I'm the one yelling first.
"Line up! Heavy-hitter training starts now! No whining!"
The beach is hot enough to cook an egg. The sand eats our ankles. A few kids groan and pretend to faint. Someone asks if we can swim instead. I plant my hands on my hips and point at the water like it's the enemy.
"No swimming until we run the drills! Legs! Backs! If you want to hit home runs, you train!"
They groan louder. I ignore them and start counting. "One—two—knees higher, Sora! You, stop dragging your feet!"
Kousei stands off to the side, half in shadow from a lazy pine, a popsicle melting down his fingers. He looks like he wandered into the wrong story.
"Arima!" I bark. "You too!"
He doesn't even blink. "Why should I? I don't even play baseball."
The kids snort. I march over, grab his wrist, and tug. He resists without moving. He's the calmest little brick in the world.
"This is strength training," I say. "It's for life."
He licks his popsicle. "Pianists sit."
"Pianists use legs and backs, genius," I shoot back. "Pedals? Stamina? Ever heard of those?"
He thinks about it like I gave him homework. Then his eyes slide down to my feet in the sand. He studies them a second too long.
"Big," he says.
I blink. "What?"
"You've got big feet."
The heat rushes to my face so fast my ears ring. "Wha—excuse me?!"
He blinks, all innocent. "You'll trip over them one day."
The world narrows to a dot. I grab the nearest pebble and fling it. He ducks; it plops into a soft patch and disappears. He takes two neat steps backward, like a cat avoiding a puddle.
"Arima!" I shriek, half fury, half laughter bursting out of me before I can stop it. "Come back here so I can kill you!"
He turns and runs, popsicle still in hand, long skinny legs kicking sand. The pack of kids who were dying a minute ago are suddenly full of life. "Get him! Get him!" They stampede after us. I'm in front, hair sticking to my cheeks, heart banging, shouting his name like a threat and a promise.
—
The beach folds itself into the next summer and the next, until it's only a taste in the air when the cicadas wake up. My hands remember the weight of a bat, the slap of a ball in my palm. My legs remember running after a boy who would rather disappear than be caught.
I make a mud ball that shines like a pearl when it dries. "I'll show Kousei," I say, proud, and then his mother calls him in for scales before I get the chance. I wait on the curb until the sun slides down and the mud ball cools in my hands. He comes out with tired eyes and sheet music folded too neatly. "Sorry," he says, like he's reading it off a page. I say it's fine. I don't mean it.
Another day I learn how to throw a sinker. I knock on his door with the ball in my fist. The neighbor says, "He's practicing." The word sits like a stone in my throat. I throw the sinker against the wall alone until my arm aches and I don't feel mad anymore, just hollow.
At school his desk is empty on days with red circles on the calendar. "Competition." "Practice." "Lesson." In choir I press my hands over my ears when the piano starts, just for a second, just enough to take the edge off the sound that steals my friend away.
"Stupid music," I mutter into my sleeve. "I hate it."
It's not true. I hate being left behind.
—
I'm brought back to the present.
We're under the big tree at lunch. The sky is yellow like old paper. The shade is soft, and the air buzzes. I sit cross-legged with my bento in my lap. Across from me, Kousei leans back against the bark, arms crossed, eyes closed like he's decided the world can wait its turn.
His glasses aren't on today. Without them his face looks different. Sharper bones, longer eyelashes, a mouth that keeps trying not to frown. For exactly one second I think, He looks kind of cool. I shake my head hard enough to make my ponytail brush my shoulder.
Absolutely not. Not thinking that. Illegal thought.
His uniform is chaos. Tie loose, top button undone, collar wilted funny on one side. There's a coffee stain on the front, the color of old dirt. I have to physically stop my hands from grabbing him by the shirt and dragging him to a sink. He'd wash it wrong. He always does.
He's not eating. He's just sitting there, breathing like it's a job.
"Oi," I say.
