On the night before our mock exam, Kamiya Itsuki got his heart broken. Shamefully enough, when I heard the news I was so happy I could barely stop grinning, and I even kept him company through a whole night of mahjong. By the time dawn came, my eyes were as red as a rabbit's and my brain had turned to paste. If Itsuki had not finally admitted he was sleepy, I might even have forgotten that I had an exam the next day.
If you had seen me on the road that morning, I swear on my honor you would never have forgotten me. My hair was a mess, my face was shiny with oil, and I had one pimple each on my forehead, cheek, and chin, like some demon spirit born of sleep deprivation. Worse still, I was sprinting while flipping frantically through my admission slip, and I had forgotten to zip up the side of my skirt. Yet there was someone sitting on the steps outside the classroom building, eating breakfast as slowly as if he had all the time in the world. As I rushed past him, I caught the familiar smell of a chocolate doughnut. The shop that sold them was tucked away behind the school, and not many people knew it. I was one of its regulars. If I had not been racing to my exam, I would have stopped right there and saluted him as a kindred spirit.
"Hey, you."
I thought he had caught the same scent I had, but all he did was lift his eyes and say, in that maddeningly unhurried way of his, "Your zipper is open."
I nearly died on the spot. And the person saying it was Asakura Sumira, elegant as a slow-motion replay. I forced myself to answer, "Well, obviously. How else was I supposed to take out my admission slip?" He paused, then lowered his head and went back to his doughnut, smiling as though nothing at all had happened.
By the time I burst into the exam room, the teacher had already started unsealing the papers. Everyone looked up at me, then dropped their heads just as fast; one boy even blushed in secret. I hurried to the window seat, shoved the window open to wake myself up, and let the cold air pour in. The wind puffed up my skirt. I glanced down, and my brain exploded on the spot. My zipper really had been open the whole way.
I fumbled my clothes back into place and had just managed to pretend nothing had happened when a familiar voice landed over my head. "This seat is mine." I looked up, and it was Asakura Sumira again. His white sneakers were so clean they hurt my eyes, and the smile on his face made him look as though he had come here on purpose just to enjoy my humiliation. I pretended not to hear him and bent over my paper to write my name. He calmly held his own admission slip in front of me and let me read the room number myself.
When the invigilator came over to check, she informed me with merciless efficiency, "Shiraishi Hitomi, your exam room is A Building, Room 103. This is C Building." So I had to pick up my bag and the answer sheet I had already written my name on and race across the campus, past the pool and the sports grounds, to another building entirely. The sun made me dizzy. It was the first time in my life I had truly hated the fact that our school was so large. Worse still, by the time I finally stumbled to A Building, panting, I realized I had left my admission slip behind in the original room.
The teacher stopped me outside the door. I stood in the corridor, dripping sweat and pleading so softly I sounded as though I were talking to myself. I was so close to throwing down my schoolbag and shouting, Fine, then I just won't take it. And right at that moment, Asakura Sumira arrived with my admission slip in hand. He passed it over with the smallest smile and said, "Go on. Hurry in." People said that because of all that, he himself ended up late and could not get into his own exam properly, while I, after all the chaos, simply put my head down and fell asleep on the desk. I was too tired. Half a month later, the list of the top two hundred scores went up on the school bulletin board in a festive blaze of red paper. Even though Japanese had nearly dragged me to my death, as the science prodigy of the year I still managed to hang on at Number 199 thanks to perfect scores in math, physics, and chemistry. One place ahead of me, at 198, was Asakura Sumira.
Evenings without exam prep felt strangely light. "Want me to play games with you?" I asked Itsuki. Itsuki said, "It is eight o'clock exactly. You need to go do your homework right now, and by eleven you need to be in bed. I'll be checking." His smile in the video call was wide, but there was still a slight crease between his brows, as if he had not yet recovered from the breakup. I shut the computer at once, spread several thick workbooks over my desk, and felt full of motivation. Problems that usually took me until midnight suddenly looked conquerable.
Itsuki asked, "Have you behaved?" "Of course." I jumped onto the bed and pulled the blanket up properly, then, though he could not even see me, obediently reached over to turn off the light. The room went dark. I buried my face in the quilt, unable to hide my smile. "Good night." "Mm. Good night." Itsuki's voice was gentle. I hung up and fell asleep with a sweetness in my chest. That night I dreamed about him. Do not think that just because I was a science girl I could not have soft and sentimental dreams. When I was still at that first budding age, I had read my share of romances. So what I dreamed was the oldest scene in the book: blue sky, white clouds, green grass, and me with long black braids like some heroine from an old drama. Itsuki wore a neat school uniform. We ran laughing around a tree. My voice rang out like a silver bell. "You can't catch me, you can't catch me." He smiled as warmly as sunshine, caught me in one swoop, and pulled me into his arms. It was old-fashioned and embarrassingly corny, but I thought it was sweet. And I told the whole dream to Asakura Sumira.
