September 10 & September 28, 2016 

Yukikaze Academy & Sapporo, Hokkaido 

20°C → 18°C, clear to rain 

Second semester begins the way second semesters always begin — with the particular energy of people who have had just enough time off to forget how tired they were, and not quite enough to actually recover. The school reasserts itself. New seating arrangements in some classes. The cultural festival somewhere on the horizon, vague and undemanding for now. The university entrance exam no longer a distant concept but a present fact, casting its shadow across every third-year conversation, every teacher’s suggestion, every unopened practice booklet. 

I notice all of this and find it largely irrelevant. 

This is new — not the noticing, which I have always done, but the irrelevance. In Aomori I was invested in the machinery of school in a functional way, the way you’re invested in any system you’re operating inside. I understood its logic and worked it and found a certain satisfaction in the working. What I find now is that the logic has been superseded by a different logic, one that has nothing to do with exam schedules or seating charts or what Fujimoto-sensei thinks of my essay on the autumn poem cycle. 

The different logic is simple. It has one variable. 

I know where he is. I know where he will be. I know the sound of his footstep in the corridor outside the classroom before the door opens. I know his handwriting, his silences, the exact register of his voice when he’s thinking versus when he’s decided. I know that the condensation on his water bottle runs in a particular direction depending on how long he’s been holding it. I know these things the way you know the geography of a place you have decided to live in permanently — not from study, just from being there, just from the accumulated attention of months of paying the right kind of attention to the right kind of thing. 

It is the tenth of September, a Saturday. The campus is quieter than a weekday but not empty — third-years studying, the library populated by the anxious and the dedicated, the grounds crossed occasionally by someone going somewhere. The sky is clear. The air has the particular quality of early September in Hokkaido, which is already cooler than the rest of Japan’s summer and knows it — not cold yet, just honest about what’s coming. 

I am sitting in my alcove in the library. He is three tables away, his book open, his water bottle sweating gently onto the surface of the table. Neither of us is reading. We are both performing reading, which is different, and the performance is comfortable because it is shared. 

The rumours have started. 

I’ve been aware of them for approximately two weeks. The content varies — depending on who is talking, we are either deeply serious about each other or inappropriately involved or simply strange, two people who have disappeared from ordinary social life in a way that makes other people uneasy without giving them anything specific to object to. I find the rumours interesting in the abstract way I find most things interesting. I have no response to them because they don’t require one. The things people are saying are, with varying degrees of accuracy, true. 

He knows about them too. Neither of us has brought it up. There is an understanding between us that the opinions of the campus — of anyone outside a radius that currently contains only the two of us — are weather. Present. Irrelevant. 

September 10 

Satsuki finds me in the library on Saturday afternoon. 

I see her coming — she’s visible from where I’m sitting long before she reaches the alcove, her red clips bright under the library’s overhead lighting, her walk with its characteristic tentativeness. I watch her approach and feel something that has been quietly completing itself over the summer finally complete. There’s no drama in it. Just recognition: she’s going to keep trying. She will keep trying until she can’t. 

She sits down across from me without asking, which is new. Since April she has always asked. She has been careful and warm and deferential in the way of someone who knows they’re working against a disadvantage and is trying not to push. Today she sits down. 

“Hoshino-san,” she says. “I want to ask you something.” 

I close my book with my finger marking the page. “Go ahead.” 

“Are you okay?” She asks it directly, no preamble. Her eyes are more focused than usual — the slightly unfocused quality she normally carries has sharpened into something that resembles concern. “I don’t mean in general. I mean — I’ve been watching you and Kanzaki-kun, and something feels different. Since the summer. I don’t know how to describe it.” 

I look at her. She looks back. She is, I think, genuinely worried. This is the most honest she has ever been with me, which means she has decided the warmth-and-persistence approach has run its course and she is trying something else. 

“I’m fine,” I say. “We’re fine.” 

“You don’t come to things anymore. Either of you.” She pauses. “I know it’s not my business. I just — I wanted to say it to someone. I’ve been thinking about it all summer.” 

“I appreciate that,” I say, and I do, in the particular way I appreciate things that are genuine even when they’re unwanted. “We’ve just been focused on studying. Third year is —” 

“I know what third year is,” she says, and there’s something in her voice that is gentle but not soft. “I’m in it too.” 

She tucks her hair behind her ear. The clips shift, readjust. Her hands settle back on the table and she looks at them for a moment, like she’s deciding something. 

“Okay,” she says finally. “Okay. I just wanted you to know I’m here. If you ever want to — I don’t know. Talk to someone who isn’t him.” 

