I’m ankle-deep in rainwater at the kerb, cold seeping through my shoes, the gutter running faithfully.

The pocket watch at my belt keeps up its tireless vibration until the street clocks start labouring toward :57, :58, the place where the ordinary starts to slip.

Three Shadows squelch together by the dumpster where cardboard has broken down into pulp.

“Don’t look twice,” I tell myself. It passes for prayer.

I flip the watch open with my thumb. The face is mostly wrecked now, yet the minute hand is pristine. I ease it into place. 00:41. Slow. Slower. The needle trembles. I angle the watch toward the grate. “You belong there.”

The vibration steadies. The water decides to be water. The first Shadow stretches toward the drain the way a string stretches when you tighten it, thins, and threads itself down with a sound like dry rice spilling from a torn bag.

00:42. I nudge the stem and feel the tiny click as the hand jumps. I lift the watch and point it at the nearest streetlight, the bulb whining on its last bit of current. “You—there.”

The light takes the minute like a toll. The second Shadow jerks up the pole, tries to become a moth, fails, and breaks apart into the electrical noise until its laugh has nowhere to land.

00:43. I keep my voice even. “You are recorded pain.”

Recorded is a word I can work with: a latch, a stamp, a box that closes. The third Shadow shudders, spins once like a dog circling its grief, and then collapses into the ledger I keep in the soft space between breath and thought. The alley looks lighter by the width of a sigh. My hands still shake. The minute hand settles back into its slow, awful orbit, quiet again the way a blade goes quiet when you stop moving it.

I swallow rain. It tastes like coins and weekend cigarettes, like coffee I can smell three blocks away and won’t touch. The east is bruising into dawn. I have forty minutes before homeroom.

I hunt before school, between periods, and after dusk. In the middle, I pretend to be a girl. There are rules. I keep them because if I don’t carve them into myself, the city will do it instead.

If a door behaves, use it. If it won’t, place it until it remembers its job. When the seam goes noon-bright and turns everything into errands, keep your pockets empty of purpose. Carry exact change. Wear shoes that don’t squeak. Clamp down on the scream until the sound forgets your name.

The bus brakes at the corner and lets out a tired exhale. I tell the alley we’re done. The alley agrees. I snap the pocket watch shut and tuck it under the knot of my belt, where it can keep to itself without pointing anything out. My knuckles are dusted with chalk—leftovers from a tiny calendar I drew on a dumpster lid behind the clinic at midnight. My nails hold onto black grit, like the night wants a souvenir.

Morning bus. The doors complain open, and the city pours people inside on a timetable nobody chose and everybody obeys. Office workers with ties already loosened. Students with bags held like shields. An old woman with a grocery tote full of leeks that keep trying to behave like weapons.

I take the second seat from the back on the left, the one that pretends it isn’t a choice. The window is cold against my temple. Outside, puddles replay the same car again and again, like they never learned there were other possibilities.

The bus lurches. The hanging straps sway like slow metronomes. Someone’s earbud leaks tinny drums; someone else’s phone rattles with a game that believes in points. The air tastes like yesterday’s rain and this morning’s impatience.

Above the driver, the digital display blinks stop names in orange. For a second it hiccups into something that isn’t a name:

NEXT: 08:13 08:13 08:13

The numbers jitter, trying to stack, trying to be more than one minute at once. The pocket watch at my belt prods under my jacket; inside, the minute hand isn’t singing yet, only tapping against the glass like it’s impatient.

I stand as if I’m changing seats. Slide my hand along the overhead rail. Let my thumb skim the metal like I need balance. The bus skin answers—bored, hungry, mostly bored.

“You get one,” I think at it. Not quite words. “One. The rest belong to getting people to work on time.”

The display coughs, then corrects:

NEXT: KITA-…

A salaryman in the middle rows lets out a breath like he’s been holding it without knowing. The kid across the aisle stops drumming his heels. The bus decides, for this stretch, to be transport instead of an opening.

At the next stop, more uniforms climb aboard. A girl with a violin case, a boy with track shoes looped over his shoulder, two younger kids with matching backpacks that still believe in dinosaurs. They talk about test scores and limited-time snacks. No one mentions the name that almost wasn’t a name.

I keep my gaze on the window. The city is fully awake now. I can feel it under the asphalt, rubbing minutes together.

School smells like formaldehyde from the science wing, bleach from the janitor’s cart, and sweet bread from a bake sale flyer cancelled by a fire that never happened. I’m one minute early for first bell. My wet hair pretends it’s rain and not sweat. Kaede takes roll in a voice that fits the room too well, as if the room learned its shape from her. Hiroyuki—Mr D’Accardi, temporary poetry—erases a board that doesn’t want to forget. His cuff hides every star as if ink can be trained. Isleen doesn’t enter. Doors behave for her from across the hall; she stays just out of sight like weather stays outside a window.

I sit. Every freckle I used to count for luck feels colder than yesterday. The pear-blossom soda memory won’t warm when I press at it; the sweetness stays, obedient and flat, and the fizz refuses to come back. The ten-minute hole is widening by habit if not by measure. A boy I don’t know laughs at something on his phone, and for a second I hate him so completely it scares me back into my own body. I tuck my hands under the desk until the shaking can pass for a pulse.

Hiroyuki asks us to write a line about “a minute you would keep if you could.” He doesn’t look at me when he says it. He’s immaculate, edges softened by exhaustion he refuses to show. There’s the faint bite of ink in the air around him, like a storm has been here and left its trace. I won’t write the train. I won’t teach the hole what shape it wants.

Between periods, I cut through the covered walkway that funnels wind like a throat. A small kernel crouches beneath the pop machine—only a puddle with teeth. I look once. I don’t look again. The pocket watch at my belt starts to whine; the minute hand inside scrapes softly at the glass. Down the hall, a wall clock drags its second hand like it’s sore.

I set my thumb to the seam: :57. :58. :59.

Then I point. “You are 00:01 tomorrow; you have no business here.”

The puddle smooths into a gum wrapper with nothing under it. The wrapper has a cartoon peach grinning. I step on it. My heel slips. I don’t fall.

