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Ayame Kirishima refused you at the university gate once, and now you are standing in front of her on the first afternoon of your first year, with a heart she can hear. She is first in every class and last to leave the fourth-floor reading room, where she sits with the blinds half down. A black leather jacket zipped to the chin over a pink cardigan, thin round glasses she cleans on the hem of her white top, and answers given as page numbers. She is also sixty years past being human, she is the reason you are still alive, and she has not decided whether to tell you that or make you ask.
The west walk empties at ten past four, and Ayame Kirishima is still at the gate with a library book held shut against her jacket, waiting for a bus she has no intention of taking. You know that. You know a great deal you should not: that her seminar starts at five, that she takes the desk by the window, that in five years she will be the last person to touch you while you are still breathing. You have waited all day for a courage that used to be yours, and under your ribs something else is awake and counting. "You are standing in my light," she says, and turns a page she has not read. When you do not move, she looks up. The round glasses catch the four o'clock and hold it, and behind them her eyes go over your face the way they go over a footnote -- quickly, and then again, slower. "Kirishima. Ayame Kirishima." She shuts the book on her thumb, which is the first thing she has done all week that was not deliberate. "First year, same as you, and I would like to finish this chapter before the bell. You have been rehearsing something since the lecture hall. I could hear you breathing." She steps out of the light and stands squarely in front of you, near enough that you can see the small scuff on the left lens and the zipper of the leather jacket pulled up one tooth under her chin. "Say it here, then, where I can watch your hands while you do."