She leaves. I watch her go with the particular attention I’ve always given her — the clips, the walk, the surprised laugh I’ve heard twice and filed carefully — and I think: she’s not wrong. She’s not wrong about any of it. She has noticed the right things and drawn the right conclusions and come to say them directly, which is more than most people would do. 

I find that I don’t have a response to this that would be useful to her. 

I reopen my book. Across the library, he’s watching me. I don’t look up, but I know. I can feel the specific quality of his attention from three tables away the way you can feel a change in air pressure — not dramatic, just present, just there. 

I read. He watches. The afternoon does what September afternoons do — cools slightly as it progresses, the light going from gold to grey at the edges. 

I see her approach him two days later. 

I’m crossing the far side of the courtyard, going somewhere I no longer remember, when I notice the geometry of it — Satsuki’s posture, his stillness, the particular angle of a conversation that is not comfortable. I can’t hear the words from where I am. I stop walking. 

She’s standing closer to him than she usually stands to anyone, which tells me she’s made a decision. Her hands are at her sides, not tucked behind her or curled around her bag strap the way they usually are. She looks — I search for the word and find it — resolved. She looks like someone who has decided to say something and is in the process of saying it. 

I watch his face. From this distance it’s the neutral version — the one he shows most people, the one that gives nothing. But I know this face well enough to read it in its neutral configuration, and what I’m reading is: attention. The real kind. Not the polite surface attention he gives to inconsequential things, but the other kind. The full weight of it. 

She says something. I can’t hear the words but I can read the rhythm of them — the way she pauses, the way she seems to take a breath in the middle of a sentence, the way her hands come up briefly and then settle back at her sides. She’s saying something that cost her something. She’s saying the thing she came here to say. 

He listens. He doesn’t interrupt. He doesn’t move. When she finishes he says something brief — two or three words, from the movement of his mouth — and his expression doesn’t change. 

Satsuki looks at him for a moment. Then she looks away. Then she walks back across the courtyard in her characteristic direction, her walk with its tentativeness, her clips in their fixed positions, and I watch her go and feel nothing in particular, which is the most precise way I can describe it. 

Nothing in particular. Clinical. The observation of a thing without commentary. 

I start walking again. He’s looking at me across the courtyard. His expression is the other one — the one that is specific to me. I meet his eyes and we look at each other for a moment that contains everything neither of us needs to say. 

I look away first. Not because I have to. Because I want to. Because looking away from him when I choose to is the only kind of looking away I do anymore. 

That night I write in my journal. 

Satsuki spoke to him today. I watched from across the courtyard. I couldn’t hear what she said but I could read the shape of it — the posture of someone delivering something they’ve been carrying for a while. The clips in their fixed positions. The surprised laugh absent, for once. 

I don’t know what she said. I don’t need to. 

I feel nothing about this that I can name clearly. That seems like the accurate thing to write. 

It happens three nights later. 

I am not supposed to be where I am. None of us are — it’s past quiet hours, the campus officially asleep, the corridors of the dormitories settled into their nighttime sounds. But I am outside. I don’t know how I knew to be there. I was awake and then I was dressed and then I was outside, moving through the campus in the particular way I move at night — quiet, unhurried, going somewhere specific without having decided to. 

The campus at this hour belongs to no one. The path lights are on but the buildings are dark, the courtyard empty, the trees along the east path black shapes against a sky that is just barely not dark. The air is cool. September has been reminding us of what’s coming, and at one in the morning the reminder is unambiguous. 

I see them near the gap in the treeline at the eastern edge of the campus — the place where the grounds thin out before the road begins, where the path lighting ends and the dark is more complete. He is there. She is there. 

I stop. 

Satsuki is talking. From this distance and in this light I can see her outline, the animation of her posture — she’s saying something with the same resolved quality as before, the same quality of having decided. She doesn’t know I’m here. She is entirely focused on him, and this is the thing about Satsuki that has always been true and is true now: when she decides to look at something, she looks at it completely. 

He is still. 

I watch. 

He moves first. It’s very fast — not dramatic, not telegraphed, just a decision enacted with the same quiet precision he brings to everything. She doesn’t hear him. She is still talking, still mid-sentence, still in the middle of whatever she came here to say, and then he’s behind her and she doesn’t understand what’s happening yet and I think: she doesn’t understand yet. 

The knife — I don’t know when he had it, I didn’t see him take it out — goes into her back. Once. The sound it makes is small and specific, and Satsuki makes a sound too, something that is not quite a word, something that is the sound of a body registering information it doesn’t have the language for yet. 