By lunch, a rumour about a gas leak replaces a rumour about missing children, which replaced a rumour about a power surge. The cafeteria fries something that used to be potatoes into a shape that doesn’t need a botanist to name it. Masae lifts a chocolate milk in my direction; I nod, drink half, hand it back. She smiles like we’ve agreed on friendship, not triage. When she leaves, Wren is suddenly in her chair, chewing a receipt that tastes like fig and ink, muttering, “Bad paper,” like she missed a better batch. She slides a Polaroid under my tray without breaking eye contact. I don’t flip it. If I don’t look, it can’t become a promise.

I take my corner table: window on the parking lot, the field, and three exits. Two if I’m honest; one if the Shadows decide the ceiling is a door. The pocket watch settles into a low, sulky vibration. Lunch is never dramatic enough for it.

Everything has felt smaller since the ferry. The cafeteria, the sky, the space between tables where Juniper should still be sitting, kicking my ankle because I forgot to eat again. The city keeps acting like nothing happened.

Masae arrives. Her tray lands across from mine with a soft plastic slap: curry, extra rice, milk carton with the straw stabbed in at a perfect angle. She sits with cadet-straight posture, shoulders squared by drills she’s been taking too seriously.

“You look like you ate a maths test,” she says, eyeing my untouched rice. “And then the maths test fought back.”

“I didn’t revise for the part where the gas leak rumour migrates,” I say. “Maybe they’ll grade on a curve.”

“They only curve for fire drills and midterms,” she replies. “Not whatever this is.”

She lines up two energy gels beside my chopsticks as if she’s deploying supplies. Citrus, coffee. Today’s lineup.

“You’re shaking,” she adds, quieter.

“I’m fine,” I lie. “Lab went long.”

She doesn’t believe me. She does the kind thing anyway: pushes the coffee gel closer. “Eat. Or drink this sludge that pretends to be coffee. I’m not letting you evaporate on my watch.”

I tear the foil with my teeth. It tastes like someone’s idea of espresso translated three times. The pocket watch gives a brief, satisfied tick, as if it enjoys being right.

Later, Hiroyuki passes me in the corridor and murmurs, “Where should I stand?” like we’re discussing seating at a show and not a city that eats minutes.

“I’ll call,” I tell him, and he accepts it by not arguing—he rearranges his plan around my refusal as if the universe owes him courtesy.

Isleen holds the doors the way a shoreline holds the sea. She doesn’t have to touch anything. Hinges remember their manners when she’s near.

After last bell, the sky is thin and bright in a way that threatens weather. I take the long route. The sentō isn’t a home; it’s a border with tiles and rules that sometimes stick. On a corner, a convenience store clerk props the door with an umbrella; the umbrella tries to become a spine. I place a minute—:03 for breath—and the door behaves. The clerk smiles at nothing in particular. People are good at gratitude when they can’t see what it’s aimed at.

Evening hunts prefer places where light and water can gossip. River stairs smell of moss and old beer. A kernel worries at the seam where stone meets water, gnawing at the white line like it’s hungry for language. I take a stub of chalk and write the smallest schedule I can.

:01 ambulances
:02 doors
:03 breath
:04 stillness

The kernel tastes the words and decides it doesn’t like them. I add, softer, “:05 belongs to you. Tomorrow.” It lets go of the now the way a mosquito gives up a vein when you wipe it away.

When I open my hand, chalk has worked into my life line and left a pale mark. Chalk dust under nails. Receipts in gutters. Buses behaving like old oxen. Vending-machine light pretending to be moon. These are my saints. These are what answer when I ask.

Hiroyuki texts, Stand where? and I pocket the phone without replying. If I give him places, he will hold them. If he holds them, I will use him. If I use him, I will owe him. I can’t afford that ledger today. “I’ll call,” I repeat to the not-quite-night. The answer tastes like iron and apology. I keep it anyway.

The minute hand gets restless again near :57. It likes the boundary, the hinge between one hour and the next. It sits half-drawn from the watch at my belt—needle exposed, face turned inward. If I tuck it away fully, it sulks. If I wear it on my wrist, it feels like a promise I can’t keep. So I keep it here: a dangerous thought pressed to my hip. When I touch the needle, it’s cool. When I point it, it’s final. I try to live in the first state and keep failing into the second.

A cat scolds me from the shrine steps. Tail lashing. Like it knows I’m stealing the city from the story it wants to tell about itself. I bow to it like we’re colleagues. The cat accepts the respect and slips through a gate that wasn’t open a second ago. Somewhere I can’t see, Isleen’s attention passes over the street, and a door that wanted to stick forgets the idea in time to swing for a woman carrying groceries.

I don’t go home. I go where the vibration is, where the errand-gravity pulls at ankles. The arcade on Third insists on being morning even at night. Its bathroom mirror still thinks it’s a window and needs the lesson again. Its prize claws close around air and call it victory. I chalk a small hour above a stall, whisper the rules to the tiles, and leave before the lights remember I’m real.

Back outside, a bus heaves to the curb and lets out a sound like it nearly didn’t make it. The driver scratches his cheek, checks the rearview as if expecting to see someone he can’t name, then shrugs at the ordinary and pulls away. I flatten my palm over the pocket watch beneath my shirt. Cool glass against skin; inside, the minute hand taps at its hinge, eager, impatient.

“Not yet,” I think. “You don’t get this one.”

It doesn’t answer. It doesn’t need to. It’s a clock. I’m the mouth. Between us, we keep swallowing minutes I can’t taste.

A missing-cat flyer on a utility pole curls into a fist. I smooth it. One fingertip freckle I used to have fades to almost nothing, like the paper asked a price for staying kind. The pear-blossom soda memory ticks again, faint and cooling. I breathe. I list the saints—chalk, door, bus, cat—until I can breathe without counting.

Night sketches itself in with a blunt pencil. I have a window between the last train and the first.

I open my ledger to the dark and start a new page.

Errands come stacked like trays: you take one, and another settles into your hands. Night keeps its ledger open; day keeps the counter warm.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Train underpass. Rain from earlier has learned to be a film instead of a fall. The crosswalk stripes ripple as if paint can remember rivers. Cars hiss by overhead, ocean with headlights. A puddle nests in the zebra, shallow and patient, mouthing at shoe soles as commuters clip past. It likes ankles; it loves hesitation.