We were not actually that close. It was only because of one ridiculous encounter after another that we had each left an unforgettable impression on the other. After that, we ran into each other often on the road to school, and Asakura Sumira would call my name with that smiling voice of his. Once someone has called you enough times, it becomes hard to go on pretending not to hear. Autumn mornings were often wrapped in mist, with no sun to be found. Sumira, who loved to enjoy breakfast in sunlight, had to sit trapped inside the pastry shop instead, holding a freshly baked doughnut in one hand and some thick philosophy or psychology book in the other, reading slowly as he ate. Once I saw him with a book so thick it looked like a dictionary. It was called Dreams and Reality. Because of that, I became convinced he was some modern Duke of Zhou and went to him for dream interpretation.
That morning, for once, the sun came out. Sumira led me on a circuit around the school and finally climbed all the way up to the rooftop of the teaching building. I followed behind him, panting. By the time I reached the top, I was too tired to eat breakfast, so I shoved my own doughnut into his hand as well. He ate it happily while listening to me describe my dream, some Showa-era romance that belonged in another century. Then he asked, "Did dream-Itsuki have a shining middle part too?" What insight. He had guessed it at once. I nodded eagerly, waiting for some deeper interpretation.
"All right," he said after an elegant sip of coffee. "I think I understand now. You're actually a girl with very classical tastes. Even your dreams travel through time. In general, I'd say this dream suggests you'd be much better suited to the liberal arts. Give it a few years and maybe you'll become the next queen of melodrama."
The light in my eyes died on the spot, and my face darkened fast. Before I could explode, the class bell rang, and Sumira waved goodbye. My classroom happened to be on the seventh floor of that very building. "Travel safely," he said. I looked off at the science building in the distance and nearly burst into tears. That was the first time I was ever late to class. When I slipped in through the back door, the Japanese teacher was explaining an old poem. Ever since I had scored an actual zero on that subject in the last mock exam, I had given up on it completely. I took out my physics workbook and attacked it instead, breezing along as if every barrier had fallen. Itsuki's university was the most prestigious science school in the country. I thought I really was better suited to science. And it was also the best path that could lead me to him. If not for love, who would ever choose to become this version of herself?
In winter I gave myself a terrible haircut and could only hide it beneath a hat. The hat was last year's, a little faded, with threads coming loose. I did not care. I wore it together with an old coat from the year before and kept solving problems until every light in the school building had gone out.
On Christmas Eve my classmates organized all sorts of activities. I went to none of them. My life was nothing but problem sets, books, and saving money, because I wanted to give Itsuki a gift he would never forget. I hoarded every bit of pocket money I got. I would not even spend it on a haircut, and that was how I ended up with the ridiculous thing on my head. I chose the gift for ages, but in the end I never got to give it to him. I could not find him. Later he left me a message online saying he had lost both his wallet and his phone. At once I went to the secondhand market and sold my own phone and CD player, borrowed a little money from my best friend, added the pocket money I had saved, and remitted the total to the address on the old postcards he used to send me. When I came out of the post office, I was smiling so happily it felt as if all the feelings I had kept hidden for so long had gone with the money and reached him at last.
The last mock exam came at the end of term. Our seats were arranged by the results from the previous test, which meant Asakura Sumira sat directly in front of me. We shared one trait: before an exam, neither of us ever studied at the last minute. So while the whole room crammed in desperate silence, Sumira and I started chatting to kill time. I talked about horoscopes and gossip. He talked about astronomy and sports. None of it matched, which somehow only made it more pointless.
Fortunately, Sumira had a beautiful smile. His features were sharply cut, with a faintly mixed-blood air about them.
There was no heating in classrooms in the south. I was taking the test while stamping my feet and blowing into my hands when suddenly a glove flew down from the row ahead. I looked up. Sumira had left his scratch paper hanging over the edge of his desk, and on it he had drawn a smiling face.
The glove was huge, but warm enough over my left hand. When the exam ended, I returned it and said, "I've actually wanted to thank you for a while. Come eat with me." Sumira nodded and happily followed me to a ramen shop. He copied me and loaded his bowl with chili until his eyes, nose, and even ears went red.
