Temporary

At 8:16 I was still standing in front of the notice board, and a window opened in my head.

[Members: 3/3 → 2/3]

[Status: TEMPORARY]

[Error: player does not count]

I closed it. It opened again.

Fumika came round the corner with her umbrella folded exactly along its creases, saw my face, and then saw the sheet. She read it the way she reads everything, once, completely. The colour left her.

"Twelve-two," she said. "I knew the clause. I know every clause. I never…" She pressed her fingers to her forehead. "Your registration says 'special auditing student'. Every one-year exchange student is registered that way. The school's new system cross-checked the club lists this week, and nobody…" She stopped. "I should have seen it in April."

Then, in the middle of the South Building corridor, with first-years walking round her like water round a stone, Fumika Tachibana bowed to me. A real bow, from the waist, held.

"Aliev-kun. This is my failure. I apologise."

"It isn't your fault, Iinchō," I said. "You didn't write it."

I meant it, completely. That was the problem. She straightened up, and her face did something that told me I had made it worse.

In 2-B, Kotone was already at her window. She had passed the board too; her ears were not red but white, which I had never seen. We looked at each other across three rows, and for once no note came.

"Sado," Daichi whispered, leaning back so far his chair creaked. "What's twelve-two?"

"It means I'm furniture," I said. "Very nice furniture. Registered."

The Student Council Room is at the east end of the North Building's ground floor, and at four o'clock it smelt of whiteboard markers and rain. Six council members sat along one side of a long table. Minase sat at the head. In the middle of the table lay the blue binder, thick as a brick, with coloured tabs, like a holy book that had been to an office-supplies shop.

We sat on the other side: Kotone, Fumika and me. Kotone had not said a word all day, not even to me. She held her pencil case on her knees with both hands.

Minase opened the binder at a green tab and read aloud, in his clear, pleasant voice:

"Article 12, clause 2. Special auditing students may register and take part in all activities, but are not counted toward quorum." He looked up. "It was written in 1974, when the school admitted adults to audit classes in the evenings. It has never been applied to a club before." A pause. "But it is written."

In Tashkent, when a rule is stupid, you find the man who wrote it and drink tea with him until it changes. The man who wrote this one had probably been dead for years.

"The spirit of the regulations," Fumika began, "is clearly—Article… Article Zero—"

"Tachibana-san," said Minase, gently. "There is no Article Zero."

She sat back. I had never seen her lose an argument before. It was like watching a train stop between stations.

So I said it myself, plainly, because plain is the only way I know.

"I attend. I sign the log. I cook. I count."

Minase looked at me for a long moment. The rain ran down the window behind him.

"I agree with you, Aliev-kun," he said. "And I can't change it for you. Because everyone in this room knows how I feel about someone in your club." Along the table, six council members looked at the table. "If I bent a rule for this club, nobody would ever believe it was for the rule."

It was the most honest thing I had heard anyone say in that building, and I hated him for it a little, and I believed him completely.

Then Kotone moved.

She peeled a blue note off her pad. She wrote on it with her 2B pencil, pressing so hard I heard the lead, in letters so big they filled the whole square, and she slammed it down on the table in front of the binder, flat, with her palm.

HE COUNTS.

Not a haiku. Two words. She had broken her own rule.

The council stared at it. Fumika stared at it. I stared at the back of her hand, which was shaking, and did not move from the note.

"I know," Minase said softly.

Then he closed the binder. "The pre-check stands. The review is on Monday the twenty-seventh of October. Until then, the club needs one more counted member." He stood, and bowed to the three of us, lower than a president needs to.

At dinner I ate slowly, which I never do. Yukari looked at my bowl as if it had a temperature. "Sar-chan, you left rice. Are you ill?"

"Something happened at school," Mio said, without looking up from her phone. "He's chewing like the rice owes him money."

Tetsuo said nothing, and after dinner, in the shop, he gave me a wheel to true, and didn't ask, and that helped more than anything.

Later I wrote it on an orange note, and didn't give it to anybody.

Temporary guest—

in the council's thick binder

I am a footnote

At ten I called Buvi. It was six in Tashkent, and she was in the kitchen, her cast gone, three weeks early by the doctor's calendar and exactly on time by hers. Behind her the loaf sat on its shelf. I told her everything, in Uzbek, too fast.

She listened. Then she said it, the one she had given me at the door in April: "Mehmon otangdan ulug'." A guest is greater than your father. "You are a guest, Sardorjon. Guests are sacred. Nobody can take that away."

And for the first time in my life I was angry at a proverb.

"I don't want to be greater," I said. "I want to be counted."

Buvi was quiet for a long time. Six thousand kilometres of quiet. She turned her healed wrist slowly in the light, as if testing it.

"Then," she said, "be the kind of guest they can't count without."

Through the wall came Mio's voice, flat as a board: "Some of us are trying to sleep."

A minute later something slid under my door. A single Pocky, on its own, chocolate end first.

Monday was a holiday, Respect for the Aged Day, and I had respected mine badly on the phone. I walked the beach alone. The typhoon had gone north and left the sky scrubbed and the sand full of broken reeds, and the sea was still loud with it.

Far out on the breakwater, at the foot of the red lighthouse, a small dark figure sat with her knees up.

In June I would have run the whole length of the wall. I stood with my feet in the wet sand and counted the waves instead. At forty I went home. I was learning that there is a way of being near someone that doesn't involve being next to them.

On Tuesday there was a blue note on my front-row desk.

"Delivered at 7:50," Daichi told me, with the solemnity of a postman. "Did not read it. Much."

Autumn leaves fall, yes—

but the tree does not say they

were never its leaves

The tree does not say they were never its leaves. I understood it the first time. I read it the other times because I wanted to: in homeroom, and in first period, and in second period under my textbook, until Kurata-sensei asked me in English if I was all right, and I told her in Japanese that I was better than all right, which was the truth.

Fumika had a class representatives' meeting after school, so at four o'clock it was only the two of us in Room 3. Kotone was at the low table, writing; I had put the kettle on, which does not exist, and it was beginning to tick.

There was a knock on the open door.

Kaito Minase stood in the doorway. Alone. No fan club pretending to read the noticeboard at the end of the corridor, no council armband. Just a third-year in a white shirt, who had walked across the whole school to the Old Building. He stood on the wooden floor at the edge of the tatami, blue-toed indoor shoes together, and did not step up, the way you wait at the edge of somebody else's house.

"Third-years retire from clubs after summer," he said. "I'm free. I'll join." He looked at Kotone, then at me. "That makes three counted members."

The kettle ticked. Outside, the pines moved.

I answered before anyone else could. "No, thank you, senpai. We don't need your help."

Beside me, Kotone's pencil stopped moving.