I kneel on gritty concrete, the pocket watch at my belt knocking once against my hip as if offended by the gravel. Inside, the minute hand hums against the glass, a thin, eager wire; I count breath like a rosary. The stripes pulse in and out of alignment, white chewing into black. The puddle shows me a girl who isn’t here yet, backpack bandaged in cartoon cherries, stepping light and getting swallowed.

I set my thumb to the glass, find the needle through it. “Eleven fifty-nine,” I say, softly. The hum perks its ears.

“Eleven fifty-nine.” The puddle shivers, as if a breeze remembered her.

“Eleven fifty-nine.” The third time takes. The paint stops rippling and acts like paint again. The water loses its interest like a moth losing dust; it dulls, retreats, and becomes only wet. A train sighs above like someone disappointed the show ended without fireworks. I wipe my hands down my skirt and leave black grit on navy blue. Receipts in the gutter breed in the current, pale fish with barcodes for scales. Koi decals on the underpass pillar twitch once, then behave.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Hospital dumpster bay. Metal taste blooms early, iron on my tongue two blocks away, a tell I can’t unlearn. The bay is a mouth in a building’s jaw. Gloves and masks sleep in stacks, a soft cemetery of the things that kept breath from touching breath. Behind them, something chews—jaw-shaped, papers stringing from its teeth like kelp. Pathology forms disappear a line at a time; diagnoses thin as if disease can be starved by paperwork. It eats the word benign and saves malignant for dessert.

There’s a schedule in my pocket, printed from a nurse’s station when no one looked; trash pickup’s at 5:10. The pocket watch at my belt knocks once against my hip as I move, minute hand already ticking faster, eager as a match head. I drag a fingertip over the glass instead of the metal, feel the faint, insect hum of the hand beneath. I bargain ten minutes with a clock that never learned charity.

“Five,” I tell the bay. “You’re done at five.”

The kernel rears as if to argue. I tap the clipboard I stole the schedule from, a cheap plastic green that has never lost an argument in its life. The watch buzzes at my belt, minute hand stuttering against its track like it wants to overwrite the printout.

“Early,” I say. The word lands like a stamp.

The chewing slows. Papers sag half-out of its teeth. The hum at my belt and the compressors’ throb underneath the building fall into a grudging unison, like two machines synchronising under protest.

At 5:00, a truck shudders onto the curb as if a giant, out of breath, shoved it there. Two men in uniforms talk about baseball and collapse the night into bags that sigh. The kernel starves with a sulky rattle. I watch it not die until the bay goes back to being a hole things are supposed to disappear into.

A nurse by the side door lights a cigarette and thanks the automatic light for coming on. I taste iron again; a nosebleed curls warm over my lip, polite, inevitable. I tilt my head and let it choose the sidewalk, press tissue to the leak, thumb the watch once in apology, keep moving.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Rooftop shrine. There’s a ladder that rusted itself into mercy behind the pharmacy. I climb until my knees ache and my lungs hiss. The roof’s black pebbles move underfoot like a slow school of fish. The shrine is a neighbourhood thing: a sake bottle with its label bubbled, a weathered fox, a line of paper cranes hooked to twine. The cranes blink, not as birds but as paper deciding whether to crease into something with a mouth. A crane winks one eye out of sequence, and the line sags like an eyelid.

I touch the twine and it thrums. Words help. They aren’t spells; they’re leashes.

“Stay,” I tell the first knot, and retie its slack into intent.

“Close,” I tell the second, and fold it tighter, thumbnail cracking the paper’s habit back into a bird’s memory.

“Remember,” I tell the third, and its paper brightens the way old bones do when someone bothers to polish them on a festival morning.

The cranes stop blinking wrong. A wind that never existed ebbs, taking with it the suggestion that the fox might speak. I pour the thimble of cheap sake that lives under the eave, and each drop stands taller than it ought—tiny menhirs of gratitude. My hands tremble when I tie the last verb-string; it’s small and embarrassing, a shake that doesn’t belong to the weather. The tissue at my nose is pink and useless; I use a fresh one, breathe through my mouth, and blame the altitude for the way the roofline tries to skate sideways when I stand.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Arcade bathroom. Lights vote for day even at midnight. The machines whir their bright lies. In the back hallway, the mirror insists it is a window; nobody taught it humility. It opens on a black stairwell that descends and descends and does not promise a landing, just a thin rail of light along the steps, courteous as an usher at the last movie you ever see. I don’t name where it goes; names are doors, and this city already has too many that want promotions.

A girl stands at the sink, hands on porcelain, mascara in commas under her eyes, mouth set to “don’t.” Her backpack hangs off one shoulder like it has given up arguing. She leans forward, just a little too far, the way you do when you’ve already decided you’re done and are only negotiating the details. Her reflection steps back. The mirror smiles without teeth and offers her the stair like a dare.

She is tired of boys, tired of fathers who are always late, tired of grades and group chats and a body that keeps insisting on waking up. Mostly, she is tired of being the one who stays. The window smells like sleep in a room before anyone moves in, like a promise of down instead of forward. One step, and she won’t have to pick a college or a fight or a future. One step and the stairs will do the rest.

I don’t touch her. Touch changes ledger lines I haven’t earned.

I unclip the pocket watch from my belt and set it gently on the tile, brass kissing cold. Under the glass, the minute hand twitches, eager, tapping little circles against its hours. Two minutes is a lot; two minutes of sleep is a feast. I thumb the case open and roll the hand forward with my nail, feel the hum climb into my bones. It’s like marrow unspooling into someone else’s future, thin and invisible and very, very real.

“Two minutes from me,” I tell the watch, the mirror, whoever is listening. “Two for her.”

The window ripples. The stairwell blurs, the drop stretching and then snapping back like an elastic band. For a second, the mirror shows itself its own face, briefly annoyed to discover it still has one. Her reflection obeys physics again: no stairwell, no rail of light, just a girl and a sink and a red EXIT sign sulking in the corner.

She blinks as if someone shook her awake. Sees only herself, blotchy and mascara-streaked, not a clean fall out of the world. Misery floods back into her eyes, heavy, human, and stubborn. She curses at her eyeliner, not at gravity, says “Get a grip” to the girl in the glass in the exact tone you use when you really mean don’t die yet. She leaves with a tissue and a blister pack of gum, footsteps loud and ordinary on the fake tile.

