Chapter 2: Void
The shock of seeing him hardened into a cold, heavy knot in her stomach. It sat there through math, through English, a lump of frozen confusion. Every time a classroom door opened, her eyes darted up. He wasn’t in any of her morning classes. Maybe it was a mistake. A weird coincidence. A ghost.
But then came the lunch bell.
The hallway erupted into chaos, a river of black uniforms surging toward the cafeteria and club rooms. Emily hovered by her locker, pretending to fumble with the combination. She saw him. He was leaning against a bank of lockers down the hall, surrounded. Not by his old friends—they were long gone, scattered to other schools or cram schools—but by a new cohort. Girls, mostly. A couple of guys who looked like they played sports.
“So you moved back from Kyoto? Isn’t it, like, totally boring there?” one girl, Aya from the tennis club, asked, her voice pitched high.
Jay shrugged, a slow, easy movement. “It was quiet.”
“Your homeroom is with Mr. Sato? He’s such a drag.” Another girl, Rina, giggled.
“Seems fine.” Jay’s voice was low, neutral. It wasn’t the voice she remembered. That voice had been quick, often laughing. This was a closed door.
Emily watched his face. He offered a slight, non-committal smile. It was a polite mask. His eyes, though. They scanned the hallway over the girls’ heads, restless. They passed right over her without a flicker. No recognition. No surprise. Nothing.
It was the nothing that carved her out inside.
Hiromi, a girl from her art elective, materialized beside her, tugging on her sleeve. “Are you seeing this? Transfer student. Tanaka. He’s in my history class. He doesn’t say much, but look at him. He’s like something out of a manga.”
“I see him,” Emily murmured.
“Come on, let’s get curry bread before they’re gone.” Hiromi linked arms with her, pulling her into the current of students, directly past his group.
As they passed, the bubble of conversation paused. Emily kept her eyes locked on the scuffed linoleum ahead. She felt the weight of a glance. She couldn’t tell whose it was.
“Hey,” Hiromi whispered, squeezing her arm. “You okay? You’re white as paper.”
“Just tired. Work was late.”
They got their food and found a spot at a crowded table near the windows. Emily pushed her curry bread around her plate. The smell, usually comforting, turned her stomach.
“So,” Hiromi said between bites, “word is his parents split up. He lived with his mom in Kyoto for a while, but now he’s back here living with his dad. Weird, right? Coming back for senior year?”
The words landed like physical blows. Split up. Back with his dad. Every piece of information was a shard of the story she’d been shut out of. She took a sip of water, but it tasted metallic.
“His dad’s some salaryman, I think. Must be rough.” Hiromi prattled on, unaware of the earthquake happening beside her.
The afternoon classes were a drone. In chemistry, she sat two rows behind and to the left of him. She spent fifty minutes studying the line of his shoulder under his uniform, the way he tapped his pen once, twice, against his notebook, a habit he’d had since he was twelve. He never turned around. He passed notes to the guy next to him. He answered a question from the teacher in that same flat, new voice.
The final bell was a release. She shoved her things into her bag, a desperate urge to be out of the building, to be anywhere he wasn’t. She needed the izakaya’s smoky, uncomplicated haze. She needed to scrub something clean.
She was almost at the shoe lockers when a voice stopped her.
“Kitsuhara.”
It was him. He was standing a few feet away, already in his outdoor shoes. Students flowed around them like water around stones.
Her heart simply stopped. Then it crashed against her ribs, a wild, painful drum. She turned. Up close, he was even more unfamiliar. Taller, his features sharper, hardened. But his eyes… they were the same dark brown. They looked at her now with a chilling, polite blankness.
“Yeah?” Her own voice sounded strange.
“You dropped this.” He held out a pen. It was her cheap, disposable pen, the one she’d been using in homeroom.
She stared at it, then at his hand. He had scars across his knuckles, new ones. “Oh. Thanks.”
She took it. Their fingers didn’t touch. He’d been careful.
