The first month was over! I lived! Barely at times, but I lived! Thus entered May, where I'd been spending the last of my days as a free, non-working man, spending the last of the mini vacation staring out my window. It's the 5th for those who don't go to school and those who have a horrible memory.

  Not that I was staring because I was melancholic, some kind of hot guy with a steaming cup of coffee, immaculate taste and manners with a roguish backstory who'd sweep you off your feet, but of a slight disgust. You see, I'd been focused on a single goal since landing in Tokyo: ramming the rat bastard that tried killing me. Getting past that made me realize that I had no other goal. Then I got one. Sometime after that I 'woke up'. Perhaps it was Sojiro deciding that my face was more appealing than puke or getting a job. Perhaps it was talking with some of my classmates, a 'how do you do?' and 'you got a pen?' and reluctantly coming to the conclusion that not every Shujin student deserved to burn in hellfire. I never mentioned these because, come on. Do you want me to narrate every time that I went to the crapper?

  For weeks I'd been navigating around the pile of books that had spilled next to my bed every time that I'd woken up, sometimes tripping when I hadn't been careful enough. A white cloak like I'd seen worn by the few Christians that managed to survive in Tokyo had been draped over the back of the desk (the most valuable member of the Phantom Thieves so far) this entire time. Cobwebs fluttered above me like nebulae. My hands could grab the air, thick with debris, and squeeze. The couch which had loose cardboard boxes, furniture, and books competing for attention everywhere except on top of it. If I ever had a guest then I wouldn't be able to offer them a blanket because I didn't have a second blanket! When was the last time I washed my own? Sticking my nose straight into the cloth made me retch.

  I woke up. And then I cleaned.

  My room was looking a lot better when I decided that I'd done enough work. Rumbling like thunder made my windows shake. All the tools had been reorganized on top of a new tarp that I had laying around, slightly less dusty and with many less suspicious stains muttered across it. The shelves were bare of both muck and spare tools.

  Let's not pretend that everything was okie dokie. There was still the Paleolithic gray of smushed down dust, white spots surely coming from some chemical reaction, that was so typical of neglected floors in forgotten corners of the world; and I'm not sure if that was being too rude towards Sojiro but it was the impression when I only heard a trickle of customers everyday. I asked myself if it could've been intentional porking me by finding the most obscure corner of Tokyo they could find.

  The lighting was depressing too. Two sources competed with each other: a swinging vine with lightbulbs connected to it, one having flickered out weeks ago, and an opaque mirror masquerading as a window where vague shapes shuddered past as if I were on ground-level. Now that I was forced to look closely, it became morbidly obvious how many spiders had been making their home right next to my innocent open mouth, probably far exceeding the doctor recommended spiders-per-year estimate they gave.

  Slapping my cheeks made me sting back into reality. This was it. Living with this would be essential in not going insane during the remaining time. I'd already been moving towards a new goal. That wasn't enough. I needed to be a person and not a robot. Nobody was going to come down like an angel and make me feel better or clean up the room or get my manga back (unless the government was feeling particularly proactive and declaring this child abuse—hah!). It was up to me to not sulk.

  So I made a little shopping list. The next day after school came a sudden shower because even the weather reporters are full of lying crooks. Light rain pelted my back as I hunched over my ward. It was almost right until there seemed to be a single patch of clouds above my little slice of hell. Nudging open the door took some finangling since my quarry was so long. Each shift made the bell hanging on the door jingle again.

  Sojiro was giving me an exasperated look. The customer, sitting at the counter, turned to me with a nasty look. I slid into the store. Just when I was about to pass, the pedal got stuck on the door frame. Yanking it once didn't get it free. Yanking it again did nothing. I kicked the petal up and it got stuck in a different angle. I put it down and walked in, pulling the bike instead.

  The woman was still glaring. It was so weird that I ended up staring back at her. Nothing came to mind for a good conversation starter so we just silently stared at each other. Eventually she said, "would you think of the people around you when you're about to make a racket next time?"

  Sojiro was standing behind the counter, giving me a look of pity. No help though.

  "I don't really know how to maneuver things like this. First time owning a bike, you know?" I gestured down to the pale red frame that clung to the thick wheels. The cheapest outdoors bike still put me in the pit, taking up the rest of my palace funds. Brass and proud, a bell wrapped around the rubber grips.