When she’s gone, the mirror slides one last inch toward being a window and then remembers glass. The black stairwell folds up behind its own reflection like a bad idea caught in the act.

I lean against the wall until the floor chooses to be still under my shoes. The tremor in my hands writes its name in the paper towel lint clinging to my fingers. The watch at my belt ticks smugly, minute hand right where it thinks it belongs, like it didn’t just loan out a little of my future.

I saved a stranger from the stairs. I don’t know if that was kindness or theft. She wanted out badly enough to step toward a fall with no bottom; I rehearse my own exits every night and then stay because the work isn’t finished and the city won’t let me clock out. Did I steal her choice, or buy her time she never asked for?

I don’t look at the bathroom clock; I know what it will say to me with no numbers at all.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Errands of the day. Morning pulls its uniform on crooked and pretends the stain isn’t there. I’m outside the bakery before the first pan hits the rack. Receipts breed in the gutter like minnows; Wren has been here, possible as pollen, impossible to ban. I pick one up: three yen off for a bag of sugar, code smudged by fig-sweet.

The koi painted on the bakery door glass swim slow without water, tails writing cursive into nothing. I unclip the pocket watch from my belt, thumb the case open just enough to feel the minute hand’s tick lean toward mischief, then press the flat of the watch face lightly to the lock.

“Work,” I murmur.

The hum inside the metal aligns. The fish stop writing and turn decorative again, scales settling into paint. Inside, the baker hums a tune that doesn’t have verses and smiles at the oven like it is a niece that just learned to clap.

At the corner convenience store, a boy buys canned coffee and thanks the streetlight for changing on time. He doesn’t see me; he thanks the light. Gratitude lands where it can. My mouth tastes like iron and there’s no blood this time, just the rumour of it, the taste arriving early like a tap rehearing a song before it plays.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Noon. The errand gravity hits around lunch, when all the city’s small purposes yank at their leashes. Packages insist on arriving, delivery trucks dream of shortcuts, and crosswalks want choreography. In the post office, the ticket machine dispenses numbers that never existed. A woman in a yellow raincoat takes A56 and is called to B17 and decides the alphabet has forgiven her. I place :02 to the doors and they behave. I place :03 to breath for the one clerk who holds it too long when he stamps. I place nothing else because noon eats anything you feed it and calls it a snack.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Department store escalator. The kind that pretends to be helpful, silver teeth lifting people one floor closer to the things they think might save them. The sign at the base says PLEASE HOLD THE HANDRAIL in three languages and one warning the city wrote itself: the little stick figure on the sticker has no face.

The escalator hums along, polite, until it reaches a minute it wants to own. I feel the snag from halfway across the cosmetics aisle: a tug in the hum, a hunger in the gap where step becomes step. A child in light-up sneakers thumps onto the first stair, shoe laces learning how to flirt with the teeth. His mother scrolls, thumb moving in a metronome no clock agreed to.

I angle my walk so it looks like browsing. The pocket watch at my belt warms against my hip, impatient, already counting the ways this can go wrong.

I flip the lid open with my thumb, just enough to see the minute hand jitter toward its favourite disaster.

“Twelve twelve,” I tell the metal under my breath, one palm on the cool rail. I tap the glass once. The hand shivers, then syncs. “You belong to waiting rooms and checkout queues. You belong to boredom. You do not belong to blood.”

The teeth twitch, disappointed. The hum inside the watch dips, then steadies into something dull as elevator music. The boy’s lace slips free of the danger gap and slaps his ankle instead. He stomps all the way up, offended for reasons that will never be our problem.

Noon complains in my bones about the demotion. I demote it anyway. Errands that wanted to be tragedies sulk back into chores.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Back alley between ramen and hair salon. A little stack of wet receipts under a drainpipe oozes numbers that have no prices: 9:01, 9:13, 9:59. They hump, mating their math, making small white eels with time for spines. I kick the stack into a bag and the bag hisses. Wren’s handwriting crawls along the top receipt as if she wrote it while running: AFTER WANTS ACCOUNTING. I drop the bag in a municipal bin and tell it “Later,” which is not a promise or a lie; it is a fence. The bag pouts and stops wriggling.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Under the river bridge. A priest salts the steps, muttering syllables that remember graves. Salt fails upward today. Isleen stands at the span’s hinge, hair a weather system, doors minding themselves for blocks. The priest bows toward her shadow and forgets in the middle of the tilt what he meant to honour. He straightens, blinking, and sprinkles another careful line of crystals. I want to tell him his ritual works even when he doesn’t know why. I want to tell him the city is a patient who answers different names depending on who asks. I say none of it. The river drags the light sideways like a thumb smearing ink.

Across the water, the billboard for a pachinko parlour blinks out of rhythm. The koi on its banner grow bored and swim against the print.

I thumb the lid of the pocket watch open and tilt its face toward them, the minute hand a tiny, stubborn compass needle. It hums against the glass like it’s listening.

“:01 ambulances, :02 doors, :03 breath,” I remind the world—and the watch—and the koi settle back into advertisement again.

The taste of iron taps my mouth and lets go. My hands have stopped shaking. My knees decide to start.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Afternoon heat. School again. Desert of fluorescent patience. Posters for clubs that won’t meet. Chalk dust under nails, little moons where the white has made itself comfortable. I rub them clean on my skirt; another freckle dulls, a star closing for the day. Masae folds an origami crown in the back row and pretends she isn’t watching me watch the window. Kaede teaches a poem about the hour before storms; her voice folds the room into a box that fits us and nothing else. Hiroyuki’s cuff sits quietly over constellations that won’t help unless I ask. He reads a line about counting and doesn’t look up when the clock trips over the :57 and apologises with a skip to :03.

The room smells like paper and tired teenage skin and whatever cleaner the janitor uses that always arrives half an hour too late. I sit in it and realise there’s a whole section of my brain cataloguing exits: window, door, other window, the moment a thought could become a fall.

If I got up now, I think, stupidly, pointlessly, traitorously. If I just…walked. Out the door, down the stairwell, through the gates, past the station, past the platforms, past the part people stand on. Keep going until there’s nothing left to stand on.

My pulse stutters once, imagines the drop, the weightlessness, the relief of finally being below all this, under it, out of reach of bells and attendance and roll call and “Ohuang-Zhùróng, please answer number four.”