He said my eyes looked like a little white rabbit and then sighed, "This is exactly what you looked like the first time I met you." "Do not bring that up," I cut in savagely, then felt a little embarrassed. "This is all I can afford to treat you to right now, so... don't mind it." "It tastes great." Sumira drained the soup in one go, then, without warning, took my hat off. He did not laugh at my hair. Instead, he pulled a brand-new orange knit cap from his schoolbag and settled it over my head, carefully smoothing my hair underneath. "Much prettier now." He leaned back to admire his work with satisfaction. I just stared at him. He kept going, voice touched with teasing. "Maybe because your first look was such a shock. Compared to that, you only seem prettier and prettier now."
When we came out of the ramen shop, small flakes of snow had started to fall. The wind was so strong it nearly blew me over. Holding my hat in place, I shouted to him, "Thanks for the gift. Happy winter break. See you next year!" Sumira did not tell me to see him again. He went quiet. The wind narrowed his eyes. Then, all at once, he pulled me into his arms. Three seconds later he let go and turned away.
My mind was completely blank. All I remembered from those three seconds was the breath of his words at my ear. "Shiraishi Hitomi, I don't like you like this at all." When the next school year began, I never saw Asakura Sumira again. I heard his whole family had moved away to a far northern city. It was the same city where Itsuki lived.
When we met again, I was still a wreck. The spring of the following year had already become the last days of middle school. It was a season of quiet beauty. The grass grew silently. But on campus, war had already broken out. Endless exercises. Endless exams. I was not late even once.
I studied every subject with all the force I had, even the ones I hated. I ran even when I was only walking from one building to another. Sometimes, as I rushed past the classrooms, I thought I could almost see Sumira sitting there the way he used to, all long limbs and easy grace, eating a doughnut in the sunlight.
Every now and then Sumira called me. When the mood took him, he even wrote letters. His handwriting was beautiful, stretching itself across white paper with easy elegance. Strangely, after leaving, he felt closer to me. We talked quietly about the little details of our lives. Neither of us ever brought up the sudden hug or that baffling sentence he had left me with. When I studied late into the night, Sumira would call. We would set our phones above our desks and hear each other turning pages, keeping one another company through the hardest hours. I even borrowed money from him once. He agreed immediately without asking why. At noon I slipped out to the bank and then mailed a whole box of food to Itsuki. He was doing an internship in another city and had fallen sick from not adjusting well. I wanted so badly to go see him, but he told me to prepare for my exams instead. "Do your best, kid," Itsuki said. "We're going to see each other soon." We are going to see each other soon. That sentence became almost all the strength I had. I let it pull me like a stringed puppet. I did not dare slacken for even a second. I did not even dare breathe too loudly. When the university entrance exam finally came, I performed unbelievably well. Walking out of the hall, I felt hollowed out, as if I had only just finished a very long, very desperate run.
When I got off the train, I nearly flew toward him. It was only my second time in that city and on that campus, but it already felt as familiar as if I had lingered there for a lifetime. I wanted to surprise Itsuki, so I ran straight to his dorm. It was the weekend, and the building felt cold and half-empty. My footsteps rang through the stairwell as I ran upstairs. But his roommate told me he was not there. He had gone to the hospital. Someone nearby pulled a face and said, "He's fine, don't worry." Then he laughed. "It's his girlfriend who's sick." Somebody coughed as if to stop him, and the others shot me curious looks. "Who are you, anyway?" I did not know how to answer. What was I, to Kamiya Itsuki? But what mattered more at that moment was something else entirely. "His girlfriend?" I asked. The roommates looked at one another and did not answer. At last one of them said, "If you want to wait, you can sit. That's his desk. But he's probably not coming back today."
Itsuki's desk was neat. His computer was still on, messages popping up one after another. I knew I should not have touched it. But in that moment I truly had no idea what else to do. There were too many questions and nobody willing to answer them. So I opened his chat account. That noon I sat motionless in Itsuki's dorm room. I read almost all of his message history. He used the same words on countless girls. Only then did I understand the looks his roommates had given me. They must have been used to this already. Too many girls had come looking for Kamiya Itsuki. When he mentioned me to his friends, he called me only one thing: that fool. That fool. That was the whole of what I had been in his life. I stood up quietly, said goodbye, and left with no expression at all on my face. But by the time I walked out of the dorm building, I was shaking all over. The force that had been carrying me had been ripped out of me in one savage motion, and the years I had worked and laughed and pushed myself forward had been smeared over with humiliation.
