Weekend Plans and a Mysterious Visit From... Someone Who Really Needs to Chill

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HOW?!

I spent the entire night buried in a sea of books and instant ramen and all I got was a lousy 65.

The red ink was smudged a little. I crumpled up the paper in a fit of frustration.

At this rate, I’ll never get into college. Never leave this stupid town. I’ll end up working part-time at a convenience store until I’m thirty. Maybe forty. Maybe forever. A walking, living cautionary tale brought to you by Tsukasa Kurayami.

“This... is… not… fair…”

“Ohh, don’t be such a downer, Tsu-kun!” Sayuri chirped. “It’s not the end of the world. Don’t tell me you’re seriously crying over a little number!”

“It’s a 65,” I muttered. “That five is just there to insult me. Like the world is saying, ‘You tried... and failed... but here’s a sticker anyway, loser.’”

Yashiro observed us as he sipped his coffee while reading the back of a sugar packet. 

“Wow. Deep.”

“Thank you.”

We were at Café Nekonomicon, the only place in town that had halfway decent cappuccino and didn't cost you an entire week's worth of hard-earned Yen. Though sometimes a fat tabby cat planted itself on your lap uninvited.

“So, Tsukasa, have you thought about what you want to do after graduation?”

Sayuri’s question seemed to come out of nowhere, which was typical of her.

“Where’d that come from all of a sudden?”

“You know, now that we’re so close to graduation. What do you wanna do after?” she pressed. “Like, your plans. Your dreams. What do you want to be?”

The truth is, I wasn’t sure. My parents had drilled it into my head since I could remember. Engineering. Something practical, something stable. Their vision for my future had always been clear: get a degree in something technical, get a good job, and above all else, never, ever risk failure.

“I dunno. Haven’t really thought about it. I was thinking about engineering…”

Yashiro snorted into his coffee.

“You? An engineer?”

His snort quickly crept into full-blown laughter.

“Maybe they’ll let you fix their vending machines when they break down.”

“Yeah, thanks,” I said flatly.

Sayuri clapped her hands together.

“I think you’d look cute in one of those orange vests, Tsu-kun! Like, with the clipboard, directing traffic or something!”

“Just what I’ve always wanted to be… a road construction traffic controller.”

Sayuri giggled.

“OH!” She abruptly jumped up from her seat. “I just remembered something!”

Yashiro raised an eyebrow. “That’s never a good sign.”

She ignored him. “You guys aren’t doing anything today, right?”

“That depends, is this going to get us arrested?”

“Only if we get caught,” she winked.

Yashiro and I exchanged glances. 

Sayuri was already grabbing her coat. “It’s a bit of a walk, but it’s sooo worth it.”

“Care to tell us where you’re planning on taking us?” 

“That’s the point! It’s more fun if it’s a surprise...” 

“You said that last time, and we ended up getting chased by geese.”

“They were majestic.”

“They were not. They were violent.”

But it was too late. She was halfway to the door.

Yashiro grinned and stood up to follow her. “Better make sure she doesn’t get herself into trouble.”

“Wait… Hold on!” I started, but no one seemed to listen.

My head fell limp, realizing I was stuck with the bill again.

⊹ ▬ ▬ ⊹ ⊹ ▬ ▬ ▬ ⊹

Sayuri wasn’t kidding. It was a long walk. After about 30 minutes, the town gave way to winding hills and dirt paths. We trailed behind, and every now and then, she called out over her shoulder.

“Just a little further!”

She pointed. “It’s up on that hill. See?”

At a distance, it looked like a structure or building of some kind, half hidden behind tangled tree branches and overgrown foliage.

As we approached, it became clear. A massive iron dome.

Every inch of it was covered in rust and decay. It sagged in places where the metal had warped and buckled from what had to be decades of exposure to the elements. Fallen tree branches had punctured through the exterior, creating jagged holes where vines and debris had begun to crawl in.

When we finally reached the top of the hill, Sayuri threw her arms out dramatically and grinned.

“Ta-da! It’s an observatory!”

This is what she wanted to show us?

“You mean an abandoned building…” I said. 

“An abandoned observatory!”

“This doesn’t look safe, Sayuri.” 