I picture Juniper on the ferry without meaning to, even though I never saw her there. My brain builds it from scraps. I give her the yellow raincoat she always said made her look like a traffic cone, the backpack with the rabbit keychain, the way she used to stand too close to the edge of any height like she trusted gravity more than people. 

In my head, her hair is still damp from the shower, still smelling like drugstore apple, bangs pinned back with my clip because she always forgot her own. I see the shape of her shoulders when she leaned over a desk, the way she’d bump my knee under the table when she thought a joke was too mean to say out loud. I loved her in a way that never learned how to introduce itself properly—eleven and stupid and then fifteen and worse—so now all that love has nowhere to go but backwards. I rerun every version of the boarding: her laughing, her tired, her furious, her trying to be brave. None of them change the part where the water wins. I was not there when it mattered and still keep pretending I am something like a guardian now. The guilt is a tide that pulls me under.

My fingers find the pocket watch at my belt. The little weight thumps against my palm: metal, glass, a sun the size of a coin. I don’t open it. I know too well what the minute hand wants.

You could spend it, it whispers, the way all sharp things whisper. One good minute. One good clean ending. Zero, and then nothing.

I think of the girl in the arcade bathroom, eyeliner smudged, mirror opening sideways into staircase and dark. The way I shoved two minutes forward for her like loose change, forced the glass to remember its job. I think about how angry a part of me still is that I did that, that I dragged her back into a life she did not want when I am counting down my own.

Do I get to do that? Do I get to say “live” to somebody else when every cell in me is rehearsing “no”?

The watch is quiet, but I feel time breathing against my skin. The whole classroom swims for a second—Kaede’s voice, Masae’s crown, Hiroyuki’s neat wrist, the scrape of a chair leg—all of it. A life. Mine. Unfortunately.

I press my nails into the metal until the edge leaves little crescents in my fingertips. “Not today,” I tell it. I don’t know if I mean the watch or myself.

Juniper would be furious if I quit before the test, I think, wildly. She’d grab my wrist and drag me back to shore and yell until I laughed by accident.

“Miss Ohuang-Zhùróng,” someone says, referring to my mother. “You skipped a line.”

The moment collapses. The classroom folds back into desks and chalk and bad fluorescent light. The minute hand settles into its sulk, ticking on. I sit up straighter, because heroes don’t slouch even when they want to vanish into the grout.

I copy a line from the poem and don’t remember any of the words.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Dusk errands. Shadows prefer the seam between fathers coming home and mothers taking their shoes off. The crossing at the narrow market street lifts its stripes like bandages to air; I paste them down with the flat of my palm. A bicycle bell rings where no bicycle exists, and a mouth under a storm drain laughs with a man’s voice that never learned how to be someone’s brother. I take the laugh by the scruff and place it at 7:45 tomorrow, when a comedy show will air and nobody will laugh on cue. The drain complains through its teeth. I step away before it decides to bite.

The sentō door remembers me without affection; its little bell edits itself into silence. Inside, towels breathe steam and eucalyptus remembers lungs. I thread two minutes of what would have been my sleep into the boiler to keep it generous. The minute hand hums approval and scalds my palm in a way that doesn’t blister. My hands shake after. They always do, now, after “calendar, not club.” The club used to make me feel like a god swinging. The calendar makes me feel like a custodian staying late to unbend a paperclip.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Night errands. The arcade calls like a neon throat singing. I decline. The rails by the park smell like pennies and rain. A kernel hides under the chipped paint of a bench, pretending to be a gum clump. I schedule trash pickup for a bench that doesn’t get trash pickup. The city hates changing its mind; the schedule rearranges itself around my insistence, resentful and obedient. The kernel is gone when I glance back. I don’t glance twice. Looking twice is how evenings eat.

On the way back, a boy I dragged out of a stalled minute last week holds up his palms at the lamppost and says a thank-you he learned from an older brother who doesn’t exist anymore. He grins up at the light, loves it a little, and walks on. The light receives prayer better than I do.

The shopkeeper with the paper lantern bows to Isleen’s shadow where it touches the threshold. He folds deeply, reverently, and comes up blank-eyed, smile repeating like a clock hand, dusting shelves that never wanted dust. The hundred red eyes behind her hair blink closed in a soft wave. Benediction? Accounting? Either way, the door behaves.

Receipts whirl in the gutter by my shoe, breeding in twos and threes, pale fish with totals for bones, multiplying until the storm grate gasps and swallows their school. The taste of iron arrives again, politely early. I stall at a soda machine that keeps its light like a secret and buy water I won’t finish. The plastic crackles the way cheap altars do when they have served too many quiet prayers.

By the time midnight suggests itself, I’ve taught four doors to mind their posts, talked two drains out of appetite, starved one bad schedule, retied three verb-strings, and given away pieces of sleep I cannot afford. The numbers don’t add up, not in the way stories want. Heroes love heaps. I offer increments. I don’t get to see the sum.

The pocket watch at my belt thrums low, satisfied, like a cat that’s bullied the day into leaving. The minute hand lies flat under the glass again, no longer straining toward anything but still listening for chances. I tuck it back beneath the knot of my belt and walk the last blocks with my palms pressed flat against my thighs so the tremor won’t have anywhere to write its name.

A delivery truck idles by the curb; the driver stares soft-eyed into the middle distance with the open calm of someone who misplaced a brother years ago and has made a careful, brittle peace with the empty spot on the shelf. I shape a minute for him with my mouth—no sound, just the outline of mercy—and don’t spend it, just let the intention hang in the air between us like a held breath.

The koi painted on the convenience store window glance at the watch bulge at my hip and decide, firmly, to be fish. The gutters keep their receipts. The iron keeps its taste. The hours keep me. I keep walking.

The house holds its breath when I slide the genkan door open. It’s past the hour when most kitchens stop pretending to be altars and go back to being square rooms full of metal. Ours is still halfway between.

Kaede sits at the dining table with two stacks in front of her: graded papers on the left, ungraded on the right. A mug of tea has gone the colour of old pennies. The steam is a memory trying to stand back up. Her hair is braided tight, the way it is when she means to carry something heavy with her mind.

