I have always felt that the world is unfair. On the day my father was killed at the construction site, everyone else ran out. He was the only one who did not, because he was the one who went back in to save someone.

And yet the compensation and insurance money took forever to arrive. All they gave me was a special scholarship place and the excuse that the matter was still under investigation. From the day of the accident to now, two whole years have passed. I lost patience with it long ago. So did my mother. In the end she remarried. She comes back to see me now and then. By now and then, I mean once or twice a year.

I met Kusano Haruki at a very small charity gala. That night the host pronounced his name with particular tenderness, as if reading a line from a love poem for someone else. From that day on, that name stayed in my heart.

He wore a neat school uniform with a school badge so small it could hardly be seen. He came up on stage as the student representative making the donation. And I was the one standing beneath the spotlights to receive it.

The whole sequence had been arranged beforehand. I was supposed to take the oversized red placard from him, shake his hand, pose for a photograph, and then hug him. It was not my first time seeing him, and yet I was still nervous. I had already stolen a glance at him backstage: a touch of baby fat still clinging to his face, very fair skin, and a smile that tilted just a little to the left.

We did not exchange a single extra word. On stage we simply hugged the way we had been instructed to. The hair clip in my hair must have scraped his chin, because I heard him take a tiny breath in. I pretended nothing had happened and went on standing in the brightest circle of light, like a target somebody had set up for display.

After the donation was over, Kusano Haruki left the stage first, and then the host went right on asking me all those questions we had already rehearsed. So my first close contact with Kusano Haruki ended just like that. We were like two pieces on a chessboard that happened to brush past each other, flashed for a second, and were pushed back to our original places. After the gala ended, I did not see him again. If anything, I felt relieved. A person like him, a situation like that, even if we ran into each other again later, we would probably only exchange some diplomatic little nod.

Later the organizers mailed me a stack of photographs. One of them was the picture of me hugging Kusano Haruki. My face was almost hidden by his broad shoulder, but the angle was so good that the two of us looked sincere, moving, nearly happy enough to fool me into believing that for one moment I had really been content.

Fujiwara Motoya once said, "Shiraishi Sono, you looked like an angel on the bus that day."

I gave him a look full of contempt. "Angel, my foot. You think I wanted to? That whole bus was packed, but you kept staring at me as if the words easy mark were written on my face."

Motoya laughed. He had that kind of good temper, the kind that made him seem as harmless as a fire extinguisher. Yes, that day he and I had both been wedged near the front door of the Number 91 bus. There were so many people I thought I was about to be pressed straight into the windshield. He felt around in his pockets for ages but never managed to find his student pass. Not just me, but everyone crowded in the front part of the bus watched him go through pocket after pocket without finding even one coin. Yet nobody offered to pay for him. I did not want to either. But he was standing closest to me, and every now and then he looked at me with such pitiful eyes. Besides, I thought he seemed vaguely familiar. We had probably seen each other at school. I felt sure I had seen him somewhere, so in the end I paid the two hundred yen for him very unwillingly. The instant he got off the bus and asked, "Hey, what school do you go to?" I regretted it to death. So he had not recognized me at all. I had wasted two precious coins on him. That was two thirds of my lunch money. A bowl of udon cost three hundred yen and came with only a few thin slices of beef, yet even that looked unbearably tempting. But thanks to my spontaneous act of kindness, my udon was ruined for the day.

At noon, when I went to the hot-water room to get water for instant noodles, I saw Fujiwara Motoya eating with a group of boys at the next table. Their bowls and plates were piled high. I could not even tell what they were eating except that there was braised pork with potatoes. Meanwhile I had only my cup noodles.

The second time I saw Kusano Haruki was at a television station. It was another charity program, this time with a few celebrities. They wanted me on stage to sing with them. I saw Haruki in the washroom beside the studio. We stood side by side washing our hands. He recognized me and greeted me first. He had come to watch the show. Someone had given his family three tickets. They had all come together. I smiled politely and nodded back. I do not know whether he saw envy or jealousy in my eyes. Whatever it was, I felt irritated. How could the world be so eager to wave other people's happiness in front of me as if it meant to keep me shut out on purpose?

The truth is, that was not really my second time seeing Kusano Haruki. We went to the same school, though he was one year above me and served in the student council. Sometimes he spoke at the Monday assemblies. Sometimes he inspected classroom discipline. Sometimes he distributed forms. I saw him often. We simply did not always see each other. Because I avoided him.

