The world is all back and legs and hiccuping breath. I'm on Tsubaki's back with my arms cinched around her neck like a life preserver I don't deserve, my knees thumping against her hips every time she jogs to keep from dropping me. My scraped knee burns in a very loud way—small and bright and certain of its importance. The hill we came down looks taller behind us than it did before I met it with skin.
"Ugh, Kousei, stop crying!" Tsubaki barks over her shoulder, more winded than angry. "It's just a little scraped knee—be a man already!"
I sob harder on principle. Tears make heat on the side of her neck where my cheek keeps slipping. Her ponytail swishes my nose like a horse's tail deciding I am a fly. She smells like dirt and sun and the aluminum tang you get when you lick blood by accident.
"To prove my point," she announces to nobody, "behold!" She twists, showing me the outside of her calf as far as physics will allow from a piggyback. There's a purple-yellow bruise there shaped like a continent no one will ever visit. "My leg went scrunch, okay? It still hurts! See me crying? No, you do not!"
"It hurts," I insist, voice breaking into pieces and then stepping on them. "It hurts."
"Yeah, genius, I can tell." She snorts and shifts me higher. Her hands are hooked under my thighs, palms calloused from a bat, from summers spent proving she exists with motion. "Ugh! I wish you could carry me for once! I swear, one day you're gonna grow up and carry me and everyone is gonna think I'm the coolest girl in the neighborhood."
For a second she drifts somewhere I can't follow—eyes gone glossy with a daydream that has a camera angle and maybe a breeze. I can feel her grin soften against my cheek. In her head she's got a cute boy—not necessarily me, maybe me if I behave—giving her a movie piggyback into a sunset that cooperates.
"This is all your fault!" I wail, detonating her fantasy on impact.
She jolts; the future pops like a soap bubble. "What, you wanna piece of me, punk?" She can't turn to glare properly so she glares at air. "Say that again and I'll body-slam you gently."
I swat at her shoulder with all the force of a damp sponge. She pretends to stagger. "Oh no, he's so strong," she deadpans, trudging. The hill drops away under us; the grass slips under her shoes and for one terrible, thrilling moment the two of us tilt together. We almost roll—she laughs in a way that says, If we roll, I will never let you forget it—and then she plants her feet, legs braced, breath bursting out of her like a whistle. I end up clinging harder, hiccupping in the aftermath.
We go a few yards in a stubborn kind of silence, the kind only kids can make: full of performance, empty of malice. Her hands tighten around my knees. Mine loosen around her neck when I remember she is not a lamppost.
"I'm glad it's just your leg," she mutters, quieter, the joke stepping aside. "Your mom's gonna be furious though." The word furious lands like the shadow of a hand. "She's always... you know. When you get hurt."
My throat closes. The hill smells suddenly like iodine and piano polish. I see the living room with its regimented quiet; I see the the look that means I have misplaced the day's quota of perfection. It was almost better when I thought the grass was the enemy.
"She's gonna be mad anyway," Tsubaki adds, kicking a stone so she can pretend to be casual. "So... so whatever. I'll tell her I pushed you by accident and then she can be mad at me instead." She says it like she's volunteering to get hit by weather.
That does it. My little brave collapses. I start crying again, because it's the only trick I know that isn't music and because music sometimes makes it worse. The sound jumps in my chest, trips over my ribs, tumbles out of my mouth in a stuttery mess.
"Oi!" she yelps, instantly soft. "Don't—hey, c'mon, don't cry. You're gonna make me—"
She does. The words melt into her own wetness. It's contagious: my noise makes hers; hers feeds mine. Now we're two dumb kids on one pair of legs, ugly-crying at the sky, scaring a pigeon that had plans for this patch of sidewalk. She doesn't set me down. She adjusts her grip and keeps walking, and if her calf shudders under the bruise she doesn't tell me. If I squeeze too tight and make it worse, she doesn't tell me that either.
We pass into the cool strip of shade thrown by the apartment block at the corner. The world quiets in the way it does when a cloud is generous. She hitches me up one last time and sniffs hard enough to clear a small road. "Okay," she says, voice raw but working. "Battle plan: we go to my place first. I wash the gravel out of your knee. You squeal. I laugh. Then I walk you home. If your mom gets scary, I stand there like a wall and you hide behind me like always."
