The ticking of the clock was a relentless, oppressive sound.
For Asa Mitaka, it was the metronome counting down the seconds of her sentence. Each tick was another moment closer to the bell, another moment closer to the solitary walk home.
She kept her back hunched just so, her gaze perpetually fixed on the worn cover of her textbook. The goal was to become a perfectly forgettable piece of classroom furniture. A desk. A chair. Anything but a person who could be noticed, judged, or, worst of all, pitied.
The teacher's droning voice, explaining a historical event that felt less real than the devils on the news, was the perfect background noise for her disappearing act.
Then, the drone stopped.
The sudden silence was an alarm. Asa's head didn't lift, but her focus sharpened. A change in the routine was a threat to her carefully constructed anonymity.
"Alright class, settle down," the teacher said, his voice carrying an uncharacteristic note of... something other than pure monotony. "We have a new transfer student joining us today."
A collective murmur rippled through the classroom.
For Asa, it was an unwelcome wave disturbing the still waters of her isolation. A new student. Another pair of eyes to avoid. Another person to categorize her, label her, and ultimately, ignore her like all the rest.
She just hoped they weren't the loud, popular type. Those were the worst.
The classroom door slid open with a rattling complaint.
A boy stood there, blinking in the fluorescent light as if he'd just emerged from a cave. His uniform was rumpled, his black hair messy, and a single, sharp tooth poked out from his upper lip when his mouth hung slightly agape. He had a vacant, almost lost look in his eyes. He wasn't handsome. He wasn't cool. He was just... there.
"This is Denji," the teacher announced, gesturing for him to step forward. "He'll be joining our class starting today. Denji, why don't you introduce yourself?"
The boy, Denji, shuffled to the front, scratching the back of his neck. He looked out at the sea of faces with an expression that was less nervous and more profoundly bored.
"Uh, hi," he started, his voice flat. "I'm Denji."
He paused, as if that was the end of the required information. The teacher had to give him a little prodding nod.
"Oh, right. Stuff I like..." Denji's eyes lit up with the first spark of genuine thought Asa had seen in them. "Burgers. The ones from McDonald's. They're cheap and good. Also... I like girls."
A few of the girls in the front row giggled. Asa felt a familiar wave of secondhand embarrassment wash over her. What an idiot.
"What I dislike..." He scrunched up his face in concentration. "Math. And Maths. And reading stuff with too many hard words."
The giggles turned into outright laughter. Asa sank lower in her seat, wishing the floor would swallow her whole just to escape the sheer stupidity radiating from the front of the room.
"My, uh... my goal," Denji finished, looking profoundly uncomfortable now that the attention was fully on him. "Is to get a girlfriend. a happy life with my family, and, uh... yeah. That's about it."
He stood there awkwardly, his introduction complete.
For a moment, his vacant gaze swept across the room and, for a horrifying split second, it met Asa's. She saw nothing in them—no judgment, no curiosity, just a blankness, as if he were looking at another desk. Then his eyes moved on.
Relief, sharp and sudden, flooded through her. He hadn't seen her.
"Thank you, Denji," the teacher said, trying to regain control of the snickering class. "There's an empty seat in the back row. You can sit there."
Asa watched out of the corner of her eye as the new boy trudged to his desk. He didn't look at anyone, simply collapsing into his chair with a sigh, immediately propping his chin on his hand and staring out the window, his brief performance over.
The clock began its oppressive ticking once more. The teacher resumed his lecture. The brief disruption was over.
Asa returned her gaze to her textbook, the words blurring into meaningless shapes.
Another idiot, she thought. The world was full of them.
---||---
They say the rooftop is where the main characters eat their lunch.
It's where they have their fateful encounters, their heart-to-heart talks, their dramatic domestic violence under the vast, open sky.
It's a special place.
That's exactly why Asa Mitaka ate here. Because it was always empty.
No main characters here. Just her, a lukewarm bento box she'd slapped together this morning, and the chain-link fence that kept the rest of the noisy, pointless world at a comfortable distance.
The wind was nice. It was quiet. It was perfect.
Until it wasn't.
She heard the soft scrape of a shoe on concrete and tensed up, her chopsticks hovering over a sad-looking piece of tamagoyaki. Peeking over the top of her bento, she saw him.
The new kid. Denji.
