We stood frozen under the lonely streetlamp, three statues in a tableau of shared, absolute shock. The only sound was the distant buzz of Ren's footsteps fading into the night. He was gone, but the echo of his words, both the harsh and the gentle, remained, swirling in the air between us.
It was Emi, of course, who broke the spell.
She let out a sound that was halfway between a gasp and a shriek, grabbing my arm with both hands. "Did you see that?! Did you hear that?!" she whisper-shouted, her eyes wide with a manic, vicarious glee. "He said he liked your hair!"
"He also told her to 'get out of the way'," Yui pointed out, her voice a calm, rational counterpoint to Emi's hysteria. "The two statements are contradictory."
"Contradictory?!" Emi scoffed, waving her free hand dismissively. "Yui, you're so literal! That's not a contradiction, that's a classic tsundere! It's textbook! He's mean on the outside to hide his true, soft, squishy feelings on the inside!" She turned back to me, shaking my arm for emphasis. "He totally likes you, Hotaru-chan! A guy like Ren Takanashi doesn't just give out compliments! That's like a dragon giving someone a marshmallow! It's a huge deal!"
A dragon giving someone a marshmallow. The image was so absurd, so perfectly Emi, that a hysterical little laugh escaped my lips. But my mind was a chaotic whirlwind.
The insult—"Get out of the way"—had been a physical blow, a confirmation of his coldness, a reinforcement of the wall between us. But the compliment... the compliment was a crack in that wall. A tiny, confusing, and impossibly bright sliver of light. He had noticed me. He had looked at me, really looked, and had been moved to say something. It wasn't a performance; it was a clumsy, unfiltered, and utterly real moment.
The walk home was a blur of Emi's excited chatter. She was already planning our first date, convinced that his gruff exterior was just a shield for a poetic, misunderstood soul. Yui walked beside us, her expression worried. She saw the contradiction not as romantic, but as a warning sign, a mark of the instability she had always sensed in him.
I heard none of it. I was trapped in the dizzying, illogical space between his two sentences. The cruelty and the kindness, the push and the pull. My experience with people was limited to two categories: Ryouko, a predator who used praise as a leash, and the fans, an anonymous mass whose adoration was for an image, not a person. Ren Takanashi didn't fit into any category I knew. He wasn't a monster. He wasn't a fan. He was just... a boy. A complicated, frustrating, and utterly captivating boy.
When I got home, I retreated to my room and stood in front of the small mirror, my fingers gently touching the short, silver strands of my hair. The reflection was of a girl I was only just beginning to know, a girl with a fierce resolve and a hopelessly confused heart.
Emi was wrong. I knew that. It wasn't a sign that he "liked" me in some simple, romantic way. It was something far more dangerous. It was a sign that he was just as confused as I was. We were two ghosts, haunting the same hallways, and for a single, terrifying moment, we had seen each other.
The thought didn't scare me. It was a dizzying, terrifying, and exhilarating feeling, like standing on the edge of a cliff and wanting, for one insane second, to jump. It felt just like a dream. It felt just like heaven.
The dizzying, heaven-like feeling from my encounter with Ren lingered for a full day, a strange, warm hum beneath the surface of my skin. But as the clock ticked down, another, colder feeling took its place: resolve. The audition was in two days. The stage was calling.
That night, I sat on my futon, my notebook open, the lyrics to A Song for the End of Summer staring up at me. This was it. My story. My truth. I hummed the melody, feeling the raw, painful power in every line. This was the song that would burn down the past. This was the weapon that would finally set me free.
And then, a different voice, a cold, clinical whisper from a decade of training, cut through the emotion. Never play your ace in the qualifying round, Hoshiko.
I froze, the pencil dropping from my fingers. Ryouko's voice. The ghost's strategy. I had been so caught up in the emotional truth of my song that I had forgotten the first rule of warfare: never show your enemy your battle plans.
The audition wasn't the performance. The festival was the performance. That was the stage that mattered. That was where the world—and Ryouko's inevitable spies—would be watching. To sing this song at the audition, in a stuffy classroom in front of a handful of students, would be to waste it. It would be a dress rehearsal for a war, revealing my most powerful weapon before the first shot had even been fired.
The realization was a splash of ice water. Hotaru, the emotional girl, wanted to pour her heart out. But Hoshiko, the strategist, knew that was a losing move. To win, I needed to get through the audition not by showing them my heart, but by showing them my skill. I needed a different song. A Trojan horse. Something technically brilliant but emotionally hollow, a performance that would impress them without revealing a single thing about the real me.
I put my notebook away, my precious, secret weapon hidden from view.
Two days later, I stood outside the school's small, stuffy AV room, waiting my turn. The air was thick with the nervous energy of the other performers. There were only five of us in total: a shy first-year with an acoustic guitar, a pair of twins who sang harmony, and a boisterous boy who was planning to sing an enka ballad. It was a perfect, pathetic, small-town revue.
A teacher, a kind-faced woman I didn't recognize, was explaining the process to us. "Now, as you know," she said with a proud smile, "our festival is very special. Every year, the solo performers are chosen not by the faculty, but by the solo performers from the past two years."
