I didn’t sleep. Again.
At this point it was practically a hobby. I lay on my bed at 2 a.m., staring at the ceiling, replaying that photograph in my head like a looped GIF. The scratched-out face. The black jacket. The red thread.
It’s a coincidence, Mio had said.
Bullshit. Even she hadn’t believed it.
At 3:17 a.m., I sat up, grabbed my phone, and did what any rational, emotionally healthy person would do. I started going through my own life like a detective searching a crime scene.
Contacts: no Mio.Messages: no Mio.Photos: nothing. I scrolled through everything, every album, every screenshot, every blurry picture of Takumi’s ramen. No rooftops. No girl in a white sweater. No stars.
My email, my cloud, my social media. All of it was clean. Suspiciously, perfectly clean, like someone had gone through my life with a damp cloth and wiped away one single fingerprint.
What the hell?
I sat there, heart pounding, as the truth settled in. If I’d really known her, there should’ve been something. Hundreds of texts. Dozens of selfies. A year of conversations.
Unless the app had taken those too.
The thought made me nauseous. It doesn’t just take the memory. It takes the receipts.
I was about to throw the phone across the room when I opened the calendar, just to check my Monday schedule.
And stopped.
There was a repeating entry. Every Saturday. 8:00 p.m. No title. No notes. Just a tiny star symbol: ★.
I scrolled back. It went on and on. Every Saturday since March. Fifty-something entries in a row. A little silver star at 8 p.m., week after week after week, until the last one, three Saturdays ago, when it just stopped, like a heartbeat on a monitor.
I covered my mouth with my hand.
It was the one thing the app had missed. A ghost in the machine. A single scrap of evidence too small and too stupid for the universe to bother cleaning up.
I used to go to that roof every Saturday. For months. And I forgot.
I read the dates again. March. April. May. June. A whole spring and summer of Saturday nights I couldn’t remember, and every single one of them marked with a star.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to put my fist through the wall. Instead I curled up on my side with the keychain in my fist and stayed that way until the sun came up.
“Okay, you look like a corpse that lost a fight with a vending machine,” Takumi said.
“Thanks.”
“No, seriously. Did you get any sleep?”
We were sitting in the courtyard at lunch, on a stone bench under a ginkgo tree, our usual spot. The leaves were turning gold. Students laughed and rushed past. I’d barely touched my food.
“Takumi,” I said. “Can I ask you something weird?”
“Everything you say is weird. Go.”
“Have I ever mentioned a girl named Mio?”
Takumi blinked. He set down his melon bread slowly, like a man putting down a weapon.
“Mio?”
“Tsukishiro Mio. Second-year. Astronomy.”
“The astronomy girl? The one who was asking about you?” He frowned. “No. I mean, you never mentioned her. Why?”
“I think I knew her.”
“You think?”
“I think I knew her really well.” I took a breath. “I think I was, I don’t know. With her? For a while?”
Takumi stared at me.
Then he stared a little more.
Then, to my absolute horror, he put his hand over his mouth, and his eyes got huge, and he said, very quietly, “Oh.”
“What? Oh what?”
“Oh my God.” He lowered his hand. “Ren. Last spring. You disappeared.”
“What?”
“Every Saturday! You’d say you had tutoring, but I knew you’d already cut your Saturday shifts because I saw your schedule. And you’d come back on Sundays with this look. This stupid, soft, ridiculous look, like a dog that got a treat.” His voice rose. “I thought you had a girlfriend and you were hiding her out of shame!”
“Out of shame?”
“Because you’re you! You hide everything! I figured it was a long-distance thing, or a married woman, or she was a nun, or something!”
“A nun, Takumi?”
“You never told me anything!” He threw his hands up. “And then at my birthday in June, you left an hour early. I asked where you were going and you said, and I swear to God, you said this with a smile, ‘Someone’s waiting.’”
My chest tightened. “I said that?”
“You said it like it was the best sentence in the world.” Takumi studied my face, and his own expression softened. Gone was the usual clowning. “Ren. I’m your best friend. I’m gonna ask you something and I need you to not make a joke.”
