Blossoms of The Forgotten Day Chapter 15: Chapter 15

Read chapter 15 of Blossoms of The Forgotten Day by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

I do not know how long I sat on the floor of the music room. Long enough for the pale February light to shift across the window. Long enough for the sounds of the school to settle into the muffled rhythm of a class in progress, voices and chalk and the occasional scrape of a chair, all of it coming from very far away. I sat with my back against the instrument shelf and my phone in my hands and I went through everything I could think of. Her name in the school directory. Nothing. Her name in the competition records on the arts center website. Nothing. Her name anywhere. Nothing, nothing, nothing. I searched for the arts center Spring Competition results. The page loaded. Third place, advancing acts listed. I found our slot in the running order. One name. Mine. Solo guitar. I stared at it. The screen was very bright in the dim room. Solo guitar. One name. As if she had never stood beside me on that stage. As if the keytar had never filled the hall. As if three hundred people had not broken open all at once when her voice came back after the silence. I put the phone face down on the floor beside me and pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes. The door opened. I did not look up. I heard two sets of footsteps, one light and quick, one heavier and measured, and I knew them both without needing to see them. Haruki sat down on the floor beside me without a word. On my other side, Asahi lowered himself more slowly, his long legs folding, and then he too was quiet. The three of us sat in the music room with the February light coming through the window and the school going on without us somewhere beyond the door. After a while Haruki said, "Tell us." So I told them. All of it. From the gate on the first morning, the collision and the sakura petals and the way time had paused for one heartbeat. The classroom, her name meaning spring, the seat beside Haruki. The roof. The tofu sandwiches. The headlock. The lyrics sheet and the music room and the clearing and the rain. The competition. Her hands around my bandaged fingers in the cold night air. I told them everything and I told it plainly, without managing it, and my voice stayed level the way it had stayed level at the grave because some things you have carried long enough that the carrying itself becomes steady. When I finished the room was quiet. Haruki was looking at her hands in her lap. Her expression was not the skeptical one or the concerned one or any of the ones I knew well. It was something quieter and more uncertain, like someone standing at the edge of something they could not see the bottom of. "It is strange," she said slowly. "I cannot remember her. When you say the name it does not land anywhere. There is no face, no voice, no moment I can point to." She paused. "But." "But," I said. "There is something. Not a memory. More like the shape where a memory should be. Like when you reach for a word and it is not there but you can feel the exact outline of the space it left." I looked at her. "I know that feeling," Asahi said quietly from my other side. "I have had it since this morning. Since you said her name in class. Something about it." He shook his head slowly. "I cannot get hold of it. Every time I try it moves." "Like a dream," Haruki said. "Yes," Asahi said. "Exactly like a dream. The kind you know was important but cannot remember no matter how hard you reach for it." I turned back to the window. The sakura petals were still falling outside, slow and unhurried, and the pale light held them for a moment before they disappeared below the frame. She was real. They could feel the outline of where she had been even if they could not see her. That was something. That was not nothing. "I am going to find her," I said. Neither of them said anything for a moment. Then Haruki said, "Okay." Just that. No qualification, no concern, no careful management of expectations. Just okay. Which was the most complete thing she could have said. After school I went to the address I had