Minami Rin

The ceiling in my room was completely ordinary. White, flat, without a single mark on it. And I’d been staring at it for probably three hours now, sprawled on my bed like a beached starfish.

On my desk lay the empty wrapper of a melon bread, abandoned and forlorn.

My brain — utterly, hopelessly inexperienced when it came to dealing with strange girls — refused to process the events of the day.

She’d just wanted to help. She’d wanted to tell me my shirt was torn. And because of that, she’d stalked me across the entire school like some kind of Terminator programmed for extermination? Why couldn’t she have just yelled it out in the hallway? Why corner me in a dark alley just to shove bread into my hands and walk off into the sunset?!

“She is completely, one hundred percent weird,” I muttered into the empty room, rolling onto my side. “Fine, she’s not a demon. But her logic is beyond my comprehension.”

A perfect plan took shape in my head. Tomorrow morning, I’d walk up to her, man to man, calm and clear, and say: “Thanks for yesterday.” And then… then I’d establish a safe, polite distance. We’d just be classmates who nod to each other in the hallway sometimes. Yes. Exactly that. No more hiding in bathrooms, no more panic attacks.

The plan fell apart the exact moment I opened my eyes and looked at the alarm clock.

Thanks to spending half the night analyzing my desk-mate’s behavior, I’d overslept magnificently. My sprint to school could’ve qualified for the Olympics. I burst into the building, flew up the stairs, and threw open the classroom door with a bang loud enough to sound like a police raid.

“S-sorry I’m late!” I blurted, bowing so deeply I nearly folded in half in front of a startled math teacher.

Catching dozens of curious stares, I half-crouched my way to my seat in the third row. My heart was pounding somewhere around my ears. I was breathing hard as I laid my notebooks out on the desk.

She was already sitting to my left. As always, leaning back in her chair with that same careless posture.

Get it together, Sota, I ordered myself. The plan. The plan is still on. Just turn, and say thanks.

I took a deep breath, clenched my fists under the desk, and sharply turned my head to the left, mouth already opening in greeting.

“Than—” the word caught in my throat.

She was close. Unforgivably, terrifyingly close. It turned out that at the exact moment I turned toward her, she’d leaned in toward me. Her face was mere centimeters from mine.

I stopped breathing. My gaze sank into her dark, heavy eyes, watching me from beneath slightly narrowed lids.

What is she doing?! Why is she looking at me like that?! My brain instantly served up an entire buffet of worst-case scenarios. Was she mad I’d come in loudly and woken her up? Was she about to headbutt me, yakuza-movie style?

The pause stretched on. I felt a bead of cold sweat roll down my temple. And then her lips moved.

“I forgot my textbook,” she said in that flat, toneless voice of hers. “Share yours.”

“Huh?” was all I managed. “Y-yeah, sure…”

Before I could recover, a loud scraping sound cut through the room. She grabbed the edge of her desk and, in one motion, shoved it flush against mine. Wood met wood. There were no boundaries left.

She propped her elbow on the desk, rested her chin on her palm, and stared down at my open textbook. The distance between our shoulders had shrunk to almost nothing. And that’s when it hit me.

The smell.

She smelled unbelievably sweet. Not some cheap, sharp perfume. It was a thick, enveloping scent of vanilla and — I think — caramel. It flooded my entire personal space instantly, filled my lungs, and went straight to my head.

I felt my ears start to burn. The heat spread to my cheeks in seconds.

Damn whoever invented that perfume! I mentally howled, gripping the edges of my own desk. How am I supposed to concentrate on class?!

I sat there stiff as a board, terrified to move. One wrong shift and our elbows would touch. I kept sneaking glances at her, but she didn’t seem to notice my state at all. Her face stayed perfectly calm, her breathing even, her eyes drifting lazily over the lines of text. To her, this was just sharing a book. To me, it was an elaborate form of torture, testing my nervous system to its absolute limit.

The entire class period passed in some kind of vanilla-scented fog. I didn’t retain a single word the teacher said.

When the bell rang, she silently grabbed the edge of her desk and, with the same loud scrape, slid it back into place. The distance returned. I finally managed a normal breath for the first time in forty-five minutes.

She started lazily packing her pencil case into her bag.

Now or never, I thought. I had to close this loop, once and for all.

“Hey, listen…” I turned to her, trying to sound confident. “About yesterday, I wanted to say than—”

“Hold out your hand,” she cut me off mid-sentence, not even looking my way.

“Wh-what?” I stammered, thrown off again. Why did she need my hand?

But arguing with her never seemed worth the trouble. I hesitantly held out my hand, bracing for anything.

She pulled a black permanent marker out of her pocket, uncapped it, and, steadying my hand with her cool fingers, quickly wrote something right in the center of my palm.

She let go of my hand, capped the marker, and put it away.

I looked down at my palm. There, in neat, slightly angular characters, it read:

Minami Rin

I froze, blinking stupidly, my eyes darting between the black letters on my skin and the girl beside me. It slowly dawned on me. She hadn’t cursed me. She’d just… introduced herself.

“I’m—” my throat had suddenly gone dry. “Kuroki. Kuroki Sota.”

She looked at me with that heavy stare from beneath her bangs.

“Thanks, Kuroki,” Minami Rin replied calmly.

Then she simply turned back to the window, propped her cheek on her hand, and watched the clouds drift by, leaving me sitting there with a burning face and a name on my palm that, it seemed, no amount of soap in the world was ever going to wash off.