A/N: Well, I sort of lied, but it was totally a white lie, so it's OK. Picked up a few spare hours, so I pumped the rest of my editing out before the weekend. I am making one major change--I'm dropping the "Act/route" deal for a few reasons. First, there are a lot of different definitions around here of what a "route" story is. I'm not going into the decision trees, or showing where/when they would be, or in any way highlighting them. The story is going to be set as is, and it won't emulate the format of the game or follow the route structure in the sense that there are branching paths. I don't want to get into what a "route" story is or isn't, so I'm just going to drop that. Second, if you'll forgive a lame-ass pun, I'm finding the "Act" structure very confining as far as planning story structure goes. I'm thinking more along the lines of, "What needs to be done in Act 1 vs. Act 2," instead of, "Where does the story naturally flow from here," and I don't dig that. The changes won't have any impact whatsoever on the content of the story--just the format of how it's presented.
As for this chapter, it briefly follows a scene from the game. I lifted some of the dialogue from the start of that conversation, but it quickly shifts away from what happened in game to what is happening in this story. I don't like taking snips straight from the game (you've already played it, why read it again), but in this case some overlap was necessary. All of the thought process is original, though, and the overlap doesn't last long. Enjoy!
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Previous Chapter
Chapter 3: Starless
I didn’t remember when I first saw a star, but I remembered when I realized I loved them. It was in the hospital. My room had a window, but I couldn’t see much out of it. There were a few buildings to look at during the day, and a highway stretching off into the distance, but my bed was too far away to get a decent view of the sky at night. It didn’t matter. The city lights and highway street lamps drown out the stars anyway. The world outside my room was wide and open, and there was nothing worth looking at.
It was the stars in my room that I fell in love with. They were glow in the dark stickers stuck to the ceiling in a random mishmash of clusters and bands. Every night after sunset, when the light in the room went dark, they glowed green for an hour or two before fading. I spent the first few nights wondering what glow in the dark star stickers were doing on the ceiling of a room in the cardiology department. I ended up deciding that my room had belonged to the children’s ward before the departments switched locations. I didn’t want to think much on the alternative—that someone younger than me had been confined to the same room with a crippled heart of his own.
After I stopped questioning why they were there, I got used to having them around. Pretty soon I knew them better than the actual stars. Their placement was random, but I organized them into my own set of constellations. Somebody else had stuck them up there, but not long after I’d inherited the room I’d made the stars my own. Everybody who walked into the room could look up and see the stickers, but only I could trace the patterns. I was the only person in the world who could look up at that ceiling and point out the constellation Iwanako. Only I could watch it burn bright in phosphorescent brilliance. And I was the only one who could do nothing but watch as it faded into nothing.
When I was discharged, I bought a book on stars. It had a whole chapter on constellations. I tried finding them myself. Every night I’d step out and search the sky, but I never saw more than a few stars sprinkled here and there. There was still too much light. Every so often I’d shut my eyes. I could still remember how the green stars had been arranged, and how the cars passing on the highway outside of my room sounded like the ocean. The hospital had been a prison. When I left I was free, and under the real sky. I missed my stars the most.
“Nakai? Hello?”
I looked up at the voice and cringed. It was Mutou, and I was in the middle of his class. I’d spent months letting my mind wander in the hospital. My body had been stuck in the bed, but my thoughts were free to roam. It was the only escape I’d had. My heart attack took a toll on my body, but I was only recently realizing how much damage it had done to everything else. I was still just as smart as I had been before the incident. Hell, I was smarter. But I was scattered. After letting my mind run loose, it was tough reeling it back in. Even in class. “Huh? What?”
“Egad!” He said, looking around the class as if he’d just discovered the cure for cancer but couldn’t remember what chemicals he’d mixed to get it. “You’ve contracted some kind of amnesia! Someone get the nurse!”
Some of the class laughed. Misha and Taro roared. Most just watched. I glanced around. Takashi was smiling, but I doubted it was at Mutou’s joke. Shizune looked like she would have scolded me then and there, if given the chance. Miki just looked out of the window. It didn’t seem like she was paying attention, either. “Sorry, sir,” I said.
