I don’t remember deciding to learn it. It’s just there, like a hand on the back of my neck steering. The way my feet already know where to go before my brain finishes the thought. At Kiku Market, there’s a narrow strip beside the freezer cases where the air is always too cold and nobody lingers because their fingers hurt. If I stay close enough, the glass doors fog a little and I can watch shapes move without meeting anyone’s eyes. I can pretend I’m comparing brands of edamame, that I’m just another kid doing errands, not someone calculating angles like it’s survival.
There’s a patch of shadow by the community bulletin board, too, where the fluorescent light doesn’t reach as hard. Flyers overlap in thick layers (taiko practice, temple cleanup, SAT bootcamp, youth group potluck) so you can “read” them for as long as you need. If you stand there, people assume you’re interested in something wholesome. People like that. People like anything that makes you look busy in the approved way.
And then there’s the endcap with the fancy snacks, the ones in matte packaging that cost too much to be casual. I’ll lift one up, turn it over, scan the nutrition label like I’m deciding. Like I have the right to be picky. It’s stupid, but the act of reading numbers steadies me, because numbers don’t ask why you’re quiet. Numbers don’t tilt their head and say, “Haru-chan, you’re so skinny these days,” like it’s a compliment wrapped in concern wrapped in a knife.
Most of the time I’m not even avoiding anyone specific. It’s the possibility of being noticed, of becoming a topic, that makes my skin tighten. My route keeps me between exits, between aisles, between conversations. It’s a second nervous system, humming under everything else, ready to reroute me the second someone’s gaze catches and holds.
I time myself to other people’s errands like I’m syncing to a metronome only I can hear. If a cart wheel squeaks toward an aisle, I pause and pretend I’m suddenly fascinated by the price tags. If an obaa-san is reaching for tofu, my hand hovers, then drops, like I never wanted it in the first place. I let people go first even when there’s no line, because lines mean eyes, and eyes mean questions, and questions mean I have to be a person with reasons.
“Sumimasen,” I whisper out of habit: soft enough that it’s more for me than for anyone else. Sometimes there’s literally nothing in front of me. I say it anyway, like an apology in advance for existing in the same square footage as someone else’s day.
It works, mostly. My body stays solvable, unremarkable. I become a gap people slide past without irritation. And I hate that I’m proud of it, how good I am at not being a problem, like it’s a skill you can earn gold stars for, like it doesn’t cost anything.
At the temple hall, I have the quietest rituals down to muscle memory. The shoe rack on the left has one loose slat that complains if you let your heel hit it; the right side is safer if you lift your shoes by the toes and set them down like they’re breakable. I can slide the slippers forward with the edge of my sock so the vinyl doesn’t slap the floor. Little things that keep me from becoming sound.
There’s a row of folding chairs that counts as “with everyone” but stays just outside the main knot of bodies. I take the end seat, angled slightly away, close enough to bow at the right times, far enough that no one has to step over me. Included, but not interrupting. Visible, but not discussable.
Faces turn into a filing system in my head, not because I’m mean, because I’m trying to stay alive in a room full of mirrors. Aunties who pinch my arm like they’re claiming inventory. Uncles who speak in scholarship acronyms and SAT dates, their laughs timed like applause. Older cousins who do a quick sweep for changes (hair, grades, weight) like reading bulletin-board updates off my skin.
By the time anyone’s eyes swing my way, I’ve already made myself smaller on purpose: hands busy with something harmless, shoulders turned like I’m mid-exit, face set to that careful blank I’ve practiced in bathroom mirrors. I stand where a doorway can swallow me if I need it to. Attention skates off; it doesn’t get traction. That’s the whole trick.
Before my shoes are even off, a hand appears in my line of sight with a job attached to it: plastic pitcher sweating cold onto someone’s palm, a bag of ice crinkling like it’s impatient. It’s not an ask, not really. More like the room exhaling: oh, good, Haru’s here.
“Can you, ” starts, and I’m already nodding.
I take it because taking it is simpler than standing there with my hands empty, waiting for someone to decide whether to hug me or comment on me or do that tilted-head scan that lands on my wrists and lingers. A task is a shield. A task means I’m useful, and usefulness is one of the only ways I know how to be forgiven for taking up space.
The bag of ice numbs my fingers through the thin plastic. I count the steps to the kitchen without looking like I’m counting. The hallway is crowded with shoes (slippers pointed toward the door in careful rows) and I tuck my toes in so I don’t bump anything, so I don’t make noise. The adults’ voices overlap in that familiar rhythm: English braided with Japanese, laughter filling in the gaps where feelings might go.
“Thank you, Haru-chan,” someone sings out as if I’m a bell they can ring to make the evening feel orderly.
I slide past an uncle’s elbow, past a tray of inari that smells too sweet, past the counter where the rice cooker is steaming like it’s doing the breathing for everyone. In the sink, empty paper cups lean against each other like tired friends. I rinse my hands, just because, just to buy a second. Cold water. A small reset.
From the living room, I catch my name again, soft, affectionate, and still a hook. My shoulders tighten, then I pull them down, like I can smooth myself flat.
I pour the ice into a bowl. The clatter is too loud, so I slow it, drop by drop, until it sounds like nothing important is happening. Nothing that needs to be looked at.
I make a slow loop like I’m orbiting the room instead of living in it, staying close to the walls where the air feels thinner and no one expects you to have opinions. Empty cups appear on low tables and window ledges like offerings. I take them before they can become evidence that I was sitting somewhere too long, being perceived. My fingers pinch the rims. Napkins get folded into smaller, sharper squares, not because anyone asked, but because corners and order make my chest loosen a millimeter. If I’m busy making messes disappear, maybe I get to disappear too.
Bodies fill the room in soft collisions: shoulders brushing, sleeves swishing, laughter puffing out in timed bursts. I slide through gaps that aren’t really gaps, turning sideways automatically, shrinking my footprint without thinking. “Sumimasen,” under my breath. I keep my face set to calm: the version of me that looks like I’m listening, like I’m grateful, like I’m fine. Present enough to be praised later. Blank enough that no one has to wonder what’s going on behind my eyes.
When an auntie’s sentence stalls out on a missing English word, I slip it in like a napkin under a dripping cup. “Extension cord,” I murmur, and she beams like I handed her the whole thought. When an uncle’s Japanese comes out too careful, too textbook, I trade it for something smoother. Not correcting. Never that. Just adjusting the angle so it lands right. “Daijōbu,” instead of the stiff, formal phrase that makes everyone’s mouths tighten.
It’s fast. Efficient. A tiny bridge built from my tongue, crossed by someone else’s relief.
Then the conversation keeps moving without me, like water finding the easiest path. My name doesn’t follow it. I’m left holding the empty space where a thank-you could’ve been, pretending that’s what I wanted.
Yuki’s jokes pop off like stage directions. Right when an auntie’s voice sharpens, right when an uncle’s “so, college…” starts to aim at my chest. They do a goofy face, a terrible accent, and everyone exhales together, laughing like it’s voluntary. I watch the spotlight stick to Yuki’s grin, and I learn my part: stay in the wings, carry things, be harmless.
Praise comes in measured pinches, like seasoning you’re allowed only if you don’t reach for more: good kid, polite, such a helper. I take it and pretend it’s warmth, because warmth has rules. It’s a contract I can actually keep. Stack the plates, don’t argue, don’t look hungry for anything. Each nod is a receipt: camouflage accepted, attention redirected.
Rooms have patterns. Even when I’m little enough that the couch cushions swallow my legs, I can feel it: like there’s an answer key taped under the coffee table and everyone else already peeked.
First, I find the loudest voice. Not the angriest, not always. The one that makes other people’s shoulders turn, the one laughter gathers around like it’s a heat source. I watch what they say that gets rewarded: stories that end in self-deprecating punchlines, complaints disguised as “isn’t it funny,” tiny flexes wrapped in modesty. If someone makes a joke and it lands flat, I note who rushes in to rescue it. If someone says something too true and the room goes tight, I memorize the exact second it happened so I can avoid stepping there later.
Then I track where the adults’ eyes go when they think they’re being subtle. Aunties scanning shoes by the door and then drifting upward, pausing at knees, waists, cheeks. Uncles pretending not to listen but adjusting their tone when someone “important” enters. The way praise gets distributed like currency. The way certain kids get asked about grades before they’ve even finished saying hello.
I figure out the lanes. Center of the room is for the people who can afford to be messy. Corners are for the people who are allowed to be quiet without anyone calling it rude. Doorways are temporary: you can hover there and it reads like you’re on your way to help, not like you don’t belong.
I choose my angle on purpose. Not invisible. Invisible gets you searched for. Instead: visible in the correct way. Seen carrying something. Seen handing out cups. Seen nodding at the right jokes. A moving target with a job attached, so no one can corner me with questions that have traps in them.
If I do it right, I’m there in the room’s story as a detail, helpful, polite, good, and not as a person anyone needs to examine.
Manners are the first language I learn fluently, before math facts, before how to say my own feelings out loud. Chin dipped at the exact angle that reads respectful instead of sulky. Smile small enough that nobody thinks I’m inviting questions. “Thank you,” “excuse me,” “no, it’s okay,” dropped like coins into a jar. Proof I’m not going to cost anyone extra.
My hands stay occupied on purpose. If I’m refilling the tea, I don’t have to be the one answering why I’m so quiet. If I’m wiping a counter that’s already clean, I can pretend I didn’t hear someone ask about my “real” parents, or my grades, or whether I’m eating enough. Tasks turn me into furniture with benefits. Useful. Unthreatening. Easy.
I get good at anticipating needs before they become requests. The second a plate empties, I’m there. The second a conversation starts to tilt toward me (like a spotlight swivel) I stand up, vanish into the kitchen, come back with napkins or more ice. It’s not lying. It’s redirecting traffic.
And when I say “daijōbu,” I mean: please don’t look closer. Please let me keep my edges intact.
Whenever tension sparks I feel my body make decisions before my brain catches up. My shoulders fold in. My footsteps turn quiet. My mouth turns into a sealed envelope. I rearrange my face into the safest version: neutral, grateful, unbothered. The kind of expression that says, See? No problem here. Nothing to pull apart.
I tell myself it’s strategy. That if I stay small, the attention will slide past me and stick to someone louder. That if I answer in short, polite sentences, nobody will think to ask follow-ups. Like calm is something I can manufacture and trade for privacy.
Like shrinking is the same as being in control.
The rule hardens into something irrational I still treat like physics: public is where bad things happen, so public has to be managed. I start running risk assessments like it’s my job. Voice level. Eye contact. How fast I chew. If I’m easy enough, smile, nod, carry plates, no one will crack the room open. No crack, no questions. No questions, no shaking.
“Low-maintenance” starts as something adults say with relief, like I’m an appliance that doesn’t break. Then it becomes my own promise, whispered under my breath: be pleasant, be clean, be grateful. Don’t ask for seconds, don’t ask for rides, don’t ask for explanations. Safety turns into a punch card. Follow the script, get to stay. Miss a line, and everyone looks up.
Meals show up like little diagrams of how to be acceptable.
The bento lid lifts and everything is already decided: rice tamped into a rectangle with edges so sharp they look cut, tamagoyaki sliced into identical coins, green beans lined up like they’re at attention. Umeboshi dead center, a red dot like punctuation. Pickles tucked into the tiniest corner so they can’t leak or take over. Even the chicken is cut to match the compartment it’s in, trimmed of anything messy. Nothing spills. Nothing surprises.
I learn fast that the shape is part of the lesson.
Not because anyone says it out loud. It’s quieter than that. It’s the way someone’s hand pauses if I reach for the “wrong” section first, like my fork is about to break a rule. It’s the way an auntie will say, “Eat some vegetables too, ne,” in the same voice they use for “Be careful crossing the street.” It’s the way portions get narrated: half-jokes about growing kids and “watching carbs,” soft laughter that still lands in my stomach like a stone.
The compartments tell you what order to be in. Protein before dessert. Greens to prove you’re trying. Rice is safe, but not too much, unless you’re a boy, unless you played sports, unless you’re “burning it off.” Fruit is a reward that pretends it isn’t. Everything has a reason that’s also a warning.
I start reading the lunchbox like a set of instructions taped to the inside of my skull. Finish what looks “responsible.” Leave what makes you look greedy. Don’t be the kid who asks if there’s more. Don’t be the kid who doesn’t finish, either.
Sometimes I practice in my head: If I eat the broccoli first, it looks good. If I save the tamagoyaki for last, it looks like a treat. If I take smaller bites, it looks like I’m savoring, not stalling.
And I don’t say anything about how my throat tightens anyway, like the food is also watching me back, waiting for me to prove I can follow the map.
Adults don’t stare outright. They do something sneakier, something that can pass for care if you squint. Their eyes flick to your plate and back up to your face like they’re checking a gauge on the dashboard. Then comes the soft play-by-play, the little affirmations dropped in between sips of tea.
“Mm, nice. Good balance,” an uncle says, like my lunch is a report card he gets to sign.
“Ara, so healthy today,” an auntie sings, when I take a bite of greens, and my chest tightens because now there’s a “today,” meaning there are days I fail.
“You finished! Sugoi,” someone chirps, and it’s meant to be light, the way you praise a toddler for tying shoes. But it pins me in place. Finished equals good. Not finished equals question time.
I learn to keep my chewing steady, my pace unremarkable. I learn to leave the same amount every time if I’m leaving anything at all, so it looks like preference, not panic. Their words are cottony and sweet, but they land like checkpoints I didn’t agree to run.
The words they use for food don’t feel neutral; they click into place like labels on a filing cabinet. “Good” is said with this soft pride, like virtue is something you can chew and swallow. “Bad” is never said straight (too sharp) so it becomes “heavy,” “rich,” “a little much,” delivered with a laugh that expects you to laugh back so nobody has to own it. Portion talk is always dressed up as teasing. “Whoa, you’re hungry today, huh?” “Careful, ne, don’t eat like an ojisan.” Friendly, friendly, friendly. Until you realize it’s a perimeter. Step over it and the room doesn’t get loud; it just gets quiet in a way that makes your skin remember.
Predictability starts to feel like a blanket I can’t breathe under. If I follow the unspoken sequence everyone’s faces stay soft, conversation keeps its careful rhythm. The room remains unbroken. But if I pause too long, if I hesitate over a bite like it might bite back, I feel it: the tiny recalibration. Eyes don’t stare. They sharpen, then slide away, like I imagined it. Like I’m supposed to pretend I didn’t.
Slowly, eating stops being about my body and starts being about their faces. I learn to time bites to the conversation, to smile at the right comments, to make my fork look casual even when my wrist is locked. I take sips of water like punctuation. Hunger turns into background noise; fullness is something I negotiate. What matters is the quiet click of approval: the invisible grade I can’t afford to fail.
I get good at being “easy” the way other kids get good at sports. Like it’s a skill you can practice until your body does it without asking permission.
My voice goes soft on purpose. The kind of soft that makes adults lean in like they’re being trusted. I nod at the right time (small, quick, like punctuation) so nobody has to repeat themselves or wonder if I’m disagreeing. If someone asks me a question with teeth in it (“How’s school?” “You eating enough?”), I answer with something rounded-off and harmless. Fine. Busy. Tired, but you know. I keep my face neutral, careful. I don’t give them a hook.
And my hands. My hands are always doing something.
I stack plates before anyone tells me to. I wipe the condensation rings off the table with a napkin folded into a perfect square. I offer to rinse the rice cooker like it’s a privilege, not a way to disappear behind running water. I learn which auntie likes her tea refilled without being asked, which uncle pretends he doesn’t notice but always does. I become useful in ways that make people smile and then stop looking too closely at me.
“Such a good kid,” someone says, like it’s a compliment, like it isn’t also a label that locks.
When the last thank-you has been exchanged and the room starts to loosen, adults turning louder, kids turning feral, I slip out as if I’m just going to the bathroom. My shoes by the door. My jacket off the hook. No announcement. The best exits are the ones no one feels.
Outside, the air hits me like permission.
The streetlights make the sidewalk look clean even when it isn’t. Neon from a ramen place buzzes in my peripheral vision. I pick the long way home on purpose, not because it’s safer, not because I have time to kill, but because for a few extra blocks nobody is narrating me. Nobody is tracking my bites or my tone or whether I’m grateful enough.
My steps settle into a rhythm that feels like mine. I let my shoulders drop one millimeter at a time. I breathe in exhaust and fried tempura and cold night air, and it still feels better than being watched.
If I walk far enough, the version of me that’s “easy” falls behind, like a jacket I can finally unzip.
In my headphones, I keep a second self breathing. Not a better one. Just one that isn’t constantly rehearsing “normal.” The playlists are private on purpose, buried under boring names like “study” so nobody gets curious. Songs that would make the aunties blink if they heard them. Bass heavy enough to feel like a heartbeat that belongs to me. Voices that crack on purpose. Lyrics that say the things my mouth refuses to shape in daylight.
On the train, I tuck my chin and let the music do the expanding. I mouth lines without sound, tongue pressing against my teeth like I’m holding something back from spilling. Sometimes I pick a chorus and loop it until it stops being a sentence and turns into a muscle. Something I can clench when people’s eyes start measuring me. Sometimes I choose the loudest track I have and let it drown out my own thoughts, the ones that keep score and whisper rules.
It’s not dramatic. It’s just mine. A secret I’m allowed to keep, even when everything else feels like it belongs to someone watching.
So I start collecting micro-choices like spare coins in my pocket, small, quiet weight I can curl my fingers around when the room tries to decide who I am. I stand somewhere new at gatherings, not in the automatic doorway shadow where it’s easiest to be ignored, not by the aunties’ elbows where I can be recruited into chores. Just… elsewhere. A different tile. A different air current.
If a joke lands wrong, I let it. I don’t throw my laugh over it like a blanket to keep everyone warm. The silence that follows is thin and dangerous, but it’s also honest, and it reminds me my face doesn’t belong to them.
And when someone says, “You’re so polite,” I don’t rush to thank them for the sentence that cages me. I just nod, slow, and keep breathing.
Across the room, my attention keeps snagging on Reina-ko like a thread I can’t stop picking at. They’re all clean lines and practiced calm until they turn their head and something flickers. Eyes going softer, mouth forgetting the right shape. It’s tiny, probably accidental, but my chest still tightens. Not because I want them to look at me. Because I want them to search for me.
The thought turns into a quiet dare I never say out loud, not even in my head where I’m supposed to be allowed to be messy. What if someone could pick me on purpose: without me folding myself into the right shape first, without me offering usefulness like a receipt. What if I didn’t have to earn the right to take up air.
I learn early that a face can be a locked door if you practice long enough.
Not blank: blank gets you asked if you’re okay. Not smiling: smiling gets you handed another question like it’s a prize. Neutral is the sweet spot, the resting expression that tells adults, I’m listening, I’m fine, I’m not a problem you need to solve. I keep my eyebrows still. I keep my mouth in a line that could mean anything. I make sure my eyes don’t look too hungry for anything. Not attention. Not food. Not reassurance. Wanting reads loud in a room like that.
My voice, too. I shave it down until it’s small and smooth, a pebble you can hold without getting cut. Soft enough that people have to lean toward me, like I’m giving them something, without being loud enough to count as taking space. If an auntie calls my name from across the living room, I answer right away, but I don’t project. I don’t let my words travel farther than they have to.
Questions come dressed up as concern. “How’s school?” “Are you adjusting?” “You making friends?” The trick is to answer in a way that doesn’t open a second door.
Good. Fine. Busy.
If I add details, someone can grab one and worry it between their fingers until it turns into a whole conversation about me. If I hesitate, they’ll fill the pause with their own story, their own theories, their own advice, their own old memories of someone else’s kid who “went through a phase.” So I give them rounded-off answers that don’t snag. I nod on the beat. I say, “Mm,” like punctuation.
And if I can’t be invisible, I can be useful. Useful is a different kind of camouflage: hands moving, dishes clinking, errands volunteered for before someone can assign them. When you’re doing something, nobody asks you to explain what you’re feeling. When you’re helpful, nobody complains that you’re quiet.
It works. Most of the time. It makes me easy to keep. Easy to place. And I hate how good I am at it.
At gatherings in LTV, I turn into a function before I turn into a person. I know exactly where to put my shoes: heels aligned, toes out, not blocking anyone’s auntie. I know how to slide past knees and folding chairs without brushing a shoulder hard enough to be noticed. If someone’s carrying a tray, my hands are already out, like I’ve been waiting for an excuse to be assigned.
I don’t even think about it. My body does it the way it knows how to breathe: stack the paper plates, rinse the serving spoon, wipe the counter before the soy sauce dries into a dark comma. Say “thank you” the second the tea touches my palms. Laugh softly at the parts that are supposed to be funny. Don’t reach for seconds too fast. Don’t hesitate like you’re counting. Don’t look like you want.
Adults love this version of me because it makes the room run smoother. I can feel their relief when I’m useful, when I’m small enough to tuck into the edge of the scene like a bookmark.
It’s a kind of disappearing they call manners.
Compliments in that room come out with the same tone as directions, like someone’s pointing to the right shelf to put me on. So polite. Such a good kid. You’re mature for your age, ne? They say it like they’re proud of how little trouble I take to store.
I learn what they’re actually praising: the way I don’t ask for rides, or seconds, or explanations. The way I say it’s fine before anyone has to decide if they want to hear the not-fine part. Being “easy” means nobody has to pick discomfort over harmony. Nobody has to pick me over the vibe.
Sometimes I can feel the invisible treat being held out: keep performing, and you won’t be a problem they have to solve.
Food lives in that same invisible etiquette column. Not nourishment: compliance. Bento lids opened like a test, portions already decided for me, eyes flicking to see if I’m “good” today. Tiny comments land like lint you can’t fully brush off: that’s healthy, so disciplined, you eat like a bird. I learn to read my appetite like rules, and swallow hunger before anyone can log it as proof.
Over time, fine stops being an answer and turns into a costume I can pull on mid-breath. Shoulders down. Eyes steady. No extra air. Stay inside the invisible tape on the floor that says where a kid like me is allowed to stand. If I do it clean enough (no stumbles, no hunger showing) then nobody shifts their gaze, nobody asks follow-ups, nobody decides I’m too much and needs to rehome me.
I learn the house the way you learn a new classroom when you don’t want to be called on: by listening for where the danger is.
Cabinet doors here don’t close, they clap, sharp, lacquered applause that makes my shoulders jump even when I pretend they don’t. The microwave has a bright, cheerful beep-beep-beep that feels like it’s announcing me personally, like: look, look, somebody is eating. The TV is always on somewhere, not even loud, just constant, a laugh track and commercials leaking through walls that might as well be paper. In my old place, silence was its own threat. Here, noise is: proof I’m in someone else’s life.
Yuki moves fast in it, like they belong to the rhythm. Keys tossed into a ceramic bowl. A kettle filled. A drawer opened, then rummaged, then shut with a little too much confidence. Their voice rides over everything, light and casual, like a radio DJ trying to keep a dead air gap from happening.
“Yo, Haru. Shoes off, genkan rules, okay?” they call, and then, softer, like they’re not sure if soft will scare me more, “You good? Long day?”
I say, “Yeah,” because that’s the safest word. It doesn’t invite follow-ups if you say it correctly. I put my backpack down as quietly as I can, aligning it with the wall so it doesn’t jut out into the hallway like a tripping hazard. I pick a spot to stand where I’m not blocking a doorway, not too close to the kitchen, not hovering like I’m waiting for something.
There’s a smell, soy sauce, maybe, and something sweet, mirin?, and my stomach does the thing where it tightens like it’s bracing for impact. Hunger is supposed to be a simple signal, not a negotiation. My therapist would say, Notice. Name. Breathe. I do it anyway, like a secret: tight throat, warm cheeks, heart too loud.
Yuki laughs at something on the TV, but the laugh doesn’t fully land. It slides off into a sigh when they think I’m not looking.
“You can grab water,” they add, like they’re offering permission to exist.
I nod, and I don’t move yet. I listen instead, mapping the floorboards, the distance between rooms, the exact spot where the microwave sound is loudest. Somewhere in all that noise, I try to find the quietest version of me.
At dinner, Yuki makes the kitchen feel like a harmless place on purpose. They line things up like choices at a convenience store. Rice in the cooker, miso soup steaming, a plate of grilled salmon, cucumber salad, a little dish of furikake like it’s confetti. “Okay, okay,” they announce to no one and everyone, doing a fake game-show voice. “Tonight’s contestants: salty, savory, and, surprise, vegetable.”
I watch their hands more than the food. The way they keep moving, so there’s never a pause big enough for feelings to fall into.
“You want more rice? Or less rice. We can do, like, a chill amount,” Yuki says, and laughs before I can answer, like laughter can fill in my blank space.
“Anything is fine,” I say. It comes out practiced, smooth as a lie you’ve used for years.
They tilt their head. “You hungry?”
“Not that hungry.” Small truth. Small voice.
I take bites that could pass. I chew slow, count without counting, keep my face neutral. Normal fork, normal swallow. I stop at the edge where my body starts to feel visible, and I set my chopsticks down like I’m just… done. Like it’s a preference, not a plan.
Questions come dressed as care, but they still arrive like hands. Too quick, too close. What do you like? Any allergies? Are you picky? Did you eat at school? You want seconds? Yuki says it like they’re offering me a soft place to land, like I’m a kid in a commercial who just needs the right snack and a smile. I give them the safest parts of myself: a nod, a shrug, a “maybe.” I time my chewing so my mouth is “busy,” so my silence looks polite instead of panicked. I keep my eyes on the table grain, on the steam curling off the miso, anywhere that isn’t my plate. Every answer makes my body feel less like mine and more like a group project in the middle of the kitchen.
That night I curl under the blanket and let my phone light my hands blue. The recovery app is clean, clinical. Meals become numbers because numbers don’t look at you and ask why. I log what I can, adjust what I can’t, then practice tomorrow’s script in my head: yes, I ate; yes, I’m trying; no, I’m fine. Cooperative, sealed. No openings for clipboards.
By day three, I can predict what makes Yuki’s eyes sharpen. A skipped snack gets a too-bright, “You okay?” like a spotlight with a smile. An empty bowl gets this exhale, like I’ve returned something they were afraid they’d lose. If I go quiet, the questions multiply, soft, fast, harmless-looking. So I don’t eat by hunger. I eat by volume. By visibility. By how to keep the air even.
The house is staged the way some people stage their faces for picture day: everything arranged to say, See? Normal. Shoes lined in a neat row by the genkan, toes pointing out like they’re ready to leave at the same time. A little dish for keys. A little hook for masks. A little sign in English and Japanese about taking off slippers before the tatami room, as if I might forget and ruin the whole set with one wrong step.
Even the sponge has a home. It sits in a plastic cradle by the sink, always angled the same way, yellow side up, green scrubby side down, like it’s waiting for direction. The dish soap is the same brand my aunt used to buy when she wanted the kitchen to smell “clean” instead of like dinner. I notice this stuff because noticing is safer than being noticed.
On the fridge there’s a calendar with color-coded blocks, blue, green, red, purple, some of them labeled with initials that aren’t mine. “SW call,” one square says, in Yuki’s loopy handwriting. “Tutoring?” with a question mark like even plans here apologize for existing. I don’t ask what the colors mean. Questions are how you get assigned something. Questions are how you become an agenda item.
The first time I put my cup in the wrong cabinet, Yuki doesn’t say anything. They just open the cabinet above the sink a minute later, slide my cup into the “right” place, and close it like a magic trick: look, fixed, no one has to talk about it. The lesson lands anyway. There is a correct way to be here, and it has nothing to do with comfort.
“Home” isn’t a feeling; it’s a system. It runs on cues. Where you set your bag, how long you linger in the hallway, how full your bowl looks when you stand up. Compliance makes everything smoother. Compliance keeps the air from changing texture.
So I learn the choreography fast. I step where the floorboards don’t complain. I copy the way Yuki says “itadakimasu” like it’s casual, not sacred. I fold myself into the gaps between routines and try not to make the set creak.
Yuki keeps the air light like it’s their job. They do this whole bit where they become the rice cooker, little wheeze, little click, then switch to a dramatic auntie voice, “Ehhhhh? You don’t want more? You trying to be model?” like it’s parody, like it’s safe because it’s not directed at me, technically. The jokes come fast, stacked, so there’s no quiet long enough for my brain to start narrating my own body.
I laugh when the rhythm demands it. Not real laughter. Just the sound that tells adults, I’m cooperating. I file it away anyway: the way humor drops in right before a question, right after I pause too long, whenever my eyes go to my plate and stay there. A laugh track button they can press to keep the scene from changing.
Sometimes Yuki’s grin slips for half a second, like they’re listening for something underneath my answers. Then it snaps back into place, brighter, louder. “Okay okay, no pressure,” they say, and the word pressure becomes a joke too, turned sideways so it can’t hurt.
But I can feel the timing. The jokes aren’t random. They’re measurements. They’re a way of checking how much space I’m taking up without asking directly.