"I don't hide," I lie into her shoulder. "I... reposition."
She barks a laugh. "Sure, soldier." And then, because she's Tsubaki and she can't let the last word belong to fear: "One day, Arima, you're gonna carry me up a hill and I'm going to make you cry from how heavy I am. That's a promise."
The memory fades on that ridiculous oath—us, small and wet and solid, going where the day told us and insisting it was our idea. The sun in the memory gives way to a rectangle of cheap morning, a desk, the rubbery taste of drool.
I wake with my face stuck to paper.
For a moment the past and present overlay badly: Tsubaki's breath under my cheek becomes the stale heat off my notebook; the grip of her hands under my knees becomes the cut of my chair into my thigh. Fate feels like it reached into the drawer the night keeps and threw a handful of old person Polaroids at my head. Cruel. Specific. Taunting.
My neck is a hinge someone didn't oil. I straighten with a sound that belongs in a much older person's mouth. The desk is a landscape of last night: pens uncapped at graceless angles, a ruler asleep halfway off the edge, three pages of notes that look like I tried to hold a storm down with handwriting. The fruit of my labor sits there without a label and without needing one. I don't touch it. Touching makes it too real for this hour and too unreal for the hour I need it.
The shower slaps me awake in a series of impatient hands. I stand under it until the skin at my shoulders goes pink and the part of me that wasn't convinced it lives here admits defeat. My glasses fog, then clear. Contacts, I think mutinously, and curse the me who hasn't got a prescription for them yet.
In the mirror, a stranger in a uniform tries hard to impersonate young me and fails. The collar is cockeyed; the top button is making its case to be disliked. My tie looks like it lost a bet. My hair appears to have had an argument with gravity and settled on a truce that doesn't flatter either of them. The bruised half-moons under my eyes have spread their empire farther than anyone voted for. Two weeks ago someone called me "innocent-looking" in a way that embarrassed me enough to smile. That boy left without forwarding his mail.
I shrug at the mirror. I am not an exhibit. I don't need to look good. I need to be operational.
The day has the smell schools have on mornings when nobody has figured out yet that the air is pretending to be safe: eraser dust, floor polish, gossip left out overnight. I fold myself into it with the practiced courtesy of a person who needs the building to overlook him. Backpack strap on the same shoulder, because the other one has started to ache in a way that warns you about future problems. Shoes a little too quiet. Eyes down not because I'm timid but because eye contact invites scenes.
My homeroom is a bus terminal. People throw words over one another and hope the right train catches them. I sit, I copy, I let the teacher's sentences pass through me like light through milk. When I try to put them back together later, I will have to guess which parts were meaning and which were glare. The clock's minute hand dials itself forward in sneaky stutters. Four classes perform the math of survival: what's due, what counts, what jokes can be smuggled in without confiscation.
By the time the pep rally arrives, my spine has resigned itself to being a clothesline.
They herd us into the gym the way you herd cats who have been trained by centuries of cats to appear cooperative while plotting a revolution. The banners have their mouths open. The bleachers creak and accept our collective weight. The sound in the space is a soft roar, the breath of a large, excitable animal. Someone has drawn lightning bolts on their calves in marker. Someone else has made a ridiculous hat that declares fealty to a sport. Another had face paint.
A woman with a clipboard and the voice of a person who has learned how to make teenagers hear says names that stand for teams. The microphone keeps its grudges to a minimum. "As you all know," she hums, "we've got competitions coming up across the board—track, baseball, kendo, soccer." She smiles against a wooden smile. "Now a representative from each team will show their spirit, starting with the men's s—"
There is a blur of motion that belongs to only one species of boy. The microphone migrates into a new hand as if it was always meant to. The gym inhales in anticipation of something preventable.
"You're a lucky lot to have been born in this generation," says Ryota Watari, smirk calibrated for attention. He lifts the mic like a trophy he hasn't won yet. "Because you get to witness the birth of a star named Ryota Watari!"