“Won’t happen again, right?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, lovely to hear!” He clasped his hands together, and smiled. I couldn’t remember seeing him with so much energy. “I’d hate to have my star pupil slacking off, after all.”
Mutou went back to his lesson. He was talking about balancing equations, and the bell rang before he’d finished going over his second example question (but not before I’d come up with the answers). As the class packed to leave—or, as in Hanako’s case, had already bolted for the door—he halfheartedly said something about finishing the problem next session. He’d probably been teaching long enough to know that the students clocked out the moment class ended, and I doubted if he really believed more than a few of them would give the question a second look. He looked defeated, like a prizefighter watching his opponent’s arm lifted after the final bell, but then he looked at me, and his face brightened. “Nakai, may I have a word with you?”
“Uh, sure.” Was he calling me out for daydreaming? He had every right to. It wasn’t like me to doze off like that. At least, it hadn’t been. It had been happening more and more often. Never in Mutuo’s class, but it was becoming a habit. Was he trying to kill that problem before it became routine? Miki hadn’t been paying attention, either. Why me, if not her, too? “Am I in trouble?”
“Beg your pardon?” He thought for a moment as the last student left the room, then shook his head. “Oh, that!” he said, laughing. “No, you’re not in any sort of trouble. I just wanted to ask you a couple of questions.”
“What kind of questions?”
“Nothing terrible.” He reached for the desk next to me, and pulled it closer. Then he sat. It was odd seeing him sitting in a student’s desk, but something about it felt right. He was too old for it, and his suit wasn’t anything like the student uniform. It was his smile that made it work. I’d only known him for a few short weeks, but I’d never seen him wear that smile. I doubted I would again. It was the same smile my grandmother had worn when my cousin was born, and the one my father gave when he took me to my first football game. Nostalgia. Mutuo had loved being a student. Maybe more than he loved being a teacher. “I was wondering,” he said, after a long pause, “what your plans for after graduation are.” He shrugged, as if he’d just asked me the weather. “University?”
“I can’t really see a reason not to go.”
“Given any thought to what you’ll study?”
“I figure I’ll come up with something when I get there.”
Mutuo laughed. “Take things as they come, eh?” The nostalgic smile grew wider. “I wouldn’t recommend that,” he said. “Then again, that’s how I did things. Sort of.”
He went off on a tangent about his university days. It didn’t seem like it was what he had wanted to talk to me about, but he looked happy to tell the story. In a way, it felt like an honor. How many students did he open up to? Probably not many. He was too excited by the telling for it to have been routine. As humbling as the experience was, though, I could see where Miki had been coming from with her distaste of science teachers. Mutuo was rambling. It was almost as if he were caught up in his own little world. Confined to his own little room. Did it have star stickers on its ceiling, too? Almost as if realizing my mind was wandering again, he looked up, and then back at me. “Anyway, that’s not important right now. I want to talk about your future, not my past. So you’re undecided?”
I nodded. I’d always figured that I’d have my entire last year to think about what I wanted to do after I graduated. After my attack, I wasn’t thinking much beyond the next day.
He clasped his hands together. Sitting in the student’s desk, he looked like he was engrossed in a lecture—except he was focused on me. It was unnerving, but I felt important. Like everything I said mattered. To him, it did. “Have you ever thought about being a teacher?”
It was definitely a conversation he hadn’t had with students before me. A teacher? He hadn’t known me long. Was knowing whether or not I’d be a good teacher something he could see within a day or two, or was it something he could just smell, like a drug sniffing dog? “A teacher?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“It was just a question,” he said. He sat back in the chair. I was more confused than I’d been before. “Actually,” he continued, “it goes along with my second question.”
When he didn’t ask straight away, I prodded. “What’s your next question?”
He nodded, and smiled again. It wasn’t the nostalgic smile. It was exuberance. “I graded the practice exams.”
The one Miki had been studying for at the festival. We’d taken it three days before, and I hadn’t studied much. I felt confident, but it was still a test, whether the grade counted or not. “You did?”