He answers with a lazy "Mm?" like a cat that heard you from the next room and decided to ignore it.
"It's still school time. Don't go to sleep."
He doesn't open his eyes. I lean forward and poke his chest with my chopsticks. "Up."
He exhales a long, put-upon sigh, and finally his eyelids lift. The blue of his eyes catches me off guard. There's always been blue there, but lately it holds weight—like a deep pool with cold at the bottom. When he looks at me, I feel something twitch in my stomach and I get mad at myself for feeling it.
"What," he says, not unkind, just tired like the word had to climb a hill to get out.
"Why aren't you eating?"
"Not hungry."
"Right. And what did you eat today?"
He pauses. His mouth opens. " I uh..." he stops, mouth Closes. Guilty silence says enough.
"Exactly." I shove my bento across the grass, stopping it with a thumb so it doesn't flip. "Eat it, idiot. We're sharing."
He looks at my face, trying to see if I'm kidding. I am not kidding.
He presses his lips together. "I'm fine."
"You're not. Eat."
"It's your lunch."
"And you're going to put it in your mouth," I say, as if talking to a feral animal. "Chopsticks. Now."
He holds my stare for three beats. Then the fight leaks out of him. He picks up the spare chopsticks tucked under the lid and breaks them apart with a soft snap. The sound makes something in my chest unclench.
He takes a cautious bite, like food might bite back. Rice, pickled plum, tamagoyaki. His shoulders loosen a little. He doesn't say anything, but he doesn't stop either.
I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding. My own chopsticks find their rhythm again. We eat in the kind of quiet that isn't uncomfortable. Wind pushes the leaves above us. Somewhere on the field a whistle shrills and a group of boys groans in chorus.
Up close I can see the small things I always notice and pretend I don't. The faint bruise-colored smudges under his eyes. The way his hair doesn't quite obey at the back. The nick on his knuckle that wasn't there last week. He's thinner than he should be. I file all of it away under Keep an Eye On and take another bite to hide my worry.
He pauses, glances at the coffee stain like he's surprised it exists. "When did that happen?" he mutters to himself.
"Second period," I say. "You bumped into Mori-sensei's mug."
He considers this. "Huh..."
"You're welcome for the reminder," I say, rolling my eyes so I don't roll him.
He huffs something that might be a laugh if it grew up.
I study his face when he looks down. Without the glasses, the lines of it show more. He looks older. Not 'grown up' older—tired older. Like someone pulled nights out of him and didn't put mornings back. The thought makes my skin prickle.
"You can't keep skipping breakfast," I say, trying to make it casual and failing. "And you need to bring a spare shirt if you're going to live like a raccoon."
He makes a small, guilty sound. "I'll wash it."
"You'll ruin it," I say automatically. "Give it to me."
He shoots me a sideways look. "You're not my mom."
"Thank goodness," I say, stabbing a piece of sausage. "If I were, you'd be in a full-body bib."
The corner of his mouth lifts—barely—but it lifts. I pretend not to see and shove the bento a little closer so he has to keep going.
We lapse into quiet again. The kind I like. His breathing evens out. A breeze sneaks under my collar and cools the sweat that's gathered there. For a second the world shrinks to this patch of grass, these dumb cicadas, his stupid face chewing my lunch.
It would be so easy to believe it could always be like this. Easy to forget the piano, the hospital smell that sometimes clings to him now, the heavy blue in his eyes. Easy to forget the way it felt to chase him and the way it feels now when I can't catch what he's looking at even when I'm right here.
He stops to sneeze—a quiet, polite little sound—and blinks at the sun as if the sky offended him. His hair falls into his eyes. Reflex moves me before thought. I lean forward, brush it aside with two fingers, and then freeze, heat racing up my neck. He blinks at me, surprised.
"Bug," I lie quickly, tapping his forehead with my chopsticks to make it a joke. "Idiot."
He scrunches his nose and pushes my chopsticks away, and I laugh because it's either that or say something I don't know how to take back.
