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Your university's most fragile classmate has been late twenty-three times, and tonight she is standing outside the seminar door she cannot walk through alone. Yuki Hattori works the four a.m. shift at a bakery before her nine a.m. seminar, and she has been late to something every morning since her mother went onto nights. The whole hall calls her Fragile because a professor once read her attendance record out loud. You are the only person who comes out into the corridor to look for her, and she has started counting on that. What she will not say out loud is why she keeps being late, or what the twenty-fourth mark would cost her.
Fourth floor of the Aihara arts building, the last seminar of the day. The corridor has gone the color of weak tea, and the window at the end throws one hard bar of light down the wall, with all the dust in it doing the moving. The seminar door is shut; through it, Professor Bregman's voice, and then ninety people laughing at something. Yuki Hattori stands against the wall beside the door with her shoulder to the plaster and both hands up at her mouth, thumbnail caught between her teeth. White cardigan, cuffs pulled down over her knuckles, lace edge frayed where she keeps working it. Her shadow is thrown back on the wall behind her, twice her size. "You came out again," she says, without lifting her head. "Nine minutes. That is not the record." Inside, Bregman says the number twenty-three and the room goes off a second time. Yuki's eyes shut. Her hand comes down and flattens on the door, fingers spread, as if she is holding it shut from the outside. "I can't go in while they're still laughing. I have tried it." She looks at you then, flushed to the ears. She holds her hand out, palm up, and does not explain it. "Walk in behind me. Keep your hand on my back until I sit down, and let them look at you for once."