The Memory Between Us

Chapter 2: You Really Don't Remember Me?

Airi's homeroom teacher was a small, brisk woman named Ms. Handa who wrote *AKIYAMA AIRI* on the board in handwriting so neat it looked printed, then turned around and said, "New student. Be nice," as though that settled the matter of Airi's entire social life for the semester.

Twenty-eight faces looked at her. Airi had done this enough times in her life , three schools in six years, courtesy of her mother's career , that she'd developed a reliable strategy: small bow, brief introduction, sit down before anyone could ask a follow-up question.

"Akiyama Airi. I moved here from Yokohama. Nice to meet you."

She sat.

It worked, mostly. A few students kept glancing over during the morning announcements, the way new students always got looked at, like a piece of furniture that had been moved into a room and needed to be evaluated for fit. By second period the glancing had mostly stopped, which was its own kind of relief.

She didn't see Haruto until lunch.

She'd assumed, without really thinking about it, that he went to a different school , his uniform yesterday hadn't quite matched hers, or she'd thought it hadn't, until she saw him crossing the courtyard in the same navy blazer as half the boys around her, and understood that he must be a year ahead, different building, different schedule. Small school. It made sense that their paths hadn't crossed until now.

He saw her before she saw him. She could tell because by the time she noticed him, he was already walking over, tray in hand, with the specific unhurried confidence of someone who was allowed to walk anywhere he wanted.

"You survived homeroom," he said, sliding into the seat across from her without asking if it was free. "How many people mispronounced your name?"

"Two. One called me Ariki."

"Ariki." He tested it like he was trying it on. "That's almost a different person."

"I told her that. She looked personally wounded."

He laughed , an actual laugh, short and real, and for a second the strangeness of yesterday receded and he was just a boy at lunch, easy to talk to, not a stranger who'd looked at her like a ghost on a train platform. Airi found herself relaxing in a way she hadn't expected to.

Then a girl dropped into the seat beside her with the enthusiasm of someone claiming territory.

"Okay, so," the girl said, "you're the new girl, and you already know Shinagawa? That took you, what, one day?"

"We just met yesterday," Airi said.

"Sure." The girl grinned. She had short hair and the kind of face that seemed permanently on the verge of finding something funny. "I'm Mei. Nakamura Mei. I sit two seats behind you in homeroom, but you were doing the thing where new people don't make eye contact with anyone, so."

"I wasn't," Airi started, then reconsidered. "Okay, I was doing that a little."

"It's fine, everyone does it." Mei stole a piece of tempura off Haruto's tray without looking at him, an action so smooth it seemed rehearsed. "So how do you two actually know each other? Because Haruto doesn't usually just walk up to new people."

"We used to know each other," Haruto said. "When we were kids."

"Apparently," Airi added, because that was still the more accurate word.

Mei looked between them with obvious interest, the kind of interest that made Airi feel like a puzzle someone had just found half-assembled on a table.

"Apparently," Mei repeated. "That's a weird way to put it."

"It's a weird situation," Haruto said, and something in his voice made Mei's expression shift, just slightly , not backing off exactly, but recalibrating, the way you'd adjust your grip on something you realized was heavier than it looked.

"Okay," Mei said, mercifully, "I'm not going to interrogate you on day one. But I reserve the right to ask again later."

"Duly noted," Airi said, and meant it as a joke, though some small part of her actually hoped Mei would ask again. It might be easier to answer a stranger's blunt questions than to sit with her own unanswered ones.

---

The rest of lunch went easier than Airi expected. Mei talked fast and asked a lot of questions that weren't about Haruto , what club Airi was thinking of joining, whether she'd tried the yakisoba bread from the school store yet (mandatory, apparently), what she thought of the town so far. Haruto mostly listened, throwing in a comment here and there, and Airi noticed that he had a habit of watching her when he thought she wasn't paying attention , not in a way that felt uncomfortable, exactly, but in a way that felt like he was checking something against a memory, the way you'd glance at an old photograph and then at the person standing in front of you to see how well they matched.

She caught him doing it when Mei went to throw away her tray.

"You're doing it again," Airi said.

"Doing what?"

"Looking at me like I'm a math problem."

He had the decency to look slightly embarrassed. "Sorry. It's just," He stopped, seemed to consider several sentences and reject all of them, then settled on: "You eat the same way."