Perhaps it would have been best to leave with anger. But at the school gate, I ran into Itsuki. He was helping a pale girl out of a taxi. After so long apart, he was still shining the way he used to. Looking at him, I found that I could not hate him at all. Even then, the moment he appeared, all those soft feelings still rose quietly inside my chest. I brushed past them. He would not remember me. I was only one more foolish girl among too many in his life. Yet in the span of half a day, the state of mind I had come here with and the one I carried now were worlds apart. I got onto a bus and leaned weakly against the window. Sunlight spilled across my face in great warm sheets. All at once I thought of Asakura Sumira. I thought of the warmth in his hands when he put the hat on me, of the tenderness in the way he had closed his eyes when he hugged me. I called him. I had only just managed to say his name before I started crying. He arrived in less than twenty minutes. I was crouched outside a cinema, and there were still faint tear tracks on my face. The crowd streaming out after a screening kept breaking us apart. He shouted over them, "Shiraishi Hitomi, don't move." Under the clear northern sky, he smiled so warmly that my heart steadied at once. When the crowd finally thinned, he ran over to me. "Did you come all this way just to see me, lose your wallet, and cry like an idiot?" I laughed in spite of myself, stood up, and pointed to the huge movie poster behind me. "Asakura Sumira, I'm rich right now. Let me buy you a movie."
Everyone else in the theater laughed. I was the only one crying. I cried and kept shoving popcorn into my mouth at the same time. Sumira suddenly said, "You weren't like this before." I stopped crying and looked at him. In the dark, his bright face seemed veiled in ash. "I miss the girl I knew before. Even if back then she would never have sat beside me. I know there's someone in your heart. I know he's driven you half mad. But you're unhappy. You came here to see him, didn't you?"
"I only came to see an online friend," I said with a small self-mocking smile. "Isn't that ridiculous?"
"Shiraishi Hitomi, I don't like you like this at all." He said it again, and then he pulled me into his arms just as he had half a year earlier. Only this time, he did not let go.
Popcorn scattered all over the floor like snow from the winter before. If only, back then, he had refused to let go and rescued me from that spell, perhaps I would not have ended up in such a state.
The whole structure of my memories collapsed. What had I been like before? Absent-minded. Quick to laugh. Bad at school, especially science. Back then my life had been full of expectations. Studying had never been the only thing in it. I had even dared to take side jobs like posing as a clothed model for the art track. It was during a freezing winter that I stood shivering in a thin dress in an unheated classroom, and that was when Sumira first saw me. Later he told me it had been the worst life-drawing class of his life. Not only had the model been a little girl, that little girl had been stiff and awkward and kept moving around, and in the middle of it she had broken an expensive prop vase.
That was our true first meeting. And of course it was also the worst part-time job I had ever taken. I looked at the shattered vase, had no idea what to do, and burst into tears on the spot. My eyes were swollen even the next day. My mother had to pay a sum in compensation. The price she extracted from me in return was that I had to behave myself and join a winter program that let students experience life at a prestigious school. I could not have cared less about the whole thing - until Kamiya Itsuki appeared. He was the student council president at that school, leading us younger kids through campus life. There was always a gentle smile on his face, and his voice was full of brightness. He looked as though he genuinely liked us and could go wild with us like a child himself. I always stood quietly in the corner and watched him. To me then, Itsuki was like a prince I could see but never reach. Once he was taking commemorative photos for us. He kept searching for a better angle, stepping left, right, then back, forgetting entirely that the artificial lake was behind him. Everyone screamed as he fell in, and somebody shouted, "Itsuki is afraid of water!" I do not know where my courage came from, but I dove in after him without thinking. My foot struck one of the stones in the lake, and the wound burned in the water. I used every bit of strength I had just to push him up.
I spent several days in the hospital. Itsuki came every day to see me, bringing his girlfriend with him. She was so beautiful that I could not help feeling inferior. I never dared look straight at them. On the day we parted, he came to see us off. He drew me aside, took hold of my arm, and laughed. "With arms this thin, you still saved my life." He wrote down all his contact information for me and made me promise over and over. "You have to keep in touch with me, okay? If anything happens, you can always come to me. Remember that, Shiraishi Hitomi?" Then he flicked my forehead. When he said my name, his voice was full of fondness. How I wished time would stop right there, let everything end there, let me go on loving that version of Kamiya Itsuki. But I was greedy. After I went home, I added him online while pretending to be a stranger. I did not dare tell him who I was. I always felt I was not good enough yet. I told myself that if I stayed in touch with him like that for a year or two, I would become as beautiful as his girlfriend, and then I would stand in front of him and say, I am Shiraishi Hitomi, the girl who once would have given up her life to save yours.
I even turned myself into a science prodigy. You see? In this world, how could effort ever fail?
Except in love. In the end, all I had left was an acceptance letter and a self so boring it knew only how to study. Everything in my memory that had to do with Kamiya Itsuki collapsed into rubble. I never contacted him again. I changed my number. Vanishing turned out to be the easiest thing in the world.