I settle my back against the bark again and look up through the leaves. The sunlight breaks into messy coins and drops them all over us. I listen to him eat. I listen to the bell in the distance that means nothing for another five minutes. I listen to the memory of small footprints in sand walking next to mine.
I think: He's still Kousei.
I also think: He isn't watching out for himself. So I'll watch for him.
I don't say either of those out loud. I say, "You're washing that shirt after school or I'm doing it." And when he groans, I smile so he can't see it.
I wish, in a place behind my ribs I don't let anyone touch, that this could be enough. The tree, the lunch, the sun, his mouth chewing and not frowning. The world small. The world easy.
"Next time bring dessert," I add, just to make the moment ordinary.
He flicks me the tiniest look. "Bossy."
"Hungry," I correct, and nudge the bento back into his hands. "Eat."
—
The soccer field shimmers in the late afternoon, heat lifting off it in waves. Grass clippings stick to socks, water bottles roll under benches, and a whistle shrieks somewhere near midfield. Watari drops onto the concrete by the chain-link fence like a puppet with its strings cut, legs stretched, hair sweat-damp, juice box straw between his teeth.
"Forget about it," he says around the straw, eyes half-closed at the sky.
"If I could forget it, I wouldn't be talking to you," Nao replies.
She stands on the other side of the fence, fingers looped through the wire, the shadow of the mesh laying a diamond pattern across her forearms. Bag slung crossbody. The look she gets when she's done tolerating everybody's nonsense.
Watari snorts a laugh. "I'm not interested in girls who won't fall for me," he says, dark chuckle, lazy grin.
"Huh," Nao says, eyebrows lifting. "That's... actually kind of refreshing." Beat. "And delusional."
He salutes her with the juice box. "Both can be true."
"It's Tsubaki."
Watari leans his head back against the fence, the smile easing a little at the corners. "Of course it is."
"She's wound up," Nao says. "More than usual."
"Tsubaki's a baby," Watari says, but there isn't malice in it. "Tell her she's wrong and she sulks and gets all defiant. Especially if it's about Arima." He folds the empty carton in half with one hand, thoughtful now. "Things get... complicated."
Nao's mouth goes flat. "Agreed," she says, and hates agreeing. "But I want to see her smile, not grind her teeth to dust."
Watari squints at the sun. "Arima's been... funny lately. Might be why."
"Funny?" Nao frowns.
"Like he went from shy-guy to... I dunno." Watari twirls the dead juice box straw between his fingers, looking for a word. "Intense. Focused. The kind of quiet that has teeth." He taps his chest with the straw, smirking again out of habit. "And trust me, I know intense people. Especially girls."
Nao rolls her eyes. "Please rest."
He shrugs. "I'm serious, though. He's different."
"He didn't show up to second period for three days," Nao says. "The class we have together."
Watari blinks, the play-acting sliding off his face. "What?"
"Three days," Nao repeats. "When he finally came, the teacher dug into him hard. He just stood there and took it." She watches Watari's reaction closely. "I thought you knew."
Watari looks down at the juice box in his hand like it might explain something. "I didn't," he says. Lighter than the frown pinching his brow. "He's been... busy, I guess."
"Busy where?" Nao asks. "Under that tree with Tsubaki? In the infirmary? In the clouds?"
Watari's grin returns, but it has a crack in it now. "Jealous?"
"Nauseated," Nao says. "There's a difference."
He laughs, real this time, then scrubs a hand through his hair and lets his head thunk back against the fence. Beyond the wire, his teammates shout, the ball skitters out of bounds, and the coach's whistle cuts the air with two sharp blasts. Practice resets.
"Tsubaki keeps saying he's like a little brother," Nao adds finally. "It's her favorite excuse."
Watari huffs. "Yeah. She's been using that line since elementary school."
"You think she's trying to convince us, or herself?"
