IN THE CLEAR SKY

chapter 3

It starts with the walk to school.

This is the thing Kei will think about later — not the notes, not the candy, not the lunch at the windowsill — but the walk. Because the walk is something he does every single day. Fourteen minutes on the direct route, seventeen on the long way. He has done it approximately four hundred times since starting at this school and it has never once been something he thought about. It was just a thing that happened between his front door and his desk. Background. Filler.

On Monday morning he catches himself wondering, somewhere around the third traffic light, whether Haru walks the same route.

He stops walking.

A woman with a pushchair has to navigate around him on the pavement and gives him a look.

He starts walking again.

It's a logical thing to wonder, he tells himself. Completely neutral. Geographic curiosity. He files it away and keeps moving and does not think about it for the rest of the walk, which takes considerable effort and therefore proves, if he were paying attention to what things prove, that it is not in fact a completely neutral thing to wonder.

He is not paying attention to what things prove. Not yet.

Monday passes. Tuesday passes.

On Wednesday there is a note on his desk when he arrives — before he gets there, which means Haru arrived even earlier than usual, which means he planned it, which is a thing Kei notices and then immediately decides not to examine.

The note says: the vending machine on the third floor is fixed. thought you should know. very exciting development.

Kei sits down. Gets out his notebook. Writes back: I don't use the third floor vending machine.

The reply comes back within the first ten minutes of homeroom: you might start. they restocked it with that peach drink you can never find anywhere. just saying.

Kei looks at this message.

He looks at it for quite a long time.

At some point between the caramel candy and this moment, Haru has apparently filed away the fact that Kei likes a specific peach drink that most vending machines don't carry. Kei cannot remember mentioning this. He cannot remember the context in which this would have come up. And yet here it is, evidence of someone paying a quality of attention to him that he finds — not uncomfortable, exactly. More like standing in a doorway with light coming through it and not being sure if you're allowed to walk toward it.

He writes back: how do you know I like that drink.

The reply: i told you. i pay attention 🎈

There is the balloon emoji again. Kei is beginning to develop a complicated relationship with that particular emoji.

He folds the note. Puts it in his desk drawer. There are three notes in there now. He is not thinking about the fact that there are three notes in there now.

On Thursday he takes the long way to school and turns a corner and nearly walks directly into Haru.

They both stop. There is a brief, graceless moment of mutual surprise — the kind that lasts only a second but feels longer — and then Haru's expression resolves into something warm and unhurried, like a window opening.

"Morning," Haru says.

"Morning," Kei says.

They stand on the pavement for a moment in the thin Thursday morning light. Around them the neighbourhood moves through its routine — a shop owner sweeping his step, a cat observing them from a wall with magnificent indifference, two salarymen passing in a rush of briefcases and coffee cups.

"You go the long way?" Haru asks.

"Sometimes."

"Me too." A beat. "When I want to think."

Kei looks at him. Haru looks back, easy and undemanding, and something about the morning light and the cat on the wall and the particular quality of the silence makes Kei say, before he can stop himself: "What do you think about."

Haru considers this with genuine seriousness, which Kei did not expect. He thought it would be deflected — something light, something funny. Instead Haru is quiet for a moment, looking at the middle distance, actually thinking about the question.

"Mostly just — whatever's unfinished," he says finally. "Things I didn't say. Things I want to do. The gap between them." He glances at Kei. "You?"

Kei, who this morning was thinking about whether Haru walked the same route, says: "The same, I suppose."

Haru smiles at that. Not the bright, public one. Something quieter.

They walk to school together.

They don't talk much. They don't need to. The silence between them has a quality Kei is not used to encountering — it doesn't ask anything of him. It doesn't need to be filled or managed or apologised for. It is just silence, the ordinary comfortable kind, the kind that means two people are fine being in the same space without performing anything.

Kei has been thinking for a long time that he prefers being alone because other people's company requires too much of him. He is beginning to suspect, uncomfortably, that this might have been less about other people in general and more about the specific other people he'd been spending time with.

He files this thought under do not examine and keeps walking.

Friday arrives and Kei realises, getting on the train after school, that he spent most of the day mildly aware of where Haru was in any given room.

Not staring. Nothing so obvious. Just — a low background awareness. The way you're aware of a window in a room, how the light from it shifts throughout the day without ever directly looking at it. Haru answering a question in class and Kei registering the sound of his voice before the words. Haru laughing at something across the classroom and Kei's attention moving toward it briefly, automatically, like a compass needle.

He stands on the train holding the overhead bar and stares at the moving dark of the tunnel outside the window and takes a quiet, careful inventory of the week.

Monday — wondering about the walk.

Tuesday — three notes in a desk drawer.

Wednesday — a conversation about a peach drink.

Thursday — seventeen minutes that didn't feel like seventeen minutes.

Friday — a compass needle.

He thinks: this is fine.

He thinks: this is completely fine. Haru is an interesting person. Interesting people are interesting to be around. This is a normal thing.

The train surfaces from the tunnel into the late Friday afternoon light, the city spreading out around it, rooftops and water towers and the thin straight lines of telephone wires crossing the sky. Kei watches it and feels the thing he's been not-examining all week press a little closer to the surface, the way something submerged will rise when you stop actively holding it down.

He pushes his headphones in. Turns the volume up.

Gets off at his stop. Walks home the direct way, fourteen minutes, not thinking.

Saturday morning he sleeps until nine, which he never does.

He wakes up slowly, the late light striping across his ceiling through the gap in the curtains, and lies there in the comfortable shapelessness of a morning with nowhere to be. His phone is on the nightstand. He does not check it immediately, which is normal. He lies there looking at the ceiling.

After approximately four minutes he checks it.

There is a LINE message from Haru, sent at seven forty-eight in the morning, which means Haru was apparently awake at seven forty-eight on a Saturday morning, which is its own kind of information.

Haru: found that peach drink in the vending machine near the park on Midori street. just thought you should know. have a good saturday 🎈

Kei reads it.

Reads it again.

He is in his bed, in his room, on a slow Saturday morning, and he is smiling. Not enormously. Just — the corners of his mouth, a small involuntary thing, present for approximately three seconds before he notices it and his expression goes back to neutral.

But it was there.

He puts the phone down. Stares at the ceiling.

Oh, he thinks. Not the way he thought it on his birthday — the flat, neutral, this-is-a-fact-about-the-world oh. A different kind. The kind that comes with a slight drop in the stomach. The kind that means something has been confirmed that you were hoping might not be.

Oh.

He lies there for a long time.

Outside his window the May morning goes about its business, bright and indifferent and clear. A bird somewhere. The distant sound of someone's weekend radio. The neighbour's wind chime, doing its small irregular thing.

He does not put his headphones in.

He just lies there and lets the thought sit in the room with him, unnamed but present, taking up the space it has apparently decided it is going to take up whether he likes it or not.

He doesn't like it.

He lies there anyway.