The Day Before

The week that followed had a different texture. Nothing dramatic. The same classes, the same hallways, the same table at lunch. But something had shifted in the small distances between things, the gap between passing in the hall and making eye contact, between sitting near someone and sitting next to them.

Aki and I had not talked again about what she had said on the stairs. By unspoken agreement we did not. But she smiled differently now when she looked at me, not bigger or warmer exactly, more like she had stopped editing it before I could see it. That was probably the right way to describe it.

I noticed Daiki giving me a look one morning that contained a full sentence without any words. I looked back at him until he grinned and turned away.

Homeroom. The morning light at that angle again, landing on my desk. Aki passed my desk on her way to her seat and tapped the edge of it with two fingers, just in passing.

"You're spacing out already?"

"I'm thinking."

"Dangerous."

I did not say anything but something must have changed in my face because she noticed and kept walking with a small smile.

I stared at the tree outside the window and thought about what thinking was actually costing me lately. Less than it used to. That was the genuine answer.

Lunch under the camphor tree. Aki had brought extra food again, claiming she had miscounted when she packed. Nobody pointed out that she had miscounted in exactly this direction for three weeks running. I accepted the extra rice ball without comment.

"You chew like an old man,"

Daiki said.

"At least I chew. You inhale."

Laughter from around the group. I was smiling before I had decided to. Haru caught me doing it and looked back at his food without saying anything, which was its own kind of remark.

The idea to go to the park came from Rui on the walk down to the station. The leaves were turning, he said, and there was a big park by the riverbank and they should go before winter made everything gray.

Haru said immediately that he was not doing karaoke.

"Nobody said karaoke,"

Rui said.

"I'm establishing that now, preemptively."

We planned for Saturday. I said I would come without needing to think about it for once.

Saturday was cold and bright in the kind of way autumn mornings are, the kind of cold that is actually pleasant if you are dressed for it. The park was wide and the trees were doing what autumn trees do and I will not describe it too much because I am already aware of how it sounds.

Aki had packed thermoses of tea and miso soup and sandwiches. Daiki had brought store-bought sweets and claimed he made them. Haru pulled a receipt out of his pocket silently and held it up without expression. Daiki took the receipt and put it in his own pocket.

We played cards on the picnic mat. Daiki tried to explain the rules of a game he was making up as he went. Rui brought candy from a shop none of us had heard of that tasted like a dare.

At some point Daiki chased a frisbee down a slope and nearly fell over in a way that was genuinely very funny. I laughed. A real one.

Aki looked at me when I did it.

"I like that,"

she said quietly.

I looked away.

The others went to the vending machines eventually and Aki sat with her arms around her knees and looked at the river.

"It's peaceful here."

"Yeah."

"You looked like you were having fun earlier. That laugh is rare."

I was quiet for a second.

"It was a nice afternoon,"

I said.

Her hand was resting on the blanket near mine. Not quite touching. Neither of us moved.

Then Daiki's voice came down the hill asking who wanted something terrible from the vending machine. The moment changed and we both stood slowly and went to see what he had found.

At home that night the house was quiet in the comfortable way it had lately started being. I rested on my bed and looked at the ceiling and thought about Aki's hand on the blanket, close but not touching, and how neither of us had moved.

I reached for my notebook and held it without opening it for a long time.

She looked at me like I was worth being here. That was the thing I kept coming back to. Not the framing of it, not what it meant in the long run. Just that. She looked at me like I was worth being here.

I opened the notebook. I wrote one line.

Tomorrow I will tell her.

I set the notebook on the desk and pulled the blanket up and let myself fall asleep without pulling the thought back out to examine it again. It stayed there on the page. I left it alone.