“Nonsense! It’s perfectly safe. I’ve been here a gazillion times.”

I turned to Yashiro, hoping he would come to his senses and stop her. Instead, he gave me a shrug and tagged behind her.

The entrance to the observatory, if one could even call it that, wasn’t much of an entrance at all. A small hole in the exterior, barely wide enough for a human to squeeze through. The jagged edges of rusted metal looked like sharp teeth as if saying: “STOP. DANGER. DO NOT ENTER.”

But Sayuri didn’t hesitate.

She crouched down, ducked her head, and slipped through the hole in a practiced motion.

Yashiro was next. “See you inside, ’Kasa.”

Then my turn.

I held my breath, praying that I had gotten my tetanus shot. Then squeezed through the narrow opening in the wall.

As soon as I stepped inside, I instantly fell into a fit of coughing. The air was so thick with dust, mildew, and whatever else had been festering in here for the past half-century that your nostrils practically burned with every inhale.

The interior was just as corroded as the outside. Broken chairs and clipboards were littered all over the ground, and a toppled chalkboard lay crooked against the far wall, its surface still marked with faded equations and half-erased diagrams of constellations.

Sunlight filtered through the many cracks in the ceiling in hazy beams.

At the center of it all stood a colossal telescope. The lens pointed up at an opening in the dome above.

“Oh, yeah,” I muttered, still holding in a cough. “Definitely safe.”

Sayuri spun around, grinning ear to ear. “See? Isn’t it amazing?”

“It’s kinda like breathing in a construction site.”

Sayuri just shrugged. “Character-building.”

Sayuri wandered toward the telescope like a kid in a candy store, brushing dust off the side with the sleeve of her jacket.

“You know, they say this place was shut down after a landslide blocked the old trail. No one even bothered to clear it. Just… left it here.”

“Probably because it’s a deathtrap,” Yashiro replied, squinting at a precarious support beam.

I stayed quiet as I continued to look around. I had to admit, there was a beauty to it. The way the dust sort of danced in the patches of sunlight. It reminded me of childhood somehow.

“I used to come here a lot,” Sayuri said suddenly.

“Really?” I asked. “How’d you even find this place?”

She smiled. Her voice was barely above a whisper like she was letting me in on a secret. “Back in middle school, I got separated during a class trip. We were supposed to be touring the botanical garden, but I snuck off with a couple of friends.”

She stepped toward the telescope and pretended to look through it. “We stumbled on this dome. I thought it was some secret bunker or something.”

“It’s a pretty interesting place,” I replied.

“Yeah… the observatory’s on a hill, so you can see the whole town from up here. On nice days, we could spend all afternoon just… watching the world. People, animals, even the trees…"

Sayuri didn’t seem like the type to be introspective. I wanted to crack a joke but felt it wasn’t the time.

"...It’s funny how much you can learn just by watching. Sometimes we’d just lay on the floor, talking about silly things like what we’d do when we grew up, or which boy in our class was the cutest. But mostly, we’d just watch.”

And for a moment, she turned uncharacteristically wistful.

“I kept coming back after that… Even after we stopped talking. Even when just watching wasn't fun anymore.”

We stood there quietly for a bit. She looked up at the opening in the dome as if recollecting some faraway memory.

Then, as if nothing, her face lit up like a kid and her bubbly demeanor snapped right back.

She stuck her tongue out at me. “Guess I just liked to pretend I was the only one who knew it was here. It’s like my very own secret base!”

“If you ever wanna escape the school chaos, go up to the rooftop after class." she added. "No one ever goes up there. Too cliché, I guess. Their loss, I get the whole roof to myself!”

“Yeah, sure,” I said, recalling how terribly my first visit to the rooftop had gone.

Yashiro, who had been sitting in a chair tossing pebbles across the observatory, stood up and stretched his back. He rubbed his stomach.

“Maaan, I’m starving.”

“OH, when aren’t you starving, Yashi?” Sayuri shot back. “But now I’m getting hungry too. Guess we could go grab something.”

Yashiro clapped his hands together.

“There’s this izakaya next to the arcade that serves the best grilled squid you’ve ever eaten. I think they let in high schoolers too.”

