She sat with her back against the chair, hands still, staring at the screen.
The cursor blinked at the end of the text with no particular purpose, and she let it blink. She was somewhere else entirely, thinking, or trying to, about Shinomiya. What Shindo had told her last night had settled into her like a burr and wouldn’t come loose. She drank cold water and her thoughts cleared briefly, which was different from being free of the problem. If anything, it came back sharper, a fog that no amount of clearing seemed to dispel.
The roots of Shinomiya’s warped need to be seen lay in where she’d come from. What she’d grown up inside.
The life Hatano found so objectionable, its causes were environmental.
So.
So what.
“— Not my business.”
She cut herself off cleanly, filing the thought away. Whatever breath came out of her after that, sigh, or something else, she couldn’t have said. She threw herself back against the chair again.
Why was she spending this much thought on someone else’s life? What was she even asking herself to do? She had no rational answer, couldn’t get a clear reading on her own feelings, and staring at an equation she wasn’t trying to solve wouldn’t produce one. Eventually she abandoned the exercise.
She picked up her phone instead, and looked at it for a moment.
Then, after a short pause, her finger found Shinomiya’s contact. She looked at the screen, the small telephone icon beside the name, looked again, and gritted her teeth and called.
The ringtone sounded in the quiet of the apartment. A few rings. The line connected.
“Hello? Senpai”?
Shinomiya’s voice, wary and faintly puzzled.
Hatano had called on impulse, with no particular plan — and she realised this now, with the phone to her ear, and for a moment could not find anything to say.
“Ah, yes. It’s Hatano.”
“It’s not a rotary phone — I can see who’s calling. Are you slow? The question I was asking was: what possible reason do you have for calling me out of nowhere on a holiday, and you should answer it immediately”.
“I’d prefer you didn’t try to compress an entire paragraph into a single sentence.”
“Please use warm and kind words to decompress it”.
Whatever she said next, Hatano already wanted to say it back harder. But then Shinomiya continued:
“So what do you actually want”?
And Hatano’s mouth closed. Because asked again directly, she had to admit she had no specific reason. The fog in her chest — whatever was clearing it was going to be somewhere on the other side of a real conversation with this girl, that was all she’d known. But she could hardly say I wanted to talk to you. She made some preparatory noise — “ah, well, that’s” — and searched for words, and came up empty.
“Wait, did you just call with nothing to say”?
“N — no. I have something.”
“Then say it. I don’t want to allocate my finite life resources to you”.
Caustic, yes, but not entirely unfair given the current silence. Hatano turned it over for another moment, and then decided that if she’d called on impulse, she might as well go the rest of the way on impulse. She said the true thing.
“…I wanted to talk to you.”
“Ew, gross”.
Hatano hung up reflexively. She stared at the call-ended screen, anger and involuntary laughter arriving at the same moment, and threw the phone onto the bed. “That little—!” she said, out loud, to no one. “Why do I have to agonise over you, you absolute—” she followed it with a few more words and pressed her fingers against her forehead and breathed.
Fine. She didn’t care. The girl could live however she liked.
She sat back down in her chair. And then the phone, somewhere near the pillow, announced an incoming call. She turned, glaring, and saw Shinomiya on the screen from across the room. She thought about it briefly, then stood up — she had called first; she couldn’t ignore it.
She picked it up. “Hatano speaking.”
“I’m the one who called, so of course I know that. Never mind that — what kind of person calls someone and then just hangs up the moment they answer?”\
Her thumb almost pressed End again. She held the impulse back with her entire remaining supply of self-control.
“…I’m sorry.”
Someone had to be the grown-up. Hatano offered the apology with some restraint. The unexpectedness of it seemed to knock Shinomiya slightly off balance; she made a disgruntled sound, then sighed. “Fine,” she said, magnanimous about it.
“So what were you going to say? I’m free right now, so I’ll give you a little time. But if you don’t make me laugh at least once a minute, I’m hanging up.”
“Is this a comedy audition.”
“Pfft — …all right, two minutes.”\
She’d broken through involuntarily, and Shinomiya granted two minutes in a voice still softened by the laugh. It was a surprisingly low bar from someone who’d set it. Hatano pressed on before the moment closed.
“…I’ve had a few chances to talk with you recently, and I feel like I’m starting to understand you better. But the more I understand, the more the way you live — the way you seek out attention from anyone, bothers me, and I can’t make it stop. I know it’s presumptuous. But I wanted to settle it, and that’s why I called.”
