The river is green glass and dare. Watari is already up on the railing, socks rolled, shirt stuck to his back, yelling something heroic that mostly sounds like wind. Tsubaki stands on the concrete lip like it insulted her and cracks her knuckles. I hover a step back with my hands on the straps of a life that is mostly rules.
"C'mon, Kousei!" Watari crows, arms flung like wings. "Three! Two—"
"No," I say, very quietly, to the rail, the water, my knees.
Tsubaki pivots, eyes bright enough to start a small fire. "You never have fun anymore."
"I have fun," I say, which is not the same as true. "My mom—she'll get mad. If I get sick. I have recital If I—"
Tsubaki blows air through her teeth like a pitcher annoyed at the ump. "Your mom's not here." She taps my chest with two fingers, quick and practical. "You are."
Watari vanishes mid-lecture. One heartbeat he's crowing on the rail, the next he's a body slicing color into the river, a thunderclap of splash and echoes bouncing off the bridge girders. He pops up immediately, hair slicked, mouth wide in happiness. "It's perfect," he shouts. "Jump, you cowards!"
I stare at the drop like it owes me an apology. The water smells like summer and algae and somebody's lost courage. "I can't," I tell Tsubaki. "Really. I'm not—"
She makes a noise like a decision. "Fine," she says. "I'll do the fun for both of us."
And then I'm air.
I don't remember her bending. I remember weight leaving my shoes, the horizon doing a lazy cartwheel, the taste of my own shout when it realizes no one will catch it. Tsubaki has me hoisted piggyback—no, shouldered—no, some wild tangle that used to be dignity and is now momentum. We drop. The world slaps.
Cold happens all at once. For a second there isn't water, there's just pressure, like the sky sat on my chest. My arms forget grammar. The sound is a roar inside my bones. Tsubaki tears away from me toward light; I reach, find only silk weeds and the slick spine of panic. My lungs lurch. Instinct, late and loud, wakes up and flails in the wrong direction.
Hands catch me. Not hands—Watari's fist on the collar of my T-shirt; Tsubaki's grip iron around my wrist. The river gives me up like something it didn't want in the first place. We tumble onto the bank in a rain of our own making. Everything is noise: their breath, my coughing, the river applauding itself for not being worse. Tsubaki's face is inches from mine, all pupils and fury. "Breathe," she orders, like air is a machine she can repair on command. "Hey—Arima—look at me. Breathe."
I breathe. It hurts. I breathe again. It hurts less. The world comes back in little squares—Watari's was frozen in fear ; the mud on Tsubaki's knees; a beetle trying to decide if we're a hill.
And then something happens I don't recognize until later: a laugh falls out of me. Not polite. Not allowed. Just a sound bigger than sense. Tsubaki blinks, as if I've spoken in a language only she knows. Watari starts laughing too because laughter is an infection if you want it to be. My chest aches and I don't care. For a moment the river is applause and we're the orchestra and every wrong thing in my life is upstream somewhere losing interest in me.
Tsubaki thumps my shoulder with the part of her hand that says idiot and alive. "Don't do that again," she says, but she's smiling in the way that means she didn't mean it exactly like that.
Things were so simple...
A white shape arcs into the corner of my eye...
The splash becomes a smack and the green becomes a gym, the soft thwomp of a volleyball punching the floor exactly where my head was until I leaned on accident and luck. The ceiling lights are a grid. The echo is laughter and squeaking shoes and the P.E. teacher's whistle trying to be God and failing.
"Earth to piano-kun!" Watari sings from the opposite court, already airborne in a way humans shouldn't be. He hammers the ball into the empty part of the world like he's settling an argument with gravity. "You planning to move your feet sometime this century?"
"I moved," I say to nobody as the ball skids past my shoe.
"Barely," Tsubaki answers for the universe, sliding in a low dig that makes the floor complain and sending the ball back up like a dare. Her ponytail is crooked and righteous, her eyes in that narrow place between joy and murder.
