16th Birthday
The toothbrush is already in his mouth when he sees it.
7:12 AM. May 2nd.
Sato Kei stands in the bathroom staring at the date on his phone screen with the particular blankness of someone whose brain is still buffering. The morning light comes through the frosted glass window the way it always does this time of year — thin and pale, like it hasn't quite committed to being daytime yet. The kind of light that makes everything feel slightly unreal. Slightly provisional.
He keeps brushing.
*Oh*, he thinks. *That's today.*
Not sad about it. Not excited. Just — oh. The way you might remember you left a book somewhere. A neutral fact. A thing that is true about the world that doesn't particularly change anything.
He spits. Rinses. Looks at himself in the mirror for a moment longer than necessary.
Sixteen.
His face looks exactly the same as fifteen. He's not sure what he expected. Some kind of visible shift, maybe. Some evidence of crossing over into something. But no — same eyes, same jaw, same slightly-too-long hair his mother keeps asking him to cut. He looks like a boy who woke up and brushed his teeth. Which is, he supposes, exactly what he is.
He picks up his phone.
Three notifications.
**Mom:** Good morning! Happy birthday sweetheart. Breakfast is ready, come before it gets cold. I made your favourite.
**Tanaka Ryuu:** happy birthday loser. you're buying snacks today. don't even try to argue
He almost smiles at that one. Almost.
He's about to set the phone face-down on the sink — his usual morning ritual, the world can wait until after breakfast — when a third notification slides across the top of the screen. A LINE message. A number he doesn't have saved.
**Unknown:** Good morning, Sato-kun! It's your birthday today right? 🎈 Did I get there first?
Kei stares at it.
The balloon emoji blinks up at him, cheerful and completely unbothered.
He reads it again. Then a third time, slowly, as if the meaning might change with repetition. The casual familiarity of it sits strangely — not rude, not strange exactly, just warm in a way he can't immediately account for. Like receiving a letter addressed to you in handwriting you don't recognise. Clearly meant for you. Clearly from someone who knows you. And yet.
He has absolutely no idea who this is.
He screenshots it. Closes it. Opens it again.
Sets the phone face-down on the sink.
Picks it back up.
Puts it in his pocket and goes to have breakfast.
His mother has made tamagoyaki cut into the shape of a star.
She has done this every birthday since he was four years old. When he was small he used to gasp like it was magic. Now he is sixteen and he sits down at the kitchen table and looks at the small yellow star on his plate and feels something he doesn't have a word for — something that lives in the same neighbourhood as gratitude but is quieter, more private. The kind of feeling you don't perform.
"You look half asleep," his mother says, setting a bowl of miso soup in front of him.
"I'm fine."
"You always say that."
"Because I'm always fine."
She gives him the look she has been giving him since he was approximately nine years old — the one that says *I know you better than you know yourself and one day you'll admit it* — and then turns back to the counter without pushing further. This is one of the things he appreciates most about her. She notices everything and chooses her moments carefully.
He eats. The kitchen television murmurs the morning news. Outside, the neighbour's wind chime makes its small, irregular music in the May breeze. The rice is good. The tamagoyaki is good. The morning sits around him, ordinary and unhurried.
His phone buzzes in his pocket.
He ignores it.
It buzzes again.
He puts his chopsticks down, pulls it out, looks at the screen under the table like a middle schooler.
**Unknown:** also i sit three seats from the window in your homeroom. in case you were wondering. which you probably were 🎈
Kei looks up.
His mother is humming to herself at the counter, rinsing something under the tap, completely unaware that her son is sitting at the breakfast table with a very strange expression on his face.
Three seats from the window.
He runs through the row in his head. Nakamura. Then the empty desk. Then—
Oh.
He puts the phone back in his pocket. Picks up his chopsticks. Stares at his star-shaped tamagoyaki for a moment.
Aoki Haru, he thinks. *Of course it is.*
He finishes his breakfast without tasting the rest of it.
---
The walk to school takes fourteen minutes on a good day and seventeen when he goes the long way, which he does when he wants to think. Today he goes the long way.
The neighbourhood is doing its morning thing around him — a woman walking a small round dog, a convenience store rolling up its shutters, two middle schoolers racing each other to the crossing and then slowing to a guilty shuffle when the light turns red. The sky above the rooftops is the particular shade of blue that only happens in early May, pale at the edges and deepening toward the centre. Clear. Unhurried.
Kei walks with his hands in his pockets and thinks about Aoki Haru.
Not extensively. Just — cataloguing. The way he does with most things. Facts arranged into something manageable.
Aoki Haru. Same homeroom, same grade. Sits three seats from the window. Kei has been successfully not making direct eye contact with him for approximately two and a half school terms, which he has not until this moment considered notable but now, walking the long way to school on his sixteenth birthday, is beginning to think might say something about him.
Not because Haru is unpleasant. The opposite, really. Haru is the kind of person who makes a room feel more inhabited just by walking into it. Easy with people in a way that looks effortless, though Kei has always suspected — in the detached, observational way he suspects things — that it probably isn't. People like that are usually working harder than they look. They're just working on the right things.
He remembered Kei's birthday.
Kei, who sits on the opposite side of the room. Kei, who has had probably four direct conversations with him in two and a half terms, none of them longer than a minute. Kei, who forgot his own birthday until 7:12 this morning.
The convenience store near the school gate is just opening. Without fully deciding to, Kei stops, goes in, buys a canned coffee he doesn't especially need. Stands outside for a moment in the morning sun, drinking it slowly, watching his school building sit there in the middle distance looking the same as it always does.
His phone buzzes one more time.
He looks at it.
*Unknown:* don't be weird about it, it's just a birthday 🎈
Kei stares at the message for a long moment.
Then, for the first time all morning, he almost laughs. Not quite. But almost — a small exhale through his nose, a slight loosening somewhere in the chest. Almost.
He finishes his canned coffee. Throws the can away. Straightens his bag on his shoulder.
"Don't be weird about it."
He walks through the school gate thinking that this is, without question, going to be a strange day.
He has no idea yet how much of an understatement that is.