She assembled the words in her head as she went, the way she might work through a passage that needed to be right. Shinomiya heard her out, and said “…I see” — no quick deflection, no easy mockery. There was something in it that suggested she was actually sitting with it.
“I don’t live well enough to go around weighing in on other people’s choices, and the need to be recognised — I understand that, I really do. But—”
“…Acting like my girlfriend because we slept together once?”\
The complaint came out slightly sulky, with a faint edge of displeasure — but no real refusal in it. The tone of someone who felt they ought to object, rather than someone who meant it. Hatano knew this about her by now: when it came to conversations that mattered, Shinomiya’s mouth might deflect, but the rest of her was present and paying attention. That was precisely why she was so hungry to be taken seriously.
Hatano spoke toward the face she was imagining on the other end.
“I’ve never thought of myself as your girlfriend. But I might be doing something like acting as a friend. And calling you out of nowhere, talking down to you from a height — I know. I’m sorry.”
Shinomiya went quiet. Not the quiet of someone reaching for a comeback — a genuine pause. For a few seconds there was only the barely-audible rhythm of her breathing. Then something seemed to release, and she exhaled. The sound of fingers running through hair. A voice that had settled into something more open.
“— The towel.”\
The towel. Non-sequitur enough that Hatano’s brow furrowed — but the sentence that followed resolved it immediately.
“I still haven’t paid you back for it. If you’ll count that as settled, I’ll meet you.”\
Hatano nearly choked. She had almost forgotten the towel entirely, and was privately impressed that Shinomiya had not. She had, in fact, simply laundered and reused it without much feeling on the matter, so she had no particular intention of billing anyone for it. But she understood the mechanism. It was a pretext, and both of them knew it.
She nodded.
“…Understood. In front of the station by the university.”
She came through the ticket gates and out into the late afternoon. The autumn light was still warm enough to soften the chill in the air, and her exhaled breath showed white as she looked around.
It was a weekend, and the crowds near the station were considerable, but it took only a few seconds to find Shinomiya. She was leaning against the station building wall, scrolling her phone with an expression of mild vacancy, and the fact that a face like hers would draw the eye from any direction meant she was found almost before Hatano had finished looking.
“Shinomiya.”
She looked up at Hatano’s approach. Those deep black eyes. She wasn’t in a particular mood — just slightly, atmospherically subdued. Without a word she tucked her phone into her bag and pushed herself off the wall. She studied Hatano’s face for a moment, then exhaled something faintly melancholy.
“What am I doing. Spending a holiday looking at Senpai’s face.”
“I could say the same thing. I’m not sure what I’m doing either.”
Hatano pressed her fingers briefly against her forehead, then shook it off.
“…Thank you for coming. I didn’t expect you to agree.”
“It’s only the towel. And, I was planning to go out anyway. This is just on the way.”
Whether or not that was true, Hatano was willing to accept it as stated. She had doubted that a conversation like this could really be finished over the phone. When Hatano let herself smile slightly, Shinomiya caught the expression and looked briefly put out.
“Well? You drag a junior out to meet you and then stand here talking in the street?”
“It’s better than sitting together somewhere more comfortable.”
“That’s fair. I’d sooner do a lap of the sewers than go on a date with Senpai.”
The sewers would get her tetanus well before anything else.
“That said, I don’t like not being indulged. Make some effort for me.”
Apparently the sewers were still preferable to a proper venue, but the implicit request was clear enough, and given that she had been the one to reach out, Hatano was prepared to make it. She thought for a moment.
“There’s a good crepe truck near here — I know the spot. There’s outdoor seating nearby. Let’s go there.”
A classmate in her seminar group, the kind of person who always knew where things were, had mentioned it once. One of the few people Hatano could honestly say she was close to, in a limited sense. She looked in the right direction and started walking.
“Crepes.”
Shinomiya said it quietly, and her eyes lit up.
She was obviously interested — and just as obviously trying not to show it, biting her lip, pulling her expression back into something composed, fidgeting slightly. Hatano had been operating on the assumption that this was a person whose diet consisted exclusively of alcohol and the company of men, and the entirely age-appropriate reaction was unexpectedly affecting. She couldn’t even think of something condescending to say.
“I’ll pay.”
“Obviously.”
Still impossible. Still.
A weekend afternoon near a popular spot in the middle of the city: the outdoor seats were close to full.