He was sitting a few feet away, his back against the wall, gnawing on a plain bread roll that looked drier than her textbook. He hadn't noticed her. Good.
She went back to her food, trying to radiate an aura of absolute unapproachability. I am a rock. I am an island. I am a particularly boring patch of concrete.
He finished his bread in three massive bites, balled up the wrapper, and tossed it into the nearby bin. Then he stood up and walked to the guardrail, leaning his arms on it and staring out at the city.
Asa watched him out of the corner of her eye. His posture was weirdly intense, his shoulders hunched. He looked… empty. Like a husk. It was a familiar feeling.
He muttered something she couldn't quite hear, something that sounded like "…freakin' trap…"
Then, he started climbing.
He swung one leg over the guardrail, then the other, and stood on the narrow concrete ledge on the other side, gripping the top of the fence with his hands.
Asa's chopsticks clattered into her bento box.
Oh no. Oh no no no. Her mind went into overdrive. This idiot. This absolute moron. Was he serious? On her rooftop?
She shot to her feet, her own carefully cultivated solitude shattered.
"Hey!" she squeaked, her voice cracking. "Don't do that! Get down from there!"
Denji glanced over his shoulder, his expression more annoyed than anything else. "Huh? I'm just trying to see better."
"See what? The pavement?!" Asa scrambled over, her heart pounding a stupid, frantic rhythm against her ribs. This was not her problem. Why was she making it her problem? "Look, I get it! School sucks! Life sucks! But it's not… it's not worth it!"
She was close enough to see the focused look in his eyes now. He was squinting, trying to see something far away. Something she couldn't see at all.
"Think about… about getting a girlfriend!" she blurted out, her face instantly burning hot. It was the dumbest, most cliché thing she could have said. "You said you wanted one! You can't get one if you're a red stain on the sidewalk!"
He finally turned to face her fully, looking utterly baffled. "Jump? I'm not gonna jump. What are you talking about?" He pointed vaguely into the distance. "I saw my family. They're going out, having fun, while I'm stuck in this prison. I thought school was supposed to be fun, but it's a total trap!"
His "family"? Asa followed his pointing finger, but all she saw were the distant, hazy shapes of buildings and cars. Nothing.
Her mind made a painful, immediate leap. Oh. He's one of those people. The kind who sees things that aren't there. The kind who talks about family in the sky.
Her own anger and panic deflated, replaced by a hollow ache of sympathy.
"Mine too," she said, her voice suddenly soft. She looked down at her shoes. "My parents are… gone. They died. But you can't just… you can't give up. You have to keep living. Even if it sucks."
The words hung in the air between them, raw and clumsy. She had never said that to anyone.
Denji stared at her, his jaw slack. The confusion on his face was slowly replaced by a look of sheer, unadulterated panic.
"Whoa, whoa, hold on!" he yelped, scrambling back over the fence so fast he almost tripped. He landed on the rooftop with a thud. "No! Not like that! They're not dead! They're right over there!"
He grabbed her shoulder and spun her around, pointing with more force. "Look! The lady with the weird eyes and the girl with the black hair! They've got stuff from the amusement park! They went without me! Can you believe that?!"
Asa squinted. She saw a pair of tiny, indistinguishable figures miles away near the distant theme park entrance, one with reddish hair, one with black. One of them were laughing.
The full weight of her double-misunderstanding crashed down on her. Her entire body felt like it was on fire. She wanted to dig a hole in the concrete and crawl into it forever.
"Oh," was all she could manage to say.
"Yeah, 'oh'," Denji grumbled, letting go of her shoulder. Then he seemed to process the other thing she'd said. He looked at her, his head tilted. "Wait. Your parents are… actually dead?"
Asa nodded, refusing to meet his eyes.
"Oh," Denji said again, this time with a different tone. Quieter. "That sucks."
An excruciatingly awkward silence stretched between them. The wind whistled. A bird chirped somewhere.
"You're one of the girls in my class, right?" Denji said finally, breaking the silence. "The quiet one."
"Asa Mitaka," she mumbled to the ground.
"Denji."
She glanced up. He was just standing there, hands in his pockets, looking as out of place as she felt. Two losers on a rooftop. One who thought the other was suicidal, and one who accidentally triggered a trauma dump over an amusement park.
It was, without a doubt, the most pathetic and human conversation she'd had all year.
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