Second Place

The cherry blossoms were, in Itsuki's professional opinion — an opinion he would go on refining for the next four years without once feeling moved to photograph one — mostly a liability. They shed. They stuck to shoes, to hair, to the inside of an open bag if you weren't careful, and somewhere on the path behind him a cluster of new students had already stopped dead in the middle of foot traffic to photograph a tree that had, in point of fact, been standing in that exact spot every April for several decades running and would go on doing so with no assistance from any of them.

He adjusted the strap of his bag and kept walking.

Koyo University's main gate opened onto an avenue of these trees, planted with the kind of old, unhurried confidence that said the people who'd planted them had never once worried about tuition. It was, Itsuki thought, a fairly efficient way to announce what kind of school this was before you'd even reached the front hall. He appreciated efficient information delivery. He was somewhat less enthusiastic about the eleven-hour overnight bus that had gotten him here, or the particular ache behind his eyes that came from trying to sleep sitting upright next to a stranger who snored in a key he hadn't previously known bus engines could harmonize with.

He'd have taken the train. The train took two hours. The train also cost roughly four times what the bus did, and four times an amount that started at "a lot" landed somewhere in the territory of "no." So: the bus. He was here. He was, by his own accounting, functioning at maybe sixty percent, and orientation hadn't even started.

This seemed like a fair trade for four years at a school that, as of eleven days ago, had never had a single student from his hometown make it past the entrance exam, let alone in.

The scholarship covered tuition in full, on exactly one condition, printed in the same flat administrative language schools used for things that mattered enormously: renewed each term, contingent on maintaining satisfactory standing within the top percentile of the cohort. Miss it once, and Koyo wouldn't throw him out. They'd simply stop paying for him to stay, which amounted to the same thing on a longer timeline. There wasn't a version of that phone call to his mother he had any interest in making. So: he didn't plan on missing it.

He didn't intend to mention any of this to anyone, either. It wasn't a secret, exactly. It just wasn't anyone's business, and he'd learned early that saying it out loud tended to produce one of two reactions — pity or suspicion — and he had no particular use for either.

The dormitory assignment sheet directed him to a building at the edge of campus, plain and boxy next to the ornate stonework closer to the gate, which told him everything he needed to know about which building housed the scholarship students. He didn't mind. It had a bed and a desk and a window that looked out on a vending machine and a bike rack rather than the cherry trees the brochure photos favored, and, per the floor plan pinned to the noticeboard downstairs, was an eleven-minute walk from the library, which struck him as the only piece of real estate information that actually mattered.

He'd barely gotten his key to turn in the lock when someone put a hand flat against his door from the other side and shoved.

___

"Oh — sorry, sorry, wrong— actually, no, this is right, this is 214, are you 214?"

The owner of the hand was already inside the room by the time he finished the sentence, which Itsuki felt was an unusual approach to a first meeting, even by the standards of eighteen-year-olds who had just been let off a leash for the first time in their lives.

"I'm 214," Itsuki said, since it seemed to be the operative question.

"Great. Perfect. I'm also 214." The guy — tall, dark hair doing something enthusiastic and unstructured on top of his head, the kind of face that looked like it had never once considered holding still — stuck out a hand like this was a business meeting and not a dormitory hallway. "Nomura Kaito. I already checked, we're roommates, I saw your name on the sheet downstairs and there's no photo so I've been extremely curious for the last ten minutes."

"Shindou Itsuki."

"Shindou." Kaito said it like he was testing whether it would hold weight. "Cool. Good name. Very — economical. I like it." He was already circling the room, inspecting it with the proprietary air of someone deciding where furniture was going regardless of what Itsuki might have planned — stepping over the crack in the linoleum by the closet, testing the give of the second bed, prying at a window latch that had clearly been painted shut sometime during a previous administration. "Okay, so, full disclosure, I have zero plan for the next four years and I'm hoping some of it rubs off on you, because I looked you up on the entrance exam boards downstairs and you scored insanely high, like, suspiciously high, like I have several questions—"

"I studied."

"Sure. Sure, everyone says that." Kaito dropped his bag on the bed nearer the window without asking, which meant it was now his bed, which Itsuki found he didn't especially care about. "Anyway I've decided we're friends, I hope that's not a problem, I don't really do the slow build-up thing."

Itsuki considered this. It had been roughly ninety seconds. In that span of time he'd been shoved into via doorway, interrogated about his exam score, and unilaterally assigned both a friendship and a bed configuration.

"Fine," he said, because it was, genuinely, fine. There were worse ways to spend four years than next to someone who apparently operated at full volume by default. It would at least be efficient. He wouldn't have to work to figure out where he stood with this one — Kaito would simply announce it.