  "Why're you bringing it into the store?"

  Still caught off guard by how hostile she was, I turned to Sojiro again.

  "He lives here," he simply said before going into the back.

  She turned back to her coffee. I took that as an apology. Not that I cared. If she thought the door was obnoxious, I still had to carry the bike through the slim staircase.

  The wheel bounced against the bottom step. "Kurusu Akira. Student at Shujin Academy."

  "Niijima Sae."

  Without anymore to be said, she put money on the counter and left. A blast of cool air rushed through the corners of the room before settling down. I could feel the stuff sinking in through my shoes.

  Sojiro came out of his bunker with a frown, wiping down the rim of a cup with a dirty rag. "She was in a bad mood today. Pity for her sister. It can't be great living in the same house when she's acting like that."

  Whatever he said didn't distract him for too long. I imagine that the bike was the second most interesting thing I could've brought along, the second being a girl. Vague intrigue danced in his eyes. It was enough that he obviously had questions but wasn't too concerned with getting them. Nipping that at the bud was better than waiting for him to make conspiracy theories about it.

  "I used the last of my money from home to buy this. Since I've got a job now, I can afford to splurge," I said.

  He grunted, nudging his head and walking around the counter. "Don't track those wheels in here. There's a place next to us where you can hook it up."

  I did that. Then I went upstairs with the plastic bag hooked in my elbow. Transporting it was a bit of a pain since I didn't want its soil jostled free before it got home. My windowsill was big enough to hold the clay pot that I eyeballed and said, "good 'nough." Transporting the plant inside a black plastic pot and a plastic lid like what those tiny cakes are carried in felt a little apocalyptic. I carefully worked the block of dirt out until my fingers safely sank into the little rooty package. From there it deposited into the pot less like a puzzle piece and more like a baby carrot into your mouth.

  Good enough. The cactus started my project at making the room a little less depressing. I tried scrubbing the strange spots on the floor, failed, and went to bed.

  The next day I biked to school for the first time. Once again I felt like I was seeing the world through a new lens, specifically Tokyo itself with the streets that I'd seen from behind a window and on my puny feet. One leg pedaled down. The other leg pedaled down. My body swayed with each pump. Getting a little taller than everybody made me feel superior. I didn't know how to turn and ended up bailing straight onto a light pole. Little laughs came from a little hunched lady coming out of a nearby supermarket.

  That was the first time that I'd ever rode a bike. Watching a Youtube video didn't translate so well when some asshole's side-view mirror was a hair from scratching off my arm.

  Now, now, please let me restate this as gently as I can and not be made fun of, because I've kept having to say it so that nobody gets weird ideas: I am not a very athletic person, okay? I'm not an athletic person at all. So when I say this, know that I mean I'm not the type who wants his muscles to hurt, watch my diet, whatever else those freaks do who want a specific body. I don't even get muscles honestly. They're not cute on women and I don't think that men have much difference when they're fat or not. People are people sounds corny but it's true! Look, keep doing what you're doing if you like it. I don't. And because I don't, I'm getting laughed at right now because I didn't know how to ride a bike when I'm closer to graduating school than not. So let's add onto the humiliation: I couldn't breathe! I was having trouble breathing when I crossed the third light! My soles were hurting from pressing harshly down onto the pedals and my legs were melting. My butt hurt. Something down my legs was aching. Even the back of my shoulders were aching. I was nowhere near school. You know how hard it is to get Tokyoites' attention? All I'm saying is that my huffing and puffing like I was the big bad wolf actually had the people at the stoplight edge away from me. Working out isn't contagious, I'll have you know!

  By the time I was near the school, I was late and out of breath. Stumbling into the class just when Kawakami started talking, I barely controlled myself as I practically fell forwards into my desk. There were a lot of stares. They couldn't affect me when my head was face down.

  "Kurusu-kun, detention," Kawakami said.

  "Okay."

  Detention was still used productively. Since we were a school of preppies, education was hailed above all else. For once it didn't feel like so much of a punishment since the teachers assumed that these kids were the cream of the crop. Taking my seat had the teacher—a person who I didn't recognize—blanch like Natsumi Tsuji herself walked in. My not-school notebook came out so I could start brainstorming.