He looks through the fence at the field, like the answer might be hiding out by the penalty box. "Both," he says, for once not sugarcoating it. "Maybe neither."
Nao makes a noncommittal sound, which in Nao means she agrees and hates it. "She worries about him," she says. "A lot. Too much."
"Yeah," Watari says softly. "A lot a lot."
They let the words hang. On the field, someone whoops. A gull carves a lazy white line across the sky, indifferent.
"Arima used to be easy to read," Watari says after a beat. "He'd duck, he'd dodge. You always knew he was trying not to take up space. Now he's... showing up, but it's like he's not all there when he does." He glances at Nao, asking permission to be serious on purpose. "Makes you want to keep a hand on his shoulder so he doesn't walk into traffic."
Nao nods once. "Tsubaki's trying," she says. "She acts like it's about lunch boxes and coffee stains, but she's keeping him from falling through the floor."
"That's her style," Watari says, small and fond.. " He's probably just worried about his sweetheart Kao-"
"WATARI! LET'S GO!"
He winces as he's cut off, he shakes his head, pops up to a crouch. "Duty calls," he says, grabbing his bag, the grin snapping back into place like a mask that knows its job. "Hey—good talk."
"Text Tsubaki after practice," Nao says. "Even if it's dumb."
"Everything I text is dumb," he says brightly, backing away. "It's my brand."
"Unfortunately."
He jogs toward the sideline, then slows, half-turns. For a second the brightness slips, and there's a flicker of the same unsettled line she's seen in Tsubaki all week.
"You'll tell me if you hear... anything?" he asks, not defining it.
"If I hear anything, I'll scream it at you from across campus."
He laughs, relief folded into it, and takes off. The fence rattles when the ball smacks against it nearby. Nao doesn't flinch. She stands long enough for the shadow of the mesh to slide off her arms and onto the ground. Then she turns, tugging her bag higher, mouth set.
—
The morning feels tilted before I even close my front door.
Air like water waiting to boil. Street empty in that too-empty way, no buses, no chatter, just the sound of my own shoes scraping the pavement and the strap of my bag whispering against my shoulder. I breathe in through my nose, out through my mouth. It should calm me. It doesn't.
However a few weird things kept happening today.
A soda can comes spinning out of nowhere and cuts across my toes like a little silver fish.
I catch myself before I trip. The clack of my heel on concrete echoes more than it should. I pivot and scan the street. Nothing. No giggling kids. No neighbor leaning out to say sorry. Just a breeze nosing at a plastic bag caught in a hedge.
"...Right," I say to nobody, and nudge the can with my shoe into a drain. The world blinks once and keeps going.
Half a block later an old dog behind a wire gate explodes into barking so loud my ribs jolt. The fence rattles with his whole body. He bares his teeth like he's been waiting all morning for someone to aim them at.
"Good morning to you too," I mutter. He hurls himself at the metal until it screams a little; I stare back until he remembers he's old and the bark turns to hoarse complaint. When I step away, it picks up again, like the noise has to follow me.
A rubber ball smacks the back of my head. It has a small bunny in the middle
"...Oi," I say, very calmly, to the empty air. I lift the ball with two fingers and hold it up. Neon green. The kind you get from a gacha machine outside a supermarket. "Who did that?"
Silence.
I toss it once, catch it, let it bounce into the gutter. I look up and down the street again. Curtains sit very still. A cicada starts up in a tree like a broken alarm and forgets its own rhythm halfway through.
A bike comes out of the side alley like it's trying to erase me from the world and misses my shoulder by a breath. Wind slaps my cheek. I turn, ready to say something that would get me sent to the office, but all I catch is a school jacket flapping and a flash of back wheel. The bike goes down the street.
My forehead knits so tight I can feel the pulse in it. I keep walking. My brain tries to laugh it off. Maybe the universe woke up bored. Maybe this is karma for being an idiot yesterday, or the day before that, or last year.