“...Okay.”
“Did something happen to you? Like recently? Because you keep spacing out, and last week you went white as paper in the middle of class, and you never talk about your dad, or the debt, or anything. And now you’re asking me about a girl you apparently dated for like six months and don’t remember?”
I opened my mouth to lie.
I’d been lying for three years. It was muscle memory by now. I’m fine. It’s nothing. I just slipped on the stairs.
But something about Takumi’s face, the way he sat there, hands on his knees, eyes steady, willing to hear whatever I said, made the lie crumble in my throat.
“Something happened,” I whispered.
“Okay.”
“I can’t tell you what.”
“Okay.”
“It’s not, it’s not that I don’t trust you. It’s that if I tell you, I think...” My voice cracked. “I think you’ll never look at me the same.”
Takumi was quiet for a moment.
Then he said, with the kind of grave, dignified solemnity he normally reserved for ramen, “Ren. I once watched you eat a raw onion for ten thousand yen. There’s nothing you can tell me that will make me look at you differently.”
I laughed.
It came out wet. Cracked. Half a sob. I put my face in my hands and just sat there, shoulders shaking, while my best friend awkwardly patted my back and said, “There, there, you emotionally constipated idiot.”
“I hate you.”
“I love you too. Eat your melon bread.”
At 4:02 p.m., my phone buzzed.
I was in the middle of a tutoring session, listening to Daichi explain why fractions were a government conspiracy, when I saw the name on the screen.
I almost dropped the phone.
It wasn’t a name. It was a number I didn’t have saved. But the message under it made my entire body go cold.
Unknown: Please stay away from me for a while.Unknown: It’s not your fault. I’m sorry.Unknown: I just need time to think.Unknown: Don’t come to the club. Please.Unknown: -Mio
I read it again. And again. The words swam. My mouth tasted like pennies.
Stay away from me.
She’d gotten my number. Somehow. She’d known my number. Which meant, which meant...
“Onii-san?” Daichi was staring at me. “You’re making a weird face.”
“Sorry. Yeah. I’m fine.”
“You look like you’re gonna throw up.”
“I’m fine, Daichi.”
“That’s what people say right before they throw up.”
I hit reply. My thumbs hovered. I typed Why? and deleted it. I typed What did I do? and deleted that. I typed a dozen different things, angry things, desperate things, things I’d never say out loud, and deleted them all.
In the end, I wrote:
Me: Okay.
It was the worst thing I’d ever sent.
I looked at it for a long time. Then I set the phone face-down on the table, took a breath, and said, “Right. Fractions. Where were we?”
My voice sounded like a stranger’s.
I walked home slowly that night.
The streets of Suginami were quiet, wet with the last of the evening rain. The convenience stores glowed like lanterns. A cat watched me from a wall, unimpressed.
Somewhere around the second bridge, my phone buzzed again.
I almost didn’t look. I figured it was Takumi. Or Yui. Or the universe, finding some fresh way to kick me.
It wasn’t.
Kurose Jin: She knows, doesn’t she.
My feet stopped.
I stood on the bridge, staring at the screen. I hadn’t given him my number. I hadn’t even kept his card out of my wallet. He’d found it anyway. Of course he had.
Kurose Jin: Tsukishiro Mio. Second year. Astronomy.Kurose Jin: I’ve been watching her for eight months.Kurose Jin: She is the only person I’ve ever found who doesn’t have the app, and remembers.
I felt the blood leave my face.
Me: Remembers what
Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.
Kurose Jin: What the world forgot.Kurose Jin: Her brother’s name was Tsukishiro Shun.Kurose Jin: Does that name mean anything to you?
I stared at the words until they stopped looking like words.
No. It didn’t. It didn’t mean a damn thing.
And yet, in the hollow at the center of my chest, where the star-shaped hole had been sitting all week, something small and cold turned over, like a key in a lock.
Me: No
Kurose Jin: Of course it doesn’t.
Kurose Jin: That’s the point.