The sound that follows is engineered to be recorded: shrieks, laughs, a wave of woo that starts at the front and breaks on the back wall. And plenty of "Kyaaas!"And "He's so hot!" From the girls were shrieked out.Watari accepts it all with a bow that is ninety percent joke and ten percent actual gratitude. He knows how to take noise and eat it for breakfast.
I find Tsubaki on the edge of the platform with the rest of the baseball kids—the stance, the shoulders, the posture of people who can throw toward a future and trust some part of it to come back. Her head is down. She's looking at a scuff on the floor that doesn't deserve the care she's giving it. She could own the space with the way she moves. She declines. Watari rides the crowd like a wave; Tsubaki stares out of it in her own world.
The Spanish teacher next to me yells in the way adults do when they want to be part of something real and only have volume to spend. Two rows back, someone bangs on a sign until the sign loses some of its structural integrity. The gym's ceiling lights buzz as if they are trying to out-cheer the crowd and will need to be replaced for their trouble.
Watari does a little victory lap of a sentence about giving it all on the field and not leaving love letters unmailed—to the ball, to the net, to victory, he's equal-opportunity about his declarations. He points at someone I can't see and winks. The wink creates a small thermal in the bleachers that lifts a handful of squeals another octave higher. He's good at this. He always has been. It looks like it costs him nothing. I know better. I also don't know.
Names keep happening into the microphone. Faces I share hallways with grow several feet taller under applause and then shrink back to their familiar sizes when the moment moves on. A boy I know from math class shouts himself hoarse and grins like pain is a handshake he's making friends with. I clap at appropriate intervals. My hands make the shape of enthusiasm and the sound it makes without negotiating with the person inside them.
From this height the floor looks like order. Lines promise games will follow rules. But I've seen rooms hold rules like they hold breath: temporarily, with effort, and not without cost.
The woman with the clipboard returns to the mic to wrest the gym back from chaos with a smile that means she likes her job and also earns every yen of it. "Thank you, teams! Remember—" she calls, above a final ripple of noise, "—we're all here to support one another. Competitions run all week! Check the posting board!"
The gym exhales into chatter. People stand up in waves and sit back down when it turns out standing isn't on the menu yet. I see Tsubaki look up once—just once—and catch Watari's eye. He's still a little drunk on attention; she's still a little seasick from it. He beams at her. She answers with a bare, specific twitch of mouth that says: I'm proud of you; don't be insufferable.
I sink into my coat of borrowed quiet and let the bleachers hold my bones. If I squint, if I pretend, I can make the roar of the gym into the white noise of a lab fan; I can turn the beat of the clapping into the regulated thrum of a piece of equipment that doesn't care about me and does its job anyway. I rub my thumb against the pad of my index finger until the friction warms me. It doesn't. Not really. It's fine.
A stray streamer lands on my shoulder and sticks, static or fate. I peel it off and spin it around my finger like a thin idea. The pep rally is designed to make you feel like part of something that will outrun your private life if you let it. I look at the floor. I am tired of being outrun.
The whistle shrieks. The herd reconfigures itself into lines that will eventually become exits. I stand when the people in front of me stand and sit when they sit and stand again when it becomes ridiculous not to. Watari vanishes into a knot of admirers. Tsubaki disappears into the crush of uniforms headed for the side door, her bat bag thudding her shin in that familiar way. She doesn't look back. I don't wave. We're both too good at not being seen when we don't want to be.
"Arima," a teacher says as I'm shuffling with the current. I look up, don't immediately recognize which adult owns my name, and locate the tie that goes with the voice. "You okay?" he asks, because I look like a modest disaster.
"Fine," I say, because the truth is complicated and fine is a the ultimate cover.
"Drink water," he advises giving me a stern look, and lets me go.
I find the stairwell that smells less like victory and more like wet concrete. The shouting dilutes with each step. Out a narrow window the field spreads like a promise people made to themselves when they were nicer. The sky is a blank staff waiting to be written on; I put nothing on it. My hands go into my pockets without checking with me first. The day keeps happening in the place I'm not. I let it.
By the time the hallway learns my name again, the gym behind me has gone back to pretending it's a tame room. My body remembers the shape of the music room door handle before my hand finds it. There's a long moment where the plan and the future argue about what counts as necessary. Then I open the door and step into the quieter kind of noise I understand.