The rules here aren’t posted, but they’re laminated anyway, shiny, unbendable. I test them the way you test bathwater, one fingertip at a time. When Yuki does the “How you doing?” drive-by, I say “Fine” on purpose, flat and complete, like a door clicking shut. I watch their smile hold for one extra beat, then rearrange itself.
Later I take my plate to my room, because my stomach feels like a stage and I’m tired of performing. Yuki doesn’t stop me. They just call after me, too bright, “Ooh, room service, fancy!” like it’s a joke and not a note.
I leave half a granola bar on the counter. It stays there like evidence. That night: “Just making sure you ate enough today,” casual, casual. Somewhere, something gets tallied. Somewhere invisible, I can feel a pen move.
Gratitude turns into another routine I can memorize: thank you quick, smile small, don’t ask for different food even if the texture makes my throat close. Don’t say therapy unless Yuki says it first, like it’s a topic that costs money. Every polite answer feels like a checkbox. And underneath: if I mess up, this stops being a home and becomes forms.
When Yuki offers care, it comes wrapped in sparkle and disclaimers. “No pressure, okay?” they say, like pressure is something you can opt out of by agreeing to it. Then there’s that soft pause: space held open for me to prove I’m easy. I start translating kindness into consequences. Some truths I keep lodged behind my teeth; others I ration, safe enough not to become paperwork.
At dinner, the table gets quiet in a way that isn’t actually quiet but the air narrows anyway. I feel it happen before anyone says my name. It’s like my body enters the room a second ahead of me and everyone’s eyes go there first, to the space my shoulders take up, to my hands, to the angle of my chair.
Yuki sets down miso soup like it’s a peace offering. Steam curls up, fogging the edge of my vision. “Okay,” they say, too casual, sing-song on purpose. “Eat what you can. No pressure.”
No pressure is always the pressure.
They say it with their grin on, but their gaze does this tiny hitch, a fraction too long on my bowl, then my face, like they’re checking whether I heard the rule and also whether I’m going to break it. Yuki’s fork stays hovering above their plate, waiting. Like if they start eating before me, it’ll look like they don’t care. Like caring is a thing you can be graded on.
I pick up my chopsticks. My fingers feel loud. I take a bite of rice because rice is neutral, rice is safe, rice is something that doesn’t argue back. The bite sits heavy anyway, not because it’s too much but because it’s witnessed. My throat tightens around being observed, not around food.
Yuki laughs, light and quick. “Look at us, very healthy family dinner, wow. Norman Rockwell but make it Little Tokyo.” They do a little pose like they’re on a cooking show. Their eyes stay on me.
I swallow. I try to make my face do “fine,” the same expression I use at school when teachers call on me. I keep my bites even, spaced out like I’m following a metronome. Not too fast. Desperate. Not too slow. Suspicious. Recovery tools call it mindful eating. Here it feels like performing a normal human in front of a jury.
“Good,” Yuki says softly, like it slipped out before they could wrap it in a joke. Then they clear their throat and add, brighter, “And hey, if you’re not hungry, that’s okay too, okay? We’re chill. We’re like… a chill household.” The word household lands like a file folder.
Their fork finally taps their plate. Mine keeps moving because stopping would be an answer.
Portions turn into a whole extra vocabulary in this house, and everyone speaks it like they were born bilingual. An extra scoop of rice appears beside my bowl like a pop quiz I didn’t study for. Yuki says it’s “just in case,” like it’s casual, like it’s not a question mark with steam coming off it. If I eat it, it means something. If I don’t, it also means something. There isn’t a neutral option, there’s just different kinds of being interpreted.
A half-finished bowl sits on the table and suddenly it’s not food anymore: it’s a statement. It’s a confession, it’s evidence, it’s a reason for someone’s voice to go softer in that way that makes my skin crawl. “You okay?” turns into “We can talk,” turns into “I’m proud of you,” like pride is a leash you’re supposed to want.
Seconds are the worst because they’re framed as victory. “Good job,” when I reach for more. Like my hunger is a performance review. Like recovery is a before-and-after photo they can point at and say, See? Better.
The stuff that used to be mine, little scaffolds I built so I could hold myself up, starts to feel like it belongs to the house. My phone buzzes with a meal reminder and I flinch like it’s an alarm someone else can hear. If I open the app at the table, it’s “Oh, you’re tracking? That’s good, right?” If I don’t, it’s “Do you want me to remind you?” like my memory is another risk factor. Even journaling turns radioactive. I catch myself angling the notebook away, hiding the screen, deleting notes that are too honest because honesty looks like instability on paper. Every routine becomes a performance with an imagined rubric: balanced, compliant, improving. I start improvising (changing times, eating in different rooms) not to avoid eating, but to avoid being interpreted.
Even the tiny choices don’t stay tiny. They get handed back to me, narrated like sports commentary. “You didn’t have lunch?” from the doorway when my backpack hits the floor. “You’re only having that?” when I pick the smaller yogurt, like I’m confessing. Their concern is warm, but it presses in, constant. My skin feels too tight, like there’s no room left to breathe wrong.
By Friday I’ve mapped the rule like it’s a bus route: my body is no longer background noise, it’s the headline. If I eat, it’s “Good,” said like relief; if I eat “enough,” it’s a little celebration that makes my stomach twist for different reasons. Even when I follow every plan, every portion, I still feel scheduled. An item on the evening’s checklist.
I try my old script first because it’s the only one I’ve memorized.
Clean plate. Quiet gratitude. Don’t make extra dishes. Don’t make extra feelings.
I say “thank you” the way I say it to teachers when they hand back tests. I chew at a steady pace, like if I keep moving I can outrun being noticed. I even do the thing where I ask one question back (“How was work?”) because conversation is camouflage. If I can get Yuki talking about their day, maybe my body can go back to being background.
But the table here is like a spotlight that swivels.
Yuki’s jokes keep landing half a beat late, like they’re listening under them for something else. Their eyes track the micro-pauses I didn’t know anyone could see: the moment my chopsticks hover, the second my throat tightens, the tiny recalculation before I take the next bite. They watch like they’re trying to learn a new language and I’m the only textbook.
“So,” Yuki says, voice casual in that too-careful way. “Seconds? You want more rice? Or… I can make, like, a little egg, no big deal.”
“No, I’m good.”
“Okay-okay,” they repeat, nodding like it’s a code phrase. Then, almost immediately, “School was okay-okay?”
Okay used to be the magic word. Okay was the bridge you could cross without anyone stopping you to ask what you meant by it. Here, okay is suspicious. It’s a door they keep trying to open wider with their foot.
“I’m fine,” I add, because I can feel them waiting for the real answer.
Yuki laughs once, quick. “Fine, fine. Love that for you.” Then softer, “Any weird stuff?”
Weird stuff could mean bullies. Weird stuff could mean homework. Weird stuff could mean my brain.
I swallow. I keep my face neutral. “No.”
Their fork pauses in midair anyway, like my no didn’t land. “Okay. Just. Tell me, okay? If anything is… off.”
I nod because nodding is cheaper than talking. I take another bite because stopping would turn the room into a question mark again.
Even gratitude doesn’t erase me here. Even silence has subtitles.
In this house, disappearing isn’t neutral. It’s a flare.
If I stay in my room too long, the hallway floorboard squeaks and then there’s a knock that tries to sound accidental. “Hey, Haru? I had extra,” Yuki says, like snacks happen to multiply here the way guilt does. A granola bar. Cut fruit in a little bowl. Onigiri wrapped too neatly to be casual. “Just in case,” they add, and I can feel the unspoken end of the sentence: just in case you’re doing that thing.
If I leave early for school, trying to get ahead of the hallway crowd and the cafeteria noise, my phone buzzes before the light rail even gets to the first stop. You got lunch? Want me to pack? Eat something, okay? The okay at the end is a soft clamp.
And if I avoid the living room, if I route myself kitchen-to-bathroom-to-bedroom like a ghost with a backpack, Yuki will find a reason to be everywhere I am. They’ll “need” to wipe the counter, “forget” to tell me something, hover in the doorway with that grin that doesn’t reach their eyes.
My silence gets tracked, collected, returned to me as concern. Like a lost item they have to report.
“I’m fine” stops being an exit and turns into the thing that makes the air change. It’s like I’ve said a keyword that unlocks a longer menu. Yuki’s grin stays in place, bright and practiced, but their eyes sharpen. Waiting for the part I didn’t say. Fine how. Fine like you ate lunch. Fine like your hands aren’t shaking. Fine like yesterday, when you laughed once and they took it as proof.
They ask it gently, like they’re offering me a blanket, and it still feels like fingers under my chin, tipping my face toward a light I didn’t consent to. I keep my expression neutral because I can’t afford to look guilty for being alive in a body people monitor. I nod. I swallow. I say “yeah.” And somehow every small answer makes more room for the next question.
I start measuring what I give away like it’s something I can run out of. A shrug turns into a story later, “Haru said it was fine”, and suddenly I’m trapped inside someone else’s version of my face. Half-truths multiply into follow-up questions. Anything about food, what I ate, when, how much, becomes a key in their pocket: permission for check-ins, gold stars, and that soft, constant watching that feels like a report card.
So I adjust without making it a scene. My answers shrink to single syllables I can swallow. My movements get economical: chair legs quiet, shoulders tucked, hands busy with napkins and utensils so nobody can read my face. I smile on cue, the safe kind, and keep giving just enough “yes, thanks” to keep the air smooth. If I can’t disappear here, I can at least blend.
I figure out fast that this table has a tempo, like a song everyone knows except me. There’s a beat for questions, a beat for jokes, a beat where you’re supposed to offer something back so it doesn’t feel like an interrogation. I start counting it without meaning to.
Speak when spoken to. Don’t interrupt. Keep your voice even, not too quiet (suspicious) and not too loud (attention). Sit up straight. Don’t hunch like you’re hiding, because hiding is apparently a symptom now.
My fork becomes my metronome. I make it do tidy, quiet work. Everything into pieces small enough that no one can clock the amount. Small bites cut smaller, like if I keep reducing it, it will stop being a topic. I chew fast enough that there’s never a pause where someone can look at my plate and then at my face and then decide they’re allowed to have feelings about it.
I swallow before the air can shift.
Yuki talks about work, about a customer who “absolutely tried to pay in expired coupons, like, sir, be serious,” and I let out the appropriate breath of a laugh. Not real laughter: just the right kind. My jaw keeps moving like a machine while my brain sits on the edge of the chair, waiting for the question that always comes in houses like this.
You want more?
Did you eat at school?
Is that enough?
The worst part is it’s not even mean. It’s the softness that makes my skin crawl, the way concern can be dressed up like politeness and still pin you in place. Yuki’s eyes flick down, plate, hands, throat, and then back up, like they’re trying not to look like they’re looking.
I keep my posture tidy anyway. I fold my napkin too neatly. I say, “It’s good,” and “Yeah,” and “I’m okay,” like I’m paying for my seat with normalcy.
If I stay ahead of the questions, maybe they won’t have time to land. If my mouth is always busy, maybe no one will ask it to tell the truth.
Yuki’s jokes come out like coins from a pocket, automatic, bright, meant to buy a little peace. They do the voice they think is “teacher serious,” make their eyebrows jump, narrate the rice cooker like it’s a cooking show. The grin locks in place: see, we’re fine. See, this is normal.
I give them the right noises at the right times. A nod on the beat. A small exhale that can pass for laughter. “Mm.” “Yeah.” “Thanks.” I don’t look up too long because eye contact turns into a doorway, and doors in this house are for entering.
I keep my face smooth, like a screen saver. I can feel their hope bounce off it anyway, like they’re testing for a crack. If I react too much, it becomes an opening, What’s funny? Why now? If I don’t react, it becomes evidence, Are you mad? Are you okay?
So I calibrate. Just enough warmth to keep Yuki from panicking. Just enough distance to keep the conversation from getting teeth. I swallow my bite and the moment at the same time, fast, before it can grow legs and walk back toward me.
They read my manners like a chart trending upward. The “thank you”s become proof. The way I keep my voice even becomes “calmer.” The fact that I don’t say anything about being tired, about my throat closing around certain words, becomes stability they can brag about to themselves. Good adjustment. Good kid. So resilient.
I let it happen because the alternative is worse. Correcting them would mean naming what’s actually going on, and once you name it, it belongs to the room. It becomes something we all have to look at, something they can touch with suggestions and questions and worried eyes. A problem. A plan. A discussion.
It’s easier to be misread as grateful than to be understood as complicated.
Compliance is just the version of no that doesn’t get you in trouble. I redraw the borders of myself in invisible ink: needs stay unnamed, emotions don’t get a chair at the table. My recovery isn’t a family group project with color-coded binders. The meal plan lives behind a passcode on my phone; my grounding stone rides warm in my pocket; my journal stays facedown like a secret.
By the end of dinner I’ve built a clean, convincing “fine.” Not empty. Just polished. I leave a respectable amount gone, wipe the rim of my bowl like that matters, and stand up before anyone can offer help. The sink water is too hot; I let it sting, a private punishment and a private proof. Then I slide back to my room, where the rules are mine. At the table, softness turns into something people can hold.
The first time Yuki’s laughter doesn’t land, it’s so fast I almost convince myself I invented it.
They’re mid-bit, mid-story, something about a coworker, a customer, the kind of harmless anecdote that comes pre-laughed at, and their hand reaches for the rice paddle like it’s the next line in a script. The spoon clacks against the pot. The sound is too sharp, like a dropped coin.
And then their face goes blank.
Not angry. Not sad. Just… gone. Like someone turned off the overhead light for half a second and I can see the room without the filter. Their grin isn’t resting; it’s absent. Their eyes don’t do the usual soft-squint that says I’m being funny, please let this be normal. They look at the rice like it’s a problem they have to solve before it spills over.
I watch it happen because I watch everything. Because if you learn the timing of other people’s moods, you can step around the parts that cut.
The blank lasts maybe a blink. Maybe less. Then Yuki’s mouth remembers itself. The corners pull up. The eyebrows lift. The joke resumes right where it left off, like the pause was a buffering wheel no one is supposed to acknowledge.
But my stomach tightens anyway, not from hunger or fullness, from recognition. That gap was real.
Yuki laughs again, louder this time, like volume can patch over a seam. “Okay, okay. Anyway,” they say, and their voice gets extra bright, extra casual. Their eyes flick toward me, then away, checking: did you see? did it scare you? are you going to make this into a thing?
I don’t. I keep my expression in the safe zone. I mirror back a small sound that could be amusement if you don’t look too close.
Because I understand the deal now, the one nobody said out loud. Their humor isn’t just for me. It’s for the room. For whatever’s waiting outside it. For the idea that if everything looks light enough, no one will come in with questions and clipboards and that careful tone adults use when they’re trying to decide where you belong.
Yuki’s grin goes back on like armor.
And I pretend I didn’t see the skin underneath.
It isn’t just me they’re measuring.
I can feel the attention on my plate, sure. The pauses between bites, the little too-fast “I’m good,” the way my hands hover like they’re waiting for permission. But the adults’ eyes keep sliding past me, ricocheting. Yuki checks their phone like it’s hot, screen tilted away, thumb flicking too quick for any real reading. The other adult (caseworker energy even if they don’t have a badge) keeps their own phone face-down, but their gaze jumps every time it buzzes, like the table is a trapdoor and the sound is the latch.
“How’s school going?” comes out light, normal-voice, like it belongs in a brochure.
Under it: Any emails? Any attendance flags? Any teachers noticing? Under that: Are you going to make us look bad?
Yuki laughs at the question a half-second late, like they’re buying time. Their chopsticks pause midair. Their shoulders stay up, polite. They look at me, then at the other adult, then back to me. I swallow and try to keep my face boring, because boring is safe, and safe is what they’re all eating.
“Just want to make sure you’re doing okay,” someone says. Soft voice, soft face, the kind of softness that has rules.
I nod like it’s nothing, like okay is a simple box you can check with a pen. But I hear the second sentence tucked inside the first, the one nobody wants to admit exists: because if you’re not, it becomes a problem we have to report, solve, explain. A file. A phone call. A meeting with chairs angled toward me like a spotlight.
My throat tightens, not from the food, from the math. If I tell the truth, it spreads. If I don’t, I become proof that everything is working.
“I’m fine,” I say, careful. The word lands cleanly, and everyone exhales like I did them a favor.
Words snag at the edges of their sentences, caseworker, meeting, forms, slipping through like steam from a pot lid that won’t seal. Nobody says them straight. They don’t have to. The air changes every time a phone vibrates, every time Yuki’s laugh gets a fraction too high. Those words sit between us anyway, an extra plate on the table, untouched, undeniable.
It hits me like ice water, not dramatic, just immediate: this isn’t love with no strings. It’s care with terms and conditions, affection braided tight with assessment. Every “we’re just checking” has a shadow, every kindness has an exit plan. If I say the wrong thing it won’t stay in the room. It will become notes. A record. A reason.
By second period I’ve counted three different ways the school can prove I exist. Not in the “good job, you’re here” way. In the inventory way.
First, the front office. The little barcode scanner by the counter that makes a clean, satisfied beep when you hold your ID under it, like it’s taking a bite. The attendance lady doesn’t look up when it happens. Her nails are painted a pale pink that matches the “Have a Great Day!” sign taped to the plexiglass, and the beep is louder than her voice anyway.
Then the hall pass system. Laminated rectangles that smell like dry-erase marker, with a tiny analog clock drawn on some of them because the teacher doesn’t trust your phone. Other passes are printed and dated and signed like they’re visas. If you’re late, the pass turns into a receipt. Proof you were allowed to be out of place.
In math, Mr. C’s tablet does this chirp, high and bright, like a bird that learned only one note, every time someone’s name gets tapped. Present. Tardy. Absent. The screen flashes colors I pretend not to see, but I feel them in my skin. Green means you’re acceptable. Yellow means you need explaining. Red means you’ve already become a story someone else gets to tell.
My therapist calls it hypervigilance. Like I’m overreacting. Like there isn’t an entire building designed to track your movements down to the minute.
I keep my face neutral. I keep my shoulders small. I keep my legs still so no one can read the jitter in my knee and decide it means something.
Someone behind me whispers, “Dude, she’s gonna mark you,” and a boy laughs too loudly, like laughter can erase a record.
I glance at the door, at the hallway beyond it and think about lunch like it’s another checkpoint. Another place where you can be noticed doing something normal and still get punished for it later.
At my locker, the metal door sticks for half a second like it’s deciding whether I’ve earned access. I tug it open and the smell of someone else’s body spray (too sweet, too loud) hits my face. I pretend I don’t breathe it in.
My schedule is folded in my pocket, creased soft from checking it like it’s a rosary. I don’t even need to look anymore. I know the times. I know the gaps. I know what happens if I miscalculate one bathroom break and it turns into a blank square on a screen.
One missed period is never just a missed period. It’s Mr. C’s chirp, then a little automated “We noticed an absence” email, then the robocall that Yuki will answer with their bright fake voice, Hi! Yes! Everything’s fine!: then the quiet after, when the kitchen light is too harsh and no one says the real thing out loud.
And somewhere, someone types it into a system that doesn’t have moods, doesn’t do forgiveness, doesn’t care if your stomach knotted up because lunch feels like standing under a spotlight.
The file doesn’t forget. It just waits.
I start moving like the ceiling tiles have eyes.
Not literally, no cameras that I can see, but the feeling is the same: every choice leaves a trail. I pick the long way to English because it avoids the front office counter and the little cluster of kids who treat the attendance lady like she’s part of the audience. I cut behind the vending machines where the fluorescent light flickers and people don’t linger. I count my steps with my breaths, then switch to minutes because minutes are what the systems eat.
If someone stops me, hall monitor, teacher, anyone with a lanyard, I already have the script cued up: Bathroom. Nurse. Forgot my book. Club flyer for Ms. Tanaka. Neutral reasons. Flat voice. Nothing that sounds like a feeling.
Feelings get follow-up questions.
In the counseling hallway the air is colder, like it’s been trained not to carry secrets. A clipboard is just sitting there on a chair, no cover, no shame, names, times, initials stacked in tidy ink like a menu. My fingers itch anyway. If I have to sign, I’ll tilt my wrist, curl my hand, make my own name unreadable. Like privacy is something you can hide inside your palm.
By lunch, it lands in me like a coin dropping to the bottom of a jar, heavy, ordinary, final. I can disappear inside a crowd and still be legible to the machines. A half-eaten granola bar, a “forgot my lunch” shrug, a too-long bathroom break: each one becomes a timestamp, a note, a call. My body can vanish; the paper trail can’t.
The club corridor isn’t technically a different campus, but it feels like one. Like someone swapped the air. The regular hallway has that washed-out, keep-your-head-down vibe. Here it’s louder without being loud, layered with intention. Posters on top of posters on top of posters, edges curling like dried leaves: JAPANESE CULTURE CLUB. Half-covered by PEER TUTORING. I drift along the wall because walking down the middle is how you get recruited, or recognized, or forced into a conversation where you have to perform being fine. The voices around me have that confident lift, like everyone’s already decided what they’re doing after school and which teacher will sign off on it.
And then I see him. The transfer kid, I think, because I don’t recognize his face and he’s wearing his backpack like it’s decorative. Leaning against a locker with one foot up, like lockers are furniture and not something you’re supposed to apologize to when you slam them.
He’s talking to two kids from my grade: scholarship kids, I can tell, clean sneakers and that restless brightness. The transfer kid’s hair is a little too styled for second week of school. His tone has the smooth slide of someone who’s never had to check whether he’s allowed to speak.
“Nah, you don’t wanna take the rail from here,” he says, flicking his hand like he’s brushing away a fly. “You go two stops down, cut through Arts District, and then you’re right there. Like, it’s literally faster if you walk past the fancy apartments. They’ve got security but they don’t care. They’re paid to look bored.”
One of the scholarship kids laughs, a little high. “You go downtown a lot?”
The transfer kid shrugs like downtown is his backyard. “My mom works near Grand. I’ve been taking those stops since I was, what, twelve? Little Tokyo’s cute, but it’s not the city-city.”
Cute. My throat does that thing where it tightens like it’s trying to hold my words in place.
I keep moving, but slower, because my brain won’t stop inventorying him: how his shoulders take up space without asking permission, how the kids around him angle toward him without noticing they’re doing it, like gravity isn’t a law, it’s a person.
The transfer kid laughs again. Full volume, no apology, like the sound belongs to him and everyone else is just borrowing it. It hits the lockers and comes back brighter. A couple of heads turn. Not annoyed. More like… recalibrating.
I watch the tiny choreography happen. A boy with a trumpet case shifts it from his right side to his left so it doesn’t clip the transfer kid’s elbow. A girl steps back half a tile, smile already loaded on her face, the kind you wear when you want to be seen agreeing. Someone tugs their backpack higher like they’re making themselves sleeker, less in the way. The scholarship kids angle their bodies toward him, open, listening, like the hallway is a stage and they’re choosing their seats.
No one says, Lower your voice. No one says, You’re being too much.
Because “too much” is only a rule for certain people.
My own shoulders fold in automatically, like my muscles have been practicing. I press closer to the wall, eyes down, pretending I’m reading flyers. JAPANESE CULTURE CLUB in bold, PEER TUTORING in neat serif. My brain does the math anyway: who gets to be large, who gets to be invisible, and how fast the air rearranges itself to make it true.
A senior cuts through the corridor like they’re late to a life already in progress. Varsity jacket, crisp cuffs, the kind that doesn’t smell like sweat, and a folder hugged to their chest, thick, laminated, stamped with university seals in gold and navy like they’re brand logos. They’re talking to nobody and everybody at once, voice pitched casual, like deadlines are just weather.
“Common App’s basically done,” they say, flipping a page. “Coach wants my final transcript by Friday. And then once I move into the dorms, it’s, like, straight to preseason.”
Someone murmurs, “Damn.”
The senior doesn’t even look at who said it. They just keep walking, future trailing behind them in neat bullet points. I feel my stomach do that small, stupid lurch: like the hallway itself is asking what my plan is, and I don’t have one I can say out loud.
My eyes keep doing it: counting lanyards like they’re rank, clocking matching club shirts, who gets a “hey, Ken!” and who gets a nod that doesn’t require commitment. Even the way people stand says who belongs. Then I catch my own face in a trophy case reflection: the light-rail mask, calm-neutral, corners tucked in. The expression that tells the world, nothing here can stick to me.
A guy I’ve seen in the counseling office sometimes (Taro, the substitute tutor) slices through the corridor like he owns the air, grinning too wide. “Okay, okay, save some academic excellence for the rest of us,” he calls, loud enough to bounce off the lockers. A few kids laugh; a few stare. A teacher passing does this tiny flinch. I register how fast a room turns when someone snaps their fingers.
The hallway keeps trading in invisible currency. You can almost hear it if you listen hard enough: zipper teeth, binder rings, the soft slap of paper passing hands like a relay baton.
A thick SAT binder shows up first, the kind with a hard plastic spine and color-coded tabs that look professionally laminated. It moves from one kid to another without anyone asking, like it belongs to the group more than to a person. The girl who hands it over doesn’t even loosen her grip all the way until the other one’s fingers are already under the cover, like they’re both making sure the exchange is witnessed. Proof of seriousness. Proof of access.
Someone uncaps a neon yellow highlighter with that practiced flick, thumb, click, done, like it’s a magic trick you learn when you’ve had the right kind of help for long enough. The smell of the ink hits sharp and chemical and suddenly I’m thinking about lines and categories, how you can mark the “important” parts of your life until the page bleeds. He drags the color across a sentence and I feel my eyes flinch like I’m the paper.
“My mom got me a tutor,” a boy says, casual, half-laughing, as if he’s confessing to ordering boba too often. No one reacts like it’s a flex, which is how I know it is. A girl nods and says, “Same, but mine is, like, only for math,” and the word only floats in the air like an apology for having too much.
They talk in these quick little abbreviations (PSAT, AP, UC) like the future is a group chat they’re already in. I’m standing close enough to catch it all, far enough to pretend I’m not. My hands stay tight on my backpack straps because if I let go, I don’t know what they’ll do. Reach? Shake? Ask for something?
And my brain, traitor-bright, starts listing what I can’t casually say. I take the rail. I do my homework on my phone when the Wi-Fi doesn’t cut out. I have an app that reminds me to eat and a therapist who reminds me that needing reminders doesn’t make me weak.
Across from the binder ritual, someone laughs and says, “I’m starving,” and it lands wrong in my chest, heavy and sharp, because in this hallway even hunger sounds like a choice.
At the Japanese Culture Club table, the sign-up sheet is already half-scripted before anyone writes a single letter. The paper sits on a clip board like a dare, columns neat: Name, Grade, Contact. And then, in smaller handwriting squeezed between lines, the invisible parts. Roles that aren’t officially there but everyone can see anyway. Secretary. PR. Historian. The jobs that mean access to group chats and keys to cabinets and whose opinion counts.
A pen gets passed around and three kids get looked at first, like the asking is ceremonial. Kenta leans in, grinning, and goes, “Reina-ko, you’re basically our communications, right?” like it’s a compliment and a trap at the same time.
Reina-ko’s smile is precise, a fraction too slow. “We’ll see,” they say, soft, and I feel something in my ribs loosen and tighten at once.
Someone else (Nao-mi, posture perfect) tilts their head and says, “We should pick people who can commit,” and the word commit lands on the table like a paperweight.
My turn never arrives. I keep my hands under the table, fingers counting breaths against my palm, watching leadership move the way money moves: to the people who already have it.
After-school plans drop into conversations like everyone’s got the same map. “We can run through it after practice,” someone says, like practice is a place you can casually orbit. “Let’s stay late, it’ll be faster,” another voice adds, and the table hums with agreement like time is elastic.
My brain doesn’t agree. It lays the light-rail grid over their words: the 4:[^12] if I sprint to the platform, the one transfer that always runs ten minutes behind, the walk from the station where the streetlights flicker like they’re deciding whether I exist. Late means the house is too quiet or too loud. Late means dinner turns into a question. Late means I’m standing in the kitchen pretending I’m not counting, pretending I’m not scared of slipping.
I keep my face smooth. I let their “later” sit on my shoulders like it’s weightless.
“Just stay, right?” someone says, like time is pocket change. I give the half-nod I’ve practiced in mirrors. Inside, I’m doing math: “just” means why don’t you have a ride, where do you live now, who’s your guardian, why are you weird about dinner. “Just” means remembered. “Just” means screenshot-worthy.
Taro’s voice slices back through everything. “Yo, scholars, breathe. Oxygen is free, last I checked.” A ripple of laughter, and I feel the attention in the hallway pivot like a camera on a tripod. Not random. Not fair. A thing you can call over with the right tone, then aim. And sometimes it lands on you.
It happens at lunch, because of course it does. Where everybody’s pretending not to watch anybody and still somehow managing to keep a mental spreadsheet of who’s eating what.
I’m at the edge of the quad with my tray angled like a shield, trying to make my hands look casual around a carton of milk I’ve already opened. I’m doing the thing my therapist calls “neutral noticing.” Sun on the table. Wind tugging at napkins. The sound of someone’s AirPods leaking tinny bass. Anchor, anchor, anchor.
Then I hear the voice.