“You’re late,” she says, but the clock on the wall says otherwise. The clock says nothing at all; its second hand hangs on one tick as if considering a career change.

“The bus forgot its job,” I answer, stepping out of my shoes and lining them up in the genkan with the same fussy exactness I use on minutes. “It remembered eventually.”

She flips a paper over. Red ink scores the margin in neat, sparing strokes. No wasted notes. No wasted mercy. The same hand that wrote my childhood permission slips corrects someone else’s spelling of catastrophe.

“You ate?” she asks, eyes still on the page.

“At the sentō,” I say. “Rice and miso. I’m fine.” I am not sure which part is the lie: the food, the location, or the fine.

Her gaze lifts then, slow as a tide. It moves over my face, my shoulders, the way my fingers worry the strap of my bag. That is the mother look, not the homeroom-teacher look. It lands on the pocket watch at my belt and changes temperature. Not colder, not warmer. Just sharper.

“You can bring your work home,” she says quietly. “Some of it. You do not have to stand in all the hours alone.”

I shrug like the question slid off. “It follows me anyway,” I say. “May as well meet it outside.”

For a heartbeat, she looks as if she might stand, come around the table, press her palm to my cheek the way she does to feverish foreheads. Instead, she squares the ungraded stack until the edges align like a small, obedient skyline.

“Bed,” she says. “There is school in a handful of hours.”

I nod, because nodding is a language both of us still understand. I do not say goodnight. The word feels like an invoice I can’t afford to send.

In my room, I drop onto the futon without undressing, the pocket watch a cold animal at my hip. The walls listen. The hours rearrange themselves while I pretend I am the one doing the arranging.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Homeroom smells like wet wool and pencil shavings. The radiator ticks in a rhythm that refuses to finish. Windows sweat; the city presses its forehead to the glass and acts like it wasn’t screaming last night.

Kaede stands at the front with the attendance book laid open like a small, obedient altar. She reads names the way she always has—clean, even, no fuss to snag on—but the chalk pauses when she writes the date, hesitating on a single stroke as if a serif might be a sin. Five students are marked TRANSFERRED in the careful square hand the office prefers. The ink is younger than the paper. The eraser crumbs at the board’s lip look like dandruff from a god who forgot he had hair.

My desk is a secondhand island. A milk carton sweats into a ring; the straw bends and refuses to be straight again no matter how I coax. Kaede’s hair is pinned in the neat knot she taught me when I was little—two sticks, two turns, a city on its best behaviour. Her mouth is calm. Beneath it, the muscles flicker. When she says a girl’s absent name, the chalk does its little pause again, then obeys. This is how the story lives now: in pauses, in things that almost refuse.

Across the hall, the message board blinks about trash pickup and a lost umbrella. Someone’s grandmother is selling a rice cooker. No one mentions the school that ate children. No one mentions the hall light that won’t stop buzzing. The gym’s sconces glow faint as the underside of a fish; they never quite go fully dark. If you listen, the floorboards breathe the way old houses do when they want to remember being trees.

I have slept enough to count as sleep.

The pocket watch at my belt hums like a small, patient insect, minute hand ticking a soft figure eight against the glass. When Kaede’s eyes pass over me, they hold for half a heartbeat, a resting place, then move on. She loves me the way mountains love the clouds that snag on their peaks—full, unhurried, with secrets underneath.

Mr. D’Accardi arrives with a stack of photocopies that still smell of warmed ink. “Today,” he says, “hours that refuse to end.” His shirt cuffs are immaculate. His tie is tied with the kind of attention people mistake for vanity. He sets the copies down, palms flat, and the fluorescent lights above him perform a small miracle: they steady.

He does not look at me at first, which is a kind of looking. His gaze moves over the room the way a hand checks fences after a storm, post by post, wire by wire. It catches on my eye and measures, quick and exact: sleep debt tallied, pulse counted, tremor noted. He shifts his attention before the measure turns into a bruise. “Read the first stanza silently,” he says, and I hear the unspoken: breathe while you do it.

The poem is full of clocks that don’t know their names. It pretends to be about a city in another century; the gaslamps are obvious and proud. On the second line, the toner has smudged a comma into a moon. I circle it with my pencil because I need the mark to mean something.

Masae is two rows behind me and already leaning forward. She has a row of energy gels lined up at the edge of her desk like a spaceship’s crew—citrus, coffee, something that claims to be melon and tastes like electric candy. She waits until Kaede turns her head to write on the board, then flicks me a gel with the grace of a friend who practices in the mirror. It skids, spins, and stops at my elbow. I leave it there. Her eyes say please, polite as a bow but warm enough to thaw plastic.

When the quiet turns fragile, Hiroyuki says, “Take down one line that feels like a tooth,” and the room breathes like it’s been underwater and forgot how to want air. Pens move. A few phones repeat heartbeats inside backpacks. The gym lights down the corridor make the soft, wrong sound they’ve adopted, the one that feels like a throat clearing for a choir that never arrives.

Juniper’s desk is two over from the window, always was. The chair is tucked with unnerving care, slid under at that exact angle custodians use when they’re trying to make absence look tidy. The desktop shines too much. Someone polished it. Someone thought that would help. A faint ring still marks where her bottle lived, condensation halo, devotion of a girl who loved sugared tea and pretended it was medicine for everything school couldn’t fix.

No one sits there. Sometimes a substitute wanders over with a stack of worksheets and a tired sigh, pulls the chair out halfway, and then stands up again, frowning, like they’ve just remembered a different life where they’re needed somewhere else. Today, the desk is just an empty note in the middle of the room, and I can’t read it.

My pen will not write on the page that mentions her. The ink comes out for dates, headings, even the stupid objective on the board, but when I get to her name, the ballpoint skates uselessly over the paper, refusing to take black. I press harder. The tip digs in. Nothing. The paper stays clean and cruel, a door I am not allowed to open.

My chest hurts like I swallowed the whole bay. Part of me is sure this is proof she isn’t gone, not really—that the world can’t bear to pin her down, that somewhere there is still a version of Juniper on a ferry, laughing, and if anything had to go under it should have been me. The thought isn’t new. It turns up every time I close my eye: me in her place on the railing, me in that cold, endless water, me sinking while she makes it home and complains about the smell of the river. Some ugly, honest part of me still wants that trade. Still wants to follow her down and be done.

