The alarm clock's scream was a blunt instrument against the quiet of dawn. Kyo's hand slid from under the thin blanket, its motion more of a reflex than an act of will, and silenced it. The room held the chill of the night, a cold that seeped into the single mattress on the floor. For a long moment, she simply lay there, staring at the water stain on the ceiling. It spread like a vague, gray continent, its borders shifting in the dim light. Mapping it was her morning ritual. Today, it looked like a sinking island.
Downstairs, the morning symphony had already begun. The sharp clatter of dishes, her older sister Mai's bright, rapid-fire chatter about university plans, and the demanding wail of her little brother, Kenji. Her mother's voice, a sound usually stretched thin with fatigue, was warm and engaged with Mai, then shifted to a sugary, patient coo for Kenji. The stairs creaked under her father's heavy, hurried steps, followed by the brief, muffled rumble of his goodbye. He was a ghost in this house, a presence noted only by his absence.
Kyo dressed in the uniform laid out the night before. The fabric was clean but worn soft at the elbows and knees. In the small, shared bathroom mirror, her reflection was a study in fading. Pale skin, dark hair that refused to hold any shine, and eyes the color of a twilight sky—a hue that never seemed to fully commit to either blue or gray. They were eyes that looked through things, not at them. She brushed her teeth, the motion mechanical, and carefully avoided letting her gaze drift below her own chin.
She descended the stairs, a phantom in her own home. Her mother was at the stove, flipping a perfectly golden egg for Kenji's plate. Mai was devouring toast, a textbook propped open beside her.
"Morning," Kyo murmured, her voice barely disturbing the air.
Her mother glanced over, a flicker of something—annoyance? recognition?—crossing her face. "Your lunch is on the counter. Don't dawdle, you'll be late."
It was not a lunch made with love, but with duty. A simple rice ball, some pickled vegetables, a protein bar. Mai's lunch, Kyo knew, would have leftover grilled fish and colorful, carefully cut vegetables. Kenji's would be a cute, character-themed box. Hers was fuel, nothing more.
She slipped the box into her bag, shouldered its weight, and stepped out into the gray morning. The walk to school was twenty-three minutes of practiced invisibility. She kept her eyes on the cracked pavement, her posture curved slightly inward, a shell seeking to close. The world around her was a blur of color and noise—chattering students in clusters, the roar of passing cars, the cheerful jingle of a convenience store door. None of it touched her. She moved through it like a stone through water, leaving no ripple.
Homeroom was a lesson in social geometry. Desks were constellations of friendship and influence. Kyo's seat was in the back, near the window, a perfect observational post for someone who wished not to be observed. She took it, arranging her books with quiet precision, building a small, fragile fortress of order on the worn wooden surface.
The morning passed in a familiar haze of half-understood formulas and droning lectures. Her mind, however, was elsewhere. It was tracing the edges of the water stain on her ceiling. It was counting the number of tiles on the floor from her desk to the door. It was performing complex calculations of insignificance.
Lunchtime was the daily trial. The classroom erupted into a chaos of moving chairs and loud conversation. Kyo took her bento and her usual escape route to the most secluded corner of the school library, a narrow aisle between stacks of outdated reference books. The air smelled of dust and aging paper. Here, she could breathe. Here, she could be alone with the ghosts of forgotten facts.
Today, however, the peace was shattered. As she rounded a corner toward her spot, she came face-to-face with a group of three girls from her class. They were leaning against the shelves, sharing a bag of chips, their laughter sharp and brittle.
"Well, look who it is," said the one in the center, Aya. Her smile was all teeth. "The library ghost. Coming to haunt some more books?"
Kyo tried to step back, but the aisle was narrow. "I was just…" she began, her voice failing.
"Just what? Trying to absorb some knowledge through osmosis?" another girl, Sachi, giggled. "Doesn't seem to be working."