The rally is more a sitcom than a sport. The ball loves chaos; we oblige it. I get my hands on one pass and my wrists ring; I get out of the way of three more like they know my birthday and want to end it early. Watari is everywhere at once, golden retriever disguised as striker disguised as volleyball savior. When the whistle finally declares us done suffering, I stagger off the line and make for the sideline like it has water I can own.
It does. I collapse into a sit that would be a lounge if I had any lounge left, the wall at my back, the bottle cold against the part of my mouth that still believes in relief. Watari slings himself down beside me with theatrical groans, then pops up to make sure Tsubaki sees how not-tired he is, then flops down again because attention is a renewable resource and he wants all of it.
"Hold still," he says, and before I can say please don't, he's got his phone out and my face in the frame. "This is incredible content. Our brave pianist, freshly deceased at practice. I'm sending it to Kaori-chan. She deserves to know the thrilling condition of her accompanist."
I tip the bottle back and let the water turn into a scold. "Don't," I say around the mouth of it.
"Don't?" He makes his voice hurt. "Don't support your violinist's morale? Don't give her joy in her darkest hour? Shame." He snaps a picture anyway, then lowers the phone and, without fanfare, flicks a glance at me that is not the same as a joke. "Seriously, though," he says, with that sideways smile he uses when he's hiding something kind behind humor. "You look like an extra from a zombie movie. She needs you awake, not... whatever this is."
I roll my eyes because eye-rolling is cheaper than honesty. "I'm fine."
He bumps my shoulder with his because shoulders are what he has instead of subtlety. "Uh-huh. And I'm going to adopt three golden eagles and teach them to fetch. You going to the hospital after? I can swing by with you. I bring soup and incredible charisma."
I stare at the line of tape on the floor like it might reveal a path. "I can't," I say, softer than plan. "I have to see my uncle."
Watari makes a face like someone took his ice cream. "Booo. Kaori-chan is my Kaori-chan now." He grins before I can bristle. "Kidding. She's everyone's Kaori-chan. But since she needs you for piano, I will magnanimously share her with you. After I hog most of the credit."
"I'll see her when she gets out," I say. It comes out too quick, like I rehearsed it, like it's supposed to sound like less than it is. "I've got... stuff."
"Stuff," he echoes, heavy with meaning and empty of specifics. He leans closer, drops his voice without dropping the joke. "Don't disappear on her, okay? She hates when you vanish, and then I have to go on side quests and it ruins my level-up schedule."
"I won't." The promise tastes like something I can pay for only once.
"Good." He pokes my cheek with his finger, delighted at his own audacity. "Also, be honest: don't you wanna see her naked again?~" He sings it, awful and high, a memory of white hospital sheets and a back we were not supposed to see. "Come on, come—"
The first ball hits him in the ear with a sound like a punctuation mark.
We both freeze, then turn at exactly the wrong speed. Tsubaki stands a few yards away with another volleyball in her hands and murder in her soul. Her cheeks are lit with outrage. "I can't leave you idiots alone for two minutes," she says, very calm in the way that means not calm at all.
"It was a tasteful joke," Watari lies, rubbing his ear and preparing to sprint.
"Say tasteful again," Tsubaki says, and throws the second one.
We scatter. Watari zigzags like a child who believes serpentine evades bullets. I choose a straight line because my brain has lost preferences. Tsubaki machine-guns us with playground-precision, each ball a verdict. I get pinged in the calf and the shoulder and the part of my pride that tried to be amused. Watari yelps, "Mercy!" and Tsubaki yells, "No!" and the class watches with the kind of reverence people reserve for natural disasters and childhood friendships they can smell from across a gym.
"Those three are always like this," someone says near the bleachers, a whisper that isn't private at all. "Since forever."
When the whistle calls timeout and the teacher tells Tsubaki to stop terrorizing the student body with poorly regulated affection, she drops the last ball and points at each of us like a goddess of consequences. "Behave," she says. "And stop being gross." Her eyes flick to me for a half-second longer than to Watari. You okay? is there, unsaid. I shrug a lie that means please don't make me open my mouth.
The locker room smells like soap trying to win. I change by habit more than order, hands doing what they always do while my head is eight minutes behind. The bell is something I walk through. I tell Tsubaki I'll text. Watari tries to draft me into a celebratory snack run; I tell him I'll pass. He complains at full volume, then winks at half-volume and says, "Don't be a ghost."
