Blossoms of The Forgotten Day Chapter 16: Chapter 16

Read chapter 16 of Blossoms of The Forgotten Day by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

I started with what I knew. Her name. Her approximate age. Her hair and her eyes. Shibuya, which was where Mr. Shouto had said her family moved from, the detail that had been introduced as fact on her first day and which now existed only inside my head. The keytar. The lyrics. The voice. I wrote all of it down in my notebook on a clean page, in a list, the way you organize things when the thinking itself has become too large and too tangled to carry without a structure to put it in. Then I sat at my desk with my laptop open and began. It was past eleven at night. The house was quiet around me, my mother long asleep, the street outside dark and still. The small lamp on my desk made a warm circle and everything beyond it was shadow. I searched her name first. Haruka. Combined with every modifier I could think of. Vocalist. High school. Shibuya. Keytar. Spring Festival competition. Nothing that matched. The name was common enough that the results spread in every direction, none of them pointing anywhere useful. I searched the arts center competition records more carefully this time, going back through the archived results page by page. Every Spring Festival for the past five years. Our slot in the running order appeared in this year's record exactly as it had on my phone, one name, solo guitar, no partner, no keytar, no voice beside mine. I stared at the screen. Then I opened a new tab and searched for the school transfer records, or tried to. The school website had no public-facing student directory. Of course it did not. I had not expected it to. I searched anyway, looking for any mention of a transfer student this term, any announcement, any notice. Nothing. I went to the school's social media pages. Photographs from the Spring Festival preparation. Students carrying decorations, setting up stalls, the usual documentation of an event that had not happened yet when she arrived, except that it had, except that I remembered it, except that I had stood in the wings with her and felt the stage smaller than it looked. I went through every photograph. Face by face. Group shot by group shot. The corridor outside the competition hall. The lobby. The results board with the advancing acts listed. She was not in a single one. Not absent in the way a person is absent when they happened to be elsewhere when the photo was taken. Absent in the way a person is absent when they were never there. No gap where she should have been standing. No partial shoulder at the edge of a frame. No blurred background figure with dawn-colored hair. The world had not just forgotten her name. It had smoothed over her image. Every place she should have existed in the photographic record of these weeks had been filled in seamlessly, like a painting touched up so carefully you could not find the brushstrokes. I closed the laptop and sat in the circle of lamplight with my notebook open in front of me. The list I had made. Her name at the top. All the details underneath it, everything I knew, everything I could still hold clearly. I read through it slowly, touching each item the way you touch things in the dark to make sure they are still there. She had given me lyrics. I had memorized them. They were still in me, every word, every line, the rhythm of them as familiar as my own breathing now. I wrote them out on the page from memory, all four verses, the chorus, the bridge, every word exactly as she had written them on that sheet of paper in the middle of class on the day she arrived. When I finished I read them back. I'm just a wannabe, wanting everything Oh-oh, I'm just a lost soul Trying to find someone to make me whole Her words. Still here. Still completely here, in my handwriting on a page in a notebook at eleven at night, proof of nothing anyone else would accept and everything I needed. The days that followed had a particular quality to them that I had no good word for. Not grief exactly, though there was grief in it. Not panic, though there were moments in