“No problem.” He gave her that same slight, meaningless smile. “You’re in my homeroom. Emily, right?”
He said her name. It was just a name from a roll call. It meant nothing to him.
The air left her lungs. The corridor seemed to tilt. Three years. A lifetime of friendship. Summers by the river, secrets whispered in treehouses, a promise to always have each other’s backs. All of it, reduced to a polite confirmation of a name he’d just heard on a list.
“Right,” she managed to say. “Jay.”
He nodded, as if she’d confirmed the time. “See you tomorrow.”
Then he turned and walked away, merging with the crowd heading for the gates. He didn’t look back.
She stood frozen, the cheap plastic pen in her hand feeling absurd, pathetic. The sounds of the school faded into a high-pitched whine. She saw Hiromi waving from down the hall, her mouth moving, but no sound came out.
He didn’t remember. Or he was pretending not to. Which was worse?
The grief she’d thought was buried, a quiet old scar, ripped open fresh. It wasn’t a sad memory anymore. It was a raw, present-tense agony. It was in the practiced emptiness of his eyes, in the casual way he’d thrown her name away. He had been her best friend. And now she was a classmate who’d dropped a pen.
Her hands began to shake. She clenched them into fists, the pen digging into her palm.
“Emily! Earth to Emily!” Hiromi was beside her, looking concerned. “You’re seriously spacing out. Was that him? Did he talk to you?”
“He gave me back my pen,” Emily said, her voice miraculously steady. “I’m late for work.”
She changed her shoes mechanically and walked out into the afternoon light. The walk to the station was a blur. Every step pounded the same words into the pavement. See you tomorrow. See you tomorrow.
At the izakaya, the routine was a merciful anesthesia. She tied her apron, took orders, avoided her mother’s searching looks. She scrubbed surfaces until her arms burned. But the image wouldn’t leave: his face, that polite stranger’s face, superimposed over the boy she knew.
During a lull, she pulled out her sketchbook from under the register. She didn’t draw the izakaya. Her pencil moved on its own, furious and fast. She drew sharp, angular lines—a jawline, the set of a shoulder, eyes that were flat and empty. She drew the boy from the hallway, the ghost in her homeroom. She drew him until the page was black with graphite, a portrait of erasure.
Her mother leaned over to refill a water jug. Her gaze fell on the drawing. She went very still. The color drained from her face.
“Emily,” Akari whispered, the sound swallowed by the bar’s noise. “What is this?”
Emily looked at the dark, brutal sketch. Then she looked at her mother’s terrified eyes.
“He’s back,” Emily said, the words finally spoken aloud making it all terrifyingly real. “Jay’s back. And he doesn’t know who I am.”
Akari’s hand flew to her mouth. Her eyes darted toward the door, as if expecting him to walk in. A silent tremor went through her. In that moment, Emily saw it all—the weight of the secret, the fear, the shame—crack her mother’s carefully maintained composure.
“Mom?” The anger in Emily’s voice surprised even her. “What really happened? What did you do that was so bad he has to pretend I never existed?”
Akari just shook her head, a desperate, minute movement. She turned and fled to the kitchen, leaving Emily alone with the dark drawing and the roaring, unanswerable silence.
The silence left in her mother’s wake was a physical thing, thick and humming. Emily stared at the kitchen doorway, then down at the violent lines of her own drawing. She snapped the sketchbook shut so hard the sound cracked through the room like a slap.
A salaryman at the end of the bar glanced up, his glasses fogged with steam from his oden. Emily forced a brittle smile, nodding as if everything was fine. Her hands were shaking again.
She shoved the book under the register and grabbed a tub of dirty dishes. The ceramic clattered as she carried it to the back, her movements sharp and precise. The kitchen was a sanctuary of steam and sizzling oil. Her mother stood at the sink, shoulders hunched, staring into a swirl of soapy water.
