I lasted five days.
Five days of pretending I hadn’t read the back of that flyer forty times. Five days of telling myself I wasn’t the kind of guy who goes to a stargazing night because of a keychain and a creepy-sweet sentence about sugar. I tutored. I studied. I opened the Notes app every morning, stared at Next reset: available, and closed it again like a man checking a loaded gun.
Kuroiwa didn’t call. Jin’s black card sat in my wallet like a stone. And every night I lay in bed rubbing my thumb over a little silver star, thinking about a girl who cried without making a sound.
On Saturday at 7:40 p.m., I put on my jacket.
“Where are you going?” Yui asked, from the couch, not looking up from her phone.
“Out.”
“Out where?”
“Just out.”
She turned her head slowly. Gave me the full-body scan. Black bomber jacket, the one with the frayed left cuff I’d patched with red thread in March because I couldn’t find black. Clean jeans. Hair actually combed.
“Onii-chan.” Her eyes went very wide. “Is this a date?”
“No.”
“You combed your hair.”
“It’s windy!”
“It’s always windy and you’ve never combed your hair!” She shot up from the couch. “Mom! MOM! Onii-chan’s going on a date!”
“It’s NOT a date!”
“Go, go, go!” Mom’s voice came from the kitchen, delighted. “Take an umbrella!”
I fled.
The rooftop of Building 7 was dark except for a few red torch lights and the glow of the city beyond. About a dozen people were scattered across the concrete: some on foldable mats, some hunched over telescopes, a couple of guys arguing about whether Mars was visible. A speaker played soft jazz. Somebody had a thermos of hot chocolate.
And at the far end, kneeling beside a small telescope with a notebook open on her lap, was Mio.
She hadn’t seen me yet. The red light caught the side of her face. She was frowning slightly at a star chart, tapping her pen against her chin, and the whole scene hit me with such a bizarre, aching familiarity that I almost turned around and walked back down the stairs.
What are you even doing here, Hoshina?
“Heyyyy! A newcomer!”
A massive guy in a Orion Rules T-shirt crashed into my line of sight. He had a beard, a bucket hat, and the hearty, thunderous enthusiasm of a man who’d never been told to lower his voice.
“I’m Hanabusa, club president! Fourth-year! Welcome, welcome, welcome! What’s your name? Major? Favorite planet? Do you believe in aliens?”
“Uh, Ren. Math. Mars?”
“EXCELLENT ANSWER.” He slapped my back so hard I coughed. “MIO! A NEWCOMER!”
Across the roof, Mio’s head snapped up.
Our eyes met.
Time did that stupid slow-motion thing again, except this time nobody was dying. She went pale, then pink, then very carefully expressionless. She set her pen down. Stood. And walked toward me, one measured step at a time, like a person approaching a deer she was afraid of scaring.
“You came,” she said.
“You told me to.”
“I said you didn’t have to.”
“Yeah, well.” I shoved my hands in my jacket pockets. “I’m bad at following instructions.”
For the first time, I saw a real smile cross her face, quick and startled, like a candle lit in a draft. “I’ve heard.”
“From who?”
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“...The department rumor mill.”
“Uh-huh.”
An hour later, I was lying flat on a foam mat next to Mio, staring up at the sky.
The rest of the club had drifted into small clusters. Hanabusa was giving a three-minute lecture on dark matter to a captive audience of first-years. Takumi, whom I’d dragged along as emotional support and who was now asleep with his mouth open, had been given a blanket.
“Okay,” said Mio. She lifted her arm and pointed up. “Do you see that really bright star? Almost directly overhead?”
I squinted. “The blue-white one?”
“That’s Vega. Part of the constellation Lyra. Now follow it east, toward the Milky Way. There’s another bright one, Deneb. And south of that...” Her arm tilted. “Altair.”
“Okay.”
“Three stars. Vega, Deneb, Altair. They form a triangle. The Summer Triangle.” She lowered her arm. “That’s what’s scratched on the back of the keychain.”
I turned my head.
She was looking up at the sky. Her profile was soft in the red torchlight, the lashes long, the mole beneath her eye almost invisible. She looked so impossibly peaceful that I forgot, for a second, to be afraid.
“Why a triangle?” I asked.
“Because from here, they look close. Like they belong together. Like they’re all part of one shape.” Her voice was very quiet. “But they’re not. Vega is twenty-five light-years away. Altair, seventeen. Deneb, over two thousand. They’re nowhere near each other. They just look like they are, from where we’re standing.”
“That’s depressing.”
