Shiosai, Your Number One Reader

Study room B of the Shirahama Town Library is the size of a lift: a round table, four chairs, a window full of cicadas and a sign that says QUIET PLEASE, which Kotone has never needed in her life.

At two o'clock she was already there, sitting very straight, like someone at the dentist, with her phone face down on the table. When I sat, she turned it over and slid it across to me without a word.

Reincarnated as the Villainess of the Seventh Tide, I Swear to Protect the Silent Princess! by Kamome Rose.

I kept my face very still. I have never worked so hard at a face.

She reached over and scrolled. Under every chapter there were comments, and under every chapter one of them was from the same name: Shiosai. Long ones, short ones. Under chapter 97: I read this on the bus and missed my stop. Thank you. Under chapter 188: The knight knelt. I had to put my phone down and walk round the room.

"Shiosai," I said. "Like the anthology."

She nodded. Then, quietly, because it was only us, with her ears the colour of pickled plum:

"The Desert Knight is… a bit like you." A pause. "That's the embarrassing thing."

A bit like me. The Desert Knight could not read the wind, and in chapter 188 he knelt before the princess. I wanted very badly to know which part she meant.

My face did everything a face can do. Surprise. Delight. Terror. And then, because I knew exactly who had written the Desert Knight, and had promised on a staircase not to say, something like a man holding a very hot pan without a cloth.

The door opened. Fumika came in with her laptop under her arm, because in summer she writes where the air-conditioning is free, and stopped.

"Aliev-kun. Shirase-san."

She sat down anyway, because she had booked the room from half past two, and opened the laptop. It woke with a soft ping.

Kotone's phone buzzed on the table between us. The screen lit up: Kamome Rose replied to your comment.

Fumika's laptop said, brightly: New comment from Shiosai.

Nobody moved. Three people and a window of cicadas, frozen.

Fumika went white. Kotone went scarlet. I studied the ceiling, which had forty-eight tiles and one water stain in the shape of the Fergana Valley.

I heard a chair creak. When I looked down, Kotone was looking at Fumika's laptop, then at the ink stain on Fumika's middle finger, then at me and my ceiling. I watched her put it together: the bow in the corridor, the phone turned face down, my someone else's secret. Three lines. One poem.

Then she spoke to Fumika. Aloud. The first sentence I had ever heard her say to anyone but me.

"I'm… Shiosai. I've read every chapter. Twice."

Fumika sat down on the floor. Not on a chair; on the carpet, with the laptop in her lap, like a person whose legs have resigned.

"Princess Kotoha is…" she said. "You know she's…"

"I know."

"And you're not angry?"

Kotone thought about it, honestly, turning her pencil. "She's braver than me," she said. "I wanted to catch up."

"Twice," Fumika whispered. "All two hundred and twelve?"

"Ninety-seven three times."

Fumika laughed. It started as a hiccup and turned into a laugh and then into something wetter, and she laughed until she cried, sitting on the floor of study room B under the QUIET PLEASE sign. I gave her my handkerchief, because Buvi raised me properly. Kotone knelt down beside her.

Then Kotone looked up at me, and nodded once. That was all. But something in my chest that had been holding a hot pan since July could finally put it down.

By the time the town chime played "Yūyake Koyake" and the librarian knocked on the glass, they were "Fumika-chan" and "Kotone-chan". I was there for the whole thing and I still don't know how it happened. Girls, Daichi says, have a separate grammar.

Term two began on Monday the first of September with a biscuit tin.

"Seat lottery!" Kurata-sensei told me in English, shaking it. "Good luck, Sardor-kun!"

I drew the front row, centre, directly under the teacher's desk. "I can read every flashcard from here, Sensei," I told her, in Japanese.

For five months I had had the sea in the corner of my left eye, and a pale-blue note in the corner of my desk. Now I had the blackboard, the chalk tray and the back of Kurata-sensei's cardigan. I had lost the window, and the person beside it.

Kotone drew the window again. Daichi landed in the middle, between us, which was how our notes became a relay. From that day they travelled across three rows in his enormous hand, which he held out behind him with his eyes shut, to prove he wasn't reading them. He was reading them.

At lunch Fumika went to the Student Council Room and resigned as club-affairs secretary. She stayed class representative, because, she said, 2-B would collapse without her in a week. Minase-senpai accepted her resignation, she reported, with one raised eyebrow and the words "How interesting," which from him is practically a scream. At four she came into Room 3, knelt at the low table, and put a membership form in front of Kotone. In the box marked Motivation, in her small, ruled handwriting:

Article Twelve says

three members. I am the third.

This is not romance.

Hanzawa-sensei woke up in the corner, read it, said "Hohoho. Welcome, Tachibana-kun," and stamped it. Kotone opened the activity log on the windowsill, where in April she had written Members: 2, and wrote underneath: Members: 3.

Then Fumika opened a box. Inside was a cake with a large chocolate 3 on top. We made tea with the kettle that does not exist. Hanzawa-sensei, who had been asleep for most of the club's sixty-three years, stayed awake for two slices.

From Kotone's notebook — Sunday, 7 September

Three members.

I write it again because I like the shape of it. THREE MEMBERS. Fumika-chan's form is in the log, stamped. Hanzawa-sensei ate two slices of cake and fell asleep holding the fork like a pen.

Mizuki-senpai, I did it. (We did it.) (He did most of it.) (Don't tell him.)

Things I did this summer that I did not do last summer:

1. Said "un" in front of his little sister. (She screamed into a thermos. I respect her.)

2. Watched fireworks from the lighthouse with other people. Four more than usual.

3. Said a whole sentence to a girl in my class. It was the most embarrassing sentence of my life, and now she calls me Kotone-chan and sends me stickers of angry ducks.

About the fireworks.

Over the dark bay

hanabi opened and closed—

your 'I' left unsaid

He said "Kotone, I—". No "-san". Then the sky exploded and took the rest.

I have thought about the next word a thousand times. (Not an exaggeration. I counted on my fingers in the bath until the water went cold.)

I'm hungry? (He is always hungry.)

I'm leaving? (He is. March. Everyone knows.)

I'm—

And then he said he was glad he came to Japan. Which is a nice sentence. It is a very nice sentence. It is the kind of sentence you write on a postcard. I did not want a postcard.

Fumika-chan says Princess Kotoha will finally speak in chapter 220. She won't tell me what she says. She says I'll cry.

I am trying to beat her to it.

(I am in a race with a fictional princess. The princess is winning.)

He sits in the front row now. From the window I can see the back of his head and the piece of hair at the top that never lies down. Hoshino-kun carries our notes with his eyes shut. He says it is a matter of honour. He reads them. He cried at one.

On Friday the twelfth the tail of a typhoon was throwing rain sideways at the windows, and the South Building corridor smelt of floor polish and wet umbrellas. At quarter past eight, with my hair losing its daily fight against the damp, I passed the council notice board. A new sheet had appeared on it, printed and stamped with the council's gull seal. Autumn Club Review — Pre-check. Forty clubs in a table. I found ours with my finger, the way I used to find words in my first dictionary.

Literature Club: registered members 3; counted members 2. (Aliev S.: special auditing student — Art. 12-2.)

I read the sheet three times. I understood every word. It was the first time my Japanese was good enough to hurt me.