Ichigo flipped chicken skins on the grill, his back to them, a monument to tactful ignorance. The radio played tinny enka.
“You can’t just run,” Emily said, her voice low.
“I’m not running. I’m washing.” Akari didn’t turn around. Her scrubbing became more frantic, a sponge attacking a already-clean pot.
“He looked right through me, Mom. Like I was a stranger. What did you do?” The question hung in the humid air, mixing with the grease.
Akari’s hands went still in the water. “It’s complicated, Em. It’s adult… it’s family business. It has nothing to do with you.”
“It has everything to do with me!” The words burst out louder than she intended. Ichigo’s spatula hesitated for a half-second before resuming its rhythmic scrape. “He was my best friend. Then he was just gone. And now he’s a ghost who hands me pens. That’s my business.”
Her mother finally turned. Her eyes were red-rimmed, but her jaw was set. “You will not go digging. Do you understand? Let the past stay buried. For both of you. It’s better that way.”
“Better for who?” Emily shot back, holding her mother’s gaze. “Because it’s not better for me.”
She didn’t wait for an answer. She left the kitchen, the dish tub forgotten, and walked straight out the back door into the alley. The cold air hit her like a balm. She leaned against the damp brick, next to the fading sticker, and took gulping breaths.
Better that way. The phrase was a key turning in a lock, but opening nothing. It only sealed the mystery tighter. She pulled out her phone, her thumbs hovering over the screen. A stupid, childish impulse. She hadn’t had his number in years. Even if she did, what would she say? Hey, remember when we used to trade manga? Why are you pretending I’m air?
She put the phone away. The pavement was slick with neon reflections from the nearby pachinko parlor. From inside, she heard the rise and fall of her mother’s customer-laugh, performing normalcy once more. The performance made her sick.
The rest of the shift passed in a numb haze. She smiled at customers, delivered beer, wiped tables. Her mind was a locked room, and inside it, a single question echoed off the walls: What are you so afraid of?
At closing, her mother avoided her eyes. They counted the register takings in silence, the only sound the rustle of bills. On the train home, Akari stared fixedly out the window at the blurring city lights.
“I’m sorry you’re hurt,” Akari said softly, still not looking at her. “But some graves… you don’t dig them up. You just learn to walk around them.”
“I’m standing right on top of one,” Emily replied. “I can feel it moving.”
The next day at school, the air felt different. Charged. Every corner held the possibility of seeing him. He was in the courtyard before homeroom, shooting a basketball with some of the team guys. His movements were fluid, practiced. She watched from a second-floor window, her books clutched to her chest.
He laughed at something a teammate said. It wasn’t his old, full laugh. It was a short, breathy sound that ended abruptly.
In homeroom, Mr. Sato droned about university application deadlines. Emily sat perfectly still, her peripheral vision filled with the back of Jay’s head. She studied the precise line where his haircut met his neck, a place she’d once aimed a water gun at during a long-ago summer. He scratched an itch there, and she looked away, her face heating.
Between periods, she found herself walking directly behind him in the crowded hall. His backpack was frayed at one strap. An old keychain—a faded plastic charm of a cartoon frog—dangled from the zipper. Her breath caught.
It was the frog. The stupid, green frog from the capsule machine outside the station. They’d bought them together. He’d said it was for luck.
He still had it.
The realization was a sucker punch to her solar plexus. It meant something. It had to. He hadn’t erased everything. The charm was a secret he carried, a tiny scar from a past he was pretending didn’t exist.
A sudden, reckless courage flooded her. She quickened her pace, falling into step beside him. The crowd jostled them together. His shoulder brushed hers.
“Hey,” she said, her voice sounding calmer than she felt.
He looked down, those brown eyes registering her with the same polite distance. “Hi.”
“That frog.” She nodded toward his backpack, her heart hammering against her ribs. “It’s old. You’ve had it a while.”