The sidewalk is a long drum. Shoes, wind, the city doing its evening stretch. A kid in a uniform two sizes too big barrels past chasing a ball that looks like it belongs to an older sibling. A delivery bike sings down the lane with a bell that apologizes for existing. I breathe and the air tastes like the end of something that refuses to end.
I haven't thought about that bridge in years. Not exactly. It gets folded into other summers, other afternoons, other arguments about who I am allowed to be. After Kaori died the first time, I swept whole rooms of memory into bags and shoved them into a back closet I never opened. Good things especially. Good things hurt more because they'd had the audacity to be good in the first place. The river was one of those rooms. Tsubaki's laugh that day. Watari's stupid victory pose. My own laugh, strange in my mouth, like someone else had borrowed my voice and used it better.
Now she's here again, like the hinge of time got bored of being straight. And all the rooms are opening on their own. The light from those afternoons keeps creeping under the door and across the floor and up the bed until I have to sit up and admit I'm not asleep. I don't know if it's mercy. I don't know if it's cruelty. It feels like waking up to a favorite song and remembering halfway through that the person who loved it most is the reason you put it on.
I think about finals and the word lands like a weight. The schedule printed in black ink, innocent as a calendar that doesn't know it's heavy. Rehearsals. Warm-ups. The hall. The joy on her face when she said We did it. The exact shape of her mouth around the word first. I could drop out, whispers a voice that tries to be practical while my ribs argue. If I step back, there are hours to buy. If I step back, the lab moves closer. If I step back, maybe the future shows up early out of spite.
What if I step back and she dies anyway?
The thought is not a thought. It's a cliff. My feet try to stop but the sidewalk insists we keep pretending this is casual. The nightmare has two heads: in one, I stand on a stage with a girl who is running out of music. In the other, I'm in a room full of white machines while she's somewhere else, and when she runs out of days she thinks I chose not to play with her. I can live with being wrong. I can't live with that.
A streetlight twitches awake. Another follows. The whole block catches the idea one bulb at a time. A bus exhales at a corner and decides not to wait for anyone. My phone buzzes. Tsubaki: got home. eat food. don't be stupid. She leaves out the rest on purpose. I type: alive. uncle now. talk later. I almost add a joke. I don't have one that isn't true.
I am so tired. Not the interesting kind. The kind that makes you want to lean against buildings because standing is too proud. My legs have that hollow feeling like I used too much of them somewhere else and expect them to still deliver me at every door. My head is a crowded hallway again—arrows, boxes, the names of people who might say yes if I catch them at the right hour. The metronome that lives between my ears ticks calmly, unconcerned with my panic. Not now. Later. Move.
If I get a lab position—and that's still an if with teeth—everything tightens. School doesn't stop. The piano doesn't stop unless I make it. Kaori does not stop. None of it will politely move aside because I've realized I'm one person pretending to be two. I already feel the edges fraying and I haven't even crossed this threshold yet. How bad does it get when the centrifuge enters the chat? When a person with a badge tells me to come in at 6 a.m. or 10 p.m. or both? When finals ask for my afternoons and nights and the research asks for my life?
Money helps, the same way a glass of water helps a house fire because you feel like you're doing something. The stocks I nudged at the right times, the bets I made on games whose endings I remembered too well—it means I can pay for trains and tools and tea, maybe slip someone a favor without writing it down. It does not make the day longer. It does not stop her from getting small under hospital lights. It doesn't play the second page while she breathes through a tremor and pretends it's nothing.
A couple walks past arguing in low voices about detergent. A bicycle chain sings pain. A cat decides I am not a threat and then revises its opinion and vanishes under a car with a tail like a question mark. Somewhere a television laughs at something no one will remember tomorrow.
You're already exhausted, I tell myself, in the tone I reserve for students who forget their own hands. Mentally. Physically. On two axes at once like a joke drawn on graph paper. You will not get a parade for collapsing gracefully. If you're this drained now, what does it look like when the lab is real? When the finals land on the calendar like a falling piano? When she needs you to be two things at once and you still only have the one body that keeps thinking about sleep like it's an elective?
