensei as a man who has built a fortress around his heart, a man living a life of self-imposed exile, cut off from the world by a secret tragedy in his past.
"Sōseki is exploring the loneliness that comes with modern life," Sasaki-sensei explained, her eyes sweeping across the classroom. "Sensei is a man haunted by his past actions. He cannot connect with his wife, he cannot trust the student, he cannot even trust himself. He is living, but he is not alive. He is a ghost in his own home, waiting for the end."
Her words were a stone dropping into the still, quiet pool of my thoughts. A man living a life of self-imposed exile. Haunted by the past. A ghost in his own home.
My eyes drifted across the room to the boy by the window.
Ren wasn't sleeping. He wasn't even looking out the window. He was staring down at his desk, at the blank, open page of his notebook, his hand resting beside it, perfectly still. But there was a tension in his shoulders, a rigidity in his posture that I recognized. It was the posture of someone enduring something, someone weathering a storm that only they could feel.
"Sensei carries a burden," Sasaki-sensei continued, her voice filled with a sad empathy. "A burden that makes genuine connection with others feel like a betrayal of his own past. He pushes people away, not because he dislikes them, but because he believes he is unworthy of their closeness. He believes his heart is a dark, poisoned place."
A delivery job. An alley fight. A solitary, mournful guitar melody. A profound, impenetrable sadness. The pieces of the puzzle of Ren Takanashi began to shift, to rearrange themselves into a new, more tragic picture. I had been looking at his secrets, but maybe I should have been looking at his burdens.
I thought about my own lies in the ramen shop, the false history I had created to build a bridge to Mio and Kaito. Was I so different? We were both ghosts, Ren and I, just haunted by different houses.
The teacher turned and wrote a quote on the board. 「平生はみんな善人なんです.いざという間際に,急に変るから恐ろしいのです.」- "Normally, people are all good people. It's only at the critical moment that they suddenly change, and that's what's frightening."
The chalk scraped against the board, the sound sharp and final. Ren flinched. A tiny, almost imperceptible movement, but I saw it. His fingers curled slightly, his knuckles going white for a fraction of a second before relaxing again.
The bell rang, shattering the heavy silence in the room. The spell was broken. Students began to chatter, the mundane reality of school life rushing back in. But I couldn't shake the feeling that something profound had just happened.
I watched as Ren packed his bag, his movements as economical and detached as ever. He was just a boy leaving a classroom. But I didn't see him that way anymore. Sōseki's novel had given me a new lens. I was beginning to understand that Ren's walls weren't there to keep me out. They were there to keep something else in.
As I walked home that day, the setting sun casting long shadows, I thought about the quiet, inevitable sadness of it all. Life just happens, moving forward whether you're ready or not. You can try to fight the current, or you can let it carry you. The journey, I was starting to realize, felt a lot like the flow of the river.