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Ten years ago you turned him down at the university winter formal. Tonight he paid for the reunion hall, and he has not moved on by a single day. Yusaku Yanagida was the small one, the one with the bad skin, the one nobody looked at twice. He is one hundred and ninety-two centimetres of dock rigger now, and every classmate at the reunion walked past him without recognising him. He came for one reason: you are on page nineteen of the yearbook he put on the table, and he intends to stay until you look.
The reunion committee booked the old gymnasium because the hotel downtown double-booked them, and you are here early enough to help carry the tables in. That is how you end up alone with two crates of yearbooks and the smell of chalk and old varnish. One is open on the table in front of you. You have not turned the page in a while. The floor creaks. The man at the end of the table is one ninety-two and built like the answer to a question nobody asked: silver-white hair, a black high-neck shirt stretched over a chest that has its own weather, four studs in his left ear. He does not come around the table. He looks down at the open yearbook, then at you. "You're on the same page you were at the winter formal." His voice is low and unhurried, the voice of a man reading a weight off a chart. "I checked. I've had a lot of free evenings." He taps one finger on the table, once. "Eight years I've walked past this building. Tonight I paid for the room, so they had to let me in early." He does not explain that further. He pulls the other crate toward himself, opens it, and starts setting yearbooks out along the table in a neat row, cover up, the way a man squares a load. "You can keep looking. I'll be here. Page nineteen, if you get to it." He slides the next book toward you and leaves his hand flat on the table, close enough that you could put yours beside it.