The last corner before the school gate is the one with the little florist on the ground floor and the cursed balcony that always looks like it's thinking about falling. I step into the shadow it throws and my skin goes cold all at once, like I've just remembered something too late.
Step right.
I obey the thought before I have time to decide it. A flowerpot punches the pavement where my toe would have been.
Pot and Clay explodes. Soil blooms up my leg, peppering my shin, dark flecks on my socks. A murdered petunia rolls near my heel like it wants to apologize.
I stare at the crater. The hair on my arms decides to learn a new language.
"Okay!," I say with a tick mark on my forehead. "Who did that?!" Louder this time.
A window above squeaks. Silence swallows it.
I listen hard for laughter. There isn't any. There's just my own breath and the far-off grind of the cleaning truck turning the corner. The feeling that someone is playing tag with me from a different century sits down on my shoulders and refuses to get off.
I shake my head and keep moving. Dirt spills out of my cuff with every step. At the gate, the guard gives me a look that says, I don't want to know, and I salute him with a face that says, Me neither.
Inside, the entryway smells like wet rubber and disinfectant. Rows of metal cubbies click as hands open and close them, pairs of shoes trade places with pairs of slippers, laughter tosses itself up and then falls. I timed it wrong: there's a gap in the flow and I'm in it. No Tsubaki to scold me for looking like I lost a fight with a coffee machine. No Watari to spill sports tape everywhere and call it a personality.
I bend, pull out my indoor shoes, and as I'm untying the outdoor pair, I feel the stare. Not the sharp one, the bureaucratic one.
"Arima."
I straighten. Guidance counselor. Tie perfect. Hair never moves. Clipboard a part of their body like a third arm evolved sometime in the eighties. Their voice is the tone that begins report cards and ends daydreams.
"Yes, sensei?"
"Have you decided?" They don't clarify what. They never have to. "High school. Your career plan." The pen hovers, ready to trap whatever I say in little boxes that will follow me for three years.
Career plan.
The phrase drops into my chest and rings there like a coin hitting a bowl.
I look down at my socks. There's dirt on them from a dead petunia. It seems important to memorize that, the exact pattern of it. My mouth opens and nothing comes out. My shoulders remember how to hunch.
"Arima?" the counselor prompts, gentler. I hear the subtext: You are a good student, or you used to be. You are slipping. I need something to write in this box that makes me feel like you are less likely to vanish.
My brain does what it always does when something hurts: it tries to split in two.
On one side: piano. Black and white, the firm kindness of keys, the weight of the lid, the smell of polish that clings to your sleeves. The stage light that makes your skin feel borrowed. The old cold that crawls out of the sound and sits on your knee and asks you to play like you're alone at a funeral. The love that lives there too, whether I want it to or not. Kaori's bow slicing the air. Her hair catching the light and pretending it's made of gold.
On the other side: lab light. Not warm either, but honest. Glass that needs your hands to be steady. Numbers that answer the same question the same way twice if you've asked it right. Machines that hum because you fed them questions. The barrel of a centrifuge clicking home. The soft thup of a pipette returning to rest like a cat laying its head on your hand. The way night feels inside a lab—wide, and alone, and purposeful.
I stand there holding my shoes like a kid who doesn't know what feet are for anymore.
What do you want to be?
The true answer is, I wanted to be the person who made sure she didn't die. That's not an occupation they put on pamphlets.
In another life, I found language for that. I didn't plan a title. I planned results. I learned how to live in fluorescent and caffeine and white noise until my eyes forgot sleep on purpose. I named things that had only numbers. I lifted lids on problems older than me. I made a tiny part of the world quieter for the people who were bleeding. Some of those people never knew my name. I didn't need them to.
I cured more than one thing. That feels like bragging when it was just triage with a calendar. Rare things that hid in small villages. Common things that killed loudly every day. Things with names that sound like clumsy spells. Things so new they only had case numbers and the sound of parents not breathing right.