  Because, okay, let's say you were in my shoes. You were just told that your path will kill you by a legit fortune teller. Obviously your next question would be, "what path?" What were you doing that would lead to your death? The obvious answer you'd say would be, "that strange, mystical realm where magical creatures are trying to kill you." Okay. That's fair. That's obvious. It's also a problem. I was bound in a situation like Icarus; I needed money, and there was an easy way to get money in front of me.

  Thinking of it, I was basically doing a job. The Metaverse paid me for dealing with people who were so awful that they unintentionally became walking magical time bombs. The police could deal with them but then the magic fortresses still existed. They still needed to be cleaned up—probably.

  So my current path was leading me to ruin, yet the question of precognition aroused some more uncomfortable questions. Was it revealing my current path or my inevitable fate? Acknowledging the latter was saying that I was screwed no matter what, so I assumed it was the former. Writing out my plan revealed a simple thought process: explore Mementos, get enough money that I was rich, and live out the rest of my life coasting by. Obviously something went wrong that got me killed. So I crossed that out and made a new plan: explore Mementos but focus on finding another palace. Palaces weren't mysterious. I knew how they worked and took one down by myself. Finding another was a bridge that I'd cross when I thought of a way inside.

  Why was I still doggedly determined to enter the place that'd kill me? Because I wanted the money. I didn't want to work a lame part-time job to slowly build up my collection again. I wanted to buy snacks. I wanted to get my collection. I wanted to build a computer again. I wanted to get the money to travel during the breaks. All of this couldn't be done with a measly part-time job. I wanted the money. It didn't matter that this whole business terrified me.

  Replace those blue skies with a gray ceiling, the daylight with humming bars that barely lit the entire tunnel. Black roots stuck out from the corners while gigantic ones twirled above. Each bump drove the bike's seat into my butt yet I appreciated how the emptiness actually made fantastic training wheels. The wind blowing against my back was another way that I learned how to navigate. No more notepad! With the little hints that the strange growths were giving alongside the breeze—plus I'm still 90% sure that there's a very, very slight downhill slant when going deeper—I felt confident in exploring the first areas. There were gigantic metal doors with hulking chains holding them shut, sprucing up the monotonous concrete tunnel a little, that seemed like they'd be a problem for all of two minutes. Arsene's claws sliced through the steel without issue and I'd go on my way.

  Just one little issue existed that I learned when finding the first shadow. They were hulking beasts, hunched over and heads sunken into their bodies. Approaching them made the strange mask sink off its body. It plopped onto the floor alongside a huge chunk of gunk. The body blew up, revealing two little guys who looked made out of roots and a Pixie.

  "Hey! Hey! That's me!" There was a giggle in my head. Despite them being silent most of the time, I never got surprised when one of my Personas piped up. Probably some 'I am thou, thou art I' fuckery. "You should talk with her!"

  Shortly after, I was wiping my blade clean from the duplicate Pixie's body. Shadows turned into that same blank mist and gunk that dissipated within seconds, but for some reason my knife would get stained by it.

  I scooped up the coins that were left on the floor. 90 yen.

  "Serves you right for stabbing me!" Pixie yelled.

  "I'll make sure to behead them next time, your highness," I responded, getting a displeased grunt in response.

  The horrible realization was still sinking in when I found the staircase towards the second floor (subfloor?). Escalators were the staircases, by the way—turned off like every electronic save for my phone. The wind picked up to a nearly unbearable amount from where I stood, hearing the rhythmic thumping of tracks beaten. Glowing red windows passed by like a photo reel. I couldn't see inside each car, but the eerie glow had managed to overpower the dull lighting coming from the ceiling. Each train that passed by brought a brush of death with it. They were all going towards the distant horizon. Whatever it was, I couldn't see it; not only was my head staying firmly away from the tracks, but a thick blackness cut out staring into the tunnel. Any sound was drowned out by another train speeding subsonic next to me.

  A wall blocked the opposite side of the platform. Red lines, occasionally dotted like it was drawn with a quill running out of ink, spread out on it. Slowly I recognized that its pattern was perfectly symmetrical, made mostly with different arcs that created some kind of mind-bending pattern. It would've been a lame default screensaver normally. Put on a wall clearly blocking my way and it became intimidating.

  Without even touching it, the entire thing started rumbling. The four-pointed center lifted as the quarter-circles at each corner spun into the walls. Another set of escalators was behind it. Tough winds buffeted my eyes. None of the aerodynamics made sense. That didn't stop me from wasting time in class drawing all kinds of theories about why the public made subways that had indiscernible wind patterns. Is it representative of those old guys who couldn't hold in their farts and made the entire train car smell?

