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Chapter Text

Grace Carrow entered the dorms in her freshmen year of college the way a ruthless general— hardened and spattered with blood from the battlefields of a very expensive high school— might have gritted his teeth and walked into a war zone. She was tired before anything even happened, not expecting the slightest scrap of kindness.

Here’s the thing: Grace was not well-liked in high school. To be fair, she wasn’t trying to be, but a mixture of too-short hair, blunt attitude, and relentlessly stellar grades in math and science turned her into a mix of pariah and homework consultant. No one hit her or stole her things, but no one ever invited her to anything, either.

It was good that way. She liked it. She didn’t need anyone. Everyone in high school was an idiot. It wasn’t like she wanted to go to their parties and help them steal their parent’s overpriced liquor anyway. Grace could fill fifty rows of an Excel spreadsheet with justifications. In fact, deep in the night in her junior year, when her childhood bedroom had been particularly small and empty, dust gathering in the platinum-blond hair of a doll her mother had bought her for appearances only, she had.

She would spend her four years studying, which after all was the entire point of going to university. To her roommate, who was listed as A. Matsumoto, she would be coldly and professionally civil, because she wasn’t there to make friends.

That had been the plan, anyway. It was three weeks into classes, and A. Matsumoto had yet to make an appearance.

Grace knew they existed. Their stuff occupied a little over one half of the shoebox-sized double dorm room they occupied. She kept a mental catalog of their belongings, trying to deduce what kind of person they be.

Not because she cared about who they were as a person, obviously. That was none of her business. It was just in case they turned out to be a dick.

On the bottom bunk of their bunk bed: a comforter patterned rather childishly with sharks. Just inside the door: a pair of trendy-looking sneakers. Twined tightly around a pole on the bunk bed: a string of fairy lights, probably an electrical fire hazard. On the other desk, shoved up against the far wall: an expensive pair of headphones, a stick of liquid eyeliner in ash brown, the Iliad, Genji Monogatari, every single volume of Narnia, something called the Hyakunin Isshu, the Man’yoshu, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, 100 Best American Poets, Romance of Three Kingdoms in three different languages, two of which Grace couldn’t tell apart, Les Miserables in English, and a book in Japanese which was apparently about how to become an Instagram influencer.

Just based on the Instagram influencer one, Grace resolved to avoid them at all costs.

It actually wasn’t hard. Grace woke up early to walk to her 8 AM class (MATH 25: Ordinary Differential Equations), and their bed was slept in but empty. She came back after a mildly unsatisfying dinner in the dining hall, and the only sign that anyone else had ever been there was that Genji or Voyage of the Dawn Treader would be somewhere else with a neon-bright highlighter wedged in a different place between the pages.

The only explanation was that they slept while Grace was in class, and spent the entire night out. Therefore, they were the sort of person Grace thought very little of, the sort of person who frittered away tens of thousands of dollars on an education only to spend it doing boring things, like getting drunk.

If any part of her was curious about who they might be, it was the part that had desiccated long ago in high school and never quite revived, a faulty experiment, a moment of weakness, a lonely child who read Voyage of the Dawn Treader under a blanket with a flashlight, whose existence— like a quantum particle, there until someone tried to look at her— could not be proven at all.

Grace woke in the middle of the night to an ominous rattling and thought, oh God, it’s those idiots next door again. I get that it’s a natural biological process, but can’t they have sex more quietly?

The rattling got louder and more pointed. Grace froze under her secondhand comforter and thought uncomfortably that it might be an animal. What did you do if a raccoon got in your dorm? Did you call 911? Did you try to catch the raccoon? Did you call an RA? Would the RA try to catch the raccoon?

She tried to picture her infinitely calm and poised RA Mori trying to catch a raccoon. Somehow, she couldn’t quite imagine it.

In the general vicinity of the window, a distinctly human voice said very crisply and precisely: “Well, fuck.”

It was a screwed-over fuck, not a sexy fuck. The rattling grew sharper and sharper, and then there was a violent crack, and a dark shape spilled in through the window. Grace dove for her phone and turned the flashlight on.

It was not a raccoon. It was an entire man, dressed stylishly in black, picking bits of tree out of his hair. He looked up into the silver light, lips parted, pupils dilating. For a brief, breathless moment, he was something ethereal, phone light glimmering like starlight in his soft black hair, face perfectly sculpted from porcelain, dark eyes alive with light and shock that hadn’t yet turned into horror.

What do you do when you find a strange man in your dorm? Oh, right. Grace screamed.

The intruder screamed back. Someone in the next dorm over banged heavily on the wall and shouted incoherently. Tapering off into a half-hearted wail, Grace checked the time on her phone: it was just after three in the morning.

The stranger stopped screaming and started apologizing, with an apparently reflexive apologetic grin, through the wall. “So sorry, won’t happen again!” Then, to Grace, “Please don’t kill me.”

“Likewise,” Grace hissed. “I have mace.”

“Christ. In your bed with you?” he asked, fascinated. “Wait, that doesn’t matter. Please don’t mace me. I know karate.”

“Do you really?” Grace said.

“Yes. I’m a black belt. I could, uh… do the thing in Kung Fu Panda where he takes the guy down with a pair of chopsticks?”

“Isn’t that kung fu?”

“The technique was carried over from China to Japan during the Sengoku period, by an exiled poet who gained recognition under famed warlord Oda Nobunaga,” he said, arranging his face into a confident smile that only wavered a little. "It's not well-known, but it's chronicled in his diary, which is stored in the collections of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo."

“You can come up with that on the spot, but the best lie you have for a martial arts technique you know is from Kung Fu Panda? ”

He finally deflated. “Yes. Please don’t mace me.”

“What are you doing in here, anyway?”

“I live here,” he said with dignity. “What are you doing here?”

“You don’t live here, I live here.”

“Did I get the wrong window? Isn’t this 225?”

“Yes, it is, but— wait. Are you A. Matsumoto ?”

“Who else would I be?”

“I assumed you were some kind of building-scaling serial killer, but that is statistically unlikely.”

“I would hate to be statistically unlikely,” he said gravely, watching her over the tops of his gold-rimmed glasses.

“But you’re a man.”

“More or less,” Matsumoto said.

“What?”
He shrugged. “My pronouns are written on the whiteboard next to the door. So is my name, by the way, in case you fancy calling me something other than A. Matsumoto.”

“No they’re not, I would have noticed.”

Matsumoto opened the door, letting in a sliver of gold light from the hallway outside. Grace picked herself out of her bed, humiliated in her wrinkled, faded Hello Kitty pajamas, clambered down the ladder, and peered at the whiteboard outside the door.

An artificially green marker clung magnetically to the whiteboard over a palimpsest of past student’s names. The latest addition was Akira, he/they, with an elegant little Copperplate tail. He had carefully left her room to write her name next to his.

“I concede the point,” she said.

“Nice pajamas,” he said.

She wondered what he could possibly mean by that. Was it an insult? She was too tired to tell. Even the ordinary fluorescent lights had taken on an oily, unreal 3-am quality.

“What?” she said.

“I mean, who doesn’t like Sanrio?”

“ What? Look, never mind. I still don’t get why you’re in my room.”

“Well, what did you put down as your gender when you applied to college?” Matsumoto— no, Akira— said. 

It was unfair of him to sound so reasonable when he was so clearly a fundamentally unreasonable person, clawing his way through second-story windows at three in the morning and reading C.S. Lewis as a fully grown adult. Grace rubbed her eyes.

“I don’t remember,” she said. “I don’t know why I should have told them anything. I’m here to study physics and acquire a base of knowledge in elementary calculus, photonics, and quantum mechanics. What’s my gender got to do with that?”

“Does that mean you filled in all the forms with ‘prefer not to say?’”

“Maybe. Why?”

“You’re right in that people are usually placed in dormitory housing with people of the same gender,” he said. “But since according to their paperwork, you’re neither a man or a woman, you got randomly assigned to the weird gender dorms. Seriously though, I’ve met everyone on this floor but you, and the only one who’s both straight and cis is Jason. But he’s chill. He plays League of Legends , but he’s, like, cool about it.”

“You’ve met everyone on this floor? ”

“What, you haven’t?” He started ticking people off on his fingers. “There’s Tasha, James, Josie, Thaniel, Ana, Emerson, Kay, Jason, Thabani, Oscar, Ren, Jiahui, our nice-scary RA Pepper, and our regular-scary RA Mori. Our families know each other, but I still don’t know his first name. I don’t think he has one.”

“How the hell do you know all that?”

“There was an orientation thing. We played Uno. There was free pizza.”

Grace remembered standing in the corner of a grimy common room, clutching a free plastic cup of Sprite and wondering if these people knew each other from high school, with how easily they slotted into each other, like a deck of cards. She remembered a knot of people, all orbiting like celestial bodies, satellites freshly chipped off the central planet, who wore round golden glasses and a brilliant, easy smile. Meanwhile, she had faded into the background. She doubted anyone had noticed she was there.

“Speaking of, you were there too, weren’t you? Over in the corner, wearing jeans and a red sweater, by the fake plant and the vending machine.”

“Oh,” Grace said, thrown.

“Anyways,” Akira said, delicately removing a bundle of pine needles from his shirt and tossing them over his shoulder and back out the window. “Let’s try this again. I promise I’m usually very charming, but it’s three in the morning and I’ve just had not one but two very close brushes with the cold specter of Death. I’m Akira, what’s your name?”

Stop talking to me and let me go to sleep, it’s nearly four in the morning, are you out of your mind? Grace started to say, but then a wire in her brain short-circuited and even though she could see what he was doing, the way he was deliberately engineering a bright smile and firing it at her over his outstretched hand, it started to work.

“Grace,” she said, shaking his hand. Even though he had just been out in the chilly October fog, his palm was warm.

“Pepper tells me you study physics. Tested into sophomore calculus classes, apparently, with a set of near-perfect AP scores. Very impressive.”

Grace felt her traitor face heat up. She didn’t get flustered easily, but when she did, it was humiliatingly obvious. In her defense, it was three in the morning. They could even round up to four.

“And you’re, what, some kind of English major?”

“That’s right,” he said. “My minor is linguistics.”

“What do you think you’re going to do with an English major and a linguistics minor?”

Her tone was insulting, but he glowed. Little digs pinged right off him. It was the first time in years that she’d had a conversation while grumpy and tired without being aware of a need to hold back.

“Enrich the world and enhance the human experience with my lyrical and elegant translations of medieval Japanese poetry, obviously.”

“Oh, of course. I should have guessed you wanted to enhance the world with medieval poetry.” She had meant it sarcastically, but it ended up sounding faintly genuine. After all, she was tired.

“And when you’re a multi-millionaire with your world-strangling tech company, it’ll be my writing making your miserable filthy-rich life worth living,” he said, quite cheerfully.

“I’ll hold you to that.”

“If it doesn’t work, you can always console yourself by rolling around in your piles of money.”

“Like Scrooge McDuck.”

He snorted. Weirdly, when his face scrunched up, it finally hit Grace that he was handsome. Scientifically speaking, that was. If handsome was a collection of variables, he had them all, with his smooth skin gilded at the edges, the mole placed on his cheek as if designed to draw attention to his bright eyes, the soft hair. The dimples. In that exact moment, she could have entered them all into a spreadsheet without stopping to think.

