YUE KAWAHARA WAS A FIRST-YEAR at Okayama Higashi Public Junior High School. Just started, in fact. Her favorite school lunch was the rice with green peas, and her favorite subject was science. She hadn’t told any of her friends about that yet—the science part, that is. Not the peas. The peas would have been easier to talk about.
“What’s the point of science anyway? Why do they make us memorize all these things? It’s wicked boooring.”
“Magma flow viscosity muh muh muh. I don’t care.”
“We’re literally never going to use this. I hate all those English and kanji tests, but at least those have a purpose. Remind me when I’m going to need to know about magma flow viscosity?”
“Exactly. You agree, right, Yue?”
“…Oh, yeah. I guess.”
At least the science teacher was as cute as a button, her friends agreed with a laugh. The other girls pulled out their phones—they were allowed to bring them to school, though forbidden to use them during classes and breaks—and started up a conversation about pop star videos.
If Yue was honest with herself, she found more joy in science class than in pop stars. Magma viscosity? Well, Yue could take it or leave it, but once that magma hardened, she was all over it. As long as she could remember, she had delighted in learning about different kinds of rocks and minerals. It felt like the ground beneath her feet, which until then had been nothing more than boring rocks and dirt, had transformed into something new and dazzling. If she traced the family tree she’d drawn in her social studies class all the way back, she would find an ancient ancestor in the planet Earth itself.
She went home and told her father this while he watched TV, but he didn’t understand. He just laughed at her and told her not to confuse science with social studies. Yue’s older sister, a second-year in high school, was too busy to talk to little sisters these days. Nor could Yue bring this up around her friends her own age. At least, not to her current friends.
“Hello? Earth to Yue?”
“…Oh, sorry. I was just spacing out.”
“C’mon, astronaut, it’s time for PE. We have to go change!”
“Wait up, I’m coming!”
Yue and her friends ran out of the classroom in a flurry of running feet and gym bags, only to freeze when they rounded a corner and bumped into their teacher. They slowed to a walk as one, pretending they’d never been running at all.
The teacher covered her mouth to hide a laugh. “Don’t run, girls. It’s dangerous,” she called after them as they tiptoed away. She was one of the younger teachers on staff, her crisp Tokyo accent a sharp contrast to that of the local students.
It wasn’t much of a reprimand. In fact, it was as exciting as if the cool older girl next door had chosen to talk to them. Yue and her friends shared a delighted grin.
“I love the way it sounds in her big city accent! ‘Don’t run, girls’!”
“It’s wicked cute.”
“Remember when the VP told us we were getting a new teacher from Tokyo who’s, like, just brilliant?”
“What a weird thing to say. That’s so creepy of him.”
“I think he meant she’s brilliant at her job. Not that he had the hots for her.”
“She’s just the coolest.”
“We love a working girl.”
“Hey, did you hear? One of the guys asked her if she was single.”
“Eww. Speaking of creeps! What’d she say, though? Does she have a boyfriend?”
“He says she refused to tell him.”
“So yes, in other words.”
“Why do you care? Creep.”
“Oh, shut up!”
The girls laughed and talked over each other as they got changed.
Yue felt rather sorry for Ms. Tanimoto. Yue didn’t have a boyfriend, either—or the desire for one—and if she’d had people gossiping about her love life behind her back, she would have felt gross, too.
It was volleyball day in PE, and the match got heated. The classroom continued to buzz with excitement all throughout lunch but fell silent the moment the students were let out for their break. Those who didn’t want to go outside and run around stayed in the classroom to snooze at their desks. Sleeping at school was the latest thing, with students folding their arms across their desks or using their bags for makeshift pillows. It cut down on the number of kids dozing off by fifth period, so the teachers didn’t put a stop to the practice. Yue usually joined her sleeping schoolmates, but she didn’t feel sleepy today. It wasn’t just all the tandoori chicken she’d eaten for lunch, either. Something was bothering her.
She hesitated a few minutes before getting up and leaving the classroom. Her feet carried her to the room she’d had class in earlier that day. Its sliding rubber-sealed door was open about fifty centimeters, give or take a few. Yue sidled in through the gap and into the science lab.
All the specialty classrooms were quiet at lunch. Eerie, even, what with the biological specimens and model of the human body in the science lab’s storage room. Even if there wasn’t anything gross lying around, the girls in Yue’s class weren’t fans.
As Yue walked in, a person surfaced from between two of the desks like a plesiosaur lifting its heavy neck from a swamp. “Oh, do I have a visitor? Hello!”
It was Ms. Tanimoto. She must have been working on something down there on the floor.
“H-hello,” Yue said.
“Welcome. You’re Kawahara, right? From class 3. What can I do for you?”
Yue liked Ms. Tanimoto. This was her first year of teaching, and, according to the older students, she could not have been more different from the old fuddy-duddy of a science teacher who’d retired just before she came. Ms. Tanimoto twinkled like a star. She wore her slightly wavy black hair in a short ponytail and pinned back her bangs with barrettes. She looked like a model from one of the magazines aimed at older teens that the more mature girls in Yue’s class took into the corners of the classroom to read. Everyone, Yue recalled, agreed that she was adorable.