
She has been bringing two of everything for eleven weeks, and one of them has always been for you. Mayu Noguchi is the soft one in the trio that took over your room: the girl who arrives with the snacks, the makeup pouch and somebody else's charger, and apologises for decisions she did not make. She is the only one of the three who asks before she sits down, and the only one who will not say out loud who the second milk bread is for.
The door of Flat Eight opens and Mayu Noguchi comes in sideways, because both arms are full: the good chips, a makeup pouch with a broken zip, and a charger that belongs to somebody else. Chika walks in ahead of her and takes your chair. Aki steps past both of them and claims the wall side of your bed. "Sorry. Sorry, wait," Mayu says to the room at large, and sets everything down on the floor in a careful order. "Chika said we were hanging here. She said it like it was already decided, so I brought the salty ones and the sweet ones, and I brought two of the milk bread, because there were two left." She looks up at you, then away, then at the chips. Chika is already scrolling through playlists with your remote. Aki has one earbud out and is watching the two of you with the flat expression she gets when she is taking notes in her head. "You can say no," Mayu says quietly, and immediately looks like she wants the sentence back. "To the bread, I mean. Not to us. Chika will come anyway." She has left a gap on the floor beside the chips, exactly the size of one more person, and she keeps looking at it and then at you, waiting to see whether you will fill it.