The sky had the color of washed denim when they stepped out of the side gate. After hours, the campus felt like a stage after the curtain: scuffed, quiet, everything a little tender from the last scene. Kaori hooked her fingers under the strap of her bag and swung it forward so the bunny's pink ear could peek out. The rabbit had been an accident of timing and softness; now it lived at her hip like a superstitious charm, like proof.
Tsubaki fell in beside her without asking. She usually walked a half-step ahead of people, cutting wind for them without thinking. Today she matched Kaori's pace and let the evening draft decide.
"Watari played well," Kaori said, too lightly. "He always plays well when he's pretending not to care."
Tsubaki didn't answer at first. She was watching the pavement the way athletes watch a pitch: like it might change on them. "He's good at pretending," she said finally. "We all are."
Kaori laughed as if that were harmless. "Speak for yourself. I'm terrible at it."
They turned onto the narrow residential street that emptied toward the river. Air conditioners muttered from windows; a bicycle bell chimed like a polite cough and then faded. Kaori tilted her face to the breeze and let it lift the damp ends of her hair. Everything in her wanted to talk about anything except the thing that had cracked the day open: the music room, the way Kousei had sat and refused to say the sentence she needed, the look on his face like a door with a chair jammed under the handle.
"He's going to be fine," she announced to the part of the evening that was listening. "He's stubborn, but he's not stupid."
Tsubaki made a noise that didn't quite qualify as agreement. "Fine how?"
"You know." Kaori shaped the air with her free hand, as if the definition might appear if she carved the outline. "He just needs to get back on stage. That's how he gets free. You saw him last time. The way he—" She snapped her fingers, failing to catch the memory in one clean motion. "He makes the world shut up. He needs that. Otherwise the ghosts get loud and then we all have to live with it."
"Ghosts," Tsubaki repeated, slow. She didn't believe in them. She did believe in eyes that looked like they hadn't slept a week in a day. "Is that what we're calling it."
"What do you call it?" Kaori asked, glancing sideways with a brightness that wanted to be dared.
Tsubaki's hands were busy with their own problem, twisting one strap of her bat bag and then untwisting it. She saw again the moment in the music room when he'd bowed his head and the light hit his face wrong. Fear had hollows it liked to live in. She'd seen those hollows: under his eyes, at the corners of his mouth, in the way his shoulders curled like he was bracing for a pitch he couldn't see.
"I call it being exhausted," she said. "He looks... " She searched for a word that wasn't mean and wasn't a lie. "Spent. Like there's nothing left in the tank and he's pretending he can run on fumes."
Kaori's smile wobbled and corrected. "That's exactly why he should play. He needs to burn it clean. You know how it is with music. The pain goes in one way and comes out another. You can use it."
"You can," Tsubaki said. "That doesn't mean he can right now."
Kaori pretended she hadn't heard that last clause. "He's always better after," she said. "You saw it, when we... when we—" She tripped over the we, the memory of the stage, the way it had held and then let them drop. "We got through it. We were good. He was good." Her voice warmed itself on that proof.
Tsubaki's jaw flexed. She wanted to tell her that winning and being okay were not synonyms. She wanted to tell her that the things that made Kaori glow could make Kousei flicker. Instead she tipped her chin at the bag bumping Kaori's hip. "That rabbit's going to get whiplash if you keep swinging it like that."
Kaori looked down and grinned, caught. "He deserves to experience velocity." She patted the ear into cooperation and then, more quietly: "It was sweet of him."
Tsubaki kept her face pointed forward. "Yeah," she said, then added because she couldn't bear the mood getting too soft, "stupid, but sweet."
Kaori's laugh came easier this time. They passed the vending machine that never stocked the flavor anyone liked. The little green park bench pretended to be a bench until your spine complained. Kids were chalking squares and failing to keep their shoes clean about it. The day did its best impression of normal.
"I know you're worried," Kaori said, the cheeriness letting a crack show. "But this is how he gets over it. He has to go through. He's not going to wake up one morning and be less scared. He has to pick up the thing that hurts him and make it work for him. It's the only way."
"That's your only way," Tsubaki said, not unkindly. "You jump and figure out the landing after. Some people have knees."
Kaori cut her a look that was almost affronted. "You think I'm telling him to jump for fun? I know what I'm asking." She ran a thumb over the seam in the bunny's ear. "I'm not blind." A beat. "Okay, I'm optimistic. Those are different things."
