The Storm She Carries
(Shin's PoV, continued)
—
After talking about the power distribution, Sora glanced down at her list, then up toward the far end of the table.
"Mm... Tsugikawa-san — did you bring the sign-up sheet? The couples' registration for the closing bonfire dance. I need a rough headcount to plan the floor space and the lantern order."
Kurone's head snapped up like she'd been pulled out of deep water.
"Y-yes, of course."
She fumbled with her folder, her fingers not quite cooperating, and drew out a single sheet.
She couldn't slide it to Sora directly because that would have meant reaching past me, and she clearly wasn't going to do that, so she passed it to the second-year beside her, who walked it up the table.
"S-So far it's mostly the younger years," Kurone said, and her voice came out thinner than she meant. "About forty pairs from the first-years, a little over thirty from the second-years. The third-years are still holding back probably because nobody wants to be the first couple to put their name on a list like that at the end of the year, you know how it gets. It'll fill in closer to the day."
"That's normal. Third-years always sign up in the final week." Sora made a quick annotation on her master sheet, unbothered. "So, seventy-odd confirmed pairs is a solid baseline. I'll order lanterns for a hundred to be safe. Thank you, Tsugikawa."
Kurone nodded, folded her hands in her lap, and did not look at me.
Sora moved the meeting on with the smooth momentum of someone who had done this a hundred times.
Waste and recycling stations, which took four minutes and one mild dispute about placement. The rain contingency for the outdoor stage, which took considerably longer, because Maruyama-sensei had strong feelings about tarpaulins and wanted all of us to share in them. The volunteer shift rotation. The final walk-through schedule for the night before.
'She's really amazing in her role...' I thought.
Sora ran through every item at a clean, even clip, and I stayed one step ahead of her the whole way. I kept giving her everything she needed, like the shift template, the grounds map, the vendor contact sheet, and even the lantern vendor's quote.
She'd name a thing, and it would already be sliding across the table into her hand, and she never had to pause or look up or lose her place.
One of the students kept glancing between us like she was watching two people finish each other's sentences.
The rhythm of it was easy, but the thing that wasn't easy to ignore was the far end of the table.
Kurone answered when she was spoken to, and every answer arrived a half-beat late, as if her mind kept wandering off and had to be dragged back by the collar.
She turned her pen over and over between her fingers, tap, tap, tap against the tabletop, until the boy next to her shot her a look and she stopped.
Twice she opened her mouth like she was about to add something to the discussion and then closed it again without a sound.
And her eyes kept moving. To me, and away. To me, and away.
Quick, guilty little flicks she plainly thought I wasn't catching, aimed at the space between my shoulder and Sora's, at my hand each time it slid another page up the table, at the easy back-and-forth the two of us had fallen into without meaning to.
I caught every one of them, but I just didn't do anything with them.
Simply because there was nothing to do.
Whatever was churning behind Kurone's face was hers to carry, not mine to solve, and I had spent seven years learning that the single most dangerous thing I could do anywhere near Kurone was allow myself to be pulled into her weather.
Get close enough to her storms, and you started calling them your own. So I kept my eyes on the paperwork, my voice calm and professional, and every time Sora needed something I passed it across and said nothing more than the task required.
I felt Kurone watching me do it, again and again, and I let her watch, giving her nothing back.
My old self could not have sat three seats from a distressed Kurone and stayed still. That version would have been out of his chair and asked what was wrong. That version had spent almost a decade rearranging his entire nervous system around the temperature of her moods.
That version got left on a rooftop on Valentine's Day, and a girl with a snake tattooed over her heart had spent all her time teaching me how to sit in my own chair and stay in it.
So I stayed in it.
By the end of the meeting, Sora looked satisfied. She capped her pen, tapped her folders square against the table, and gave the room the small nod that meant they were free.
"Good job, everyone. We're ahead of schedule for once, which never happens, so let's all agree not to jinx it." Then, her gaze slid down the table and settled, gently, on the far end. "Tsugikawa-san... is everything all right? You've seemed a little mentally far away today."
Kurone straightened in her chair.
"Y-Yes, President Fujimoto. Everything's fine." A shade too quick. "Just tired. My mother has returned from the business trip, and we were so busy at home this weekend..."
Sora held her eyes for a moment with the same quiet, reading look she'd given me in the corridor earlier, the one that saw more than it said, and then let it go with a gracious little smile.
"I completely understand, Tsugikawa. Your family is very important for this country. So make sure you actually rest tonight, all right? I promise that nothing will happen if you skip one meeting."