The music room is the inside of a held breath. Door shuts, latch clicks, and all the cafeteria noise and pep-rally leftovers seal on the other side of a thin, polite world. Dust floats in the long bars of afternoon as if somebody cut the sun into staff lines and told the motes to read.
I set my bag down so carefully you'd think it contained Glass. The piano waits, a black animal with its head on its paws, pretending not to notice me until I prove I know how to touch it. The bench is where it always is, three centimeters to the left of where a nervous person would leave it. I slide it half a hair with my knee and sit. My spine remembers its script without consulting me.
Hands hover. Keys breathe back.
Bach first—the old discipline, the house that never collapses, the staircase you can climb in the dark. Clavier in G: tiny sunlit mechanisms all clicking in their proper teeth. I drop the hands in and let them do the job they were trained to do when the rest of me was younger and thought obedience would save us. The figures chase one another across the keyboard, polite and exact, a conversation that never raises its voice. Every trilled laugh lands where it should; every step finds the tread. My wrists float, my fingers curve, and for a merciful minute there is nothing to be except correct.
The room reflects me back in black wood and ghosted glass. The metronome—face turned toward the wall like a child in time-out—keeps its mouth shut. I don't need it. I am the meaner parent.
Chopin next. Op. 25, No. 5—the wrong-note etude, the pretty joke with teeth. The left hand lays silk; the right hand twitches an eyebrow in the wrong place on purpose and then makes the insult into wit. I run through it as if someone hidden in the woodwork is giving me a mark for every millimeter of controlled blasphemy. No smudges. No tiny compromises you let live because they come with a cute face. I sand everything smooth. The wrong notes sound wrong in exactly the right way, which is another kind of lie I know too well.
Somewhere between the second page and the slightly vicious little ending, a thought tries to rise and I push it back down. Not now. Not here. Not when the one part of the day will line up the way you tell it to if you keep the rest of you out of its way.
The last cadence lands like a stamp. I hold the finish a beat past dignity, because I can, because control feels like moral goodness if you haven't slept.
I take my hands off the keys and only then notice that I've been clenching my jaw. Teeth let go of one another with a complaint.
From the door behind me, a voice: "Utterly soulless."
The word utterly has an appetite. It eats the leftover ringing out of the room.
I don't flinch, but I turn. Kaori is already inside, the door closing with a soft clink behind her heel. One hand holds a bagel by its paper collar like she arrested it on suspicion of being breakfast. There's a constellation of crumbs on her wrist. Her hair is loose from whatever held it earlier; the wind-light mess looks deliberate even when it isn't. She's chewing. Somehow she chews like a performance too. Her blazer was forgone with only her uniform shirt on.
"You heard me," she says around the bite, eyebrows knitting in a frown that would be cruel on someone else and is only exact on her. "Soulless."
"Hello to you too," I say, and my voice comes out even, because I spent years learning how to pass for calm while parts of me took turns drowning.
She takes another bite as if fuel is an argument you should always be prepared to make. "Where's the color?" She gestures with the bagel, a sesame seed launching bravely and dying on the lid. "Where's the ambition? You're coloring inside lines that are already printed onto the page. You don't even press hard enough to leave an indent."
"It's enough for the competition," I say, aware of the precise way my mouth flattens on enough and hating that I know it.
She stops chewing. That's the part that hurts: how quickly she can turn off her own brightness when she wants to look directly at you. "Maybe for judges." The word judges has too many consonants when she says it; it sounds like a broom sweeping up people. "Not for humans."
I could say a lot. I could tell her I do not have time to lavish on making the thing pretty when I'm already bleeding hours for a different kind of pretty that isn't pretty at all. I could tell her perfection is cheaper than feeling; perfection is a machine you can switch on and off. I could tell her I don't want to open the door inside a door inside a door that music always is, because the room at the end is the one where everything I couldn't save lives on the floor and looks up at me. A room where the truth of his life shines through and reminds him how destroyed everything really is- his whole life...
