Chapter 2: Condition

Wednesday, afternoon. After class.

Unfamiliar…

I was walking on a street that was unfamiliar to me. Glancing at the unfamiliar faces who walked past me. Looking at the unfamiliar houses as I passed by them. Shuffling my feet over the unfamiliar concrete towards an unfamiliar destination I didn’t want to reach but had to.

Going to meet an unfamiliar boy who made an unfamiliar request.

… and an unknown condition.

What am I doing? I thought for the last time. I hoped it was the last time.

Why did I come here? I tilted my face up toward the sky, hoping that from all that blue there was something in it that would tell me the answer. There was none. There were only the clouds drifting slowly, like they were matching how I moved my feet.

But underneath those questions, there was a quiet persistence that would talk to me.

There is hope. All I have to do is hear what he has to say. Then I go home.

Were they convincing? Enough... probably.

I sighed and kept moving.

I recalled what happened this morning. It was difficult. A different type of difficult.

I’d sat in my seat before first period and looked around at everyone. I tried to find the expressions I was wearing on the faces of my friends.

Hina was at her desk, clean and composed like she always was. Her eyes gazed towards the windows. Whatever she was thinking, it was only for her alone. And I never wondered what it was until that time.

A few seconds later, I found Yui standing in front of Mika’s desk. Her expression cycled through different emotions during their conversation. She was probably talking about stories she had heard a few days ago. And Mika was more animated than yesterday. Reacting to Yui’s story the way she was supposed to. But I knew she was only trying. I knew yesterday hadn’t left her. I could see it in the moments between her reactions, a few fractions of a second where she would lose control.

My eyes started to move without me noticing. Toward the windows. Toward the back.

And there he was. Completely unbothered. Absorbed by his book, entirely isolated from the noises the classroom had contained before homeroom. I didn’t even know if he noticed the empty space around him. Nobody talked to him. Nobody paid attention to him.

Except me, right at that moment.

I looked away before anyone caught me. I sighed.

Everyone seemed to have moved on from what happened yesterday afternoon. In this same classroom, in that heavy atmosphere. Or maybe they were doing a better job pretending they were.

...Better than me, at least.

Since...

I was the one who had to walk to a near-stranger’s apartment after school. I was the one who had to prepare to hear a condition that no one knew yet. And I was the one who had to steady my face, to hide everything that I was thinking... So that my friends wouldn’t worry.

I tried to keep it up all day. And I was very tired.

A few times during the walk, I stopped. I turned halfway back, contemplated for a few seconds, wondered what I had been asking myself since I arrived at the station. But I always turned forward... Turned forward and kept walking.

He’s a person, I thought. I needed it. I needed to remind myself what I had rehearsed ever since I woke up this morning. He’s a human being. He’s a student, not a criminal. He looked intimidating. But when we talked to him, he was never violent...

Then...

Also, why was he unusually slow? It was very nerve wracking watching him move from one place to another while the room sat in such a tense mood. And he profiled my friends one by one, like he knew everything about them and where they rank in school, he probably knew the scores they even got, and he was right but…

I paused.

Well... That was actually a bit creepy. Who even does that?

My thoughts suddenly went in another direction…

What about his condition?

I shook my head. I needed to. Positive thoughts. Positive thoughts only.

Instead, my mind tried to embrace quiet.

…

…

… condition.

I gave up.

The sight of the apartment he wanted me to go to finally came into view. A few more minutes of walking and I found myself standing below it. I looked up. Ten floors. It looked expensive. But maybe not. It was quite fancy, though. A little bit, but enough that it made the houses around it look small and a little embarrassed by comparison. It had solid walls, gray. They were so thick that I imagined if I went inside and screamed, nobody from the outside would hear it.

… That last thought wasn’t necessary.

I walked to the front entrance.

The door was glass, sturdy and clear, and beyond it I could see a second door of the same material. I stepped forward, the outer door opened automatically, and I went inside.

I stood there for a second.

This didn’t look the same as Hina’s apartment. I mean, I had known it since I saw the building from the outside. But I wasn’t sure how to proceed.