Not loud. Not mean. Soft like a blanket you didn’t ask for.
“Hey,” a girl says to someone two seats down from me: one of the track kids, I think, hair still damp at the roots like they showered too fast. “You didn’t eat yesterday, right? Are you… okay?”
It’s the kind of concern that arrives already formatted. Eyebrows lifted just enough. Smile tucked in the corner like a safety pin. She leans forward, palms open on the table, the posture adults love. I watch the track kid’s shoulders do that tiny jump, the flinch you can pretend is nothing if you laugh right after.
“I was just busy,” they say. They try to make it a joke. “Forgot.”
“Oh my god, same,” the girl says immediately, relief flooding her face like she’s solved something. “Just, like: don’t do that, okay? You need fuel.” Fuel. Like a car. Like a body is only respectable if it runs.
The track kid nods, eyes down, and the girl’s hand hovers near their wrist, almost-touch, not-touch, before pulling back like she’s being tasteful. She’s careful. She’s good at this.
I think it’s over. I try to lift my fork. I try to let “fuel” be just a word.
But two minutes later, I see her phone screen tilt toward the center of her table. I don’t even mean to look. My eyes do it the way your tongue finds the sore spot.
A group chat. A familiar cluster of names. Kenta’s bitmoji doing some stupid dance.
The girl types fast with her thumbs.
just checked on ____ lol they “forgot” lunch yesterday 😬
keep an eye?? ❤️
The hearts make my stomach go cold. Concern, copy-pasted. Care, turned into a link you can forward. The track kid laughs at something someone else says, unaware their missed meal has already become a shared file.
I stare at my tray like it might betray me if I blink. My app buzzes in my pocket, Eat something. Breathe. And I realize the scariest part isn’t a question.
It’s how easily an answer can travel.
I can feel it before I see it: the glide of attention, the way eyes do drive-bys. Not staring, because staring would be rude. Just a soft skim that pretends it’s nothing, like the fluorescent light is the thing they’re looking at, not my hands, not the angle of my fork, not how much is left.
My tray becomes a diagram. Protein. Carb. Fruit. The milk I opened too fast like I was proving something. My stomach twists, not from hunger, but from being measured.
No one asks me anything. That’s the part that messes with me. Questions would be easier. Questions have edges. You can answer them wrong, but at least you know you’re being tested.
This is different. This is inventory: counting the visible evidence of whether I’m behaving right today. Whether I’m “better.” Whether I’m trying. Whether I’m failing in a way that gives them a reason to talk about me like I’m not there.
I keep chewing anyway, slow and mechanical, like if I make it look casual enough, I can pass. Like I can be food-shaped and human-shaped at the same time.
A joke skims across the table, something about “health influencers” and “rabbit food”, light enough to pass as friendly if you don’t listen too hard. It isn’t even aimed at me. That’s the trick. The laugh that follows is, though: a clean little wave, everyone hitting the same note like they rehearsed it in a group chat. Half a second late, half a second too perfect.
My body hears it before my brain does. Shoulders soft, mouth corners up, eyes down. Perform normal. Don’t make it weird.
I get it then: the joke is a rope line on a hike. You can walk inside it and pretend it’s scenery, or you can step over and watch the whole trail turn to point at you. Stay in the script, or they’ll write you as the punchline.
The kids who look effortless aren’t floating; they’re doing geometry. They’re tilting their faces toward the right adults, laughing half a beat after the funniest person so it reads supportive, not try-hard. They’re deciding who gets tagged, who gets credited, who can be the designated awkward one so everyone else stays smooth. I can almost see the work beneath their smiles, like seams under makeup.
Kindness, I decide, isn’t automatically safety. Sometimes it’s a net. Soft voice, polite knots, “just checking,” and suddenly you’re caught in a story you didn’t consent to. The realization dents something I didn’t know I still believed, but it also sharpens my sight. I can track attention like a flashlight beam: who aims it, who flinches, who gets to call it care.
Still, my feet do it. They drift toward the loudest knot of the Club Hallway like there’s a string tied to my ribs and somebody on the other end is reeling me in.
Kenta’s laugh hits the lockers and comes back doubled, like the building is also in on the joke. People stand too close around him, shoulder-to-shoulder, phones out, faces tilted toward the center as if closeness is currency and they’re all trying to pay for a better seat. A few of them don’t even look at him directly; they look at the people who are looking at him, tracking reaction like it’s a test you can pass by timing your smile right.
It’s stupid, the way I want to see it up close. Like if I can study the mechanics of it (the choreography of hands on backpacks, the casual leaning that says I belong here, the way someone touches someone else’s sleeve and nobody flinches) I’ll understand how to be a person without feeling like I’m taking up contraband space.
My stomach flips, and not in a cute way. In the inventory way. In the are-you-about-to-get-perceived way.
I tell myself I’m just walking to my next class. I tell myself it’s coincidence my path angles toward them, that I’m not looking for Reina-ko’s precise little smile somewhere in the orbit, or the relief of being near noise so my own thoughts can’t be heard. I tell myself I’m not drawn to the center, because the center is where you get named.
Kenta says something (can’t hear the words, just the rhythm) and a chorus of laughter lands like a stamp. Someone claps him on the back, hard enough to mean friendly. He spreads his arms a little, soaking it in, and for half a second I can see the cost of it: constant output, constant brightness, no dead air where anything real could sneak through.
My shoes slow like they’re thinking for me. The air feels warmer here, crowded with deodorant, boba sugar, perfume that’s trying too hard to be grown. I swallow and taste milk, metallic and old.
I’m close enough now that if somebody turns, they’ll have to decide what I am: background or problem.
I hover at the perimeter like it’s a skill I can list on a resume. Half-turned so I’m not blocking traffic. Backpack strap wrapped around my fist, an anchor, a leash, a reminder that I can leave. My face does that neutral thing. Interested enough to look polite, blank enough to not invite anything. Close enough to be counted as “around,” far enough that no one has to make room.
It’s a posture I built over years of not wanting to be a problem in anyone’s hallway.
Up close, the sound is layered. Someone flicks a crumb off someone else’s sleeve and it reads as intimacy, not insult. A phone gets held out, not to record, but to prove: we were here, we were included.
I let my eyes move the way a security camera does: slow, sweeping, pretend it’s automatic. I’m watching for openings and traps. For who turns their body to shield someone. For who keeps their hands busy so they don’t have to hold themselves together.
If Reina-ko is in there, I don’t let myself search. Searching is a kind of reaching. Reaching is how you get noticed.
I watch it happen like a dance I’m not brave enough to join. There’s a pattern to who gets waved in with a chin lift, no words, just permission, and who has to pay first, sliding in an offering: a punchline, a charger, a “hey, did you do the chem homework?” like a tribute. Space isn’t free here; it’s rented by being useful or funny or loud at the right volume. And when the air gets too tight, someone gets volunteered as the sacrifice. Not cruel enough to look cruel, just a quick little nudge of embarrassment so everyone else can exhale and feel bonded. The target laughs along, because laughing is the receipt that proves it was “fine.” I catalog it anyway. Like knowing the steps will keep me from tripping.
A flicker of wanting hits so fast it feels like muscle memory. Belonging, sure: but also the relief of dissolving, of being just another face in the noise, buffered by everybody else’s laughter. Like anonymity you can borrow from the crowd. The spotlight here is everywhere and nowhere; it would scorch if it found me, but if I stay slightly out of focus, I can breathe.
I shift forward (one careful half-step like I’m testing ice) then my body vetoes the rest. It’s not dramatic. Nobody notices. The risk still hits my tongue sharp, like biting a grapefruit rind. I let the second step die in my shoe. Staying at the edge isn’t panic; it’s math. Angles, exits, plausible deniability. How close can I get without becoming a story?
The hallway is the same width it always is (tile, lockers, the sad little posters curling at the corners) but it stretches anyway, like the building learned a magic trick: make every step feel like it’s taking you farther from whatever you thought you could handle. Past the Club Hallway the campus breaks into tributaries, and each one is already claimed. People move like they’ve been sorted into lanes since freshman orientation and nobody told me what color my wristband is.
It’s not that anyone stares. That would be honest. It’s the micro-glances: eyes that tap my face and flick away, quick as checking the time, fast enough you could pretend it didn’t happen. But I feel each one land and do its tiny math. Girl? Boy? Japanese enough? Scholarship kid? Foster kid? Safe? Weird? Background?
I keep walking like my body isn’t reacting. Like my ribs aren’t tightening in that specific way they do when I think someone is going to say my name. When you’re in recovery, you get good at acting normal while your brain is running three parallel threat assessments: food, control, attention. Attention is the one that looks harmless until it isn’t.
Someone brushes past me with a soft “sorry,” not looking sorry, and it’s not rude. It’s the kind of sorry you say to air. A group in matching club hoodies moves as one organism, laughing at something I didn’t hear, shoulders angled so the current of them forces everyone else to step aside. Not mean. Just certain.
I find myself tracking where people place their bodies. Who takes the inside of the hallway and who hugs the lockers. Who can stop mid-walk and make others reroute around them like water. Who keeps their hands busy with snacks and phone cases and lanyards, like proof they’re allowed to exist loudly.
My face stays neutral because it’s what I know. My feet keep a steady pace because if I speed up it looks like I’m running, and if I slow down it looks like I’m waiting for someone. Either way, it looks like I want something. And wanting is a kind of confession here.
Rules show up in the smallest places, the ones you can’t argue with without looking dramatic. Which table is “theirs” even though nobody owns cafeteria furniture. Who can drop their tray late and still get waved in like gravity rearranges for them. Who can talk over a teacher, laughing, calling out, making a whole thing, and the teacher laughs too, like it’s cute. And who gets their name written down for the same volume.
I watch a girl tap a boy’s arm and point at his untouched sandwich, and three people chorus, “Aww, are you okay?” like it’s care, like it’s soft. A minute later, another kid says they’re not hungry and someone snorts, “Sure,” and the air changes. Concern is a privilege. Suspicion is a sentence.
Being “new” isn’t neutral here. It’s a flashlight beam you can feel heating your skin. New means people get to decide what you are before you do, quiet, stuck-up, weird, sad, foster, whatever fits their story best. I keep my posture small and my expression blank, like if I don’t offer a shape, nobody can grab it. But the hallway is already outlining me anyway.
Lunch is loud in a way that isn’t random. It moves like a tide with rules, pushing bodies into their assigned coves. Club hoodies, sports duffels, scholarship kids with matching iced coffees like uniforms. I take my tray and feel every available seat come with an invisible cover charge: laughter, a story, a willingness to be teased and call it bonding. If I hover, I’m “looking.” If I sit alone, I’m “sad.” If I leave to get air, I’m “skipping,” and “skipping” is never just a verb here, it’s a headline someone can pass around like it’s concern.
I pick the table that makes me least visible and eat like my face is glass. The room keeps talking anyway, building my absence into something loud enough to hear.
Opportunity here isn’t a door, it’s a spotlight with a clipboard. Sign-up sheets taped to the wall like wanted posters. Officer lists with last names in bold. “What are you applying for?” said like hello, said like: What are you worth? Scholarship talk turns into inventory. I can’t opt out of being seen; I can only hope they don’t file me under the wrong story.
Silence isn’t armor here; it’s a blank form people fill in for you. If I don’t explain myself, it reads like guilt. If I don’t react, it reads like I’m asking to be tested. “Fine” has to be engineered. Pack the right snacks, say the right amount, laugh once and not again. Leave before eyes can latch on and make me their afternoon project.
I start treating the day like it’s a floor plan I have to memorize to survive a fire drill that never ends.
Corners first. Always corners. The places where the fluorescent light doesn’t hit you straight on and people’s eyes slide past like you’re a poster that’s been there too long. I don’t aim for the center of anything anymore: center is where questions happen, where someone can just decide you’re part of the conversation and then act offended when you’re not grateful about it.
Between first and second period I pause by the trophy case like I’m reading names, but really I’m counting bodies. Who’s in the hallway early, who lingers, who’s already laughing like it costs them nothing. Kenta’s group is loud enough that I can feel it before I see it, like bass through a wall. Reina-ko is there sometimes. Close enough to them that it reads normal, not close enough that it looks like she needs them. That’s what people reward: the illusion of not needing.
I keep one earbud in even when there’s no music. It’s my excuse for not answering the first time. It’s my tiny shield.
At my locker I do things in the same order on purpose: spin the dial, exhale, check the schedule, tuck the meal-plan notification back under the weather widget so nobody catches the words if they’re behind me. I don’t look down at my hands too long because that turns into counting and then counting turns into… other stuff. I tap my thumb against the metal edge grounding like my therapist taught me, like it’s not ridiculous to have coping strategies for walking down a hallway.
I test scripts under my breath when the bell hasn’t rung yet. I’ve got tutoring. I’m meeting my guardian. I’ll catch you later. Sentences that let me disappear without sounding like I’m running.
And still, every time someone says my name, Haru, like they’re tasting it, I feel my posture tighten, my shoulders trying to fold me back into the smallest possible version of myself, the one no one can accuse of taking up space.
Lunch is the hardest because it pretends to be casual. Everyone acts like you just drift into a table the way you drift into a song, like it doesn’t mean anything where you sit or what you do with your hands while you chew.
I pick my table like it’s an escape route. Back to the wall, yes, but more than that: a clean line to the trash can and the door, no chairs to squeeze past, no one who can trap me with their knees and a “wait, where are you going?” if I stand up too fast. I drop my bag on the seat beside me so it looks like I’m saving it for someone, not guarding my perimeter.
Phone out. Screen angled down. Not because I’m hiding: because I’m not giving anyone a reason to look. Water bottle on the right like it’s a habit, sleeves tugged over my wrists like I’m cold, like I’m normal. I scroll through nothing on purpose. I make my face into “busy.” My thumbs tap patterns that aren’t messages.
If I time it right, I can unwrap food, take a bite, swallow, and be done before my brain turns it into a performance for an audience I never agreed to have.
My earbuds are the closest thing I have to a force field. I can lift it or drop it like a visor (one click of my thumb, one tug at the wire) and suddenly I’m “in something,” unavailable. Half the time there’s no music. Just the soft, static hush that buys me a second to decide what I owe anyone. If someone says my name, I get to pretend I didn’t hear it, let the syllables float past without flinching.
It’s not even about ignoring people. It’s about not being drafted. Not being made responsible for someone else’s bit, someone else’s mood. A joke skims my shoulder and I don’t have to laugh to prove I’m harmless. I can just… keep walking.
In the black gloss of my phone screen, my own face floats back at me: washed out, careful. I mouth exits like prayers: I’ve got tutoring. I promised I’d check in with someone. I’m running late. Soft, polite phrases with hidden teeth, built to close a door without slamming it. If I can make leaving sound like responsibility, nobody can argue I’m being rude.
I practice the scripts where they matter: in motion. I drift past the Club Hallway like I’m just cutting through, and the second a clipboard appears, I pivot, “gotta run”, before my name can be asked for. When the hallway thickens, I step into the shadow of a display case, let the crowd swallow itself. I leave early so nobody has to offer me a seat, or notice I wanted one.
The counselor catches me between fourth period and lunch, like she’s been watching the hallway currents and picked the moment I’d be least able to slip into a side route. Her office door is open in that intentional way (inviting, impossible to refuse without making it a Thing) and the air inside smells like citrus cleaner trying too hard.
“Haru, hi. Come in for a second?” she says, already holding a neat stack of papers like they’re an offering.
It’s always paper with adults. Paper means they can say they did something.
She sets them down in front of me with the careful cheeriness people use around breakable objects. Color-coded pamphlets. A flier for a “Lunch Connect Group” with bubble-letter clip art that makes my stomach turn. A schedule template. A list of clubs with highlighted meeting times. The word structure shows up three times in the first paragraph like it’s a magic spell.
“I’ve been thinking,” she says, soft voice, eyes kind in the way that still feels like a spotlight. “Sometimes having something structured helps. Especially when you’re… adjusting. New placement, new routines.”
Adjusting. Like I’m a picture frame they’re trying to get level.
I nod at the right beats. I keep my face in the neutral zone. My hands stay folded in my lap so they can’t see how hard my fingers want to pick at my cuticles, count, rip, anything.
“What’s the lunch group,” I ask, because one question makes you cooperative. One question makes you not a problem.
“It’s small,” she says quickly. “Just a few students. We eat together. Talk about stress. It’s very low-pressure.”
Eat together. Talk about stress. In a room where everyone can watch what you do with your fork. Low-pressure like a vise that hasn’t tightened yet.
I take the flier anyway. The paper is glossy and too bright. I fold it once, then again, edges lined up so perfectly it feels like sealing something shut. I slide it into my backpack behind my binder where it won’t wrinkle, where it won’t be seen, where it can’t become evidence of anything.
“Thank you,” I say. I hear how polite my voice is. How practiced.
“Of course,” she replies, relieved, like my gratitude is a signature. “And if you want, we can check in weekly. Just five minutes. Accountability can be really. “I’ll look at these.”
Her eyes flick down to my bag, like she’s imagining me opening it, committing. I stand before she can add another idea, another net.
In the hallway, the bell hasn’t rung yet, and I can feel lunch waiting like a test. I put my earbud back in, no music, just the thin hush of choice.
At home, Yuki doesn’t sit me down. They orbit. They drift through the kitchen with a pot lid in one hand and their phone in the other, like the world is one long casual suggestion. “So,” they say, stretching the word into something harmless, “there’s this thing at the community center. Not a big thing. Just, like, a chill club? You could meet some kids.”
They say it like offering more rice. Like it would be rude to say no, like the refusal would make the room colder.
I keep my eyes on the counter. The cutting board is clean. That helps. “That sounds nice,” I say, because it’s the right temperature of gratitude.
Yuki’s grin brightens on cue. “Japanese Culture Club is also… very you. Cultural. Educational. Free snacks sometimes.”
My stomach twitches at snacks, at together. I slide my response into the only safe container I have: logistics. “Midterms are coming,” I say. “I have tutoring after school. And the commute. If I stay late, the light rail gets… weird.”
“Ah, the spooky train,” Yuki says, making it a bit. But their eyes flick, just once, to see if I’m okay.
“Maybe after midterms,” I add gently, sealing it. A promise-shaped delay.
They nod like it’s fine, like it doesn’t land. Then they talk about soup. The conversation thins out on purpose, and I let it.
Teachers start aiming higher the way people do when they think they’ve found a safe bet. Like I’m a scholarship application in a human shape. “You’re so responsible, Haru.” “You should apply for this.” “We need students like you.” The compliments come wrapped around asks, and I can feel the trapdoor under each one. Say yes once and they’ll stack it into a role, then a title, then a face everyone knows.
So I give them exactly what can’t grow legs.
“Sure,” I say, soft as a receipt. I volunteer to staple flyers. I wipe down whiteboards after tutoring. I take meeting notes one time, then “forget” my laptop the next. I sign up to bring napkins instead of ideas.
And before anyone can add, also, I’m already moving: backpack on, earbud in, slipping into the hallway current like I was never offered anything at all.
My no’s turn into geography. I take the back stairwell that smells like dust and mop water, cut behind the gym, skirt the Club Hallway choke point like it’s a crime scene. On the light rail I get off one stop early, headphones in, and walk until my calves sting. Pain that feels earned, measurable. I schedule food for later, alone, and if someone clocks it: “Not hungry yet.”
My private systems thicken into something like a quiet fortress. The meal app buzzes and I kill the notification, then bring it back five minutes later, then ten, like I can negotiate with my body. I type grounding notes in my phone, inhale, five things, feet on floor, then delete them before anyone can glance over my shoulder. In my journal I write I’m fine and underline it so hard it bruises the paper. Every polite refusal stays small enough to dismiss, sharp enough to keep everyone, including adults, from making me into a project.
Reina-ko starts showing up in my day the way a song gets stuck in your head. Not the loud kind, not the one everybody knows and sings wrong, but the one that plays underneath everything until you don’t remember when it started.
It’s small at first. The library mezzanine has those carrels that feel like confessionals, three walls and a narrow view of the courtyard if you lean. I always pick the one furthest from the stairs because people’s footsteps make my shoulders do that involuntary lift. One Tuesday, it’s taken. Textbook open, neat handwriting already moving across the page. Reina-ko doesn’t look up right away. Just keeps writing, like they were here before the world got loud.
I should turn around. Turning around is my whole personality.
But then they glance up, and there’s no surprised face, no oh (sorry) performance. Just a quick, calm flick of their eyes to the carrel beside them. Open. Like: it exists. Like: you can sit if you want. Like they’re offering me an exit that doesn’t require me to take it.
So I sit. My backpack makes the tiniest thud and I hate how much I hear it. Reina-ko goes back to their notes. The silence isn’t a punishment. It’s a choice we’re making together.
After that, it keeps happening. The same seat in the Club Hallway becomes an orbit I can slip into when the bell rings and bodies compress. Reina-ko is there with a book open like a shield, and when Kenta’s laughter ricochets off the lockers, their mouth tightens for half a second. Not a comment. Just a signal: I heard it too.
Sometimes it’s even less than that. A look when someone says “You’re so disciplined” like it’s a compliment. The tiniest eyebrow lift, almost imperceptible, like, that was weird, right? And my chest does this stupid, traitorous warm thing, because someone noticing without naming it feels like being handed something fragile and being trusted not to drop it.
Reina-ko never asks me the questions people think are gentle. Not “Are you okay?” not “Did you eat?” not even the fake-casual “So how’s… everything.” They just slide the world into place in ways that don’t require me to perform gratitude.
An extra pencil appears on the edge of my desk like it wandered there on its own. When the teacher starts talking too fast, Reina-ko nudges their phone screen toward me: a shared doc already titled with the date, the period, the unit. No big look to see if I’m watching. No whispery “I told Ms. Sato you’ve been having a hard time,” the kind of sentence that turns your life into a hallway announcement.
In the library, they tap the window seat with one finger. “Want it?” they say, like it’s about sunlight and not about having my back to a wall, like it’s normal to want a view and not an escape route.
I can feel how different it is immediately. Their help doesn’t come wrapped in concern. It doesn’t come with scanning eyes, searching for proof of damage.
It’s just logistics. Options. A door held open without someone counting how long I take to walk through.
It stays small on purpose, like we both signed an unspoken agreement not to make anything a Scene. At 12:[^47] a.m., my phone lights up with a link from Reina-ko. No “lol,” no “thought of you,” not even an emoji. Just a playlist title that could mean nothing if you wanted it to: for studying.
I put one earbud in like I’m sneaking contraband. The first song is all soft synth and steady drums, the kind of rhythm you can match your breathing to without realizing. By the third track my jaw has unclenched. My shoulders drop a fraction. It feels like someone turned the fluorescent lights down inside my head.
The next day, Reina-ko doesn’t look at me like they’re waiting for a reaction. They ask about the homework like the playlist never existed. Like they didn’t spend their night building me a place to stand.
Reina-ko slides a snack across the table like it’s nothing (like a highlighter, like an extra sheet of paper) fingers barely grazing the laminate before they’re already back to the worksheet, pencil moving, face calm. No watchful pause. No “you should.” My chest still locks up. Not because I’m being cornered, but because nobody’s tallying me. Nobody’s waiting to see what kind of person I am if I accept.
The closeness builds faster than my defenses can label it. Warmth pools at my wrists when our hands brush passing the eraser; it clings there like I’ve been stamped. A laugh slips out of me (small, startled) and I clamp it down a beat too late. My cheeks flare, heat like evidence. I keep my face careful. Inside, it’s bright and dangerous, like standing in sunlight with nowhere to set the feeling down.
At home, I keep the real scaffolding where it can’t be seen, because seen turns into discussed and discussed turns into monitored. My phone stays facedown on my desk like it’s ashamed of itself. Notifications are muted so the little chime doesn’t betray me in the living room: no bright pop-up that says Lunch: 12:10 like my body is an assignment. If I need to check the meal plan, I do it the way other people check group chats: quick, thumb already hovering over the home button in case someone walks past.
Yuki doesn’t snoop. That’s the point and also the problem. Trust can feel like a spotlight if you’re used to hiding. They’ll call, “Dinner in ten!” in that sing-song voice like we’re in a sitcom, like the word dinner is neutral. I answer, “Okay,” the same way I answer “How was school?” and “Do you want more rice?” A flat line that keeps the house from catching fire.
Sometimes I take my plate to the sink before anyone can see what’s left. Sometimes I eat slower on purpose, forcing myself to stay at the table even when my brain starts sprinting. Either way, I rinse dishes fast, water loud, like I’m erasing evidence.
The journal is the most dangerous thing I own because it’s honest. I don’t even keep it in a cute notebook. It’s a cheap composition book with a cracked spine, slid behind a stack of old math worksheets in the bottom drawer where the pencils go to die. If anyone pulled it out, it would look like homework. If anyone opened it, it would look like me.
There’s a weird intimacy to typing “urge: 7/10” into an app while the rest of the house watches TV and laughs. Like I’m sitting in the same room but living in a different language. I keep my face blank. I keep my thumbs steady. I keep everything quiet enough that I can pretend I’m just scrolling.
When my chest starts doing that thing, like it’s trying to fold in on itself, I don’t announce it. I don’t even stand up fast. I just drift down the hallway like I forgot something, like the bathroom is part of my normal route between nowhere and nowhere.
I lock the door, not all the way, just enough to feel the click under my thumb. The mirror is too honest, so I keep my eyes on the sink. Faucet on. Not a trickle, full, steady stream. Loud enough to blur the TV noise from the living room into something harmless. Loud enough that if Yuki calls my name, I can pretend I didn’t hear.
I plant both hands on the counter and count: in for four, hold for four, out for six, the numbers lining up with the pulse of water hitting porcelain. My fingers are always curled like I’m bracing for impact, so I tell them, quietly, like a secret, unclench. Unclench. Unclench.
If someone knocks, it’s just running water. It’s just me washing my hands. It’s just nothing.
I learn Yuki’s rhythms the way you learn train schedules: the exact window when they’re on speakerphone with an auntie, laughing too loud to cover the stress, or when they’re wiping counters with one hand and stirring miso with the other, hips swaying like it’s a joke. That’s when I move. Not rushing, rushing looks guilty, but quiet and precise. I slide open the fridge just enough so the light doesn’t spill, pull out the portioned container I made earlier, and set it on the counter like I’ve always belonged there. A glass of water. A breath. The soft, plastic click of the lid resealing is the only applause I allow myself. If Yuki turns, I become background: just grabbing something, just passing through, nothing worth noticing.
The proof gets erased fast. I rinse plates before anyone can read them, scrub forks like they’re confession. Wrappers get folded into tiny, sharp squares and shoved under coffee grounds, buried like it’s archaeology. I take the trash out early, too early, the bag warm against my leg, like I’m smuggling my own life to the curb. Anything that might invite a question becomes something that never happened.
Yuki gets the version of recovery I can stand having a witness to: a calm “mm-hm,” a casual “yeah, I ate,” my eyes already on the sink like there’s something urgent about a rinsed bowl. I keep my mouth soft, expression neutral, like I’m agreeing to weather. I don’t offer timestamps, portions, feelings. I don’t let that sentence mean anything specific enough to be held.
At school, I wear competence the way other people wear merch: loud enough to signal I belong, generic enough that no one asks follow-up questions. Backpack zipped all the way like I’m sealing in air. Sleeves tugged down even when it’s warm, because skin feels like evidence. Hair flattened, corners smoothed. I keep my hands busy: adjusting a strap, tightening a lid, tapping my phone screen so my face doesn’t have to explain itself.
My voice is the most controlled thing about me. I practice it without meaning to. Neutral pitch, clipped endings, a soft little upward lilt that makes everything sound easy. “I’m good.” “No worries.” “Yeah, I already turned it in.” I hand people answers like receipts: time-stamped, complete, no room for returns.
In the Club Hallway, the air smells like dry-erase markers and someone’s sweet coffee. Posters shout about meetings and fundraisers and SPIRIT WEEK in fonts that feel too excited to be real. I walk the edge, not the center. The center is where you get pulled into orbit.
Someone calls my name and my body does that split-second calculation: friend, teacher, scholarship kid, officer. I turn with the correct amount of attention. Enough to be polite, not enough to be available. A girl from Japanese Culture Club asks if I’m coming to the planning thing after school, like it’s casual, like it doesn’t come with a whole set of expectations. My mouth says, “Maybe,” and my eyebrows do a small, apologetic shrug to make it land as busy, not avoidant.
Inside, my brain is counting anyway. Periods. Minutes. The distance from my next class to the bathroom. The time window where the lunch line is shortest so no one can narrate what I choose. The places where mirrors catch you unexpectedly. The places where people notice if you’re not chewing.
I don’t rush. Rushing looks like guilt. I move at the speed of someone who has nothing to hide, even when my ribs feel like they’re trying to listen through my shirt. I keep my face clean and mild, like a blank form. Like nothing on me is worth reading.
I keep a running inventory of what makes me disappear without looking like I’m trying to disappear. There’s the nod that says got it and also we’re done here: firm enough to close a conversation, casual enough that it doesn’t look like a door slam. There’s the half-smile, not the real kind that shows teeth and gives people permission, just the one that lands as polite and finished, like a period at the end of a sentence.