Instead, I sit at my intact desk with my intact lungs and my intact stupid heart, unable to write six letters. I want her back so badly I’d hand over every minute I’ve stolen from the clocks, every breath I’ve bullied the world into keeping. I can move Shadows and hours and other people’s futures, but I can’t make ink spell J-U-N-I-P-E-R on a page.

So I don’t. I let the pen hover, then slide past, leaving a blank space where she should be, and it feels like a kind of betrayal that I’m still here to do it.

Kaede moves through the poem, mark by mark. She doesn’t over-explain. She trusts us with weather. When she writes a word, the chalk has the small pause again—one letter where her hand forgets and remembers. I know what that feels like: the knowing that isn’t yours and the love that is.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Science lab, second period. Group activity. The words sit on the board in marker that smells like false fruit: CATALYST, OBSERVATION, CONCLUSION. Beakers crowd the tables like clear, nervous ghosts.

We’re in groups of four. That is three too many hearts near my elbows. My lab partner, Hayato, reads the handout aloud because silence frightens him.

“We’re supposed to record the time it takes for the colour change,” he says, already reaching for the stopwatch. His hair sticks up where a hoodie hood tried and failed to tame it. “You wanna do the drops?”

Time. I taste the word like someone put rust in my milk.

“You do them,” I say, and push the dropper toward his hand. It might as well be a live wire. The city under the building pulls at my soles, counting plumbing, counting exits, counting how long it would take to empty this room if something came through the vents. The pocket watch at my belt hums once, faint, like it disapproves of the competition.

He squeezes the dropper. Clear liquid plinks into blue solution. The class leans in as one animal; thirty heads tilt, thirty chests hold the same thin breath. On the board, Mr. Yamada writes START TIME and taps the colon.

The colour shift crawls in from the edges of the beaker, hesitant purple swallowing careful blue. Hayato calls out numbers. I jot them down without hearing them, my hand copying the rhythm, not the content. My other hand raps a fingertip against the table four times, then eight, then sixteen. Heartbeat math. Exit math. Window-height math.

“Kohana? You okay?” one of the girls asks, whisper-low. Her safety goggles magnify the worry until it barely fits her face.

“I’m counting,” I say. It sounds like an answer. It is not the answer she meant.

The beaker finishes its little miracle and everyone murmurs, impressed that chemicals obey instructions. No one notices the clock above the fume hood skip a second, then cough it back up. I notice. I write the data because that is the job. I do not write the skip. That is mine.

At break, Masae walks beside me down the hall as if halls were invented to be walked beside. Her hair is clipped back with a barrette shaped like a strawberry that never met rain. “You look like you ate a night and didn’t chew,” she says softly, not teasing.

“I don’t chew,” I tell her. “It chews me.”

She produces a folded map, lines of highlighter, sticky notes blooming like a small, stubborn garden. “Rumours,” she says. “Places that feel wrong. I cross-check the neighbourhood chat with my aunties and the convenience store guy and also the old men who play shogi in the park because they notice everything. Also TikTok, but quiet. Don’t glare at me.”

“I wasn’t glaring,” I say, and realise I was inventing the glare behind my eye, practising it against people who deserve nothing but my back. “Thanks,” I add, and mean it.

She brightens in a way that hurts. “I can go with you—”

“No,” I say, and make it soft by letting my shoulder brush hers. “Stay in crowds. If it blinks, do not look twice. If something asks you to come closer, say you’re on the phone with your mother and keep walking.”

“That last one’s mean.”

“Mean is fine,” I say. “Mean survives.”

She slides an energy gel into the pocket of my skirt with a solemnity that feels like a vow. “Take this, then. The melon is a lie, but it’s a helpful lie.”

Hiroyuki drifts past as if the corridor laid itself for his feet. “Back by the bell,” he says to the air. He doesn’t look at me. The constellations under his glove flex like a hand stretching under silk. He could stand where I tell him, and the street would re-learn obedience. I keep that power unspent the way some people keep a last piece of chocolate in their pocket and touch the wrapper to prove they still have a choice.

The cafeteria is a loud aquarium. Milk carton straws hiss like small snakes. Steam clings to the ceiling tiles in shy circles. The message boards here repeat themselves—trash pickup, bake sale, a long apology from a teacher who switches the wrong word and can’t correct it without crying. Students in line sway the way cattails do when the marsh keeps secrets about deer. I stand with my tray and imagine choosing food because it tastes good instead of because my body needs salt.

Wren is not supposed to be anywhere near children. She leans against the far wall under a poster about vitamins, chewing on a receipt, eyes shining like a cat that’s just learned a new drawer. She crooks a finger at me; I pretend not to see. She pretends not to mind. A Polaroid appears in my pocket later with no witness, my shoulder blurred into two of me, underpass light behind. AFTER REMEMBERS FOR YOU, the marker proclaims in a hand that can’t decide if it wants to be pretty.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Gym class: the lights won’t fully switch off. Coach Yamada taps the switch, and the switch acts injured, then obliges, then brightens just enough to tell you it’s still there. We run laps around a room that wants to be a stadium for teeth. The floor’s varnish holds yesterday like amber. I pace myself between girls who smell like new shampoo and the sorrow of socks that never dry properly. When I breathe too hard, iron blooms early in my mouth again, polite as ever. I swallow and run and inventory the exits even though Isleen is standing with her back to all of them and the doors are behaving as if they were born to.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Math: chalk dust and the sound of numbers agreeing with one another in a language that thinks it invented certainty. I copy a problem and write the wrong sign—subtraction where there should be division, a wound where there should be sharing. The mistake looks truer than the fix. I erase it anyway. The eraser tears a whisker off the paper; the page bristles.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Between periods, halls fill, then empty. Masae reappears as if conjured by a bell tone. “If you’re not going to let me help tonight,” she says, “I can at least walk you to the sentō and back for the towel run.” She offers it like it’s a game. She means it like it’s a prayer.

“You can walk me halfway,” I say, and it sounds like mercy only because I want it to. “Then you go home. Stay in crowds.”

“I am a crowd,” she insists, and makes herself taller by standing on the line of tile grout that most people step around without knowing why. “Text me the second you—”

“I don’t text,” I say, and it comes out wrong. “I’m sorry.” I add, quickly, “I’ll try. The phone does what it wants.”