I pass the bakery that pretends every hour is morning. A tray slides into the case with a shine like new cars. For a blink I see Watari balancing a pastry box like a relic, see the nurse's eyebrows, see Kaori's shoulder blades glinting with disinfectant and embarrassment. The part of my brain that edits me tells the rest to cut the scene. It doesn't listen. I let the door of that memory be open for three steps and then close it gently so I don't slam my own fingers.
They and passed the Finals.... He had already made significant changes.... Last time they failed and Kaori urged him to join a piano competition. He needed to deal with this situation whether he liked it or not. But the thought of talking to Kaori... and seeing her dejected and betrayed face once i tell her my intentions. It made my gut wrench
Uncle's street is a little different than mine in ways you can only hear—older trees, less traffic, somebody's piano the next block over practicing scales like they're a prayer. I've done this walk in my head a hundred times with different weather, different shoes, different versions of me. In most of them I arrive smarter and earlier in the story. In exactly one I arrive too late. I try not to step on that version of the sidewalk.
He doesn't have a lab in his living room. He has keys to rooms where a person might let me stand and learn. He has names of people who can teach me the parts I faked the first time with stubbornness and rage. He has the patience to tell me I am not special and then the audacity to call in a favor anyway. He will look at my face and see the lack of sleep and decide how much of it is integrity and how much of it is stupidity. He will hear the part of my voice that shakes and file it under things we don't mention if we can help it.
I could drop out. The sentence keeps trying on different coats to see if any of them make it less naked. Step back. Prioritize. Optimize. It stays a knife no matter what outfit it wears. If I set it down now, do I save her later? If I set it down now, do I cut something I can't mend?
The house is there before I'm ready for it. Same bricks. Same small garden that manages to look like attention even in bad months. The upstairs light is on, soft and useful. Through the front window I can see the corner of a bookcase that smells like the years that built it even though smell doesn't carry through glass.
I stop at the gate and then at the walk and then at the invisible line where the threshold begins even though it's still three paces away. The breath I take feels like the one before the first note—light, precise, unnegotiable. My hand finds the strap of my bag and squeezes the fabric like it might answer a question I haven't figured out how to ask.
On the porch, the paint is the same stubborn blue. The bell still has that tiny chip like a bitten lip. The door is the ordinary kind that opens if you want it to.
I stand there and listen to my heartbeat count out the measures of the next thing. I think of a girl who laughed with tears on her face, of a friend hurling volleyballs at my bad ideas, of a boy who refuses to stop being sunlight just because the day got complicated. I think of a river that gave me back my breath and my laugh in the same instant and wonder if time is a river or a wall or neither.
I don't knock. Not yet. I stand at my uncle's door and try to pick a life in one breath.
———————————-
The rice bowl is still warm in her hands when she realizes she has been staring at nothing for three minutes. The TV in the other room murmurs about weather and someone laughs like it's their job. Her mother asks if she wants seconds; she says no without moving her eyes. The chopsticks rest on the lip of the bowl like they're waiting for a signal. She gives them none.
Upstairs, her room is the same as always—pinned tickets, tournament brackets curling at the edges, a string of tiny lights she forgets to turn off, the bat leaning in the corner like a friend who didn't go home. She drops onto the mattress and the bed springs make that small complaint they always make when she lands too hard. Her phone is a cold rectangle on her stomach. She taps it awake and scrolls nothing: old pictures of the team chirping victory signs; a video of Watari doing shoulders in a way that looks illegal; a blurry shot of Kousei pretending to be invisible at lunch and failing.
He looked awful today, she thinks, and the thought lands like a ball right in the meat of her glove. Not the dramatic awful, not a fever, just that paper-thin version of him that shows up when he's been borrowing from tomorrow for too many tomorrows. He said "I'll see her when she gets out" and smiled the smile that means he is building a lie carefully so no one gets cut on it. She can still hear Watari's laugh turning serious under the joke, hear herself turning into a ballistic missile with a ball for a nose because if she doesn't keep their lines straight, who will?