Once, he had been the donor and I the one receiving charity. Now he was the audience and I the performer. Our places were always tilted that way, and I hated it. I did not want to meet him. That was not perverse. It was only human nature. No one wants to be the weak one in front of someone else. No one does.

That day the program itself was simple enough. I said thank you like I was supposed to, then sang Gratitude of the Heart with some third-rate celebrity. I had half expected they'd make us sing True Heroes instead. By rights, once that segment ended, I should have been able to go home. But then they suddenly announced an interview. Someone who looked like a reporter thrust a microphone toward me and began asking questions: How is your life now? Do you feel confident about the future? Will you study hard and repay society? Are you moved to be on a program like this? Say a few words of thanks to all the kind uncles and aunts who helped you. It went on and on until the final star guest arrived, and only then did they transfer their attention elsewhere. I picked up my schoolbag and walked out of the studio. Outside, the television station was lit up so brilliantly it looked like a palace, a mysterious palace I could not help fearing a little. I hated being interviewed over and over again by every possible outlet, being turned into a feature for magazines and television, my father and I described like some tragic folk tale. I did not want my classmates looking at me differently either, each of them glancing at me the way people in a market glance at cabbages. Ah, that's Shiraishi Sono, the girl who got the five-thousand-yen donation. Lucky her.

I did not want any of it. But the things we want least are always the things that happen most easily. "Shiraishi Sono!" Someone called from inside the palace before I had fully shaken myself awake from it. Then a camera and microphone came running toward me. It hit me like a bolt of lightning. I shoved the door open and ran. They chased after me, shouting. By the time I reached the big entrance to the studio, Kusano Haruki appeared like some kind of superhero and pulled me sharply to one side. We cut around the corner. He raised a hand toward the street, and a taxi stopped in front of us. I hesitated only a second before jumping in.

That was the first time I followed Kusano Haruki anywhere. I do not know why, in all the many times that came later, I could obey him just as I did then. I resisted him, and yet for no reason at all I was willing to trust him. If that had truly been the case, perhaps I should have had a beautiful ending.

In a city of only a few million people, I became a headline. Sometimes I think there must be famous people who never intended to become famous, but whether it is good or bad, overnight fame is the sort of thing you cannot dodge. Not if it has chosen you.

The summer two years earlier, the day after my father died, I became the focus of the whole school as the tragic heroine and the hero's daughter. Half a year before that, when my mother remarried in great fanfare and the wedding firecrackers woke the sleeping city, the red double-happiness papers became gossip all across town, and of course the talk circled back to me. And now, after I had fled from the reporter's camera, stories about taking charity money and running, about refusing interviews and lacking gratitude, spread in all directions. My notoriety only grew. Every newspaper in the city wanted a piece of me. Fujiwara Motoya said, "Shiraishi Sono, this really wasn't well handled. It was only a few lines into a microphone. Did you have to ruin your own name over it? They say fame should come early, sure, but not like this."

He was right. But nobody knows what the next second holds. If I had been able to foresee the future, then no matter what happened, I would never have ended up with Fujiwara Motoya.

I started dating Fujiwara Motoya in the third month after meeting him. After those reports spread, very few girls at school still wanted to stay close to me. As for upright boys like Kusano Haruki, after bringing me home that day, he never spoke more than a few words to me again. Sometimes he would smile at me at school. Sometimes, if he saw me eating noodles in the cafeteria, he would quietly buy me a meat dish, braised beef with potatoes or fried hairtail or a rice plate with a cutlet. I accepted those things with complete peace of mind and never thought of them as charity. I would eat greedily and be in a good mood. Even so, he never spoke to me much. Never. So much so that even saying thank you would have felt theatrical and strange.

Fujiwara Motoya, by contrast, was ordinary. So ordinary it almost glowed. He waited at the bus stop for two entire weeks just to return the two hundred yen to me. During those same two weeks, I rode my bicycle to school because the family next door had moved away and given me an old women's bike they no longer wanted.

I can still remember the expression on Fujiwara Motoya's face as he held out those two coins. The tiny beads of sweat on the bridge of his nose looked like little translucent pearls, and there was something round and foolish in his eyes that made me throw my head back and laugh, even though I had not really laughed for a very long time. In Motoya's version of the story, that was the moment he was captured. He said I looked like a female demon showing my true face in broad daylight. Later I told him, "You're really something. Some kind of masochist?" He only laughed and never fought back. A boy like that, willing to stay with a heartless bad girl despised by the whole town and gain nothing at all from it. I would often tap him on the forehead and say, "Fujiwara Motoya, are you missing something in the head? What do you see in me, to waste your first love and your first kiss on a demon like this?"