Kaito grinned like he'd won something. "Good. Great. You're gonna need at least one friend who isn't terrified of you once people find out your score, so, you're welcome in advance."

Itsuki didn't ask what that meant. He set his bag down instead, on the side that hadn't already been claimed, and started unpacking the two changes of clothes and the secondhand textbooks that made up the entirety of his luggage, while Kaito narrated, unprompted, the full floor plan of the dormitory, the location of the nearest convenience store ("clutch, by the way, remember that, open all night"), and a working theory about the cafeteria schedule that he seemed to have developed independently of any actual evidence.

It was, Itsuki thought, a genuinely unremarkable start to the day.

He had no way of knowing, yet, that it was the only unremarkable part of it.

___

The walk from the dormitory to the main hall took them past a building Kaito identified, with the confidence of someone repeating something he'd heard exactly once, as "the old admin building, I think, or maybe the library, one of those." It was, in fact, neither. A placard by the door read STUDENT RESULTS HALL in gold lettering old enough to have gone slightly green at the edges, but Itsuki didn't correct him, mostly because he was still working out what it was himself.

Through the open doors he could see a wall-mounted board, glass-fronted and lit from above by a single fluorescent tube that gave the whole alcove the hush of a shrine room, currently occupied by a single sheet of paper — this year's entrance exam results, ranked, in print small enough that a little knot of new students had gathered close just to find their own names. Twenty of them. No more. The glass had been polished recently enough that Itsuki could see his own blurred reflection standing behind the crowd, waiting for nothing in particular.

"Oh, hey, that's the thing I saw your name on," Kaito said, unbothered, already walking past it. "They do that after every big exam here, apparently. Regular exams, mocks, whatever — top twenty names go up on that board like it's a shrine. Whole school walks by it on the way to lunch. I heard an upperclassman call it 'church.'"

"That seems like a lot of ceremony for a piece of paper."

"Right? I love it. It's deeply, deeply unhinged and I respect it completely." Kaito grinned back over his shoulder. "Anyway, you're probably gonna end up on that thing eventually, given the whole—" he gestured vaguely at Itsuki in general "—suspiciously high test score situation. Good luck, I guess. I hear it gets competitive."

Itsuki glanced back at the board once before they moved on. He didn't feel much of anything about it, one way or another — it was a piece of information about how this particular school chose to keep score, tucked in next to the dormitory assignment and the tuition due date, with about the same weight as either. He had a considerable, entirely practical interest in the fact that staying enrolled here at all depended on numbers not unlike the ones printed there, but that was a different matter, and not one he saw any reason to bring up on his first day.

He followed Kaito toward the main hall and didn't think about the board again — not until, several weeks later, his name was on it.

___

The orientation assembly was held in that same main hall, a cavernous room with a ceiling high enough to make every voice in it echo, which meant several hundred eighteen-year-olds attempting to whisper simultaneously produced a sound roughly like a hive of bees with strong opinions. Itsuki found this less objectionable than he'd expected. It was easy to disappear into. Nobody looked twice at a guy in a plain shirt standing near the back when there was this much other noise competing for attention.

Kaito, characteristically, had opinions about standing near the back.

"We should be closer," he said, already angling them both toward the middle of the crowd with a hand on Itsuki's shoulder. "You can't build a social network from the back row, Shindou, that's just basic—"

He stopped talking.

It took Itsuki a second to notice, because Kaito stopping talking was such a structurally unfamiliar event that his brain initially logged it as some kind of malfunction. Then he followed Kaito's line of sight and understood, more or less immediately, what had caused it.

The crowd near the room's side entrance had done something that a crowd of eighteen-year-olds does not typically do on its own initiative: it had organized itself. Not into a line, exactly. More like water finding the shape of a container it hadn't been told existed — a clean channel opening up through the middle of several hundred people, wide enough for one person to walk through without brushing a single shoulder.

The person walking through it was, Itsuki assumed, the reason the channel existed.

She was — he catalogued this the way he catalogued most things, with a kind of neutral, unhurried attention, the same attention he'd have given a diagram he was trying to memorize — tall for a girl, though not dramatically so, with hair a pale, dusty pink that had clearly been left down on purpose rather than out of laziness, and glasses with thin, precise frames that looked less like something she wore and more like something that had simply always been part of her face. She moved like someone who had never once had to check whether a room was going to make space for her. It generally already had.

She wasn't smiling. She wasn't doing much of anything, expression-wise — a kind of composed, unbothered neutrality, the look of someone attending a meeting she'd already read the minutes for — but the effect on the room was roughly the same as if she'd walked in wearing a crown.