Instead I rest my fingers on the keys again and play a single C like it's a diagnostic. Color? my head thinks, meaner than I want it to. What about the color in your face? The thought hits me like the clap of thunder that gets lost after a firework; it flashes, makes the cheap bright, and is gone. I say none of it. I don't want to spend that kind of honesty in a place that remembers.
She comes closer, sets the bag on the bench beside me, wipes crumbs off her thumb with a seriousness that would be comic if it weren't part of how she works. "I know you can be messy," she says. "I've seen you be messy. That—" she nods at the motionless piano like it owes her money "—was not messy. It wasn't even clean. It was... polite." She makes a face as if she found raisins in her cookies. "Are you trying to bore me to death so I'll haunt you and yell in your ear for the rest of your life?"
"I thought you already planned on that," I say. "Given the schedule."
Her mouth twitches and then refuses the laugh. She leans in, squinting at my face like she's trying to read the notes someone scribbled on me when I fell asleep. "You didn't sleep."
"I did," I protest automatically. "Horizontally, even." It's half-true. The floor counts as horizontal.
She rolls her eyes with the operatic precision of a person who has trained in expressive muscles. "How long?"
"A while," I say, and she makes an unprincessly noise to register her contempt for that answer.
She looks at me with a face that clearly doesn't believe my lies "We're getting you out of here for today no more practicing we're gonna go watch the Athletics teams"
"Shouldn't I practice to be less soulless?" I ask dryly, because jokes are cheaper than apologies and because if I hand her something to slap she'll slap that instead of the part of me that is already falling apart.
She glares, victorious, as if I've stepped into the ring she set up for me and acknowledged her title. Then—because she is genetically incapable of staying inside one mood longer than it does its job—she hooks her finger under her lower eyelid and pulls it down at me, tongue out: comically rude, aggressively childish, impossible to take personally.
"No," she says when the face returns to addresses-only. "You shouldn't try to be anything. We're going to fix it the old-fashioned way."
"What's the old-fashioned way," I ask, against my better judgement.
"Seeing our friends." She says it like the formula for an antidote. "Musicians need to see the sky sometimes."
I can feel the argument spool up in my chest like measuring tape: retractable, precise, satisfying to snap closed. The sky is not going to help me on Thursday; the sky is not an input that produces the output I need. But I also remember the gym, and the roar, and the way Tsubaki looked at the floor like it might do her the favor of opening. I can't tell whether my resistance is a matter of time or a matter of cowardice. Either way it's boring.
Kaori inhales, then pivots, the bagel a pointer in her hand. "By the way: what club are you in?"
The subject change makes a noise in my head like a gear shift in a badly maintained car. "What?"
"Club," she repeats, as if the word were a vocabulary term I should have underlined in my notes. "You are in one? Or you're intending to be in one? Or you're avoiding the question because the answer is embarrassing?"
"The Blonde Appreciation Club," I say, before my better self can stop me. It slips out with the exact intonation of a boy choosing the path of maximum doom because he wants to see what kind of firework it makes.
Her cheeks go pink in a fast, furious bloom, which, in a betrayal of both our interests, looks very pretty. She does not dignify it by looking away. She glares down at me as if daring the color to be permanent. "Idiot."
I shrug, caught and not sorry. "None," I add, because truth does eventually have to show up for work.
"Good." She plants the last bite of bagel in her mouth with a little theatrical chomp, dusts her hands, and points at me with a newly clean finger. "Because the cultural clubs have to go watch the athletic teams this week and turn in an attendance slip. Today and tomorrow. Which means you're coming with me."
"Is this punishment or medicine," I ask.
"Yes," she says, not quite an answer. "Think of it as scurvy prevention. Vitamin... human. Fresh air. Other people's sweat." She wrinkles her nose. "You're invited."
I look at my fingers splayed on the keys—ten pale arguments for staying exactly where I am until the day runs out of me—and then at her. She's already made more decisions about my afternoon than I had patience to make. She is also holding the door I keep insisting is not there.
"Are we going to watch the soccer team?" I ask, aiming for neutral and landing near resigned.
Her mouth goes mischievous, a little tilt that puts trouble in her teeth. She taps the closed lid of the piano with two knuckles like announcing a magic trick. "Nein."