Blossoms of The Forgotten Day Chapter 12: Chapter 12

Read chapter 12 of Blossoms of The Forgotten Day by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

Competition day arrived the way important days always do, without ceremony, without warning, just the alarm and the grey morning light and the ordinary sounds of the house waking up. I lay still for a moment after the alarm went off. The ceiling above me was the same ceiling it had always been. The cold air in the room was the same cold air. Nothing announced itself as different. But something was. I got up, showered, dressed in the clothes I had set out the night before. Dark trousers, a plain white shirt, the navy jacket my mother had pressed without being asked. She had left it on the chair by my door sometime in the night, which was her way of saying what she could not always put into words. Downstairs she had made rice and miso soup. She sat across from me while I ate and did not fill the silence with anything. Just the soup and the morning and the steam rising from both our cups. When I stood to leave she followed me to the door. "Sae." I turned. She looked at me for a moment with an expression I had seen before, the one that carried more than it showed, and then she straightened the collar of my jacket with both hands, slowly, carefully, the way she used to when I was small. "Play well," she said. I nodded. I put on my shoes, picked up my guitar case, and stepped out into the morning. The venue was the city arts center, a low wide building near the river with tall glass doors and a lobby that smelled of fresh paint and floor wax. Students from half a dozen schools were already filing in when I arrived, most of them in small groups, their instrument cases and nerves worn visibly. Haruki and Asahi were waiting near the entrance. Haruki had her arms crossed against the cold and an expression of focused loyalty that she would have denied if anyone named it. Asahi had his hands in his pockets and nodded once when he saw me, which meant everything was fine and also that he was proud of me and also that he would never say either of those things out loud. "You look like a person," Haruki said. "Good improvement." "Thank you." "Where is Haruka?" "She said she would meet me inside." I found her in the backstage corridor, near the instrument check area. She had her back to me when I first saw her, talking to one of the event staff, and she was holding something I had not seen before. A keytar. White, with a strap already over her shoulder, sleek and a little unconventional, the kind of instrument that did not apologize for being what it was. She had it resting against her hip with the easy familiarity of something she had carried for years. She turned and saw me and her face opened into that small easy smile. "You came," she said. "You keep saying that like you expect me not to." "Old habit." She tilted her head at the keytar. "I should have mentioned this earlier. I play keys as well as sing. I thought it would fill the sound better than voice alone. Is that okay?" I looked at the keytar. Then at her. "Play me something," I said. She raised an eyebrow. Then she adjusted the strap, found her position, and played eight bars of the chorus from memory, the keys clean and warm and full, sitting underneath where the guitar would go like they had always been there. It was better. Significantly better. The sound was rounder, more complete. It gave the whole thing a weight it had not had with voice alone. "Yes," I said. "That is okay." She grinned. "Good. Because I was going to do it anyway." We were fourth in the running order. Three acts before us, two after. We stood in the wings and watched the third act from the side, a boy with a violin who played with his eyes closed and his whole body following the bow, technically precise and completely inside himself. The crowd was generous. The arts center seated three hundred and most of those seats were full, students and families and teachers and a panel of four judges at a long table near the front. Haruka stood beside me in the wings. I could feel the small contained energy coming off her,