 “Just like Scrooge McDuck,” he said.

“It’s late,” she said, because she didn’t know how to arrange her face. She wasn’t sure what she was thinking, exactly, but she knew she didn’t want him to find out.

“Yeah, we should get to bed. You’ve got morning classes and all.”

She didn’t ask him how he knew. “Can I turn my phone flashlight off now?”

“Yeah. Wait, I still need to find my pajamas. Can I turn the string lights on?”

They were gentler than the overhead fluorescent lights. “Go for it.”

A golden glow suffused the room. Akira had a trick of stepping softly around the room like a cat, the only sounds a reassuring rustling and their low breath. It was no wonder she hadn’t seen him before.

“Matsumoto?” she said, sitting down in her bed and chickening out of his first name at the last possible second.

“Carrow?”

“Why did you try to climb in through the window?”

“Lost my ID in the woods trying to get back from a party. Which was also in the woods. Don’t laugh, it’s very serious. I don’t know how I’m going to get into the dining hall tomorrow.”

“You know you can just pay with regular cash.”

“Oh, really? Thank God. I’m saved.”

There was a clink as he removed his toothbrush from the mug sitting on his desk, and then the door gently clicked and locked behind him. In his wake, he left the warm glow of the fairy lights and a clean, cold forest smell, made almost tangible by a warm undercurrent of liquor, which had been clinging to his clothes. In another context, it would have been cloying or sharp, but the smell of fallen leaves softened it, made it nearly unplaceable.

Grace felt something in her chest melt oddly for the first time since she had been very young.

“I don’t want to be a world-strangling tech millionaire,” she said, as the door clicked back open and she heard the feathery sounds of Akira pulling back the covers of his bed.

“Probably for the best.” The bunk bed creaked. “What do you want, then?”

“Promise never to bring this conversation up again.”

“You have my word. What happens at three fifty-six in the morning stays there.”

“I just want to get to know the world,” she said. “It’s beautiful because it’s so intricate in the way it’s made. Infinitely many particles, interacting in infinitely many tiny bright collisions at every possible moment, too small even for the units of time to be something we can sense. And for hundred years, we’ve been in the process of mapping it all out. I just want to be a part of that process.”

“Carrow,” he said, sleepily, “in another life, I think you might have been a poet.”

Fully awake, she might have been insulted. Now, she could almost see it: the last time around, or the next, she would be the poet and Akira would be the scientist, like changing steps in a dance. They were on the edge of understanding another perfectly. One more moment, and she would have known him her whole life.

It was too late: she was already falling asleep, and in the morning, she would remember the conversation only vaguely, and he would already be gone.

Chapter Text

The next day, very little changed, and the next, except that Grace’s lab partner was steadily flaking out on her. It was a source of constant, low-grade stress, like background radiation. She started biting her fingernails again.

Tossing aside her math homework, she sent them a very pointedly polite DM on Instagram, on the account she only used to talk to people in group projects. Annoyingly, her lab partner hadn’t given her a regular phone number. Hello! Just wondering if we might connect sometime soon re: the report that’s due Tuesday, October 16th. Thanks in advance!

No response. Grace pictured the version of herself that said wondering if we might connect sometime, and then pictured smashing her head in with a sledgehammer. A page of unsolved integrals stared back at her from the desk, stubbornly refusing to solve themselves.

She raised her head and stared at the other side of the room. The only outcome of their brief meeting a few days ago was that Akira now apparently felt comfortable to scatter his belongings across their shared space. His fleece-lined jacket was draped haphazardly across a corner of her desk. It looked soft, and also a little like it smelled like him.

This irritated her so much that she picked it up, folded it, and placed it on his desk, along with various other Akira-themed detritus that had accumulated on her side of the room: three well-kept paperbacks, a handout on which parts of your mouth various sounds came from, and a William Blake poem.

She pulled a roll of masking tape out of her backpack, ripped off the longest strip she could, and used it to neatly divide the room into two equal halves. Grace might have to live in a shoebox with a lunatic, but that didn’t mean she had to tolerate the lunatic’s stuff in her half of the shoebox.

The next day, everything Matsumoto owned was carefully arranged on his side of the tape, except for a neon-pink post-it note, which had been stuck neatly across the line. Grace picked it up.

Does this mean I can only sleep in the top half of my bed?

—A.M.

Grace considered this. The tape— if it kept going that far— would indeed have bisected the bunk bed inconveniently down the middle.

No, she wrote, on a yellow post-it. Then, thoughtfully, But stop sticking post-its to the tape. They make it look messy.

The next day, there was a response, written on a candy-pink piece of Hello Kitty stationery, stuck to the line with a piece of Scotch tape.

Okay.

Following the letter of a law but not the spirit was, in Grace’s opinion, objectively funny. She tore all the notes down, because they did make the room look messy.

She still kept them, though.

Her phone pinged with a text from her mother. She opened it, mood souring. Although she hadn’t realized the notes had made her particularly happy, they had.

The text read, How’s the experiment going?

‘The experiment’ was how Grace’s mother referred to her major and the fact that she was attending a public research university at all instead of a private women’s religious college. Even in text, the doubt came across.

She deleted the message and dropped her head in her hands. Then a message came from her lab partner, asking what they had to do, because of course her lab partner hadn’t read the syllabus. Still. Things were looking up.

She ran across Akira in person, only once, on her way to class. As usual, he was surrounded by a crowd of laughing people, mostly men. One of them brushed against her shoulder, forcing her to step into the street.

“Oh, sorry,” he said without looking at her, already moving on.

Normally, she would have been reasonably pissed, but her attention was seized by Akira. In the gold autumn sunlight, he was luminous. His eyes weren’t completely black; in strong light, like slanting afternoon sun or a silvery phone flashlight, they rusted into the color of strong red tea.

He spends every night out. How is he never hungover? she thought. But that was just the way he was. Things that would have hurt a normal person, like other people’s opinions, medical fact, and 80 proof vodka, bounced uselessly off him.

It was a thought that would become ironic, later.

Autumn slowly tipped closer and closer to winter. Grace thanked God her parents had given her permission to stay in the dorms over Thanksgiving, although the dining halls were closed. She would just have to live on takeout and instant ramen.

Akira was also not going to see his family, but this was because he was jetsetting off to Belize with a girl from his linguistics class. They weren’t dating, as far as anyone could tell. Grace chalked it up to his constant need to charm or be charmed. Typical.

One day before break, she encountered him in the common room, keeping watch.

“Guys, shut up,” he called over his shoulder. “Wait, never mind. It’s just Carrow.”

“Who’s Carrow?” someone Grace vaguely recognized as living on their floor.

“Grace.”

“ Oh. Hey, Akira, why do you call your roommate by her first name? It’s weird. It's like you’re some kind of repressed Victorian Englishman.”

“She did it to me first, so really, the repressed Victorian Englishman in this situation is Carrow. Left to right, Thabani, Josie, Emerson,” he added in an undertone.

“Who says I forgot their names?”

Akira gave her a look.

“Oh, all right. Thank you,” she said back quietly.

“I stand by Halloween,” Josie said.

“Way too soon. That’s in like a week. They’re too repressed, you’re going to lose all your money,” Thabani said, pushing their glasses up their nose. “Hey, Grace, you should get in on this. When do you think?”

“Oh, uh, I have to get going, I have a lab report due soon.”

“You do, but you’ve finished your part and now you’re just waiting on your lab partner,” Akira said, patting the arm of the couch where he was perched. “Come on. Sit.”

“How the hell do you know that?”

“From estimating your stress levels. If you actually still had work to do, you wouldn’t be checking your phone every thirty seconds. Come on, Carrow, it’ll do you good. One can’t live on laboratory fumes alone. You also need to gamble once in a while.”

“Fine,” she said, dropping into place next to him. He was wearing the fleece-lined jacket that had bothered her so much when it was hanging off her desk. He was also wearing an earring: a tiny golden swallow, twirling on a chain. Pressed against her thigh, his leg was warm. “What are we betting on?”

“When Thaniel is going to get together with Mori,” Thabani said decisively.

“Who?” Grace said.

“The guy who keeps sneaking into the lounge next to the dining hall to play the piano at bizarre hours and our terrifying hacker RA. Do try to keep up, Carrow.”

Grace knew of Mori by reputation. He was one of the best programmers in the entire university, mysterious winner of no fewer than four robotics competitions, and the owner of a small soft-bodied octopus robot named Katsu, who had once scared the living daylights out of her by wriggling through a small rip in the screen of their window and flopping leggily onto her comforter.

Outside of Mori’s door, he had a whiteboard with his surname, pronouns, and office hours, because those were a thing RAs had in their building, like they were professors of How Not To Set The Building On Fire. There was also a small box of other people’s socks, because Katsu slipped through mouseholes and windows to steal them. Like a real octopus, he could squeeze through holes that were fractions of his body size.

Every time Grace passed Mori in the halls, she felt a twinge of jealousy. He was the sort of person who effortlessly excelled, who saw the things no one else seemed to see. In high school, that had been her.

“Oh,” she said. “Wait, when , not if?”

“It used to be if. And then…”

Josie flapped her hand at the back of the room. It contained a keyboard piano, rather old and covered in scratches, with an iridescent green dollar-store Christmas bow stuck to it.

“What’s that?”

“Keyboard.”

“I know that, Matsumoto, I have eyes.”

“Technically it belongs to the building, but a week ago, it was as broken as it is possible for an instrument to be. Who has the technical know-how to fix an electronic keyboard with nothing but wits and a screwdriver? Who semi-secretly yearns to play piano?”

“How do you even know that’s a romantic gesture?” Grace said.

“It's breathtakingly romantic. Just because your soul is made of wet cardboard and unsolved integrals, Carrow, doesn’t mean the rest of us work the same way.”

She kicked him.

“Ouch,” he said, with great dignity. “Oh, oops, code red— never mind, it’s Pepper. Hello, Pepper.”

“What are you all up to?” Pepper said.

“Openly speculating on your coworker’s romantic life,” Akira said.

“Oh, all right, carry on.”

“I want someone to do that for me,” Josie sighed.

"Openly speculate on your romantic life?" Akira said.

"No, just that kind of gesture."

“Do you play an instrument?” Akira said.

“Nah, but it’s the vibes, you know?” she said. “That said, I still have my stupid sister’s electric guitar, ‘cause she’s too cheap to pay for a storage unit.”

“I played bass in high school,” Thabani said.

The next words out of Akira’s mouth were so predictable, Grace thought they might actually have been inevitable.

“We should start a band,” he said.

“What?”

“It’ll be genius. Thaniel on keyboard, Pepper on drums.”

“I do like hitting things,” Pepper said thoughtfully.

“Mori on synth or something similarly computery. I’m so smart, this is a brilliant idea. Me on Josie’s sister’s electric guitar. Grace—”

“I can’t sing,” she said repressively.

“ I can sing,” Akira said. “You can play the triangle.”

“Sounds good,” Mori said. “When’s practice?”

Akira fell backwards off the arm of the couch and scrambled to his feet. “What are you doing here? How long have you been there?”

Mori lifted his laptop. The fans hummed thoughtfully. It was unadorned, except for a little sticker with the University of Tokyo’s gingko leaf logo. Rumor had it, he had a job lined up there already, although he seemed to be dragging his feet on accepting it.

