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Ryouhei doesn't like rumours. Spreading exaggerated stories about people you barely know for fun is, in his opinion, pointless and kind of mean. He hates how much his school seems to be fueled by them. He hates it even more when he starts hearing one about him.
Technically, it's more involving him than actually about him. He feels worse for the girl it's really about: Ueno Mari. Apparently, she has a crush on him, and a friend who can't keep a secret to save their life, because now their entire year knows, and it's all they talk about. Ono has been teasing him about it non-stop all week, and it's been insufferable– Ryouhei can't imagine what Ueno herself must be going through.
Ryouhei barely even knows anything about her. She's in class 1-4, two classes away from him. He hears that she's smart, but people might just say that because she has glasses. They say she's plain-looking. Ryouhei tries to avoid listening to that kind of talk. He also hears that she participates in a lot of gossip herself. People say she deserves to have her dirty laundry aired, when she does the same for so many others. Ryouhei can't help but roll his eyes at the classmate who tells him that, just for their hypocrisy.
He's is at the school shop, contemplating making his own lunches before his wallet becomes completely divested of its virtue, when he feels Ono slap his shoulder from behind him in line.
“Hey, Yamamoto, your secret admirer’s here,” He teases.
“Shut up already, Ono,” Ryouhei replies, but can't help turning back to look. Sure enough, there she is, stepping into the back of the line, typing on her phone.
She's… cute. Ryouhei searches for another descriptor, but can't find one better fitting. The loose pigtails suit her heart-shaped face, softening it, though it already doesn't need any help with that. She purses her lips in a pout at something on her phone, pushing her glasses up on her face.
Ryouhei is baffled as to why people were calling her plain. She's anything but.
“Oho~ What do we have here?” Ryouhei jerks back to awareness as Ono leers at him, propping himself up on Ryouhei’s shoulder despite being almost a head shorter than him. “Looks like Ueno has a shot after all!”
Ueno glances up at them, locking eyes with Ryouhei. Her eyes are big, bright and focused. Her cheeks flush a bit, but she doesn't cower, and her smile doesn't show a shred of self-consciousness. She raises one hand in suggestion of a wave.
Ryouhei, a bit cowed himself, waves back, before the clerk calls for the next in line and he almost trips over himself to move forward.
“Shut up already, Ono,” Ryouhei grumbles as snickers follow him.
Once Ryouhei knows what she looks like, he starts spotting Ueno everywhere. He sees her pigtails weaving through the crowd on the way to class, finds her walking with friends at the school gate, sees her eating in the canteen, always on her phone as she does.
She's… honestly really pretty. To the point that she's probably out of his league– why she would like him Ryouhei has no idea. But he still knows nothing about her as a person. Do they even have anything in common? Wound she even like him once she got to know him, or would she lose interest once she realises Ryouhei is, frankly, kind of boring?
By now, the rumour that Ryouhei likes her back is all around school. People are now asking him all the time if he's dating Ueno yet– and honestly, don't they have anything better to do than be invested in the love lives of their classmates– and are baffled when he says he just hasn't spoken to her yet.
“Even the stoic Yamamoto is shy with girls, it seems,” Furuta croons to him one day before class starts. Somehow Furuta, Ono and Shiraishi have all crowded around his desk. Though he thinks Shiraishi’s presence is more a coincidental than the other two; he seems to avoid gossip entirely, even with rumours actively about him. Ryouhei would admire that level of restraint if it was intentional, but as far as he can tell Shiraishi is just oblivious.
Case and point, Shiraishi chimes in with, “What's this?”
“Oh, you haven't heard yet, Shiraishi?” Furuta sounds far too pleased about this.
“If he hasn't, leave him out of it,” Ryouhei protests, and is of course, ignored.
“Yamamoto has a thing for Ueno, but can't work up the courage to talk to her,” says Ono, “even though he already knows she likes him back!”
Ryouhei sighs. “I don't have a thing. And it's not about courage. I just haven't had the chance yet. We're not in the same class or anything.”
“But what about in the canteen?” Ono prods. “We see her in there, like, every day. You could've talked to her at any time.”
Furuta makes an exaggeratedly interested sound. Shiraishi has the same blank look on his face as always.
Ryouhei feels his ears burn, and he knows that's not helping his case. “What am I even supposed to talk to her about? There's nothing to start a conversation with, so how would I start one?”
“Just ask for her LIME ID,” Furuta says.
“Out of nowhere? That's creepy.”
“People do it to Shiraishi all the time! It's fine!”
