The Handbook

It was bound in clear plastic, and not a speck of dirt under or above the plastic layer. The cover was brown, a brown just as you would expect from any diary. Perhaps if you noticed very carefully, you could see the hints of age. The slight discoloration at the spine. The uneven posture of some pages from the side as they lay on top of other pages. Yet, it was only if you looked close enough. It was clear someone had loved it very much and maintained it very well. 

Ryuuji found it on the setup cart between a box of juice and a stack of name tags. The boy's bubbling curiosity won out over the part of him that knew better than to pick up things belonging to others. He knew within one page that he had found something holy. The margins were full. Whole sentences underlined, some of them twice. Little notes crammed into the white space in a small, furious hand, 'SEE APPENDIX B', and 'This is important', and once, heavily boxed, 'Do NOT skip this'. He held the book the way you would hold a relic that might crumble.

"Listen to this," he said. "No... everyone. Listen." 

He cleared his throat and read in the hushed voice of a man at a shrine. 

"The reading corner is the heart of our work. A child who is read to with patience will carry it the rest of their life."

He pressed the book to his chest.

"Do you guys understand what we are dealing with? This was written by a poet. Some gentle soul. Some tender, patient woman who has known great sorrow—" 

"It's nine in the morning," Ai said, dragging a folding table into place.

"—and great love. You cannot write like this without love, Ai. The prose breathes. Whoever she is, I would walk into the sea for her—"

"Ozaki wrote it."

Ryuuji stopped.

"...What?"

"Ozaki wrote the handbook." Ai didn't look up from the table. "Wrote it, printed it, laminated the nice copy himself. That's his personal one."

Ryuuji looked down at the book in his hands. He looked at it for a long moment, the way you'd look at a photograph that had just turned out to be of someone else.

"No," he said quietly.

"Yeah."

"No."

"Put it back before he—"

"Those are my notes."

Everyone turned. Ozaki stood in the doorway with a box of pencils and the expression of a man who has walked in on a burglary. He crossed the room, drew the handbook out of Ryuuji's frozen hands, and turned it over, checking it for damage the way a mother checks a dropped child.

"Appendix B is on read-aloud pacing," he informed the room, though no one had asked. "Nobody reads Appendix B. I put the most important material in Appendix B, precisely so that I would know who takes this seriously and who does not." He tucked the book under his arm, sniffed once, and left.

The silence held for a second.

"I... Wha?" Ryuuji stood with his jaw still open, his face a mix of emotions — surprise, betrayal and, admiration.

"Jobs, everyone, come on!" Ai cheered happily as she blocked everyone's vision of a confounded Ryuuji, and took the laminated chart out of her bag to see the day's schedule.

No one was watching the desk when Hinata set her bag down beside it and Ai herself didn't realize that Hinata had snuck up on her from one side. 

"You're doing six things at once," she said to Ai, warm and unhurried as the younger girl jumped a bit at the sudden appearance of the polite older girl.

"Why don't you give me the roster today? I would like to use the wonderful system you've created for us! You go be everywhere — I'll only tick the boxes so I don't take the fun out of it for you. Sounds good?"

"O— Oh... would you? You're a lifesaver, senpai!" 

Still a little surprised, but pleased after being praised, Ai pressed the pen into her hand with a beaming smile and was gone, already halfway across the room toward the next section.

Hinata clicked the pen once. Then she looked down at the chart, and read it, and began to think.

***

The rotation had scattered them but that also meant a fresh change of pace for everyone. Shelves was Hinata and Shizu, reading corner was Ryouta and Ryuuji and finally, setup was Futaba and Ai.

Ryouta had spent the whole walk over deciding, one more time, that today would be normal. He would say good morning to Futaba like a functioning person, and it would be fine, and the thing from last Saturday would shrink back down to the nothing that it should always have been.

He was still rehearsing the good morning when Futaba appeared in front of him with a cart.

"Oh, good, you're here. Settle this for us, would you — Ryuuji says the picture books go by author. They go by title, obviously, they're for six-year-olds, nobody's checking the author. Can you back me up on this?"

"...They do go by title," Ryouta said, still a little unsure.

"Thhhhank you! That's what I had been saying this entire time. I'll go tell Ryuuji — don't know if he will believe you agreed with me though." She was already wheeling past him. "When I said it, he looked at me like I'd insulted him." For a second, she stopped to look back over her shoulder at Ryouta, and with a very breezy grin said, "Reading corner's that way: The children await Ryouta-sensei's lessons."

And she was gone — light, easy, already three sentences deep into something with Shizu — and Ryouta was left holding the elaborate mental script he had stupidly spent all morning rehearsing.

He felt, absurdly, a little embarrassed. He had turned it into a whole thing in his head while Futaba had clearly filed it under nothing at all. With hop, skip and a beat, she was already over it like it never even happened, saving Ryouta the feeling of guilt and awkwardness.