He does it again. And again. She starts falling — not all at once, not dramatically, but in stages, her knees finding the ground first, her hands coming up in a gesture that means nothing, that is just the body doing what bodies do when they are no longer receiving the right instructions. She falls. The red clips catch the path lighting for a moment as her head goes down. 

She is still. 

I stand in the treeline and watch. The campus is quiet. The path lighting ends at the edge of the grounds and the dark beyond it is complete. He stands over her for a moment — not looking at her, looking at the surrounding dark, scanning it with the same methodical attention he gives everything. I am in the treeline. He knows where I am. He does not look at me. 

He picks her up. She is not large and he is precise about how he does it — careful, deliberate, the way he is careful and deliberate about everything. He carries her in the direction of the maintenance buildings at the far eastern edge of the campus, where the incinerator sits behind its concrete enclosure, where no one goes at this hour, where no one will go until morning and by morning there will be nothing to find. 

I watch him go until the dark takes him. 

Then I look at the ground where she was. There is something there — I can see it from here — and I look at it for a moment with the attention I give to most things, which is complete and without judgment, and then I turn around and walk back to my room. 

My footsteps are quiet on the path. The campus is the same campus it was. The trees are the same trees. The air is the same cool September air. The path lighting makes the same pale circles on the concrete it always makes. 

I don’t feel anything that requires naming. This seems like the accurate thing to write. 

That night I sit at my desk for a long time before I open my journal. 

When I do, I write this: 

She approached him tonight. I saw it from the treeline path. I watched what happened afterward and then I looked away and came back inside. 

The red clips were still in her hair. 

I don’t have anything else to write about this. I don’t think anything else needs to be written. 

I close the journal. 

I don’t open it again until September 28th. When I do, Satsuki’s name is not in the entry. It is not in any entry after this. She is simply gone from the text — the way a word disappears when you stop needing it, quietly and without announcement, leaving no gap that needs filling. 

September 28 

It rains in the evening, a cool Hokkaido rain that is no longer summer rain — heavier, colder, the kind that comes with the smell of leaves beginning their process. The campus has been turning for weeks: the trees along the east path going from green to gold to the particular ochre of early October, the air thinning, the days shortening at both ends. By five o’clock the lights are on in the classrooms. By six the grounds are dark. 

We are in his room. We have been in his room most of the afternoon, studying in the way third-years study in the second semester — with the particular intensity of people who have calculated the distance between where they are and where they need to be and found it manageable but not comfortable. He reads. I make notes. Occasionally one of us says something and the other responds and then we go back. 

This is what our days look like now. This is what our days have been looking like for some time. I find that I don’t experience it as narrowing. I experience it as accuracy — as the gradual elimination of the imprecise, the unnecessary, the things that were always going to be shed when the real thing arrived. 

The rain picks up against the window. He looks at it. 

“It’s different now,” he says. 

“The rain?” 

“Everything.” 

I look at him. He’s looking at the window still, his water bottle in hand, the condensation running. What he means is: the world has reorganised itself and we are the thing it has reorganised around. What he means is: us against everything, and everything has stopped being a threat because we have stopped needing it to be anything at all. 

“Yes,” I say. 

He looks at me. The expression that is specific to me. 

“Is that alright?” he asks. 

It’s the kind of question that sounds like a question and isn’t. He’s not asking whether the change is alright — he knows it is. He’s asking whether I see it the same way he does. Whether we are, as he suspects, looking at the same thing from the same angle. 

“Yes,” I say again. 

Something settles in the room. Not tension releasing — there was no tension. Something more like the final piece of a structure clicking into place, quietly, without drama, the architecture complete. 

He goes back to his book. I go back to my notes. The rain keeps going on the window. 

I think about Satsuki. I think about the red clips, same position every time. I think about the laugh that sounded surprised. I think about her saying I just wanted you to know I’m here and meaning it completely, and what it meant that she meant it, and what it means that it didn’t matter. 

I think: she saw what was happening. She was not wrong. 

I think: it didn’t help. 

I write in my journal that night. Not about her — there is nothing left to write about her. I write about the rain and the room and the particular quality of the settling I felt when he asked is that alright and I said yes and we both knew what we were agreeing to. 

I write: I don’t think about the outside world the way I used to. I’m not sure when that changed. I think it changed slowly and then all at once, the way things do when they’ve been changing all along and you just haven’t been watching the right variable.

I write: He is the right variable. He is the only variable. Everything else is constant now.

I close the journal. 

Outside, the rain keeps going. The campus is quiet. The lights in the other dorm windows are going off one by one, people making their decisions about sleep, about tomorrow, about the ordinary machinery of their ordinary lives. None of it reaches me. None of it is relevant. 

I am exactly where I have decided to be. 

I am not going anywhere.