“It’s not.” She turned her head. Our faces were a foot apart. “It’s beautiful. It means they don’t need to be close to make something real. You just have to look at them from the right place.”
My heart did something painful.
“Mio,” I said. “Have we met?”
She went completely still.
I could see her swallowing. I could see her trying to decide something, weighing it, her eyes searching mine like a person reading a letter in a language she’d given up on. For one terrifying second, I thought she was going to say yes.
Then the light in her face dimmed, carefully, deliberately, like a lantern being turned down.
“No,” she said.
It was the first lie she’d told me that I could feel.
“No,” she repeated, softer. “We haven’t.”
“Okay.”
“I’m sorry. I know you want a better answer.”
“It’s fine.”
It wasn’t fine. I was lying too. But I didn’t push. Because something in me, some animal part, knew that if I pushed, she’d flinch again. And I couldn’t stand to see that.
I looked back at the sky.
“Can I ask you something weird?” I said.
“You can ask me anything.”
“Have you ever lost something and not known what it was?”
The silence that followed was so long I thought she wasn’t going to answer.
“Yes,” she said at last.
“What was it like?”
“Like I was missing someone who was still alive.” A small breath. “Like I was standing next to them and they were the one who’d forgotten how to see me.”
My throat tightened.
I didn’t know what to say. So I said nothing. And after a while, I felt a hand slide across the foam mat, tentative, cold, and rest very lightly next to mine, close enough to touch, not touching.
Neither of us moved.
We lay there for a long time, two idiots under three stars that weren’t close at all.
By ten, the roof was mostly empty.
Hanabusa was folding up telescopes with the gentle reverence of a man putting his children to bed. Takumi had been poked awake and sent home with a promise of ramen. I stayed behind to help stack mats, which was a poor excuse, and we both knew it.
Mio was packing her bag at the edge of the roof, her back to me, her notebook open on the concrete beside her. She zipped up the telescope case, slipped her pen into her pocket, and picked up the notebook.
A photograph slid out from between the pages.
It landed face-up on the concrete, right by my shoe.
“Oh, hey, you dropped...”
I picked it up before she could turn around. I didn’t mean to look. I swear to God, I didn’t. It was just there, in my hand, and my eyes did what eyes do.
It was a snapshot. Old, a little blurry, taken at night. A rooftop. The same rooftop, maybe. A girl in a white sweater, laughing at the camera with her whole face scrunched up, so happy she looked like a different person.
Mio.
And beside her, one arm slung around her shoulders, was a guy.
Except you couldn’t see his face.
It had been scratched out. Not torn, not cut. Scratched, dozens of tiny furious lines, back and forth, until the paper had gone fuzzy and gray. Whoever’d done it had done it again and again and again, like they couldn’t stop.
All you could see of him was a shoulder. A black jacket. And a left cuff, hanging loose by the girl’s arm, with a ragged patch of bright red thread sewn crookedly across the frayed edge.
I stopped breathing.
It was a very specific patch. A very specific mistake. I’d sewn it myself, at midnight, in March, because I’d run out of black and was too broke to buy more.
I looked down at my own left cuff.
Red thread. Crooked stitches. Identical.
“Ren.”
Mio’s voice was thin as glass.
She was standing three steps away, one hand half-raised, her face the color of ash. All the warmth had drained out of her. She looked like a person watching a house burn down.
“Give me that,” she whispered.
“Mio...”
“Please.”
I held it out. My hand was shaking. She snatched the photo like it might bite, jammed it into her notebook, and pressed the whole thing against her chest.
“It’s nothing,” she said. Her voice cracked on the last word. “It’s just a, it’s a photo, it’s an old friend, I should go, I’m sorry, I have to...”
“That’s my jacket.”
She froze.
“The guy in the picture.” My heart was beating so hard I could barely get the words out. “He’s wearing my jacket. That’s my cuff. That’s my stupid red thread.”
“It’s a coincidence.”
“Mio.”
“It’s a coincidence, Ren.” Her eyes were bright and huge and brimming. A tear escaped and ran down her cheek, and she didn’t even wipe it. “Please. Please. Don’t ask me. Not yet. I can’t...”
Her voice broke.
I stood there, stupid and helpless, as she ran. Her footsteps echoed down the stairwell, light and fast, then faded to nothing.
The roof was empty. The wind tugged at my jacket. Far below, the city lights glittered like a spilled box of stars.
I looked at my sleeve for a long, long time.
And somewhere in the dark, in the hollow place where a memory used to live, I felt a very small, very quiet truth settle into my chest like a stone sinking into a well.
I’m the guy in the photo.
And I scratched out my own face.