“The wifi is better out here. I have a project due tonight,” he said.

“Oh, for sure, naturally,” Akira said, higher-pitched than normal.

“Hey, Joy,” Pepper said, moving over to make room for him on the arm of her armchair.

He perched there, very gracefully, like a cat, balancing his laptop on his lap and typing without looking at the keys. It was crunching through a complicated simulation. The grind of the fans made it sound like an engine.

Grace made eye contact with Akira and mouthed, Joy?

Maybe it’s ironic, Akira mouthed back.

“Are we really starting a band?”

“Why not?” Mori said.

“Josie, let me borrow your sister’s guitar,” Akira said.

“Sure. It’ll probably piss her off,” Josie said cheerfully. “It’s hot pink, though.”

“I could rock a hot pink guitar.”

Josie opened her mouth, but Grace cut in with, “I know. Don’t agree, though. Matsumoto doesn't need their ego inflated further.”

“Do you think I’d look good with a hot pink guitar, Carrow?”

“In your dreams.” She did, but he didn't need to know that.

“Oh, everyone’s here,” Thaniel said, sticking his head around the wall. He caught sight of the repaired keyboard. “ Oh. ”

“Why don’t you check and see if it works?” Mori said.

“It better. We’re starting a band and you’re in it,” Akira said.

“I’m not…” Thaniel looked unsure. “I haven’t played in front of other people in a long time.”

“You have, actually. Scary tech genius Mori-sama lurks on the bench outside the lounge doing his homework whenever you play, ohgodI’msorrypleasedon’tevictme,” Akira said, without stopping to breathe.

“Yeah, we don’t actually have the power to do that,” Takiko said, examining her nails, which were painted black.

“Neat,” Akira said.

Creakily, like a machine that had rusted into place, Thaniel sat down at the piano. His hands hovered over the keys. Grace saw Akira look at him, see the hesitation, and then deliberately move the conversation along to take the attention off him. Thaniel glided through scales as easily as a swan slipping through water.

“So, Pepper, why do you call him Joy?”

“It’s the direct English translation of his name,” Takiko said.

“Oh, really? I thought his name meant woods. Like a Japanese Elle Woods. Ha, I’ve always wondered why a weird genius like him ended up at a state school instead of an Ivy. It’d be pretty funny if he was chasing after someone.”

“Yes,” Mori said. Grace followed his gaze. Thaniel had segued neatly from scales to Ode to Joy. “Hilarious.”

“Can you imagine, though? They’d have to be someone really amazing,” Akira continued. “I can’t picture it.”

“It’s not actually Woods. It’s the other one,” Pepper said.

“Oh, right, fur-value.”

“Or Featherworth.”

“Nice. Fancy. Stylish,” Akira said. “Wait, does that mean Joy is his first name? How do you know that?”

“Oh,” Pepper said, still examining the chips in her nail polish. “We used to date.”

Thaniel missed a note. The keyboard clanged oddly. He moved on quickly and smoothly, without a single flicker in the expression on his face.

“Didn’t work out. Now we’re still friends,” Pepper said.

“Mostly it didn’t work out because she was pining for the lovely person who is now her long-distance girlfriend,” Mori said, without looking up from his laptop. 

“Ooh, star-crossed romance.”

“Lots of that going around,” Pepper said pointedly.

Mori wrinkled his nose at her.

“Wait,” Akira said. “If Mori is Featherworth, what am I? The best I can come up with is Pine Origin.”

The conversation moved on, awash in piano music. Grace leaned into Matsumoto and listened to him talk animatedly about translating names so that they sounded like fancy British aristocrats. Like this, she could easily believe he had a beautiful singing voice. While he was speaking, it was in the room with them, invisible, just around the corner.

Grace had no illusions about it. It wasn’t real belonging. Someday soon, the other shoe would drop. But for the time being, she had to admit to herself that Akira had been right. The stress was manageable, held at bay by soft music and conversation and something that, if it wasn’t friendship, was at least something warm.

Chapter Text

Grace’s lab partner ghosted her completely.

Everything started more or less fine. They divided the work via Instagram DMs. Grace would have preferred to be emailed properly, or texted, or at least messaged on Discord, which was a decent and suitable platform for group projects, but it was tolerable. Grace occasionally messaged her for updates in her chirpy customer-service tone: Hi! I hope your section of the report is going well. I don’t mean to nag, but have you gotten the data for Part B yet?

And her lab partner would respond with something like yea all good.

Which wasn’t encouraging, but what was Grace supposed to do? Find out where she lived and drag her to the physics laboratory by her hair? It wasn’t like she wasn’t tempted, but she was pretty sure that was illegal.

That sense of dread haunted her as she made an appointment to meet in the library, sat at a table on the first floor, and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

And watched bruised leaves spiral down from the sycamore tree outside, collecting in drifts like snow. Dusk seeped up from the earth. A light fog rose, twining its fingers through the branches and winding them around the streetlights, which grew pale halos.

It was becoming increasingly clear that the lab partner was never going to show, even though Grace had reminded her three times, and even though the report was due the next morning. In short, she was screwed.

Like a jilted date, Grace cycled miserably through incandescent rage and dull resignation. All group projects were an exercise in proving the two most important laws of physics. First, Murphy’s Law, that everything that could go wrong definitely would. Second— something Grace had believed since childhood— that people were, fundamentally, self-serving assholes.

It was nearly midnight when she began numbly and wearily packing her things back into her backpack. She was going to fail the assignment. Due to an ancient law that existed to thin the ranks of wannabe engineering students, this meant she would also fail the class. And then, her parents…

She shut the door firmly on that thought and hoisted her backpack over her shoulder. The library was nearly empty, but— just her luck— as soon as she stepped out the door, she smacked straight into someone, ghostly in the blue light of a phone screen.

It was Akira. She blinked up at him, temporarily shaken out of her bad mood. The screen of his phone made bright rectangles in the lenses of his glasses.

“What are you doing here?”

He shrugged. “One of my friends has been working in the library for ages. I decided to wait for her.”

Probably one of his infinite supply of admirers. Grace’s mood soured again instantly.

“You’d better go see her, then,” she said, gripping her backpack. “I would hate for her to be deprived of your company.”

“She’s not,” Akira said. “She also happens to be my roommate.”

“Oh,” Grace said, thrown. “What would you have done if I’d decided to stay in there all night?”

“Died of hypothermia with your name on my lips.” He smiled at her scowl. “Just kidding, I knew you were going to come out soon. You go to sleep at nine-thirty on the dot like some kind of elderly lady.”

“To what do I own the honor, then?”

“You weren’t in the dorms. It’s like midnight, I was getting kind of worried. Also, it looks like rain.”

“What if I had been out for the night, what then?” Grace said.

“Doing what?” Akira scoffed.
That rankled. “Having marathon sex with my hot mathematician boyfriend.”

Akira’s face went too still, and then he laughed, very lightly, but with an edge to it. “What kind of boyfriend would put up with you?”

There was a pause. It didn’t sting like the implication that there was nothing that Grace could possibly be doing on a Friday night besides sitting in the library, abandoned. Unlike a finished lab report or an interesting life, Grace didn’t actually need or want a boyfriend. But it was weird to watch Akira get mean, like sticking your hand into ice water when you expected a hot bath, especially since his effortlessly polished tone of voice stayed the exact same.

“Sorry,” he said almost immediately afterwards. “Sorry. That was— that was a stupid thing to say. I don’t know where that came from. It’s been a long day.”

She wondered what a long day looked like to Akira. The sun patch he napped in moving onto the floor, maybe, or the library taking too long on an inter-library loan on a book by his latest obscure dead poet idol.

“It’s okay,” she said.

“I’ll make it up to you. I’ll be your wingman. We’ll find you ten mathematician boyfriends.”

“That’s too many,” Grace deadpanned. “I only want five.”

“Why mathematicians, anyway?”

“Because I dream of pillow talk that involves Fourier transforms,” Grace said. She kicked a rock. “No. It’s just, I’m not pretty or good at talking, but I know how to do math. It’s like, what else am I good for?”

“Carrow. Do you think romance is about being able to recite the same dry academic principles?”

“Well, shared interests are—”

“You do realize that would limit my dating pool to people who can quote Ono no Komachi, right? Also that it’d rule like ninety-nine percent of the United States right out.”

“I have heard romance is about having things in common,” Grace said.

“Nah,” Akira said. “I’d like to think it’s more about meeting in the middle.”

“Huh.”

A light rain picked up, pattering invisibly on the fallen leaves. Akira conjured an umbrella: transparent as a soap bubble, with goldfish swimming lazily in a circle around the edge. The raindrops on the plastic sounded like fingertips tapping out a beat.

Now that Akira wasn’t actively talking, the train of thought Grace had cut off started to finish itself.

I’m going to fail this class. My parents will declare the experiment a failure. I’ll have to transfer to a private religious college where the point isn’t learning anything, it’s getting ready to be a wife, because my only alternative will be doing the same thing at home and not learning anything at all.

She hugged her elbows, watching unshed tears blur the brocade pattern of autumn leaves on the path.

I’ll never be a scientist.

I’ll move back in with my parents. I’ll watch my entire life get smaller and smaller until they wear me down enough to make me forget I ever wanted anything different.

“We’re here,” Akira said. “Hey, do you have your student ID?”

Grace swiped hers through the slot in the door to let them in. “Where’s yours?”

“Dunno.”

“Is it still lost in the woods? I thought you got a new one.”

“I did. It’s missing too. Every time I go out at night, I swear…”

“You really ought to be more careful.”

Thaniel was playing the keyboard in the common room. It was a song she had never heard before, gentle and bright. Akira tipped his head to one side to listen and grinned at her with half-lidded eyes.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said.

“So,” Akira said, sitting on his shark comforter and tossing the book that was on his bed at his desk. “What’s been bothering you this whole time?”

“What?”

“Why are you upset? What were you doing in the library?”

Grace opened her mouth to complain about her lab partner and burst into tears.

She didn’t see it coming, or even recognize that she was about to get emotional. She just opened her mouth to say my fucking lab partner won’t do her work, but no sound came out of her mouth, and hot tears spilled down her chin.

Akira’s eyes widened.

“My lab partner,” Grace said, mopping at her eyes with her sleeve. The tears wouldn’t stop. “My, my lab partner— my lab partner stood me up. And the report is due tomorrow morning, and there’s nothing that I can do.”

“That’s—” Akira said, getting back up.

He stopped just shy of touching her. They were on opposite sides of the masking-tape line on the greasy carpet of the dorm, the line between art and science, between a decent well-rounded person with friends and whatever the hell Grace was supposed to be these days. It was a line that would probably never be crossed.

“And I’m going to fail the assignment, which means I’m going to fail the class, because if you fail one of the labs you fail everything.”

“That doesn’t seem fair.”

“It’s the way things are! And I can’t— can’t help but feel like it’s my fault for being so stupid!”

“You’re not stupid, Grace, it’s just one class. You don’t have to pass every class in your life,” Akira said.

“I do! If I can’t pass this class, I’m not going to graduate! My parents said they’ll stop paying for me to go here, and I— I— if I don’t have this, then what do I have? What do I even have? I don’t have any friends and even my own parents don’t fucking like me, if I’m not smart then what am I for?”

