The classroom felt different today. The air was thick with a new kind of energy. It was as if a spotlight I'd never asked for had been cast on me. The ghost was no longer invisible.
As the last of Mr. Fujita's calculus students left, I stayed sitting in my usual seat at the back. The encounter in the hallway played on a loop in my mind—the shock of the impact, the dizzying scent of strawberries, the weight of Hikari Yoshida on my lap, and the cool, analytical gaze of Kurayami that had seen right through the chaos. My ribs ached with a dull throb, a familiar pain that was far easier to process than this social pandemonium.
I pulled out my electrodynamics textbook and my phone, jamming my earbuds in with a sense of desperation. I scrolled to my training playlist and tapped on Voodoo Child. Ah god bless hollywood Hogan. The frantic, wailing guitar ripped through my skull, building a wall between me and the loud classroom. I stared at the complex equations on the board from the previous lesson, my hand moving on autopilot to solve them. This was my thing, I love maths.
I paused the music for a second, just to check if Honoka-sensei had arrived or not. That's when I heard it. A hushed whisper, sharp as a razor blade slicing through the quiet.
"…no, I'm serious! It was totally her who ran into him. And he just, like, boom she was straddling him."
My hand stilled above the notebook. The voice belonged to Aimi, a girl who just gossiped. My heart hammered an uneven rhythm against my ribs.
A second voice, laced with disbelief. "Get out. Yoshida? She ran into Nakamura?"
"Yes! And get this—they fell. She was, like, on top of him. Her chest was right in his face! It was so awkward. But he was so calm about it. Just got up and was like, 'it's fine.'"
A soft, collective gasp from her little coven. My jaw tightened. So that was the story. My private, shocking moment was now public property, a juicy piece of gossip to be dissected. The ghost was being discussed. This was not part of the plan.
I thumbed my phone screen, jamming the music back on, louder this time forcing the voices out. I forced my eyes back to my notebook, but the variables swam on the page. The clean, orderly lines of differential equations had been invaded by the messy, unpredictable virus of social speculation.
The bell rang, a jarring sound that felt like a reprieve. I was the first one out of my seat, shouldering my bag—its weight from the hidden plates a comforting, familiar anchor. I needed a different kind of silence.
The school library was my usual refuge. It was mostly empty, save for a few diligent first-years. I beelined for my spot, a secluded carrel hidden behind a shelf of outdated encyclopedias. I pulled out my book—The Biomechanics of Human Movement—and tried to lose myself in the physics of leverage and kinetic chains, things I could actually control.
That's when I heard them. Two girls from my class, whispering by the new fiction shelf, completely unaware of my presence.
"…no, I'm telling you, Emi, it was him. Satoshi Nakamura."
I froze, the page on diagrammed takedowns forgotten.
"The guy who used to be with Yumi? That Nakamura?" Emi's voice was a hushed shriek. "I barely recognized him. When did he get so… I don't know… sculpted? It's like he spent the summer getting carved out of marble."
A giggle. "I know! And he's smart, too. Fujita-sensei was practically beaming at his test. It's like he had a total system upgrade and nobody got the memo."
"I heard from Hana that Yoshida was totally flustered after. She was at her locker talking about how 'surprisingly solid' he was and how she could feel 'something'."
My grip on the book tightened. This was surreal. I was a specimen being examined. Sculpted. Marble. A system upgrade.'something'??. The words were so detached from the brutal, sweaty reality of the gym, from the pain that had forged this new body. They saw the result, not the process. They saw the calm, not the storm that had preceded it.
A small, deeply buried part of me felt a flicker of something—vindication? Pride? It was quickly smothered by a powerful wave of discomfort. This was attention. And attention was dangerous.
I gathered my things as quietly as a ghost and slipped out the other side of the bookshelf, avoiding them completely. I needed water. I needed to not be perceived for five damn minutes.
The universe, it seemed, was not on my side.
As I approached the vending machines near the courtyard, I saw them. Tanahashi. And his usual gang of futureless muscleheads. They were loitering around, their body language screaming entitlement and boredom, a stark contrast to the disciplined nature of the Lion's Den people.
I kept my head down, aiming for the water button. I could feel their eyes on me, like physical weights.