"Are they." Tsubaki slowed to let a mother with a stroller pass and then sped up again. "Today he looked—" She broke off, picturing the precise curve of his mouth when Kaori had said we're entering and he'd said nothing. "He looked like he wanted to be anywhere that wasn't that room. And not because of the piano."
Kaori's head lifted: a small flare of defensiveness. "Then where?"
"I don't know," Tsubaki said. It was the truth and she hated it. "He's hiding something. He always has his secrets, fine, but this is... different." She clenched and unclenched a fist by her side. "He looks like he's carrying something heavy without asking anyone to grab the other end."
"I'd grab it," Kaori said, fierce for a second, fierce enough that her voice scratched. "I'd carry it. He's the one who keeps putting it behind his back like it's decorative."
Tsubaki looked at her, surprised into a small smile. "Yeah. That sounds like him..."
They walked a block in silence and let the neighborhood speak: a dog making editorial comments at nothing; a moped objecting to a hill; a woman watering potted plants with the care of someone who liked listening to leaves drink. The quiet wasn't unfriendly. It was an old blanket, worn and real, shared because both of them needed it.
"I don't want to break him," Kaori said into that quiet, so abruptly that Tsubaki had to rewind the sentence and make sure she'd heard it right. "I know I push. I know I... talk like gravity is optional and every cliff is a suggestion. But I don't want—" She exhaled. The breath trembled. "He's not made of the same stuff I'm made of. That's not an insult. It's just true."
Tsubaki swallowed lightly. "He's softer," she said, choosing a word that made her want to cover it with her palm. "That's why it works when he plays with you."
Kaori smiled with her mouth and not her eyes. "It does, doesn't it."
"Yeah." Tsubaki fixed her gaze on a power line, on the shape of the insulators against the evening. "Just... don't decide what his medicine is if you're not looking at the side effects."
Kaori glanced at her like she was a lecture and a kindness at once. "Thanks, doctor," she said, but the sarcasm was thin and grateful.
They reached the little intersection where their routes split: Kaori toward the bridge that flexed over the river like a wrist; Tsubaki toward the old shopping street where produce stood in crates like a line of colorful soldiers. They stopped under a streetlight that had come on early, like an overachiever.
"Do you want me to—" Tsubaki began.
"—walk me?" Kaori finished, smiling. "No." She lifted her bag and patted it. "I have security."
"Right." Tsubaki eyed the rabbit a smile building. "Intimidating."
"The most." Kaori bumped her shoulder against Tsubaki's gently. "We're okay," she said, meaning herself and Kousei and possibly the part of the day that had fallen in on itself. "Right?"
Tsubaki looked at her. Kaori's hair was messier than usual, her lipstick bitten off in the middle, her bravery sitting closer to the surface than was safe for anyone. "We're trying," Tsubaki said, because she hated lying and loved her enough to compromise. "Text me."
"You text me," Kaori shot back, already stepping backward toward her route. "If you see him, tell him—" She stopped herself, then shook her head. "No. Never mind. I'll tell him."
"What were you going to say," Tsubaki asked, even though she knew.
"That I'm not mad," Kaori said, which wasn't entirely true. "That I'm just very, very right."
"You two deserve each other," Tsubaki muttered.
Kaori's grin flashed full-wattage for half a heartbeat. "Working on it," she said, and waved, and turned.
Tsubaki watched her until the blocks ate her and the river air took custody. She didn't move right away. The streetlight hummed. A scooter zipped past, leaving a wake of fried-dough smell from a stall somewhere. She exhaled and felt the breath go out like something she'd been saving too long.
She should have gone straight home. There were drills tomorrow. There was homework. There was the part of her that wanted to march back into the music room and tell Kousei with full clarity that he was ridiculous and she was not going to let him waste away or die on her watch, and also could he please eat something with protein in it that wasn't a rumor. Instead she took her phone out of her pocket and stared at it as if it were a mouth she hadn't taught to speak yet.
The last messages on her thread were a stack of ordinary things: group chat noise; Watari sending a blurry picture of his own sweaty face captioned KING OF THE COURT (Kidding. Sort of.); Kaori posting an unflattering photo of the bunny wearing a bottle cap like a hat; a weather alert pretending to be important. None of them were what she was looking for. She scrolled up until the name she was avoiding stopped moving away from her.