“Okay,” Akira said. “Okay.”

He reached over the masking-tape line, grabbed her wrists, and slowly brought her hands down from her face. His thumbs rubbed her wrists, back and forth. Over the gold rims of his glasses, his eyes met hers, dark brown and reflecting the firefly light from the string lights, more serious than she’d ever seen him.

“I know what we’re going to do,” he said.

It was said with so much conviction that she actually stopped crying to stare at him. “What?”

“We’re going to get shitfaced and sing karaoke.”

“What?”

“Actually, we’re not actually going to get shitfaced. You are going to consume however much alcohol it takes for you to have fun in my company, and we are going to go out and have fun. If we leave in ten minutes, we can make the next bus. Also, for what it’s worth, your parents sound like insufferable assholes.”

Grace was startled into a choking laugh.

“For the record part two, I don’t actually think there’s nothing you can do. There’s resources specifically for when your parents start refusing to pay for your college. There’s scholarships. You can get Thaniel to help you fill out the FAFSA. But there’s nothing specifically you can do right this exact moment, so we’re going out. Put on the nicest thing you own.”

“O-okay.” Mechanically, because there was nothing else she could think to do, Grace started rifling through her wardrobe. “Why karaoke?”

“Because I’ve been wanting to do karaoke lately. Also, because you will feel a lot better if you do something that forces you to remember that you’re a normal person. Normal people are allowed to screw up and sing badly and worry about the future. Those are actually the hallmarks of being a normal person.”

He turned his back and drew the blinds as Grace wriggled into a lint-speckled cocktail dress her parents had bought for her for some party. She tugged at it, trying unsuccessfully to get rid of the wrinkles. It was an unfortunate shade of green.

“What if I don’t want to be a normal person?”

“I’m sure you’d be a perfect report-writing robot if you had the choice, Carrow, but you were born in this world, so now you’re cursed to live in it. That’s the nicest thing you own? No, never mind, let’s just roll.”

He scrabbled for his phone and an eyeliner pen on his desk and tossed them both into his bag. The swallow earring swayed like a real swallow, catching the light and flashing.

“Wait, are we really—”

“Yeah. Game face, let’s go. Yes? You can say no.”

“Yes,” Grace said, and she let him drag her out the door.

It was Friday night. The bus heading off campus was packed, the crowd suffused with conflicting smells of perfume and body spray. Because Akira probably had something wrong with him, he did his eyeliner standing up with his phone camera while the bus was moving. Grace watched him, fascinated, waiting for him to stab himself in the eye when the bus screeched to a stop. He never did. Nothing seemed to ever go wrong for him.

He led her out into a bustling street, where bars— the only places still open, except for a vintage chrome 24-hour diner— cracked open periodically and spilled light and music out onto the asphalt. A bouncer stood in front of a nondescript door, smoking. The end of his cigarette was tangerine against the charcoal black of the alley.

“IDs?” he said. “Oh, Akira.”

“Hi,” Akira said.

He sized Grace up. “Got a hot date?”

“Nope, helping a friend through a crisis.”

He waved them in. “Good enough.”

Inside, the walls were mirrored and the ornate ceiling covered in dingy gold leaf. Hundreds of bottles in different shades of glass glimmered against the wall behind the bar. Grace saw them and a thought rose in her mind, unbidden, like a shaft of sunlight falling through water: the shades of amber were like a catalog of all the colors of Akira’s eyes. It was a stupid thought. She shook it off.

The bartender greeted him by name. Her dress matched her lipstick and her nail polish perfectly. She was effortlessly gorgeous, the sort of model-like woman Grace assumed Akira liked.

“What are you doing tonight?” she said.

“Crisis karaoke.”

“What, again?”

“Lots of crises going around,” Akira said, quite cheerfully. “I want a strawberry daiquiri. Make one for her, too.”

“Roger that.”

“They let you drink here?” Grace said in an undertone, fascinated.

“We go way back,” Akira said enigmatically. “Anyway, karaoke. Sit on the stage. I’ll serenade you. I’ll also get you a drink.”

“Ugh,” Grace said, but she still sat.

A projector affixed to the gold ceiling projected the lyrics to songs onto the white wall behind the stage. In addition to a disco ball, hundreds of little prisms hung from the ceiling on nearly-invisible filaments, hanging low enough to brush Akira’s hair. He did something to the karaoke machine, and the lights dimmed, and the liquid flecks of light spilling off the disco ball slowly started to skate around the room.

At the first piano chords, the bartender groaned. “Oh God.”

“This one goes out to my very intelligent roommate,” Akira announced.

“I don’t like where this is going,” Grace said.

Akira picked up the microphone and sang, “ Just a small-town girl! Living in a lonely world! She took a midnight train going anywhere. ”

“Oh my god,” Grace said.

And Akira launched into Don’t Stop Believing, complete with air guitar. And the worst part? It worked.

He had an incredible stage presence, strutting and spinning and tangling himself in the microphone. He pulled exaggerated expressions and slid across the stage on his knees. Stage light winked like stars off the rims of his glasses, and the synths picked up. The bartender pressed a drink quietly into Grace’s hand. It smelled like rum and strawberries and sugar. There was a little paper umbrella on it, patterned with pineapples.

She found herself actually mouthing the lyrics along with him. As soon as the music stopped, he took her hand and dragged her onstage with him.

“What? No,” she said.

“We’re going to do the next one together.”

“I don’t know song lyrics.”

“Sure you do,” he said.

The opening guitar sequence of a song started to play, and she realized she did. It was Mr. Brightside. It was one of the songs that had slipped into her head by osmosis.

“ Coming out of my cage and I’ve been doing just fine—” Akira said.

“ Gotta gotta get down because I want it all— ”

“It started out with a kiss, how did it end up like this—”

“It was only a kiss.”

“It was only a kiss!”

Grace dissolved into laughter, and Akira carried the next verse, complete with dramatic hand gestures. She’d never had a strawberry daiquiri before. It tasted like summer, with a kick like the first sharp time falling in love.

Everyone knew Akira was charming and attractive. He wore those qualities like a fashionable coat, or glasses with fake lenses. Watching him sing, though, there was something else too it. When he meant something, he meant it so much. When he walked into a room and focused his attention on someone, he was more there than anyone Grace had ever met.

She remembered the rest of the evening as a haze of sweetness and bad singing (on her part) and good showmanship (on Akira’s). She drank more than she meant to, even though-- she was tipsy enough to admit-- she would have enjoyed his company stone cold sober. By some strange alchemy, the alcohol, the multicolored lights, and the songs created a molten-hot golden bubble of something in her chest, rising with every breath that left her lungs. It seared the humiliation away. It didn’t leave any room for anything else.

At the end of the night, she was too tipsy to notice him paying their tab. They waited at the bus stop together, watching moths flutter against the fluorescent light, briefly turning gold and papery where the light shone through their bodies. Grace shivered. The wind seemed to blow right through her, seeping into the neckline of her dress.

Akira took off his fleece-lined jacket and draped it around her shoulders. It did smell like him after all.

This time, the bus was nearly empty. They sat in the back. Akira swung his legs up onto Grace’s lap and stared at the ceiling of the bus.

“I think that chewed-up wad of gum looks like Hungary,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“Wait, no, it’s Slovakia.”

“I see,” Grace said seriously.

He swung his head down to look at her. “You should sing in the band.”

“No, I shouldn’t. I’m terrible.”

“Yeah,” he said. “But I had fun. We should do this again.”

“I’ll try to have another crisis as soon as possible, then.”

He threw back his head and laughed.

#

As soon as they were back in their dorm, Grace collapsed onto Akira’s lower dorm. The room was warm with the golden light of the fairy lights he had wrapped around the post. Like his jacket, his shark comforter smelled like him.

“No, yours is up there,” he said, nudging her.

“I can’t climb the ladder like this. I’ll slip and die.”

“Alright,” he said after a beat, sitting heavily down next to her.

She twisted so that her back was to him and, just briefly, let herself bask in the warmth from his back and the fact that he had chosen to spend the evening with her when he seemed to have infinite options. Feeling safe, she fell asleep like that, with the sound of Akira’s voice softly humming in her ear.

Like always, when she woke up the next morning, he was already gone.

Chapter Text

“You should also talk to someone about that assignment, though,” Akira said the next time she saw him.

She was still wearing his jacket. He raised an eyebrow about that but didn’t say anything, and Grace tucked her fingers into the sleeves, feeling defensive. She was coming to the scientific conclusion that men’s clothing was just better. Nicer fabric. Bigger pockets. She normally thought of Akira as shrimp-sized, but he was actually decently tall, and the jacket was comfortably oversized. 

The fact that it smelled like him was something Grace was aware of, like the conjugate of a complex number, but not actively thinking about, because it wasn’t relevant to the actual solution. Of the math problem of why she was wearing Akira’s jacket. Yes.

“What assignment?” she said, distracted.

His eyebrow crept a millimeter higher. “The one you were freaking out about?”

“Oh right. That assignment. Who do I talk to?”

He shrugged. “Pepper, maybe?”

“Why would I talk to her?”

“It is her job to prevent us from flunking out of all our classes,” Akira said cheerily.

“Is it? I thought she was here to keep us from going all Lord of the Flies on each other.”

“That too. But you should talk to her,” he said. 

He checked his phone. The case was shiny, lacquered black, with a Japanese woodblock print, by Hokusai or Hiroshige or some other Edo period fellow whose name probably started with H. It wasn’t Great Wave, because he probably thought that was too mainstream.  Instead, it was a quiet scene of a bridge, and snow, and a black smudge of a crow on a branch. Grace had heard somewhere— not from Akira himself, because he wouldn’t be caught dead talking about it— that his family had been samurai, and that somewhere in Japan there was a Matsumoto Castle, called Crow Castle because it was famously all black.

“Her office hours just started,” he said. “You can go and knock.”

Grace didn’t particularly want to go through the trouble of talking to someone, even though the stress sat in the pit of her stomach like a corrosive chemical compound. In the back of her mind, she was trying to calculate the predicted success rate of lying to her parents. But Akira was inconveniently standing there and looking at her, with a guilelessly earnest look in his eyes, so she gritted her teeth and went.

“Come in,” Pepper called through the door, “it’s open.”

She had propped it open with a brick. Grace briefly speculated on where she got it, and then decided she didn’t want to know.

Pepper’s dorm was the same size as theirs-- miniscule-- but without a second person to share the space, it seemed positively spacious. Grace stood in the door, looking at the posters tacked to the walls. She had been expecting band posters, but instead there were glossy advertisements for Takarazuka productions and something that looked like a kabuki adaptation of Macbeth.

Pepper herself was seated at a desk that contained a laptop and a mint-green vintage sewing machine, painting her nails scarlet and reading a script.

“What’s your major?” Grace blurted out.

“Theater.”

“Oh.” Suddenly, she wished she had gone to talk to Mori instead. He might be intimidating and freakishly skilled, but at least robotics engineering was a sensible field of study.

Pepper screwed the cap back on her nail polish and set it aside. “What can I do for you, Grace?”

“You know my name?” Grace, who never remembered anyone’s name, was always baffled and alarmed when someone remembered hers.

“Yeah. Take a seat?” She gestured at the beanbag next to her desk.