'I'm such an idiot,' he told himself, almost laughing, and went to the corner feeling lighter than he had in a week.

At the same time, Ai found Ryuuji trying to teach a four-year-old to high-five, and losing on purpose so the boy could win.

"That's so stupid," she scoffed.

It left her before she could stop it — her habit of turning the adorable moments of Ryuuji Ito into snide remarks. But this time, she caught it. Bit down on the end of it. And in the half-second she had, rerouted it into her actual feelings instead.

"...But you're good with them," she said. "The kids... They trust you fast."

Ryuuji looked up, honestly surprised. "Yeah?"

"Yeah. It's—" And there it was, the sincerity, out in the daylight, and it was unbearable, and her ears went hot. "It's a normal amount of good. Average. Don't make it weird."

"Oho Miss Class President! You finally see my cool side, huh?"

"I take it back."

"You can't take it back, it's out, the tree gave its life for the handbook and now this—"

"I will personally fold you into the donation box."

But he was grinning, and it wasn't the performing grin. It was just a real one, pleased and unbothered. "You used to be way scarier, you know that?" he said, straightening a cushion in front of him. "First term, the first-years were all terrified of you. But you're—" he reached towards the cushion and landed on it "—you're fun, once you stop trying to bite my head off. It's nice. We're basically friends now."

He said it the way you'd mention the weather, because to him it was the weather, and without waiting for Ai's response, he'd already turned towards the boy while still laying on the cushions as a makeshift bed.

"...Right," Ai muttered to herself, a twinge of pain in her eyes. "Basically friends."

***

At half past ten, Ozaki found a boy standing on a chair.

"Off! Off! Off! Do you have any idea— these are not toys, this is a place of quiet, and if you split your head open on this floor, who do you imagine—"

The boy's face crumpled from the chin up.

On shelves, Hinata's hand slowed on a spine. She didn't turn around. She only went still, one book half-seated in its gap, watching the whole thing sideways without seeming to.

And in the corner, the heat came up the back of Ryouta's neck. Fast. Familiar. The old thing turning over behind the door, and the words already assembling themselves without him in his head — 'he's four, it's a chair —'

He set them down immediately.

He looked at the floor, took a deep breath in, and let Ai cross the room and take the situation apart gently. And when it was over, Ryouta was still standing where he'd been, jaw tight, hands loose at his sides, but knuckles still white, having said nothing at all.

He'd seen it coming this time. That was the difference. Last week it had come up under him like a wave; today he had felt the shape of it half a second early, and set his feet, and held.

On shelves, Hinata watched him not go off. She had been watching all morning for precisely something like this. She slid the book back into the shelf, deep in thought. 

'Not that way. Not anymore.'

Anger, he could see coming now. She would have to bring him something he had never once thought to brace against. She had to improvise a bit. Hinata excused herself as Shizu didn't even suspect anything while Hinata walked over to the desk where the roster was. She uncapped the pen which was on the desk, drew a small neat line through one name, wrote another above it, capped the pen, and set it down exactly parallel to the edge of the chart.

***

The last parents came at four, and the children went out yawning into the heat, and the long slow business of putting the day away began. 

Hinata picked up her end of the returns cart.

"It looks like it's just the two of us free," she said, as if she hadn't precisely planned that earlier. "Would you help me take these to the back?"

Ryouta took the other end without hesitation. After all, she was only asking for his help after the reading corner was done. 

They wheeled the cart down between the tall shelves, where the light came in low and gold and the noise of the front room fell away to nothing, and it was the natural route, more or less. It only took them past the desk because the desk was on the way, and the handbook only happened to be sitting there because Ozaki always left it squared in the same spot, and Hinata only happened to slow as they passed by it.

She stopped as Ryouta looked at her with a visible question mark on his face.

She picked the well-maintained handbook up and turned it over in her hands, unhurried, the way you'd pick up anything. Ozaki's careful book. Ozaki's careful baby.

"He'd have a heart attack," she said, mild, "if anything ever happened to this."

"Probably a real one."

"Mhmm."

She thumbed the cover open and shut, open and shut. Then she looked at him — and it was not the reading-corner smile, not the sorry-I'm-late smile, none of the ones he'd seen in a long time. The corner of her mouth went up. Something lit in her eyes, bright and daring and conspiratorial, the look of a kid at the top of a wall waving you up after her.

"We really shouldn't," she said softly.

And Ryouta looked at that, and something in his head matched Hinata's grin.

There was no heat in his neck this time. Nothing to be angry at, no one to stand in front of. Only a girl holding a forbidden book, looking at him like the two of them were the last two people on earth in on the same joke — and the voice in his head, the part of him that had never once had anything to do with rage, grinned in the dark and came out to meet her before he could decide to stop it.

