Yui's question—"It's not just a song, is it?"—hung in the air between us, sharp and fragile as a shard of glass. The cheerful rooftop bubble had popped, leaving a sudden, ringing silence. Emi looked back and forth between us, her expression a mask of pure confusion, her half-eaten ice cream forgotten in her hand.
This was it. The precipice. I could lie again. I could invent another story, another flimsy piece of fiction to patch the holes in my identity. It would be so easy. It was what Hoshiko was trained to do.
But I looked at them. I looked at Emi, whose loyalty was so fierce and unquestioning it was humbling. And I looked at Yui, whose quiet, analytical mind had seen past the performance and straight to the broken person underneath. They had offered me their friendship, a genuine, unconditional thing, and I had repaid them with a false name and a borrowed life. They deserved the truth. I deserved to give it.
I took a deep breath, the salty air filling my lungs, and I stood up.
The sun was a perfect, burning orange sphere, sinking into the horizon behind the school building. Its last, glorious rays caught my hair, setting the short, silver strands ablaze. For a moment, I wasn't a runaway or a transfer student. I was a figure wreathed in golden light, my shadow stretching long across the rooftop. I was a spectacle. But for the first time, it was on my own terms.
"My name isn't Hotaru Abe," I said. My voice was quiet, but it carried in the still evening air, clear and steady.
Emi's jaw dropped. Yui just watched me, her expression a mixture of sadness and confirmation.
I looked directly at them, at the two girls who had become the first real friends of my entire, fractured life, and I let the final wall crumble.
"I'm Hoshiko."
The name, my other name, the one that had been both my throne and my cage, sounded strange coming from my own lips. It was an admission, a confession, and a reclamation.
Emi's face went through a rapid series of emotions: confusion, disbelief, dawning comprehension, and then, a sudden, explosive joy. "I KNEW IT!" she shrieked, jumping to her feet and pointing a triumphant finger at Yui. "I TOLD YOU! I TOLD YOU SHE LOOKED EXACTLY LIKE HER!"
But Yui didn't look triumphant. She looked incredibly sad. "It must have been so hard," she whispered, her eyes full of a profound empathy that made my own eyes burn. "To be here, all alone."
And just like that, the fear was gone, washed away by their acceptance. Emi's fan-girl excitement and Yui's quiet compassion were two sides of the same perfect, beautiful coin. They knew, and they were still here.
I sat back down, the tension draining out of me, leaving me feeling light and hollowed out in the best possible way. The three of us sat close together on the bench as the last of the sun disappeared, the secret binding us in the gathering twilight. The weight of my double life, a weight I hadn't even realized I was carrying, lifted.
After a few moments of quiet, I leaned in closer, a new, more terrifying and infinitely more normal confession bubbling up inside me.
"Can I tell you guys something else?" I whispered, a conspiratorial thrill running through me. "Something... really embarrassing?"
They both nodded eagerly, their faces close to mine.
I took a breath and let the most ridiculous, illogical, and honest truth I knew spill out into the darkness. "I think... I think I have a crush on Ren Takanashi."
The silence that followed was more profound, more absolute, than the one after my Hoshiko confession. Emi and Yui just stared at me, their faces perfect mirror images of slack-jawed, stupefied shock.
"Ren?!" Emi finally squeaked, her voice an octave higher than usual. "Takanashi?! The sleepy, grumpy, scary guy who looks like he wants to murder everyone before he's had his morning coffee?!"
"But..." Yui stammered, for once at a complete loss for words. "Of all the people in this school... you chose him?"
The music room was a cage of dead air.
We were playing, but it wasn't music. It was noise. Kaito's bassline, usually a solid, melancholic anchor, felt plodding and aimless. Mio's drumming, which could be a sharp, angry thunderstorm, was just a series of disconnected thuds, a bored teenager hitting things with sticks. And my guitar... my guitar sounded like a stranger's. The notes were correct, the chords were in the right order, but the feeling was gone. It was a machine executing a program.
We ground to a halt at the end of what was supposed to be the song's climax. The silence that followed was heavy and pathetic.
"That sucked," Mio said, dropping her sticks onto the snare with a frustrated clatter. "Like, officially, that was the worst we've ever sounded."
"Something's off," Kaito mumbled, staring at his fretboard as if it had personally offended him. "The tempo is all over the place."
They both looked at me, the unspoken question hanging in the dusty air. I didn't answer. I just stood there, the weight of my guitar a dead thing on my shoulder. I knew what was wrong. It was the silence. The empty space where a voice should have been. Her voice.
My mind, against my will, replayed the memory. The sound of her singing our song, the raw, ugly, beautiful truth of it filling every corner of this room. The way the air had crackled with a life that had nothing to do with technical perfection. We hadn't just been playing a song; we had been holding a storm in our hands.
Now, the room just felt... dull. The cool, detached vibe we'd cultivated for years didn't feel cool anymore. It felt quiet. Empty.
A surge of irritation, hot and sharp, went through me. I slammed my hand down on my guitar strings, the discordant TWANG making both of them jump.
What the hell am I doing?
I never thought about people. It wasn't my function. My world was a simple, brutal equation: work the night shift, make enough money to keep the lights on, make sure my grandmother had her medicine, and try not to get kicked out of school. That was it. My family's well-being was the beginning and the end of my concerns. Other people were just background noise, static I had learned to tune out.
But she wasn't static. She was a feedback loop, a piercing, high-frequency squeal that had somehow gotten into my head and wouldn't leave. The image of her face—the terror in the alley, the confusion when I'd kicked her out, the brief, shattering moment our eyes met across the schoolyard—it was a constant, looping intrusion.
