The cafeteria smells like a hundred different decisions. Mine is an egg sandwich and a paper cup of something pretending to be tea. I eat fast, like finishing this will make the clock move where I want it. Noon light slants across long tables and faces I don't have room for. My bag lives on my shoulder like a second torso; every time it knocks my ribs it reminds me what's inside—notes, a summary trimmed until it bleeds, and the small pink shape I keep telling myself I only packed because I'm superstitious.
After school, straight to Saitou Yonoshita. No loops, no waiting, no "maybe if I rest first." I'll beg. I'll prove it. I'll cry if I have to. I picture the building, the security desk, the elevator panel that will feel like a test before the test. I rehearse an apology clean enough it doesn't look like a bribe. I tell my face to remember how to look like a person and not a plan wearing a face.
I crumple the wrapper, toss, miss, retrieve, try again. My hands are doing tiny chores so my brain can run laps. I check the blazer folded in my bag one more time, as if the cloth will tell me I'm older than fourteen if I crease it just right.
When the bell finally hammers the air back into motion, I peel myself off the chair and let the tide carry me into the hallway. Kids pour from doors in eddies. My metronome ticks under the noise—after school, train, lobby, seventh floor, do not flinch. I'm halfway to the back stairs when the building shifts around a single fact and stops being one.
She's there.
Kaori stands at a window at the far end of the corridor, shoulder to the glass, sunlight pinning her hair into gold geometry. The world inside me lurches like the elevator I haven't gotten in yet. The sling of my bag digs a little too deep. For a few seconds my only talent is not moving. She's out. Of course she's out; that's what "discharge" means, but my body didn't believe it until this exact frame, her reflection nested in daylight, her hand idling over the strap of her case like it's listening.
Watari catches sight of her a heartbeat before she catches sight of anyone. He lifts a hand, grin already switched on, moving toward her with that ridiculous stride that thinks every hallway is a runway. I shrink half a step into the doorway's shadow—bad habit, second nature. Old life muscle memory threads a needle through my chest: I thought she liked him. I thought if I stood very still the idea would pass.
What an idiot I was.
My mouth makes a soundless sorry at a boy I used to be. The burn behind my eyes is the kind that says "not now" and means "not now." I squeeze the strap until my knuckles discuss whiteness, and I tell myself the most reasonable lie I own: tomorrow. I'll see her tomorrow. This isn't abandoning. This is triage. This is choosing the thing that might give her more tomorrows to stand in windows and laugh at the angle of the sun. I'm not running. I'm moving in the only direction that doesn't feel like backward.
I pivot toward the exit before my courage has time to ask a question I can't answer.
Outside, the day tastes like chalk and bicycle chain. My feet know the route before my head catches up—across the courtyard, down the side street with the vending machine that's always out of the only flavor anyone wants, past the park bench that pretends to be a bench until your spine reminds you it's a plank. The notebook is in my hand without permission. I'm halfway through a page of possible openings before I notice I've started.
"Dr. Saitou, I'm sorry to impose. My name is—"
Too formal. He'll throw that away before the comma cools.
"Mr. Saitou? I read your—"
No. Don't lead with flattery. Lead with work.
"Sir, I have a two-page summary of a study proposal in early-stage review of—"
Study proposal is a generous phrase for a teenager's wishful thinking, but I cross out nothing. I add a box that says ASK SMALL THINGS. I underline it twice. I scribble: do not lie about what you don't know. Then I scribble it again because repetition sometimes tricks me into honesty.
I am fourteen. I write it like it's a stupid joke at my own expense and not the absolute ceiling grown-ups will see first. Lab doors don't open to kids who still hand in math homework. People do not take you seriously just because you've learned the habit of seriousness. But today is not an application. It's a knock. A knock doesn't need age; it needs knuckles and direction. I can provide both.
The metronome ticks. My head tips down, eyes on paper lines so I don't look at faces and forget the sound my feet make.
"Ken... pa!"
Two syllables hop across the road and land in me like pebbles tossed at a bedroom window. I look up. Two little girls in bright socks are doing the world's oldest experiment with squares of chalk—one foot, two feet, pause, clap, giggle. Their braids swing like punctuation. They chant again, little lungs throwing their whole bodies into it.
"Ken—pa! Ken—pa!"
I want to smile. I'm too busy bracing. Across the narrow street, by the low rail above the river, she stands. Casual as gravity. Kaori's hand sits on the chalk line like she was born knowing where to place it. She taps one square with the toe of her shoe, the way you do when you're timing your jump and also teasing a decision. She says the game along with the girls softly, like tasting an old word.
