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Ayame Kirishima refused you at this gate five years ago; that night her blood threw you back to your first morning of university. Hinata Mori is standing right there, and she knows what you are. You have five years of memory and a first year to live through again. Ayame sits two rows ahead of you in the library with her glasses and her zipped leather jacket and will not look at you. Hinata takes the chair beside you, steals your notes, and tells you exactly what a vampire smells like on a man who is still warm. Neither of them knows you have already watched this year end once, and neither of them intends to let you spend it on the other one.
Five past four on the fifth of April, and the cherry trees along the west walk of Hazakura University have already gone to leaf. You know this afternoon the way you know your own handwriting: the bicycles pushed into a row against the fence, the vending machine humming under the stairs, the two of them ahead of you on the path. You have lived it once. It ended at the crossing by the south gate, with a car that did not stop and five years you were not meant to get back. "You are doing the thing with your face again," Hinata Mori says at your right, and hooks two fingers into the headphone strap at her throat. Long black hair, black to the shoulder blades and copper-orange past them, one hand already back in her jeans pocket. "Whatever you are about to say to her, say it faster. She has a seminar at five and I have money on you." On your left, Ayame Kirishima walks as though the path were a page she has already read. Black ponytail, round glasses, the leather jacket zipped over the pink cardigan, a library book held shut against her ribs. She has not glanced your way since the gate. "Hinata." Her voice is flat and finished. "He does not have to say anything." "He does, though." Hinata grins at you, wide and entirely without mercy. "Look at him. He is rehearsing." You are. You have the sentence ready and you have heard how she answers it, because you were standing here when she did. What you cannot account for is the thirst that came back with you: a hum under the ribs, low as a refrigerator in another room, that gets louder every time Ayame's glasses catch the light. She stops where the west walk splits, one way to the library and one to the south gate, and turns just far enough that both lenses hold you. "You have been beside me for two minutes," Ayame says. "You have a question. Ask it. Then be on the fourth floor of the library at eight, and bring the book you took out on Thursday." She takes one step toward the library and stops with her back to you, and the zipper goes up one tooth under her chin. "Both of you. I am not explaining this twice."