"Cloudy turning..." That was how I used to tease him, because he would only laugh and say, "Every part of you is good." The truth was, there had been no first kiss. Fujiwara Motoya was so honest he nearly had no gender at all. The most scandalous thing we ever did was hold hands and walk across the most deserted bridge in town, Seiran Bridge. Its arch was so high that if I stood on one side, I could not see Motoya on the other. Sometimes I would sit up on the arch with a little drawing board and sketch while Motoya sat nearby, squinting, half-dozing, always smiling.

I also loved calling his name across the arch. His voice answering mine sounded like an echo, stretched out and soft.

"Hey, Shiraishi Sono..."

"Idiot..."

That was the last time my feelings were simple. The last time before eighteen that I possessed anything so easy and bright.

Fujiwara Motoya and I were punished for our puppy love one chaotic morning. When a teacher called me in, Motoya was just coming out of the office with his head hanging. He glanced at me but did not slow his step. Behind him the teacher was already shouting, "Fujiwara Motoya, back to class." As if we might collude on our testimony. The teacher then turned on me. "Do you know what your identity is? A scholarship student. Do you know what that means? Don't you feel ashamed? Look at your grades this time. Only twentieth in the class. Every other scholarship student is in the top three, do you understand?" I kept my head high and said nothing. There were sixty-four students in my class. What was wrong with coming in twentieth?

I could never understand why a scholarship student had to get outstanding grades. Why a scholarship student could not fall in love, could not like someone, could not go through adolescence. Did tragedy already suffered mean an ordinary girl's right to grow up had to be strangled afterward as well?

When the teacher finally ended a lecture that seemed to last twenty-seven minutes, I walked out of the office. In truth, according to my watch, it had been thirty-seven. My watch was slow again. It was a gift from my father, and it watched my humiliation in silence.

I did not go back to class. I left school through the back gate. I had no idea where to go, so I wandered the streets. I had no money, not even enough to sit in a fast-food place and order a drink. I stood outside polished shop windows looking in. Fashionable, proud women in high heels drifted past inside. Diamond necklaces hung in the most conspicuous places, flashing coldly at all the envious eyes turned toward them. Places like that split me away from the world and left me dizzy. I had never before allowed myself to imagine that one day I too might walk arm in arm with someone through spotless counters like those. Even if it were only to look, that would already have felt complete.

I was nothing.

"This isn't vanity," Kusano Haruki told me.

By the time he found me, I had already skipped school for two days. When he woke me where I had fallen asleep outside a huge display window, his face looked dreamlike. I said, "Kusano Haruki, come inside with me. Just walk through once. All right?"

I hooked my arm through his, took off my school jacket, and tied it around my waist. Like a gentleman in a television drama, Kusano Haruki gathered my hair high with a rubber band. We walked through the department store with the proud air of people who belonged there. Haruki said, "Shiraishi Sono, what you need is love. A normal life." At the time I did not hear him clearly, because I was too hungry. Even a simple bowl of rice topped with green peppers and shredded pork was enough to hold me captive. Only much later did I remember his words and wonder what he had really meant. He said I needed love. Maybe. But who can really tell the difference between having love and lacking it, between having much and having little?

Haruki also said, "The whole school knows you've been skipping class. They're all jealous of you." His eyebrows curved in a way I did not remember from before, and somehow that made him even more handsome. "But when too many people envy you, it turns into jealousy. You've had your two days off. Go back to school now. Be good, like before."

As if under a spell, I went back.

Sometimes I think that if I had not returned, perhaps things would have ended differently. But whatever else I think, I still believe following Kusano Haruki was the simplest, most direct thing I could have done.

Because my violation of school rules was considered severe, I received an official warning. At the same time I lost my status as a scholarship student. From then on I was no longer allowed to receive donations. Fujiwara Motoya, because his family came to plead for him and promised he would break things off with me, received a lighter punishment. I stood in front of the whole school and read out my self-criticism. My own voice echoed in the empty air like the fluttering of wings, or like a dove dropping a mess from above, harsh and ugly. I saw Kusano Haruki standing not far away. That week he was leading the flag-raising ceremony. Less than ten meters separated us, and still the distance felt endless.