They found what they wanted from the menu, collected their crepes, and were looking around for somewhere to sit when a shaded bench tucked between the trees came free. Hatano gestured toward it; Shinomiya sat.
Her eyes hadn’t left the crepe since she’d picked it up.
Hatano settled onto the bench and noticed the look Shinomiya was giving her — patient, waiting, not yet eating. As if she were waiting for permission. Surprisingly, stubbornly conscientious. Hatano smiled wryly. “Go ahead,” she said, and they said itadakimasu together and bit in.
The texture was the first surprise — soft in a way that made her think for a moment she’d bitten into spun sugar, and she nearly lost a piece of it. Not the aggressive sweetness of cheap sugar syrup — the fruit and cream had a freshness to them, a suppleness, wrapped in dough that was genuinely good. Hatano could see why people came here. She didn’t have much of a sweet tooth as a rule, but this she could get absorbed in.
She glanced at Shinomiya. Whipped cream on the corner of her mouth, completely engrossed, eyes shining. Like a small animal with a nut. Hatano decided not to disturb her, and put off the difficult conversation for a few more minutes.
Then she noticed Shinomiya’s eyes sliding sideways to Hatano’s crepe.
Hatano had chosen the house signature — the obvious, classic option. Shinomiya had gone straight for something loaded with citrus, apparently her preference. The glance was eloquent: it did not require words to convey give me a bite.
She laughed quietly and held out her own crepe, the untouched end forward.
“Here. Just one.”
Shinomiya swallowed, looked conflicted.
“I — it’s — “ a voice carefully extracted from somewhere, eyes directed away, at the nearly-finished crepe in her own hand, “— it’s fine. I’m… fine.”
Hatano noted the last-second activation of pride, said “suit yourself,” and was bringing the crepe back to her own mouth when Shinomiya’s hand closed around her arm. She looked. Shinomiya was wearing an expression of deep wounded dignity while looking studiously elsewhere.
She’d called her here; she owed her something. She held the crepe out again, wordlessly.
Shinomiya looked at it, then at Hatano, then back. With the air of someone stepping into slightly uncertain territory, she opened her mouth — and bit in, without worrying about where Hatano’s mouth had been.
The expression that followed: eyes wide, delighted, chewing with suppressed excitement. Around food she loved, she was completely unguarded, and watching that unfamiliar face was quietly charming in a way Hatano didn’t quite have words for. Then, after a moment, a look of faint reluctance — and Shinomiya held out her own, nearly-finished crepe toward Hatano’s mouth.
“…Equal exchange.”
Grudging. Barely.
The thought crossed Hatano’s mind that the truck’s owner would surely be happier if Shinomiya ate it, given how deliciously she seemed to enjoy it, but Shinomiya’s eyes held something that looked like an expectation that Hatano would actually taste it. A desire to share something loved. Hatano took a bite of the citrus crepe. Faint, buried in the late autumn air, a fragrance of citrus and depth.
“I think I prefer this one.”
She said it plainly, and for some reason Shinomiya looked proud, and finished her own.
A few minutes later both crepes were gone. They folded the wrappers and looked at the outdoor seats, beginning to empty as the light changed. The food truck had started closing up.
Shinomiya watched the scene, and let the words drift out on the air.
“Food trucks are kind of nice, aren’t they.”
Vague enough to take Hatano a moment — but she followed it, broadly. What surprised her more was that it was Shinomiya who’d said it — that this was a register she apparently inhabited.
“I wouldn’t have guessed that about you. That you had that kind of sensitivity.”
“I have a normal life I just don’t have reasons to show it most of the time.”
Shinomiya pouted in mild protest, then grew nostalgic.
“I watched a Western movie recently on a streaming service. About a chef who gets fired from a hotel and starts a food truck with his son — their relationship was strained.”
“…Chef. Jon Favreau.”
“That’s it!”
Her expression brightened immediately. Hatano found herself more surprised that Shinomiya had seen it than pleased at getting the title right. She’d written off this person’s cultural landscape entirely.
“You know it well. Bit of an obsessive, aren’t you, Senpai.”
An objection was forming — but being called perceptive by someone who used to take her for a type wasn’t entirely unwelcome.
“I love film. Plot structure, direction — it all feeds into writing. Most of what we call classic cinema is built on something called the Hero’s Journey — the monomyth framework drawn from comparative mythology — and those underlying structures translate directly into prose. Even into successful manga, up to a point, though not always exactly—”
She was warming to it, had begun to speak faster, and Shinomiya was watching her with something like delight.