Grace sank down into it, feeling tiny. Then she took a deep breath and let the entire story spill out. In the light of day, it seemed a lot more manageable, even though her brain kept on whispering what will your parents do?

Pepper nodded like she had heard the same thing a million times before. “Lab partners are rat bastards sometimes. Did you go to anyone else for advice?”

“Yes,” Grace said, although that was a nice way of saying she had broken down and cried at Akira. “My roommate.”

“Oh, Akira, huh. What’d they say to do?”

Grace opened her mouth and then closed it again. Pepper shook her head.

“Never mind. If it was illegal, I don’t want to know. Do you know what the first thing you ought to do in these sorts of situations is?”

Get drunk and go sing karaoke with your inconveniently charming roommate was probably not the right answer. What was it people were always telling her to do?

She gritted her teeth, swallowed her shame, and said, “Ask… for help?”

“Close enough. Email your professor,” Pepper said. “Right now. Get your laptop out. CC the lab’s TA and make an appointment to talk about your grades.”

“Oh,” Grace said.

“Even professors with the strictest policies sometimes soften up when you talk to them directly and ask for help,” Pepper said, highlighting something in her script with a flick. “You probably won’t get full credit, but people’s group partners being flaky is like the world’s oldest problem.”

“Oh,” Grace said again. “This was actually really helpful. Thank you.”

“Anytime. It’s the reason I get free housing,” Pepper said.

Grace left her room feeling lighter, with a groveling email in her drafts. Musical noises drifted up from the common room, piano accompanied slightly clumsily by electric guitar riffs. She poked her head in to see what was going on.

Mori was seated sideways in one of the armchairs, with his laptop balanced on the arm and a copy of Kernighan and Ritchie’s The C Programming Language open in his lap. Thaniel stood at the keyboard, looking thoughtful.

Completing the tableau of people who didn’t know how to sit in chairs, Akira sprawled upside-down across the couch, picking at an electric guitar. It was, as promised, hot pink.

“We still haven’t decided if we’re going to do original songs or just covers,” he said, strumming.

“Thaniel composes music,” Mori said, not looking up.

“Ooh, do you?”

“Not for a very long time,” Thaniel said, looking up and fixing a mild gaze on Mori with his wintery eyes. “Not since I was a child, actually. I was meaning to sign up for a music theory class, but the terms of my scholarship mean I probably don’t have time. How did you—”

“Scholarship terms are sometimes subject to change,” Mori said, without any particular inflection. He typed something into his computer and the output of the program scrolled across the screen. “It’s in the fine print. You should check again, just in case.”

“...Alright,” Thaniel said. “I will.”

Grace made eye contact with Akira, who shrugged minutely-- as if to say no idea what that was about -- and moved on to say, “This is great, actually. Thaniel can write the melody and I’ll do the lyrics. Or we can be one of those bands that sets Emily Dickinson poems to music. You know, because of the meter, because I could not stop for death-- ”

“I’d probably have to know what the song was about before I started writing music for it,” Thaniel said slowly.

“Let’s do one about murder. No, unrequited love.”

Mori looked up from his program, just briefly. His eyes flicked to Thaniel, and from there to Akira and then to Grace. He hummed slightly and went back to his laptop.

“No, definitely murder,” Akira said.

“Unrequited love and murder,” Thaniel suggested, with the air of someone who just wanted to see what Akira would say next.

“Genius,” Akira said.

Grace hoisted her backpack farther up on her shoulder and gave them up for a pack of fools.

She didn’t see Akira for a few days after that. There had been a little gap, a rest, in which he didn’t spend every night out at parties and his new student ID remained in its rightful place in his wallet, or it seemed to, because there were no further tree incidents.

She’d heard a suspicious rustling out there one night, and gone to the window in her Hello Kitty pajamas to check, but it wasn’t Akira. She caught a glimpse of a silhouette that was too bulky to be anyone but— well, Thaniel, actually. She couldn’t picture Thaniel in a tree, so she chalked it up to a midterm-induced stress dream.

It was the calm before the storm, though, because one night at two in the morning, someone knocked.

Grace’s first bleary thought was that there was a fire, because Akira never knocked. She opened the door, though, and there he was. He swayed gently, backlit by the always-on fluorescent yellow light. His eyes wouldn’t focus right.

“Matsumoto?” she said. “Come on, don’t just stand there spacing out.”

“Grace?” he slurred.

The sound of her own first name sent prickles down her spine. Belatedly, she was starting to sense something was wrong.

“I… don’t feel…” he said vaguely, and then staggered past her.

She wasn’t quite fast enough to catch him. He dropped to his knees with a nasty crack— the floor was carpeted, but it was a thin layer over something unforgivingly hard, like concrete— and threw up.

“I don’t feel very well,” he finished the sentence weakly.

“Jesus Christ,” Grace said, going to her knees as well to try and stop him from falling over completely. “What happened to you?”

“There was.. this girl…”

“What, did she poison you? ”

“They kept trying to make her drink.”

There was a thin sheen of sweat on his forehead. Grace wiped it away with her baby-pink sleeve, and he closed his eyes— a little like he was enjoying the touch, and a little like he just felt sick.

“Jesus Christ,” she said again, with feeling. “Akira, did you get roofied?”

“Probably… not,” he said, after several labored seconds of thought. “Probably just drank too much.”

“Jesus, probably? Leave it to you to be the first person to gender-diversify our university’s crime statistics . Come on, work with me, I’m putting you to bed.”

“You don’t have to do this,” he said, in a moment of sudden clarity.

“You make it sound like I’m trying to mug you. Up we go.”

She heard the distant voice of some fitness instructor. Lift with your knees. She heaved Akira into his bed, as gently as she could, which was not very. He groaned. She dragged her wastebasket over from her bed and took off his shoes.

“Throw up in there, not in your bed,” she said. “I’m not finding out how to wash your comforter for you. The laundry machines here are enough of a nightmare as is.”

He didn’t respond. Grace wasn’t sure if he’d heard her. He just slumped across his bed, motionless, like a broken doll someone had tossed out and discarded on the curb. Her heart jumped.

“Akira? Hey,” she said, going over to touch his shoulder.

She was desperately trying to remember the two-hour drugs and alcohol course the university had made her take in her first week. She was pretty sure not responding to outside stimuli was a really bad sign. Signs of alcohol poisoning, she pictured herself Googling. Signs of regular poisoning.

When to call 911.

What to do if your best friend dies.

Then he groaned and turned over. “Not morning yet,” he mumbled.

“No, it’s not, go back to sleep,” Grace said, massively relieved, plus a little unsettled to discover that he had somehow become her best friend.

Embarrassing, really, when she probably wasn’t his. She tamped the thought down and went to raid the communal bathroom for its terrible brown paper towels.

When she got back, he was sleeping restlessly, his eyes moving frantically under the lids. She sat down on the floor to try and clean up the vomit with her limited resources, wondering at the fact that she didn’t feel any resentment. Normally she hated being forced to clean up after the men in her life, after a lifetime of being made to do it for her brothers.

Akira was different. Maybe it was because he was usually the one picking up after her. The masking-tape line was ghostly ivory in the dark, half-forgotten. They were well past that, she thought.

If it had been one of her brothers, she would have called someone else, or just left him to his own devices. It was weird. She hated feeling like somebody’s servant. With Akira, though, it felt like she was just balancing the other side of the equation.

She sat back once the smell was gone. There was still a weird stain, but it would be one in the residence hall’s vast collection of weird stains. She was boiling with resentment, she realized, but not even a single drop of it was directed at Akira. It was everyone else that was the problem.

He whimpered in his sleep. Grace went to sit on the end of the bed, and he stopped, slipping into a deeper, more restful sleep.

The entire scene felt wrong, backwards She had gotten so used to the idea of him as untouchable, immune to everything and always lazily happy, that the idea that he wasn’t made her furious. He should always be happy. It ought to be a law of physics. Now that he wasn’t, it was the universe that was wrong. Grace wished she could give it a sharp kick to get it back into shape.

“Have you really been losing your ID?” she said, folding her arms. “It’s in your wallet, and you always have that. Has someone been losing it for you?”

It was just the kind of thing his stupid frat friends would find funny: no punchline, just cruelty. Grace simmered.

Akira didn’t answer, because now he was deeply asleep, mouth open. A strand of hair fell down to tickle his nose. He wrinkled his nose like he was about to sneeze.

Now that she was pretty sure he wasn't actively dying, Grace found him quite funny. The anger was still there, but it was folded and put away, less relevant. She brushed the hair away. He pressed his cheek into her palm, still asleep, like a cat.

She slept a little and woke up in time to take the first bus off campus. There were a thousand justifications for what she was doing, and her mind kept spinning them busily in the distance. Her favorite of them was that she was tipping the scales of the universe back in the right direction. Everything’s going to be okay, she thought. I’ll make it be okay, since it’s doing such a garbage job of it itself.

When she got back, he was awake, although still laid out flat in bed, scrolling through Instagram. She caught a glimpse of his feed as she came in. Grace had expected thirst traps, but it was all pictures of small animals, skincare tips, and elaborate matcha parfaits from people's Kyoto travelogues.

“How are you feeling?” she said.

He considered this. “Like half my bones have been freeze-dried and the rest have been microwaved.”

“Sounds about right,” said Grace, who was relieved to find him forming full sentences.

He made to sit up, looking queasy, and swung his legs out of bed.

“No, don’t move,” Grace said. “Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to stay seated, and we’re going to turn your bed into a blanket fort, and you’re going to follow my instructions to the letter, because I know you’re not feeling well enough to fight back. I’ve been googling hangover cures for an hour, and frankly most of them are scientifically unproven and probably bullshit, but I’ve curated a list of the pleasant ones which will cheer you up even if they don’t do anything else.”

“What?” Akira said.

“Hydrate,” Grace said, pressing a bottle of water and a bottle of Tylenol into his hands.

He took them gingerly and then stared at them as if he couldn’t quite figure out what they were. Grace bustled around closing the blinds, turning the string lights on, and hanging her blanket over the side of her bed to make a fort. Akira watched her, looking equal parts disheveled and confused. One strand of hair stuck out at an odd angle, like a feather.

“I bought you some other stuff,” Grace said, plopping her backpack and two plastic shopping bags on his bed inside the fort. The cracks of sunlight seeping through the red fuzzy blanket made them both flushed. “Green tea, something called konjac jelly, and seven different books of poetry, all sad and mopey and metaphor-y, so you’ll probably like them. I got them from the used bookstore, so you’re stuck with them now. In case it wasn’t clear, you’re staying in today. I can ghostwrite your emails to your professors.”

“What is this?” Akira said, extracting a book from Grace’s backpack.

“One hundred and one translations of that one frog poem,” Grace said.

“No, I see that,” he said, and waved the book to encompass the blanket fort. “What’s all this?”

“Self care,” Grace said, as if it should be obvious.

“Is it self care if you do it for me, or is it Carrow care?”

“Assisted self care. Forced self care, even. And if you say a single word about motherly instinct, I will kick you in the nuts.”

Akira closed his legs instinctively. “Noted. Why not just mace me, though?”

“We’re in an enclosed space, Matsumoto. I sincerely doubt the ventilation in these rooms is up to code. Also, I don’t actually have mace.”

