Brocade Night

Sometimes life is like a robe of brocade draped over the night.

You know it is splendid, and yet in the dark you may never see every pattern woven into it. But that is all right. As long as the wind is warm, the road is still underfoot, and there is one small thing inside the heart still shining, that is enough to keep a person walking on.

This year's Star Academy of Art festival had been livelier than ever.

The stage, the lights, the guest artists, the posters, the security staff, the reporters, all of it had turned the whole campus into a pot at a rolling boil. The ones suffering most were the student council and the volunteers. Every night Ono Yui followed the temporary cleanup crew around packing up the grounds, picking up flyers, putting away equipment, and checking the lists. By the time she returned to her dorm room, she was often so tired she did not even want to take off her shoes.

Her roommate Elena scolded her mercilessly, saying she sounded like a woman hitting menopause early, and that volunteering was one thing, but volunteering for the dirtiest, hardest jobs on purpose was sheer madness. Yet Yui always only smiled and said that work had no high or low, and if someone needed something done, then someone had to do it.

Elena cursed with her mouth, but her heart was soft. Every day she boiled water in advance for Yui, afraid that if Yui came back too late there would be none left for a bath. That night, after showering, Ono Yui stood in front of the mirror struggling to remove her colored contacts. Elena had gone with her to get them before the festival opened. Before that, Yui had always worn black-framed glasses and never thought there was anything wrong with them, until her roommate casually said what boy these days would like a girl who always wore glasses, and somehow the remark lodged like a thorn. So she gritted her teeth and swapped her glasses for cosmetic lenses.

After she put them on, everyone said she looked much prettier.

Only Shiraishi Hayato said nothing.

Shiraishi Hayato was the president of the student council, and also the busiest person at the whole festival. He was always rushing past her, with time only to throw her a work assignment, never an extra glance. And yet the more he was like that, the less Ono Yui could stop herself from thinking about him over and over, wondering whether he was too tired, whether he had eaten properly, whether she had made her feelings too obvious.

The next day, Ono Yui failed to appear for her volunteer shift.

In the middle of the night her eye had started hurting as though needles were being driven into it. Her left eye had swelled red, and tears would not stop running. Elena cursed her for deserving it even as she shoved her into a taxi and sent her straight to the hospital. The doctor said she had fallen asleep in her contact lenses and then got tap water into her eye while bathing, causing the lens to inflame and stick to her cornea. If she had come any later, the consequences might have been serious.

It was not until nearly the end of the morning that Shiraishi Hayato heard from someone else that she had gone to the hospital.

In that instant, all the irritation in him vanished, leaving only a thin thread pulling back and forth in its place. At last the chaos of the festival's final day came to an end. By the time he finished dealing with all the last details, the student council building was empty. The elevator had stopped running early, so he had no choice but to take the stairs. He had just turned the landing when he saw someone standing against the wall in the stairwell.

It was Ono Yui.

Her left eye was still swollen. Her back was pressed to the wall, and her ten fingers were twisted tightly together. She looked like a child who knew she had done something wrong and was stubbornly refusing to run away. Shiraishi Hayato stepped closer, let out a breath of relief, and then could not stop himself from frowning. "What are you doing here? Weren't you told to stay at the hospital?"

With her head lowered, Ono Yui said quietly that she had only come back to apologize. She had not stayed until the end during the day, and she was afraid she had caused trouble for everyone.

Shiraishi Hayato had come prepared with a whole stomach full of reproaches, but hearing that, he found himself unable to say any of them. The girl before him could barely open her eye from the pain, and yet she was still worrying about a volunteer post that was already over. That earnestness, earnest to the point of foolishness, made something inside him cave in all at once.

"Who said you caused trouble?" he asked, his voice gentler now. "You did more than enough."

Ono Yui stared, as though she had never imagined she might hear such an answer. She lifted her head instinctively, and the motion tugged at her injured eye. Her foot slipped and she nearly missed the step. Shiraishi Hayato reacted at once and caught her hand. Her fingers were icy cold, while his palm was startlingly hot. Both of them seemed to be frightened by the sudden warmth and stepped apart again at once. Shiraishi Hayato cleared his throat, held out his sleeve, and said, "Hold on to this. Don't fall on the stairs."

Only their footsteps sounded in the stairwell, one after another, knocking at the heart.

When they came out of the building, the moonlight was spread across the campus paths like water. Shiraishi Hayato insisted on seeing her back to the dormitory. On the way, he asked a great many questions about her eye. Ono Yui answered obediently, nearly even letting slip why she had suddenly decided to get colored contacts in the first place. When he heard the whole story, Shiraishi Hayato could not help laughing. "So you really believed something like that?"

"Believed what?"

"That boys don't like girls who wear glasses."

At once Ono Yui felt the roots of her ears burn. She stammered for half a day, feeling mortified beyond words. By the time they reached the dormitory, she was just thinking she could use the opportunity to flee inside when Shiraishi Hayato suddenly called her back. He stepped closer and gently plucked a fallen leaf from her hair. His voice was as low as the night breeze.

"Don't wear those again."

"What?"

"You were fine the way you were before," he said.

Ono Yui fled like someone escaping disaster.

She ran all the way up to the fourth floor and leaned over the window on the stair landing to look down. Shiraishi Hayato was still standing where she had left him, his head lowered as though lost in thought. It was only when the dorm matron leaned out to see what was happening that he seemed to come back to himself and turn away. That night, lying in bed with her eyes open, she no longer felt any pain in them at all. It was only her chest that felt as though something had knocked it quietly ajar, leaving a scene of total chaos inside.

What finally convinced her that she had not merely been imagining things came at the first weekly meeting after the festival.

She had gone back to wearing her black-framed glasses and was sitting in the last row, earnestly taking down the minutes. After the meeting, everyone left in twos and threes. Only Shiraishi Hayato stopped her and said the volunteer summary still lacked a few details, so she should stay behind. When the office had gone entirely quiet, he pushed a cup of hot milk toward her.

"Elena said you haven't been eating breakfast lately."

Ono Yui stared blankly at the milk for so long that she forgot even to say thank you.

Standing by the window as if weighing his words for a long time, Shiraishi Hayato finally spoke. He said that, in truth, he had remembered her from the very first day she came to sign up for the student council. That girl in the huge glasses, carrying a stack of documents, whose ears had already gone red with nerves and who still insisted, pretending to be calm, that there was no job she could not do, had never looked like someone who would give up halfway. It was not that he had failed to see how hard she worked. He had simply not dared let himself look too long. Because he was about to graduate, while she was only just beginning to grow a life of her own there.

"But later I realized that the more I tried to stay away, the more I cared," he said softly. "Ono Yui, I may have liked you a little earlier than you think."

Outside, the wind stirred the blinds, and scattered shadows of light fell across his shoulders. Suddenly Ono Yui thought of all those nights when she had dragged her exhausted body back to the dorm, of that morning when her inflamed eye had hurt so badly tears would not stop, and of the sleeve he had held out to her in the stairwell. It turned out the signs had been there all along. She had simply never dared think in that direction.

She lowered her head, nudged her glasses up her nose, and smiled softly.

"Then do you still think," she asked in a small voice, "that no one likes girls who wear glasses?"

Shiraishi Hayato smiled too. He walked over and lightly tapped her frames.

"Am I not already standing right here?"

That evening they walked out of the student council office together. The wind blowing over from the athletic field carried the scent of early summer grass and leaves. The campus was still noisy, but Ono Yui suddenly felt that perhaps a brocade night was nothing more than this: a night whose full design you could not see, and yet knew with certainty was beautiful.

And at last, she no longer had to walk through it alone.