"Okay, so," Kaito said, voice dropped to something almost reverent, which was, for him, a significant adjustment, "that's Saionji. Saionji Reina."

"Should that mean something to me."

"You're kidding. Please tell me you're kidding." Kaito looked at him like he'd just admitted to not knowing what fire was. "First place, Shindou. Three years running. Middle school, then high school, then — I heard she topped the mock exams so hard last cycle that the second-place kid transferred schools out of what I can only describe as spite. There's a whole—" he made a vague gesture meant to encompass an entire ecosystem of rumor "—thing. Her family's some old academic dynasty, apparently — her mother, or her grandfather, I don't fully know, one of them set some kind of legendary record here decades back, and everyone's just been quietly assuming Saionji's going to do it again since she was, like, twelve."

"That's a lot of pressure to put on a twelve-year-old."

"I mean, sure, but also she seems built for it? Look at her. She looks like she'd win an argument with a typhoon." Kaito was still watching her cross the room with the frank, undisguised fascination of someone watching a nature documentary. "There's that board we just passed, by the way — same one. Apparently it's been Saionji at the top of it since the day she enrolled. I heard some third-years call her Saionji-sama as a joke that isn't really a joke anymore."

Itsuki took it in without much particular reaction. He understood, abstractly, that this was supposed to be impressive, the way certain old buildings were supposed to be impressive regardless of anything they'd actually achieved. But rankings, in his experience, were a means to an end — proof you'd cleared whatever bar had been set in front of you, useful mainly insofar as clearing it kept a roof over your head and your name on a renewal list. He'd never had the luxury of caring about a number for its own sake. He'd only ever had the luxury of needing one.

Still, he looked a second longer than the situation strictly required — the same neutral curiosity he'd have given any well-known fact he was encountering firsthand for the first time, like finally seeing, in person, a mountain he'd only ever seen on a map. She didn't look particularly happy to be the mountain. Composed. Contained. Not happy, exactly. He found that mildly interesting, in a none-of-his-business sort of way, and then the assembly's opening remarks started up at the front of the hall and he redirected his attention, because he had, in fact, come here to attend orientation and not to conduct field research on a stranger's expression.

He didn't think about her again for the rest of the ceremony. He was reasonably certain, if asked, that he could have gone the rest of the semester without thinking about her at all.

He would, if asked, have called this assessment reasonable, given the information available to him at the time. It was also, as it later turned out, wrong by a margin large enough to eventually require a wedding to correct.

___

By the time the assembly let out, the sun had shifted enough that the cherry blossoms along the main avenue had gone from pink to something closer to gold, and the same first-years were still, somehow, photographing the same tree. Kaito talked the entire walk back to the dorm — a running commentary on everyone he'd made eye contact with during the ceremony, a working list of who he intended to befriend by the end of the week, and a lengthy, unprompted theory about which club Itsuki should join that seemed to be based entirely on which one had the best snack budget.

Itsuki mostly listened. It didn't require much from him, which he appreciated. Kaito seemed like the kind of person who could sustain an entire friendship on his own conversational output, which suited Itsuki fine. He'd never been much of a talker, and it was restful, being around someone who didn't need him to be.

Back in the room, with Kaito gone quiet at last over some game on his phone, Itsuki unpacked the last of his things: a framed photo he set on the desk without ceremony — his mother, some years younger, laughing at something outside the frame — and a class schedule he'd already memorized on the bus. The paper had one date circled in his own handwriting, three weeks out: first major exam of the term, the one whose results would go up on that glass-fronted board in the main hall, the one that would decide, among other things, whether the scholarship letter in his bag stayed a promise or turned into a problem. Tomorrow, before his first lecture, he'd need to find the convenience store Kaito had pointed out and ask about hours, see if they were hiring for early mornings. Tonight he needed sleep, actual sleep, in an actual bed, for the first time in about thirty hours.

He thought, briefly, about calling his mother to tell her he'd arrived. He'd do it tomorrow, once he sounded less tired. There was no version of tonight's call that ended with her worrying less about him from three hundred kilometers away, and every version where he waited a day and sounded fine.

He did not think about the girl with the pale pink hair and the crowd that had parted for her like she came with her own tide. He assumed, if he thought about it at all, that whatever brief impression she'd made would fade into the general blur of new faces every incoming class produced, well before that circled date on his schedule ever arrived.

He would, to be fair, have plenty of chances to think about her later. As it turned out, roughly all of them.

For now, he turned off the desk lamp, and Koyo University's newest, most thoroughly unremarkable student went to sleep — with no idea that the three weeks between him and that circled date were about to go by a great deal faster than he was expecting.