And every time I wrote a result, every time a trial turned a corner, every time a graph finally bent the right way, there was one shape in the back of my mind walking down a hospital hall with a bouquet she'd pretend wasn't for her.
Kaori. Every miracle was just me practicing on strangers to get ready for you.
"Arima?" The counselor again. The pen's shadow falls like a metronome across the clipboard.
I think about Skyclars. How close it is. The way the timeline will fight me no matter how hard I push. Animal trials first. Then people. Then proof all the way down to silence. Two months feels like a joke when your heart notices every hour.
I think about the hospital room. Bandage around her head like someone tried to keep the light in and didn't know how. The way she smiled when Watari dumped the stack of books he pretended he checked out. The way the IV line trembled when she laughed too hard.
I think about a theater full of people clapping for someone else while I sat in a bathroom and let a faucet talk over the noise in my head. I think about a piano as a headstone you can push sound through. I think about the relief in deciding I didn't have to bleed that way today.
A long, stupid, helpful breath finds me. I put the indoor shoes on and straighten up like the motion can decide me.
"Science," I hear myself say. The word tastes like water. "Medicine, sensei."
The counselor's eyebrows lift. Surprise first. Then something softer. Relief, maybe. They nod and write it down like that makes it true.
"You'll need to review science high schools," they say, already in motion. "There are several strong programs. I have pamphlets. And we can discuss preparatory coursework for—"
"Okay," I say. My voice is calmer than I expected. "Thank you."
We trade the small bows people trade when they've completed a ritual. The counselor moves on; the pen clicks. I tuck my outdoor shoes into the cubby and close the metal door. The sound is neat. Finished.
In the hallway, students ripple past. Someone laughs too loud. Someone bumps my shoulder and says sorry without looking. I start walking and my body feels a fraction heavier, which is how relief pretends to be something else before it settles into the right name.
This doesn't mean I'm done with the piano. It can't. That would be like taking out a rib and expecting to stand up straight. It lives in my hands whether I sit at the bench or not. It lives in the way I count my steps. It lives in the way I listen when the air hums.
But a piano can't stop a body from losing itself cell by cell. Sound can hold a person. It can't hold back a disease like a door.
The lab can. The lab is a different kind of stage. You don't get applause there. You get numbers. You get answers that don't care if you cried while you made them.
How many people could I help if I stop pretending my life is just a question about one girl and start admitting I already know how to write other people's answers? How many other parents wouldn't have to wake up and learn the names of machines their children are attached to? How many kids wouldn't have to have bandages that make them look like someone tried to fix a thing that shouldn't have broken?
If I keep what I know folded up in my chest because I'm tired or scared or because music is prettier, it's not just cowardice. It's theft.
The classroom door is half open. Voices peel out of it and stick to the hall. I stop before I go in and put my hand on the frame until the wood remembers I'm here.
"I'll save you," I say, quietly enough that the sentence belongs to me. "No matter what it costs."
It isn't a vow made at a piano. It isn't romantic. It isn't even brave. It's a logistics problem with blood in it. It's me telling the part of me that wants to run that it can walk later, after.
I push the door. Desks scrape. A few heads turn. Someone says my name like they're testing if I still answer to it. I do.
At my seat, I drop my bag, slip into the chair, and let the scrape of the legs be the sound that starts this version of the day. Dirt from a dead flower falls off my sock and freckles the floor. I brush at it with my shoe until it makes a little comet and disappears under my desk.
On the board the teacher has written three dates and a question mark. On my notebook I write one word in the top corner where no one will see it unless they're trying to be me.
Science.
The bell rings. The room snaps to attention, then relaxes into the ritual of listening. I let my pen cap roll under my thumb. It clicks twice, a soft metronome only I can hear.
I don't look out the window. If I do, I'll see a sky the color of yesterday's promise and I don't have time to argue with that. Not today. Today I keep my eyes on the board and pretend the future is a line I can follow without tripping.
Outside, somewhere, a dog barks again. This time I don't flinch.