"Ken... pa."
She looks up and her eyes nail me to the moment cleanly. I don't have anywhere to hide; not here, not now. We just stand there with the stupid sky being exactly the shade of blue that makes poems make sense. Her mouth opens around my name and closes on something gentler.
"Out of the hospital, huh," I say, because my throat picks the wrong sentence and refuses to return it for store credit.
She smiles. It's not the hero's grin from the stage. It's the quiet version, the one you could fold and tuck into a pocket and it would still be a smile when you opened it later. "Yup," she says, maddeningly cheerful. "A-okay now."
"What are you doing here...?" It comes out more helpless than I intend.
"Playing Kenpa," she says, putting mock patience on the obvious. She gestures with the ease of a person who expects the world to meet her halfway. The girls giggle, sensing drama the way birds sense rain.
"She's waiting for somebody!" one singsongs.
The other nods fiercely, delighted by facts that aren't theirs. "Somebody!"
Color flashes in Kaori's face—annoyance, then fluster, then an expression that is somehow both. "Hey, shhh," she hisses at them with zero authority and total entertainment value. They grin wider. I feel my mouth tilt without permission, the old tease muscle remembering its job.
"Woah," I say, widening my eyes like an idiot and leaning in as if I'm hearing this for the first time. "I wonder who you're waiting for?"
The glare she throws me is legally distinct from a glare. It's a glare with warmth baked into it, which is cheating. She turns on her heel and steps close enough that I smell hospital soap hiding under river air. She sticks out a hand, palm up, fingers expectant. "Give it."
"Give... what?"
"My gift for getting out of the hospital, duh." Chin tip, challenge, whole act of a person who refuses to let a single beat of the day go unscored. "You didn't forget, did you?"
The old timeline throws a scene up on the inside of my skull: her palm landing on my shoulder with theatrical injury, the fake tears, the little girls scolding me for being a cad. We laughed because we had no idea we were laughing at a cliff.
Not this time.
I unzip the top pocket of my bag without breaking eye contact. My fingers brush the soft plush the way you check a pulse. I didn't plan to hand this over this soon; it wasn't supposed to be for light. It belonged to winter and late and a room that smelled like bleach. But if time is a river that sometimes returns what it took, then I won't argue with the current.
I bring out the pink bunny, ears folded from being carried, stitching neat, eyes wide with the kind of innocence that survives manufacturing deadlines. Kaori's breath catches. It's audible. She blinks twice like her body needs help believing itself.
"W-wait," she says, voice smaller than she lets it be in public. "You... you really got one?"
"Seems like it," I say, and it's nothing, and I'm shaking.
She lifts it carefully to eye level like you would a creature you don't want to spook. The ears flop. The battered softness of it makes the afternoon kinder by three degrees. She tucks it to her chest. The way she hugs it is not theatrical. It's the sort of hug that blesses both giver and gift.
"Suitable gift," she pronounces, and the warmth of the sentence lands on the bridge of my nose and burns. For a blink, this is the version of the world where small edits compound into miracles. For a blink, I'm allowed to imagine that changing one detail rewrites the paragraphs after it.
Then she ruins me with two syllables.
"So," she says, as if we've been on this path since the first listen. "Finals."
My eyes go somewhere over her shoulder where the river pretends to be a mirror. I can feel the color draining off my face; it leaves me a sketch. The silence stretches just long enough to make itself comfortable. My mouth opens around truth and closes on mercy.
"I..." I have to swallow around a lump the size of what I owe her. "Maybe we... shouldn't?"
Her brows jump. The bunny slips a fraction in her grip, caught, corrected. "Why not?" she says, astonished that a boy could be this dense where applause is concerned. "We played great. Are you still scared?" She leans a little, conspiratorial. "We're all scared, Kousei. Every time we stand there. That's the deal."
She thinks it's my mother again. She thinks the ghost in my spine is a woman with a metronome for a mouth. It's worse and not her fault. How do you explain to someone that you have already watched a day finish with them in it and can't bear to run the piece again? You don't. You steal air from your own lungs and let them keep theirs.
"I bet there are a million musicians who have done that," she barrels on, adopting a mocking whine. "'No way, I can't do this!'" She hides behind the rabbit and peeks around it in a way that makes the two girls squeal. "But they always pick it back up and face the music. That's how—"
The words punch me with how perfectly they remember themselves. They're the same notes, in the same order, pouring from the same mouth that will later shape a different kind of goodbye. My back tightens like the body is trying to retreat from the past in the present tense. The sentence that killed me once moves through me again, and I hear myself answer it under my breath, too soft to be heard by anyone but my bones.
