The Villainess of the Seventh Tide

At ten to eight on Tuesday morning, Fumika Tachibana marched me up the North Building stairs to the landing under the roof door: three padlocks, a sign that said NO, and nobody else in the world.

"Sit."

I sat on the top step, which made us, for once, the same height. Rain ticked on the little window above the door. The stairwell smelt of floor wax and wet concrete, and of fear. Not mine.

"How much did you read?"

"One line in the library. Then chapters one to nine last night, with a dictionary. I stopped at two o'clock, because the princess went to sleep and it seemed polite."

Fumika shut her eyes. "Two hundred and twelve chapters. About twenty thousand bookmarks. My parents think I'm studying for mock exams, and the council thinks its club-affairs secretary sleeps at ten." She opened them. "If this gets out, Aliev-kun, I will be the class representative who wrote Reincarnated as the Villainess of the Seventh Tide, I Swear to Protect the Silent Princess! At my wedding. On my gravestone."

"It's a good title," I said. "It tells you everything before you get on. Like a bus."

I had questions. I always have questions.

"Why Kotone-san?"

"'Kotone-san'," she repeated, the way a cat repeats a bird. "Last year she was the most interesting person in this school, and she never said a word. It was narratively irresistible."

"And the Desert Knight?"

"You arrived." She pushed her fringe straight. "You were… narratively convenient."

"He can't read the wind. I can't read the air."

"I'm aware, Aliev-kun. I'm the one who wrote it down."

Then she produced her clipboard, which she had brought to her own confession, and offered a deal: my silence, in exchange for unofficial advice to the Literature Club on every form, deadline and trap in Article 12.

"Then join us," I said. "You're a writer. We need a third member."

"Absolutely not. I enforce Article 12. I can't be enforced by it." Then, to the padlocks: "And people would ask what I write, and I would have to say 'silly romance'."

"Is it silly?"

"She is reincarnated as a villainess, Aliev-kun."

"My grandmother watches a Turkish series about a sultan with four wives. Every night at nine, very loud. Nobody calls her silly." I considered this. "Not to her face."

The corner of her mouth moved. She held out her right hand, the one with the ink stain on the middle finger, which I now understood was not an accident but a profession.

"Not a word. To anyone. Not even to Kotone-san."

That was when I learned that a promise can have a second page.

"…Not even to Kotone-san."

At the bottom of the flight she stopped. "Chapter one hundred and eighty-eight. The knight kneels. Too much?"

"He's very tall. It's easier to talk to a princess from down there."

She wrote that down.

On Wednesday it rained on the pines outside Room 3 as if it were paid by the hour. Kotone sat across the low table from me, frowning at her phone the way Buvi frowns at a melon she suspects of lying. She peeled off a blue note and pushed it over: LINE. For club logistics.

A second note followed, also not a haiku, which meant it was a law: LINE is for times and places. Anything that matters goes on paper.

"Agreed," I said. My phone buzzed. Her first message, sent from one metre away:

🟦

I laughed. She didn't explain. Then, quietly, because it was only us: "The Iinchō bowed to you. This morning. In the corridor."

She had: fifteen exact degrees, like a signature.

Since the lighthouse I had told her everything. I opened my mouth, and nothing came out.

"It's someone else's secret," I said at last. "I promised."

She looked at my collar for a long moment. "…Okay."

Her phone buzzed on the table and she turned it face down so fast I assumed it was her mother. Fumika's secret sat on the tatami between us like an extra member of the club: it took up room, and it would not sign the log.

On Sunday Tetsuo drove me to the JLPT in Yokohama at seven in the morning, in the shop's white van, which smelt of inner tubes. At the university gate he said, "Mm. Luck," which from Tetsuo is a speech.

In the listening section a man and a woman discussed where to put a bookshelf; I understood every word and not one thing they decided. At four I walked out into the drizzle wrung like a zōkin. My phone had one message.

🟦 7/7

Seven out of seven? By Kamakura I had decided it meant she believed in me, and I was very moved, and completely wrong.

On Monday a bamboo appeared at the school entrance, leaning against the shoe lockers like a tall boy who had overslept, and by the first bell it was hung with strips of coloured paper.