“Yes.” He bobbed his head back and forth, as if conceding. “Well, not all of them. But I did finish yours. And most of the others.”
“When will we get them back?”
“I’ll pass them out officially as soon as they’re done.” He reached into a manila folder and pulled out a packet of paper. “Unofficially, you can see yours now.”
The packet he handed me was the practice test. I’d gotten every question right. Even the extra credit. I didn’t bother flipping through the pages. Everything I needed to know was on the cover. “Thank you.”
Mutuo shrugged. “You enjoy science?”
As a time killer. Something to look into when there was nothing better to do. I hadn’t loved science before I started frequenting libraries, and I couldn’t honestly say I loved it after. I loved some of the broader concepts—the idea of time, gravity in a free fall, stars—but it would have been a stretch to say I enjoyed the science behind them. It was just something I knew. Like a reflex. “You think I should be a science teacher?”
Mutuo laughed. “I think you should look into it. If that’s what you want to do, I mean.”
Teaching science didn’t sound like it could wreck my heart. At least, no more than any desk job. Mutuo seemed to love what he was doing. He could be scatterbrained at times, but his smile as he handed me my test told me he was getting exactly what he wanted out of life. I didn’t know what I wanted out of life. I was even less sure it was the same as what Mutuo wanted. “It seems to me like knowing the science isn’t the same as being able to teach it.”
“That’s right,” Mutuo said, drawing back. He looked nervous. “And that’s actually why I asked you to stay late.”
“Your second question?”
He nodded. “I’ve been teaching for some time, and I like to think I’m pretty good at it. I keep my office door open, I give extra help when it’s called for, and I genuinely care about all of you. Unfortunately, test scores don’t always reflect that.”
I looked down at my packet. Everything right, plus change. “Were the scores bad?”
“They were about what I’d expect.” He leaned back into his chair. “So far they’ve been better than I expected, really. At least, overall. I find it so exciting,” he continued, smile practically dripping off his face, “watching you students learn these equations for the first time. It’s like exploration. Some of the equations themselves have been around for ages, but that doesn’t make watching you discover them any less awe inspiring.”
I cocked my head. “Overall?”
Mutuo furrowed his brow for a moment, as if struggling to follow. “Oh, right!” he said, realizing he’d gone off on another tangent. “Overall the test scores were better than expected. But there’s always a curve.” His smile faded. “And then sometimes there are outliers. I had two this time.”
I assumed I was one, and as I was the only one he was congratulating, that the other was on the low end of scores. “You want me to help tutor?”
“Quick on your feet, as always!” Mutuo leaned in close enough that I could see the weave of his suit jacket, and patted me on the shoulder. “That’s why you’re my rising star.”
It was hard to even think about declining with him so close. Heaping so much praise. I’d always had trouble saying ‘no’ in person. Over the phone it was as easy as pushing a few buttons. Looking somebody in the eyes and telling them you wouldn’t, though, might have been impossible. Mutuo seemed to see a lot of myself in him. Did he know what kind of position he was putting me in? “I don’t think I understand,” I said, shaking the thought. Mutuo cared too much for us to scheme about forcing hands. The thought that he would felt like mutiny. “If you’ve been teaching for so long, what makes you think I can do better on my first try?”
“Teaching doesn’t always work that way.” He opened his mouth to speak, then shut it. Instead, he sat clasped his hands together again. I could see he had tangents running through his mind. “Let’s say you’re in the lab running an experiment.”
I nodded. “Sure.”
“You’re trying to get a certain reaction. Say a double displacement. You set up your workspace, draw out your hypothesis, put on your safety goggles, gloves, and coat. You’re wearing your closed-toed shoes. Everything is set to go.” He paused to think, as if pulling the story from memory. Maybe he was. “Except the reaction doesn’t happen. You got a single displacement. So you repeat the experiment to make sure you didn’t make a mistake the first time. Same results. What do you do?”
Did he know that he was making an offer I couldn’t refuse? If the experiment didn’t get the results you were looking for, the answer was to try again with something new. When he put it like that—like a scientist—it was hard to ignore. “Alright,” I said. “I’ll give it a shot.”
