Chapter 6 — Interlude: Shizuka

The koi pond behind the science building was easy to miss. The path wound around a building nobody used anymore, and the water was small and still, half shaded under a sakura tree that had lost its blossoms weeks ago.

Shizuka's feet knew the way there without her thinking about it.

The koi swam in slow circles under the surface, orange and white, one black one always a little behind the rest. Light came through the branches and moved every time the wind blew.

"...Just like that day," she said, quiet, to no one, and let herself remember.

Three years ago.

The library was crowded that day. It was raining hard, and half the school had come inside instead of staying in the courtyard. Shizuka had her usual corner, book open, turning a page every few minutes whether she was really reading it or not.

The door banged open. A girl walked in soaked through, hair stuck to her forehead, laughing at something the two girls behind her said. Loud enough that a librarian looked up, then decided not to say anything.

Shizuka looked back down at her book.

Fifteen minutes later, a chair scraped out across from her.

"What are you reading?"

She looked up. The same girl had already dropped her bag on the table like the seat was hers.

"...It's a novel."

"Is it good?"

"I don't know yet. I'm halfway through." Shizuka hesitated, then added, because it seemed rude not to, "I'm Aoyama. Shizuka."

The girl grinned like that was the best thing she'd heard all day. "Sakuraba Sora. Nice to officially meet you, Aoyama-who's-halfway-through-a-book."

"That's not really a name."

"It's a very accurate name."

She pulled out her own textbook and just sat there reading, not saying anything else. Shizuka watched her for a second longer than she meant to, then went back to her page too.

Sora came back the next day.

"You don't have to sit here," Shizuka said, on the third day, not looking up.

"I know."

"I'm not very interesting to talk to."

"You haven't talked at all yet. That's kind of an early guess."

Shizuka didn't have an answer for that, so she didn't give one. Sora didn't seem to need one either. She just kept coming back, day after day, and Shizuka kept answering in as few words as she could, hoping she'd get bored and go find somewhere louder to be, the way everyone always had before.

She didn't.

It was a Tuesday, weeks later, when the notebook thing happened. Shizuka remembered it was a Tuesday because Tuesdays were the day two boys in her class liked to mutter things as they walked past her desk. Nothing anyone would ever report. Just small. All the time.

That Tuesday, one of them knocked her bag off the desk on his way to the pencil sharpener. Her notebook skidded across the floor, pages open.

He laughed. A few other people laughed too, the easy kind of laugh that doesn't cost anything.

Shizuka knelt down to pick up the pages, face hot, already telling herself the thing she always told herself. It doesn't matter. It's fine.

A hand grabbed the last page before hers did.

"You dropped this."

She looked up. Sora held the page out flat, completely calm, then stood and looked straight at the boy still laughing by the sharpener.

"Do that again and I'll tell everyone whose test you copied last week."

The room went dead quiet. The boy's face went red, but not the funny kind.

Nobody touched her desk again after that.

"You didn't have to do that," Shizuka said later, at the pond, because the library had felt too loud and she'd needed somewhere quiet, and Sora had just followed her there without asking, the way she seemed to follow everywhere.

"I know."

"Then why did you?"

Sora shrugged and sat down on the grass, watching the koi. "You looked like you needed someone to."

Shizuka waited for the rest of that sentence, the part where it turned into pity, into being handled like something fragile. It never came. Sora just sat there, elbows on her knees, watching the black koi fall behind the others, like she'd said something completely normal.

"The black one's slow," Shizuka said, mostly just to say something.

"He's not slow. He's dramatic. He's saving his big entrance."

"That's not how fish work."

"You don't know that."

They sat there a long time after that, not talking much. It was the first quiet in years that hadn't felt like something she needed to get away from.

After that, it just became a habit. Nobody planned it out loud.

Homework at the pond, most afternoons, Sora always finishing first and spending the extra time making fun of Shizuka's handwriting.

"Your Ts look like little hats."

"They do not."

"They're wearing tiny hats, Shizuka. Every single one."

A café near the station, most Saturdays, splitting one dessert because neither of them would admit a whole slice felt like too much to order alone.

"You get the strawberry half."

"I always get the strawberry half."

"That's how you know it's working."

Two years went by like that. Quiet. In all the small moments nobody thinks to remember until later, when it turns out that's where everything actually happened.

Then one afternoon at the pond, Sora said, "I'm joining student council next term."

Shizuka looked up from her textbook. "You'd be good at that."

"You should too."

"I'm not council material."

"You're exactly council material." Sora said it plain, like there was no room to argue. "You just don't know it yet."

Shizuka didn't believe her. Not that day. But she thought about the sentence on the walk home, and again that night, and again the next morning, until it stopped feeling like Sora's certainty and started feeling a little bit like her own.

She filled out the application with her hands not quite steady. Sat through an interview she was sure she'd fail. She never told anyone the real reason she was doing it, because it felt too small and too big at the same time to say out loud.

So I could stay close to you.

The koi pond looked exactly the same as it always did. The black one still a little behind the rest. The sakura tree still scattering broken light across the water.

Shizuka stood at the edge of it now, three years later. A council member. Not the girl eating alone in the library anymore, hoping nobody would ask why.

And somewhere across the school was the same girl who'd sat down across from her in the rain three years ago, still calling herself Sora, still the person Shizuka had spent two years quietly falling for.

She just didn't know yet that she'd fallen for two.