"Tanabata, Sardor-kun!" Kurata-sensei told me in homeroom, in English. "Orihime the weaver and Hikoboshi the cowherd are lovers, but the Milky Way is between them, so they meet only one night a year: tonight! We write our wishes on tanzaku and hang them on the bamboo!"

"Who decided one night, Sensei?" I asked, in Japanese, as always.

"Her father! The Emperor of Heaven!"

"In Tashkent, the grandmothers would overrule him."

"It usually rains on Tanabata," Fumika added from the front, "so they usually don't meet." It was the saddest thing I had heard in Japan.

Daichi wrote WIN ONE GAME so big that his strip curled. I wrote mine in Uzbek, so that no one could read it: Kotonening ovozini ko'proq eshitishni xohlayman. I want to hear Kotone's voice more. I tied it to the highest branch, higher than anyone's. If the wind could read, it would get to mine first.

At lunch Yukari's bento was the flag of Uzbekistan: nori for the blue ("Blue food does not exist, Sar-chan, use your imagination," said the note), rice for the white, shiso for the green, threads of pickled plum for the red lines, a crescent of omelette and twelve stars of white sesame. Half the class photographed it.

Fumika stopped at my desk with the class register, in which the Iinchō records the date, the weather and, for reasons nobody remembers, birthdays. "Unofficial advice," she murmured. "It's the seventh of July. Shirase-san's birthday. I assume you have a present."

Seven, seven. The blue square had not been a score.

"Seriously?!" said Daichi. "Man. That's a strikeout."

I had nothing but a flag made of rice. Then I remembered the bag of qurt that had moved from my suitcase to my school bag in April, for emergencies of the homesick kind. All through fifth period I counted on my fingers under the desk, using the only story in my head that day.

By four the rain had stopped and the pines outside Room 3 were steaming. Somewhere in them the first cicada of the summer was testing its voice: a scrape, a silence, a scrape again.

I put the bag on the low table with an orange note taped to it.

Tanabata stars—

two lovers across the sky.

Happy birthday. (Qurt.)

"I only found out at lunch," I said. "But it's four hours earlier in Tashkent, so there it's still early."

She read it. The tips of her ears went red, and then the rest of her.

I read my own note upside down, arrived at two lovers, and my ears caught fire. In my head the Hikari Foundation's booklet fell open at Rule 7: Students should avoid serious romantic relationships during the exchange year. "It's the story," I said, too fast. "From homeroom. It's astronomy."

She took out one grey-white ball. When Mio ate her first qurt, her face collapsed like a tent in the wind. Kotone's didn't. She chewed slowly, frowning, the way she counts syllables. Then, very quietly, aloud:

"Salty. Sour." A pause. "…More."

She ate six. I counted. Nobody in Japan had ever eaten six.

"What did you wish for? On your tanzaku."

She turned her pencil twice, wrote, and held the note up for me to read.

On my paper wish

I wrote only one small word.

The wind can't read it.

I didn't guess. I had a secret of my own now, sitting in my chest like the stone in an apricot. Some words live with one person, and asking doesn't make them move.

At half past eight I sat on the bench outside the konbini with Daichi, who was eating his second dinner after practice: two rice balls, fried chicken and a carton of milk. The square smelt of wet asphalt and the sea.

My phone buzzed. Mio: a photo of the school bamboo at dusk, zoomed in on one strip of paper. Went up to read the high-school wishes. They're funnier. Can't read yours. Then the same photo with one word circled in red: Kotonening. Except this bit.

I turned my phone face down.

"Saturday's our first game," Daichi told his milk. "Nishi-Sagami Tech, in Hiratsuka." He was quiet for a whole rice ball, which for Daichi is a long time. "Shirahama hasn't won a summer game in eleven years, Sado. I was five."

"You'll win, Hoshino-kun," I said, because in Tashkent that is what you say.

"If we win, I'll tell the Iinchō."

"Tell her what?"

He stared at me, the second rice ball halfway to his mouth. "…You really can't read the air."

Then he looked up at the sky over the station, where there were no stars tonight, only cloud, and said it again, quietly, like a prayer.

"If we win."