“That’s excellent.” He let out a breath, as if shrugging off weights. “I think you’ll enjoy it.”
I wasn’t as sure. Maybe he was right, and teaching was fun. Maybe it was fulfilling, too. I doubted he would have stuck with it if it wasn’t. But not like this. Not with him smiling at me like he was. I realized his nostalgia wasn’t my friend. He was projecting himself onto me. I’d aced his test, and suddenly he saw me as himself when he was in high school. I could feel myself starting to smile despite the wrenching in my chest. It was an honor, really—but one I wasn’t sure I could live up to. “I’ll do my best.”
The excitement oozed from his face. I was playing right into his hand, and he was eating it up. Was it wrong of me to accept his offer because I assumed it was what he wanted? In the course of a single meeting, I’d cemented my place as a yes-man. He shuffled through his papers again, but didn’t hand any to me when he stopped. “You know Ms. Miura, right?”
“Miki?”
He nodded. “Friends?”
The wrenching in my chest turned into a pounding, then moved down into my gut. I knew where this was headed. Couldn’t it have been Haruhiko that needed help? Or Lezard, even. I would have taken anybody but Miki. “Yeah.”
Mutuo shrugged. “I never saw you two talking in class. Wouldn’t have guessed you were close.”
“We’re not close,” I said, shaking my head. What were we? Miki and I were definitely friends, but that still left a wide range. Acquaintances? I hoped we were more than that. Somehow I was sure we were more than just familiar faces. But we definitely weren’t close. I didn’t know where we fell, and I couldn’t begin to imagine how to explain it to somebody else. “We’re tight.”
Mutuo examined me for a moment as if I were the results of an experiment he didn’t quite understand, then nodded. “I see,” he said, as if he understood. Maybe his comparison of us wasn’t as far off as I’d thought. “Well, that’ll make things easy, then. See if you can set up a meeting with her and go over that practice exam a few times. I think it’d really help her out if it came from you.”
He made it sound as easy as asking about the time of day. Miki and I may not have been close, but I knew it wouldn’t be that simple. Every time I’d offered to lend her help, she shrugged me off. She’d clammed up at the mere mention of her science notes. As soon as she saw me looking at them she hid her book. I might have been unable to say no to Mutuo, but Miki could surely say no to me. Somehow that scared me more than letting Mutuo down. “What exactly was her score on the exam?”
“I can’t tell you that,” Mutuo said, shuffling the papers. He put them back into his folder. “Student privacy and all. You’ll have to ask her yourself.”
“You already told me she failed. What’s the difference between that and showing me her exam?”
Smiling, Mutuo shook his head. “I never told you she failed,” he said. He looked like a game show host who was always one step ahead of the contestant, and relished it. “I just told you she might be looking for a tutor. You assumed the rest.”
I was pretty sure he’d already told me more than he was supposed to. It was for a greater good though, right? At least, I was sure that’s what he thought. Whether he was right to do so or not, I couldn’t argue that he didn’t care about his students. I couldn’t think of any teacher I’d had before coming to Yamaku who would have done the same. Would I have gone that far? “So you want me to set all of this up myself?”
“Yes. I’ll think she’ll take to the idea better if you don’t mention that it was mine.”
“Where am I supposed to start?”
“You’ll figure something out,” he said. “You are my rising star.”
Our meeting went on for another fifteen minutes. With the Miki business out of the way, he went back to talking science. He even gave me a book to read, and suggested that we start a science club. I couldn’t say no. I left with a club membership, A Brief History of Time, and a mission.
My mind wasn’t on any of them. It was on the stars, and the imaginary lines I’d drawn into the ceiling. I’d done that myself. It took the meeting with Mutuo for me to realize that I hadn’t done anything on my own since. Whether it was helping with the class booth, running with Emi, or tutoring Miki, just about everything I’d done since charting those constellations had been at somebody else’s prodding.
It was overcast when I walked outside. There wouldn’t be any stars that night.
