Blossoms of The Forgotten Day Chapter 9: Chapter 9

Read chapter 9 of Blossoms of The Forgotten Day by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

It started, as most things did, with Haruki noticing something she had absolutely no business noticing. We were on the roof. The rain from the day before had cleared overnight and left the sky a sharp, clean blue, the kind that only shows up in February when the cold has scrubbed everything else away. Asahi had his orange juice. I had my coffee. Haruka was reading something on her phone with her lunchbox balanced on her knee. Everything was normal. And then Haruki put down her sandwich, looked between me and Haruka with the slow, deliberate attention of a detective who has just found the final piece of evidence, and said: "You two are weird together." Haruka looked up from her phone. "Weird how?" "Just weird. Like a specific kind of weird I do not have a word for yet." "That is not a description," I said. "I know. I am still working on it." She picked her sandwich back up and took a bite, still watching us with that look. "Asahi, back me up." Asahi, who had been minding his own business with the focused innocence of someone who had sensed danger and was attempting to become invisible, slowly lowered his juice. "I am not getting involved in this." "You are already involved. You are sitting here." "I am sitting here eating my lunch peacefully and I would like to continue doing that." "Asahi." He sighed the sigh of a man who had lost before he started. "Fine. Yes. You two are a little weird together." "See," Haruki said, pointing at me with half a sandwich. "Weird is not a diagnosis," I said. "It is not a criticism either. It is an observation." She tilted her head at Haruka. "Like, you talk to him differently than you talk to us." Haruka blinked. "I talk to everyone differently. That is just called being a person." "No, I mean differently differently. Like you are less loud." "I am plenty loud." "You are loud with us. With him you go all," Haruki lowered her voice to an approximate imitation that was nowhere near accurate, "quiet and thoughtful and here is something I have been considering." Haruka stared at her. Then she looked at me. I looked at the sky. "And you," Haruki continued, turning the full force of her attention on me now, "you make that face." "What face." "That face you just made denying you make a face. The almost-smile one." "I do not almost-smile." "You do. You have been almost-smiling for two weeks. It is new. I have known you since we were twelve and you did not almost-smile before she got here." There was a brief silence. Asahi looked at the horizon with the careful attention of a man watching for weather. Haruka had gone back to looking at her phone but her ears had gone faintly pink at the tips. And I picked up my coffee and took a long, slow sip and said absolutely nothing because there was nothing to say that would improve the situation. "Interesting," Haruki said, mostly to herself, in the tone of someone filing information away for later. "Can we talk about something else," I said. "We can. I am just saying what I see." "You see wrong." "I see football wrong. I see people correctly." She picked up her juice. "Ask anyone." "She is not wrong about the football," Asahi said quietly, and received a kick to the ankle for it. The afternoon passed in its usual way. Last period was literature. We were reading a story about a fisherman who kept returning to the same stretch of sea even after it had taken everything from him, because he said the sea did not owe him anything, it was just the sea, and he was just a fisherman, and some things simply were what they were. I copied the passage into my notebook without being asked to. I did not fully understand why until later. After class I stayed behind to tidy the music room, which had been left in minor chaos from lunch the day before. Asahi had left his water bottle. I set it on the shelf by the door where he would find it tomorrow. Haruki had moved one of the chairs and not moved it back. I put it where it belonged. I was straightening the instrument shelf when th