"What's in the lunchbox, ghost?" Aya reached out, not for the box, but for Kyo's bag strap, tugging it. The movement was just enough to throw Kyo off balance. She stumbled, and her bento box fell from her hands. It hit the floor with a dull plastic clatter, the lid popping open. The rice ball rolled out, coming to rest against a dusty book spine.
A beat of silence. Then, laughter.
"Oops," Aya said, not sounding sorry at all. "Better clean that up. You wouldn't want to attract real bugs, would you?"
They swept past her, their shoulders bumping hers, leaving behind the scent of cheap perfume and the echo of their mirth. Kyo stood frozen, her cheeks burning. She slowly knelt, her knees pressing into the cold linoleum. With trembling fingers, she picked up the rice ball, now flecked with dust and lint, and placed it back in the box. She methodically gathered every grain of spilled rice, every shred of vegetable, her movements slow and precise. The humiliation was a cold, heavy stone in her stomach, but it was a familiar weight.
This was the pattern. The whispered names she pretended not to hear. The occasional shove in the crowded hallway. The deliberate exclusion from group work. The bento incident was just a variation on a theme. Her invisibility was not perfect; sometimes it failed, and she became a target for a moment's amusement, a vessel for someone else's casual cruelty. Then, she would fade back into the background.
The final bell was a release. Kyo packed her things with deliberate slowness, waiting for the classroom to empty. The walk home was the reverse of the morning, the gray light softening into twilight. She stopped at the small park near her house, sitting on a swing that creaked a lonely protest. She didn't swing. She just sat, watching shadows lengthen.
At home, the evening played out like a rehearsed scene. Dinner was a noisy affair centered on Kenji's day and Mai's future. Kyo's responses to direct questions were monosyllabic. Her mother's eyes would sometimes linger on her with a look of weary frustration, as if Kyo were a problem that had long since become too tiresome to solve.
Later, in the bath, she faced the proof. Steaming water clouded the small room. She turned her back to the mirror, then glanced over her shoulder. There, across her shoulder blade, was the landscape of her childhood. A sprawling, slick patch of discolored skin, a web of shiny, twisted tissue. It was not ugly to her anymore; it was just a fact. A permanent receipt for an accident with a tipped kettle, a moment of her mother's distracted anger. It was the mark of where she had learned to be quiet, to be small, to not cause trouble.
She sank into the water, letting it cover her shoulders, her chin. The heat seeped into her bones, but could not reach the cold core inside. Her mind, as it did every night, turned to the future. It was not a future of university applications or career dreams. It was a simple, clear horizon.
High school graduation was in three months. It felt like both an eternity and a heartbeat away. To her family, it would be a checkbox. Mai's graduation had been a celebration. Kenji's would be a festival. Hers would be a administrative formality.
She had a plan. It was not a dramatic plan. It did not involve notes or grand gestures. It involved the sleeping pills the doctor had prescribed her mother for stress, pills that sat half-forgotten in the back of the medicine cabinet. It involved waiting for a weekend when her family was away visiting relatives. It involved simply… not waking up.
The logic was quiet and irrefutable. Her existence was a faint pencil sketch on a crowded, vibrant canvas. It could be erased, and the picture would not suffer. It might, in fact, be improved. Her absence would free up a room. It would remove a source of quiet tension at the dinner table. Her mother would have one less mouth to feed, one less disappointment to quietly tally.
She got out of the bath, dried herself, and put on her worn nightclothes. In her room, she opened her school notebook. Not to study, but to a blank page at the very back. She had begun a list there, weeks ago. It was titled, in small, neat letters, "Reasons."
Most of the lines below were blank.
Only one was filled in.
It read: No one would notice.
She looked at the line, then out the window at the darkening sky. A single, bright star had appeared, pinpricking the vast gray. It seemed impossibly distant and alone. Kyo closed the notebook. She turned off the light. She lay down on her mattress, pulling the blanket up to her chin, and waited for sleep to come, one day closer to the quiet end of all her gray mornings.