Wait… dramas…

If I remembered correctly. There was supposed to be an intercom panel around here somewhere. And it was probably that one, left side beside the door.

I opened the note he gave me and approached the panel. I wasn’t sure at first since there were two panels in front of me. One seemed to look like where key cards go through. Maybe this one with a keypad.

“Room number 502,” I said while I typed the numbers on it.

I stared at the panel while I waited.

“Who?” A voice came through the speaker, flat and immediate.

“I-It’s me, Miyase Runa. I came here to talk about…”

“Proceed.”

The inner door opened before I finished what I wanted to say.

Right. Of course.

I walked inside. There was a reception desk but no one was behind it.

He’s a person. He’s a human being. He’s just a student.

I told myself repeatedly all the way to the elevator. I told myself repeatedly while the elevator moved. By the time the doors opened on the fifth floor. I had told myself it enough times that it had stopped sounding like words and started sounding like a sound I was making with my mouth.

I reached one of the apartment doors then checked the note he gave me one last time.

Fifth floor. Room 502.

I took a breath.

Took another one.

And knocked twice.

A few seconds later. The door opened.

I gripped my bag.

I looked at him.

“You could’ve used the doorbell,” he said.

Hmm?

I looked to the left of the door frame.

There it was. Right there. A doorbell, where doorbells had always been, in the place that doorbells had always existed, on every door I had ever encountered in my entire life.

My face went warm. I tried to hide it.

“I… didn’t see it,” I said, because it was the only sentence I could locate in my head at that moment. It didn’t sound convincing, in fact, it didn’t convince me at all. Because there was no way I could have missed it. Maybe because I had not thought anything about doorbells for the past day. Maybe because I had been thinking more about what happened yesterday and what was going to happen today. And now I was standing here having knocked on a door like someone who had never encountered doors with a doorbell before.

He’s definitely reconsidering everything.

“Come in,” he said, after looking at me for a moment that felt longer than it was.

I took off my shoes and arranged them neatly by the entrance.

“Excuse me for intruding,” I said, bowing slightly.

I stepped inside.

He led me to the living room.

I stopped just inside the doorway and looked around without meaning to.
It was clean. It wasn’t empty but felt like it was since there were no unnecessary decorations inside. There were two sofas, one smaller facing the flat screen TV in the corner, and one longer that faced the door of the living room, perpendicular to the smaller one. And in the center was just a carpet. There were no tables, no cabinets, no photographs on the walls. Nothing else.

To the right was the kitchen connected to the living room with no walls between them. And just as much as the living room, I only saw what seemed to be the necessary utensils that he needed. Or so I assumed.

It kinda fits him, actually.

I thought about it for a second.

“Sit anywhere you like,” he said.

I considered the longer sofa and the smaller sofa for a second. I started walking towards the longer sofa, I sat at the other end near the smaller sofa, which put the most distance between me and the other end of the room. As I settled in I noticed a book sitting on the opposite end of where I sat. I leaned slightly, curious to what it was.

English. The cover was entirely in English.

“Do you want water?”

I straightened up. His voice came from the kitchen and it caught me off guard since I felt like I was intruding someone’s private life when I leaned towards the book. His voice is always serious, it wasn’t cold but it was different, like the strict kind of different, or maybe leaned more towards indifference? I didn’t know, I was just startled. I wondered if he was aware of how he sounded to others? Probably not.

“There’s soda in the fridge too. Which one?”

“Soda please,” I answered before I finished deciding. I meant to say water. I didn’t know why I said soda.

He came back a few minutes later with a glass of soda with little ice cubes. He handed it to me.

“Thank you.”

He went back to the kitchen. I watched him go, wondering what he had planned to do. I noticed he was going towards a small wooden table at the corner of the kitchen before he started carrying it. Then walked back to the living room and carefully set it down over the carpet between the two sofas.

It was a low kind of table, made for sitting on the floor to write.

“You can put your drink here.”

“Thank you.”

He walked around the table he just placed. He ended up in the other end of the longer sofa, picked up the book that was there, and sat down.

And opened it.