Her phone buzzes.
saito-senpai: can you talk?
She stares at the three words long enough to feel the heat creep up her neck. It's stupid how fast her thumbs get nervous. She doesn't like when her hands don't belong to her. She types: sure and then, like she didn't mean to be that available, adds: for a bit.
The ring is barely half a ring before she swipes. "Hey." It comes out like she's jogging even though she's lying perfectly still.
"Hey." He sounds like a gym after lights-out: quiet, echoing, everything put away. "Did I catch you at a bad time?"
"No," she says. "Just... digestion."
He laughs, low and a little embarrassed. "Same. I swear our coach feeds us like he's trying to grow us two inches by Friday."
"You wish."
"I do," he says, and she can hear the grin even if he's trying to play it down. "How's the head? You took a weird hop at short last game. Looked like it caught you on the lip of the glove."
"It did," she admits. "Bad read. I was thinking of other things."
"Don't," he says, without scolding. "You know the drill—first step in, never up. Let the body act stupid so the brain can be smart."
She snorts. "Your brain has never been accused of being smart."
"Ouch," he says, pleased. "Okay, Ms. Fundamentals, let me return the favor: double-play feeds. You're drifting too close to the bag. Plant earlier, turn on the line. Trust your second to get there."
She slides her eyes to the ceiling and feels the old thing she doesn't like to name: respect that grew into a crush that grew into a comfortable memory she could keep in her pocket without it poking her. "Yes, senpai," she says, mocking and not. "Regionals are going to eat us if our pivot is late."
"They won't," he says, and for a second he is all captain and no boy at all. "We keep the infield clean, we save a pitcher an inning. You and me—" He catches himself and resets, pretending he doesn't know he almost included her in something that is his to own. "Our teams, I mean."
"I knew what you meant," she says, quiet enough to slip under his guard. She props the phone on her shoulder and stares at the glow making a small halo on the wall. "How's your side of the bracket?"
"Rude," he says instantly. "The kind of rude that pretends to be polite. Sakanishi's got a freshman who thinks he's already in Koshien. He's not wrong."
"Throw him junk," she says. "See if he can keep his hands back."
"We will," he says. "If we meet them. First we have to get through Mr. Forkball and his merry band of slappers. It's like trying to close a window in a hurricane."
She laughs, this time real. "I hate slappers. Pick a side: be fast or hit."
"Some people get to be both," he says, swagger turned down to affectionate. "Some people are shortstops who can cover half a county and still complain about their throws being off by an inch."
"If you're not aiming for perfection, what are we even doing?" She says it like a joke and tastes the truth in it anyway.
There's a little beat where all she hears is his breath and the tiny sound of him shifting the phone from one ear to the other. He does that when he's about to say something he hasn't practiced.
"So," he says, trying the word on and finding it larger than expected. "About what I said earlier."
She rolls onto her side, the ceiling becoming a wall. Outside, a scooter whines past like an insect with opinions. She pinches the corner of her pillow and waits for her mouth to find a position to hold that won't break. "Yeah?"
"I meant it," he says, and the bravado he usually wears like a jacket isn't there. He sounds like a person without a uniform. "I mean—if you'd want to... go out. With me. Not as a team thing. Just us."
Her face goes hot in a way that annoys her because she's not a blusher and she doesn't want to start now. She says, to buy herself a heartbeat, "You're bad at this."
"I am," he agrees, relief making him almost laugh. "You make me bad at it."
"Good," she says, and hates that her voice wobbles on the d. She sits up so the blood has somewhere else to go. The room looks exactly the same and not at all. She turns her bat in the corner into a lighthouse and tries to steer toward it. "Why now?"
He exhales. "Because I'm dumb," he says, then tries again. "Because regionals make me honest. Because I kept waiting for the right time and it turns out there isn't one. And because—" He stops like a runner seeing if he can make third and deciding not to. "Because you were always kind of my favorite kind of problem."
She laughs, a small burst that escapes. "That's terrible."
"I know," he says, and now the bad-boy act sneaks in like a cat at a door. "I'm a menace. I'll write you an apology on a baseball."