His step faltered almost imperceptibly. His hand came up, fingers brushing the cheap plastic charm. A mask slipped for a fraction of a second, revealing something raw and bewildered in his gaze. It was gone so fast she wondered if she’d imagined it.
“Yeah,” he said, the flat tone returning. “Just a dumb charm.”
He sped up, cutting left toward the science wing without another word. He didn’t look back. But just before he turned the corner, she saw his hand close around the frog, gripping it tightly, as if to crush it or to make sure it was still there.
The grip on the charm was a confession. It lasted only a second, but it was enough to liquefy the ground beneath Emily’s feet. He remembered. He absolutely remembered. The confirmation was a white-hot wire straight to her core, burning away the confusion and leaving something clearer and more dangerous: fury.
She stood frozen in the hallway as students parted around her. The bell for next period rang, a sharp, irrelevant sound. Her sketchbook felt heavy in her bag. All those drawings of empty spaces and tired eyes—they were a prelude to this. To the boy around the corner who was holding onto a piece of their past so hard his knuckles had gone white.
She didn’t go to her next class. She walked straight to the art room, which was empty during this period. The northern light was cold and clear. She dropped her bag, pulled out her sketchbook, and flipped to a new page. Her pencil didn’t hesitate.
She drew the frog. She drew the frayed strap of the backpack. She drew the muscular tension in a hand closed around a memory, the tendons standing in stark relief. The lines were explosive, charged with a truth he was trying to hide. She drew until her wrist ached, translating the silent hallway confession into something she could see and understand.
“Skipping, Kitsuhara?”
Mr. Sato, the homeroom teacher, stood in the doorway, holding a steaming mug of tea. He didn’t sound angry, just observational.
“Free period,” Emily said, not looking up. It was a lie. She had English.
He wandered in, looking at the scattered still-life setups. “You’re in here a lot. These are good.” He nodded toward her open sketchbook. “Raw.”
She slowly closed the book. “Thanks.”
“Well, don’t waste all your talent on angsty sketches. The senior portfolio showcase is announced next month. You should consider it. Get your work seen.” He left as quietly as he’d arrived.
Angsty sketches. The dismissal stung, but the word ‘showcase’ lodged in her brain. A way out. A real one. She looked down at the drawing of the clenched hand. It was the most honest thing she’d ever done.
She spent the rest of the school day in a fog, avoiding the courtyards and the cafeteria. During last period, as rain began to streak the classroom windows, she saw him again. He was walking across the soccer field, alone, head down against the drizzle. No jacket. He just let the rain soak him.
She watched until he became a grey smudge in the distance, a lone figure dissolving into the weather. It wasn’t brooding. It was punishment.
The izakaya that night was slower, a Wednesday gloom keeping people home. Akari was quieter than usual, her smiles brittle. She flinched every time the door chime rang.
“He remembers, Mom,” Emily said abruptly, not looking up from the glasses she was polishing. The suds were hot on her hands.
Akari froze, a rag mid-wipe on the counter. “What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything. He has this old keychain. The stupid frog we got together. He still has it.” She finally met her mother’s eyes. “When I mentioned it, he looked like I’d stabbed him.”
All the color left Akari’s face. She leaned heavily on the counter. “Emily, please. You have to stop. This isn’t a game.”
“What did you think would happen?” Emily’s voice dropped, harsh. “That I’d just never ask? That I’d live my whole life wondering why my best friend was forced to act like I’m a stranger? I saw his face. It’s hurting him, too. Whatever you did… it’s hurting both of us.”
“It was a mistake!” The words burst from Akari, too loud. The few customers looked over. She lowered her voice to a frantic whisper. “A terrible, selfish mistake. And his family… his mother… she made sure there would be consequences. For all of us. Part of that was no contact. Ever.”
“Consequences,” Emily repeated, the word thick and ugly. “So we were the consequence. Jay and me. Our friendship was part of the price.”
Akari had no answer. She just looked shattered.
Later, as Emily took out the trash, the rain had turned to a cold mist. The alley was dark, the sticker on the wall just a darker smudge. She hugged her arms around herself.