My eyes have jobs. If I look at the flyer board, I’m “checking dates.” If I look at my phone, I’m “responding.” If I look past someone’s shoulder, it reads as distracted, not panicked. I angle my body slightly toward my next class so even standing still looks temporary.
I learn which questions mean nothing and which are fishing hooks. “How’s it going?” gets a quick, weightless “surviving,” like it’s a meme, like we’re all in on the joke. “Did you eat?” gets the same smile as “did you do the homework?”, tiny, automatic, designed to make the asker feel satisfied without giving them anything they can hold.
When the questions drift from weather into my body I reach for the same tiny joke like it’s a coin I can slide across the counter and be done with the transaction. “Sleep? Love her, miss her,” I say, or, “Food? I’m on that photosynthesis grind,” and the laugh that follows is relief, not warmth. People like an answer that doesn’t ask anything back.
I keep it light on purpose. Humor is a lid: click, sealed, no spills. I tilt my head, make my voice airy, give them something easy to carry so they don’t try to carry me. Connection is messy. Exits can be clean if you smile at the right angle.
In the passing periods, my brain is a spreadsheet nobody can see. Eyes on me? Angles of sight. Which bench has a back to the wall. Who’s already seated, who’s scanning, who will narrate my tray like it’s commentary. I keep my face calm anyway, like I’m just efficient. Competence is a costume so no one thinks to reach inside.
By the time the bell finally spits us out, I’ve already arranged myself into the kind of person teachers like: on time, helpful, quiet. Someone who doesn’t need anything. I keep my shoulders tucked, my answers pre-folded. It works. Nobody looks too hard. But the cost is stupidly high. Even choosing which hallway to take feels like a confession I have to practice.
At lunch I treat my phone like a shield and a script. Screen brightness down, thumb steady, the same motions I use when I’m checking grades or bus times, tap, scroll, tap, because if it looks ordinary maybe it becomes ordinary.
My meal-planning app opens to today like it’s a calendar event I scheduled weeks ago. 12:[^14] p.m. Lunch. It’s stupid how comforting that is: a box with a time and a checkbox, like my body is a group project I can manage with enough reminders. I skim the plan fast, not letting my eyes linger on the words long enough to turn into a feeling. Protein, carb, something with fat. “Balanced” like it’s a personality trait.
I angle the screen toward my chest and away from the aisle. The cafeteria is all glare and noise and everyone pretending they aren’t watching everyone else. Trays clatter. Someone laughs too loud like they’re trying to prove they’re not afraid of silence. I can feel the light rail vibration in my legs even though I’m not on it; my body remembers commutes better than it remembers hunger.
A kid two tables over says, “Bro, that’s all you’re getting?” and the words hit my ribs like a knuckle. Not at me. Probably not at me. My brain writes it down anyway.
I scroll like I’m bored, like I’m just killing time. The list of “safe” options is there in tiny text: onigiri from the kiosk, miso soup, a yogurt, granola bar I can actually finish. I pick one, commit, and my thumb hesitates over the checkbox like it’s a confession. The app doesn’t care. It just waits.
I check it off.
For a second the panic spikes, hot and stupid: what if someone sees, what if they connect it to the rumor, what if “meal plan” turns into “they have a problem” turns into everyone having a reason to look at my hands, my mouth, my tray. I lock the screen so fast it’s almost a flinch, then force my face into neutral like I’m texting.
Breath in. Four counts. Breath out. Six.
It’s just a schedule, I tell myself. Just another thing I’m responsible for. Just another box I’m allowed to fill without asking permission.
I choose a line like it’s a dare I’m issuing to myself. Not the shortest one. Shortest means faster, means less time to talk myself out of it, which somehow makes it worse. I go for the middle, the one that looks boring. Boring is safe. Boring is invisible.
My feet move and I don’t let my brain renegotiate. One step, then another, and suddenly I’m in it, boxed in by backpacks and swinging lanyards and the sharp smell of fryer oil that makes my stomach do that confused lurch. Hunger or nausea, flip a coin. I keep my shoulders loose on purpose, like I’m practicing a role in a play where the character is Just A Kid Getting Lunch. My throat tightens anyway, tight enough that swallowing feels loud.
I stare at the menu board and pretend I’m deciding, even though I decided on the walk in. Onigiri. Miso. Something I can finish without turning it into a performance.
My hands stay out of my pockets. My jaw stays unclenched. I can do this. It feels like grabbing the wheel for half a second. Powerful and terrifying, like the car might notice and swerve.
Halfway forward, a laugh cracks open from a table to my left and my whole nervous system tags it as Danger. Not because it’s about me. Because it could be. Because laughter at school is never just laughter; it’s currency, it’s a weapon, it’s a receipt.
My fingers go cold around my phone.
I step out of line like it’s casual, like I’m suddenly remembering I left something on a table, like forgetting is normal and not an escape hatch I keep polished. I angle my body away from the menu board, flatten my face into Nothing, and make my feet move without rushing. Slow enough to look unbothered. Fast enough to get air.
Behind me, the line shuffles forward without me, relief and shame braided tight.
I take the long route past the trophy case, where glass and fluorescent light turn everyone into reflections. My footsteps click in a steady metronome and I count breaths to match (four in, six out) like I can trick my body into believing this is just a hallway. Panic moves through me like heat under skin: sharp, sweaty, temporary. I keep walking anyway.
In the bathroom stall, I balance my journal on my knee like it’s contraband. Pen scratches fast, clipped on purpose: What happened: I bailed. What I felt: heat-panic, shame, that stupid hunted feeling. What I’ll do next: breathe, drink water, try again. Different line, different plan. The sentences look like control. The fear under them doesn’t: control only counts when other people can see it.
I step out of the stall with my sleeves tugged all the way down, cuffs gripping my wrists like they’re doing a job. The air in here is cold and thin, bleachy, and the fluorescent lights make everyone look like they’re made of paper. I move like the tile has invisible wires stretched across it, like if my foot lands wrong something will snap and a siren will go off and everyone will turn.
At the sinks I pick the one at the end, because endings feel safer. I turn on the water, too hot at first, then I twist it down, careful, like the sound itself might be recorded. My face does the thing I taught it to do, neutral, empty, uninteresting. The mirror in front of me is scratched up, but it still shows enough: behind me, someone near the hand dryer, a kid leaning on the counter with their phone in their palm like a secret.
My eyes keep flicking, not dramatic, just… counting. The way you count exits without looking like you’re counting exits.
A stall door clicks. A laugh, small and sharp. My shoulders lock. I can’t tell if it’s about me or just a joke about someone’s TikTok, but my body doesn’t wait for clarification. My skin goes tight, like my shirt is suddenly too small, like the fabric is a hand.
I scrub my hands longer than I need to, because stopping feels like announcing I’m done, I’m leaving, I exist. In the mirror a girl’s gaze lifts, catches mine for half a second, then slides away too quickly. Too fast to be polite. Fast like you touched something hot.
I dry my hands with a paper towel that tears in my damp fingers, and I fold the pieces small, small, smaller. Anything I can control without anyone noticing. My phone buzzes once in my pocket, a dull thud against my thigh, and I don’t take it out. Whatever it is, I can’t look at it in here, under these lights, with these mirrors.
The hallway hits me like a stage light. Not brighter: just… aimed. The noise is the same as always, but it has hooks in it. It catches on my name, on the shape of my backpack strap, on the way my knees decide to move. People don’t even have to turn their heads all the way; they can keep their faces pointed at each other and still angle their shoulders, still leave a little gap in the circle that says, We see you.
I try to read it like I read everything (who stands where, who’s pretending not to look, who always laughs a beat late) but it’s like the rules changed overnight. A sophomore steps aside for me, polite, too quick, eyes skimming down and back up like a reflex. Inventory. A girl I’ve never talked to pauses mid-sentence when I pass, then starts again louder, like she’s proving the conversation didn’t need me.
My skin goes hot under my shirt, tight at the collar. It doesn’t matter if this is normal hallway chaos or something else. My body has already decided it’s about me.
A phone buzzes close enough that I flinch like it went off in my own pocket. A cluster of kids by the lockers folds in on itself, shoulders touching, laughter caught behind hands, soft, sharp, practiced. The kind that says screenshot. The kind that says not to look over here, which means: look over here.
My brain starts doing captions again because silence is a vacuum and someone will fill it. Haru walks at a normal speed. Haru is not rushing. Haru is definitely not going to the cafeteria. Haru is definitely going to the cafeteria. Each step turns into evidence I didn’t submit.
I adjust my backpack strap like that isn’t also a sentence. I keep my face flat. I keep my eyes on the floor tiles, counting squares like they’re safe. Somewhere behind me, another buzz, and the laughter tightens, like a knot being pulled.
By the trophy case, glass reflecting everyone in pieces, I catch my name in someone’s mouth, “Ha, ” then a pause like they’re checking if I’m close enough to hear, then the rest, lowered. Not a greeting. Not even curiosity. More like a tag they can stick on me when they need an example. Haru-the-topic. Haru-the-warning. Haru-with-the-food thing.
The strangest part is how fast a name can get edited by other people’s mouths. Nothing about my face changed overnight, same careful blankness, same hands that don’t know what to do when they’re seen, but the air around me has new rules. My body turns into a bulletin board: readable, discussable, correctable. Privacy stops feeling like a right and starts feeling like something I misplaced.
The glare follows me like a hand on the back of my neck, and I hate that my brain does this: reaches backward for a version of me that didn’t have to be translated.
Middle school Haru knew the map of places where you could go quiet without it becoming a headline. The library stacks that smelled like dust and glue, where the aisles were narrow enough that people had to turn sideways and (miracle) look away. The black curtain wings behind the auditorium where the air was always warmer, thick with old paint and someone’s forgotten stage makeup, and you could stand there and be nothing but a shadow with a backpack.
Back then, my quiet was just… a trait. Not a symptom, not a statement, not an invitation for theories. If I ate alone, it was because lunch tables were loud. If I didn’t, no one wrote a narrative arc about it. “Haru” was a body in a chair, a pencil moving, a locker opening and closing. A seat filled. A backpack moving from point A to point B. No push notifications.
I miss that kind of invisibility so hard it makes my throat sting. Like my body remembers what it felt like to take up less space and be rewarded for it.
And then I think that recovery ruined it.
Not ruined like I regret it. I don’t. I chose it, I keep choosing it, even on days when my hands shake over the simplest things. But choosing to get better means other people get to notice you. It means adults ask questions with their eyebrows. It means friends (if you can call them that) try to be “concerned” in a way that turns you into a group project.
I swallow, like that does anything, like that’s a reset button.
In my head I can still see middle school me slipping behind the curtains, safe in the dark. Now even the dark feels like it has an audience.
Now every small choice feels like it generates commentary. I slow down by the vending machines and it’s like I can hear the headline write itself: stalling, calculating, performing. My hand hovers over the buttons too long and suddenly my fingers are guilty. I pick water and it’s disciplined. I pick something sweet and it’s a cry for help. I don’t pick anything and it’s proof.
In the cafeteria line my body becomes a diagram. The angle of my tray: too empty, too careful, too much. The way I stand with my shoulders tucked in. I hold my fork wrong (I don’t, I hold it like everyone else, but my brain insists) and I can almost feel someone annotating it: control. I chew and I imagine the count of my bites landing in somebody’s group chat like stats. I swallow and my throat tightens because swallowing feels like agreeing to a story I didn’t write.
I can see the invisible captions as people slide past me: disciplined, dramatic, attention, fragile. Like my lunch is a vote and everyone’s watching the results.
Recovery was supposed to be my quiet promise, the kind you keep the way you keep a password, close, boring, uninteresting to anyone but you. Log the meal. Drink the water. Set the timer for breathing. Put my feet on the ground and name five things I can see when my head starts sprinting. Adult stuff. Steady stuff. Proof that I’m not letting my body become the battlefield again.
But the second people decided they could read me, it stopped being private. Now every choice comes with a subtitle I can’t mute. If I eat “enough,” it’s suspicious. If I eat “too much,” it’s a punchline. If I eat at the wrong time, it’s a symptom. I’m doing math I never asked for.
I hate that a part of me still aches for the old disappearing act. Not the sickness, not the wreckage, just the relief of not being inspected like a lab sample. Back then, being quiet wasn’t a red flag. Being small wasn’t an invitation. Middle school me could skip talking, could be hungry, could eat later, and it didn’t mean I was making some kind of point.
Walking toward the cafeteria, I rehearse neutrality the way I used to rehearse answers before getting called on. Drop my shoulders, un-clench my hands, let my face go flat like a sheet of paper. Don’t speed up. Don’t hesitate. Breathe like it’s normal to have your stomach and your reputation in the same room. If I look unbothered enough, maybe nobody will decide my lunch is evidence.
The cafeteria doors breathe out heat, fryer oil, and the sharp sweetness of canned fruit, and it hits me like walking into someone else’s mouth. Noise first: chairs scraping, a shout that becomes laughter, the buzz of a hundred conversations stacked on top of each other until they blur into one constant, edible pressure. My skin does the thing where it wants to turn itself inside out and hide.
I step through anyway, because the alternative is worse: hovering outside like I’m waiting for an invitation to be examined.
My eyes do a sweep I pretend is casual. Where are the blind spots. Where are the adults. Where are the tables that have enough bodies to make me disappear but not so many that I’ll be forced into conversation. The safest edge like it’s just preference, like it means nothing about how fast my heart is sprinting.
There’s a table near the windows where the light is too honest. No. There’s the corner by the vending machines where people line up to refill drinks, and every person would have to walk past me. Also no. I aim for a two-person gap at the end of a long table, the kind of spot that says I’m with you without committing to being with you.
My tray feels loud. Not the actual plastic, just the idea of it: Look, here’s Haru with a choice. Here’s Haru proving something. I keep my grip steady anyway, thumb pressed to the rim like a grounding point. The therapist voice in my head is annoyingly calm. Feet on the floor. Name five things. Fluorescent lights. A crumpled napkin. Someone’s green Hydro Flask. The menu board with today’s “teriyaki bowl” in bubble letters. My own hands, trying to be ordinary.
I sit like I’m folding myself into a comma. I angle the tray so it’s less visible from the aisle, which is ridiculous because hiding it makes it feel like evidence. The fork is cold. The fruit cup sweats sugar water onto the paper. I don’t open anything yet.
I’m still pretending this is just me being me when I hear that specific kind of laugh, big enough to be shared, shaped for an audience, and my shoulders go tight before I even look up.
Kenta’s group is already mid-bit, a loose semicircle of laughter and backpack straps and phones facedown like they’re innocent. Their table sits just off-center, not the loudest spot in the cafeteria but somehow the one that controls the volume. I can tell they’re doing the thing where they pretend the joke is spontaneous while they watch who’s watching. Heads tilting, eyes flicking to nearby tables, a quick scan for teachers like they’re checking lighting before going live.
They don’t look at me first. That’s the trick. They let my existence be peripheral, like I’m not worth a direct hit. Their attention orbits, my tray, the empty space next to me, the way I set my shoulders, then swings away fast, like they might get contaminated by sincerity.
Kenta leans back, one knee up on the bench, sneakers dirty from P.E. or track or just not caring. He laughs too early at something someone else says, then repeats it cleaner, louder, and everyone follows because that’s the job of a hub: take raw noise, turn it into a signal.
I keep my face blank. My pulse doesn’t cooperate.
“Minimalist eating,” someone says, airy and approving, like they’re recommending a skincare routine. The phrase lands on the table and pretends it belongs there. My fingers go numb around the fork.
“Intermittent fasting,” Kenta supplies, like he’s translating for the room, half-grin already loaded. He doesn’t say my name. He doesn’t have to. His voice rides that careful line: projected enough to drift into other people’s conversations, angled enough that if anyone calls it out, it becomes What? We’re just talking about trends.
A couple of them laugh on cue, light and clean, like this is harmless. I feel the empty inches of my tray like a spotlight. My throat tightens, and I keep staring at the plastic lid on the fruit cup, willing my face to stay blank.
Two tables over, a sophomore with glitter eyeliner flicks her eyes to me, to my tray, then snaps them back to her phone like she touched a hot pan. Another kid does the same, a fast double-take and then nothing, like longer would mean choosing a side. I keep my face arranged, jaw loose, mouth soft, and stare at the menu board like I’m deciding between rice and more rice.
Kenta keeps conducting it: micro-pauses like he’s letting the room breathe, then a nudge, a tag, a callback, so the laughter feels inevitable instead of chosen. Their chuckles swell and drop in synchronized little tides. I can see the trap: if I flinch, I’m “sensitive.” If I speak, I’m “making it a thing.” So I move slow, deliberate, like silence is a path I can stay on without cracking.
I keep my face in its safest setting: eyes half-lidded like I’m bored, mouth settled into that almost-not-a-smile that reads “thinking” if anyone asks. It’s the expression I practiced back when I still believed you could rehearse your way out of being noticed. I let my gaze stick to nothing in particular, the laminate table pattern, a smear of soy sauce someone missed, the corner of my worksheet sticking out of my binder, anything but their table, anything but the sound.
Kenta’s jokes bounce off the cafeteria walls and come back sharper, like the room is designed to return laughter with interest. I can feel the attention land near me without landing on me, the way you can feel a hand hover over your shoulder in a crowd. The rumor isn’t a sentence anyone has to say out loud; it’s a lens. It turns my tray into a statement, turns the way I hold my fork into a confession.
Don’t react. Don’t correct. Don’t explain. Explaining is just giving them more surface area to poke.
I shift, careful, as if I’m adjusting for comfort and not for survival. My shoulder angles toward the vending machines, a couple inches at a time, like I’m rotating in slow motion. If I line myself up right, the metal column blocks part of their sightline. It’s stupid, geometry as armor, trigonometry as a mental-health plan, but my brain grabs anything that feels like control. A sliver of privacy. A slice of shadow. A place where my hands aren’t fully on display.
The vending machines hum and click, cold air leaking out when someone buys a soda. The sound is steady, mechanical, reliable in a way people aren’t. I breathe with it. In. Out. My ribcage feels too small for my lungs, like my body is trying to fold in on itself and become background noise.
Across the aisle, someone laughs too loud, then too quiet, like they remembered they’re supposed to be nice. I pretend I don’t hear the cadence shift when Kenta says something that makes the laughter hitch, makes it turn and search for permission.
I swallow, throat tight, and keep my eyes half-lidded, like I’m just thinking about homework. Like the only thing I’m trying to pass is a test.
I pull out my phone like it’s part of lunch, like it’s always been part of lunch, like I’m not doing a whole performance for an audience that won’t admit it’s watching. Deliberate. Smooth. Normal teen thumb-scroll energy. I’ve practiced this kind of steady in bathroom mirrors: chin level, shoulders loose, face set to fine.
The meal-planning app takes a second to load, and that second stretches. The little spinning icon feels like a spotlight. When the screen finally snaps into place, the checkboxes are lined up too neatly, all these tiny boxes asking for proof I’m trying. Breakfast: checked. Snack: checked. Lunch: blank. The blank isn’t empty; it’s loud. Louder than the cafeteria hum, louder than whatever Kenta is riffing about now.
My thumb hovers, and my hand does that thing where it forgets it’s attached to me. A tremor, barely there, but I see it because I’m always watching for it. I tap too hard. The phone wobbles against the table. I swear I can feel people registering the movement without looking straight at me. I tap again, softer, like I can erase the first tap’s panic.
I unzip my lunch bag anyway. Slow. Clean. Like I’m demoing a life hack: how to be Normal in three easy steps. The new version of me eats consistently: no drama, no visible shaking, no tragic backstory leaking onto the table.
My fingers move on autopilot: napkin flattened, container squared to the edge, chopsticks aligned. I can do this part. I can make it look like I’m not thinking about it.
Two heads tilt in my peripheral, a beat too long. Not even trying to be subtle. Their eyes flick bag → hands → my face, then away, like they’re checking if the rumor matches the footage.
The rumor slides into my muscles like an instruction manual. Don’t give them a scene. Don’t give them proof. I peel the lid back and my throat closes, like my body’s waiting for permission I don’t know how to give.
I stand up like it’s casual, like I’m just doing the normal lunch-ritual thing. Toss a wrapper, rinse my hands, come back. But the trash cans catch me. I hover there, staring into the black plastic liner like it’s an oracle. My stomach cinches. Use your tools, my brain whispers. Don’t make it weird. The scripts overlap until they cancel out, and I just… freeze.
I fold the napkin back into its perfect square, snap the lid on like it never opened, zip my lunch bag with the quiet finality of a decision. I slide my phone into my pocket, stand, and walk out at an even pace: performing not hungry, performing busy, performing unbothered. The doors thunk shut, and shame floods in, hot and fast, because an empty stomach feels like co-signing their rumor.
My phone buzzes halfway between the cafeteria doors and the quad, a quick angry vibration against my thigh like it’s trying to remind me I have a body. I keep walking anyway, because stopping feels like admitting I’m lost. The screen lights up through the fabric of my pocket, blue-white, too bright for midday, and I already know who it is before I look.
Yuki: a meme of a corgi in a tiny chef hat aggressively stirring something in a pot, captioned in all caps: I AM MAKING SOUP. I AM DOING MY BEST. Under it: “There’s leftovers if you want.”
My chest does the thing where it tightens and lifts at the same time. Warmth, then panic right behind it, like a second wave.
I step out of the main traffic lane by the trophy case (everyone’s faces staring out in glossy photos, perfect smiles, perfect posture) and I finally pull my phone out. The glass is smudged where my thumb lands. The meme is stupid. It’s so stupid. It’s also exactly Yuki: comedy first, vulnerability wrapped in something you can laugh at without choking.
I stare until the brightness ticks down a notch. The letters start to blur at the edges, like my eyes are trying to unfocus on purpose.
“lol” is the easiest lie. A thumbs-up. “Maybe later.” “I ate.” “Thanks.” Each option feels like choosing which trap I want. If I say yes, I can already see Yuki’s face doing that relieved-soft thing, and then the next question will slip out like it’s casual. If I say no, it will turn into why not? with a joke attached so it doesn’t sound like why not.
My thumb hovers over the keyboard. I type a single “t” and delete it. I type “thx” and delete it. My hands are cold even though the sun is out. I can feel the cafeteria still on me like a smell I can’t wash off.
I lock the screen.
The black reflection catches my own face for a second (neutral, careful, like I’m the kind of person who always knows what they’re doing) and then it’s gone. I slip the phone back into my pocket and start walking again, faster this time, because unread feels safer than wrong.
The problem isn’t that Yuki offered food. It’s that the offer has a shape now, like everything does once people start noticing. “Leftovers if you want” used to mean: there’s a warm container in the fridge, there’s a place at the table, you don’t have to earn it. Now it feels like a soft flashlight under my chin.
If I answer, I’m answering more than a text. I’m opening a door for follow-up. Did you eat at school? (said like a joke, but not really.) Was the line too long? Did someone say something? Yuki would try to keep it light but their eyes would be doing math. Counting bites. Watching my wrists. Reading my face for a flinch they can pretend they didn’t see.
And I hate myself for how fast my brain turns love into a threat.
Because the next step after “leftovers” is “just in case.” Just in case becomes an extra snack tucked into my bag like a secret. Just in case becomes them texting at lunch. Just in case becomes me being a project in my own kitchen.
My phone stays silent in my pocket, and the silence feels mean. It also feels like the only thing I still get to choose.
Next day, the cafeteria is the same fluorescent aquarium, but my body acts like the rules changed overnight. I do the whole routine, sit, unzip, breathe like it’s easy, except my hands keep hesitating in midair, like they’re buffering.
Maya used to wordlessly slide a mini bag of chips across the table, a quiet truce between algebra and the afternoon. Today her fingers stop on the crinkly edge. She watches me like she’s trying to read subtitles on my face.
“Are you… good?” she asks, voice softened into something careful. Not casual. Not nothing.
“Yeah.” The word comes out too fast.
The chips don’t move. Her smile snaps on, too bright, too quick. “Cool,” she says, and turns back to her friends, laughing a second late. The empty space between us sits there like a question I’m not allowed to answer.
Small kindnesses start coming with warning labels. “I didn’t want to pressure you,” someone says, like I’m a glass they’re scared to touch. “Is this… okay?” about a granola bar, a sip of boba, a tangerine segment. “Just tell me if you need anything,” which means: please don’t make me guess. They mean well. That’s the knife of it: care turning into distance, offerings withdrawn before they can look like evidence.
I try to fix it the way I fix everything: by getting smaller. I map out blind spots. Library mezzanine, the side benches by the gym, anywhere the light doesn’t catch me mid-bite. I take tiny sips of water on a schedule, like hydration can look like lunch. I keep my face blank, a closed caption that says nothing. But the quiet is loud, and every buzz of my phone feels like a tally mark.
The lunch bell hits and the hallway turns into a shaken soda can. Everyone bursting out at once, laughing too loud, talking over each other like the noise itself is proof they’re normal. I let the current carry me for three steps, then peel off like I forgot something. Like I’m just going to the bathroom because bodies do that. Because this is boring. Because this isn’t strategy.
I keep my shoulders tucked in, eyes down, phone in my hand so I look occupied instead of hunted. The first bathroom is already a choke point: girls fixing hair in the mirror, a cluster of freshmen blocking the sinks, someone spraying perfume that’s too sweet and too sharp. I don’t go in there. I don’t want witnesses. I don’t want anyone to clock the way my throat tightens like it’s bracing.
The second bathroom, farther down by the student activities wing, is quieter. Still fluorescent, still tile, still the smell of bleach trying to erase whatever happened in here last period. The door swings shut behind me with a soft clap that feels louder than it should.
I head straight for the back stall, the one with the crooked latch that never catches on the first try. The hinge squeaks like it’s tattling. I slide in anyway and turn so my body blocks the gap before I lock it. Thumb pushing, then lifting, then pushing again until it finally clicks. Thin, familiar strip of privacy. Not enough to feel safe, but enough to pretend.
I sit on the closed lid, knees pulled in, and angle my feet back so they’re harder to spot from the aisle. Shoes can be evidence here. Shoes mean they’re in there again. Shoes mean someone gets to decide a story and pass it along without ever seeing my face.
Outside, someone laughs, high and sharp, and my brain instantly offers, helpfully, like a reflex: That’s about you. Even though it could be anything. Even though it probably isn’t. The stall walls don’t care what’s true. The tile amplifies everything until all sound feels personal.
I press my palm flat against my stomach like I can hold myself together by force, like I can make my body stop broadcasting. I tell myself: just five minutes. Just until the hallway clears. Just until my pulse stops acting like it’s trying to escape my ribs.
The fluorescent lights buzz like they’re mad at me personally, like I’m doing something wrong just by existing under them. I pick a point on the stall door and I make it my whole world.
Breathe in for four. Hold for four. Out for six.
My therapist calls it “anchoring,” like I’m a boat and not a person wedged in a bathroom stall trying not to dissolve. I do the math anyway because numbers don’t gossip. Numbers don’t tilt their head and go, Are you okay? in that voice that means we already decided you’re not.
Inhale. One-two-three-four.
Hold. One-two-three-four.
Exhale. One-two-three-four-five-six.
The hand dryer kicks on somewhere near the sinks, a sudden roar that makes my shoulders jump. Someone taps a heel, impatient. A toilet flushes, too loud, then the auto-sink sputters alive like it’s choking.
I press my forehead to the cold metal divider and focus on the chill. If I can feel that, I can feel anything. I can be here. I can be fine. I count again until my chest stops fluttering like a trapped bird and the noise in my head drops, just barely, below the buzz.
Outside my stall, the door bumps open and a little pack of voices pours in like it owns the place, bright, careless, the kind of energy that makes you forget walls are thin. Someone says something that ends in a -ru sound and my brain pounces, stitches it into my name anyway. Haru. Haru. Haru. Even when it’s probably “Haruna” or “hurry” or literally nothing.
Laughter snaps against the tile and comes back doubled, like the room is making fun of me for free. I stare at the gap under the door like it might blink first. My ears go hot. My face goes hotter, like I’m about to be caught doing something criminal when all I’m doing is sitting here, breathing too loud, existing wrong on purpose.
I keep my forehead pressed to the divider until the cold bites, until it’s the only honest thing in this room. And then it hits. Invisibility was never armor. It was just a delay. A pause button. Now I’m noticed anyway, except the version of me they see is wrong, and I don’t know how to correct it without becoming proof.
My phone vibrates in my pocket like it’s trying to crawl out. I pull it out anyway, scroll the notifications without opening them, names, emojis, half-sentences I can already hear in people’s voices. My thumb hovers over my drafts: explanations that read like admissions, boundaries that look like attitude. I close my eyes, lock the screen, choose silence again, and it curdles into something that feels like yes.
The bell traffic thins the way a tide pulls back, sudden, loud absence where there was noise a second ago, and I slip into the main hallway like I’m late to my own life. Shoulders tucked, chin down. I keep my eyes on the floor tiles because tiles don’t look back. Tiles don’t decide you’re interesting.
