The classroom door closed behind him and Rin kept walking.
Behind it, two voices — were saying things he had already decided not to hear. He understood, on some level, why they reacted the way they did. He even understood, with the particular self-awareness of someone who has lived through enough timelines to recognize patterns, that his handling of the situation had not been optimal. A simple explanation, offered at the right moment, would have cost him very little and spared everyone a significant amount of friction.
But the explanation would have required a longer conversation, and the longer conversation would have required a certain emotional availability he didn't have in the middle of a classroom with an audience, and so he had left, which was its own kind of answer and not a particularly good one.
I'll talk to Mai later, he reminded himself. I said I would. So I will.
He turned a corner and let the sounds of the building settle into the ordinary background texture of an institution carrying on its business without him.
He ended up in the library.
He always ended up in the library when he walked without a destination. He had never examined this tendency particularly closely, but it was consistent enough to have become something like a pattern, the way certain paths become worn into a landscape not because anyone decided to walk them but because the terrain simply makes them the path of least resistance. The school's library occupied a wing of the older building, the part that had been standing long enough to have developed opinions about itself, and it wore its age in the good way: high ceilings, wood that had deepened to a warm amber over decades, windows set at intervals that caught the afternoon light and distributed it evenly across the shelves like something that had been arranged by someone with a sense of proportion.
The door groaned as he pushed it open. It always groaned. He pushed it gently, which helped approximately nothing, and stepped inside.
Empty, as usual. The library during class hours was reliably, comfortably empty, which was the primary reason he kept arriving here without entirely meaning to. He moved through the entrance and into the main stacks, his footsteps quiet on the old floor, the smell of aged paper and wood polish doing something unremarkable and pleasant to the quality of the air.
He found a section he'd been working through intermittently and ran his finger along the spines, reading titles.
"My, my. Rin-kun. Shouldn't you be in class right now?"
Sumireko Sanshokuin stepped out from the far end of the shelving row with the comfortable ease of someone who had been there for a while and had known he was coming before he arrived. She was wearing her usual arrangement: the large, thick-framed glasses, the twin braids that sat at an angle no one under the age of sixty had worn sincerely in living memory, the long skirt that moved with the slightly dragging quality of fabric that had been chosen for concealment rather than aesthetics. She had her head tilted at the angle she used when she was amused by something.
Rin did not turn around.
"You're also missing class," he said.
Sumireko absorbed this without visible offense. "I asked first."
He pulled a book from the shelf, checked the index, slid it back. The silence between them was the comfortable kind, the kind that doesn't require filling. Sumireko had come around to stand behind him at a distance that was social rather than intrusive, and he was aware of her the way you are aware of something that has settled into a room without disrupting it.
"Did you come to see me?" she said, a note of playfulness in it, the tone of a question that isn't really a question.
Rin found the book he was looking for and pulled it free. "I didn't know you'd be here."
"And yet here we both are."
"The library is a public building."
"During class hours."
"Yes."
She made a small sound that was almost a laugh and wasn't quite. He heard her shift her weight slightly, and in the movement he caught the particular quality of someone who was making an effort to seem at ease and was mostly succeeding. He turned a few pages, not reading, thinking.
Then he said: "Hiding your real self while criticizing people for judging by appearances. Doesn't that strike you as a little inconsistent?"
The silence that followed had a completely different quality than the one before it.
Rin still had not turned around. He was looking at the page in front of him, though the words on it had stopped registering. Behind him, the small sounds that indicated Sumireko's presence — the faint shift of her skirt, the particular quality of her breathing — changed in a way that suggested the question had arrived somewhere it hadn't been invited.
"I'm not sure what you mean," she said. Her voice had taken on the careful, pleasant smoothness of someone improvising around a gap in their prepared remarks.
Rin turned a page. "The glasses are too thick to be functional. The braids haven't been fashionable since before either of us were born, and you wear them with the specific intention of making them look worse than they are. The skirt is three centimeters longer than the school's longest compliant hem. And the binding." He paused, giving the word exactly enough space. "That's uncomfortable enough that it affects your posture. You hold your shoulders differently when you've been wearing it for a few hours."
A beat.
"All of that is a considerable amount of work to put into looking like someone you're not."
The sound Sumireko made was not a word. It was the small, involuntary exhalation of someone who has been carrying something carefully for a long time and has just had a stranger walk up and name every piece of it with complete accuracy.
Her face, had Rin been looking, would have been remarkable. The warmth that had started somewhere around her collarbones had moved upward through her throat and arrived in her cheeks with the comprehensive, thorough commitment of color that only arrives when the body has stopped asking permission. The glasses. The braids. The skirt. Each one named, each one correct, and the last one — the binding, the specifically personal, specifically hidden last one — named with the same even, unself-conscious certainty as the others, as though it were simply an observation and not an intimate detail that she had never, not once, allowed anyone outside her immediate family to know existed.
How. The thought circled without landing. How does he know. He can't know. He's not supposed to know.
Her hand moved to the elastic at the end of one braid, a small, reflexive gesture. Her fingers closed around it.
She pulled.
The braid came loose, and then the other one, and the hair she had spent genuine effort making look worse than it was fell free around her shoulders in a long, dark wave, and the person who emerged from that careful arrangement of concealment was, simply, not the same person who had been standing there thirty seconds ago.
She stood very still for a moment, feeling the weight of her own hair against her back and the particular, exposed sensation of having been seen through something she had been building for a long time.
Rin turned a page.
He said nothing. He did not make anything of it, did not remark on it, did not turn around to observe the change. He simply stood at the bookshelf and read, giving the moment space to be whatever it needed to be, and the afternoon light continued its even distribution across the shelves as though nothing of particular significance had just occurred.
Which was, Sumireko thought, with a feeling she couldn't quite identify, either very rude or very kind.
She hadn't decided which yet.