More than two years after the accident, my father's work unit finally sent over a lump-sum compensation payment. It was Fujiwara Motoya's father who brought it to our house. Until then I had not known he and my father had worked together. There was no reason he needed to come in person. But he wanted to warn me himself not to keep entangling his son, so he volunteered to play courier. As he was leaving, he said, "Your father put that much thought into things. If you don't live properly, then he threw his life away for nothing."

I knew those words hid something beneath them.

I blocked Fujiwara Motoya for nine straight days, threatening that if he refused to see me I would die in front of him. Only then did he agree to meet me on Seiran Bridge. "Shiraishi Sono," he said, "I still like you. But just because we're not together now doesn't mean we can't be later. Wait for me, all right?"

He thought I had come to patch us back together. Clearly, I had not. Fujiwara Motoya turned out to be an excellent spy. The very next day he brought me the answer.

He said, "Your father had already been diagnosed with terminal cancer. He wanted to get a little more insurance money, so he insisted on going to the most dangerous section of the site. When the collapse happened, he rushed in as if he had seen hope, but in fact there was no one left inside. Strictly speaking, there shouldn't have been any compensation at all. I understand it now. My father wasn't bringing official compensation that day. He was bringing his own money."

Maybe it was to make up for something. Maybe he pitied me. Maybe it was only for the sake of his old colleague. I do not know, and I no longer want to know.

Fujiwara Motoya said, "I didn't want to tell you. But I just couldn't lie to you."

I did not believe him. I had always believed my father was a hero. I had always believed he was a hero. I went wild and beat Fujiwara Motoya half to death. He never hit back. When I finally stopped, there were bloody half-moon marks from my nails on his jaw.

Then I slapped him once more and ran.

I ran faster and faster and faster, across Seiran Bridge, until I could no longer hear Fujiwara Motoya calling after me. I have no idea how far I went. Only when I had no strength left at all did I finally stop.

That was the end of whatever fate there had been between Fujiwara Motoya and me. We never saw each other again. Not for any complicated reason. I simply never went back to school. I did not want to. The one thing that had sustained me, the belief that my father was a hero, was gone too. I could think of no reason to stay in that place any longer, not when every familiar scene had become unbearable to look at. I remain grateful to Fujiwara Motoya. In those lonely days when I was treated like some strange creature, he stayed beside me. Whether it had been sincerity or not, he had still been there, and at the time that was enough for me.

The year I turned eighteen was catastrophic. Not only headlines and punishment and being turned into an example of what not to do, not only a first romance and a public self-criticism. There was theft as well. I stole sleeping pills from the home of one of the few classmates I still got along with. Her family ran a tiny clinic, and because I had often gone there to play, I knew exactly where everything was kept.

I had turned my thoughts seriously toward death. Everyone says eighteen is the age of flowers, but a flower no one waters will wither no matter how beautiful it is.

I thought of killing myself many times, yet I never found a suitable method. In the end I crushed the stolen pills, scattered them over slices of bread, and spread ketchup on top. I thought that might improve the taste. Perhaps it would be my last dinner. There was no point being cruel to myself at the very end.

But grinding all the pills down took too long and left me exhausted. I also cleaned the room and washed all my dirty clothes, wanting to leave a good impression on anyone who came to say goodbye. By the time I had arranged everything, I was so tired I could have thrown up. I fell asleep. When I woke, flies had crawled all over the ketchup bread. It looked so disgusting that I had to throw it away. But then I searched every corner of the house and could not find a single dead fly.

Kusano Haruki was the best person in the world at finding people. A police dog in human form. I was idly sketching the jasmine plant on the windowsill when he wandered in as if he were only out for a stroll. The jasmine had gone so long without care that it was all but dead, only the faintest white dot left where a bud should have been.

Yes. Kusano Haruki's sharp eyes had already noticed the medicine bottle.

I put on a show and said, "Kusano Haruki, people never know when a casual goodbye will really become forever. Don't miss me."

Haruki said, "Don't say goodbye to me. I don't want to stop seeing you."

He spoke to me like a counselor for a long time. I sat by the window listening and sketching him. I had never drawn a person so intently before. Yet by the time I finished, the man on the paper no longer looked like Kusano Haruki. I could not catch his eyes. I could not make him the same as the person I held in my heart. I could not draw him.

For the first time in front of Kusano Haruki, I cried.

Haruki said, "I like the way you look when you're holding a drawing board. Please, you have to keep painting."

Haruki said, "You have to live well. We both do. Even if your sky has gone from clear to cloudy, it will still turn brilliant in the end. Brilliant the way our first embrace remains so vivid in memory."

That time, I did not refuse him.