There’s a route I’ve learned between the cracks, the scuffed corners, the places where someone spilled a smoothie last month and it still looks like a bruise. Left of the drinking fountain where the water pressure is too high. Past the bulletin board with the club flyers curling at the edges like they’re trying to escape. I let my backpack sit heavy against my spine on purpose: an anchor, a reminder to stay in my body, not float up into that bright, buzzing panic that comes with being seen.
I can still feel the cafeteria in my throat, even though I didn’t stay. The smell of fries, the way people say “You good?” like it’s a joke with a blade inside it. The rumor has legs. It’s sprinting. I keep thinking about hands, about mouths, about screens lighting up with my name and a little laughing emoji I will never see but will somehow feel anyway.
My phone vibrates once, then stops. I don’t check it. If I check it, I exist in a way I can’t control.
I pass a classroom door propped open with a textbook. Someone’s voice says my last name wrong, stretched out like taffy, and my stomach does that stupid elevator drop. I don’t look. Don’t correct. Don’t give them a target that moves.
Instead I count: four breaths in, hold, six out. Like my therapist says. Like it’s supposed to make fluorescent lights less sharp, like it’s supposed to stop the buzzing in my wrists.
At the end of the hallway the trophy case throws back my reflection, small, careful, already apologizing, and I angle away from it. I’m not trying to disappear. I’m trying to be unremarkable enough to make it to the next hour without anyone deciding they’re allowed to comment on my body, my lunch, my everything.
My shoelace taps the tile with each step: don’t-trip, don’t-trip, don’t-trip.
Taro is already there like a punctuation mark the hallway forgot to erase: posted near the trophy case where my reflection would usually betray me, half-screened by a fan of faded college pennants. UCLA, UCSD, someplace in the Midwest with a mascot that looks like it wants to fight God. He’s angled sideways, shoulder on the glass, one foot hooked behind the other, phone in his hand but not really in it, like he could be waiting for literally anyone and it wouldn’t be a lie.
Which is the point. No chasing me down. No dramatic “Hey, we need to talk.” Just… an exit sign that doesn’t flash.
I slow without meaning to, because my body is stupidly trained to respond to adults the way it responds to alarms: assess, calculate, comply, disappear. But he doesn’t step into my path. He doesn’t widen his stance like a gate.
He shifts his weight like he’s just killing time between bells, and his gaze skims past me, not through me. Like he’s making space for me to decide if I want to exist in it.
He doesn’t say my name. Not even the safe version adults use when they’re trying to prove they’re cool about it. He just tips his head back and squints at the ceiling like the lights offended him personally, like he’s about to file a formal complaint with the universe. The panels buzz in that high, mosquito whine I’ve been pretending not to hear all year.
For a second I’m waiting for the other shoe. For the concerned-voice, the lowered tone, the “you okay?” that makes my skin crawl because it turns me into a problem to solve.
But he lets the silence stay… normal. Like hallway silence is allowed to just be hallway silence. His mouth twists like he’s doing mental math, and his eyes flick past me, not pinning me, giving me the option to keep walking without it becoming a scene.
He flicks his eyes up at the ceiling like he’s sizing the lights up for a fight, then makes a tiny shooing motion with his hand, like he can wave the buzzing away. “These fluorescents,” he says, voice dry, not aimed at me so much as the whole hallway, “make everybody look haunted. Like, ghost documentary energy.” A beat. “Not a character flaw.”
He peels off the glass like it never held him in the first place, a smooth little unspooling of limbs, and somehow the air feels less trapped. He doesn’t angle his body to block mine; he angles it to the side, making a pocket of hallway where I could stop without it meaning anything. Like: here. Neutral ground. No spotlight, no questions. Just room.
Taro tilts his head like he’s catching a frequency I can’t hear. Not the bell: too far away. Not the teacher voices. Muffled behind doors. It’s the hallway’s other soundtrack: sneakers squeaking, someone’s laugh snapping too sharp, the little inhale people do before they decide to say something mean but “funny.”
He doesn’t turn his whole attention on me like a flashlight. He looks past my shoulder, then down at the line where the wall meets the floor, like he’s giving my body a break from being evaluated. Adults always think they’re being subtle when they scan you. Taro’s gaze doesn’t do that. It feels more like he’s taking attendance of the space.
His hand comes out of his hoodie pocket with something small and rectangular. A granola bar. The kind with the loud wrapper that makes you feel like everyone can hear you existing. He doesn’t offer it like a gift or a test. He just slides it onto the ledge of the trophy case with two fingers, casual, like he’s setting down his phone.
“FYI,” he says, still not looking at me directly. “This is not a trap. I’m not a raccoon.”
I huff air through my nose before I can stop myself. It’s not a laugh, not really, but it’s a crack in the glass.
He taps the wrapper once, soft, like punctuation. “You got a plan for today?” he asks, and it’s so logistical my shoulders almost forget to be tight. Not are you eating, not what’s going on with you, not the words that would turn my throat into a closed fist. Plan. Like I’m a person with agency, not a rumor with legs.
I stare at the granola bar like it might explode. My phone buzzes in my pocket again and I don’t move for it. The buzzing in my wrists wants to climb.
Taro’s eyes stay on the floor line, respectful in a way that makes my chest hurt. Like he knows how it feels to be watched and decides, on purpose, not to add to it.
He keeps his voice almost conversational, like he’s narrating weather, like he’s not about to reach inside my ribs and name something I’ve been pretending isn’t there. “When people feel watched,” he says, and his gaze stays on the scuffed tile, the blue-and-gray speckles like static, “they start performing.”
The word lands wrong and right at the same time. Performing is what we do at assemblies, in front of aunties at obon, in the counselor’s office when they ask you how you’re adjusting and you put on the right amount of grateful. Performing is also what my body does when the cafeteria line moves too slow and I can feel eyes like fingers counting what I choose.
Taro shrugs one shoulder, like it’s not deep, like he’s talking about the way everybody suddenly loves matcha. “It’s just… survival math,” he adds. “If you think you’re being watched, you pick a costume that keeps you moving.”
My throat tightens, because he doesn’t say your costume is stupid. He doesn’t say take it off. He just says it like a fact, like the sky being too bright is a problem with the sky, not with you.
He brings his hand up, two fingers tapping his own chest like he’s checking a pocket for keys, then he flicks them out toward the empty space between us, like he’s laying down two lanes on an invisible map. “You know the options,” he says, still light, like we’re talking about schedules. “Either ‘fine’, smooth, unbothered, nothing sticks. People love ‘fine.’ It’s easy. No paperwork.” His mouth quirks, but his eyes sharpen for half a second. “Or ‘broken’. Cracked open on purpose so everyone rushes in and you don’t have to explain. You just… leak, and they call it honesty.” He lets his fingers hover midair, then drops his hand back down. “Both get you through the hallway. Neither one is free.”
He lets the silence sit there, intentional, like he’s leaving room for my lungs to remember how to work. No pep talk. No “have you tried journaling” voice. Just the hallway hum and my pulse being loud. Then, still looking anywhere but at my face, he says, “Those aren’t identities.” His thumb nudges the air, like adjusting a collar. “They’re costumes that help you get through a room.”
He shifts his weight like he’s planting himself, like he’s making the floor agree with him. His sneaker scuffs a half-moon into the tile and the sound is weirdly steadying. “Neither one is you,” he says, voice still casual but not joking. “And I’m not asking you to pick a role. Not for me. Not for them. Just… figure out what’s yours to carry today.”
Taro doesn’t fill the quiet with reassurance or questions. He just lets it hang there, like it’s a thing with weight and he’s not scared of it. Like he’s proving, without saying it, that I’m allowed to take up a few seconds of air without performing gratitude, without rushing to make him comfortable.
His eyes flick once past me toward the main hallway, quick and flat. Not the way teachers look when they’re pretending not to look. More like checking an intersection before you step off the curb. Traffic. Timing. Who’s coming, who’s listening. Then his gaze drops again, to nothing important: the trophy case seam, the dull strip of floor wax that never quite dries right.
It’s weirdly kind. It makes my skin stop buzzing for half a beat, because he’s not collecting data about my face. He’s collecting data about the environment, like the problem is out there and not in me.
A cluster of voices swells and passes, laughter ricocheting, then thinning. Someone says my name: not loudly, not directly. The way you say “weather” when you mean “storm.” My stomach does that hollow-drop thing that feels like physics and shame at the same time.
Taro’s fingers drum once on his thigh, an impatient little rhythm he seems to keep for himself. He doesn’t move to block me, doesn’t angle his body like a shield. He stays slightly sideways, leaving me an exit route. The kind of posture that says: I’m here if you want it. You can still leave.
I realize I’m staring at the granola bar like it’s a confession. The wrapper catches the fluorescent light and looks too loud for my life. My hand inches toward it, then freezes. My brain starts listing consequences in bullet points, like I’m making a plan to defuse a bomb: If I eat it here, someone sees. If I don’t, I’m proving them right. If I take it and hide it, it’s still a story either way.
Taro makes a small sound, almost a sigh, almost a laugh, and shifts his weight again, recalibrating to the hallway’s pulse. He’s still not looking at me, but it somehow feels like he’s paying closer attention than anyone who’s ever stared.
“Here’s the part nobody says out loud,” he adds, voice low, almost casual: like he’s bracing a door open, not trying to push me through it.
He finally looks at me, but not in that therapist way, not in the scanning-for-symptoms way. More like he’s checking I’m still here. “They don’t need you to actually do anything,” he says. “They just need a shape to put you in.”
My fingers pinch the edge of the wrapper until it crackles. The sound feels obscene in the quiet.
Taro nods once, like he’s confirming a number in his head. “Rumors are cheap,” he keeps going. “They run on empty space. On you disappearing before anyone has to decide how to treat you. On you being polite enough to let other people narrate you.”
There’s a heat in my face I can’t tell is embarrassment or anger. Probably both. I swallow and it tastes like cafeteria air and pride.
He lifts his hand, palm up, offering nothing and still somehow offering something. “So, logistics,” he says, forcing it back to practical. “You taking that with you? You eating it now? Or you want me to walk you somewhere less… audience?”
“If you’re waiting for this school to stop talking, you’ll starve on promises,” he says, and it lands in my ribs like a seatbelt yanking tight, annoying, necessary, not gentle. He doesn’t say it like a threat. He says it like he’s reading off a bus schedule: if you miss this one, you’re just standing here longer, pretending you’re not cold.
My throat tightens anyway, because my brain hears starve and immediately tries to make it holy. Control. Clean. Earned. Like if I can outlast them, I get a gold star and the hallway finally goes quiet.
Taro’s eyes don’t soften into pity. They stay practical. Like: I see the trap. I’m not letting you call it a plan.
“Rumors don’t need proof,” he says again, quieter, like it’s a rule he learned the hard way. “They just need empty space to echo in.” His mouth pulls sideways, not quite a smile. More like he’s tasting something bitter he recognizes. I picture my silence like a vacant room with good acoustics, my name bouncing off the walls until it sounds true.
“And you’ve got a lot of empty space around you,” he says, and it’s not an insult so much as a measurement. “’Cause you’re polite. You fold yourself up, you scoot to the edge, you go quiet so nobody has to feel weird.” His eyes flick to my hands, to the granola bar, then away. “But that space? People fill it. With whatever story makes them comfortable.”
Taro tilts his head like he’s lining up a problem set, not a confession, and keeps his voice in the same casual register he uses for homework help, steady, unthreatening. Like we’re about to talk about algebra, not my body, not my brain, not the way my lungs forget how to work when someone says “concerned” in that sugary adult tone.
“Okay,” he says, the word rounded off at the edges. “Let’s do this like it’s math.”
I blink. My fingers are still fused to the wrapper seam, my nails leaving little crescent dents. I hate how my hands give me away. I hate how there’s always evidence.
He angles his shoulders a fraction more toward the trophy case, like he’s trying to make the hallway less of a stage for both of us. “You don’t have to perform anything,” he says. “Not gratitude. Not strength. Not ‘I’m fine.’ Just… pick a variable.”
“A variable,” I repeat, because my brain wants rules. It wants a worksheet. It wants someone to hand me a right answer I can cling to until the bell rings.
“Yeah.” He nods once, like I’ve answered correctly. “Option A: you eat it now, here. Two bites, three bites, whatever. You let the world be weird and you keep moving. Option B: you put it in your bag and you eat it somewhere less… fluorescent.” His mouth tugs like he knows that word isn’t the point. “Option C: you don’t eat it. But then we’re not doing recovery today, we’re doing avoidance. And I’m not gonna call that something prettier.”
My stomach lurches at the word recovery like it’s a name I don’t want said out loud. My throat tightens anyway, reflexive, offended. Like he’s accusing me. Like he’s right.
He doesn’t lean in. Doesn’t lower his voice into secrecy. He keeps it normal, which is somehow braver. “No one gets to take credit for your eating,” he adds. “Not me. Not them. Not the rumor machine. This is yours. You decide.”
My eyes sting, which is stupid. It’s a granola bar. It’s a hallway. It’s my heart acting like it’s about to be graded.
Taro’s gaze flicks to the end of the corridor again, traffic check, then back, soft but not soft like pity. More like certainty. “What’s the smallest next step you can do on purpose?” he asks. “Not to prove anything. Just because you said you would.”
He catches my eyes like he’s picking up something I dropped, not like he’s pinning me to the wall. It’s quick (an in, an out) enough contact to prove he’s there without turning me into a scene. Most adults look at you like they’re either solving you or saving you. Even the nice ones. Their gaze comes with an invoice: Explain. Confess. Perform gratitude. Let me feel like I did something.
Taro’s look is different. It doesn’t drag me forward. It makes a little pocket of space where my lungs remember how to work.
I realize, with this sharp, annoying clarity, that he’s been watching me the way I watch everyone else. Counting exits, tracking who’s nearby, clocking when laughter turns mean, when “Are you okay?” is actually “Are you making us uncomfortable?” He’s noticed the way I make myself smaller, the way I choose invisibility like it’s a uniform, the way I turn my own needs into background noise so nobody can complain about the volume.
And he’s not impressed. He’s not disgusted. He’s just… registering it. Like data. Like survival.
“You’re not fragile,” he says, and it’s not the gentle kind, not the kind adults use when they’re trying to talk you off a ledge. It’s flat and certain, like he’s peeling the wrong sticker off a folder and tossing it. “You’re precise.”
My first instinct is to reject it. Precise sounds like a compliment that can be revoked. Precise sounds like a way to make expectations look like praise. But he doesn’t say it like I owe him anything. He says it like he’s naming a tool I already carry, even if I keep it hidden in my sleeve.
I swallow, my jaw tight, waiting for the follow-up. Be stronger, be better, be grateful. Instead, he just watches my face like he’s checking a temperature, not a performance.
He makes it small on purpose (two fingers, a soft tap on the trophy-case ledge between us) like he’s pointing at numbers only I can see. Not calling attention, not making a lesson out of me. “You catch patterns,” he says, eyes sliding past my face like he’s checking the hallway first, “before other people even realize they’re standing inside one.”
His mouth quirks: almost a joke, but not aimed at me, more like a little confidence he’s sliding across the table and pretending it’s nothing. “That’s power,” he says. “Not the loud kind. The kind where you get to pick the next move on purpose.” His eyes flick to the granola bar again, then away. “But only if you practice using it.”
Taro taps the edge of the desk twice, not loud. More like he’s tapping a mic that isn’t on. Like he’s checking if the world will let us be small for a second.
“Okay,” he says. “Boring tools. The kind that work because they’re boring.”
From his pocket he pulls a scrap of paper: torn from something with a printed margin, already creased like it’s been carried through too many days. He smooths it with his thumb, the way you flatten a receipt you don’t want to lose, and sets it between us. Not pushed at me. Just… there. Available.
“Two columns,” he says again, and I hate how the structure makes my brain unclench. I hate how badly I want an assignment.
My hands hover like I’m afraid to touch it and leave fingerprints that prove I’m the kind of person who needs this. The hallway noise blurs behind the glass of the trophy case. Taro doesn’t react. He stays in this exact square of space like he’s holding a boundary for both of us.
“You don’t have to be good at it,” he adds, casual, like he’s talking about taking notes in class. “You just have to do it.”
He offers me the pen, and it’s a cheap clicky one with a cracked clip. It’s absurdly normal. I take it because refusing feels like a bigger scene than accepting.
“What do I. What if the spiral is the most honest part of me.
Taro nods like he heard all of that anyway. “Start with one line,” he says. “One thing. Doesn’t have to be the worst thing. Just the most recent.”
I stare at the blank paper and suddenly everything I’ve heard all week stacks up in my head like cafeteria trays. I don’t write yet. I just hold the pen, letting its weight tell my fingers I’m real.
He taps the desk once more, softer this time. “Ready when you are,” he says, like time belongs to me for once.
He draws the line down the middle with that busted clicky pen, the ink skipping like it’s allergic to commitment. The paper wrinkles under his palm, then lies flat like it decided to cooperate.
“Column A,” he says, and his voice goes into substitute-teacher mode. “Facts. Literal. What you actually heard. What actually happened. No adjectives.”
No adjectives is brutal. My brain is basically made of adjectives.
He glances up, quick check, like he’s making sure I’m still here and not halfway out of my body. I nod because that’s what I do when I’m trying not to cry in public.
“Column B is the caption your brain slapped on it,” he continues, tapping the right side with the pen tip. Tap, tap. “The story. The spiral. The ‘and therefore I’m disgusting and everyone knows’ part.”
Heat crawls up my neck. He doesn’t look satisfied by being right. He looks… practical.
“We separate them,” he says, softer now, “so you can argue with the story without gaslighting the facts. Facts get to stay facts. But the caption?” His mouth tilts like he almost wants to joke. “Captions are editable.”
He draws three little boxes under the columns, square corners, like he’s building me a tiny exit route. “Then,” he says, like this is as unromantic as algebra, “a plan you can hold in your hand.”
Box one: Food you chose. Not a prize. Not a punishment. He underlines chose, quick, like it matters more than the food itself. “Something you can tolerate,” he adds, eyes on the paper instead of my face, “not something you have to earn.”
Box two: a place. “Somewhere you can sit where nobody’s doing play-by-play on your tray,” he says, and my throat tightens because he said tray, not body.
Box three: time limit. “Ten minutes, twenty. Whatever’s real. Goal isn’t ‘be fine.’ It’s ‘get through the next slice of the day.’”
He nudges the paper an inch closer, but it stops before it crosses that invisible line where I start feeling owned. “You don’t have to show it to me,” he says, like he’s telling me I don’t have to hand in homework. “Notes app. Back of a receipt. On your arm if you’re feeling punk.” His gaze flicks up. “I’m serious. The point is options that aren’t white-knuckle it or disappear.”
His voice stays casual, like he’s offering a bus route and not a lifeline. “If you want, I can be the person you text ‘green’ or ‘yellow’ to,” he says. “No explanation, no essay, no ‘sorry I’m like this.’” Green means you’re steady. Yellow means you need a pivot: different seat, different plan, different adult. “I’ll know what to do with just the color,” he adds, like it’s obvious.
Taro keeps his eyes on his phone like he’s reading a schedule, not studying me. The glow makes his face look easier, like it belongs to somebody who only has normal problems like “Where did I park?” and “Do I have time for boba before fourth period?”
“Options,” he says, thumb tapping the screen once. He doesn’t say it like a big offering. More like a menu board. You pick, you pay, you move on.
I watch his hand instead of his expression. If I look at his face I’ll start trying to predict what he wants from me, and then I’ll pick the choice that makes me least inconvenient. My brain is always calculating inconvenience.
“I can talk to staff if you want less heat,” he goes on, scrolling a little, like he’s pulling up a calendar. “Like, I can send an email that sounds very responsible. ‘Just checking in.’ ‘Concerned about lunchtime supervision.’” His mouth twitches like he almost wants to make fun of himself, but he doesn’t. “I can also act like I’m a decorative plant. Either way is valid.”
Decorative plant. A fake pothos in a corner. Something you forget exists until it starts collecting dust.
He glances up for half a second. Not a stare. A check, like he’s making sure I’m still breathing.
My chest tightens anyway, because there’s something worse than being watched: being offered control and realizing you don’t trust yourself with it. If I say yes, I’m admitting there’s “heat.” If I say no, I’m the one turning down help like it’s a party invite.
“And before you decide,” he adds, still casual, “I’m not asking for your whole story. No trauma TED Talk. Just logistics.” He flicks his phone screen off. The sudden dark feels like privacy. “Do you want less eyes on you today, or do you want me to stay invisible with you?”
Invisible with you.
My throat clicks when I swallow. I think about the cafeteria, the rumor, the way people say “concern” like a weapon. I think about how adults can turn one sentence into a file.
I nod once, small, automatic, then stop. Nodding to what? To him? To fear? To the idea that I’m allowed to choose the shape of being seen?
He tears a scrap off the edge of the worksheet like it’s nothing, like he’s just tidying. The rip is soft but it still makes my shoulders jump. Then he slides it toward me, stopping it short of my hands the same way he stopped the other paper: close enough to be offered, not close enough to feel like a demand.
Two columns. Neat, blocky handwriting. No flourish.
INTERFERE / DON’T.
Under that, a second set like a quieter layer.
WALK WITH / HANG BACK.
My eyes snag on the words like they’re street signs. Interfere sounds loud, like stepping between me and the world with a hand out. Don’t sounds like abandonment if you say it wrong, like being left to rot in a cafeteria corner. Walk with makes my throat go tight. Hang back feels safer until it doesn’t.
“Pick per situation,” he says, tapping the paper once with his pen, then pulling the pen away like he’s disarming it. “Not a personality test. Just… transfers.” He shrugs, like we’re planning a bus route and not my entire ability to stay upright. “Some days you want the express. Some days you want to take side streets and nobody needs to know why.”
When I don’t reach for the scrap, he doesn’t do the thing adults do where they keep talking until you give them something they can file. He lets the quiet sit between us like it’s allowed to exist.
Taro nods once, slow, like he heard an answer anyway. Like my not-answer counts as data, not defiance.
“You don’t owe me the story,” he says, and my shoulders want to drop but they don’t trust gravity. His tone stays so normal it almost hurts: like this is a schedule change, not a minefield. “You only owe you the next step.”
I stare at the pen mark on his worksheet, at the tiny boxes like little doors. My brain starts listing next steps the way it lists exits: breathe in, breathe out, swallow, stand, don’t bolt.
He waits. No sigh. No disappointment. Just space I can actually fit inside.
He angles his body toward the hallway, not blocking me, not herding me. Just making a clean exit available like it’s part of the furniture. “If you want me there, I’m there. If you want space, I’m gone,” he says, voice light enough to pass as a joke. But his eyes go sharp. “Define ‘seen.’ Just for today. Tomorrow can be a different definition.”
Taro lifts two fingers, not a point-point, more like he’s indicating a direction on a map, toward the club wing where the fluorescent light always feels like it’s waiting to judge you. “If you decide to risk it, we do it clean,” he says. “No hovering at the edge, no half-in.” His voice stays flat, logistical. “Pick a door. Pick a plan. Then we move like you meant to be there.”
Taro doesn’t look back to see if I’m following. He just moves like he belongs to every hallway in this building, like the fluorescent lights were installed for him personally. His sneakers squeak in a lazy rhythm. I match it by accident, then panic and shorten my steps so I’m not synced to him, like that would mean something.
Club Hallway is always too bright, too loud in the way quiet places can be loud. Posters layered over posters, QR codes peeling at the corners, glitter letters announcing meetings I will never attend. The air smells like dry-erase markers and someone’s citrus hand sanitizer. I keep my shoulders tucked in and my backpack high, like if I make myself compact enough, I won’t register on anyone’s peripheral vision.
Count doors. Count breaths. One. Two, Key Club. Three, Japanese Culture Club, maybe, depending on whether the flyer with the sakura border is lying. My brain keeps inventory without asking: who’s laughing, who’s pretending not to listen, which teacher is on patrol, which cluster of kids would notice if I turned around.
Taro slows down just a fraction, like he’s giving my body time to catch up even if his mouth doesn’t say it. He taps the laminated sign taped next to a classroom door. “Here,” he says, like it’s no big deal.
From inside: voices rise and fall like a tide. Someone’s laugh breaks off into a cough. Chairs scrape. The sound hits me in the sternum, not the ears: belonging as a frequency I don’t have the right equipment for. I can picture it without seeing it: people angled in toward each other, knees pointing like arrows, inside jokes passing like currency.
My phone buzzes in my pocket, meal plan reminder, probably, and I don’t check it. The part of me that’s been practicing recovery tools like they’re math formulas whispers, Ground. Name five things. My fingers pick at the seam of my sleeve instead.
Taro’s hand goes to the doorknob. He doesn’t force it open for me. He just holds it there, a question with no words, and my throat tightens with the old rule: stay outside. Stay optional.
I stop with my hand hovering near the seam of the door, like it’s hot. The old rule slides into place so smoothly it feels like safety: stay outside. Stay optional. Be the kid who can say, later, I wasn’t even there. No one can misread you if they don’t have material.
Behind me, the hallway hums. In front of me, the room breathes. I can hear individual voices now, names I’ve learned by listening from a distance, laughter that spikes when someone says something just risky enough.
Taro doesn’t move, doesn’t cheerlead, doesn’t rescue me. That almost makes it worse, because it means the choice is mine.
My phone vibrates again, a soft insistence against my thigh. I don’t look. I curl my fingers tighter on the knob and tell myself: in through the nose, out through the mouth. One step. Just one.
The door swings, and I slip through the gap before I can change my mind. The click of it shutting behind me is small, ordinary: still it lands like a stamp on paper. No undo button. Just me, in here.
Inside, I let my face settle into the same neutral mask I use in the counseling office and at temple, polite, not inviting. I keep my movements tight, elbows in, backpack still on like it’s armor, and my eyes do what they always do when I’m scared: map the room before anyone can map me.
Officers cluster near the whiteboard, standing too straight, like they’re already posing for a photo that isn’t happening yet. The loud laugh is coming from the back row (of course) where Kenta’s hands are moving like he’s conducting. A couple chairs have hoodies draped over them, territorial flags. I clock the corners with clean sightlines, the door hinge, the way I could slide out if my throat closes up. I choose a seat that doesn’t look chosen.
I head for the sign-in sheet like it’s a dare I already accepted. The paper is clipped to a sad plastic clipboard, a pen tethered by a strip of fraying tape like someone didn’t trust us to return it. I pull it free anyway. My hand shakes once, then steadies. I write HARU in careful block letters. Too deliberate to be accidental, too real to erase.
When I set the pen down, my palm peels off it like tape, damp, almost embarrassing. My first instinct is to rub my hand on my jeans, erase the evidence, but I don’t. I keep my fingers curled, let the sweat just exist. No little self-soothing, no secret apology. I take one step farther in, spine straight, like I belong here on purpose.
I do the thing I always do when I’m new somewhere: I look for the angle that asks the least of me.
Not the center. Never the center. The side, where the room’s attention slides past like water around a rock. I clock the chairs by sound, not sight: metal feet on tile, the particular squeal that makes everyone glance over. I find one chair that’s already half-out, like someone got up to sharpen a pencil and might come back any second. The perfect loophole. I could sit there and if it goes bad, I could stand up fast and no one could say I committed.
Except I’m already here. My name is already ink. My hand still feels like it’s holding the pen.
The open table isn’t even “open” the way adults mean it. It’s open the way a space in a crowd is open: technically available, socially risky. Two girls lean in over a shared phone, whisper-laughing. A boy in a varsity jacket is tapping a mechanical pencil against his teeth like a metronome. There’s a stack of handouts in the middle, slightly fanned like a dealer’s cards, and an untouched bag of senbei someone brought as a bribe for civility.
I measure the distance between my shoulders and the backpacks on chair-backs. One brush and someone will turn, eyebrows lifting, and the story will start: Who are you? Why are you here?
My brain offers the old escape route. Hover by the wall. Pretend you’re waiting for Taro. Be furniture.
But hovering is its own announcement too. A different kind. The kind that makes people decide things about you without you giving them anything real.
I slide my chair out in one controlled motion, slow enough the legs don’t shriek, fast enough I don’t lose nerve. The movement feels loud in my bones. Choosing a seat is a choice. A claim. I hate that I can feel my pulse in my throat because of a chair.
Somebody’s conversation stutters for half a beat, then keeps going. No one says my name. No one welcomes me. That should feel like relief. It doesn’t.
It feels like standing on a stage with the lights off, knowing the audience is still there.
I sit. Not perch, not hover, sit, all the way down until the chair takes my weight and I can feel the cold metal through my jeans. The empty space I’ve been orbiting snaps shut behind me like a door.
My notebook comes out of my bag with too much care, like it’s fragile or like I am. I set it on the tabletop exactly parallel to the edge, press my palm to the cover for one second longer than necessary. Anchor. Proof. My knees draw in, feet hooked around the chair legs so I don’t accidentally sprawl into anyone’s territory. I make myself narrow, a person reduced to clean lines.
Across from me, someone’s screen lights their face blue; laughter bubbles, then gets swallowed. No one looks directly at me, which is its own kind of looking. My skin prickles anyway, the sense of being counted without being addressed.