"The same way as what?"

"As you used to. You still push the vegetables to one side of the tray before you eat anything else."

Airi looked down at her tray. She had, in fact, done exactly that, without thinking about it, the way she'd done it her entire life without ever once considering it might be a detail someone could remember about her.

"That's oddly specific," she said.

"I have an oddly specific memory of you," Haruto said, and there was something almost rueful in how he said it, like he was aware the words sounded strange coming out of his mouth. "You hated tomatoes. You'd eat literally everything else on your plate and leave the tomatoes for last, like you were saving the worst for last on purpose so you could get it over with."

"I like tomatoes now," Airi said.

It came out simply, an ordinary correction, the kind of thing you'd say to anyone who'd gotten a small fact about you wrong. But Haruto went quiet in a way that made it clear the correction had landed somewhere it wasn't supposed to.

"Right," he said, after a beat. "People change, I guess."

"I guess," Airi said, though something about his tone made the ordinary phrase feel less ordinary than it should have. She watched him for a second, trying to read whatever had just crossed his face and gone.

"Can I ask you something?" she said.

"Sure."

"How well did we actually know each other? Because you keep saying things like we were close, but you also look like each new thing you learn about me is , I don't know. Surprising. In a way that seems bigger than 'oh, she likes tomatoes now.'"

Haruto turned his water bottle a quarter turn on the table, an idle gesture that Airi was starting to recognize as something he did when he was deciding how much to say.

"We were really close," he said finally. "For one summer, when we were eleven. You lived here for a few months , I don't actually know all the details, your family situation was kind of complicated even then , and during that time we were, like. Together constantly. Every day. You'd probably find it embarrassing how much time we spent together for two eleven-year-olds."

"That doesn't sound embarrassing. That sounds like being a kid."

"Sure. Except then you left, and I never heard from you again. No letter, no goodbye, nothing. Your family was just , gone. And I spent a long time being pretty angry about it, if I'm being honest." He said this lightly, like a fact rather than a wound, but Airi noticed he wasn't looking at her when he said it. "So finding out you don't remember any of it , that's a weird kind of correction too."

Airi sat with that for a second. It was more than he'd told her at any point since the train station, and it didn't fully make sense , not the leaving, not the silence, not the six years of nothing , but it also didn't feel like a lie. It felt like a piece of something much larger, cut carefully to avoid showing the rest of the shape.

"I didn't leave on purpose," she said slowly. "I mean , obviously I didn't decide anything, I was eleven. But I don't even remember deciding to forget. I just don't have it. Like a blank page where a chapter should be."

"That's what I don't get," Haruto said. "You don't remember any of it? Not the beach? Not the," He stopped himself, the sentence cut off cleanly, like he'd caught it before it could finish.

"Not the what?"

"Nothing. Never mind." He said it too quickly, and Airi noticed, filed it away next to the growing list of things he almost said and then didn't. "It doesn't matter right now."

"You keep saying that. That things don't matter."

"Some of them really don't."

"And the ones that do?"

He looked at her then, properly, the bell for the end of lunch already ringing somewhere behind them, students standing and gathering trays around them in a general current neither of them was moving with.

"Those," he said, "I'm still figuring out how to say."

---

That evening, Airi sat on the floor of her new room with boxes still half-unpacked around her, and pulled out her phone to text her mother, who was working a late shift at the hospital.

*Do we still have any pictures from when we lived here before? The ones in the closet box?*

The reply took almost twenty minutes, which was unusual for her mother, who normally answered texts within a minute even during shifts.

*Why do you ask?*

Not *sure, I'll dig them out.* Not *which pictures?* Just the question, careful and slightly too fast, the exact texture of a subject being redirected that Airi had apparently spent thirteen years learning to recognize without ever naming it.

*No reason,* Airi typed back. *Just curious about the old town.*

She didn't get a response after that. She sat with her phone in her lap for a while, looking at the two messages, and thought about a boy who remembered exactly how she used to eat tomatoes and a mother who couldn't answer a simple question about a box of photographs without a twenty-minute pause.

Somewhere in this town, six years ago, something had happened to her that she couldn't remember and apparently wasn't supposed to ask about.

She was starting to think she was going to ask about it anyway.