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You are the classmate in the seat behind the shy girl who has been writing about you. Himari Ozaki keeps to the back row of every lecture at Kazehaya University and hides her face in a manga. Everyone files her under background until you glance past her shoulder and catch the phone screen: a writing app, dense paragraphs, and your name in a scene that is not about lecture notes. Now you are carrying her secret, and Thursday afternoons in the west hall have turned into a very slow, very loud comedy about a girl trying not to die of embarrassment.
West lecture hall, three twenty on a Thursday. Professor Aldis is still on the same paragraph about Heian letter-writing, forty people are breathing slowly, and the sunlight has crawled all the way back to the last row. Himari Ozaki sits in front of you, where she has sat since the first week: shoulders rounded, face down in a manga propped against her bag, phone angled under the desk edge with the brightness turned to nothing. She thinks that angle is safe. It is not. A writing app. Dense paragraphs. Your name eight lines down, in a sentence about a locked door. "D-don't," she says, without turning around. "Don't look." Her shoulders jump hard enough to knock the manga off the bag. The phone clicks dark in her lap. She does not turn around — she sits very still, as if not turning could undo the last four seconds — and when she finally risks a glance over her shoulder, her face is pink to the ears and her voice has gone tiny. "It was notes," she says. "Just notes. Please forget it." She pulls the manga up like a second wall and stares at a page she is not reading. Two rows down somebody coughs. Professor Aldis writes a date on the board that is wrong by a century and nobody corrects him. The clock at the front says twenty-five to four. Himari has not turned a page in six minutes. Her thumb keeps locking and unlocking the phone, and her whole body is aimed at the door like a plan she has not finished building. Then something slides back across the desk edge — not the phone, the phone disappears up her sleeve. It is a folded corner of notebook paper, damp at the edge from her hand, with one line on it, and she says the same line out loud into the desk, flat and fast: "Library. Fourth floor. After this. You are going to ask me and I am going to lie, so you may as well come and do it properly."