This is the part I can’t edit later. Not in my head, not in a group chat, not in the story people tell about me. I’m not “just passing through.” I’m here, on purpose, and my throat tightens like my body wants to argue.
A stack of handouts glides down the table like a quiet test. Someone’s fingers (nails bitten, ink-smudged) pushes them in my direction without looking up, like I’m already part of the distribution pattern.
I take the top sheet with both hands. Not because anyone told me to, but because one hand feels too casual, too confident, and I don’t have that kind of body language to spare. The paper is warm from other palms. My thumbs worry the corner, then stop. I smooth it flat like I’m calming an animal.
JAPANESE CULTURE CLUB flashes at me in bold, and my eyes jump over it twice, pretending I’m reading while my lungs remember how to work. Headers, bullet points, meeting dates. Structure. Rules. Something to hold on to.
If I look busy, maybe I’ll look like I belong on purpose.
“Hey, uh. If anyone can stay after, we need somebody to fold the flyers and maybe clean up the sign-up sheet,” someone says, like they’re asking the room about the weather.
My mouth opens. Air goes in. My brain tries to draft a neutral response, maybe, I’ll see, depends, but my voice slips out first, thin and too clear. “I can.”
As soon as I say it, my hand is already reaching for the pen like it’s a life raft. I pull the sign-up sheet closer, line the names up with the ruler edge of my palm, square the corners of the flyers until they behave. Useful. Easy. A task you can’t accuse of needing attention. Except usefulness is a spotlight too. Ink is evidence. My presence, officially logged.
Kenta shifts like he’s stepping onto an invisible mark, chair legs scraping just enough to announce him. He doesn’t even stand up, but the room tilts toward his voice anyway. The way it does when someone’s learned how to make air feel like an invitation.
“So,” he says, dragging the word out, grinning like he’s about to confess something charming. “Can we talk about how everyone’s in their, like… self-improvement era right now?”
A couple people laugh on autopilot. The kind that says yes, keep going, make it easy for us.
Kenta taps the edge of the table twice, like he’s keeping time. “No, because it’s always something. One week it’s ‘I’m going to optimize my sleep schedule’ (” he makes a show of checking an imaginary smartwatch “) and then it’s ‘I’m cutting sugar,’ and then it’s ‘I only eat foods that have, like, touched sunlight personally.’”
More laughter, a little louder. My eyes stay on the handout, but the words blur. I can still see his face in my peripheral vision: his eyes flicking around the circle, collecting reactions like tips in a jar. He’s not looking at me. That’s the trick. He doesn’t have to.
“And then,” Kenta goes on, voice turning mock-serious, “you’ve got the people who are doing that mysterious lunch routine. You know the one. Like, they’ll be like, ‘Oh, I already ate,’ and you’re like, ” he widens his eyes, performs confusion “, bestie, it’s 12:[^05]. You ate in a different timeline?”
Someone snorts. Someone else says, “Stop,” but they’re smiling, like it’s a compliment to be targeted.
My pen is still in my hand. I realize my grip is too tight because the plastic bites into my finger. I loosen it carefully, one millimeter at a time, like disarming something. My mouth does the polite curve it’s trained to do. I can feel it, the way you can feel a bandage on skin: there, obvious, not actually helping.
Kenta’s gaze skims past me again, over my head, over my paper, over the space where I’m trying to be small enough to count as furniture, and the timing is so perfect it might as well be a finger pointed straight at my lunch bag that isn’t there.
My body answers before my brain can vote. My shoulders creep up like they’re trying to hide my neck. My throat dries out in one swallow, like someone turned the air to powder. The handout under my palm suddenly feels too thin to be real. Paper pretending it can keep me here.
I keep my face the same. The neutral setting I’ve practiced in mirrors and in front of adults who say my name like it’s a file. The one I use for roll call, for foster-agency photos, for when Yuki says “smile, Haru-chan” and I do, because it’s easier than explaining what smiling costs.
Inside, everything is loud. My stomach folds in on itself, not hunger exactly, but that cliff-edge feeling that always shows up when food and jokes share the same room. I count my breaths like a cheap magic trick: in for four, hold, out for six. My pen hovers over the sign-up sheet like if I keep moving, I can outrun being seen.
Don’t react. Don’t be the story. Just be useful. Just be flat.
A couple people chuckle, not because it’s the funniest thing they’ve ever heard, but because laughing is the easiest way to stay on Kenta’s good side. The sound ripples around the table, light, rehearsed, like everyone’s tapping the “like” button out loud. Someone adds, “In a different timeline,” and then snickers like she invented it. Another voice tosses in, “Quantum lunch,” and it gets rewarded with a bigger laugh, the kind that says yes, keep it going, keep it away from anything real.
My brain files it away with the same cold efficiency I use for seating charts: this is allowed. This is fun. And if it’s fun, it can’t be cruel: right?
I make my mouth do the thin smile anyway, small, careful, the kind adults read as “coping” and classmates read as “chill.” My cheeks lift like they’re on strings I don’t control. I hate that I can feel it happening. Hate that I’m participating. Like laughter has an entry fee and I just paid it, quietly, with my own boundary.
My stomach pulls into a hard little fist, tight enough I swear it has knuckles. Under the table my fingers won’t behave, thumb worrying the edge of my nail, nail worrying the side of my finger, until the sting turns clean and sharp, proof I’m still in my body. Above the tabletop I freeze, smile pinned on, pretending the joke isn’t circling the exact part of me I’m trying to keep faceless.
The laughter swells the way a song does when you accidentally hit volume up instead of down. It isn’t even mean-sounding. That’s what makes it worse. It’s warm, easy laughter, like a blanket everybody else gets to share, and my skin reads it like heat lamps.
My cheeks go hot so fast it feels unreal, like I’m blushing on a delay from something I didn’t even do. I can feel the flush climb from my collarbones to my face, like my body is trying to announce me in a language I didn’t consent to speak. My throat tightens. Not crying-tight, not panic-tight: more like a fist gently closing, polite about it, the way everything here is polite. My swallow sticks halfway and I have to force it down, careful and quiet.
The fluorescent lights above the table sharpen. Someone’s water bottle catches the light and throws it back at me in a thin, bright line. The laminated agenda in the middle shines like a little stage. The air smells like dry-erase marker and someone’s citrus hand sanitizer, and I suddenly can’t tell if I’m breathing the room or if the room is breathing me.
People laugh and the chairs squeak and the sound is normal, totally normal, and my brain still does the thing where it starts measuring exits. Door to the left. My backpack strap already on my shoulder. Two steps and I’m in the hallway. Four more and the noise will be behind a wall. I could vanish cleanly if I move now, before anyone decides to make eye contact and turn the joke into a “Hey, no offense, Haru.”
No one says my name. No one has to. The space around me tightens anyway, like the circle has remembered it can be a trap.
I press my tongue to the back of my teeth and taste pen ink, phantom-blue, from biting earlier in the day. My fingers find the edge of the paper and flatten it, smoothing a crease that wasn’t there, like I can iron myself back into invisibility if I keep my hands busy.
My face stays on autopilot, blank, polite, the expression that says I’m listening and nothing else. It’s a skill, like learning how to fold yourself into the smallest shape on a bus seat. But my body is louder than I am. My pulse starts thumping in my ears, not fast enough to be panic, just relentless, like someone tapping a pencil against my skull and waiting for me to snap.
I make my breathing deliberate, too deliberate. In. Hold. Out. The numbers feel like a script I’m reciting to prove I’m fine, and that alone makes me feel guilty, like if I was actually fine I wouldn’t need math to do something as basic as air.
So I don’t look up. I keep my eyes on the table: on the grain in the fake wood, on the corner of the agenda, on the little crescent scratch someone made with a chair leg. If I meet anyone’s gaze, it’ll turn into a moment. Are you okay? We were just joking. And if I don’t, I’m suspicious. Head down means hiding. Head up means exposed. My attention pins itself to the tabletop anyway, like it’s the only surface in the room that won’t judge me back.
A few glances land on me and ricochet off like they touched something hot. I can feel their eyes do inventory: my hands, my face, my backpack strap like it’s evidence. Somebody on the far side of the table shifts their phone in their palm, screen half-lit, angle changing in tiny increments. Not aimed at me, technically. Just aimed at the space where I am. Like if they catch a clip of my “reaction,” the joke becomes content instead of cruelty.
I keep my gaze on the agenda and let my expression go flat, safer than a smile. My jaw aches from holding still. The room keeps breathing like nothing happened, and I try to do it too.
The meeting drifts into agenda stuff, fundraisers, sign-up sheets, who can bring folding tables, but the joke stays wedged between sentences like gum under a desk. Every check-in turns sideways. “You good?” comes out sing-song, almost performative, like they’re offering me a line to laugh at instead of an actual question. Bodies angle away in polite inches, far enough to avoid responsibility, close enough to watch.
Later it comes back like a delayed bruise you press by accident. In the hallway, by the vending machines, in the library line: same words, softened and scrubbed. “I heard they’re on some health thing.” “Like, they’re being careful.” It’s concern with the teeth filed down, polished into something you can repeat without blame, something that moves faster because no one has to own it.
Reina-ko sits two seats down from me, close enough that I can see the little decisions happening in their face. Their smile doesn’t fade: it just sharpens. It becomes the kind of smile you put on for yearbook photos and temple aunties, the one that says I am fine, we are fine, nothing is happening here, even while something is definitely happening here.
Their eyes flick to me once. Not a stare. A scan. Quick as checking for blood on someone’s knee after they trip. It lands on my mouth, my hands, my shoulders: like they’re trying to measure how much damage the joke did by how still I’m holding myself. Then their gaze snaps back to the circle, to Kenta, to the floating attention that’s made of other people’s laughter.
I watch them try to do the impossible thing: stop it without becoming the story.
Reina-ko’s posture stays perfect, scholarship-perfect, spine aligned like a ruler. But their knee starts bouncing under the table, tiny and fast, betraying them. Their pen clicks once, twice, and then, like they realize sound is dangerous, the clicking cuts off. Their fingers tighten around it until the plastic looks strained. They’re holding the pen the way I’m holding my breath.
Their lips part like they’re about to speak, and I can almost hear the drafts of sentences forming behind their teeth. Hey, can we move on? Too obvious. That’s not funny. Too much. Actually, about the fundraiser, A detour that might work, if anyone lets them steer.
They glance at the agenda in the center like it’s a lifeline. Their hand hovers above it, hovering in that half-second before you raise your hand in class. They could interrupt. They could throw themselves between me and the room by making themselves the center. And I hate that I want them to, because wanting it feels like asking them to bleed for me.
Their eyes cut to me again, softer this time, a question without words: Do you want me to? And I give them nothing. I keep my face blank, keep my silence loyal to my own rule.
Reina-ko swallows, and their smile locks back into place, too precise to be real.
Kenta doesn’t let the air settle. They catch it mid-fall and spin it into something lighter, like this is a talent show and the prize is everyone’s approval. “No, because like. Some people are doing this whole wellness era,” they say, dragging the words out, eyes skating over the table without technically landing on me. “We love growth. We love… discipline.” A few people snort. Someone coughs a laugh like it’s a reflex.
Their hands are animated, palms up, offering the joke like it’s a harmless little gift. “It’s just wild when you’re, like, so committed you can’t even be seen near the vending machines.” More laughter, louder now: relief laughter, like everyone’s grateful they’ve been told what to do with the discomfort.
Reina-ko’s pen clicks once, then again, keeping time. Then their fingers curl, tighter, until the plastic doesn’t move anymore. The clicking stops like a door closing softly. Their knuckles go a shade lighter, skin pulled smooth over bone. Control traded for quiet containment.
Kenta keeps talking, buoyed by the room, not noticing (or noticing and liking it) how silence has started to cost other people.
Across the room, the quiet kid, the one I’ve clocked a dozen times by the windows with big headphones and a bent-over notebook, shrinks like Kenta’s words have gravity. Their shoulders creep up toward their ears, hoodie strings pulled tight by nervous fingers, and their eyes drop to the scratched tabletop as if looking up would make them eligible. I watch their mouth flatten, a practiced nothing-expression, the same one I’m wearing. Their knee starts doing that tiny jitter under the chair, barely visible unless you’re trained to notice small tells. They don’t laugh. They don’t look around to see if anyone noticed they didn’t laugh. They just fold inward, becoming less, and I feel this mean, sour recognition: it’s not only about me. It’s about teaching the room where to aim.
I can feel the lesson settling in like dust: if you keep your voice sweet, if you say just checking, if you wrap it in a laugh and call it “care,” nobody has to admit they’re being cruel. It stays technically unclaimed, a joke with no owner. But my skin still hears my name in it, and everyone else does too.
Reina-ko doesn’t look at me again. Not because they don’t care, but because looking is a kind of pointing, and pointing turns you into a co-author. Their stillness is a shield with sharp edges. The quiet kid by the window goes statue-still, like if they hold their breath long enough the joke won’t find them next. I feel it: my endurance leaking outward, buying everyone else a lesson in how to disappear.
I leave while the room is still rearranging itself, chairs screeching, backpacks thudding, someone saying “Wait, so who’s bringing, ” like we didn’t just all hear what we heard. No announcement. No “I’m gonna head out.” If you name the leaving, people get to look up and decide what it means. I can’t afford meaning.
My brain does the math automatically: the door closest to the club hallway is a funnel: everyone will pour through it, shoulder-to-shoulder, and someone will make a comment about me “escaping.” The side exit by the storage closet has that stupid little window where faces catch on the glass. Too visible. The back door near the trophy case is technically for staff, but it’s propped open because the AC is broken, and the air tastes like warm metal and institutional lemon cleaner.
So: back door.
I stand up like I’m going to throw something away. I pick up my empty water bottle like it’s proof I belong here, like hydration is a reason. My hands are steady because I force them to be. My eyes stay on the agenda paper, on the corner where the ink has bled, on anything except anyone’s face.
Someone laughs again behind me: aftershock laughter, the kind that keeps the moment from becoming a moment. Kenta’s voice cuts through it, bright and careless. I don’t catch the words, only the shape of them, and my stomach does this thin, mean twist like it’s trying to fold itself into a safer size.
At the threshold, I feel Reina-ko’s attention on my back. Not a grab. Not a stop. Just that quiet pull of someone choosing not to make it worse. I hate how grateful I am.
The door pushes open with a soft suction sound, and the hallway air hits me, cold, sharp, too clean. Like my body was waiting for permission. Like the second I’m out of the circle, my chest finally remembers it has been holding something.
I keep walking. Normal pace. Don’t run. Running turns you into a story. My throat burns anyway, like I swallowed the laughter and it’s scraping on the way down.
By the time I’m outside, my brain flips into inventory mode like it’s a coping skill I didn’t ask for.
What I did: showed up. Sat down. Smiled the right amount. Kept my hands folded so nobody could see the shake starting in my fingers.
What I didn’t do: say, “That’s not funny.” Look at Kenta and make it real. Look at anyone and ask them to be better. I let the joke roll over the table and I let it find its shape around me and I pretended my face didn’t change. Like if I stayed neutral enough, the room would get bored and move on.
I tell myself leaving wasn’t wrong. Leaving was survival. But the shame isn’t even about the exit. It’s the part where I stayed long enough to be measurable. Long enough for someone to decide I was a safe target. Long enough to call it trying to belong when really it was me handing over my throat and hoping nobody would squeeze.
Streetlights flicker on, one by one, like witnesses clocking me home. My body keeps walking, steady, obedient. Inside, everything is still loud.
In my room, I drop my backpack like it’s full of broken glass. My thumb finds the recovery app without me deciding to: muscle memory, like checking a pulse. The screen lights up, clean and bright, all neat boxes and percentages. For a second I can feel my brain reach for numbers the way it reaches for edges when I’m scared. Control, disguised as “health.” I stare at the logging button and it feels like stepping back into that meeting: a spotlight I’m pretending not to see.
I close it. Too fast.
Instead I go to the sink and shove my hands under cold water until my knuckles ache, until sensation drowns out sound. In for four, hold, out for six. Again. The laughter keeps looping anyway, Kenta’s voice, the room answering, like it’s stuck to my skin and I can’t scrub it off.
Accountability fractures into three ugly doors and none of them are free. I could tell Taro and watch my life get translated into bullet points (incident, trigger, plan) and then I’m not a person, I’m a precaution. I could message the club officer, polite and firm, and earn the label that follows you forever: difficult. Or I could swallow the simplest truth: invisibility was a rule because it kept me alive, and I broke it.
By the time I’m ready to eat something, it isn’t hunger that gets the final vote. It’s spite, quiet and clinical: my body is not a punchline, my recovery is not a group activity. I microwave leftover rice, stand at the counter, chew like it’s a promise I’m making in secret. Still the question won’t unhook: what happens when “community” decides you’re just material?
I push the glass door open with my shoulder because my hands are full, tote bag, folded jacket, my phone gripped like a talisman, and the temple air meets me halfway. Incense, soy sauce from someone’s donation tray, that clean-cold smell of floor cleaner that always makes everything feel more holy than it is.
Shoes are lined up in perfect rows. Little kid sneakers next to polished leather loafers. Someone’s geta, too loud even when they’re not being worn. I pause because I always pause, because if I move slowly enough maybe no one registers me. That’s a skill I’ve gotten good at: being a blur.
The hall is bright in that fluorescent community-center way, not candlelit like the main temple room. Folding tables. Metal chairs. A bulletin board with flyers curling at the edges, Obon practice, language school signup, teen volunteer hours. The kind of stuff that’s supposed to mean belonging.
I slip my shoes off, line them up like an apology. My socks are clean. I made sure. My brain throws up images anyway. I swallow against the familiar tightness and tell myself: temple rules. Quiet. Respect. No one will,
A laugh pops from the far corner, sharp and contained, like somebody pinching the sound so it doesn’t get too big. Adult laughter, the kind that ends before it shows teeth.
“Is that Haru-chan?” one of the aunties says, not to me. About me.
My name travels across the room like a dropped spoon.
I keep my face neutral. Careful. The way you do when you’re walking past a barking dog.
“Genki?” a volunteer asks too loudly, eyes flicking down and back up, fast, like checking for bruises. Like checking for… I don’t know. Evidence.
I nod, the smallest nod I can manage. “Yeah. Genki.”
My phone buzzes but I don’t look. Looking would make me seem guilty, like I have something to hide. Which is stupid. Which is also how it works here.
Behind the table with the tea urn, I hear Nao-mi’s voice before I see them, calm, precise, polite enough to cut paper.
“I’m not trying to be dramatic,” they’re saying, soft smile included in the words. “It’s just… when a kid is in foster care, we should be mindful. The community has a responsibility, ne?”
Responsibility. The word lands heavy in my stomach, like a stone I’m supposed to carry for everyone.
The first cracks don’t look like cracks. They look like politeness.
An aunty I don’t know lets her eyes stick to me a second too long, like I’m a flyer on the bulletin board she’s deciding whether to take down. Her smile stays glued on, but her gaze does that inventory thing: cheeks, wrists, posture, the space I take up. My body goes hot with the urge to prove something and the urge to disappear, both at once.
A volunteer near the tea urn lifts their voice into brightness. “Genki?” Too cheerful, too practiced, like a doctor using a cartoon bandage.
“Mm,” I answer, because a full sentence feels like an admission. I keep my mouth closed after that so nobody can count anything.
Someone’s hand hovers (not touching, not quite pulling back either) as if they’re debating whether I’m fragile in a way that would make them look kind. I hate how my brain starts translating every micro-expression into a verdict.
It’s not concern. Not really.
It’s a check. A scan. A community-wide little audit, conducted with clean nails and soft voices.
Behind the folding partition, one of those cheap beige dividers that pretends it’s privacy, I hear it: my name, softened at the edges like they’re afraid it’ll bruise someone’s mouth.
“Haru-chan,” an aunty murmurs, and then the careful words start lining up like offerings. Worry. Support. Structure. Somebody says routine the way you say vitamins, like it can’t be argued with. Someone else adds, “It’s good the guardian is… fun, but kids like that need consistency,” and my throat tightens on kids like that.
They’re building a version of me that fits on a flyer. A project with bullet points. Something everyone can nod at without having to look directly at the messy human underneath.
Nao-mi keeps that even, temple-friendly voice, no sharp edges, no drama, just “standards” and “reputation,” like they’re reciting sutras. They say what’s “best” for someone like me, how “these things” look to scholarship committees, to aunties, to the temple board. Each sentence bows politely, and still it slices. I hear it: cruelty, washed clean, served with tea.
Something in me clicks, cold and clean, like a light switch flipped in a room I thought I knew. This isn’t a refuge just because it smells like incense and everyone says gasshō with soft hands. It’s a stage with better manners. My recovery can be performed in public, politely, while nobody even has to get loud.
Sound in the community hall doesn’t travel so much as it settles. It clings to the beige walls and the metal legs of the folding tables, to the steam rising off the tea urn, to my skin. Incense you can wave away with your hand. Words just… stay.
I drift toward the bulletin board because it gives me something to do with my eyes. A curl of paper taped crooked, Obon volunteer schedule. A Japanese school flyer with smiling clip-art kids. A handwritten note about lost Tupperware like it’s a tragedy worth announcing to the entire neighborhood. I stand close enough to pretend I’m reading, far enough to keep my shoulders from touching anyone.
Next to the board is a stack of folded chairs, the kind that always pinch your fingers if you’re not careful. I angle myself so the chairs block half of me. Not hiding. Just… reduced. Like I can make myself into a corner.
And then my name, again, but softer this time, slipped into the air like it’s already been passed around enough to lose its heat.
“Haru-chan,” someone says, with the same tone they’d use for poor thing without actually saying it.
There’s a small pause, like a ceremonial breath, and then someone replies, “They’ve been… skipping lunch? At school?” The last two words come out cautious, as if the building itself might report them for being rude.
Another voice, older, warmer, performs worry the way you perform condolences. “Maybe it’s stress. You know how scholarship kids are.”
My stomach turns, reflexive, annoyed at how my body still reacts like it’s on a leash. My fingers tighten around my phone. I don’t check it. I just hold it like proof I exist somewhere else.
“I’m not saying it’s, ” a woman starts, and doesn’t finish, because everyone knows what she means. The unfinished sentence does more work than a finished one.
“Foster kids,” someone murmurs, like a category in a filing cabinet. “They need extra eyes.”
Extra eyes. Like mine aren’t already enough.
The chair stack digs into my elbow. I shift, too quickly, and the metal squeaks. The squeak slices through the murmur and for a second there’s a micro-silence: everybody recalibrating, deciding whether that sound belongs to a person.
I freeze, smile-ready, face blank, hoping to be mistaken for furniture. Hoping my name will stop being used like a communal object passed between careful hands.
A laugh slips out from behind the partition, soft, brief, like a spoon tapping porcelain. Not amusement. Confirmation. It lands and everybody’s shoulders loosen, as if agreement is a kind of absolution. Someone makes that little sympathetic tsk sound, tongue against teeth, the noise you make at a dented car or a child with scraped knees. My pulse trips over it anyway.
“We should just keep an eye,” an aunty says, voice gentle enough to be framed as love. Another adult hums, approving, and I can almost see the nods I’m not allowed to witness.
They don’t say anything cruel. That’s the trick. They say “unpredictable schedule” like it’s a weather report. “Adjustment period.” “Structure.” Words that smell like clean laundry and still manage to pin me down.
In their mouths I’m not a person who makes choices; I’m a situation. A fragile headline. A before-and-after photo waiting for the right lighting. I’m careful, unfinished, needing supervision: an object you store properly so it doesn’t warp.
I press my thumbnail into my palm until it stings, just to remind myself: I’m here. I’m not their story.
Details don’t stay sharp in rooms like this. They get sanded down with polite language until they’re safe to hold. “Skipping lunch” becomes “not eating,” becomes “having trouble,” becomes a vague we’re worried that anyone can repeat without feeling like they’re the kind of person who repeats things. The story loses my actual face and gains a caption.
With every pass, it sounds more logical, more inevitable. Like it’s happening to me, not something I’m fighting through on purpose, every day, with alarms and checklists and rules I made to keep myself alive. Someone will say, “It’s probably nothing,” and then still carry it to the next aunty like a covered dish.
And nobody has to admit the secret thrill: I’m interesting, because I’m failing correctly.
Another voice slides in with “helpful” specifics, bell schedules, lunch periods, who supervises where, as if mapping my body like a route on Google Maps. They say “routine” and “support system” the way you say “intervention,” clean and administrative. I recognize the mechanism: worry translated into paperwork-brain, concern shrink-wrapped into a label you can carry without guilt, hand to hand.
By the time an aunty says, “We’ll just keep an eye out,” the rumor stops being air and becomes furniture. It tucks itself into the room’s polite warmth, between the tea urn and the volunteer sign-up sheets, like it’s always had a reserved seat. I feel it settle, heavy and ordinary. Silence won’t erase it; it’ll only let it get filed away as fact.
I stop at the half-open door like it’s a neutral zone, like the hallway can’t decide if it’s part of the room or an escape route. The paper cup in my hand has gone lukewarm, tea skinning over at the edges, but I keep holding it because it gives my fingers a job. My thumb rubs the seam of the cup lid until it squeaks, tiny and private.
Inside, the community hall breathes in that slow way. Chairs scraping, someone rinsing something in the kitchen, the soft Doppler of aunties orbiting each other with trays. I could leave. I could make my feet do the normal thing and step fully into the corridor and walk until the light rail station swallows me. But my body does the thing it always does when my name is nearby: it leans in before my brain votes.
There’s a click in the conversation, like a zipper catching, and then (casual, careful) my name drops in.
“Haru,” someone says, not loud, not secret, just… placed. Like a bookmark in a story everyone’s already reading.
It’s not said with malice. That’s what makes it worse. It’s said like an item on a list, like “parking permits” or “who’s bringing mochi for the fundraiser.” My throat tightens anyway. My therapist calls it activation, like there’s a switch inside me that flips on when I’m being observed. My stomach does the stupid dive, and I hate it for performing on cue.
I adjust my grip on the cup. The paper is damp now, softening where my fingers keep pressing. I imagine the heat that was there earlier and how fast it left, how fast things leave when you’re not paying attention.
“Did you hear, ” a voice begins, and stops, because the rest of the sentence is a communal property. Everyone already knows how to fill in the blank.
I stand still, shoulders angled toward the doorframe, in-between enough to pretend I’m passing by. In-between enough that if someone turns and catches me, I can smile and say, oh, sorry, I was just: something harmless. Something that doesn’t sound like I was listening to my own life being edited.
The words they choose are soft-edged on purpose, like they’ve been warmed up in someone’s hands before being offered. We’re just worried. We should make sure they’re supported. Nobody says rumor. Nobody says control. They say it like they’re tucking a blanket under my chin, like if they keep their tone low enough it turns the whole thing into kindness by default.
And because it’s temple and everyone knows everyone’s last name, the language is extra careful: respectable concern, packaged so clean you could set it on a folding table next to the rice crackers. Worry becomes a civic duty. A performance you can do with your eyebrows pulled together and your voice dipped into that sympathetic register, so if anyone questions you, you can blink and say, What? We’re trying to help.
Help is a word that doesn’t require consent.
Support is a word that can mean someone else holding the steering wheel.
Even the pronouns get slippery (they, them, the kid) as if my actual name would make it too real, too personal, too much like gossip. The gentleness isn’t for me. It’s for their own reflection.
They start building a plan out loud, like my body is a shared project. “If someone just eats with them,” an aunty suggests, and another voice answers with a timeline: who’s on campus which days, which lunch period is “less chaotic,” where the duty teacher stands by the vending machines. It’s all so neat. A checklist you can laminate.
Someone says “check-in,” like it’s casual, like it’s a text you send a friend, but the way they say it has corners. Someone else says “routine,” and I can hear the capital R: Routine as leash, as proof you’re doing something. They talk about supervision like it’s kindness with a hall pass. Like hunger is just a scheduling error adults can correct, if they put the right person in the right place at the right time.
And then it drops in, foster kid, like a diagnosis they can say without saying my name. The room doesn’t change volume, but the air tightens anyway, like someone cinched a drawstring. My past becomes an explanation and a caution sign at once. Suddenly “keeping an eye out” sounds reasonable. Suddenly my body is evidence, and watching me is framed as responsibility.
In their careful, temple-voice English (soft consonants, respectful pauses) I hear the click. The moment “concern” turns into a key. The moment kindness stops being a feeling and becomes a tool you can hold up like a clipboard. Help isn’t an offer anymore; it’s a pre-approval, a hand sliding over the wheel like my yes is assumed, like my body is community property.
The heat starts under my sternum like someone struck a match in there and forgot to blow it out. It isn’t dramatic. It’s not the kind of anger that makes you slam doors or cry in public. It’s quieter than that because it just sits and keeps eating oxygen.
My face stays where I put it. Neutral, polite. The expression I learned is safest because it gives people nothing to grab. I can feel my mouth holding still, my jaw staying loose on purpose, my eyes doing that unfocused-not-listening thing. Like if I look blank enough, I’ll disappear enough.