"Well, well. Look what the cat dragged in. Or should I say, what finally crawled out of its hole."
It was Kenji, Tanahashi's primary lackey, his voice a permanent sneer.
I ignored him, retrieving my water bottle. The cold plastic was a grounding sensation.
"Hey. Nakamura. I'm talking to you." Kenji's voice got louder, more aggressive. "You deaf now, as well as dumb?"
I took a long, slow drink of water. I didn't turn.
"Relax," Tanahashi's voice cut in, smooth and dripping with a lazy disdain that was far more venomous than Kenji's outright aggression. "It's just Nakamura. Can't you see? He's trying out a new look. Thinks a few push-ups and a new haircut will make people forget he's a pathetic loser who got his girl stolen."
My back was to them. I could feel the old, familiar heat of shame trying to bubble up from the past. I quashed it, mentally shoving it down. I visualized the cold, analytical calm of the gym settling over me like a cloak. This was just verbal sparring. They were throwing weak jabs, testing my guard.
"He's putting on an act," Tanahashi continued, his voice aimed at his friends but meant for me. "He's still bent out of shape about Yumi. This is all just a sad little performance to get a reaction. It's transparent. And pathetic."
Kenji snorted. "Looks like it's working on Yoshida, though."
There was a beat of silence. I could almost feel Tanahashi's smirk tighten.
"So?" he said, his voice losing a fraction of its cool. "She's just being nice. She feels sorry for him. Thinks he's some kind of wounded puppy. He's still the same loser he always was. He's just pretending he's not."
That was my cue to leave. I had the data I needed. The threat was clear. Tanahashi felt that his status was challenged, and his strategy was to reassert his dominance, to verbally push me back into the box he'd built for me. It was predictable. Boring to be honest.
I turned slowly. I didn't look at Kenji. I didn't look at the other guys. I looked directly at Tanahashi. My expression was neutral. I held his gaze for exactly two seconds—long enough for him to see the complete absence of fear or anger, long enough for his own sneer to become slightly unsure, and then I walked away.
I didn't hurry. I walked with the same speed that I used in the gym. I could feel their stares burning into my back, but no one followed me or called me out. They were all silent
The walk back to my electrodynamics class was unique . The whispers felt louder. I caught more glances from girls who quickly looked away, cheeks flushing. I felt the hard, suspicious glares from other guys excluding Tanahashi's bitches. The classroom was no longer just a room; it was a social battlefield, and I had been thrust onto it without my consent.
Hikari Yoshida was there, laughing with her friends. She didn't look at me. Kurayami was already in her seat by the window, a single earbud in, her sketchbook open as she absently drew while the teacher droned on.
I took my seat. The factions were drawn, not by me, but by them. I was either an object of curiosity or a target of resentment. There was no middle ground.
So, I did the only thing I could control. I opened my textbook. I focused on the clean, elegant certainty of whatever was written in Haliday-Resnick, mhm western author books are very good . I lost myself in the flow of electric fields and magnetic flux. This made sense. It was refreshing not gonna lie. ….. And just like this hours passed, periods passed and finally everything was over.
The final bell of the day was loud, jerking me out of a deep focus on a problem involving Grignard,organic chemistry is a weird language. I packed my bag slowly, the weights clinking inside with a sharp sound.
The walk out of the school gates felt like jumping a border. The buzz of the day, the whispers, the stares, the charged interactions all of that began to fade, replaced by the familiar rhythm of my own footsteps. The gossiping girls, the jealous guys… they were just noise. Mob characters in the much louder narrative of my own life.
But as I turned the corner onto the industrial road, the sound of my footsteps mixing with the distant rumble of a train, the events of the day replayed in my mind with crystal clarity.
They could whisper. They could speculate. They could call me a faker or a marvel. They could try to put me back in a box I had broken myself out of.
A slow, cold smile touched my lips, one that would have looked foreign on my face a year ago. It wasn't a smile of happiness. It was the smile of a fighter who had just finished sizing up his opponent and found him lacking.
They thought this was an act. A performance.
They had no idea that the calm they were seeing was the most real thing about me. It was the calm of the eye of the storm.
And if they pushed too hard, they were going to learn exactly what the rest of the storm felt like. The storm that was forged every day, across the railway tracks, in the Lion's Den.