I woke up the next morning to an unnerving silence. The phantom buzz of my phone still echoed in my ears, but the device itself lay dead on my nightstand, a black mirror reflecting a life that was no longer mine. For a single, blissful moment, I let myself believe it had all been a fever dream- the concert, the confession, the digital explosion. Then the reality crashed back in.
"You can't be serious about going to the university," Hina said, blocking the doorway as I tried to leave. She was already dressed, but her face was pale with exhaustion. She had been up all night with Ms. Kurosawa, planning, strategizing, rebranding.
"If I hide, I'm admitting that I'm part of your world," I said, trying to sidestep her. "My only defense is to maintain my routine. To act like nothing has changed."
"But everything has changed, Onii-chan!" Ayumi pleaded from the kitchen table, where she was pushing food around her plate. "Ms. Kurosawa said it's better to stay home until the official statement is released."
"I don't care what your PR guru says," I stated, finally pushing past Hina. "I have a lecture on thermodynamics, and I'm not missing it."
Of course, the idea that I could simply attend a lecture was a laughable fantasy. The moment I stepped onto campus, I understood the true extent of the damage. It wasn't a loud, chaotic mob. It was something quieter, and far more unsettling. It was the stares. It was the whispers that stopped the moment I looked in their direction. It was the sea of students parting before me as I walked, as if I had an invisible force field around me. Phones were raised, not to my face, but from a discreet distance, the lenses glinting in the morning sun.
My classmates, people I had known for years, looked at me with a new, strange light in their eyes. Kenta, my programming lab partner, gave me a hesitant wave from across the quad, a gesture that was a mixture of awe, envy, and fear. I was no longer one of them. I was an alien species that had crash-landed in their midst.
"I figured you'd be stubborn enough to show up."
Nami was waiting for me by the entrance to the engineering building, a small, determined smile on her face. Her presence was a lifeline, a small island of normalcy in a sea of strangeness.
"Thanks for coming," I said, genuinely grateful.
"Of course," she said, falling into step beside me. "We're the Quantum Duo, remember? We're in this together."
Her act of solidarity was, naturally, immediately documented by a dozen hidden phone cameras. As we walked, I could already imagine the online narrative being written: "Mikuyi's Brother and Mystery Girl Arrive at University Together!" "Is Nami Tanaka the Secret Girlfriend?" Ms. Kurosawa's predictions were coming true with terrifying speed. Nami hadn't just been drafted; she was being cast as the romantic lead in a story neither of us had written.
The true nightmare began in the lecture hall. My professor, a man who had barely acknowledged my existence for three semesters, stopped mid-sentence as I walked in.
"Ah, Kitamaki-san," he said, a strange, sycophantic smile spreading across his face. "Welcome. We were just discussing the practical applications of signal processing." He paused, looking around at the other students. "With your… family's connections to the entertainment industry, perhaps you could offer us some unique insights into the engineering that goes into a modern concert production?"
The entire class turned to stare at me. My academic life, the one sanctuary that had always been sacred, the one place where I was judged solely on the merit of my work, had been breached. My reputation as a top student was being twisted, reframed through the lens of my sisters' fame. I was no longer a promising engineer; I was a novelty act, a celebrity sideshow. I sank into my chair at the back of the hall, the professor's question hanging in the air, feeling the last wall of my old life crumble into dust.