“Oh! The kind of otaku who speeds up when she hits her subject!”
Hatano stopped. The observation was accurate. She felt a small, unwanted flush of embarrassment and turned away to hide it. “You have more human moments than I expected,” Shinomiya said, her expression softening — and then she leaned just slightly closer and murmured something more careful.
“But I’m never going to make fun of you for taking it seriously.”
Not the smile she used as armour. Not the smile she used on men. Something behind it — sadness and warmth together, and the specific quality of someone who is looking at a person they know standing in front of someone they are looking for.
Shinomiya leaned back against the bench and watched a leaf come down, and spoke.
“That film — most people would call it a feel-good comedy with a happy ending. Washed-up chef falls from grace and then surpasses even his own peak again.”
“Low-stress viewing. Cheerful, forward-moving — I have a soft spot for that register.”
“Maybe we’re compatible in the things we watch. In the things we watch.”
An oblique, meaningful little smile. “Maybe,” Hatano agreed, and let it pass.
“I… like that film. A father who’d given everything to work, who loses his position and starts building something new alongside his son — actually facing him for the first time. The son watches his father’s back and finds his own path. They both take something from each other and both grow, just by one step.”
She extended two index fingers side by side and parallel, then brought them together — two roads converging. Hatano looked at the gesture and felt a small, quiet shame at some corner of herself that had been underestimating this person.
“That’s what a good relationship looks like,” Shinomiya said.
And in hearing her describe a parent’s love as the thing she valued most in that film, Hatano saw — behind her words — the watercolour she hadn’t been able to shake since last night. And heard, one more time, Doesn’t it hurt. When no one acknowledges you.
“Your family — how are things with them?”
The question arrived at the right moment, and she took it.
Shinomiya was visibly caught off guard. Something flickered — surprise, and then something more cautious. Maybe she sensed Hatano’s instincts were closer than usual; maybe she simply felt that something was known. Either way, she didn’t open everything up. She offered a vague smile and a vague answer.
“Oh, normal. Fine.”
Hatano had come here knowing she wasn’t sure what she was going to do — but she was certain she had come to get past that face. To say something to the performance, and mean it.
“Shindo told me some things.”
Shinomiya tilted her head, questioning.
“Your sister is a painter with solo exhibitions abroad. Your family is an artistic dynasty.”
Shinomiya’s eyes opened wide — the pupils caught and held Hatano like a pin going through something. Then she pressed her lips together, looked away, closed her eyes. It was the look of someone who has decided to stop resisting.
Hatano had been about to follow up with questions — the kind that would have sounded like a lecture — and looking at that face, she stopped herself. She waited instead.
“…I didn’t know Shindo-san knew all that.”
“He was in your sister’s year at school, apparently.”
“Of course. He was after Nee-chan all along.”
She said it with understanding rather than bitterness.
Then she acknowledged the rest.
“—You’re right. My sister is the watercolourist Rōkai — she held a solo exhibition in New York six months ago. My family is a distinguished artistic lineage going back generations.”
She delivered it the way you might describe weather in a distant city — remote, as though it were someone else’s world entirely.
Hatano had already been fairly certain. Hearing it confirmed made it heavier. Unsupported inferences crowded in: that the particular shape of Shinomiya’s hunger was bound up in that lineage; that the way she’d talked about the father and son in the film — the warmth of it — suggested that the real thing was something she was missing. But these were guesses without foundation, and she didn’t give voice to them.
What she could do was say something true — something that reached past the careful surface without cutting. She searched for that for a moment, and Shinomiya looked at her face and laughed softly.
“Are you trying to encourage a dropout?”
A dropout — someone fallen from a higher place. She said it about herself without flinching. Hatano’s first instinct was to push back, and then she remembered that she herself was not someone who found it easy to speak well of people she was hard on. She couldn’t object to the framing. She found her words instead.
“I’ve said this before and I’ll keep saying it — I don’t like the way you’re living, the way you sell yourself to anyone for acknowledgement. But the parts of you I saw today — the unperformed parts — I like those. If the way you’re living now and what you used to do with art are connected somehow — if there’s something I can do — that’s why I called. That’s why I came.”
She said it as plainly as she could manage, even the parts she couldn’t quite account for in herself. Shinomiya heard all of it, and her surprise didn’t hide itself.