And started reading…

Started reading…

I tried to confirm what just happened. I came all the way here. Ten minutes of train ride, fifteen minutes walking from the station to this apartment, I had failed to locate a doorbell that had been directly beside the door, and now this. I thought we were going to start talking about what he told me yesterday. Instead, he started reading.

“Um.” I tried.

He turned a page.

“About what we discussed yesterday…”

Nothing.

“…Never mind.” I let out a laugh. It sounded awkward. I immediately regretted the laugh.

I looked at the soda. The ice was already starting to melt at the edges. I took a sip. Looked up at the ceiling for reasons I couldn’t explain. There was nothing interesting about the ceiling. It was a ceiling.

I decided to search inside my bag instead. The only things that I found were textbooks, notebooks and my test papers that put me in this situation. I cursed at them. In spirit.

My phone buzzed inside my pocket. I opened it. There were notifications that Mika and Yui had messaged me privately. Once from Mika, five times from Yui. There was also a flood of notifications that came from our group chat. It didn’t say who made those fifteen notifications, but I am totally sure it was Yui.

I didn’t have the mood to reply yet. So I opened an app, found a video, maybe just watch for a little bit. Made myself look busy just like him.

Ten minutes passed.

I put down my phone.

“Hello?” I looked at him directly this time.

Everything that I was thinking before coming here and everything I heard about him both were gone in that moment. I didn’t come here to sit in silence and watch videos.

If he still didn’t answer me this time, I was leaving.

My eyebrows pulled together.

He slowly looked up.

“Are you done with your drink?” he asked.

My eye twitched.

I wasn’t DONE with my drink, thank you. I was DONE waiting here for nothing. If you still make me wait for one second more and waste all that effort and all those worries I had been carrying on my way here, THEN I AM LEAVING.

I thought… they came out good in my thoughts…

I sighed for a bit, tried to compose myself. Okay now he is paying attention to me.

“Yes,” I replied. My voice still had an edge to it that I didn’t bother smoothing out. “Thank you.”

“Follow me.”

He stood up.

I took a breath. Smoothed my expression back into something neutral. It took a moment. Afterwards, I stood up and followed.

He led me back out to the hallway. Two doors on the right from the living room. We passed the first one and stopped at the second, closer to the main entrance. He opened it.

I looked inside.

The room was the complete opposite of the living room.

An electric piano against one wall, a guitar on a stand, and something that looked like a smaller, plastic version of the piano with little buttons and dials I didn’t recognize, plugged into a computer setup near the window.

One computer, but with three monitors lined up side by side, all three still on.

The middle one had lines of text. They were small, colorful, structured in a way that reminded me of what the programmer characters in dramas were working on when emphasized. Except this looked real. Less glamorous. Just a wall of text that I didn’t know what it meant.

The screen on the left had a bunch of horizontal bars in different colors, all squiggly and uneven, kind of like one of those heart monitor lines from medical dramas but way more of them, stacked on top of each other, with little boxes and tiny switches everywhere.

And the one on the right. Drawing? Just the outline of someone’s head, unfinished, floating in the middle of a mostly empty white background. No face yet. Just the shape.

My eyes moved away from the screens, taking in the rest of the room.

A drawing tablet. Papers stacked on a separate table, some of them weighted down with pencils, some of them half-finished with marks I couldn’t fully read from here. Notebooks. Drawing pads. Crumpled paper on the floor near the waste bin. Probably were thrown but didn’t quite make it. A lot of them were not even close to the waste bin. Rulers, erasers, pencils that had been used and not put back.

It was a mess. It was surprisingly chaotic and messy.

I thought the living room fit him well because of how he moves and how he talks. Both with a certain precision.

But this…

This explains the dark below his eyes.

This explains the messy hair.

And I could totally picture him in here. Staying up late, scratching his head leaving his hair a mess. This room gave me everything the living room didn’t. I could guess exactly where he spent his time, what he put his hours into, what he cared about. Without him saying a single word about it.

I forgot to breathe. So I did.

“Are you…” I searched for the right question. “A musician?”

“No,” he said. “I just bought those, I’m still learning.”