I don’t.
My fingers, though. My fingers don’t know how to perform. They curl tighter around my bag strap until the woven nylon bites into the grooves of my skin. The pressure is clean. A line I can follow. A sensation I can control. I count the ridges under my thumb like a rosary: one, two, three, four. My pulse keeps trying to push past my grip.
A laugh floats from inside the room, light and practiced, and my stomach does that hollow wobble like it wants to be punished for existing. I think about the times I did eat lunch and still felt watched, like chewing was a test I could fail. I think about how recovery is already a room full of eyes even when nobody’s looking. How it’s plates and numbers and apps and reminders that you can’t trust your own brain, and now it’s going to be aunties and “check-ins” and a laminated plan.
I swallow, and it feels like swallowing a name I’m not allowed to say.
I want to step in and tell them: I am not a schedule problem. I am not a community service opportunity. My body is not your project. But I can’t, because the second I speak, the story becomes about my tone. Whether I’m “grateful.” Whether I’m “difficult.” Whether I’m proving their point.
So I stand there, holding my bag like it’s an anchor, while the heat under my ribs keeps blooming (private, stubborn) and I refuse to let it show on my face, because that’s the only thing that still feels like mine.
Their voices keep moving, stacking details like they’re filling out a form I never signed. Dates. Times. “Lunch period.” “Attendance.” “We noticed a pattern.” Like my day is a spreadsheet and the cells that matter are the ones that prove I can be managed.
Someone says stability the way you say seatbelt. Someone else says, “In foster situations, structure helps,” and I feel my shoulders go hard, like my body heard foster before my brain did. They don’t ask what’s true. They ask what’s trackable. What can be confirmed by a teacher who glances up from a duty post. What can be reported without anyone having to look me in the eye.
“Compliance,” Nao-mi’s calm voice offers, like it’s a neutral word, like it isn’t a leash dressed in good manners. The room hums with agreement: if I follow the plan, I’m “doing well.” If I don’t, I’m “at risk.” Nobody says maybe they’re surviving. Nobody says maybe it’s complicated. They measure worth in how easy I am to supervise.
My name still doesn’t enter the room. Just my behavior, abstracted, cleaned, translated into concern. And somehow that hurts worse than being talked about directly, because it means the real me isn’t even part of the conversation.
The grief shows up a half-step behind the anger, like it was waiting for permission. Not cinematic. Not the kind that makes you fall apart in a hallway and have someone press a paper cup of water into your hands. It’s just weight, dense, quiet, settling over the version of me who used to believe manners could save you. Like if I kept my voice even and my eyes respectful and my thank-yous perfectly timed, adults would treat me like a person instead of a problem to solve.
I grieve that kid the way you grieve a myth you didn’t realize you were living in. Because listening from the outside, I can hear it: politeness isn’t a shield here. It’s a handle.
Another kind of grief follows, thinner than the anger and somehow worse. Like being caught with your zipper down in a room full of polite smiles. My body, my food, my progress. Apparently it’s public inventory. Something adults can discuss in gentle tones over paper cups of tea, as if softness makes it permission. Like recovery is a protocol they can manage without ever asking me.
My brain starts taking inventory the way it always does when I’m scared: names attached to voices, who lets silence hang, who rushes to fill it. The word support lands heavy, like a gavel in a room that still smells like incense. Not an offer: an outcome. My throat goes tight, and something inside me goes still and hard: if this is help, it comes with paperwork, with permission, with owning pieces of me.
It happens so smoothly I almost miss the exact moment the air changes.
One second they’re doing that thing adults do, warm concern, head-tilts you can hear through the wall, “we’re just making sure”, and the next, the words tilt sideways into something else. Not my health. Not my feelings. My presentation. How it “looks.” What it “signals.” Like my body is a flyer someone left on the wrong bulletin board.
A chair scrapes. A paper cup gets set down too carefully. And then someone says, “We just don’t want people to misunderstand,” like misunderstanding is the worst injury on the table.
Temple is its own ecosystem. Everyone knows which aunties sit where. Who brings the best manju. Who reads too much into a quiet kid’s face. I can hear them shaping the rumor into something temple-safe: a story that can be repeated without sounding like gossip. The version where they’re not talking about me skipping lunch because it makes them uncomfortable. It’s because “they’re worried,” because “it’s about stability,” because “we have to be mindful of the community.”
“Optics,” somebody says, soft, like they’re apologizing to the word.
Nao-mi’s voice threads through it, steady as a metronome. “It’s not about blame,” they say, and I can tell they mean it the way people mean standards. Like the harm is incidental, like the point is to keep the room tidy.
“They’re in a foster placement,” another adult murmurs, like my living situation is a fragile glass everyone is afraid I’ll drop. “We can’t have… misunderstandings. Not with agencies.”
And there it is. Not the truth of what’s happening in my brain, or how hard it is to eat when you feel watched. The fear isn’t that I’m struggling. The fear is that someone will notice the struggle in a way that makes the temple look messy.
My nails press crescents into my palm. I can picture them already: the careful email, the gentle check-in, the controlled conversation at a folding table. Nothing loud. Nothing shameful. Just a clean little narrative everyone can agree on, with my name left out like that makes it respectful.
Their volume drops, and it’s like watching someone dim the lights before they tell you bad news. Softer, slower, extra gentle: like kindness is a setting you can toggle on to make whatever comes next moral. They smooth their sentences the way you smooth a tablecloth over something ugly. We just want to make sure. We’re only concerned. It might be helpful if. Every edge sanded down until the words can slide into someone’s mouth later without catching.
I can hear the performance of it: compassion shaped into something repeatable. Not the messy kind that asks questions and waits for answers, but the clean kind that lets you keep your hands dry. The careful tone makes them sound like they’re protecting me, but it also makes it impossible to call it what it is. If I walked in and said, Stop talking about me like I’m a problem, I’d be the one breaking harmony. I’d be “emotional.” “Defensive.”
They round off my life into polite phrases, a situation, a delicate balance, a young person who needs support, and each one erases a detail that might make me human. Softness doesn’t make it gentle. It just makes it easier to swallow.
Words like “structure,” “accountability,” “community standards” start lining up in my head, neat as folded towels. It’s the same cadence teachers use when they’re about to “loop in” counselors, the same gentle voice that means decisions have already been made. Each word is clean, respectable. Each one is a hinge.
I’m not a kid who’s tired or hungry or trying, not a person with a brain that misfires around lunch tables and mirrors. I’m a liability. A headline. A thing that could reflect badly on somebody’s program, somebody’s temple, somebody’s good intentions.
“Just to keep everything stable,” someone says, and I feel the click: like a lock turning. Stable for who. Quiet for who. Safe for who. Not me. Not really.
Respectability isn’t a shield here. It’s a bargaining chip. A roof someone holds over your head and calls it care. Until you realize they can lower it whenever you don’t smile right, eat right, say the right thank-you. They offer “support” with their palms open, but there’s a thumb on the scale. A handle on my life, steering me gently, like I won’t notice.
The sharpest part isn’t even the rumor: it’s how fast it gets translated into permission. Into other people saying my name like they’ve been assigned it, like my body and my choices are a community project with a clipboard. Ownership wrapped in soft voices. A polite kind of harm that expects me to nod, to thank them for tightening the leash, to call it care because they said it gently.
I slip out like I’m doing something normal, like I’m one of the kids who gets bored during adult talk and wanders to the side to scroll. I tap my pocket and make my face blank, the one that says sorry, I’m just checking something, and nobody stops me because nobody is actually looking at me. Not directly.
The hallway air is colder, or maybe that’s just my skin deciding it’s done pretending. My phone screen lights up and immediately feels too bright, too loud. I don’t even have a notification. I just need a prop. My thumb moves anyway, unlocking, locking, swiping between apps I’m not reading. My hands shake hard enough that the glass protector ticks against my nail.
In my head the words keep coming back, stacked like those temple chairs they fold and tuck away after events: concern. support. stability. Each one soft, each one shaped to fit in someone else’s mouth. Like if you say it in the right tone, it stops being about control. Like if you call it support, it can’t also be a leash.
I hate how my body reacts. It’s not dramatic. It’s smaller than that. A tightness under my ribs. A heat behind my eyes that doesn’t spill. The stupid, automatic inventory: Did I eat enough today? Will someone ask what I ate? Did I take too long in the bathroom? Did I look tired? Did I look thin? The questions don’t care about answers; they just keep running, like a treadmill I didn’t step onto but can’t step off.
From down the hall, I can still hear the cadence of adult voices, muffled through the wall, gentle, measured, like a lullaby that’s supposed to make you grateful. My throat does this thing where it feels like it’s closing around a word I’m not allowed to say.
I type a text to nobody, just a row of dots, then delete it. My fingers want help. My brain wants to stay invisible. And somewhere between those two wants, my whole life becomes something people can “manage” as long as they keep their voices kind.
In the courtyard I stop in the strip of shade between the garden stones and the vending machine, where I can keep the glass doors in my peripheral and the parking lot in my direct line of sight. It’s a stupid little skill I pretend is just being “aware,” like I’m the kind of person who reads self-defense threads and takes them seriously, not the kind of person who learned early that you should always know how to leave.
I watch aunties drift past with foil pans, watch a kid chase a paper cup across the concrete, watch the way the temple’s sliding doors reflect back a warped version of me, small, neat, unbothered. My brain does the math anyway: If someone comes out, I can cut left to the side gate. If I get cornered, I can pretend I forgot something in the hall. If I need air, I can walk to the rail stop and nobody will question it.
Except that’s the part that lands like a stone in my stomach: I can map exits all day and still not control the story. Keeping my head down isn’t camouflage. It’s just giving other people a cleaner angle to aim from.
The things that used to keep me upright (small, boring routines I built like handrails) suddenly tilt into something else. My meal-planning app isn’t a quiet reminder anymore; it’s a pop-up someone could glimpse over my shoulder and translate into a story. The snacks I pack, the ones my therapist called “neutral choices,” feel like props in a courtroom. If a wrapper shows up in the wrong trash can, if I skip eating it because my stomach goes tight, it’s not just a moment. It’s “a pattern,” said sweetly, said in that careful tone that means they’re already writing the conclusion.
Even the calendar invites, therapy at 4:[^30], check-in on Fridays, look like fingerprints. Like proof I’m broken in an official way. Like anyone can pick them up with clean hands and still leave smudges.
I make rules in my head like I’m tying knots I can feel later. No explaining if they ask with an audience. No “just checking in” that turns into permission slips signed in soft voices. No more handing out pieces of my recovery like samples. Trust gets built like steps: small, repeatable, private. If someone wants me safe, they can show up when nobody’s watching.
When I step off the temple grounds, it isn’t relief: just a new kind of weight settling in, permanent. Belonging here has a price tag, and it’s paid in little pieces of yourself you don’t notice until they’re gone. There’s no going back to thinking “community” means safe. There’s only deciding, over and over, what I can share and what I have to guard.
I scan the cafeteria the way I used to scan the sky walking from the light rail: like if I stare hard enough I can tell whether it’s going to break open on me.
The onigiri line is a slow river. The scholarship table is its own weather system: bright, loud, contained. I track the usual coordinates without meaning to. Who sits angled toward the wall, who keeps their backpack on the chair like a reserved sign, who takes selfies with their food like proof of being alive. My eyes hop from the trash cans to the condiment station to the far corner where people go to be “alone” together. Little tells. A laugh that stutters and restarts. A shoulder that tightens like someone tugged an invisible string. A whisper behind a hand that doesn’t fully cover the mouth.
Somebody’s phone is angled down but not away. The screen flashes, dim blue against cafeteria light. A thumb scrolls, stops, scrolls again. That’s not texting. That’s watching.
I pretend I’m deciding between edamame and the sad-looking apple slices. My throat does the thing where it closes like it’s protecting me from swallowing anything, even air. I can feel my own face staying neutral: carefully neutral, like that’s a skill I’ve been practicing for years and not a reflex built out of other people’s reactions.
Across the room, Kenta throws his head back in a laugh that’s too big for whatever was said. The people around him follow like it’s choreography. Reina-ko is there. Straight posture, smile set, eyes flicking once, quick, like checking a mirror. Nao-mi isn’t laughing. They’re not even pretending. They’re looking past the table, past the noise, like they’re waiting for something to line up.
A freshman at the edge of the line glances at my hands, then away, then back again, like they’re trying to see if I’m holding what they heard I wouldn’t.
The worst part is how normal everything keeps moving. Trays sliding. Milk cartons thudding. Someone calling, “Yo, save me a seat.” The whole room pretending it’s just lunch while the pressure shifts, quiet and thin, right under my skin.
I run the script anyway, because the script is what I have.
Tray. Plastic fork. Water cup that sweats against my palm. I take the route that keeps me in motion and out of anyone’s direct line: past the condiment station, not too close to the scholarship table, not too close to the corner where people gather to look lonely together. My feet know it like muscle memory, like commuting.
But halfway there the room feels…different. Not louder, not quieter. Just tuned to me. Like someone turned the bass up on my name.
I don’t look up right away. I can feel it first: the little pauses in other people’s movements, the way conversation keeps going but thins out around the edges. A chair leg squeaks and then stops, like the person decided not to move after all. A laugh lands too hard, then gets swallowed.
When I finally flick my eyes up, three heads do the same thing at once, turn, register, snap back. One person doesn’t snap back. They hold on, just one beat too long, waiting for the proof. Waiting for me to be empty. Waiting for me to be the rumor made visible.
I do the thing my therapist taught me like it’s a spell I can say under my breath. Five things I can see: the crooked poster for Spirit Week peeling at the corner. A ketchup packet smeared flat like a red coin. Someone’s glittery acrylic nails tapping a tray. The emergency exit sign glowing too bright. Reina-ko’s hair clip catching the light when she turns. Four things I can feel: my tongue pressed to the back of my teeth, my jaw trying to weld shut, the strap of my backpack cutting my shoulder, my socks slipping in my sneakers. I loosen what I can: drop my shoulders a millimeter, breathe into my ribs instead of my throat.
It helps the panic, yeah. It doesn’t change the way eyes stick like gum under a table. Even if I’m “fine,” the rumor still gets to have a body.
It hits my body first, before my brain can negotiate it into something harmless. I take the long way after school: an extra mile like a penance nobody assigned. My legs keep moving even when my head feels full of cotton. It isn’t hunger; it’s that hollow, punished kind of tired. The old reflex whispers: fix it by shrinking. But pretending nothing’s happening drains me faster than following my meal plan ever has.
On the light rail home, the windows turn my reflection into a ghost layered over warehouses and new condos, and I stop trying to outthink what happened. It isn’t paranoia if it keeps repeating with different mouths. Lunch (my lunch) has become a story people pass around like a meme, like currency. I press my tongue to my teeth and practice sentences I might survive saying.
I let myself in like I’m borrowing air. Shoes off at the genkan, toes curling against the cool tile. I line them up because order is cheaper than comfort and because if I’m careful enough maybe I won’t take up extra space in the house, either.
My backpack goes down by the wall, zipper turned inward like a mouth I don’t want anyone to read. The light rail smell, metal and somebody else’s perfume, clings to my hoodie. I peel it off and hang it the same way every day, hook, sleeve, sleeve, like if I repeat the ritual nothing new can attach itself to me.
From the kitchen comes the hiss of something hitting a hot pan. Soy sauce, maybe. Garlic. The kind of smells that are supposed to make you feel safe and hungry and normal. The rice cooker is doing its quiet, patient work on the counter. I can hear Yuki moving. “おかえり, Haru!” Yuki’s voice is bright. Too bright. Like when someone turns the TV volume up because the silence is louder. “How was school? You survive? Nobody threw a chair? No pop quizzes? You know I hate pop quizzes. Even when I’m not the one taking them.”
I hover in the doorway. The kitchen light makes everything look clean and possible. Yuki doesn’t look at me right away; they’re stirring something, shoulders bouncing like they’re keeping the rhythm of their own joke. I know this move. I’ve watched it enough to memorize it: humor first, always, as if laughing is a lid you can screw on tight.
“School was…” I start, and it comes out flat. My tongue feels thick, like it’s been holding my name in place all day.
Yuki glances over, smile still on, eyes scanning me fast (hair, face, hands) like a checklist they don’t want to admit exists. “Just ‘school was,’ huh? Very poetic. We should get you into Haiku Club.”
My chest tightens. The old part of me wants to nod, to give them the answer that keeps everything easy. Fine. Normal. No trouble. The new part, the part that has alarms and grounding techniques and a meal plan app that nags like a tiny, caring robot, wants one real thing.
I step closer, fingers worrying the seam of my sleeve until the rice cooker clicks, loud enough to cover my heartbeat.
I wait for the rice cooker to click, that little plastic clunk like permission. Like if something else makes the noise first, I won’t have to. Yuki keeps stirring, wrist loose, shoulders doing their constant almost-dance. The pan hisses. The vent fan rattles. The house is busy being normal.
My throat feels like it’s packed with cotton. I pick one sentence because it’s all I can carry without dropping everything.
I step to the counter and set my phone down even though I’m not going to show them anything. Just having something in my hands makes me look like a person with a reason to be standing here. My fingers press the edge of the laminate, feel the tiny chip where someone’s knife hit too hard once.
“Um,” I say, then hate the sound of it. Like I’m asking for permission to exist.
Yuki glances at me, smile already ready, and I force the words out before I can take them back, placing them between us like a bowl that could spill.
“People are talking about my lunch.”
Yuki’s smile snaps on like a light switch, reflex, practiced, almost automatic. “Wow,” they say, widening their eyes like they’re doing a bit for an invisible audience. “Celebrity status. Next thing you know, they’ll be asking for autographs on your onigiri.” They even mime signing something with the spatula, shoulders doing that familiar bounce, the performance that usually keeps our kitchen harmless.
The joke lands with a wet thunk in my chest. It hangs in the air, shiny and wrong, like tinsel on a bruise.
My face stays neutral because it’s trained, because I can’t afford to look dramatic. But my shoulders betray me. One small lift, a half-inhale that never turns into air. My fingers clamp harder on the counter edge until the chipped laminate bites back.
Yuki sees it (my stillness, the way my hands are too careful) and their grin falters like they’ve hit a loose tile. “Okay: no,” they say, softer. “That was me being… me.” The knife goes down with a deliberate click; both palms press the counter like they’re anchoring themself. “Can I try again?” A breath. “I don’t need the whole story. Just: are you okay right now? Do you want help, or do you want space?”
My throat tries to close around the old reflex: make it smaller, make it funny, make it not a problem. My brain offers names like a tray of knives and I push them away. I shake my head, then manage one tight nod, like that’s the most truth I’m allowed. Yuki’s shoulders stop dancing. Their voice drops, steady. “Okay. We make it boring. We make it safe. And if adults show up? That part’s mine.”
Morning makes the kitchen feel like it has a microphone. The fridge hum is a bass note under everything, the kettle does that impatient pre-boil tick, and Yuki’s slippers keep whispering across the floor like they’re trying to erase their own footprints. Sunlight slants through the blinds and turns every crumb into evidence.
I stand at the edge of the counter, not sitting, not leaning, occupying the amount of space you’d give a delivery person who might leave any second. My hands don’t know what to do, so they fold and unfold around my phone until the glass gets warm.
Yuki opens the fridge, squints in like it’s going to reveal a plot twist. “Okay,” they announce to the air, voice bright on purpose. “Chef Yuki’s Special. Edible. Affordable. Possibly emotionally devastating.”
They do the little flourish with the butter knife, like they’re on a cooking show. Usually it works: usually the joke is a bridge I can cross without looking down.
This time it’s just… sound. Thin. The kind of laugh-track line that makes the silence behind it more obvious.
Yuki’s shoulders drop a millimeter. The knife pauses midair. They clear their throat, and the brightness drains out like someone pulled a plug. When they look at me, it’s not scanning-for-problems, it’s waiting.
“Okay,” they say again, quieter, like they’re choosing each word instead of tossing them. “What can I do that won’t make it worse?”
My stomach flips: not from hunger, from the sheer wrongness of being asked directly. My brain starts offering full explanations anyway, paragraph after paragraph, as if I can earn safety by being comprehensive. Therapy voice. Recovery voice. The truth with footnotes.
I swallow it down.
“Just… don’t make it obvious,” I manage. My voice comes out small and scratchy, like I haven’t used it yet today. “No notes. No, like, ‘healthy’ stuff people comment on. Nothing that smells. Nothing that spills.”
Yuki nods once, slow, like they’re taking my order at a counter and not filing me into a folder. “Okay,” they say. “Boring. Portable. Low-commentary.” Their mouth twitches, almost a joke, then stops. “We can do that.”
I can feel the explanation trying to rise up anyway, the whole annotated version of my life (triggers, calories, therapist-approved phrasing) ready to perform so nobody gets mad at me for being complicated. But if I start, I won’t stop. If I start, it turns into a meeting.
So I pick the smallest truth that still has edges.
“No big talk,” I say, staring at the seam in the countertop like it’s a script. “And please don’t… do new stuff. Like, chia, spirulina, whatever.”
Yuki’s eyebrows lift, a reflex to joke, but they just nod, serious like a barista who’s heard a hundred specific orders and never once asked why.
“No notes,” I add quickly, heat crawling up my neck. “Not like, ” I gesture with two fingers, like a tiny flag. “Not in the lunchbox. That makes it feel… obvious.”
“Okay,” they say, and it isn’t pity. It’s logistics. “No notes.”
I take a breath that actually reaches my lungs. “Something that won’t spill. Won’t smell. Won’t make people… look.”
Yuki’s nod is slow, deliberate. “Low-smell. Low-drama. Portable.”
The way they treat it like an order instead of a diagnosis makes my shoulders unlock a fraction, like my body was bracing for impact and didn’t have to.
We line things up on the counter like evidence we’re trying to make look ordinary: onigiri wrapped in plain paper (no cute seaweed face, no “ganbatte”), a turkey-and-cucumber sandwich cut clean, a little cup of orange slices with the white strings pulled off so they won’t look messy, crackers that don’t crumble into dust, one small packaged sweet that reads “vending machine” instead of “self-care.” I keep shaking my head: too diet, too Pinterest, too sad. Yuki doesn’t argue. They just swap items in and out, hands quiet, like we’re doing math.
In the end it’s… normal. Enough that no one can narrate it. Enough that I can actually finish it.
We redesign it like we’re trying to outsmart a camera: the same plain container every day, parked in the same corner of the fridge so my eyes don’t start bargaining. A backup snack goes in my backpack and stays there like a spare key. Yuki adds everything to a repeating grocery list, keeps it deliberately boring: small rotation, same safety rails, no surprises that turn into a spiral.
Before I can disappear out the door, Yuki leans on the counter like they’re just waiting for the kettle, not about to hand me something fragile. “If someone says something,” they say, gentle, “you don’t have to fix it with a smile.” I nod like that’s normal advice. The lunch thuds into my bag: ordinary weight, new rule. People might still look. Home doesn’t have to.
In my room, the air feels less watched. The house noise turns into a muffled tide behind my door, and I can pretend my body is just my body, not a community bulletin board.
I sit on the edge of the bed with my phone angled like I’m hiding something, even though there’s no one here. Habit. My thumb finds the meal-planning app on muscle memory, like a panic button I press in slow motion. The screen lights up my hands and the underside of my jaw, and for a second I hate how clinical it looks: how it takes the messiest part of me and turns it into boxes and checkmarks.
But boxes are… better than free-falling.
The recovery plan is there, all the categories my therapist helped me name: breakfast, dinner, snacks. “Lunch” has always been a vague blob, the part I pretended would solve itself because it was in the middle of the day and other people were around and I could always say I ate earlier, ate later, wasn’t hungry, had a big breakfast, had practice, had a thing.
I tap edit. The little pencil icon feels like permission.
I make a new category and don’t overthink the label. Not “midday nourishment” or “fuel” or any of the words adults use when they’re trying not to scare you. Just: School lunch. Two words. A place where the rumor lives.
My fingers hover over the reminder settings. I set one for the night before, 9:[^12] p.m., specific on purpose, because “9 p.m.” feels optional. Title: Pack lunch. Then another one for the actual day, right before fourth period ends, synced to the bell schedule I could recite in my sleep. Title: Eat lunch. Not “try.” Not “if you can.” Not “be kind to yourself.” Just a verb.
I add notes, but only logistics. Container in fridge. Backup snack in backpack. Water bottle. Sit where there’s an exit. I don’t write why.
When I hit save, nothing dramatic happens. No fireworks. No moral victory music.
Just a plan that exists outside my head, where it can’t shapeshift with my mood. Quiet. Precise. Real.
I scroll back up to School lunch and force myself to think about the version of me that’s wrecked, not the version that’s trying to impress anybody. No aesthetic, no “balanced plate,” no proof-of-being-okay. A bad-day lunch. On purpose. Like a fire drill.
Something I can defend without talking.
No curry. No tuna. No anything that announces itself to the whole table the second I crack the lid. Nothing that looks like I’m “being healthy” in a way people can comment on, or “being weird” in a way Kenta can turn into a bit. Just… ordinary, sealed, repeatable.
I type it in like I’m writing a cheat code:
Option A: two plain onigiri (salt, maybe a little furikake if it won’t smell) plus a yogurt drink, plus a small packet of edamame.
Option B: turkey-and-cheese on wheat, cut the exact same diagonal every time, orange slices, crackers.
I save it as a template. I name it Bad Day Lunch and don’t let myself rename it into something softer. Fewer choices means fewer negotiations. Fewer negotiations means I actually eat.
In the kitchen, Yuki doesn’t narrate my hands like they’re hosting a cooking show. They just… stand there, close enough to help, far enough to let me decide. Their eyes flick to the onigiri, the sandwich bread, the little cup of oranges, then away, like looking too long would turn it into a test.
They start a joke anyway, because that’s what they do. “Okayyy, Chef Haru, giving us five-star cafeteria vibes. I don’t give them the reflex. I keep my face neutral on purpose, like holding a door shut.
The joke collapses in the air. Yuki clears their throat, and I watch the grin slip back into something careful. “Alright,” they say, softer. “What’s easiest to eat when your brain is loud?”
Yuki takes my answer like a recipe, not a confession. Same grocery run every week, same bland rotation, same hand-off. Container already waiting in the same square of fridge shelf so I don’t have to ask or search. They add quiet armor: an opaque lunch bag, plain ice pack, nothing see-through. A sticky note that only says “12:[^05],” like an appointment, not encouragement. Ordinary on purpose.
The next morning, Yuki does an adult thing and doesn’t make me watch. Their phone stays facedown on the table like it’s misbehaving. Later I hear the printer cough once, then the soft-click of their nails on the screen: brief email, then a short call. Privacy. Harassment. Students tracking another student’s food. Firm asks: no staff commentary, fast shut-down of targeting. Nothing else. No reasons. No labels. Just boundaries.
That evening I hover in the kitchen doorway like a ghost with homework, pretending I’m just passing through, pretending I’m not monitoring the temperature of the whole house.
Yuki has a legal pad flattened on the counter, the kind with the faint blue lines that make everything look more organized than it is. They click a pen and start writing like it’s a performance. Big loops. Dramatic headings.
“Snack diplomacy,” they murmur, like they’re narrating a nature documentary. Under it: yogurt drinks, crackers, those little seaweed packs that are basically edible shh.
Then, “Emergency rice.” They underline it twice. Like we’re preparing for a natural disaster instead of a Tuesday.
I wait for the punchline. It doesn’t come. Yuki’s grin stays on their face the way a sticker stays on a cup after you’ve washed it: technically there, but not doing anything.
They tilt their head, add “Foster-parent bribes” and immediately scratch it out, hard enough the pen tears the paper. The sound is small, but it does something to my chest.
Yuki rips the page off and tosses it in the recycling like it never existed. No flourish. No joke about being “too real.” They start again on a clean sheet, and the handwriting changes. The letters shrink. Straight lines. Columns. Brand names. Quantities. A list you could hand to a stranger without them seeing you.
Bread. Cheese. Nori. Rice. Turkey. Fruit. Plain, plain, plain.
I watch their hand move, steady on the surface, and then the pen pauses. Not a thoughtful pause. An arrested one. Their fingers press into the paper, and I see it: the tremor, just at the tips, like their hand is trying to shake something off without permission.
Like the week is a glass they’re carrying and they can’t let it rattle.
Yuki glances up and catches me. For a second their face does that quick recalibration: host mode, then human. “Hey,” they say lightly, too lightly. “Anything else you want? Any… special requests?”
Special. Like food is a treat, not a landmine.
My mouth is dry. I could retreat. I could let them keep holding the week alone.
Instead I step one foot into the kitchen and make my voice work. “People are talking about my lunch.”
At Kiku Market, Yuki keeps the brightness dialed up like the overhead fluorescents: laughing at the sample lady’s pun, tossing out an “arigatouu” that’s a little too musical. But their eyes don’t stay on what they’re doing. They flick. Endcaps, mirrors, the little convex security bubble above aisle three. Faces. Aunties. Temple uncles. Anyone who might know our last name or the foster agency acronym.