Saitou-senpai had texted weeks ago, after practice, when she'd been bent over her cleats on the third-base line and he'd walked over with the kind of swagger boys borrowed from each other. You're fast, he'd said in person then, the compliment tossed like a ball, easy to catch. Want to see a movie sometime? He'd followed with the text because he'd seen her face go static and had decided persistence would do what charm hadn't. She hadn't responded. She'd told herself the reason was homework, season schedule, life. She'd told herself the real reason wasn't envy and fury and the helplessness that came from watching someone you loved grip the edge of a cliff and call it practice.
She tapped the message. The bubble opened like a held breath.
Her reflection looked back at her in the black at the top of the screen: hair yanked into a ponytail that had lost the argument with humidity, eyes that didn't belong to a girl who liked fun. She heard Kaori's voice in her head—He needs to play—and her own spoken in reply—He looks dead on his feet—and the part of her that had always put Kousei before the map of her day protested. It didn't matter. None of it changed the fact that she had to choose what to do with her own hands while she couldn't stop his.
Her thumb hovered over Call. She pulled it away. Hovered again. This was a bad idea, she told herself, which was why it might work as an antidote. He didn't have to be a person. He could be a task—put on makeup, meet at a place, talk about nothing, laugh at something, not think about boys who forgot how to eat.
She hit Call.
The ring purred in her ear like a cat that didn't get along with her yet. She considered hanging up before anyone could answer. She considered throwing the phone into the river. On the third ring, he picked up.
"Tsubaki?" Saitou's voice dragged a smile behind it, the kind that came easily to boys whose shoulders had never had to be anything other than broad. The field always filled his sentences with dust. She could hear cleats in the background, the metallic scrape of a dugout bench being moved, someone yelling nice cut at nobody in particular. "Did I finally win the lottery?"
She almost hung up. She almost said the thing she would have said any other day—Sorry, wrong number—and made it a joke they could both keep without using. Instead she cleared her throat and aimed for neutral.
"Are you busy," she asked.
"For you?" He laughed. It was a little too loud; he was showing off to someone within earshot. "Never. What's up?"
She had not prepared a script. Words shuffled. Pride tried to take the phone away from her and let her do something safer, like burpees. She thought of Kousei's face in the music room, the color gone out of it like someone had erased him one stroke at a time. She thought of Kaori walking away and calling herself right as if that were a spell. She thought of how much she hated liking and losing control in the same week.
"About what you asked," she said.
A beat. "Movie?" His tone pulled its volume down like a curtain.
"Yeah." She tucked the phone between her shoulder and ear and readjusted her grip on the bag. Her fingers smelled like rosin and metal. "If that's still... if you're still asking."
"I'm still asking," he said, warmth turning real now that he wasn't performing for the bullpen. "I thought you'd forgotten me."
"I didn't forget," she said. "I was just—" She stopped. She was not going to hand him a paragraph about other people's bridges. "Busy."
"Good busy or bad busy?" He sounded like someone who believed those categories mattered.
Tsubaki squinted at nothing. "Both," she said. She stared past the street's end, where the river shrug-shrugged under the footbridge. The air lifted a strand of hair into her eyes. She blew it away. "Senpai... "
"Yeah?"
The word landed weird in her mouth. She'd said it a thousand times to a thousand boys without giving any of them space in her head. He was friendly, not an idiot, and his hands knew how to catch. Those were not credentials for the job of being anything that mattered. She knew that. She also knew the value of moving her body in a direction until her brain quit arguing.
She swallowed. "Senpai... let's... go out."
Morning comes like someone dragging a wet blanket off my face. My desk is a low hill of paper—scribbles in pencil that look like I was trying to hold a storm down with handwriting. The chair has a groove that remembers my spine too well. My phone lies facedown on a notebook like it fell asleep first.
I flip it over. One message from an unknown number that isn't unknown anymore.
Thursday. 6 PM. Don't waste my time.
Thursday....
My stomach does the thing it has been doing since last night—falling and then remembering it can't, not from this height. I copy the number onto a scrap and tuck it into my wallet like people do with prayers. The clock on the wall tries to pretend mornings have value; my body isn't convinced. I wash my face until the mirror stops looking annoyed, pull on the blazer that gives me a shape adults respect, and tell my hands to stop shaking until I can afford it.
The train breathes warm into the platform like a tired animal. School smells like yesterday when no one had the nerve to open a window: floor polish, pencil shavings, lunch plans muttered like strategy. I keep my head down and maneuver through the hall with the old skill—timing steps to avoid a classmate here, a teacher there, the way you memorize where the creaky board is in a familiar house.