  I'd been intimidated and that was the end of the exploration. I had no idea how deep the next floor was anyways, and most of my curfew had been spent getting lost. The revelations about Mementos had disquieted me and drinking a cola on the way home didn't help. I was moody, which only got worse when Sojiro, for the first time, seemed to perk up when I entered.

  He made some grunt of surprise, gently draping the rag that he was using behind the counter. He walked around to greet me. Open, inviting, somewhat positive—I already knew he wanted something from me. It didn't stop him from crossing his arms, by the by. Don't do that when you're trying to be friendly. Makes you seem more closed off than relaxed in my opinion.

  "Now that you're working, we need to talk."

  I double-checked the store: empty. Usually there was at least one customer when I came back. "Sure."

  He half-sat on a table. The attempt to seem conversational wasn't lost on me. "It's been a month since you skipped. While I don't think anybody is happy about you already having missed or been late seven days within the first month, you've been doing good otherwise. You listen. You, heh, actually cleaned! Wasn't expecting that. I'd ask for you to stop messing around with the local kids, but…"

  It made me shudder when some low growl came from deep within his throat. Chuckling—that's what it was supposed to be. He only allowed two before clamping down with a frown.

  "Well, I've been in my own fair share of adventures when I was younger. Just never thought I'd have the opportunity to see it from the other side." He mumbled a few more things to himself before focusing again. "Let's say that it's water under the bridge for now. Don't worry about showing up—three hours?—three hours after you're let out of school. Heh. I'm surprised you lasted this long with such a stringent rule. In exchange, I need your help around the shop."

  I must've made a face since he immediately soured. I tried to mend it over. "Oh, uh, are you sure it has to be me?"

  "I thought you would've been jumping at the opportunity to earn more money," Sojiro said.

  Sure, except that I already had two part time jobs, one with an occupational hazard of burn, frostbite, breaks, bruises, bullet wounds, stab wounds, death, so many different types of death, and the other one being mildly embarrassing at times. Saying that I wasn't enthused to jump into another one was an understatement; I wanted to run up to my room and suffocate on my pillow case just thinking about all of my freetime evaporating.

  Easily coming up with something, I said, "I already got a lot of time at the flower shop. I was expecting that to be my only workplace so, uh, yeah."

  "I can wait," he said.

  "And I got into a club."

  "A club?"

  There was a lead ball getting stuck on my Adam's Apple. "Um, not exactly a club, but I'm helping the teachers with stuff. Little things. I figured it would be better that I got into their good graces after missing a bunch of class."

  Which meant now I did have an obligation in case Sojiro came sniffing around, completely defeating the purpose of avoiding getting my free time eaten.

  To make it even worse, Sojiro's eyebrows curved in suspicion. "Really now?"

  "It wasn't my fault. I got confronted about it by a classmate. She—" was a person that'd convince him this was serious business—"the student council president, that is, practically forced me into it."

  "So even the president is paying attention to you? What did I say about keeping your head down? If she's on your case, then you're not going to get a moment to yourself," Sojiro chastised. Completely switched tracks there. On the bright side, he seemed to be buying it.

  "It's not like I was doing a great job at that anyways. It's been hard to stay low after my record leaked."

  I rubbed the back of my neck, wondering why there was so much sweat pooling under my palm. Cars moved around outside that I could barely hear through the glass door, one of the great things that I appreciated about Leblanc. Once there was the coffee machine softly humming, the television spouting some drivel about a landslide election, sipping, newspapers ruffling, it was like the outside world became a nonfactor. Only when another person broke through the pale did it come in with a rude reminder, a fleck of smog that would stick around until the coffee eventually snuffed it out. Underneath it all was a pain that would ride along your nose, make your bridge quiver and head lull into a trance, making it through the tiny kitchen's fans that had been manufactured back in World War 2. I tried making an egg on one of those pans once and came away with my tongue glowing red.

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  "What's this about your record?"