Sayuri lit up.

“I want something sweet. Umm… OH! Taiyaki. I want taiyaki!”

“Alrighty, then. Let’s go.”

⊹ ▬ ▬ ⊹ ⊹ ▬ ▬ ▬ ⊹

The sun was beginning to dip below the horizon now, and the sounds of various nighttime animals could be heard through the trees. Chirps, croaks, and the occasional 'choo'  from something unidentifiable.

Sayuri hummed beside us as she led us down, and Yashiro slipped on wet leaves every few minutes.

By the time we got back, the shops had turned on their glowing neon signs. Weekend nightlife wasn’t the town’s strong suit, but there were still a couple of packed streets. Drunken salarymen stumbling home to their sexually frustrated wives, arrogant high schoolers loitering by vending machines shooting whistles at passing girls, and a few popular ramen joints that were well beyond fire-hazard packed. 

The little izakaya was nestled between a shuttered arcade and a Lawson. Sayuri’s eyes locked on the dessert place across the way and she gave us a dramatic wave.

“I’ll meet you guys in a sec! Don’t let Yashiro eat all the food!”

She jogged off into the crowd.

Yashiro sighed. “That’s not even a little fair.”

He turned to me. “I’ll go get us a spot. You comin’ or what?”

“I’ll be right there,” I replied. “I’m gonna go stretch my legs for a bit.”

I walked down the side of the street toward nowhere in particular. A cat darted between my legs and disappeared into a stack of crates in a nearby alley.

Then, I heard footsteps behind me. Quick ones.

Before I could turn, someone grabbed me by my collar and yanked me into the alley.

“What the—?”

I twisted around.

Minase?!

“What are you doing…?”

But she didn’t speak, only continued to pull me further away from the main street.

She was wearing a long, cream-colored coat over a white blouse, and dark jeans. It was the first time I'd ever seen her without her school uniform on.

And she was holding that purple notebook.

What could she possibly want with me now? I shifted uncomfortably. My pulse quickened just a little.

“I was hoping I’d run into you,” she said. “I didn’t want to do this at school.”

I cleared my throat.

“Uh, do what?”

“You’re Tsukasa, right?”

“Yeah… that’s me… What’s going on?”

“This is the notebook you picked up, right? A few days ago.”

“I promise, I didn’t tell anyone abou—”

“Just shut up for a second.”

She glanced over her shoulder, then leaned in just slightly. “But… you did open it, didn’t you?”

I hesitated.

She flipped to a page in the notebook and turned it toward me. “You didn’t—this wasn’t you, right?”

“What do you mean?”

“Just look.”

I looked.

There, on the last page, was a series of illegible rune-like symbols, repeated over and over. Some looked like geometric patterns like triangles and circles. Others looked like arrows and mathematical symbols. Based on the other entries I'd seen in her notebook, it didn’t seem like something she'd would write.

But I hadn’t written it either.

And I had no idea what it meant.

“I—what is that?”

“You’re telling me you didn’t write this?”

“No. I didn’t, I swear.”

For a moment, she just stared at me, as if trying to figure out if I was lying or not. Then she slammed the notebook shut.

“You really don’t know what this is, do you?”

“No, I don’t.”

“I’ve seen these symbols before.”

“What do you mean?”

Minase hesitated and bit her lip. “I read about stuff like this online… not just random things, like, real, in-depth stuff. There are people who study this kind of thing, and they’ve written about it. These sort of markings…”

A pause. Then: 

“I know this sounds crazy, but… I think I want to investigate this with you…”

Upon asking that, she looked away, as if it were embarrassing to her.

I swallowed, trying to process everything she’d just said.

“I can help you,” she added quietly. She was looking down, but there was an honesty in her voice.

And I didn’t know what to say.

On the one hand, she was completely insane… on the other hand, the most popular girl in school basically just asked me out on a date.

“Okay…” I said. 

Minase looked up. She didn’t smile, but her expression seemed to relax. She stepped back, slid the notebook into her bag, and turned to leave.

“Meet me Monday after school,” she said. “At the school library. Don’t be late.”

I stood there and watched as she walked off into the night.

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