"The most beautiful lie is born," I murmur.
"What?" She tilts her head.
"Nothing," I say, because everything is the opposite and I won't put it in her hands. "Just... thinking."
She studies me, the way she does when she's about to dare me into breathing. The light on the water gets brighter like daylight is auditioning to be memory. The girls have started arguing about which chalk square is luckier. Somewhere behind me a truck coughs past; a dog decides not to bark. Life keeps flowing like it didn't just run into a wall.
I should tell her now. I should be brave in the useful way and say the sentence that will take a bite out of her smile and maybe save her a different kind of pain later: I can't. I won't. Not because I'm scared of a stage or a ghost with a baton, but because there's another door I have to pound on with both fists until blood answers.
But she's holding a bunny I brought from a different ending. She's brand-new out of a room where machines keep count. She believes in what we did together with a faith that makes new rooms out of empty air. I can't be the person who breaks that in a hallway with children chalking the ground into squares of permission.
She fills the silence herself, like she always does, generous enough to hand me a way out and also a way forward. "We're only fourteen," she says, and her grin does that knife-trick where it's sharp and somehow not cutting. "Let's jump in with both feet first."
Before I can answer, her palms kiss the rail—skirts flick, a flash of heel—and she's already gone over, vanishing in a spray of light and air as the two girls gasp and my breath forgets me.
There's a hollow slap and then water everywhere—silver droplets, a quick-blooming ring, the kind of splash that erases everything for a beat and writes joy in its place.
The two girls squeal like a firework just remembered its job. I stand rooted to the rail, hands useless at my sides. She just got out. That sentence blares in my head and has no effect on the world at all.
Kaori breaks the surface like a secret surfacing to laugh. Hair slicked back, eyes bright, she whoops, spins, and flings a fan of water toward the sky just to see what it looks like when it falls. "It feels so good!" she calls up, giddy. "I always wanted to try that!"
Of course she did. Of course she would say that—take something ridiculous and make it ordinary by doing it first. The girls bounce on their toes, clapping. "She's crazy!" one declares, which in their language is another word for brave.
"Are you okay?" I hear myself ask, and it comes out thin, a thread tugging at a kite already airborne.
Kaori floats on her back for a second and kicks lazily, as if the river were a couch and the sky polite enough to make room. "I'm perfect," she says, and she clicks the p in a way that makes the afternoon grin. "Come on!"
I look down at my shoes, at the damp rail, at the chalk squares now freckled with drops. My mind starts doing math on reflex—water to hospital discharge to body temperature to bad ideas—and then trips over its own seriousness. She waves, and the wave is aimed at all of us: the little girls, me, the part of the day that might have chosen to be dull.
The bunny's ears peek from her bag, looking ridiculous and right. The sight makes something pinch in my chest. Last time this memory carried me like a bridge. Now it carries a countdown. Same sun, same river, same girl, and I can't separate any of it from the red second hand I can't unsee.
Why her? Why is the person who makes everything lighter the one with weight tied to her ankles? The unfairness tastes metal. I grip the rail hard enough that cold bleeds into my palms and has nothing to say.
A knot tightens behind my eyes. I rub it away, impatient, then slower, then not at all. Great. Tears. The day is so bright I can feel each one like a betrayal, heat traveling where it doesn't belong. I angle my face so the kids don't notice and fail anyway.
"Are you crying?" one whispers, delighted and concerned in equal measure.
"Wind," I lie, even though the air is barely moving.
Kaori swims to the shallows and plants her hands, boots digging into the riverbed, then stands with water cascading off her like a second dress. She pushes her bangs back with both wrists and beams up at us. "See? Easy."
"Easy," I echo, and it sounds like another language.
She hikes the bag higher on her shoulder so the bunny can watch properly, then looks up like she expects me to join her, to vault the rail, to say yes with my whole stupid body. That used to be who she was trying to build in me: someone who didn't ask the ground for permission. Today I have an appointment with a door that will not swing open for anyone who can't explain themselves. Being brave in one direction makes me a coward in another. I hate the arithmetic of that.
"Are you coming?" she calls.
"I have to—" my mouth starts, and I stitch the rest shut. Not here. Not after that smile. I let my hands do small useful things: check my watch even though I know the time, tuck the notebook deeper under my arm, smooth a wrinkle in the blazer sleeve like that could organize me. I want to tell her I can't stand on that stage. I want to say I already chose. My throat won't carry it. The act of speaking would dent this moment, and she just earned it with both feet.