She gestured to the three students sitting at a folding table inside the room. One was a third-year I vaguely recognized, and two others were university students who had come back for the occasion. They looked impossibly important, their faces set with a deep, self-serious gravity.
"We believe," the teacher continued, her voice swelling with sentiment, "that they know best what the stage needs. They know how the audience should feel."
A sound, a short, sharp, incredulous puff of air, escaped my lips before I could stop it. I disguised it as a cough. It was the single most ridiculous thing I had ever heard.
How the audience should feel.
My entire life had been a masterclass in scientifically-backed, market-researched, psychologically-profiled audience manipulation. Ryouko had entire teams of people whose only job was to analyze demographic data and craft emotional responses with the precision of a surgeon. The idea that these three amateurs, with their one-time performance of some saccharine pop song, had some deep, spiritual insight into the "feeling" of an audience was so absurdly earnest it was almost insulting.
This wasn't a professional audition. It was a sentimental tradition. And it was a game I could win in my sleep.
I watched as the shy first-year went in, his hands trembling as he clutched his guitar. I felt a flicker of something, a distant, phantom limb of pity.
The shy first-year came out of the AV room looking like he'd just faced a firing squad. His face was pale, and he clutched his guitar to his chest like a shield, refusing to meet anyone's eyes as he scurried away. The twins went next, their harmonies pretty but forgettable.
Then, the teacher called my name. "Abe-san? You're up."
As I stood, a war broke out inside me. Three different people, all trapped in one body, screaming for control.
This is a lie, Hotaru, the girl from the pier, whispered in terror. This isn't your song. This isn't your voice. It's a trick.
Analyze your audience, Hoshiko, the ghost, countered, her voice cold and clinical as a surgeon's scalpel. Three amateurs with inflated egos. They don't want truth; they want to be impressed. Give them a technical showcase. Overwhelm them. Make their decision easy.
And then there was the third voice, the new one, the alloy. The girl with the silver hair. She was silent, but it was her hand that reached for the door. She would use the ghost's skill, but it would be for Hotaru's purpose. She would not be a victim of the performance. She would be its master.
I stepped inside. The room was exactly as pathetic as I'd imagined. Small, windowless, and smelling of dust and old plastic. A cheap projector hummed in the corner, casting a weak, lonely beam of light through the air. The three judges sat behind their folding table, trying their best to look like seasoned music industry veterans.
"Your name, and the title of your song, please," the third-year said, his voice dripping with a laughable, manufactured authority.
"Hotaru Abe," I said, my voice calm and even. I gave them the title of a famous, technically demanding ballad—a song known for its soaring chorus and dramatic key changes. It was a song that was all technique and no heart. A perfect Trojan horse.
I walked to the center of the room, where a single microphone stood on a cheap, wobbly stand. I didn't need a backing track. I took the microphone from its clip, the muscle memory in my hand absolute. The weight was familiar. The cold metal, a weapon.
I let the silence hang for a beat, drawing their full attention. The projector light caught the silver of my hair, creating a halo effect. It was a calculated, theatrical touch.
And then I sang.
The first note was a perfect, clear, crystalline thing that cut through the stuffy air of the room and silenced the hum of the projector. The three judges, who had been slumping with bored self-importance, all sat bolt upright. Their faces, which had been masks of critique, went slack with pure, unadulterated shock.
This wasn't Hotaru's voice. It wasn't even Hoshiko's voice. It was a fusion of the two. It had all of Hoshiko's power, her perfect pitch, her flawless breath control, her years of relentless, agonizing training. But it was fueled by Hotaru's raw, desperate need to be on that stage.
I didn't just sing the notes; I owned them. I moved with a subtle, practiced grace, my body a vessel for the sound. In the cramped, dusty room, I created a stage where there was none. My eyes were closed, not in emotional reverie, but in absolute, focused control.
I built the song, line by line, from a soft, breathy verse into a powerful, earth-shattering chorus. I could feel the other performers crowding the doorway behind me, their own nervous ambitions forgotten, replaced by a stunned, reverent silence.
I hit the bridge, the song's most difficult passage, a series of cascading notes that climbed higher and higher. I didn't just sing them; I ascended them, my voice a flawless instrument. I saw the university girl's hand come up to cover her mouth, her eyes wide with disbelief. The third-year had forgotten his notepad, his pen frozen in mid-air.
I reached the final, soaring note, the one that had made the song famous. I poured every ounce of Hoshiko's training into it, holding it with a power and clarity that was almost violent in its perfection. I let it hang in the air, a burning, unforgettable fire, for a beat longer than humanly possible. And then, I cut it off, the silence that rushed back in was as shocking as the sound had been.
I opened my eyes and gave them a small, polite, professional bow.
The room was utterly, completely silent. I had not given them my heart. I had not told them my story. I had simply reminded them that they were amateurs, and I was not.
I placed the microphone back in its stand, turned, and walked out, my expression a perfect, calm mask. I didn't need to hear their decision. The war was not over. But I had just won the first, decisive battle. The stage was mine.