All three of them turn to Shiraishi. He rubs the back of his head with a nervous laugh. “I guess people do that pretty often…”
“Okay, but you don't find it weird?” Ryouhei asks. “Like, not at all? When it's people you haven't even spoken to before?”
Shiraishi averts his eyes. “Well, I wouldn't say weird.”
“But it's not welcome?”
He looks even more nervous. “Well…”
“See, there you go.” Ryouhei folds his arms. “Creepy. Not doing that.”
“But she already likes you!” Furuta insists.
“I don't want to hear advice from you two when you can't even talk to girls yourselves,” Ryouhei grits out.
They both go eerily quiet after that.
“W-well,” Ono splutters, “Shiraishi can talk to girls! He gets confessed to, like, all the time! Surely he's got some advice!”
“I didn't say that was my problem, I said it was yours.”
“I don't think I can offer much help here,” Shiraishi says, “I'm not really interested in dating.”
“Agh!” Ono throws his hands up. “You both have girls who like you, and you're both totally wasting it!”
Shiraishi just laughs again. Ryouhei thinks that's the appropriate response to that comment. The bell rings then, saving Ryouhei from this conversation.
At lunch, Ryouhei sees Ueno in the canteen again. He's really starting to wonder how he never noticed her before: she's always there, and her pale hair makes her pretty distinct. He must really have a hair-trigger for the sight of her now.
(It doesn't occur to him that she might not have been there before.)
When he's bought his food and is about to leave, he finds her looking at him. She has a sort of twinkle in her eye at all times, like she's moments away from getting up to something. It's a bit unnerving. She waves at him again. He waves back. He wonders if this would be a good opportunity to go and talk to her, but she immediately turns on her heel and leaves.
Well. Nevermind, then.
He sits in confusion about that until the next morning. As he's reaching into his shoe locker, yawning, he finds something blocking his shoes.
It's an envelope, pale yellow, sealed with a pink heart sticker. He wasn't expecting something like this. The paper inside isn't any sort of fancy stationery, just plain printer paper.
Meet me in the stairwell to the roof at lunch, is what it reads. It's signed Mari.
How straightforward. It would have been obvious who this was from regardless, but this makes it clear that she's not interested in beating around the bush or being coy. That's something they have in common, then.
Ryouhei doesn't tell anyone else about the note. The last thing he needs is their prying– or even worse, one of them spying on him while he talks to Ueno. This, at least, can just be their business.
Come lunch, he tells Shiraishi and Furuta he's going to the canteen, tells Ono he's going to buy something off-campus, then makes for the closed-off stairwell. This place has sort of an eerie atmosphere, what with all the rumours about it, but at least it's empty.
“Ueno-san?” he softly calls as he begins to climb the stairs.
“Up here!” Is the response, and sure enough, there she is, on the last level before the closed rooftop, leaning on the railing on her folded arms. When she catches sight of him, she smiles. “Hi.”
“Hey.” He climbs up to her level. She looks a lot shorter up close like this. She's wearing a yellow sweater over her uniform today. .
Ueno turns so her back is facing the railing. So she can look at him better, he realises. “Thanks for meeting me here. I know it's kind of a weird spot for this kind of thing.”
He shrugs. “I don't mind. Better than somewhere everyone can overhear us and gossip about it more.”
“Yeah… sorry about that,” she says with a soft laugh. It's not a conventionally pretty sound, not like you hear in dramas, but… It's nice. Ryouhei likes it.
“Don't apologise for other people. It's not your fault they were all talking about you.”
Ueno shuffles her feet. “Actually, it… kind of is.”
How? Because she told her friend? Because she likes gossip herself? It's hard to say. “Well, it's not like you started the rumour.”
She hesitates again. “...I kind of did, though.”
“What.”
Ueno props her elbows on the railing with a sigh. “I got my friend to spread it around.”
Ryouhei is, honestly, having a hard time believing this. “Why?”
Her voice is unwavering, but she isn't meeting his eyes. “Because I wanted you to hear about it, and about me, so you could know who I am and decide how you feel about me, before I actually asked you out directly.”
“...Oh.” Ryouhei has no idea what to say to that. Or what to do with that information. “That's…” He doesn't have an ending for the sentence.
“I'm sorry if people bothered you about it,” she adds softly.
“They didn't… not a lot. It was fine,” he hedges, half distracted. “But couldn't you have just talked to me?”
“But then you wouldn't already be thinking about me in a girlfriend context,” Ueno rebuffs.
“You could've just told me you liked me, then.”
“But you might’ve rejected me on principle!”
“Then you could've given me time to think about it.”