If time could run backward, what would you do? University life began anyway. On that enormous campus, I never once ran into Kamiya Itsuki. Asakura Sumira was studying at an art academy in the same city and often skipped class to come see me. He would tell me he had had a life-drawing class that day and then add, "The model was gorgeous." I ignored him, though inwardly I was carving him to pieces.
But none of that meant anything. He had hugged me twice, yet both times he had said the same thing: that he did not like me. He did not like the girl I was now. He only missed the old Shiraishi Hitomi. Or perhaps getting close to me was the same as me getting close to Itsuki - the better you knew someone, the more the illusion broke apart.
But I had no way back to what I had once been. Maybe I would be this wreck forever. At the end of the year, the school held a dance. I had no partner, so I called Asakura Sumira for help. He said he had a few things to sort out and would come later, but I waited until the dance was almost over and he still had not appeared. I sat in a corner playing a game on my phone to pass the time. When I got bored and rubbed my eyes, I looked up - and someone was walking straight toward me through the crowded dance floor. In that instant, the music seemed to stop. The moving bodies blurred into the background, and light fell across his face. It was Kamiya Itsuki.
He came closer and closer, carrying with him the weight of an enormous stretch of memory. I could barely breathe. I wanted to stand up and run. "I've been watching you for a while," he said, stopping in front of me. "You look a lot like..." I looked at him and said nothing. "Shiraishi Hitomi?" he said at last, uncertainly. "Whoever you are, dance with me." Without giving me a chance to refuse, he pulled me to my feet and drew me into the dance. We moved terribly together. I stepped on his foot three times. He did not care. He kept turning me, and I could not get free. When my face came around to his shoulder, I said, "I'm that fool. Little Ink."
Little Ink was my online name. Itsuki's steps stopped dead. We stumbled down at the edge of the dance floor. The dim, shifting light moved over his face as he stared at me for a long time. "Why didn't you tell me?" he finally asked. "If I had known, it would never have turned into this." I smiled, full of contempt and hurt. But the girl who had deleted that old account, who had turned away in pain, who had sold off the things she loved most, could not be found again. Itsuki lowered his head and kissed me.
"I kept waiting for you." There was something like sorrow in Itsuki's eyes. "Maybe I'm not a good person. Maybe you think I'm rotten to the core. But, Hitomi, even if I love dancing and spinning endlessly, I would still stop for one person. Like this." His hand went to the scar on my ankle from that year, stroking it lightly. "This was because of me..." I had gone completely blank when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a figure flash past the entrance to the hall. Asakura Sumira. I shoved Itsuki away and ran after him. He was already far ahead, moving so fast it looked as though he might vanish in the next second. Snow was falling in heavy flakes, landing all over my dress. I hugged my arms around myself. Northern winters were so cold. Slowly I walked back to the dorm. I knew Itsuki was following behind me, but I also knew that the one I wanted most in that moment was the person who had always stayed beside me, who had crossed mountains and flames with me, who had held me when I was cold, who had given me strength when I felt lost. But when at last I wanted to take his hand and walk with him into some shining palace, he had finally grown tired. I put on a thick down coat, wrapped both hands around a cup of hot water, and stood on the balcony. Snow had already spread itself into a thick white layer. Little by little, my palms warmed. My heart only grew colder. Sumira, whenever I cried over someone else, you were always there. But tonight...
A figure appeared in the snow below, coming closer and closer until it stopped. His shoulders rose and fell as if he had crossed a thousand mountains and rivers to get here. He lifted his head. Snow settled on his brows and lashes. We looked at each other for a very long time, until the water in my hands went cold, until the snow almost covered his eyes.
I ran downstairs. "I thought you'd gone." "I only went back for something important," Asakura Sumira said. He kept pulling things out of his backpack - a phone, a CD player, a book of poems, a stamp album, every single thing. "I thought if I ran hard enough against the wind, maybe time would turn back. Maybe I could go back and find the girl I met the first time. But I wasn't fast enough." "Sumira, you need to understand that I can't become that person again. I can only -" "I only wanted to go back to then," he said. "To help her up when she fell. To put my coat over her when she was frozen. That was what I always wanted to do, but I didn't have the courage. I've regretted it for so long. Otherwise I wouldn't have lost her and only found her again after all this time."
"Idiot. You can't outrun the speed of light. How could time ever run backward?" I cried again. I was always this pathetic. And Asakura Sumira wrapped his arms around me exactly as I was. Then I asked him, "Do tears freeze into ice in the winter up north? If they do, then maybe we could stay like this forever."