Before she knew it, midnight had come. Startled, Yuki lifted her head, blinking, checked the time on her desk clock through the pounding of a terrible headache, and dropped her eyes to her hands.
Pen still gripped in her fingers, the notebook held a string of characters she didn’t recognize. Comparing it to the reference book, it turned out to be a coherent sentence — she’d apparently been studying half-unconscious.
Then, glancing at her bare arm peeking from her short-sleeved pajama top, she noticed a severe rash on her left arm, and the moment she registered it, the headache worsened. Setting down her pen, she scratched at the arm roughly, then glanced at the clock with eyes only half-open, deciding to call it a night for now, and stood from her desk.
—Born into a good household, blessed. Really, I’m jealous.
—Let your guard down and you’ll fall behind in no time.
But recalling those words, she sat back down at her desk as if possessed and picked the pen back up.
Two more hours of cramming knowledge into her head without a break, and Yuki, reaching her limit, stood from the chair like an empty husk and collapsed onto the bed as if pulled by some force.
She didn’t have the strength left even to turn off the light; dragging her body along, she pressed her face into the pillow.
She couldn’t even manage to get under the blanket.
Her body was utterly exhausted, her mind worn thin. The headache, the nausea, and the itching on her arm were all getting worse.
She wanted to pass out and sleep right now, but her body burned with an unbearable heat regardless. Perhaps from repeatedly relying on masturbation to relieve pent-up stress, the core of her body throbbed by conditioned reflex. Face still buried in the pillow, Yuki pulled down her pajama pants along with her underwear and reached a hand down.
“Haa… haa………………… aa…………”
With her mouth buried in the pillow, she gazed at the headboard with eyes as vacant as a ghost’s as she pleasured herself.
Little by little, the pleasure crept in like an infection, eating away at the stress, the headache slowly replaced by the sensation. But as the pleasure built, noise crackled through her brain, dredging up things she didn’t want. Hashimoto’s jealousy. Her uncle’s encouragement. Her classmates’ expectations and her own sense of alienation. Sakura’s declaration. Her longing for Aya. Hugging the pillow with her free hand to forget it all, she moved her hand more urgently. “Mizuki-san,” she murmured, and heat rushed to her face with an intensity that almost felt cold, blowing the stress away. Using her precious friend to forget everything else, murmuring “Mizuki-san… Mizuki-sa—” for a few minutes, right as she felt herself nearing release —
*
“—Hey! Still studyi—ng…?”
*
The blood drained from her face. The pleasure turned to agony, and Yuki whipped around, pale, to look at the doorway.
There stood her sister, equally pale, hand over her mouth.
Unlike her brother, who’d moved out right after starting university, her sister had continued living at home for a while even after enrolling. Yuki considered them fairly close, and her sister had checked in on her more than once, worried about how buried she was in studying. But this was the first time she’d walked in at night without knocking, and Yuki’s mind went completely blank.
No longer even sure if her face was hot or cold, Yuki barely managed to pull her pants back up, and, feeling discomfort between her legs, grabbed a tissue to wipe her fingers.
Her sister, coming back to herself, said “I’m really, really sorry” in a trembling voice and tried to leave the room, but Yuki said “it’s fine” — her own voice startlingly, cheerfully bright.
She hadn’t noticed a mask-like smile had plastered itself onto her face. Her brain burned, but her skin felt cold, her expression frozen like rigor mortis.
To her sister, who’d stopped, looking apologetic, Yuki added:
“It’s fine. I should be the one apologizing. Sorry you had to see something weird.”
The smile stayed plastered there the whole time.
A few days later, midterms arrived, and once the four days of testing wrapped up, peace returned to the students.
The following week, answer sheets came back for every subject, and Yuki maintained her usual results — perfect scores on most of them. But — most. Only in modern Japanese literature had she made a small mistake, dropping two points.
As papers were returned and classmates chattered noisily, friends peeking at her answer sheet and offering words of praise or comfort, Yuki let them wash over her with hollow, empty replies, feeling a throbbing ache behind her eyes, hit by a wave of dizziness and fatigue that felt like it could knock her out at any moment.
She barely remembered what happened after that.
Classmates seemed to be saying something, but Yuki, fearing it might be words of disappointment, fled home as if escaping. There seemed to be some talk of a celebration for finishing midterms, but she decided not to think too hard about it.
Getting home, she reported her results to her parents over dinner, and they praised her the moment she finished speaking.
And since anyone can make a small mistake, maybe she should double-check her work more carefully going forward — with advice no deeper than that, the conversation ended.