"You'd only spell my name wrong," she says. His chuckle tumbles into the line and lands on her shoulder like a coin.
He shifts again. She can hear a street outside on his end too: a car starting, someone calling a dog, the metallic click of a bicycle being convinced to behave. "I thought about asking you a bunch of times," he says, softer. "After the fall tournament. After that game where you turned that stupid hop into an out and looked at me like you could take my job if you wanted to. After graduation last year—" He stumbles over the timeline and corrects without making a big deal of it. "You know what I mean. Moments. And I didn't. I always, I don't know... acted like I didn't care enough to try. Because that's easier."
She knows exactly what he means: the pose, the lean, the way he throws his cap and slouches and pretends to be made of shrug because being earnest is like stepping up to a pitch without a bat. She used to look up to it because it meant he wasn't afraid of the mask. Later she noticed it was the mask.
"I liked you," she says, not a confession, just a fact placed carefully on the table between them. "Like-liked, the middle school kind that thinks liking is a sport. It was... shiny. I thought if you asked me then I'd die of happy."
He doesn't say anything, and the silence is decent about it.
"And then it kind of—" She rotates her hand in the air at nothing. "Maybe I grew up. Maybe you did. Maybe I was too busy dragging a certain piano idiot around by his collar to notice that the glow changed." She smiles so he can hear it. "It got... softer. If you had asked me at graduation, when the air felt like a big yes and everybody was crying and pretending they weren't, maybe I would've lit up like a stadium. Now it's—" She searches for it honestly. "Warm. Nice. A good thing. But not fireworks."
"Not fireworks," he echoes, and he doesn't make it a wound. He says it like he's holding something that can still be useful even if it isn't a sparkler. "I'd still take warm."
"I know," she says, relieved he said it first. She flips onto her back again and drags the heel of her foot along the sheets because the body needs a job when the heart is writing memos. "I'm not saying no."
He makes a sound like his chest just untied itself. "Okay. Good. Because I'm terrible at being rejected. I'd have to move prefectures."
"You can't," she says. "Regionals."
"Right," he says. "Duty."
They drift for a minute in the easy parts: who's batting second now that Yamada can't track a curve; whether Coach is really going to make them shave for the tournament like it's 1992; how Kashiwagi will laugh if she hears any of this and how she will absolutely hear any of this. He gives her one more practical thing, because that's how he says I like you: "On short hops, stop stabbing. Beat it to the spot with your feet. You already know this."
"I know," she says. "Tell my legs."
"I will," he says. "I'll send them a letter."
"Use small words," she says, and he laughs again, and she feels the old small lift in the center of her chest, the one that shows up when a person is uncomplicatedly kind to her.
"And... him?" he says, quiet, like he's asking a plane to land safely. He doesn't say Kousei. He doesn't have to.
She bites the inside of her cheek and looks at the tiny lights strung over her desk, a galaxy as cheap as it is sincere. "He's..." She stops, because she doesn't want to lie and she also doesn't want to open the window so wide the night comes in and refuses to leave. "He looks tired," she says, which is true and not the whole truth. "He's always looked tired, but lately it's like his bones forgot how to rest."
"He won't tell you why," Saito guesses.
"He won't tell anyone why," she says. "Even when he's trying to. He gets this look like he's holding a note you can't hear."
Saito hums like he gets it without needing the details. "Then you'll do what you do. Throw balls at his head until he drinks water."
"That's the plan," she says, and he accepts it like it's a strategy and not love wearing a helmet.
He clears his throat. It is ridiculous how endearing it is that he does that before every brave thing. "So. Saturday? After practice. There's a place that pretends to be a café but it's really a crime scene for pancakes. I can take you. Or we can go stand on the bridge and dare the water to do anything about it."
She laughs, and it's easy. "I'm not carrying you if you drown."
"Fair," he says. "I'm heavy with muscle."
"Lies," she says. "It's all hair gel."
"Cruel," he says, delighted to be called on a product he does not actually use. "Saturday, then?"
"Saturday," she says, and the word sits in her mouth like a coin she hasn't decided to spend. "Text me."