I don't look for Kaori. I don't look for Tsubaki or Watari. I carry my map in my head: homeroom, math, a stop at the vending machine to put sugar in my body until it remembers what food is, back stairwell up two flights, library doors with hinges that squeal like gossip.
I take the back table by the window where the light is good and the librarian is either kind or too tired to fight. I unfold three pages and pretend to study history; behind them I have my real notes—titles and abstracts printed small, lines where I tried to simplify something complicated enough to make most people give up. I draw a box and write Thursday in it, then underline it until the paper starts to resent me. Two days. Forty-eight hours is a polite way of saying don't screw this up.
Somewhere in the courtyard, someone laughs in Kaori's key. It threads through the window glass like a tuning fork. I keep my eyes on the page.
Lunch is an egg sandwich and a bottle of tea that doesn't promise to be good; it promises only to be wet. The cafeteria is a mouth with ten conversations going on at once and chewing with its mouth open. I take the outer aisle, move against the wall, keep my head down so the neon lights of a certain bow case don't catch me. I've become very skilled at looking like I'm going somewhere even when I'm going nowhere at all.
The day unspools. I write notes in class and do not retain them. I copy down homework and forget. The bell at the end of last period rings with relief it doesn't own. People pack up and spill into the halls, all elbows and relief. I let the current carry me for three steps and then slip sideways, cut under an arm, duck through a closing door, and suddenly I'm in a quiet place with dust motes practicing their ballet.
The music room holds the day's heat like it's a secret. Stands are pushed back like shy people. The piano sits with its lid shut, patient the way only furniture can be. I close the door and the click sounds like consent. I set my bag down, take my notebook out, lay my pen on the page like a divining rod. The relief that hits me is stupid and immediate: no eyes, no questions, no smile that could disarm me.
I spread pages on the floor the way kids make forts out of blankets. Terms and arrows, a sketch of a thing that is not a machine but acts like one inside a dish. I write measure and circle it and then draw a smaller circle next to it and write fast. I could lie and say I like the science for its own sake; maybe once I did. Now it's a tool I have to sharpen until it cuts what I want cut. Measurements are the only honest thing in my day—numbers that don't clap even when you want them to.
The air in here is a mixture of varnish, old rosin, and the perfume of other people's skin after nervous hands. I press my palms flat to the floor and tell myself to breathe like a person and not like a broken machine. Then I get to work. I translate a paragraph into something my hands understand. I scratch out a step that will take too long and add a smaller, meaner step next to it. I write controls twice because Saitou's voice in my head is already tired of me.
The clock above the door does its slow clack, a metronome pretending to be better than it is. The sun slides off the floor in a long sigh. Students pass the door in clusters and then stop passing it. The building empties itself the way it does every afternoon—down stairwells, into bikes, toward dinner. I stay. It's quieter to fail when nobody can see it.
At some point the numbers swim. My handwriting drifts at a tilt. I get up to stretch and my spine corrects a complaint I didn't hear it file. I sit down again, and the floor has become very persuasive. I put my head down on my folded arm to rest my eyes for a minute.
It is not a minute.
When I open my eyes, the room is navy blue. The small red exit sign is the only bright thing; it paints the corner like a bruise. The window turns the campus into a handful of scattered lights and the suggestion of a field. My cheek has printed a name on my arm in reverse. I peel my face off my skin and sit up slow. There is a patch of drool on the page. The ink resents me and has run in a little flower. I wipe it with the side of my hand and succeed in nothing useful.
I sigh. Great I slept the whole day.... My eyes instantly direct towards the door as I heard noises of someone trying to enter
I sit up readjusting the glasses that fell.... I should really go back to contacts...
The door moves. Wood sighs. A strip of brighter hallway swings across the floor like a slow blade. The handle doesn't squeak. It's the small click that tells me whoever is on the other side knows how to open this door without needing it to make a scene.
Kaori...
She stands framed in the rectangle of light, hair messy in the way wind makes art, socks showing an inch above her shoes in defiance of a rule somewhere. A juice box dangles from one hand like the least dignified, most necessary offering in history. She looks at me like I am a puzzle the day has been saving. Then she steps inside, nudges the door closed with her heel, and the world shrinks to the shape of this room.
She walks up to me maintaining eye contact.
"Here," she says, holding out the juice like she found it on the sidewalk and it has been waiting for me all day.
"Thank you," I manage. My voice sounds like I left it somewhere and came back for it. The straw resists me until it doesn't. The first sip is unreasonably sweet. It tastes like every childhood bribe.