“All of them? The piano, the guitar, and…” I gestured vaguely at the plastic thing with the buttons.

“That’s a MIDI keyboard. I am currently trying to make music for my game.”

“What about the drawings?”

“Also learning.”

“Are you making a manga?”

“No. Just drawing for my game.”

“And the computer? The colored texts?”

“Those are programs.”

“For making a game?”

“Yes.”

“Isn’t that… aren’t you amazing?”

“Not really. I know how to code now. I still don’t know how to draw or make music.”

But isn’t he still amazing?

I looked at the three screens again. And that reinforced my thought. The lines of text, the squiggly bars, the half-finished head all just sat there. All equally impressed me.

I opened my mouth but I didn’t know what I could say. The questions just ran in my head and they kept overlapping each other. And on top of that, some part of me felt like I was already prying just by standing here looking at all of it.

“How are you finding time to learn all of this?” I asked finally.

“I have a schedule.”

Of course. But still…

“Since when did you start?”

“I started learning how to program since I was ten. Started making a game when I was thirteen. Started learning guitar when I was fourteen. Started learning how to draw last year. Started learning…”

“Wait, okay I get it.” If I hadn’t stopped him there, I had a feeling he would list everything. And I had a feeling there was more than what I was seeing today. “So did you finish making a game?”

“I posted one online last year. Free. It was the one I’d been building since I started.”

“How did it go?”

“Around two thousand downloads, last time I checked.”

Two thousand? Downloads? That many!?

I couldn’t even get a hundred views for that one dance video Yui and me posted when we were still in middle school. Isn’t two thousand like really good?

“But that’s beside the point,” he said when I was about to say my thoughts. “Let’s go back to the living room. Let’s talk there.”

As soon as he said that, reality snapped me back to the reason why I was here.

He closed the door then started leading me back to the living room.

My eyes couldn’t resist glancing for that room one last time.

I could never do that. I thought. And I meant it entirely without self-pity. It was the scale of it. This kind of sustained, quiet, solitary commitment to something was not something I had ever managed. Maybe that was part of why I was here.

We entered the living room and I sat down where I’d been before. He took his end of the sofa. And for some reason, the room felt smaller. It wasn’t uncomfortable, it was just different. Like I was seeing it properly now instead of through a filter of nerves.

“So,” I said. I knew what we were going to talk about now. I felt ready. “What is it?”

“If I do this,” he started, “I’ll have to set aside all of that.”

My eyes widened a little. I didn’t consider that.

“My part-time job. I’ll have to quit it.”

He has one? I had no idea.

“All the time I would spend learning to draw, learning to play music and making games. All of them will get reduced. As well as the time I have for my own studying.”

I wanted to cover my face with both my hands. I felt confident opening the conversation as soon as we got back to the living room. Now, I was feeling the weight of all the things that he was saying. The heavy sacrifices that he was willing to make for my sake. And everything felt like pressure sat on my back.

“You don’t have to do that,” I said.

“I do.” No hesitation. “If I’m going to tutor you, I’m not doing it with half an effort. When I set a goal I intend to reach it.”

“But...” I, on the other hand, hesitated. “But if you stop now…” I didn’t know what to say. But somehow he knew what to answer.

“I am not stopping. I can go back to learning once we’re done.”

Why?

“Why would you do all that for someone you don’t even know?”

He paused for a moment and stared at me. As if he was trying to figure out how to answer what I asked.

“Because you need help,” he finally said.

I waited for the rest of it. There wasn’t any.

That’s it? I felt like he was about to say more. Was that really all? Because I needed help, he would ruin his schedule, quit his part-time job and cut into his dream?

I didn’t understand. I thought I had figured him out. But it felt like what I knew was far too little compared to what I didn’t know.

But he continued.

“Honestly, when I first looked at your test papers I was going to say no.”

Obviously.

“But when I looked at the answers themselves. They weren’t random. You never left a question blank. Every answer had a logic behind it, even when it was completely wrong. That logic came from somewhere. It means you were thinking, not guessing. I saw the hard work written on every answer. They were just tangled up with the wrong methods.” He kept his eyes on me. “If we work the right way, you’ll get a different result.”

