The Bus List

Training log updated.

Take a breath. The next test is already starting.

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By the time I got home, Iida had already sent the class a spreadsheet.

He called it a provisional attendance record. Mina called it a spreadsheet, which seemed more honest. It had twenty names, a column for morning confirmation, and another for equipment. The last column contained a note in bold: PLEASE DO NOT INTERPRET THIS DOCUMENT AS PERMISSION TO BOARD THE BUS WITHOUT YOUR HOMEROOM TEACHER.

I read that twice while standing in the entryway with one shoe off. It sounded exactly like Iida. It also sounded like somebody had handed him a job at lunch and he was trying to build a fence around every possible way to do it wrong.

My phone buzzed again. A short message from Jiro appeared under his link.

Do we actually need to bring anything, or is this all school stuff?

Iida answered before I could take off the other shoe. According to the schedule, the shared demonstration materials would travel with the class. Personal items remained our responsibility. He would clarify which materials were being issued in the morning.

Then Kaminari asked whether a phone charger counted as shared equipment. Then Mina asked if Kaminari counted as equipment. The replies arrived fast enough to push the actual question off the screen.

I leaned against the wall and felt my calf object. The walk from the station had been ordinary. My body kept offering its dissent anyway.

"Shoes," Mom called from the kitchen.

"One of them is off."

"Ambitious."

I put my phone in my pocket and finished the job. The smell of miso and toasted sesame reached the hall. For a minute I let it be dinner and not an exam I hadn't studied for.

Mom had the school notice open beside the cutting board. She'd circled the return window in blue pen. Not the departure time. Not the address. The return window.

"What time are you supposed to be back?" she asked.

"The bus is scheduled to return before the end of school. I should get home at the usual time. Maybe a little later if the train's slow."

"Should?"

"That's what the notice says."

She set down the knife. It wasn't a dramatic motion. That made it worse.

"I'm asking what time you'll let me know if that changes."

I looked at the circle she'd drawn. I had answered the timetable instead of the question.

"Before I leave campus," I said. "If the return runs late, I'll message as soon as we're allowed to use our phones."

"And if you don't know yet?"

"I'll tell you I don't know yet."

She nodded and turned back to the vegetables. That was all the approval I got, and it was enough. I went to wash my hands.

After dinner I spread my school things over the floor. The schedule named Basic Rescue Training and the U.S.J. I knew the facility by reputation: different environments under one enormous roof, built so mistakes could happen where someone had planned for them. I kept trying to imagine what we'd be asked to do there. I could picture water, rubble, maybe a fire zone. I could not picture myself going through all of it without checking my shoulder every few steps.

There was a little room left in my bag. I had offered Iida, during the noise after class, to help carry whatever the class needed. At the time it had sounded like an easy way to be useful. At home, lifting my bag with one hand made the strap pull across my shoulder and sent a bright, narrow complaint into my ribs.

I set it down.

The offer was still hanging somewhere in the group chat. No one had accepted it. That didn't make it less of an offer.

I opened Iida's sheet again. Under equipment, my row said volunteer, pending assignment. There was no actual object beside it. I stared at those three words long enough to feel ridiculous.

I typed, I should take my name off the carrying list.

Deleted it.

I typed, My shoulder is still giving me trouble, so I can't carry the shared case tomorrow. I can help check the contents before we leave.

The second sentence felt like bargaining. I deleted that too. We hadn't been told what the case held, or whether checking it would be our job. I sent the part I knew.

My shoulder is still giving me trouble. Please don't assign me to carry the shared equipment tomorrow.

I laid the phone face down before the reply came. For a few seconds the room was quiet except for the washing machine downstairs and a motorbike passing outside. Then the phone tapped against the floor.

Understood, Iida wrote. Thank you for telling me before I made the assignment.

He added another message almost immediately.

I should also correct the attendance column. Please bear with me.

The sheet refreshed. One cell changed from ABSENT to UNCONFIRMED. I had been so busy reading my own row that I hadn't seen it before. Bakugo's name sat beside the changed cell.

Iida called.

I considered letting it ring. That would have been funny for about three seconds and then another mark on his sheet.

"Hey, Iida."

"Midoriya. I'm sorry to interrupt your evening. I made an error."

"I saw the correction."

"Bakugo did not respond to the message requesting confirmation. I entered him as absent. That was inaccurate. He has not been absent from anything yet."

"He might not have read it."