She sets her bag down and walks to the window and leans her forearms on the sill, chin tipped just enough to see the field. The night outside sits with good posture. If I were a braver person, I would say something small and useful. It's late, maybe. You should be home. I say nothing because wrong words multiply in rooms like this.
"You should call it a night," she says, without turning. "It's late."
"That's my line," I say, and make it sound like a joke so it doesn't sound like fear. "I'll leave soon. Don't worry."
"Mm." Her reflection in the glass lifts an eyebrow. The glass puts stars in it that aren't real. "What are you even working on?"
"Nothing." The lie is a poor one and doesn't even dress up. "Homework."
"Homework," she repeats, an insult and not. She picks at a chip in the paint with one nail and blows the dust off her finger. "You fell asleep on the floor doing homework."
"I'm very studious."
She snorts, soft. The silence after is not hostile. It's a calm lake that hasn't decided whether to drown you. The clock does not tick louder. My heart does.
When she speaks again, it's small enough that the glass keeps some of it and only a piece makes it back to me. "...Do you hate me?"
The juice box stops halfway to my mouth. The straw bends under my teeth and squeaks. "What?"
"Do you—" She swallows the rest of the sentence, then forces it up again. "Hate me."
I sit very still because moving would make the moment break into pieces I'm not sure I can pick up. "No."
She nods once as if she expected me to say that and respects my good instincts while preparing to ignore them. "Tsubaki told me this was pain for you," she says, still to the window, to the field, to the version of the night that doesn't have to answer. "I knew that. I know that too. I could tell when I saw your room." Her shoulders hunch a millimeter. "You're sad and hurting and I pretend not to notice."
"Kaori—"
"I keep pushing you to play in the finals." The words come faster now, as if they have to clear a narrowing passage. "What right do I have? I kept saying all those things—" She mimics her own brightness bitterly. Jump. Don't look down. Who cares if it hurts. "Play the piano and don't care about the consequences. Like pain is interesting. Like it's a story."
"It's not your fault," I say, because I want it to be true for her, if not for me.
"You're suffering," she says, and the sound of it in her voice is a blade that isn't aimed at me. "And it's my fault." She laughs a little; it breaks halfway through and turns into a sound that has no name. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry." She folds her arms and puts her face on them and shoulders that spend most of their time at angles meant for duels slope into something like surrender. Her hair hides her. Water makes its small, ugly tracks.
My body moves before my brain files a request. I stand and go to the window and I don't talk. Talking would be a betrayal. I wrap my arms around her and put my head next to hers.She gasps, a small intake that isn't theater. For a heartbeat she stays rigid. Then she melts two centimeters, enough to let me know I haven't misread the room completely.
We stand there with the crooked city outside the glass and the straight lines of the piano's reflection inside it, and I think of all the sentences I have practiced. None of them matter.
"I care more about you than myself," I say into her hair, because truth is cheap if you wait long enough to say it. "I don't hate you. I hate myself." The words are not brave; they are what's left. "There are reasons I don't want to continue this competition and none of them are because I dislike you."
She pulls back a little so she can glare up at me. Tears make her eyes wide and too bright. "You can't just say that, idiot," she says, and the insult is a lifeline, and I take it.
"You're one of the three things keeping me sane, Kaori," I say. The other two sit unnamed because I am a coward and because saying them out loud would make them into a list, and lists can be lost. "If I look like a ghost lately, it's not because of you. It's because I don't know how to be a person and a plan at the same time."
She blinks hard, twice, the lashes sticking briefly with salt. The anger in her face doesn't leave; it just softens until it can be worn without injuring anyone. "Fine," she says, like pulling a tooth. "Fine... Don't compete in the finals."
I'm so surprised I forget to breathe. "What?"
She sniffles, wipes her cheek with the heel of her hand, and squares herself like a tiny general. "If you won't give me that," she says, "then give me something else."
"What," I ask, cautious as a person feeling the ground for buried glass.
"The Maihou piano competition," she says, and the room hears how much she has already rehearsed this line in her head because it comes out clean. "If you won't do the finals with me, then do that. Win it." Her mouth twitches toward a smile that has grief in it. "Winner gets an invitation to Europe. The piano competition there. Imagine what that could do for you."
She was such a good person.... But Prestige has no weight in my hands right now. Europe is a picture in a calendar someone else bought. All of it is time. Time is the only currency I have, and I am already in debt. I grimace and fail to make it look like a stoic smile. "Must I?"