She looked at Hatano for a while with an expression of genuine curiosity. Then settled into something warmer — and a moment later traded it for the wry, teasing look she used when she wanted to deflect.
“…Overprotective. Self-righteous. Kind of disgusting, honestly. All that talk about hating me, and then the moment things go a certain way, you flip completely. You play the lone wolf, and then you’re kind to people — that’s a little too on-purpose.”
It was delivered without mercy, and Hatano felt a section of herself sag. She had, she supposed, taken quite a few liberties, and Shinomiya’s summary of them was not inaccurate.
But then Shinomiya’s expression did something new.
It wasn’t the amused predator’s look. It wasn’t discomfort, or the performance of softness, or the unguarded delight she’d shown over the crepe. It was none of the faces Hatano had catalogued. It was a smile with nothing behind it — clear, easy, the kind you show a friend without thinking about it.
“You’re a strange person. Probably an endangered species. But—”
“—thank you. I’m all right — please don’t worry about it.”
In that moment, Hatano saw Shinomiya — the real one, the core of her.
She wasn’t disappointed to have the offer turned away. She was only, very slightly, sad. But if that was what Shinomiya wanted, she wasn’t going to push past it. “Okay,” she said, gently, and collected the wrapper from Shinomiya’s hands and stood up.
There was nothing left on that subject worth pressing. She needed to get Shinomiya back before it got dark. She tossed the wrappers in the bin and indicated the direction of the station.
“Let’s head back. I’ll walk you.”
“Thank you for the food.”
Shinomiya slung her bag over her shoulder and fell into step behind Hatano.
The distance between them, walking back, was a little smaller than it had been on the way here. Neither of them noticed it particularly. They were almost at the station when Shinomiya stopped.
Hatano turned. Shinomiya was standing still, looking at a bookshop beside the road — or rather, at its window. Behind the glass: shelves, books, the ordinary furniture of the place. But after a moment Hatano saw that Shinomiya’s eyes weren’t on any of that. They were fixed on something posted on the glass.
Several posters. And the one Shinomiya was looking at—
“— The aquarium?”
One of the largest in the country, not far from the station. The kind of place most people in the city knew by name. In a part of Tokyo with little water to speak of, it was an institution.
Shinomiya looked at the poster with a vague, dreaming quality in her voice.
“I’d forgotten it was near here.”
“The aquarium. Do you like it?”
She shook her head, a little offhand.
“Not especially. It’s just — the penguin show.”
“The penguin show?”
The poster listed the show’s times. The next one: eight o’clock. It was just past five. Plenty of time.
“I went to a drinks thing for the drama club a while ago, and we came here. The penguin show was about to start — and everyone was too busy thinking about who they were going to sleep with, and we were out in ten minutes. It wasn’t my money so I didn’t really mind, but…”
She was looking at the poster with something quiet in her face. Younger than she usually appeared. Just a girl.
“…I’d been looking forward to it a little.”
She said it softly, to the air, and Hatano felt something fold open in her chest. Shinomiya knew perfectly well what she was doing — Hatano was not a person she had reason to expect anything from in this direction, but she also knew what kind of person Hatano was by now. And saying this in front of her was, whether she meant it to be or not, a form of invitation.
“Want to go?”
The words were out before Hatano had quite decided to say them. A proposal she couldn’t have imagined making a few weeks ago. Shinomiya looked at her, taking a moment to process the meaning — three words, a simple question — and then she understood that she’d said something that sounded very much like someone who wanted to be invited somewhere, and her face went red and she rushed to undo it.
“N — no! Please! Are you asking me on a date?! This is why women who can’t get anyone are such a problem — you’re nice to them for five minutes and they take it the wrong way! I can practically see your ulterior motives! Your ulterior motives are doing most of the talking at this point! They’re so loud I can hear them from the inside!”
“Your vocabulary for insults really is exceptional.”
There was probably embarrassment in there too, but the sheer inventiveness of it was impressive in its own way. Still, if she genuinely didn’t want to go, Hatano wasn’t going to drag her. She’d make it there on her own one day if she actually cared.
“Fine, I was joking. Let’s just go home.”
Hatano started walking toward the station.
And then: a small hand took hold of her sleeve. No force in it — barely a pinch. But it was enough.
She turned around. Shinomiya stood with her face and ears so red she looked like she might be generating actual heat, eyes on the ground.
“…Please stop getting my hopes up and then walking away.”