I trail behind the cart like I’m trying not to exist, and that’s familiar, but watching Yuki do it is new and sharp.
They steer the cart sideways whenever we stop, body and metal forming a shield. Rice, nori, turkey slices, plain yogurt drinks. Everything disappears behind the cart wall like contraband. When they reach for bread, they glance over their shoulder first, like buying sandwich bread is a statement.
I clock the micro-math happening in their head: if someone sees this, what story will they tell? If someone tells a story, who hears it? If someone hears it, do they write it down?
Yuki’s hand tightens on the handle until their knuckles go pale. The cart squeaks, like it wants to snitch.
The cashier rings up our plain, plain stack like it’s nothing, beep, beep, beep, and then looks up with the soft-face adults use when they’re trying to be kind without getting too close. “So, how’s school going?”
Yuki doesn’t even blink. “Oh, you know,” they say, too quick, like the words were already waiting behind their teeth. “Living the dream. Surviving the teen ecosystem. Pray for me, ne?” A little laugh, pitched high, harmless, practiced.
It lands. The cashier smiles automatically. The line behind us exhales.
But I hear the half-second after, the tiny hitch Yuki can’t joke over. The way their breath catches like they almost said the truth and swallowed it. Their hand taps the counter once, like a punctuation mark that means: Normal. We’re normal. Don’t write us down.
On the walk home I replay things I usually blur on purpose: Yuki’s jaw locking when an auntie sighs, “kids these days,” their shoulders squaring the second we pass anyone in an LTVHS hoodie. Even the laugh has timing, like a door shutting. It hits me late and hard: they’re not minimizing me. They’re trying to keep me from becoming a file, a whisper, a “situation.”
Later, at home, Yuki unloads the Kiku bags with theatrical care, calling out ingredients like they’re on TV. I just… stay. At the table, in the same air. Let it land: they’re scared too (of auntie eyes, of forms, of being a headline in someone else’s file) and laughter is how they keep their feet moving.
The routine holds for six days so cleanly it almost convinces me it’s permanent.
Monday: turkey sandwich, clementine, yogurt drink. Tuesday: onigiri from the little mold Yuki bought like it was a joke gift, except they wash it like it matters. Wednesday: pasta salad in a container that snaps shut with a decisive little click. The predictability should make me feel safe. Instead it makes me feel watched by the calendar, like if I mess up I’ll ruin the streak and the streak is the only thing keeping me upright.
On day seven the cafeteria sounds are louder, like someone turned the treble up. Chairs scrape. Milk cartons pop. Somebody’s laugh spikes sharp and then dies.
I sit where I’ve been sitting: same corner of the same table, back half-turned like I’m not choosing a spot, like gravity put me there. I line my things up: napkin, fork, container. The app in my head starts doing its sick little calculations anyway. How visible is this? How loud is the plastic? How fast can I disappear if I need to?
The table next to us has one of those scholarship-kid clusters, all matching hoodies and matching confidence. One of them (voice too big for the distance) leans back and points, not even trying to be subtle.
“What’s that?”
It’s not even a real question. It’s a flare.
A couple heads turn. A glance lingers on my hands. Someone snorts, the sound caught between a laugh and a cough, like they want credit without committing.
My chest goes tight on instinct, ribs trying to fold inward. The old urge arrives like it owns me: close it. Toss it. Make an excuse. Become air.
My fingers hover on the latch, and for a second I hate how much meaning a piece of plastic can carry. Then I make myself press down and pop it open anyway. The smell is almost nothing: just rice and soy and normal. I take a bite.
It tastes like cardboard at first. Then, weirdly, it tastes like proof. Like I can be here, in fluorescent daylight, with eyes on me, and still do the thing. My throat shakes when I swallow, but I swallow.
I don’t look up. I don’t smile. I just keep eating, steady on purpose, like my body is a fact nobody gets to debate.
In the mornings Yuki makes lunch like it’s a law of physics: same two or three options, same containers, same movements. They pack it the night before while I pretend to do homework at the table, because if it happens the morning of, it turns into negotiations my brain is too good at winning. If it’s already done, it’s just… there. A fact.
No neon “protein” labels, no aggressive wellness language, nothing that looks like a performance. Sandwich. Onigiri. Pasta salad. Fruit that doesn’t bruise if you breathe on it wrong. The kind of normal that doesn’t give anyone a hook to hang their opinions on.
Yuki narrates it anyway, like a cooking show nobody asked for. “Tonight, we have Turkey That Will Not Betray You,” they say, and then, “Clementine. Cute. Powerful.” Bright voice, safe voice.
But sometimes I catch them pausing with the lid in their hand, eyes flicking to my face like they’re checking weather.
Their smile softens, drops a notch. “Okay,” they say, quieter. Not joking. “Which one feels easiest today?”
Not best. Not healthiest. Easiest.
And my chest loosens, just a little, because I can answer that without disappearing.
I start budgeting “manageable” like it’s another class period I can’t skip. Before I hit the cafeteria doors, I stop in the hallway shadow where the trophy case blocks the worst of the glare and do the dumb little grounding thing Taro taught me (five things I can see, four I can feel) until my hands stop trying to shake out of my skin. I open my meal app like I’m checking the weather, and I leave myself a note that isn’t inspirational, just factual: ate anyway. Proof, not a performance.
I make a rule: comments get one replay, max. After that, I label them “noise” and shove them off the edge of my brain like papers I’m done grading.
Some days I eat fast, like I’m running a drill. Some days I go slow on purpose. Eaten is the point. When the urge to skip spikes, I don’t let it become a movie. I text Yuki one word, hard, and keep my phone face-down so the whole world doesn’t get to watch me be brave.
The rumor doesn’t vanish; it just thins out, like smoke you can’t quite air out. In the hallway a friend-of-a-friend does the soft-eyed thing, voice pitched like a counselor. “You good? You never eat.” They’re offering me a script: deny, confess, reassure. I keep my face flat. “I ate.” Nothing else. No story. No apology. Staying is its own kind of control.
When it doesn’t blow over (when the looks keep landing like pennies flicked at my tray) Yuki takes one careful step outside our kitchen. Not a dramatic meeting. A quick check-in, framed like scheduling: “We’re keeping routines consistent. Please don’t comment on lunch. Please don’t let other students make it a thing.” No confession, no file-worthy words. It doesn’t erase the noise, but it shifts it. Less spotlight, more shield. Enough.
I clock it the way I clock everything now: not as feelings, not as a story, but as numbers I don’t write down. Three days in a row where nobody does that half-laugh, half-whisper “You good?” like my body is a public service announcement. Two lunch periods where the same sophomore who used to angle their phone like they weren’t walks past me without that tiny pause. One whole week where Ms. Larkin’s gaze slides from my hands to my face and then away, like she’s remembered I’m a person and not a checklist.
It’s not that the attention disappears. Little Tokyo Vista doesn’t forget. It just… dulls. Like someone took a sharpie to the rumor and left it out in the sun.
In the cafeteria line I keep my headphones in, even with no music playing, because the plastic barrier of them gives me a second to breathe before I have to make choices that everyone thinks they’re allowed to audit. The trays clatter, the fryer smell sticks to everything, and the fluorescent lights make the apples look like they’ve been waxed into obedience. I pick what’s on my plan. I hold the carton steady. I don’t do the thing where I pretend I’m “not hungry” as a joke, a flex, a shield.
My phone buzzes with my meal app reminder and I let it. I don’t swipe it away like it’s embarrassing. I’m allowed to have tools.
At a table near the windows, Kenta’s laugh detonates and a few heads swivel automatically. Not toward me. That’s new. The world still rotates around loud people, but it doesn’t have to rotate around my plate.
When I sit, my hands shake once, then stop. I ground the way my therapist taught me. Thumb to fingertip, four points of contact, the cold edge of the table. Across the aisle, Reina-ko’s eyes find mine for half a second, and they don’t look sorry. They look… present. Like a quiet agreement: we’re both here. We’re both eating. We’re both alive in public, and nobody gets to make it mean something else.
I still take the back stairs most days, the ones that smell like mop water and old posters, because habit is a kind of gravity. My shoes are quiet. My routes are mapped in my head like emergency exits: avoid the trophy case glare, cut behind the vending machines, don’t get snagged by the Club Hallway traffic where people stand in circles like they own oxygen.
But I notice my shoulders aren’t trying to disappear anymore.
It’s not confidence, exactly. It’s more like. My body finally got tired of apologizing for existing. I keep my face neutral the way I always have, but the neutrality shifts. It stops being “please don’t look at me” and starts being “I’m doing something. Move.” The same blank calm teachers get to have when they’re carrying coffee and a stack of papers, like the world is required to make space.
I pass a group of scholarship kids and I don’t angle my torso away like I’m avoiding contamination. I don’t smile to prove I’m harmless. I just walk straight, breathing through my nose, phone in my hand like an anchor.
Invisible, but on purpose. Not erased. Selective.
A couple heads tilt as I pass: eyes doing that quick inventory thing, flicking from my hands to the clear container like they’re checking a label. The old reflex rises: move faster, make it funny, make it nothing. Hide it behind a binder. Let my body become a punchline before someone else writes one.
I don’t.
I keep my pace exactly the same, sneakers scuffing the same tile seam, breath steady enough to count. The container stays in my grip, not clenched, not displayed. Just held. Like any other kid carrying lunch. Like my lunch isn’t a referendum.
When I reach the table, I set everything down with both hands. No flourish. No apology. I peel back the lid. I take a bite.
Ordinary on purpose.
In the Club Hallway, a knot of bodies colonizes the doorway. My old reflex twitches: fold, slip, become an apology-shaped shadow. Instead I stop. Just… stop. I let my weight settle evenly in my shoes, let the silence of my waiting do the work. When their conversation finally eddies open, I walk through. Shoulders level. No “sorry.” No flinch. Just passage.
Later, when I get a pocket of alone, bathroom stall, library corner, that slice of hallway between bells, my hands do what they’ve been trained to do. Notes app: lunch done. Breaths: four in, six out. Checklist: water, feet on floor, name five things. I don’t do it to shrink. I do it to anchor, to stay in my body long enough to keep choosing it.
The old reflex rises first like my body is already packing itself away before anyone asks it to. It’s automatic, like blinking. Like when you touch a hot pan and your hand jerks back before your brain can narrate it.
Doorways become math. If Kenta’s group is by the vending machines, I can cut behind the trophy case and pretend I’m reading the names like I care. If Nao-mi is anywhere in the Club Hallway, I can take the back stairs that smell like mop water and surrender to the quiet humiliation of arriving sweaty and “late” but unseen. My feet do the route before I decide. My mouth gets ready to be empty. My face gets ready to be neutral in the way people call “calm” when they don’t want to notice the panic under it.
My mind starts offering trades: If you don’t look up, maybe they won’t notice your hands. If you keep your voice soft, maybe nobody asks what you ate. If you laugh at the right time, maybe the joke won’t land on you.
And I hate it, the way my ribs tighten like I’m bracing for impact in a hallway that’s just… a hallway. It makes me want to be angry at myself, like I’m failing some invisible test of recovery and maturity and being a normal teenager who can walk from third period to fourth period without performing survival.
But then, under the anger, something else: a small, stubborn tenderness that feels embarrassing. Because this reflex is old. Older than LTVHS. Older than the rumor, older than the foster paperwork, older than my meal plan app buzzing like a tiny judge.
It’s my body remembering.
So I don’t shove it down. I don’t call it pathetic. I don’t let it run the whole show, either. I just… name it, silently, the way my therapist taught me to name a trigger without swallowing it: This is the disappearing thing.
This used to keep me safe. Classrooms, kitchens, conversations where attention could turn mean without warning. The skill isn’t the enemy.
I can keep it like a pocketknife.
And I can decide whether to open it.
I let it rise. My body already tucking itself in, shrinking my elbows, flattening my expression into something “easy” to look at. The instinct shows up so fast it feels like it isn’t even mine, like it belongs to a smaller version of me who learned the rules early: don’t take seconds, don’t ask for clarification, don’t make the room have to deal with you.
My throat does the old thing, closing around words I didn’t even get to choose.
And for a second, the shame tries to snap on like a seatbelt. Really? Still? Like recovery means never flinching, never wanting to vanish, never having your pulse spike when someone’s eyes land on your hands.
I don’t scold it. I don’t bargain with it, either.
In my head, quiet and plain, no drama, no apology, I label it the way you label a file: This kept me alive. In classrooms where attention meant getting called out. In kitchens where food became a scoreboard. In conversations where one wrong tone could flip someone’s face from nice to sharp.
It wasn’t weakness. It was strategy.
I can thank it without obeying it.
I picture it as something I still own. Not a curse, not a personality flaw, not proof I’m “bad at recovery.” A tool. Small enough to fit in my pocket, sharp enough to matter. The kind you keep because you’ve needed it before: because there were times being unseen was the safest thing I could be. I know the weight of it, the way my fingers want to find it without thinking.
But a pocketknife isn’t supposed to be your whole hand.
I can carry it and still choose what I’m cutting through. I can leave it folded when the hallway gets loud, when someone’s voice tilts toward teasing, when the old part of me reaches for vanish like it’s oxygen. And when I do need it (when the air gets too thin) I can use it cleanly, then put it away again.
When the laughter tilts (just a degree sharper, like it’s looking for a rib to slip between) and someone’s eyes stick to me like they’re counting, I feel the pocketknife in my pocket. The old me wants to fold in half. Instead I pause. I check my feet. I decide: bathroom sink and cold water, or stay. Let it wash over me. Don’t flinch.
The decision doesn’t feel like fireworks. It feels like weight settling where it’s supposed to, like my shoulders remembering they’re allowed to be wider than my fear. Invisible isn’t my default anymore. It’s a setting I can toggle. A pocketknife, folded. I can pass through a crowd without apology: or I can let myself be seen on purpose, and not act like it’s a mistake.
Hunger used to feel like evidence. Like if I let it show, someone would pin it to a corkboard and draw lines between it and whatever story they already wanted to tell about me. So I learned to treat it like contraband. Keep it hidden, deny it, act like I didn’t notice it buzzing under my skin.
Between third and fourth, it shows up anyway. Not dramatic. Just a plain, physical pull, like my body tapping my shoulder with a clipboard: Hey. Schedule.
I stop in the Club Hallway where the lighting is too honest and everyone’s laughter bounces off the lockers like it’s trying to recruit you. My hand goes to my phone. For half a second the old reflex makes the screen feel incriminating, like I’m about to commit a crime by opening it.
Then I open my meal-planning app. The interface is clean and boring and kind of merciful. Breakfast logged. Snack reminder. Lunch slot waiting. It looks like any other calendar, any other person’s life. My thumbs are steadier than I expect. I tap in what I planned, not what I “deserve.” I set the timer for after fourth because I know my brain will try to bargain later and call it “forgetting.”
I feel eyes on me. Not a stare-stare, but the way attention in this school brushes past and sometimes decides to snag.
Kenta’s voice lifts nearby. Something about “discipline” and “summer bodies,” said like it’s a joke but aimed like a dart. My stomach drops in the old way, the way it always does when somebody makes food into a performance.
I inhale. Long, through my nose. I name it without drama: trigger. Not a prophecy. Not an instruction. Just a label.
My shoulders want to fold. I don’t let them.
I lock my phone, not like I’m hiding it, just like I’m done. I keep walking. The hunger stays with me. Not contraband. Just information my body is allowed to give me in a hallway full of people who act like needing things is embarrassing.
On the light rail, the seats are warm from other people’s bodies, and the windows hold my reflection like it’s deciding what to report. I keep my backpack on my lap, a barrier and an anchor. Outside, LTV slides by in tidy blocks, Kiku Market’s red awning, the temple banners, like the neighborhood is pretending it doesn’t notice me noticing it.
I open my notes app anyway.
Not a vague “can we get food,” not a sad little hint. Specifics, like
I’m ordering supplies for a life I’m actually planning to keep.
Milk: Lactaid 2% (small).
Yogurt: Oikos vanilla, 4-pack.
Frozen: Ajinomoto gyoza, the small bag. Not the giant
one.
Applesauce pouches (cinnamon).
I add portions in parentheses because my brain likes loopholes, and I’m
done feeding it escape routes.
I paste it into a text to Yuki and hover over send until my thumb aches. Then: sent.
Three dots. Then: Ooooh, look at you, chef. Want me to get a tiny apron too?
Old me would laugh, would let it dissolve.
I type: Yes.
And then, without apologizing, I add: Also: onigiri. Tuna mayo if they have it.
Next meeting, Student Activities smells like dry-erase and somebody’s microwaved cup ramen. I get there on time anyway, which feels like walking into a spotlight on purpose. The chairs are already in their loose circle, everyone’s backpacks making little territory borders, and there’s the usual safe option. Standing near the door like I’m just “passing by.”
I don’t.
I pick a chair and sit all the way back. Feet flat. Backpack under my knees, not as a shield, just… there.
They’re arguing about fundraiser shifts and who can bring a tablecloth that doesn’t look like it survived a war. I say, “I can cover first shift if. Heat climbs my throat.
I lift my hand, small, like I’m in class. “If nobody else can, I can do first shift,” I finish, quiet but complete, and I don’t smile to soften it.
Taro’s eyes flick to me like he caught a new habit forming. “Look at you,” he says, grinning. “Showing up early. Who are you and what’d you do with Haru?”
It’s an exit ramp, offered like a joke. I don’t take it. “Can you help me draft an email to Sato-sensei about the make-up lab? And maybe skim my outline: five minutes.”
His smile thins, respectful. “Yeah.”
“No surprises,” I add. “Don’t tell anyone unless I say.”
That night, when my room is dark enough to blur the edges of everything, I send Reina-ko a playlist link. No caption essay. Just a title: 10/14 . Koko. Here. My thumb hovers like I’m about to admit to a crime. Minutes later, they reply with one song, soft, steady, like a hand offered without grabbing. I let it sit there. Legible. Not managed.
I catch myself doing it in the stupidest places. Waiting for the vending machine to spit out my drink, staring at the cafeteria menu like it’s going to offer me a new personality instead of spaghetti. My brain keeps holding out this shiny, fake coin: What if this is the week everything clicks? One good week. One perfect lunch. One adult who says the exact right sentence in the exact right tone, and then my body stops being a problem I have to negotiate with.
It feels like hope until I look closer and see the little print underneath.
If the world changes, I won’t have to.
If Kenta shuts up, if the hallway stops keeping score, if my therapist says some magic phrase, if my foster file becomes irrelevant, if nobody ever notices the shape of my eating again. Then I can be “fine” without doing the work of being fine. Then I can stop choosing. Stop logging. Stop setting timers. Stop sitting down like I deserve the chair.
It’s not even laziness. It’s… exhaustion dressed up as a miracle.
I think about how often I’ve waited for someone to rescue me in a way that doesn’t feel like rescue. Like they could slide me a new set of rules where hunger never means anything and my face never gives me away. Like the problem is the lighting, not the room.
But every time I daydream that flip, I disappear inside it. Because the version of me who gets saved is the version who doesn’t have to be seen wanting things.
In fourth period, my stomach does that plain tug again, and my brain tries to bargain, you had a decent breakfast, you can delay, you can prove something, and I hear the hidden clause like a whisper behind my own teeth.
So I answer it, quietly, without making it inspirational. No. The world doesn’t have to become gentle for me to eat. I don’t get to postpone my life until everyone else learns manners.
The next day doesn’t do that thing stories pretend happens after you make one brave choice, where the world rewards you with softer lighting. The hallways are the same fluorescent honest. The same eyes, not even mean all the time: just trained. They track who arrives with who, who breaks off, who gets waved over like they’ve been granted entry. Even the drinking fountain has a line that feels like a test. Take too long and you can feel the invisible pen click: weak. weird. attention-seeking. something.
I notice it the way I notice weather. Not as proof that I’m doomed, not as a sign I’m failing at being “better.” Just data.
This place measures people. It measures shoes and silence and lunch trays and the exact angle your shoulders fold inward. It measures which jokes you laugh at, and which ones you pretend you didn’t hear. It will keep measuring, because measuring is how it stays calm.
I let that fact land without trying to argue with it.
Then I turn my face toward my locker, spin the dial, and breathe like I’m allowed to take up time.
I stop trying to beat the watching by becoming stricter than everyone’s eyes. That kind of control always turns feral on me. Instead I do the unglamorous version: I pack food I can actually finish without it turning into a performance. Not “healthy,” not “impressive,” just possible. I set two reminders on my phone with names that don’t sound like threats and when they buzz I don’t flinch like I’m in trouble, I just notice: oh, it’s time. I take the longer hallway past the library mezzanine because it’s quieter and the air feels less chewed up by people. I’m not fearless. I still feel every glance like a fingertip on the back of my neck. But I get more predictable with myself, and that starts to feel like trust.
I start rewriting what support even means while it’s happening. Not a spotlight, not a “concerned” meeting where my name turns into a file and everyone speaks in careful voices. Not a favor that keeps accruing interest until I owe someone my privacy. Support is something I can say yes to in pieces, an email draft, a quiet check-in, a snack offered like it’s normal, with terms that stay mine.
With that in mind, the future stops being this glossy poster I’m not allowed to touch and turns into something I can stack, piece by piece. Graduation isn’t salvation; it’s an exit door I can keep walking toward. My routines can travel. I can choose people who don’t make me audition. And my identity can stay close to my chest, not up for a vote.
I try the old method like it’s a superstition I can’t stop touching. Keep my shoulders rounded. Keep my face neutral. Don’t meet anyone’s eyes long enough for them to think I’m a person with opinions. Walk the edges of the hallway like I’m just passing through someone else’s life.
It works, in the way a door with a broken lock “works” if you don’t jiggle it.
In first period, I slide into my seat before the bell and stare at the corner of my notebook. The teacher does attendance, my name gets said, and I don’t look up. No one turns around to check if I’m doing okay. No one asks me anything that could turn into a conversation. The quiet is immediate, like warm water.
At break, I take the long route behind the science building where the sun hits the cement and the air smells like sanitizer and grass. I keep my earbuds in without playing anything. People see headphones and stop trying. That’s the whole point.
By lunch, I’ve made myself almost invisible on purpose. I move like I’m apologizing for having elbows. I don’t sit at the tables where Kenta’s laugh turns into currency. I don’t sit near Reina-ko, either, because closeness is something people notice and notice becomes a story. I pick the bench by the vending machines, half-hidden by the recycling bins, and I eat like I’m trying not to be caught eating.
It’s calmer. That’s the problem.
Calm is not the same as safe. Calm is just… absence. A cleared stage.
Because the moment I’m not taking up space, space opens up around me for other people to fill. Two girls from Student Council walk past and glance down like they’re checking the label on something. One of them says, not even mean, just automatic, “Doesn’t Haru never eat?”
Never. Like I’m a habit, not a person. Like I’m a rumor with a backpack.
I keep my eyes on my hands. I don’t react. I let them walk away thinking they were right about me.
And that’s when it clicks: the quiet I buy with disappearing isn’t peace. It’s permission. It’s me handing the pen to whoever wants to write what I am.
A teacher’s voice catches me on the way out of the cafeteria, soft like a blanket someone is trying to tuck over my head without asking. “Haru, sweetheart. Did you get enough? You look… tired.” Their eyes drop, fast, to the corner of my tray like it’s a receipt.
It shouldn’t matter. It’s not even cruel. That’s what makes it worse.
My body does the old math anyway: prove it, prove it, prove it. I can feel the reflex reach for the sharp tools. Skip the rest of lunch, walk it off, make tonight smaller, make tomorrow perfect. Control sliding into my palm like a hidden blade.
I stop walking.
Not dramatically. Just enough that my shoes squeak and I have to be in my own skin for a second.
This isn’t safety. This is the thing I do when I’m scared of being seen: I make myself so airtight no one can get in, not even me. I call it discipline so I don’t have to call it loneliness.
I swallow, put my hand flat against my stomach through my hoodie, and breathe like I’m choosing something, not being punished. “I’m okay,” I say, and it’s the least interesting answer on purpose. Then I keep going, tray still warm in my hands.
In the bathroom stall after fifth period, I open my phone like it’s a confession booth and build a playlist with my thumbs shaking just enough to be annoying. Titles only. No voice notes, no paragraphs, no “hey can we talk.” Just songs that say things I can’t get past my teeth: the ones about being sorry without groveling, the ones about hunger that isn’t cute, the ones that sound like clenched fists in a pocket. I name it something stupid so it won’t look dramatic if someone glances and then I stare at Reina-ko’s contact until my brain starts bargaining.
I hit send anyway.
This is easier than talking, I type, and I don’t add anything else.
Reina-ko doesn’t text back a whole paragraph, doesn’t ask if I’m “okay” like it’s a trapdoor. Just: got it. Then, later, when the bell spits us into the hallway, they drift close like it’s an accident and press a sealed onigiri into my sleeve. Warm from their bag. A scrap of paper follows: Library mezzanine. End carrel. No sightlines. It’s care that doesn’t grab my wrists. It lands and lets me decide.
When the logistics start eating my week. He translates the rules, drafts a clean reply, tells me what I’m allowed to say no to. I hit send. My name stays on it.
The next morning my body wakes up before my brain does, like it’s already late for something. The house is still dim, the kind of gray that makes everything feel underwater. Yuki’s slippers scuff once down the hall, then stop. No cheerful commentary. No “ohayō, superstar.” Just the quiet hum of the fridge and my own pulse being annoying.
I do the routine because the routine is a rope I can hold onto. Container out. Rice measured. Protein, vegetable, fruit. Checkboxes that aren’t moral, just practical. I open the app and tap through the plan my therapist and I built, the one that’s supposed to keep my brain from turning food into a debate team.
Timer set. Water bottle filled. It’s all so ordinary it almost makes me mad.
Half-latching the container, I freeze.
There it is: the old voice, soft as a suggestion so I can pretend it isn’t a threat. You could just skip. It would be easier. Less to carry. Less to explain. Less to watch you.
Like my lunch is a neon sign. Like eating is an announcement. Like I owe the hallway a performance, either “fine” or “problem.”
My thumb stays on the lid. I can feel how close I am to making the choice that looks like calm from the outside and feels like punishment on the inside. I picture fluorescent lights, eyes dropping to my hands, someone’s automatic comment wrapped in fake concern.
I inhale until my ribs complain. Grounding, like a stupid little life hack that somehow works: feet on the kitchen tile. Cool. Solid. Real. I look at the container, not like it’s evidence, just… food.
“I’m allowed,” I whisper, and it comes out hoarse.
I click the lid shut. The sound is small but final. I set it by the door where I can’t “forget” it without meaning to.
At the table, I open my journal and write one line, no explanation, no pep talk.
Not a project. Just a person who eats.
From the light rail stop to campus, I usually practice disappearing. Chin tucked, shoulders tight, eyes on the safe strip of sidewalk like it’s a line I’m allowed to walk. Today I keep my gaze up. Not defiant. Just… level. Like my face belongs out here.
The air smells like exhaust and Kiku Market’s fried something drifting from across the street, and the morning crowd is a moving puzzle of backpacks and earbuds. I track it automatically anyway: who walks in pairs, who peels off toward the gym, who’s already performing. My lunch container bumps my hip with each step, a small, steady weight. Proof of nothing. Just weight.
The Club Hallway hits me like fluorescent weather. Posters layered on posters, volunteer hours, auditions, “WE’RE A FAMILY”, and the laughter is too bright, like someone turned the treble up. The rumor-space lives here, between locker doors and group chats, and I can feel it before I hear it: the static shift when my name is almost said.
A knot of scholarship kids goes quiet for half a second. Someone’s eyes flick to my hands. Someone else looks through me on purpose. My body wants to fold in. I don’t.
I walk like I’m allowed to take the same air as everyone else.
At lunch my brain does the old math automatically: smallest corner, back to the wall, become part of the cafeteria noise. It offers it like kindness. Like vanishing is self-care.
I thread between tables anyway, shoulders tight, counting stupid anchors so I don’t float off: the cold slick of my water bottle sweating onto my palm, the repeating squares in the tile, the steady thud of my container against my thigh. I pick a spot that’s technically in the open but still mine. Edge of a table near the vending machines, where people can see me without having to look at me.
“Hey, you… eating today?” someone asks, voice all sugar and surveillance.
“I’m good,” I say, plain. “Please don’t comment on my food.”
Then I peel back the lid and take the first bite like it’s just lunch.
Later, when the procedural stuff tries to turn my afternoon into a paper shredder, I let help stay help. I text Taro, deadline? which box?. And stop there. No trauma footnotes. No sorry-for-existing. In the counseling office I keep my voice even, hands flat on my knees, and say what I can do and what I can’t. I don’t decorate it. When I leave, my chest feels weirdly light.
The hallway’s still the same: fluorescent buzz, laminated smiles, poster corners peeling like everyone’s pretending not to. I stop anyway. My shoulders haven’t gotten the memo, they’re still a little tucked, but my feet don’t move back. Earbuds in, bass steady, lunch warm through the container. I lift my eyes. Not daring anyone. Not asking permission. Just… here. Visible on purpose.