“Maybe you should get some, just in case. It’s pretty safe here, but some parts of the city are kind of iffy at night.”

“I don’t go outside.”

“Oh right. Well, maybe you should.”

“What, so I can mace people?”

“Yes,” he said, straight-faced. “Recklessly and with wild abandon. Let that anger out. Choose the path of violence.”

Grace gave this some thought. “No,” she said eventually. “Sit down.”

“You were tempted. You felt the call of ancient bloodlust. I saw it in your eyes.”

“Where would you be in all this? Calling the cops? Tripping people into alleys so I can mace them?”

“Cleaning up all the fluids.”

“Gross.”

“No, I’m serious. You’re good at neatening things and putting things away, but you suck at actually cleaning.”

“What’s the difference?” Grace demanded.

“Dusting. Scrubbing. Using bleach.”

“Ugh.”

“Yeah, see, exactly.”

“If you’re feeling well enough to talk shit about my cleaning abilities, you’re feeling well enough to go to the bathroom and do your fancy skincare routine,” Grace said. “I’ll be here when you get back.”

“How do you know about my fancy skincare routine?”

“You’re too pretty not to be weird and obsessive about it.”

“You think I’m pretty?” Akira said, cracking a smile.

“Don’t let it go to your head,” Grace said. “Go on, get out.”

He returned fifteen minutes later, in his silk pajamas this time, looking actually physically shinier and somewhat refreshed. Grace patted his bed next to her and waited for him to sit down. 

“Book. Tea. When you’re feeling well enough to eat, I’ll get us takeout,” she said, dumping the named items in his lap.

“Thank you,” he said, hushed, like someone who had just had a butterfly land on his finger.

“Has it occurred to you that all your friends are pieces of shit?” she said.

He didn’t even blink. “Yeah,” he said, a little sadly.

“Then stop going to their stupid parties.”

“But you’re not,” he said.

Grace hesitated, feeling unbalanced. Laws of physics: that everything was easy for charming Akira Matsumoto, and that Grace Carrow was good at math but also kind of an asshole. God, the universe was coming apart at the seams.

“Shut up and read your book,” she said.

He smirked-- he had a talent for it, like his face was built for it, with the single dimple and the stupid beauty mark-- and opened the book. Grace made to get up, and stopped. He had grabbed the hem of her jacket (actually his jacket) without even looking up.

“Come on, I have work to do.”

“Building a blanket fort and then not even doing your work in it would be a serious waste,” he said, dead serious.

She hesitated. If she went off to the library or even just to her desk, she could pretend that all this was purely an Akira thing, with no actual link to her.

“Matsumoto--” she said.

“You called me Akira last night.”

“That was probably some kind of alcohol-fueled hallucination,” Grace said.

He looked at her steadily, with an expression that Grace found completely unreadable, because she wasn’t used to warmth. “It was nice.”

“Ugh. Fine. So long as you never bring this up again.”

“A gentleman’s word is his bond,” Akira said, scooting over to make room.

She dragged her laptop and her textbook over and settled in next to him. He smelled like skincare products.

If someone had told her in high school, or even in her first week of high school, that she would end up in this situation, she wouldn’t have believed it. It was a bizarre fluke of probability, a little inside joke of chance. Composed of the blushing light, the firefly-gold of the string light, and the distant sound of Thaniel’s repaired keyboard piano, a weird happiness rose up in her chest, and she had to try not to let it show.

Chapter Text

Thanksgiving came and went. Akira presumably had a good time running off to more tropical climes. Grace enjoyed nearly a week alone eating takeout, but— bizarrely— she felt a rush of contentment hearing the unmistakable noises of Akira swearing as he tried to drag his oversized suitcase up the residence hall stairs.

Then her mother texted again.

“Oh shit,” Grace said.

“What?” Akira said, unpacking skincare products from his suitcase.

“My parents want me to go to my father’s New Years party.”

“Is that a bad thing? Free champagne,” Akira said optimistically.

“Interacting with my parents is not worth the consolation prize of free champagne,” Grace said, running her hands through her hair.

She hadn’t failed that one class after all, but she had barely scraped by with a C+. She’d managed to avoid thinking about what her parents would think about that for this long, but now it came back in force. Grace flopped over and lay facedown on Akira’s bed, screaming internally. He crouched next to her, looking concerned.

“What’s wrong with your parents?”

“My father is a conservative politician.”

“Oh, ew,” Akira said.

“In order to improve his image for campaigning, they don’t want me to be a scientist, they want me to settle down with a rich husband I met at college and then give up on all academic aspirations whatsoever,” Grace said.

“Which is stupid. Please tell me you’re not considering that,” Akira said.

“Of course it’s stupid and I’m not considering it, who do you think I am?”

“That’s my Grace Carrow.”

She tossed one of his own pillows at him and hid her face. “Who told you you’re allowed to call me that? Embarrassing.”

“What, your name?”

“Ugh.” She rolled over, clutching Akira’s owl plushie for emotional support. “Anyway, if they find out about my grades this semester—”

“Your grades are literally fine, though.”

“I’m going to get a C+ on my physics lab, Akira!”

“Cs get degrees. It’ll be an honorable gentleman’s C+, a reward for not hunting down and murdering your lab partner,” Akira said, very reasonably.

“You know that. I know that. My father will see it as proof that I, and possibly women in general, are not suited to studying anything that involves mathematics. So unless I show up at that party with a stunningly wealthy potential fiancé, they’ll give the entire idea of me going to a research university up as a colossal failure,” Grace said.

She had gone past anxiety into sick resignation. Akira tipped his head to one side, like a bird, and then perched on the edge of his own bed so that she had to crane her neck to look at him, upside-down. 

“I’m stunningly wealthy,” he said.

“I know that, you ran off to Belize for basically no reason,” Grace said mulishly. Then it hit her. “Wait.”

He raised an eyebrow at her and pushed his glasses up his nose.

“Is this a proposal?”

“Of course not. You’d never meet my exacting standards for a wife,” he said.

“Wow. Thanks for that.”

“I mean, my God, you can’t even quote Ono no Komachi from memory. And I can’t solve differential equations. I barely know what an integral is. It’d be a disaster.”

“Recipe for instant divorce. We’d have to draw a line down the house to even last out a month,” Grace agreed.

“ Recipe for instant divorce. Name of our band’s first hit single,” Akira said.

Grace snorted.

“No, but seriously. We can’t actually date, because that’d be a disaster of epic proportions,” he said. “But I’m a man, sort of. My family’s definitely rich. I could be your terrible politician father New Year party will-they-or-won’t-they-have-a-summer-wedding fake date.”

“You might have to kiss me at midnight,” Grace warned.

“Horrors. I’ll have to hold my breath.”

She shoved him. He snickered.

“Are you really willing to do this for me?” Grace said.

He shrugged. “I like drama and free champagne. And it’s part of the bro code, you know?”

“The bro code has a clause where one bro will pretend to be madly in love with another in order to manipulate said bro’s parents?”

“Sure, why not?” Akira said.

“Are you sure this is a good idea? I mean, we’re so different, who would even buy us as a couple?” Grace demanded.

Really, she looked like some kind of troll standing next to him. Grace had acne and wore hoodies, and Akira’s skin was so clear she sometimes wondered if he was constantly wearing foundation perfectly matched to his skin tone. He didn’t seem to have pores.

It didn’t bother her overmuch, except as a sort of sense of cosmic injustice. Luckily one didn't have to be drop-dead gorgeous to study physics. It wasn’t about being bothered, though, it was about realism.

“Grace, I hate to be the one to break this to you, but our floor has a betting pool on when we’ll get together. It’s right next to the one for Mori and Thaniel, who for the record I think are sleeping together already,” Akira said.

“What? That’s ridiculous.”

“I swear I saw Thaniel climbing that tree,” Akira said, pointing outside.

Mori’s window was the next one over. Grace and Akira made eye contact and briefly shared a horrifying vision of what would have happened if Akira had successfully broken into Mori’s dorm instead of his own.

“No, not that,” Grace said, waving it away. “Us. No one in their right mind…”

“Oh, I know.”

“Wait,” Grace said. “Wait. If we’re pretending to date anyway…”

“This is a money-making opportunity, you mean?” Akira said.

“Well, how much is in the pot?”

“At least $200.”

“Jesus, okay. So the plan is, we tell everyone here we’re dating as a test run, to make sure it’s feasible.”

“I’ll tell Thabani I’ll ask you out on a specific day in exchange for half their winnings,” Akira said.

“Better give it a week or two in case the pot grows,” Grace said.

“Smart. Say… December 12, just before finals, on the day we’re bringing the band to the college talent show.”

“We’re bringing the band to the talent show?”

“As soon as Mori and I can convince Thaniel, which is frankly a matter of time,” Akira said. “You can come and play the triangle.”

“I really don’t want to.”

“Come on, it’ll be fun. All you have to do is hit a little metal thing, it’s easy.”

“And be asked out onstage,” Grace said. “Because I assume that’s what you have planned.”

“You have to admit I’ll be doing most of the work there. If I do it right, no one will even be looking at you. I’m the pretty one, after all.”

“Fair.”

“You weren’t really supposed to agree with that, Grace. Ought I to be worried about your tender self-esteem?”

Grace made a rude hand gesture at him and then, thoughtfully, said, “If we’re doing this, we should do it properly.”

“I agree,” Akira said.

“We should go on a few practice dates to make sure we look believable.”

“Sounds reasonable,” Akira said.

“We should also have a spreadsheet.”

“You’ve lost me.”

“I’ll make a Google sheet and share it with your school email,” Grace said.

“A spreadsheet of what, exactly?”

“You know.”

He looked at her with something like a helpless smile rising on his face. “I really, really don’t.”

“Couples things,” Grace said, feeling as though this should have been evident. “Number of practice dates, number of romantic gestures per date— I don’t know, number of times holding hands, flower-buying schedule, fake dating budget.”

“Are you my pretend lover or my real accountant?”

“Well, since it’s not real and all, you’d hate to overspend,” Grace said.

“Excuse you, I’m not a fake cheapskate. I’ll spend as much money as I like, thank you.”

“What if you spend $300 on a giant swan made of roses or some stupid thing like that for the talent show and then find out I’m allergic to them?”

He considered this. “I do see your point. Very well, I’ll let you handle the finances. By the way, are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Allergic to roses.”

“No,” Grace said with dignity. “It was an illustrative example.”

“How about swans?”

She punched his shoulder, lightly. He fell over in exaggerated shock, laughing, and lounged on his pillows looking up at her. Her heart stuttered oddly.

“Oh, and one more thing,” she said.

“What?” He caught sight of her expression. “Oh. Let me guess. Absolutely no falling in love with each other for real?”

“Absolutely no falling in love with each other for real,” Grace said.

“Don’t worry,” Akira said bitterly. “I’m not the sort of person who’d follow you around piteously after this sort of thing. You won’t have to scrape me off the bottom of your shoe.”

She waited for the sudden fit of bitter wryness to pass. After a moment or two, he ran his fingers through his hair and nodded.

“I just think it might be easy for someone to get their feelings hurt,” she said.

“Meaning me, because your heart is an unassailable fortress that can only be entered by peculiar facts about electromagnetism. Yes. I understand. But really,” he said scathingly, “I see no reason why it would ever be a problem.”