"Precisely. Or he read it and declined to answer. Neither possibility permits the entry I made."

I sat on the edge of my bed. Iida sounded less worried about a wrong total than about what the word did to the person attached to it.

"You can ask him at school," I said.

"Yes. I will confirm everyone at school. The sheet is preparation, not attendance."

There was a small silence. Through the phone I could hear a pencil tap, pause, and tap once more.

"I thought the mark was a way to identify work left to do," he said. "But it reads as a judgment about a classmate who hasn't even arrived."

"Bakugo probably wouldn't like either version."

"That is not a defense of mine."

I smiled despite myself. "No, it isn't."

"I sent it to the whole class. I should correct it there as well."

"You already changed the cell."

"The cell does not tell them why."

He was right. I thought of the way an empty chair could become a story by the time it reached the back of a room. And Bakugo, of all people, would hate being turned into a problem for someone else's orderly morning.

"Keep it short," I said.

"I can do that."

He could. Whether he would was another question.

Iida cleared his throat. "About the equipment: thank you for being direct. I should have asked for a confirmed volunteer, not copied down an offer you made during a conversation."

"I did offer."

"You are allowed to revise an offer."

He said it like a rule he was still learning to apply to himself.

"Did they tell you what we're carrying?" I asked.

"Only that there will be a class materials case. I will ask Aizawa-sensei which items are ours to transport and which remain with staff. We should not assign a burden we cannot identify."

"That sounds more like him than guessing."

"I have been doing a considerable amount of guessing."

The confession landed awkwardly between us. Iida had raised his hand after a terrifying lunch and his classmates had given him a title. The title didn't tell him what to do with a phone full of unanswered messages at nine at night.

"You're checking," I said. "That's different."

"I would like it to be."

We ended the call before either of us could turn that into a speech.

I kept the sheet open while I folded my uniform jacket. New messages came in. Iida posted to the group that his earlier absent mark was wrong; no one would be recorded absent on the basis of a message reply. Morning attendance would be taken in person and checked again when the class boarded. It was four sentences. He had managed to keep it short.

Bakugo did not reply. That seemed appropriate.

Jiro sent a thumbs-up under the original equipment question, then asked again whether students had to bring anything beyond their own things. Iida answered that he'd ask Aizawa in the morning. Momo added that she would be there to help confirm the class materials before departure. No inventory list appeared. No one volunteered to smuggle an entire rescue facility into a school bus.

My phone rang again. This time it was Uraraka.

"Is he okay?" she asked as soon as I picked up.

"I think so. Why?"

"Four sentences. That must have hurt."

"He survived."

She laughed. I sat back against the bedframe, careful of the shoulder. Somewhere in her room I heard a zipper close.

"You took your name off the carrying list," she said.

I looked at my bag. "Yeah."

"Good."

It came out so quickly that I had nothing ready to say.

"I didn't ask you to carry it," she added. "I just saw your name there and thought you might be trying to make tomorrow harder."

"I thought it would be light."

"You didn't know what it was."

"Apparently that's a theme tonight."

"Maybe school trips are made of paperwork and guessing."

"We could put that on the brochure."

She laughed again, softer this time. Then she asked what I thought the U.S.J. would be like. I told her what I'd heard: zones, rescue scenarios, Thirteen teaching. She hoped we'd get to work near the water. I said I hoped the water stayed where it belonged. Neither of us was making a plan. It was nice to talk about tomorrow as something we would find out together.

When we hung up, Iida had made one final update. The equipment column no longer named me. It didn't name Momo, either. It said, Assignment after staff confirmation. Beside attendance, every student was marked Expected. Below the names he'd added a note: verbal count at boarding; repeat count at arrival.

Twenty names on a screen. I had spent enough time looking at lists to know how satisfying a complete column could feel. It was more useful to know where its edges were. The list could tell Iida whom to ask for. It couldn't make anyone answer, couldn't lift a case for me, couldn't get us home on time because Mom had circled a box in blue.

I put my own bag by the door. The strap lay flat against the fabric. In the kitchen, Mom called that the rice cooker was off and asked whether I needed anything before she went to bed.

"No," I said, then corrected myself. "Could you remind me to send the return-time message tomorrow?"

"I can ask," she said. "You'll have to send it."

"Fair."

I turned the desk lamp off. The sheet glowed once more when I checked my phone, still open to the same twenty names. I closed it and set the phone where I could reach it in the morning.

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