“You shouldn’t be out here without a coat.”
The voice came from the mouth of the alley. Jay. He was leaning against the wall, shadows masking his face. He wore a damp hoodie, hands shoved in his pockets. How long had he been there?
Her heart jackhammered. “Neither should you.”
He didn’t smile. “I saw you leave. I was walking.”
“This is a long way from your dad’s place.” She knew the neighborhood his father lived in—a newer, quiet cluster of apartments across the river.
“I walk long ways.” He took a step forward. The single security light caught the angles of his face. He looked exhausted. “You shouldn’t have talked to me about the charm.”
“Why? Because it’s true?”
“Because it’s over.” His jaw tightened. “All of it. It’s just… over. You acting like it’s not… it makes it harder.”
“Harder for who?” She took a step toward him, the old defiance flaring. “You’re the one carrying it on your bag. You’re the one pretending I’m nobody. How is this easy for me?”
He flinched. For a long moment, the only sound was the distant drip of water from a gutter. His facade was cracking, and the raw pain beneath was immense. “You have no idea what it was like,” he said, his voice rough. “The screaming. The things my mother said. The look on my dad’s face. We had to leave. We had to leave everything.”
“You could have called. You could have written one letter.”
“I wasn’t allowed a pen, Emily!” The words exploded from him, echoing off the brick. He lowered his voice, a defeated tremor in it. “My mom monitored everything. My phone, my email. She’d have these… rages. She said your family was poison. That you were poison. I was fifteen. What was I supposed to do?”
The sheer helplessness in his question hung between them. Emily’s anger faltered. She saw not the aloof transfer student, but the scared kid he’d been, trapped in an adult war.
“And now?” she asked quietly.
“Now I live with my dad. Which is its own kind of hell. He doesn’t talk. He just… exists in the apartment. And my mother’s rules still play in my head.” He finally looked directly at her, and the eye contact was like a physical shock. “Seeing you… it’s like resetting a broken bone that never healed right.”
The back door opened, casting a yellow slice of light into the alley. Akari stood there, her silhouette rigid with panic. “Emily. Inside. Now.”
Jay’s gaze shifted to Akari. His expression closed down completely, becoming a mask of such intense, icy contempt that Emily took an involuntary step back. It wasn’t the blankness from school. This was pure, directed hatred.
“Mrs. Kitsuhara,” he said, the title dripping with formality and venom.
Akari couldn’t even speak. She just stared, a hand pressed to her throat.
Without another word, Jay turned and walked away, disappearing into the misty dark. He didn’t run. He just vanished, leaving Emily standing between her trembling mother and the empty space where he’d been.
“Go home, Mom,” Emily said, her own voice surprisingly steady. “I’ll finish closing.”
“You can’t talk to him, Emily. You see? You see how he looks at me?”
“I see how hurt he is,” Emily corrected, turning back toward the door. The warmth of the izakaya felt suffocating now. “And I’m starting to understand why.”
She locked up alone an hour later. The rain had stopped, leaving the city glistening under the streetlights. As she walked to the station, she didn’t feel the cold. Her mind was replaying the shattered look on his face when he’d said, “What was I supposed to do?”
He’d been a prisoner. They both had. But his sentence hadn’t ended. Her hands curled into fists in her pockets. The silent acceptance her mother demanded felt like cowardice now. He was carrying that frog, and all the pain, every single day. And her mother wanted her to just walk around the grave.
She couldn’t. Not anymore.
When she got home, Akari was already in her room, the door shut. Emily went to her own tiny space and opened her sketchbook to a clean page. She didn’t draw his anger or his pain. She drew the keychain in precise, careful detail—the frog’s chipped smile, the worn metal ring, the faint ghost of a pattern on its back.
Underneath it, she began to write. Not a letter she could send, but words she needed to shape for herself. You were supposed to fight, she wrote. And so was I.