Kurone forced a smile. "T-Thanks, President Fujimoto," She said, scratching the back of her head.
"Don't thank me; taking care of students is my job," Sora said, her voice soft.
She then looked at everyone and spoke. "You're free until lunch break. Just be sure to do your tasks and then give me your reports at the end of the day."
And then, chairs scraped back. The committee thanked Sora and began filing out in twos and threes, already splitting off into their own conversations about lunch and lessons and who was doing what banner, and the room started to drain of people and noise.
Sora gathered the last of her folders into the crook of her arm, then paused and glanced at me.
"Ishikawa-kun, would you mind putting the rest of these away before you head out? The grounds maps go back in the cabinet by the window, and the schematics need to stay clipped inside the blue folder or Maruyama-sensei will have another crisis." She was already drifting toward the door, arms full, hair falling loose from where she'd tucked it. "I'd do it myself but I have to get these numbers to the printing club before the lunch bell or we lose our slot."
"Sure," I said. "I've got it. Don't worry, you can go." My lips curved into a soft smile,
"Thank you." She smiled at me, warm and unguarded, but she couldn't hide the small blush on her face. "You're a lifesaver, honestly. I don't know how I ran this thing before you."
And that was when Kurone, who had drifted with the others as far as the doorway and then stopped there, one hand resting on the frame, turned back around.
"I— I'll help him," she said. "With the folders. I don't have class until fourth period."
The words came out a fraction too fast, a fraction too bright, brittle at the edges. That was an obvious lie.
I looked at her. And I had no move.
Because Sora was standing right there in the doorway, and Sora didn't know. She had no idea what Kurone had done. She knew nothing about the years of small cruelties, the way she'd kept me on a string since we were children, how she betrayed me with Kenji... Nothing.
To Sora, this was nothing more than one committee member offering to help another tidy a room before lunch. Completely ordinary. Slightly kind, even.
If I turned Kurone down flat, in front of the president, for no reason that Sora could possibly see, it would look strange. It would look like there was a story underneath it, and that was exactly the story I wanted to stay buried, because it was mine and Akane's and nobody else's, and I had no intention of unearthing it in a committee room over a stack of grounds maps.
So I said nothing.
Which was, of course, its own kind of answer.
I had to endure whatever Kurone had in mind.
Sora's eyes moved between the two of us for half a second, and she found nothing alarming in it. Just two people and a table of paperwork.
Then, she shifted the folders higher in her arms.
"I'll go on ahead, then, Ishikawa-kun," she said, easy and light. "See you at the rooftop later? Akane's expecting both of us, I think."
"Yeah," I said. "See you there."
She gave me one last smile, and then she was gone, her footsteps clicking away down the corridor and fading into the general hum of the building, growing fainter and fainter until they were nothing at all.
The door drifted almost shut behind her.
Not all the way. It caught on the warped frame the way that door always did, leaving a hand's-width gap onto the empty hallway.
And then it was just the hum of the old fluorescent tubes overhead, the cold tea going colder in its thermos in the middle of the table, and the two of us.
Me and Kurone.
I turned back to the table and started stacking the grounds maps into a neat pile, one on top of the other, corners squared, methodical, because it gave my hands something to do that wasn't looking at her.
"The maps go in the cabinet by the window," I said. My voice came out flat and even, the same register I'd kept the whole meeting. "If you actually want to help, you can put the colored tabs back in the box on the shelf."
Kurone didn't move toward the tabs.
She stood a few feet away with her folder still hugged tight against her side like a shield, and when I glanced up she was watching me with her eyes gone bright and glassy at the rims, wet in the specific way that means the next blink is going to send it down her cheeks.
"Shin," she said.
Quietly. Not Ishikawa-kun, considering that we're strangers now, not anything careful or performed.
Just my name, in the same way she used to say it when we were little in a sandbox, before any of the rest of it had happened, before either of us had become the people we'd turned into.
It landed in the empty room and made my hands go still on the maps.
"H-How are you, S-Shin?" Her voice wavered and held. "I... I'd really like to know." She added, her voice almost hopeful.
The fluorescent light hummed overhead.
I stood there with a half-stacked pile of maps in my hands, the door caught open a hand's width behind me, and carefully maintained distance suddenly worth exactly nothing, and I understood that I was not going to walk out of this room the same way I'd walked into it.
I set the maps down on the table.
"I'm fine, Tsugikawa," I said...