Watari would yell something obnoxious and leap. Tsubaki would throw a shoe at my head and call me names designed to get me moving. I stand there like a signpost while the river tries to show me how to live.
Kaori turns a little circle, soaking in everything she can—pigeons bickering on the bridge, the girls imitating her kick on dry land, me failing to wave back. She cups her hands around her mouth. "You're allowed to be happy, you know!"
The words land and roll around inside, knocking against sharp corners. Happy is a door with a lock on the outside. I'm not barred; I'm the one holding it shut. I think of Yonoshita's address, the floor number, the way my uncle said don't expect much like advice and weather. I think of a room with solvents in the air and a man who stopped writing sentences because one person he loved ran out. If I make it past his threshold, if I can be in the hum of machines, if I can fetch and label and learn without being a nuisance—maybe that's what happiness looks like from this angle. Not a rush. Not a plunge. A series of doors that grudgingly click.
"Ken... pa!" one of the girls chants to herself, scooting on two feet through chalk lakes. The other turns to me, eyes big. "She's so cool," she says, confiding a secret that the day already leaked.
"She is," I say, and my voice cracks the way it does when a note is almost in tune and decides at the last second to be honest instead.
Kaori sloshes toward the steps built into the bank, wringing water from her sleeve and then deciding not to care. When she reaches the top she shakes like a dog and makes both girls shriek and laugh. Then she looks at me, and the last of the river drains from her lashes, and for a heartbeat we're alone in a room made of afternoon.
"Don't vanish," she says. Not sharp. Not even a request. A habit we're both trying to keep alive.
"I won't," I answer, and I feel the lie and the truth share a cup. I won't vanish on purpose. I will disappear into a lab if I can, into tubes and benches and a stack of protocols, into the kind of work that doesn't clap when you're done. That isn't vanishing. That's... trying differently.
The metronome starts up behind my ear again. Not loud. Present. After this, go. Train, lobby, seventh floor. Knock until my knuckles learn the door's shape. Don't apologize for existing. Apologize for the interruption and then refuse to leave as politely as possible.
Kaori squeezes water from the ends of her hair with both hands and laughs at how much there is. "Look," she tells the girls, solemn as a priest. "Scientific fact: hair multiplies in water."
They nod, enthralled by a law of physics that belongs solely to her.
I take one small step back from the rail. The movement feels bigger than it is. She notices. Of course she does. Her smile flickers, then holds steady. She knows me well enough to smell a retreat. She's kind enough to pretend she doesn't.
"Saturday," one of the girls says to the other, already writing this down in whatever calendar children keep. "We'll come back Saturday and practice being brave."
"Okay," the other says, like agreeing costs her nothing.
I picture a different Saturday—the one Kaori suggested with her eyes when she talked about finals, the hall full of people who don't know they're waiting for a miracle. I can't stand next to her there and also stand where I need to stand now. The day refuses to make room for both.
"Thank you for the bunny," she says suddenly, quieter, sincerity folding the words into something small enough to hand back to me.
I nod because my mouth is busy stopping more things from falling out. "Don't let it swim," I manage.
She glances at the ears peeking from her bag and smiles like I gave her something clever and not obvious. "I'll make it a life jacket."
The little girls bolt down the steps to throw pebbles, declaring each one a wish. Kaori waves at them, then at me. The wave is easy, no strings. I'm supposed to wave back. The signal fails to leave my shoulder. All I can do is look, and looking hurts in a clean way I don't know how to bandage.
I print the next hour in my head so I can read it when fear tries to edit: cross the bridge, train, station coffee I won't taste, lobby with potted plants that think they're trees, elevator chime, hallway, a door with someone's name beside it who loved a person who ran out of time. I'm fourteen. I am also the weight of two lives' worth of regret stuffed into a blazer that fits better than it should. If he tells me to leave, I'll leave. If he tells me to sit, I'll sit. If all I get is a map of what not to say next time, I'll take it like medicine.
The sky leans toward the color that means homework exists. Kaori shakes her wrists one more time, water flaring from her fingertips. "Text me later," she says. "Or I'll haunt you while alive."
"I believe you," I say, because I do.
She laughs. The sound climbs the rail and catches on my jacket and decides to ride with me for a while whether I want it to or not.
I back away another step, then another, memorizing: the exact angle of her stance, the way the bunny's ear tilts like it's curious, the girls inventing a game with new rules in wet shoes. She lifts her hand again, bright as the day.
I don't lift mine. I just stand there, full of motion I can't show, and look down at her—still waving at me, and at the kids, and at whatever comes next.