I leaned my head lightly against Kusano Haruki's shoulder. It was the same angle as in the photograph, but not the same coldness. What I found there was a beauty I had not been able to recover in a very long time. Even when I was with Fujiwara Motoya, it had not felt like this. This was a more burning kind of beauty.

After I turned eighteen, I dropped out completely. I had skipped classes for two months in a single term. There was no going back. Every morning I rode my bicycle an hour and a half into the county town to work. At night I sold beer in a middling restaurant. On weekends I handed out flyers outside department stores. I even spent a while doing telemarketing for a business center. Later I left that little city altogether and tried one job after another, seeing all the coldness and warmth the world has to offer. But the one thing I never stopped doing was taking three art classes every week. I paid those outrageous tuition fees with money I had earned the hard way, all for the sake of standing one day in front of the best art academy in the province, wearing a sky-blue dress and white Converse sneakers, with a bright school badge pinned to my chest and a sketch board on my back.

That was my wish.

It was Haruki's wish for me too.

I donated every yen of the charitable money I had once received. I did not need anyone else's charity. I had hands and feet. I could support myself. I sent the money to a remote hope school in my father's name. I thought it was the only thing I had done that might have pleased him. In the letter I enclosed, I wrote: Be grateful, but do not feel indebted. Everyone has the right to a better life. The hardships one person carries in this life may fall on someone else in the next. Life is made of endless turns, and whoever's turn it is, bears it.

After that I never again felt the urge to die. Every day I dressed myself neatly in simple T-shirts and sturdy jeans and cheap sneakers bought online for almost nothing. I painted desperately. I bought good pigments and canvas. I went to exhibitions. I studied hard and made myself stronger. I am grateful now that I did not die, because later I read in a book that most people think of suicide at some point in youth. Some really die, and most stay in the world and go on either contributing to it or tormenting themselves inside it.

That sentence gave me chills. I was one of the people who had failed to die and then grown afraid of death. Otherwise I would have eaten that revolting bread no matter what it looked like. But I did not want to become one of the people who spend the rest of their lives tormenting themselves. Even if I could never contribute much to society, I wanted, at the very least, to live happily.

I wanted to live happily.

That was my wish. Haruki's wish for me too.

The last time I saw Kusano Haruki was right before I left that town for good. I said, "Kusano Haruki, I like you." I said it as bluntly as if I were asking for a kilo of cabbage at the market. I remembered the flicker in Fujiwara Motoya's eyes when he told me he liked me, and I wondered whether my own eyes had gone bright and sharp as a wolf's. What I felt inside was not excitement so much as a painful twisting, because I already knew Kusano Haruki would not be with me.

Sure enough, he said, "Shiraishi Sono, you'll find someone better than me."

Holding back my tears, I smiled at him. "I know. But I will never be this good to anyone again. I won't hug someone the first time I meet him. I won't trust him so much the second time I touch him. I won't tell someone I like him so easily. Never again."

Kusano Haruki said nothing. His face was calm and plain, like a glass of water. Then he turned and left. As he walked away, I wanted desperately to call after him, to ask what schools he planned to apply to, or tell him to write to me. But I could not move. I did nothing.

I watched his back grow farther and farther away until it became almost unreal. My memory slid backward again to the television station, to Kusano Haruki under the lights like a superhero. I tried and tried to remember it properly, but I could no longer recall the exact posture of the way he pulled me along, or the warmth of it. Later, after I had finally been admitted to the art academy, there came a season when social networking sites were suddenly all the rage. One idle evening I searched Kusano Haruki's name. Seven results came up. I opened them one by one. Three were clearly not him, because they had photo albums and unmistakable faces. The other four revealed almost nothing. But on one of those homepages I found a line that said:

I wanted so badly to hold your hand and walk the road ahead with you. But you told me that people never know when a casual goodbye will become the kind after which you never meet again. I think you're right. One day I might disappear that way too. I watched you walk out of my world. The sky at the end of the road turned from clear to cloudy. I knew I would not come back. And neither would you.

I do not know whether that Kusano Haruki was my Kusano Haruki. I did say those words to him once, after all. At that time, I wanted nothing more than to escape. In youth, disregard for life can be like a poison. Everyone has an antidote. Kusano Haruki was mine.

But what was Kusano Haruki's?

All I could do was smile and let the question go.

The only true ending I know is this: I never saw Kusano Haruki again. He became like a shadow in my life, so faint at times that I can no longer be certain he ever truly came through it at all.