“But that's, like, embarrassing?”
Ryouhei raises an eyebrow. “More embarrassing than starting a rumour about your own crush on purpose?”
She sighs as though explaining this is a laborious task. “That's embarrassing as a concept not embarrassing to experience directly.”
“So none of this whole thing was embarrassing for you at all–?”
“Oh my god, are you gonna go out with me or not?” She cuts in.
Ryouhei finds himself laughing. This girl is definitely something else. He doesn't mind it, though. In fact… “You know what? Sure.”
Ueno scoffs, but there's no heat behind it. She folds her arms, smirking. “Oh, so this is something to be you know what, sure about. Good to know.”
Ryouhei finds himself smiling back. “Considering this is the first time I've talked to you? Yeah, it is.”
“You could've talked to me at any time if you wanted to so bad.” She points out. At some point during the conversation, maybe while they were trading barbs, she had moved much closer to him.
She's so small. It's easy to forget, she has quite a presence, but she's more than a head shorter than him. He could comfortably rest his arm on the top of her head if he tried. She seems like the type who would hit him for it, though.
Ryouhei puts his hands in his pockets. “I was going to, in the canteen yesterday, before you up and left.”
“You could've before that!”
His ears go hot again. “You think I wasn't embarrassed, too? You saw how Ono was when I so much as looked at you.”
Ueno considers this, pursing her lips and still glaring seemingly on principle, before she sighs. “...Okay, fair.”
For a few beats, they both stand there, unsure what to say. Ueno seems to become aware of the way she has to crane her neck to look at him, and looks down at her hands instead.
“So, uh,” she starts, and does not continue. She fiddles with one pigtail, looking a little flushed herself.
So she can be shy, after all.
Ueno looks up at him again. Ryouhei has the sudden thought, apropos of nothing, of what she might look like without her glasses. If removing the sharp frames would soften her gaze.
“Are you free on Saturday?” she asks, almost timidly.
Ryouhei’s whole face is burning this time. “Yeah.”
“Okay. Here, give me your LIME ID.” She waves her hand at him until he produces his phone for her to take.
“Making sure I can't ghost you?”
She clicks her tongue. “Obviously! That's like confessing 101!”
He can't help but tease her– “You might as well write your number on my hand in permanent marker.”
“Keep talking like that and I will.” She does not once take her eyes off his phone as she speaks.
(They're standing close enough that she could– could just grab him by the wrist to write something on his hand. Leave a mark for everyone to tease him about.)
(Ryouhei isn't sure why a little part of him is disappointed that she doesn't.)
Ryouhei phone is returned to him, opened proudly to a new chat with Ueno, where she has sent herself a sticker of a cat. Ryouhei doesn't even use those. In seconds, he receives a smiley face in response, and looks up to find her making the same expression at him over her phone.
“So… I'll message you? And we can figure out where to go?” She presses the edge of her phone to her mouth. God, she's cute. How the hell did they get here? To her asking him on a date? How did this happen?
“Yeah, sounds good.”
The bell rings then, making them both jump.
“I… didn't eat lunch,” Ryouhei says, a bit stupidly.
But Ueno laughs. “Me neither. Oops.”
They both look at each other, and then suddenly break out into laughter. Ryouhei isn't sure what for– he's really going to regret this when he gets to track practice– but he just can't stop. It's not even funny, really, it's just… he doesn't know.
(He's just happy. About this.)
“Okay, okay,” Ueno wheezes, then takes a deep breath. “We really need to get back to class.”
“No kidding.”
They both nearly run down the stairs, then have to split off, their classes in opposite directions.
“See you on Saturday, Yamamoto-kun!” she calls.
“That's in three days! You can talk to me before that, you know!” he shouts back.
Her high laugh follows her as she turns the corner, out of sight.
Ryouhei can't get the smile off his face, all the way back to class, not even to avoid Ono and Furuta’s jeering. He remains tight-lipped at all their questioning, despite their best efforts, all the way until the end of the day.
He's looking forward to the weekend more than usual. More than he'd even like to admit.
(Way, way more.)
-
The next day, Sakura corners Mari.
“So, did you tell him!?” she demands, practically bouncing in place, “are you guys dating yet? What happened!?”
Mari is momentarily confused as to why she would ask. Surely everyone has heard by now that she asked him out.
Unless… Yamamoto didn't say anything. Unless he kept it all to himself. Kept it all for just the two of them.
(The fluttery feeling from when he looked her right in the eyes yesterday is back.)
Mari grins, and holds her finger to her lips. “That's a secret.”