She touched his shoulder, and he came back to himself. The tension in his shoulders slowly eased, and his expression brightened by degrees.

“Sorry, yes,” he said. “You have my word. Absolutely no falling in love for real.”

“Gentleman’s honor?”

“Exactly.”

They shook hands.

Their first date— the practice run— was scheduled for December 5. It was technically before the scheduled performance at the talent show, but finals were coming up, and Grace very sensibly didn’t want her date shenanigans to interfere with her studying.

“Besides, this makes a better story,” Akira observed, sitting on Grace’s upper bunk so that his hair brushed the ceiling. “This way the Talent Show Incident isn’t me putting you on the spot with a sudden confession, it’s our way of making the relationship public. Maybe we’ve discussed it beforehand, and found out this is what we both think is romantic.”

“We did discuss it beforehand. That’s what we’re doing now,” Grace said, perched on the ladder with her laptop. She had split the screen between the slides for her physics class and the date spreadsheet.

“Exactly! Which is why I feel better about it,” Akira said. “Hey, have you ever noticed your mattress is way nicer than mine?”’

And so it was decided.

The really ironic thing was that, when for the first time in her life Grace wanted to consult someone on what to wear and do in preparation for a date, the only person she wanted to talk to about it was the person she was dating. Also the whole thing was a sham, but that was less relevant.

“I don’t know what to wear,” she said, sitting on Akira’s bed. “Have you decided what you’re going to wear?”

“No, of course not, I don’t know where we’re going.”

“Art museum.”

He spun in place, looking startled. “Really?”

“Yeah. Bring your student ID so you get free admission.”

“I thought we’d be going to a math meet or something.”

“Is that what you think I do for fun?” Grace said, although he wasn’t wrong. “You’d only get bored and start some kind of illegal betting ring in the background. We’re going to the art museum for Akira Enrichment. Now tell me what you’re going to wear.”

“In that case, turn around.”

“Huh?” 

“Watching me change before marriage? What are your parents going to think?”

Grace rolled her eyes and turned around. The wall behind Akira’s bed had an interesting spiderweb of cracks, and also an actual spiderweb, complete with a tiny house spider. She tried not to listen to Akira’s clothes rustling and zippers being unzipped, but the room was so small. Not looking at him made him seem closer than he actually was.

“Okay,” he said.

She turned back around. Akira was wearing a hummingbird-green dress that looked startlingly good on him. Grace’s opinions on men in dresses, ordinarily neutral, were hastily rearranging themselves. It framed his hips and seemed to be made for him.

“Where did you get that dress?” she said almost reflexively. “It looks amazing on you.”

He stopped mid-twirl to give her a look. She scowled.

“Well, forgive me for not knowing all the trendiest shopping places.”

“It’s not that,” he said, continuing the odd look. “Grace, this is your dress. I got it from your wardrobe.”

“No, it’s not,” she said.

“It really is.”

“What did you do to it?”

“I washed it and ironed it.”

“Stop looking at me like that,” she said. “Is that where the pleats came from?”

“It was always supposed to have pleats.”

“No,” she said, circling around him. “No, it’s more than that. What did you do?”

He opened his mouth and hesitated, uncharacteristically. Grace scrunched up her nose at him.

“Spit it out,” she said.

“Maybe,” he said quietly, “it’s that I actually like it and feel comfortable wearing it.”

She took a physical step back, like he had hit her.

“No judgement,” he said, in the same tone. “Plenty of people don’t feel comfortable in cocktail dresses. So many, in fact, that it might even have something to do with the human condition.”

“What do you know?” she said at last, shocked.

“Nothing. That’s why I have so many opinions on the human condition.”

Grace bit her lip and worried at the cuff of her gray sweatshirt, which was starting to fray. “If I tell you to drop this conversation,” she said, “will you never bring it up again?”

“Sure.”

“Very gentlemanly of you.”

“Thank you,” he said. “Would you like to borrow some of my clothes?”

She tensed up immediately.

“For revenge,” he clarified. “Because I stole yours.”

“Oh,” she said, relaxing. “Well, if it’s for revenge.”

Shockingly, everything actually went as planned.

The practice date went off perfectly, except that at no point did it ever feel like a date— it felt like any other day out spending time with Akira, except that they split an overpriced museum cafe smoothie and Akira complained that it wasn’t a milkshake.

“Too cliche,” she said. “We’re traversing new faux-romantic drink-sharing territory.”

"The cutting edge," he said, mollified.

She kept getting glimpses of her reflection in Akira’s ripped jeans and feeling sourcelessly pleased. On the heels of that was a melancholy— that things couldn’t always be like this, and the last time this would happen— her father’s New Year party— they’d be odd painted simulations of themselves, with Akira in a suit and Grace probably in that same stupid dress.

It was hard to stay melancholy for long, because with every new room of the museum they entered, Akira dragged her into a new game of fuck-marry-kill with the paintings.

Then, as if the days had slipped through her hands like fine sand, she was standing on the little stage in the lounge, watching the colored lights warp and stretch in the reflective chrome surface of a triangle.

It was a millisecond after they’d finished the song. Sounds from plucked strings still hovered in the air, resonant, like the air in a church after a hymn. The electric buzz of the equipment shut off with a sound like a book closing.

The contrast between dark and light made it impossible to see the audience. Grace half-turned, waiting for Akira to give whatever speech he had planned. Sound and color seemed suspended in the air.

He didn’t say anything. Instead, he only leaned in and kissed her cheek.

A camera shutter clicked.

The audience gave them a round of applause.

“We got the money,” he said, later that night, the night before winter vacation, carefully packing Josie’s sister’s guitar back into its case.

“Cool,” Grace said. “Everything’s coming up roses.”

“About that,” Akira said.

The photo was going through the building like wildfire, airdropped randomly in the small hours of the night. It was a good photo. Grace hadn’t realized, but at that exact moment, someone had thrown glittering confetti. It fell around them like multicolored snow, twirling and catching the light.

In the photo, Akira’s face was in shadow so that all you saw was his posture, easy and relaxed, like the hand that gently touched the neck of the guitar. In contrast, Grace was surprised. Her shoulders had come up. It was obvious that she hadn’t been expecting it, but rather than pure shock, the expression on her face looked like hope. The photographer had caught the exact moment her face had started to open into happiness.

“Here’s your fifty dollars,” he said, handing her two twenties and two fives.

“Cheers,” she said, stuffing them haphazardly into her wallet. “I still can’t believe Thabani got a hundred bucks out of this. Hardly seems fair when we’re doing all the work.”

“About that,” Akira said.

He was standing in the door, half in, half out, looking unusually grave. Grace finally looked up.

“What’s wrong? Spit it out,” she said.

“Is it going to be a problem?” he said.

“What?”

“That you’re actually in love with me.”

Grace almost laughed, but he was dead serious. Her fists clenched involuntarily. She felt hot, then cold, then furious.

“What did you just say to me?”

He straightened his posture but kept his mouth pressed into a line, saying nothing.

“Is this because of that stupid photograph?” Grace demanded. She was so angry— or something that felt like anger— that her fingertips had gone numb. “I’m not in love with you. Why would you even think that? What reason could I possibly have to be in love with you?”

Her phone lay on Akira’s bed, equidistant between them, face up. Rather than speaking, he only tapped it to make it light up.

Grace’s lock screen was the picture of the talent show, cropped and zoomed in to show Akira’s face and only half of hers, with that stupid hopeful expression. Like a dog. With the photo digitally brightened, it was just barely possible to see that Akira had been smiling.

“I don’t— that doesn’t—” she said, aware that in some visceral way nothing she said would make him change his mind, because they both knew he was right.

“ Is it going to be a problem?” he said gently. She wanted to throw something at him.

“Just leave me alone,” she said instead.

He nodded, like he had expected that, and left the room. The door clicked gently shut behind him.

She waited for him to come back, but he must have spent the night in a friend’s dorm. All the scathing comebacks she could think of went unused, and so did the apology, and eventually she fell into a restless sleep.

Chapter Text

Grace’s father hosted his New Year’s party every year, on the top floor of a tall hotel where he and his associates could watch both the fireworks and the seething masses of people watching them from the streets below. As usual, she met her mother in a hotel room somewhere below so that her mother could dress her, like a doll or a child, for the photographs.

“What are you wearing?” her mother said, instead of a greeting. “No, there’s no time. Get in.”

Grace hadn’t had a chance to speak to Akira again. The deal was almost definitely off. She’d made him too uncomfortable, which made perfect sense. Grace could see him pretending to date someone as a joke, or a bet, or a kind gesture for a friend, but pretending to date someone who was actually, shamefully in love with him was something else entirely.

She still hadn’t changed her phone background.

“You need to take better care of your skin,” her mother said, pinning a strand of Grace’s hair to her scalp with a sharp-ended bobby pin. “What are you looking at on your phone?”

“Nothing,” Grace said, turning it off. She had been looking at her lockscreen again.

She would have to do it alone-- that was alright. Her parents would spend a few hours berating her for her failures and then try to pull her out of university. It was survivable. She would sit through it-- but not smile, because after all, she wasn’t Akira. She would probably scowl the whole time. Still, she would live.

He had ended up helping her after all, in a roundabout way, just because of the fact of his existence. She could look at her phone screen and be reminded that there was someone out there who was relentlessly charming, not because he wanted something from anyone, but simply because that was his mode of interacting with the world, like breathing. Everything anyone else could have said to her bounced off if she pictured him talking about one of his dead poets or making a quip about the hotel’s interior decor.

It would have been easier to realize she was in love with him if he hadn’t been around all the time. There was no control group. Being happy had become normal, and only now that he wasn’t directly in her presence had she managed to isolate the cause.

“There, that’s better,” her mother said fondly, smoothing her hair again. “You could be pretty if you just tried, Grace.”

Grace nodded and checked her phone again. She was sort of hoping he would message her, she realized, which was a little bit depressing.

Akira didn’t say things like you could be pretty if you just tried. Once he had said Let me know if you want to try any of my skin goop, meaning his skincare routine, and Grace had said I would be more tempted by that if you didn’t call it skin goop.

If she’d ever asked him if she was pretty— which was a humiliating thing to ask someone, for the record, and Grace would rather say anything else— he’d probably instantly say something like, “Hideous. I regularly mistake you for some kind of sewer goblin,” in a way that made it reasonably clear he was being sarcastic. Then she could make a rude hand gesture at him and feel better about everything.

Of course, that was before. It probably wouldn’t go that way now.

“Your father’s been delayed,” her mother said, checking her smart watch. “Come on, let’s go say hi to the guests.”

Grace stood up. She was wearing a new cocktail dress in salmon pink, and she hated the way it clung to her chest and accentuated the curves, but it was a dull hatred, like an aging bruise. She checked her phone again.

“Trouble with the car,” her mother said. “He wouldn’t have texted you about it.”

As if Grace needed her to tell her that. “Is he alright?”

“Yes. Apparently it just won’t start.”

The sun was still in the process of setting, just barely sunk below the toothy city horizon. The afterglow was still bright and coppery, enough to light the mirrored windows of neighboring buildings. The view was spectacular, the windows floor-to-ceiling, showing the intricate circuitboard grid of the city streets, still doused in the dying embers of the sunset. Grace felt her stomach sink anyway. The party would last past midnight, which was hours from now.

