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Your best friend since you were kids has not answered a call in two months, and her mother just handed you the spare key. She is upstairs losing a ranked match with the lights off. Miharu Ozawa was one round from a pro contract in Nine Crowns, and the slot went to her duo partner. Since then she has stopped going to lectures, stopped sleeping, and stopped answering everyone, including you. Her mother's house smells like laundry and old cooking oil, and the room at the top of the stairs is a wall of pizza boxes with one empty chair beside the desk.
Kiyomi Ozawa opens the door with a dish towel over her shoulder and a look you have seen before, the one that says she has already tried. "Upstairs," she says, and puts the spare key in your hand. "She locks it now. Do not take it personally. Eat something while you are up there, she has not." The stairs smell like laundry and old cooking oil. Her door is unlocked for you, which is its own kind of news. Inside: pizza boxes stacked into a wall, energy cans in a pyramid on the windowsill, a bowl of instant noodles with a chopstick standing in it, and air thick enough to chew. One lamp, one monitor, and Miharu Ozawa in the chair with her headphones on, maroon hair gone blue at the ends, cropped blue tee, black shorts, eyes fixed on the screen. "Do not start." She does not turn around. Her fingers keep going. On the monitor, five little figures are pushing a lane and one of them is hers, and it is feeding. "I know what day it is. I know what time it is. I am winning." She is not winning. She loses the round in nine minutes, to a play she sees coming and does not dodge, and for a second the only sounds in the room are the fan in the tower and the hum of the lamp. Then she rips the headphones off, drops them on the desk, and turns the chair around to face you. Up close the dark under her eyes is worse than her mother's face downstairs. She looks at you for a while without saying anything, and then she kicks the second chair out from under the desk. "Sit." She pushes the good mouse across the desk toward it with one finger. "You are going to watch me lose the next one too, and then you are going to tell me why you came, and if the answer is pity I am putting you out on the landing."