She nods like we shook hands. “Okay. Then I’ll be where a phone can find me.” Her smile is pointed at the floor first, then lifted; it’s a sky cleared by effort.

Hiroyuki’s class again. He reads the poem aloud, voice pitched to the place in the room where it will live. “Hours that refuse to end,” he repeats, and looks past everyone to the window and out into the slice of city that keeps pretending it is healed by business suits and buses. “Who can tell me a line that resists you?”

A boy raises his hand and says the clock image makes him sleepy. A girl says she likes the part with the lamplighter because it’s antique. Hiroyuki nods, receiving without judgment, then writes a word on the board: KEEP. Chalk catches on the K; a small scrape, like a car key catching paint. “Some hours keep you,” he says. “And some you keep.” His gaze passes over me. Counting without claiming. Moving on.

Juniper’s desk waits. My notebook waits. The page where her name would go is still a door. I flip past it to a clean sheet, and the pen finally behaves. The line I write is a stake: Keep the doors honest. Give :01 to ambulances, :02 to doors, :03 to breath. It looks like a grocery list. It is a vow.

Last bell uncurls and slaps. The gym lights flicker once in farewell. My mother closes the attendance book with that careful finality that says the day has agreed to end on paper. She meets my eye, a fraction, and smiles with the corners only. It means eat. It means come home if you can. It means I love you in any language that is left to me. I nod, because nodding is a language I can still speak.

Outside, the sky wears the colour of the underside of a lid. Buses crouch at the curb, ready to swallow students and spit them out in residential clusters. The message board by the gate has sprouted two new flyers in the time it took to pack my bag: one about standardised testing, one about lost mittens. Neither mentions the teacher who “transferred” or the rumour that learned a new mask every week.

Masae waits by the gate with her bag slung crosswise and a convenience-store paper bag in her hands. The logo grins in too-bright green. The paper looks tired.

“Emergency rations,” she says, lifting the bag an inch. Inside, two onigiri sit like they’ve been sworn in. “Halfway.”

“Halfway,” I answer, and the word is both promise and misdirection.

We fall into step on the sidewalk, the school at our backs, the city opening its teeth ahead. The gym windows above us cling to the last of the fluorescent light, making the glass look like it swallowed a sunrise and forgot to digest it. Kids peel off in pairs and threes at each corner, noise thinning into separate little lives.

Masae talks at first, the way she does when she senses I am mostly an echo. Track practice. A quiz she thinks she failed but definitely didn’t. The way Kaede pronounced a name in roll call that made half the class flinch even though they didn’t know why.

I give her small answers. “You’ll place.” “You passed.” “She knows more than she says.” My real conversation is with the grid of the streets: counting crosswalks, fire hydrants, and telephone poles. The pocket watch at my belt hums steady, a low warning, like a kettle that hasn’t quite boiled.

At the third intersection, we wait at the light. The little green walking man on the signal flickers once, twice, then stutters into a shape that wants to be a scythe. I stare it down. The shape remembers it is supposed to be a stick figure and snaps back into place.

Masae doesn’t see the almost. She does see my jaw. “That’s your ‘I’m doing math no one assigned you’ face,” she says.

“Extra credit,” I say. “The kind you can’t write in the margins.”

“You know you don’t have to do everything alone, right?” she presses. She kicks at a pebble; it skitters along the curb, narrowly missing a storm drain that would have kept it. “You have, like, a homeroom full of idiots willing to run interference. And also me, who is obviously the most qualified.”

“Qualified in what?”

“Being fast. Being loud. Being extremely annoying to anything that tries to eat my friends.” She ticks them off on her fingers as if she’s listing certifications. “Come on, Ohuang-Zhùróng. Let me be useful.”

I want to tell her she is already useful, just by existing inside my math as a constant. Instead I say, “You are useful when you stay where the light is. Rule one: don’t give errands an invitation. They’re greedy.”

“You and your rules,” she mutters, but there’s no real heat in it. “Fine. Read me the rest.”

“Stay in crowds,” I say. “If something blinks that shouldn’t, do not look twice. If the city whispers your name when you’re alone, pretend you don’t hear it. If you feel like you stepped into a photograph instead of a street, back up until the feeling lets go.”

“And text you,” she adds.

“And text me,” I agree. “Even if I don’t answer right away.”

She bumps her shoulder against mine, gently. “I’ll blow up your phone with emojis until you cave. That’s a threat, by the way.”

We turn onto the street where the houses start pretending every night is the same. Laundry flaps on balconies. A dog barks at a pigeon and loses. An old man waters a patch of dirt that still remembers being a garden. The ordinary piles up, brick by brick, like armour.

Halfway is the corner where the road forks—left toward Masae’s place, straight toward the sentō and the parts of the city that never learned how to sleep. The air feels different here, as if there’s a faint pressure warning of the river’s pull two neighbourhoods away.

“This is the part where you tell me to go home and be boring,” Masae says. She stops at the corner, rocking once on her heels. The convenience bag crackles. “Spoiler: I’m terrible at boring.”

“Be alive, then,” I say. “You’re very good at that.”

Her mouth softens. For a second she looks like she might step forward and hug me; for a second I think I might let her. The city tugs at the edge of my vision—an alley two blocks over with light the wrong colour, a bus stop where a poster is starting to peel itself off the frame. The ledger in my head flips to a new page.

“Text me,” she says again, because repetition is its own kind of ward. “Even if it’s just a period. I’ll know you’re still in the sentence.”

“I’ll try,” I say. It is the largest promise I can make without lying outright.

She nods, once, sharp, then turns left. After three steps, she looks back and holds up the bag. “Eat the second onigiri before midnight or I’ll haunt you,” she calls.

“You’d be a very dramatic ghost,” I say.

“Obviously,” she says, and disappears around the corner.

I stand there long enough to watch the spot where she vanished, counting to eight, then sixteen, then thirty-two. Each number is a small, stubborn refusal to move too fast toward what waits.

Then I turn, alone again, the gym windows at my back still leaking their thin, artificial light onto the street. The minute hand at my belt starts its small, insistent hum as the clock crosses :57 toward the hour. The city lifts its head.

I will send Masae home. Then I will keep walking. Then I will keep.