I shook my head, trying to physically dislodge the thought. I don't even like her. She was a nuisance. She was trouble. She had the eyes of a stray cat that you know you shouldn't feed but you do anyway, and now you're responsible for it. She was annoying.
"Practice is over," I grunted, unplugging my guitar and shoving it into its case. "Let's go."
Mio and Kaito exchanged a look but didn't argue. They packed up in silence, the misery a shared, unspoken cloud. They left, and I was alone in the quiet, empty room.
My eyes were drawn to the microphone stand, standing upright in the center of the room like a tombstone. It was just a piece of metal. But a week ago, it had been a lightning rod.
With a curse, I walked over to my amp, plugged my guitar back in, and cranked the distortion knob all the way to ten. I hit a single, raw power chord, a blast of pure, ugly noise designed to fill the space, to obliterate the silence.
But it didn't.
The distorted chord faded, leaving behind a ringing, empty silence. The noise hadn't worked. It was just a different kind of quiet, a different shape of the same hollow space she had left behind.
I slammed my guitar into its case with more force than necessary, the clasps snapping shut like prison doors. I had to get out of there. The room felt like it was suffocating me, every dusty corner echoing with a voice that wasn't there.
I walked home, my hands shoved deep in my pockets, my head down. The evening was cool, but I felt hot, a low-grade fever of pure, undiluted frustration simmering under my skin. My thoughts were a tangled mess, a feedback loop of her face, Ayame Kurokawa's perfectly veiled threats, and the dead, lifeless sound of our music. I was supposed to be in control. I was the one who built the walls, who kept the world at a safe, manageable distance. Now, the walls were crumbling from the inside out, and I didn't know how to stop it.
I turned a corner onto the main street that led toward the pier, and the sound of laughter, bright and carefree, cut through my internal static. I looked up, and my feet froze on the pavement.
It was them. Her, Emi, and Yui, standing under the warm glow of a streetlamp, sharing a bag of something from a convenience store. She was laughing, her head thrown back, and the light caught her hair.
Her new, silver hair.
It was a beacon, a declaration. The shy, dark-haired ghost was gone, and in her place was something radiant and terrifyingly familiar. She looked like the pictures you see in magazines, an idol just pretending to be a normal girl for a day.
The laughter died the second she saw me. Her smile vanished, replaced by that same haunted, hollowed-out look from the day before. Emi and Yui shuffled awkwardly, their cheerful energy evaporating into the tense silence that suddenly stretched between us. We just stood there, two islands of misery separated by a sea of unspoken things.
My first instinct, my only instinct, was to reinforce the wall. The promise I'd made, the threat Ayame held over the club—it was the only thing that mattered. I had to protect what was mine. I had to push her away.
I started walking again, my path taking me right past them. As I drew level, I didn't look at her, but I spoke, my voice a low, gravelly thing meant to wound. "Get out of the way."
I saw her flinch out of the corner of my eye. I brushed past, my shoulder deliberately not touching hers, and kept walking. One step. Two steps. The scent of her shampoo, something clean and floral, hit me, a ghost in the salty air.
Keep walking. Don't look back. It's for the best.
But my feet stopped.
I don't know why. I don't know what broke through the layers of anger and duty and self-loathing. Maybe it was the defiant, beautiful silver of her hair. Maybe it was the memory of her small, triumphant laugh in the ramen shop. Or maybe I was just tired of breaking things.
Against every rational thought in my head, I turned around. She was still watching me, her face a pale, wounded moon in the darkness.
"Nice hair," I said.
The words came out flat, devoid of any emotion, almost a grunt. It was the stupidest, most useless thing I could have possibly said.
I didn't wait for a reaction. I couldn't. The mortification was already a hot flush crawling up my neck. I turned back around and walked away, my pace quickening with every step, leaving the three of them standing in stunned, absolute silence under the lonely glow of the streetlamp.
By the time I reached the quiet street where my grandmother and I lived, the mortification had curdled back into a familiar, cold anger. I successfully shook it off again. What was I doing? She's probably the same as that first-year girl last spring who left a note in my shoe locker, saying she "liked me." All it did was waste my time. It was a distraction, an emotion I had no use for, no space for. Hotaru Abe, with her sad eyes and her silver hair, was just a more complicated version of the same problem.
I have always hated socializing. In middle school, while other kids were joining clubs and going to festivals, I was stocking shelves at the general store. They saw me as the poor, quiet kid who never had any fun. I saw them as children with the luxury of a life I couldn't afford. The wall between us felt as wide as the ocean. Nothing had changed.
I still had no time for luxuries. My "work" wasn't a choice. I do deliveries at night, running supplies for the convenience stores, pharmacies, and small restaurants in this town and the next one over. The old scooter wasn't glamorous, but it paid for my grandmother's medicine and kept the lights on. It was a simple, brutal equation.
My routine was the only thing that kept me sane. It was a fortress of habit, a bulwark against the chaos of my life. The deliveries started at ten and ended when the last box was dropped off. I always came back precisely at 4:15 AM. I'd study for an hour and a half, the only quiet time I had to keep my grades from collapsing completely, forcing my exhausted mind to absorb facts about history and theorems I would never use. Then, I'd walk to school early, get to my desk by the window as the sun was just beginning to rise, and finally, finally get the sleep I needed before the first bell rang.
It was a hard, lonely, and repetitive life. But it was stable. It was predictable. And there was no room in it for a girl with silver hair who sounded like a storm when she sang.