"I will," he says, and then, because he's decided to be brave all the way through tonight, "Goodnight, Tsubaki."
She hides her face in the pillow and says, "Goodnight," into cotton, and hopes it didn't sound like she threw it too hard.
When the call dies, the room hears itself again. Someone bicycles past outside and whirs down the block. The house creaks its old familiar creaks. She flips her phone face-down and then back up again because she wants the dark and she wants the glow. She settles for the glow dimmed to a whisper.
She is happy. She is. It is a clean happiness, the kind that stays on the plate and doesn't make a mess. He's good. He's better than the act he sometimes wears to make boys listen. He sees her as a player first and a girl second and then both at once without making it complicated. He has hands that know how to field a bad bounce and still get the out. If the story ended here, she thinks, it would be the kind of ending you can bring home to your parents and no one has to fight in the car afterward.
But her heart isn't sparkling. Not like it used to when she was twelve and Saito looked like a poster and she looked like a person who could run forever and the idea of being chosen tasted like soda. Not like it might have if he'd asked on a day when everyone was dressed in leaving and the air was an open gate and the sun was saying yes to everything. Not like it does when a boy with a piano in his shadow looks at her like he's trying not to ask for help and she throws a ball at his head so she doesn't have to answer the question.
She thinks of the gym today—the volleyball arcing, Watari's ridiculousness, Kousei's almost-smile that never made it to his eyes. She thinks of the way he said "uncle" like it might save someone. She remembers being small on a bridge and furious that he wouldn't jump and then dragging him into the air anyway because if she had enough courage maybe she could lend him some. He laughed when he woke up. She did not. She was too busy counting the seconds he'd been gone.
Maybe that's the problem, she thinks, and the word problem isn't fair to anybody. Maybe she doesn't know how to stand next to a thing until it stops being scary. Maybe she only knows how to kick it or throw something at it until it changes shape. Kashiwagi told her that on the bridge walkway today with the boys being idiots in the background and the river pretending to be wise. You don't have to fix everything by kicking it. Sometimes you can just stand.
Stand. She rolls the word around on her tongue. She could stand with Saito. It would be easy. There are worse lives than easy. She could stand with Kousei too, but that's a different verb in a different language, one that costs you days of sleep and makes your chest tight and turns you into the kind of person who keeps snacks in her bag because he forgets.
Her phone lights again with a new message. saito-senpai: i'm serious, you know. i'll be good at this.
She smiles because it's sweet and because he thinks affection is a skill you can train like footwork, and maybe he's not wrong. She types: i know. and then, because she's trying to be a person who doesn't lie as much as she did last year, she adds: thank you for asking me for real.
Three dots. He sends back a flexing arm and then: goodnight for real. dream of hitting lasers.
She laughs into the quiet. okay, captain.
She switches the phone to do-not-disturb and lies back, staring at the ceiling that is also her sky. The tiny lights are uneven. One flickers like it's remembering something. She lifts her hand and pretends to catch it between her fingers. She thinks of Saturday. She thinks of regionals. She thinks of the finals she's not supposed to be thinking about because they don't belong to her, and of the girl with a violin case who can turn a room into belief and then pass out in the wings because belief is expensive. She thinks of a boy who looked at a door today like it might be a stage and a sentence that lives in his mouth too often lately: I'm fine.
She turns onto her side and pulls the blanket up to her chin even though it isn't cold. The house settles. Her mother laughs at something downstairs and coughs and laughs again. Tsubaki closes her eyes and tells herself she is happy and believes it and also doesn't, both at once, which is just another way of being alive.
If he had asked me at graduation, she thinks, and the picture is bright for one second—caps flying, the light on everyone's faces, the feeling like the world is a road you can actually see. If he had, maybe I would've been fireworks. Tonight, I am a porch light. On. Warm. Waiting.
Her phone is a small moon facedown on the pillow beside her. She does not touch it. She breathes. She listens for a train far off that sometimes threads the city with a line only the sleepless can hear. It takes a long time to come. When it does, she's already almost asleep, her hand curled near her cheek like someone put something there and asked her to keep it safe.