“About that school of yours,” Grace’s mother said. “I don’t think it was a good idea, Grace.”

Grace found she didn’t care. Now, for the first time, she thought, I don’t like these people at all. I don’t care if they like me.

There were people she liked. Akira. Pepper. Thaniel. Mori, as part of a complicated mix of jealousy and respect and wariness. She cared more about his opinion than her mother’s. The thing was, no matter what happened to her, the people she liked would go on living and giving bad concerts and dating each other and placing stupid bets, so— really— nothing could be the end of the world.

She could apply for financial aid. She could get a job, or two jobs. She could ask Pepper and Mori for help.

“We’ll talk about it later,” her mother said darkly.

“Okay,” Grace said, checking her phone.

“And this time, Grace, do try to talk to people.”

She said it with some asperity, but then some politician’s aide came up to her other shoulder and she snapped on an artificially whitened smile like a lightbulb. Her teeth matched her pearls.

Grace edged towards the fringe of the party, feeling sour. She tried to exude the impression that she didn’t want to talk to anyone.

Of course, this immediately attracted a young man in a crisp black suit, who walked over with two glasses of champagne. For fuck’s sake, Grace thought, resolutely not looking at him in the hopes that he would miraculously obtain a clue. She checked her phone again: still no messages.

The man was hovering in front of her, waiting to be noticed. Grace gritted her teeth and looked at him. His suit caught her eye first. It was subtly pinstriped. His tie was electric blue silk, and there was an entire iris tucked into his buttonhole. In fact, the whole ensemble sort of reminded her of—

“Hi,” Akira said, handing her a glass of champagne.

“Jesus Christ!”

“Not quite. Although there seems to be a lot of him going around, your father is quite popular with the evangelicals.” He took a sip and made a thoughtful face. “You were right. The champagne isn’t worth it.”

“I did warn you,” Grace said, so ridiculously relieved to see him that she felt like she was floating. “What are you doing here?”

He looked uncharacteristically awkward. “I decided it isn’t good to abandon one’s friends.”

“Even the ones that are in love with you?” Grace said. She’d meant to say it dryly, but it came out soft.

“Especially them, I think. Although I think you’ll find I don’t have many of those.”

“Nonsense,” Grace said. “Everyone and their grandmother’s in love with you. All your hangers-on.”

“Oh, lovely, I’ve always wanted a dating pool that includes people’s grandmothers,” he said dryly. Then he went back to being solemn. “Not like you, though.”

Solemn looked strange on Akira, incongruous with the mole on his cheek and the way his eyes usually danced. Grace hummed thoughtfully, trying to piece together what not like you meant and failing.

“So which one of these oddly greasy old men is your father?” he said lightly, as if trying to make conversation.

“None of them. He’s been delayed.”

“Oh, by what?”

“Something’s up with his car. He drives a Tesla, you do sometimes hear stories about shoddy engineering.”

He nodded. “Gives us time to get our story in order. Canapé?”

“No thanks, they’re not very good. Sorry, our story?”

“Or are we not still doing that?”

“I didn’t think you’d—” She swallowed. “You don’t have to force yourself.”

“I love lying to politicians. My father would call it a taste of their own medicine,” he said.

“You know what I mean.”

“Force myself to say that I like you, you mean?” he said. “Force myself to mention things that are good about you, to let people believe that I might be attracted to you, to say I think you’re worthy of desire?”

“Well— yes.”

They had been standing side by side, like porcelain figurines on a mantelpiece, but at that moment Grace turned her head and found him looking at her. The expression on his face was complicated, as though he was forcefully tamping down something he wanted to say. She expected him to say something flippant to laugh it off— like yes, it’s such a trial— but he didn’t, and the pause stretched.

“We probably don’t want to say we met in the queer people dorms,” he said instead, after a while.

“Good point.”

“We can say you tutor me in mathematics,” he said.

“Good enough,” Grace said. “ Would you like me to tutor you in mathematics?”

“God yes. But only if you can make it less than its usual degree of agony.”

“Mathematics isn’t agony, Akira, it’s not like it bites. Don’t be a baby.”

“What if it does bite, though? I don’t trust complex numbers. Aren’t the normal ones complex enough?”

“Complex numbers actually make a lot of calculations much simpler,” Grace said.

“See? That’s just unintuitive.”

Grace snorted. He didn’t smile like he usually would, but he was also looking at her a lot more than he usually did. She couldn’t make sense of it.

“Your father is stubbornly refusing to appear,” Akira observed.

“He is. He must be taking an Uber,” she said. “Traffic must be really bad.”

“Grace,” he said very seriously.

“Akira?”

“If I say something very stupid, will you humor me?”

“Of course,” she said.

He scanned the crowd of dull-suited men, and then looked at her. “Do you want to leave?”

It was the last thing she’d expected. “I—”

“I know this party is what we’ve been doing everything for, all that planning and random heartbreak and even a spreadsheet, and it’s probably very important to your future that you continue to lie down and let your parents walk all over you. But the champagne isn’t even good,” he said in a rush.

“I know.”

“And I don’t know about you, but I didn’t eat dinner. I thought there’d be better canapés. And there’s a ramen shop like five blocks from here that’s really good and open even though it’s a holiday. Do you want to get out of here?”

“God yes,” Grace said with feeling.

“Really?”

“Yes. Get me out of here, I don’t want to be here anymore. Let’s go eat ramen.”

He really smiled then, for the first time that day. It made him nearly too radiant to look at. “Should we finish our champagne first?”

“Of course. I would hate for all this to be for nothing.”

He clinked his glass against hers with a crystalline sound like a bell and drained it with a flourish. Grace finished hers too, and in the process, tasted it for the first time.

He took her glass and deposited it on the tray of a passing waiter, and then, rather formally, offered her his arm. Grace took it, feeling a strong sense of the surreal. The things which ought to have been important weren’t important anymore, and the things which should have meant very little had quietly taken over. She might have a panic attack about it later, but right now, it was a holiday, and Akira’s arm was warm.

She half-expected someone to stop them, but no one did. He let go of her to take their coats from the coatroom, and then took her hand to go through the revolving door at a run and spill out into the street.

The air was shockingly cold. It smelled like fried food and exhaust. It had clouded over and started to snow— bad news for the fireworks— in little flinty flakes that caught the tangerine light of the streetlights and lit up like tossed glitter.

He didn’t let go of her hand, but instead used it to tug her along into a jogging half-run over the mica-studded sidewalk, laughing.

“Come on, we’ve got to get out of here.”

“What are they going to do, chase us down? They’re all a hundred years old.”

“I don’t want to be chased by ravenous ancient politicians. Sounds like something out of a nightmare.”

He only stopped running once they were around a corner and completely out of sight. Instead of letting go of her hand, he tucked it into his pocket with their fingers still interlaced. Grace wanted to say something about it, but she couldn’t work out what to say.

They sat side-by-side at the bar of a tiny ramen restaurant, wedged together by the crowd of people. Akira’s glasses steamed up immediately, so he pushed them up onto his forehead where they gleamed like miniature moons.

“Do you do this for every friend who happens to be in— well, you know,” Grace said into her ramen, which was actually delicious.

“Sorry, what?”

She chickened out. “I think that lady’s earring fell in your soup.”

“Oh shit.” After some effort, he fished it out with his chopsticks and placed it on a napkin. “Ready to go?”

“Yeah.”

Akira paid the bill before she could get there, helped by his height and his ability to wiggle through the crowd like a minnow slipping upstream. She met him out in the street, significantly more disheveled and still wrapping her scarf around her neck, and slipped a bill into his pocket under the guise of taking his arm.

“Where to next?” she said, fully expecting him to announce that he was going home.

“If we go get a spot on the bridge now, we can wait there to see the fireworks.”

“There’s still like two hours to go.”

“Oh the horror, spending time having a conversation with you,” he said, smiling. “Imagine if I had to do that every day, like if we were roommates or something. I’d probably collapse.”

“I’ll make you collapse right now,” Grace said, shaking her fist.

He laughed.

They settled in next to each other at the railing of the bridge, watching the dark water shift and settle with the wind. It reflected the lights of the city, mostly gold, but partially multicolored, red tail-lights winking and twining. 

“No, really,” Grace said. “What do we do after this?”

“Go back to the dorms,” Akira suggested. He rested his hands on the freezing railing, looking at the mottled combination of rust and paint, with the expression that Grace couldn’t read. “Then, over the summer, you can come with me to Japan, if you’d like. If we say you’re my girlfriend, I can definitely convince my father to pay for your tickets.”

“I can’t,” Grace said immediately. “I can’t be your fake girlfriend anymore. This whole ordeal has been one long exercise in proving that, in case you haven’t noticed. I can be your roommate, I can maybe be your friend— I hope so— but I can’t do this anymore, I can’t lie to people and pretend you actually love me. I feel pathetic.”

The multicolored lights swam and melted into each other in the gold rims of his glasses. Someone in the distance shouted drunkenly. Sirens wailed.Grace rubbed her eyes with the end of her scarf.

“That wasn’t exactly what I had in mind,” he said.

“And I’m sorry if that hurts your feelings, or makes things weird, but— what?”

“I'm the one that's making things weird. Sorry. It's not your fault. And for what it's worth, I still don’t believe you that all my friends are in love with me,” he said.

“They absolutely are, but go on,” Grace said, sniffling.

“People have had feelings for me before, but not the way you do. Or maybe it’s just that no one who’s had feelings for me has been like you.”

“What?”

“I am doing a really terrible job of this,” he said, and kissed her.

Grace froze. The rims of his glasses were the temperature of the air, holding the winter in the glass, but his lips were warm. To her own surprise, she relaxed almost instantly into the warmth-- it was a familiar smell, a familiar touch, and although everything was technically going to shit-- she was burning all her bridges and possibly her financial future in one go-- she had never felt more safe.

“No matter what your parents say or do, I’ll be here,” Akira said, turning her hand over in his. “We’ll work it out together.”

“Has anyone ever told you you’re disgustingly earnest?” Grace said, although inside she was strongly, unexpectedly happy, so much so that she was surprised passerby weren’t stopping to stare.

“No,” he said, “but I’ll add it to my resume.”

In the distance, mostly obscured by buildings, fireworks started to burst. Rather than the fireworks themselves, Grace saw their mirror images, in the watery glass faces of buildings, and in Akira’s glasses. They were chemical reactions incarnate in fire, and in a second, she would explain them to Akira, who had his hand in her hair.

It could wait. She closed her eyes and basked in the feeling that, in this moment, everything was alright.

When they went back to the dorms, they found Mori ensconced in his usual armchair in the common room, working. 

“What are those?” Akira said, bending over to look at his screen.

“Tesla schematics,” Mori said neutrally.

“Huh. Are those for school?”

“No, just a personal project. It’s complete now, though, I think,” he said, closing out of the schematics and closing his laptop. “It’s an interesting concept-- connecting cars to the internet. Of course, anything that’s connected to the internet is vulnerable to attacks from that direction.”

“Uh, yes, I suppose they are,” Akira said, clearly unsettled. He was silent until they got back to the dorm, apparently mulling something over, and then he said, “Grace, didn’t you say your father drives a Tesla?”