"Yes," she says, and glares because glares are her easiest armor. Then, softer, like the light deciding to go easy on a room: "Yes, you must." She bites her lower lip and says in a voice so honest it makes my ribs hurt, "Please? For me?" She swallows the next sentence and then doesn't. "I want to see you play. I want to see you show everyone your symphony."
" And that way... you don't have to worry about me....."
The word shouldn't land like it does. It's a black box where you put all the meanings that hurt to carry loose. It's also a promise I wrote in a different life with different ink. The part of me that had started to grow claws around the idea of no retracts them because she asked with for me in the middle and because her eyes are wet and not manipulative and because my spine is not made for refusing her. Her final words dug deep into his heart.
I hurt her deeply i need to make up for this in the future 100 fold. I felt like a practical cold monster....
Join The Maihou Piano competion.... Again...
Inside, the math explodes. Every hour I'll have to tear from somewhere to practice scales I can do in my sleep and the pieces I can't, every minute I won't be at a desk figuring out how to bring her something that weighs more than a sentence, every piece of me that will get burned because sleep becomes a rumor. The new plan drafts itself in a single breath: become a zombie, become a martyr, treat the body like a thing you can ignore until it breaks, keep smiling if she's looking.
She had died after his final competion. His symphony didn't get to her. He had gotten the invite to the European competion. He had gotten first place and done it.
Yet.....He felt absolutely nothing looking at the letter. Absolutely Fucking Nothing.... Like losing an arm and expecting ice cream to fill the vacancy.
He promptly ripped up the letter and tossed it into the trash. The only association he had with music was pain and regret. And Death.
It horrified the people around him. He will never forget Tsubakis face when she found out....
I inhale deeply
"Okay," I hear myself say, the syllables heavy and too soft.
Her eyes widen, the tears gathering but resisting the fall. "Really?"
"Yeah," I say, and I'm surprised by how tired I sound. "I'll do it."
She shifts on her feet, and then the smile happens. It isn't the stage grin that knows how to make a room stand; it's the small, private smile that makes any room kinder by existing in it. Warmth pours out of it like someone opened a door in winter. The look is so bright it pushes at the dark thing inside me until it retreats to a corner and curls there, smaller but harder.
"Thank you," she says, and the gratitude is not performative. It lands on my chest and burns pleasantly. "You won't regret it."
I will. That's fine. I would regret the opposite more. I nod and finish the juice box because it feels like the right punctuation and because she brought it and therefore it is sacred. She watches me like she can see the parts of me rearranging themselves into shapes that will hold when she is not here to check them.
She glances at the clock and winces. "We should go," she says, already bending to scoop her bag up, already a girl with a train to catch and an argument to win later in a dream. "It's late."
"Right." I gather my papers quickly, stuffing them in at angles I will hate myself for later. The room returns to the shape it had before I decided to make it an office: stands aligned, piano quietly judging, window measuring out the dark. I flick the light switch and the fluorescents take a second to remember how to die.
We step into the hallway. The school is a husk, the kind that needs voices to feel like itself and doesn't get any. Our footsteps bounce and come back thinner. She bumps my shoulder with hers without comment and the gesture is more intimate than any hand-holding would be. We walk down the stairs like a single thought.
At the gate, we stop because habit makes you stop at thresholds even when there's no reason. She looks at me and I look at her, and the air between us tries to come up with an excuse to keep us here. It fails.
"Practice," she says, grinning because she has put her mask back on and because this kind of bossiness is a language we share.
"Sleep," I shoot back, and she rolls her eyes so hard a city should take notes.
"Eat something with color," she adds, stealing Tsubaki's line without knowing it.
"I'll try." It's the truest promise I can make that doesn't steal from a future I haven't earned.
She salutes with two fingers; the gesture should be ridiculous, and somehow it isn't. Then she steps backward, then turns, then is gone—down the street that hears everyone's secrets, toward the bridge that thinks it's a wrist, into a night that will keep being a night whether or not any of us behave.
I stand there for a second longer than is polite and let the breeze move the hair at my temple like a hand. My phone is heavy in my pocket with a Thursday-shaped message. My hands smell like paper and a little like juice. The plan in my head has too many parts and not enough sleepi. I take a breath and let it out and the air does not collapse from the weight of my decision.
Life is about to become ten times tougher than tough. That's fine. Tough is a word people use when they don't have a better one. I start walking, because standing still has never saved anyone I love.