The pen was in his hand. He didn't remember taking it from the desk.

He opened the book to the back, and in the margin beside a careful double-underline he drew a cat. Four lines and a scowl. Lopsided and furious and perfect.

The grin that broke across his face was not his careful grin. It was easy. It was alive. It was a little bit wicked at the corner, and it belonged to someone Hinata had known a long time ago.

"He's going to lose his mind," Ryouta said, delighted.

"He really is."

She said it warmly, and she was smiling, and to anyone watching they were only two friends over a small shared crime in the gold light. But she wasn't laughing with him. Behind the smile she had gone very still, and she was watching his face — not the cat, not the book, but his face — the way you watch a dying fire, holding your breath for a sudden spark to rise out of the dark.

It held for three whole seconds. Then he blinked.

She watched the spark go out. Watched him look down at the pen as though he couldn't think how it had got into his hand. Watched something close, quiet and final, behind his eyes — the grin folding away, the easiness going out of him, the careful mild nothing settling back over his face like a sheet over a table. By the time he set the pen down he was back to the older Ryouta.

"...We should put this back," he said.

"Of course."

She took the book from him, gently, and squared it back on the desk in exactly the place it had been, careful to leave no trace of either of them on it.

Three seconds. She'd had three whole seconds of him, and no one had gotten hurt, and for a moment she just stood there holding that like something breakable. She kept her face soft and her hands easy and let none of it show — but underneath it something had gone quiet and certain and a little bit frightened of how much she'd wanted those three seconds to last.

She would find her way back to them.

***

Ryouta was still confused at what had happened today as he walked back to his house with Ryuuji. The strange part—the part that worried at him the whole way home, that he turned over on the train and now again at his own door—was that it hadn't felt like the other times. He hadn't hurt anyone. He hadn't said a thing he'd have to bury. He had drawn a cat in a book and laughed, and it had felt good. Clean. Like coming up out of deep water for a breath he hadn't known he was holding.

And that was somehow worse than any of it. Guilt he understood. Guilt he knew what to do with. He did not know what to do with a door that had opened onto something that felt like relief.

Ryuuji was on the front steps, untying his laces, when he looked up to see Ryouta's face struck with a sudden, heavy guilt — one he knew Ryouta wouldn't share with him. He let his older brother walk up ahead of him, noticing his slowed movements and dazed expression.

Ryuuji sat on the front steps with one lace looped through his fingers and turned the day over in his mind. The roster. All day, the roster had put Ryouta right beside Ozaki. Whether it was reading corner or the shelves, right in the man's path, hour after hour after hour. And every time the jobs shuffled, every time a name moved, Hinata had been near it.

He frowned down at his shoe. It was nothing. Hinata was always helpful when it came to the club; she always did her tasks with due diligence, in an almost robotic way. Ai had handed her the roster in front of the whole club. 

There was nothing in it. He knew there was nothing in it.

Yet, he remembered a scene from earlier that day when they were leaving the library. He had glanced back through the glass doors into the emptying room, where Hinata stood at the desk in the last light of the dying sunset, tidying something that was already tidy—perfectly composed, perfectly kind, perfectly still. 

He had watched her a second too long. 

Then Shizu had come out asking whether he'd seen the spare key, and the discordant note in his mind vanished as though it had never sounded. He had laughed, got to his feet, and forgot entirely to remember it.

Now, sitting in the quiet chill of the evening, that forgotten note returned. It sounded louder this time. Out of tune.

He recalled the exact moment Ai had handed Hinata the roster. It hadn’t been an accident. Hinata had approached Ai, her movements so smooth they looked natural, but her eyes had been fixed entirely on the paperwork. She had volunteered for the scheduling before anyone else could speak. And later, at the library desk, she hadn't just been tidying. Her fingers had been tracing the edge of the handbook, her gaze fixated on the corner where Ryouta and the handbook had been forced to interact — not that Ryuuji knew what had happened in that corner, but something in his head told him, it was the reason behind Ryouta's heavy expression.

Ryuuji's hands went completely still on his shoelaces.

It wasn't a coincidence. The shifting names, the sudden room assignments, the calculated proximity — it wasn't a series of helpful gestures. It was a grid. A map she had drawn herself, placing Ryouta exactly where she wanted him to be, moving him like a piece on a board. 

Ryuuji suddenly felt a cold dread settle in his stomach. 

Ryouta hadn't found a door out. He had walked right into a trap Hinata quietly laid out today.

Ryuuji looked up at the front door where his brother had just vanished inside. With only two Saturdays left before the end of the library volunteer event, he realized with terrifying certainty that Hinata wasn't just helping the club. 

She was running out of time, and she was just getting started.