Back in her room, Yuki set the modern Japanese literature answer sheet on her desk and stared down at it for a while.
Staring fixedly at the number 98 through eyes blurred with eye strain, she kept scratching the inside of her left arm, over and over. Each scratch eased the headache a little. Her heartbeat echoed inside her skull now and then like an arrhythmia, her body temperature swinging wildly for no reason at all, sweat beading faintly under her clothes one moment, her throat parched the next, over and over.
Hearing faint laughter drift from the living room, Yuki glanced toward where the stairs outside her room would be. Then, turning her eyes back to the answer sheet, she scratched her left arm several more times, pulled out her study materials, and sat back down.
It was four in the morning. Her sister, waking unusually early, opened the curtains, captivated for a moment by the sky not quite bright yet, then yawned, stepped into the hallway, went downstairs, and headed to the bathroom.
Finishing up and heading back to her room, she noticed light leaking from under Yuki’s door. The incident from the other night flashed through her mind. Guilt gripped her chest at the memory of the terrible thing she’d done, barging in without knocking and catching her little sister in such a state — but as someone who’d also taken the med school entrance exams herself, she felt a flicker of genuine worry too, and decided, as her sister, to check in, just in case.
This time, of course, she knocked first.
Careful not to wake their parents sleeping downstairs, her sister knocked softly on the door.
“Yes.”
An answer came back, flat but clear. Her sister blinked a few times, glanced at the time on the phone she’d carried with her to the bathroom, said “coming in,” to be sure, and stepped inside.
There, Yuki sat at her desk facing her notebook, dark circles under badly strained eyes.
Struck speechless by the unbelievable sight, her sister stood frozen for a while, and Yuki, as if eager to get back to studying, turned her eyes back to her reference book. Lost for words, her sister wet her dry mouth with saliva and managed, “Still at it? It’s already four in the morning,” stepping inside.
“Yeah.”
That was all Yuki murmured before setting her pen back to the notebook and beginning to mutter to herself again. Her sister, her head aching at the sight in front of her, spotted the severe rash on Yuki’s left arm resting on the desk and widened her eyes; about to say something about it, she then noticed the 98-point answer sheet sitting on the desk.
Taking it all in, her sister mobilized every rust-covered brain cell still waking up, pieced together roughly what was going on, and let out a sigh of disappointment. Disappointment in herself. She was too stunned to speak.
But knowing she had to do something about this, her sister took a breath.
“—Nice, you’re really putting in the work. Impressive focus!”
Putting on a bright voice like that, Yuki looked at her with a somewhat calmer expression.
“Yeah, I’ll keep at it.”
“Good, that matters. But you might be pushing yourself a bit too hard, huh. If you want to study efficiently, you should get proper sleep. Come on, wrap it up for tonight and get some real sleep, okay?”
Gesturing toward the bed, her sister said this, and Yuki’s face immediately twisted with displeasure as she checked the clock.
“But it’s almost time for school, and if I sleep now I might not wake up. So I’ll just keep going like this.”
Saying this, she moved to set her pen back to the notebook, but her sister covered Yuki’s hand with her own, stopping her firmly, and looked at her with calm, serious eyes.
“I’ll call the school and say you’re absent. Skip school today and sleep.”
“But…”
“It’s okay. Yuki, it’s okay.”
Saying this, disgusted with her own helplessness, her sister gently pulled Yuki into a hug.
Yuki blinked her sleepy eyes a few times, and for a moment her face crumpled as if she might cry. But she barely held it together, said “okay, got it” obediently, closed her notebook, and stood up slowly to head for the bed.
Her sister let out a relieved breath, pulled back the blanket ahead of time, and once she confirmed Yuki had lain down, pulled it up to her shoulders. To Yuki, looking up at her with eyes as pure as they’d been in childhood, her sister smiled “goodnight,” then dimmed the lights, closed the curtains properly, and finally took the light’s remote and Yuki’s writing supplies away with her. That should stop her from resuming her studies.
Then, muffling her footsteps, her sister left the room, closed the door, put a hand on her hip, and sighed.
A rash. — An excessive, almost obsessive-compulsive attachment to studying.
Probably the result of accumulated excessive stress. What came to mind was the incident she’d witnessed the other night, but thinking back, something had already seemed off even before that. And backing that up: that score in modern Japanese lit. Was it stress from overloaded studying, or some other worry entirely? As a sister, she badly wanted to fix this, but didn’t know what territory she was allowed to step into.
Holding her head, sighing, her sister decided to set aside the question of root-cause treatment for now, and prioritize symptomatic relief instead.