I sat with that.

Hard work written on every answer.

I bit my lip. I did give my all. I spent nights reading textbooks I tried to understand. In the end, I wasn’t able to and I thought it was impossible for me. And here was someone looking at the same evidence and arriving at a completely different conclusion.

I wanted to believe it. Can he really make me become a top ten student in a year?

I stared at my hands.

If I worked hard just like him, then maybe? If he thought it was achievable, then maybe? If he was sounding very sure of it… then it might actually be real.

“But I need some kind of insurance,” he suddenly said. “If I put everything in and you still failed, I need something in return. I don’t like wasting time.”

I nodded. Reluctant. I didn’t know if I could promise not to waste his time.

“What is it?” I asked.

“If you fail an exam. Midterms and finals, for the rest of the year. For every subject you fail, I get five minutes.”

I waited.

“Five minutes. To touch you.”

The room didn’t move.

I heard the words. I understood the words individually. They just didn’t make sense when I put them together. Assembling into something I couldn’t process correctly.

“Touch me?” I said. I wanted him to say that he was just joking.

“Yes.”

He wasn’t.

My hand tightened slightly on my bag.

Absolutely not . That is supposed to be the answer. Immediate. Clear. Correct.

If he failed me on purpose, how could I ever tell? If the consequence of my failure was something that benefited him, what was stopping him from not doing it? He could teach me badly on purpose, or not at all, and collect whatever he wanted from whatever subject I failed.

I needed to say that. I needed to push back on it directly. The words were right there.

I looked at him.

I opened my mouth, but he went first.

“Don’t misunderstand,” he said. “I’m not going to teach you halfheartedly. When I said top ten, that wasn’t a promise. It’s my intention. And I intend to follow through on it. But I need to know your resolve.”

I didn’t move.

My resolve?

“You don’t have to decide now,” he continued. “You don’t have to decide at all. If you don’t come back, that’s your answer.” He paused. “But if you do come back. Then that’s your answer too. Not just to me. To yourself.”

I didn’t know what to say to that so I didn’t say anything.

“You can go,” he said.

I didn’t move right away. I didn’t know if I can even move right away.

When my eyes reached him, I saw him reading his book again, like he just didn’t say the most outrageous thing to say to a girl.

For a moment I sat with everything. I felt the weight of what he’d put on the table and the equal weight of what he was offering in return.

Finally I stood up. I picked up my bag from the floor and held it against my chest.

I started walking towards the door, as fast as I could.

“The condition stays between us,” he said before I could walk towards the hallway.

I hesitantly nodded. I shouldn’t have. It felt like agreeing to something before I’d decided anything. But I also didn’t want anyone else carrying the weight of this before I’d figured out what I was going to do with it myself.

I let myself out.

The elevator was waiting. I got in.

What do I do?

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Wednesday, Night.

That night I lay in my bed staring at the ceiling with the lights off. Dinner was done. My replies to the group chat were done. Just enough to prove I was alive and accounted for, nothing that invited follow-up questions I wasn’t ready to answer.

The dark was easier right now. Less to look at. More space to think, or to avoid thinking, which was what I was mostly doing.

My phone rang.

Mika.

I picked up.

“Hello.”

“Are you okay?”

“I am. Don’t worry.”

“Did he do anything?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

She didn’t answer for a few seconds.

“You don’t sound sure.”

“I’m just tired.”

“...Really?”

“Yes.”

She paused.

“Okay.” Her voice was careful. “I’ll let you sleep. But tomorrow, tell me everything.”

“Okay.”

She hung up.

I lay there in the dark looking at the ceiling.

Sorry, Mika.

I was already apologizing to her in my head. Because I knew, even now, that I wasn’t going to be able to tell her everything. Not even a single word of what had been said.

That part…

All of them…

Were all mine to carry…

I pressed my hand flat against my chest.

What do I do?

The ceiling had no answers. It was just a ceiling.

But somewhere underneath all the weight of it, quieter than everything else, something was still there.

I saw the hard work written on every answer.

I closed my eyes.