Blossoms of The Forgotten Day Chapter 13: Chapter 13

Read chapter 13 of Blossoms of The Forgotten Day by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

They posted the results on a board in the lobby. A single printed sheet, names and school affiliations in two columns, the advancing acts listed in order of score. We found it twenty minutes after coming offstage, Haruki pushing through the small crowd that had gathered around it with her elbows and no apology. Asahi followed in the gap she made. Haruka and I came last. Haruki found our names first. She went very still for exactly one second, which for Haruki was the equivalent of a full dramatic collapse, and then she turned around with an expression that could have powered the entire building. "Third," she said. "You came third. You are through to the next round." Asahi looked at the sheet himself, then at me, and broke into the wide slow grin he reserved for things that genuinely surprised him. He grabbed my shoulder with one hand and shook it once, hard, and did not let go for a moment. I looked at our names on the sheet. Third place. Advancing. I had not even been thinking about the next round. Honestly I had not been fully certain they would let us finish. We had stopped mid-performance. I had bled on the stage. The whole thing had come apart and then come back together in a way that felt more like something personal than something competitive, too uncontrolled, too raw for a panel of judges with scoring criteria. But then again, I thought, they also care about the audience. And the audience had given us everything they had. Maybe that counted for something. Maybe it counted for quite a lot. Haruka stood beside me reading the sheet. She was quiet in a way that was slightly different from her usual quiet but I did not examine it then. I thought she was processing the result the way I was, just taking it in. "Well," she said. "Well," I said back. She smiled at the sheet. Small and warm. "I told you it was enough to know the rest was still there." We went to the ramen place two streets from the arts center, the four of us, still in our competition clothes, Haruki still vibrating with an energy she could not fully contain. She ordered for the whole table before anyone had looked at the menu, which was her way of expressing love, and then immediately started reconstructing the performance beat by beat with the intensity of a coach reviewing match footage. "The moment you stopped," she said, pointing at me with her chopsticks. "My heart actually left my body. I was standing in the audience thinking I am going to climb onto that stage and play the guitar myself and I do not even know how to play the guitar." "That would have been worse," Asahi said. "Obviously. But I was prepared to do it." Haruka laughed at that, a real one, her hand coming up to cover her mouth. Asahi stole a piece of her chashu while she was distracted and she caught him and stabbed at his hand with a chopstick without breaking the laugh. I ate my ramen and watched the three of them and felt something I did not immediately have a name for. It was warm and it was full and it had an edge to it that I could not locate precisely. The way a good thing sometimes has an edge when you are aware, somewhere underneath the good, that it will not last exactly like this forever. I told myself I was just tired from the stage. The dinner went on. Haruki ordered dessert for everyone again without asking. Asahi pretended to protest and ate all of his in four bites. The restaurant was warm and loud around us, other tables full of their own conversations, the winter night pressing cold against the glass outside. At some point I noticed Haruka had gone quiet. Not her usual quiet. Something slightly different. She was still present, still smiling when Haruki said something worth smiling at, still there. But there was a quality to her stillness that had not been there earlier. Something turned slightly inward. Like a light behind glass. I did not ask. I told myself I was imagining it. We left the restaurant around nine. The cold hit us immediately after the warmth inside, sharp a