  Speaking of my freetime going away like a ghost, he made me slowly repeat every detail about my first few weeks until he left, slamming the door behind him. Apparently I never mentioned that Kamoshida had done a gross invasion of my privacy before being dragged out. Or that my record had somehow leaked to the student body. Or that some of my teachers were a little jerkish. I'm sure there's other stuff that I forgot. Most of that night was a blur, a sweaty blur, where I had to be under Sojiro's glare for most of it. Let me tell you that despite being a scrawny guy who looks like he has a library card and expired gym membership, that was a glare that could melt through steel beams.

  Thankfully I had a day of break to rest my legs which I spent vegetating in bed. I slept early. The next day I was able to do jumping jacks right when I woke up. Sojiro hadn't even come to the restaurant yet. Riding my bike for some reason didn't lay me out even if it was only a single day divorced. Chips that I bought with my Metaverse money were crumpled and cracked which I don't like.

  I was once again planning instead of listening. Sketching out my immediate plan was updated with the newfound information that Mementos sucked. The shadows were spread out which made it take an insane amount of time finding ones that were weak enough for me to deal with. Compounding that problem was that the money they dropped was more fit for a five year old's allowance.

  Then, and this should be obvious, I had no idea how deep the 'nobody knows how long they are' tunnels went. Biking through every corner had taken me about an hour. I was intentionally going slowly and double-checking little details and taking every fight, which I figured could be reasonably cut down to twenty minutes of traveling; that was still twenty minutes for a singular floor. If, say, Mementos was one hundred floors, then I'd have to bring camping equipment and convince Sojiro I was hiking around Mt. Fuji. One mistake and I'd be running up on floor twenty-five with an empty stomach, forgotten by the world as I starved halfway up. I was not being paranoid! Every fight forced me to delicately lean my bike on the wall before engaging the shadows. This was begging for fate to destroy my only way to escape. Even worse, remember how I keep calling these places dark? Remember how a 'shadow' is called a 'shadow'? I've only been ambushed once in Kamoshida's palace, and I wasn't arrogant enough to say that I was skilled enough to always see them.

  So Mementos didn't give a lot of money, was hard to navigate, and brought the most risk if I really wanted to explore it deeper. Of the two methods to make money, one was clearly better than the other. Within a single week I made enough money to fund the bike and a bunch of Phantom Thief materials for goodness sake!

  Yet I was struggling to think of a method to find a new palace. Find jerkish people? The whole thing about Kamoshida was that it was a secret, even if it was a badly kept one. What hope did I have for accidentally finding another scumbag? There had to be a better method towards finding new palaces. Prisons? Actually reading the news?

  "Kurusu-kun," Kawakami said. I snapped up to see her standing above me. The room was empty. "Everybody has gone."

  "Oh, thanks," I mumbled. My things were stuffed into my bag.

  She hesitated for a moment before saying, "you're welcome. Make sure that you're ready for the exams."

  The world came to a halt. It reminded me of my awakening where my senses became overwhelmed, only able to recognize the broad brushes of reality rather than the nitty gritty brush strokes that made this fence. That word, tyrannical, conquering each neuron until my entire headspace was occupied with each pretty letter that created the monster.

  Exams. Exams. Exams. Exams were two days away and I barely did homework. Nothing that was written onto my page entered the long term memory when the problems morphed into Metaverse-related things. 'If x is y and a is b, then how long is this treasure room in Kamoshida's palace?' and 'if the sentence (in English) is put, 'I being ambushed by shadows,' is it correct? If it is not, then write the correct way to put it' and other banal things like that. In short, I had not focused on schoolwork the entire time and I still had my part-time job later that day. Sojiro still removed his curfew but I couldn't appreciate that when I was scrambling to make it on time on my stupid bike while stressing about being the bottommost percentile in the whole school, setting new records for how stupid a stupid kid could be.

  The underground mall was a place which I've never seen empty. Could it ever be empty? Even with the shutters closed, I could easily imagine the people slinking in the back streets making it their temporary homes until they were shooed out in the morning. That was my thought process until I spotted the gigantic folding fences, red crisscrossing monsters which would extend and lock into place with a hefty padlock that was loosely hanging at the entrances. It was impossibly clean, to the point where I was comparing it to the supernatural beauty of the castle. So says me!

  At least the place was primed for otaku like me. I personally fully embrace the term as what else do you call a person who wants to game, loves the bright colors and flashing lights, and feels more comfortable when there's a ceiling above him? Overstimulation literally isn't real. It just means that person's really easily distracted. Our little corner wasn't in front of any screens save for the matte white tiles that sucked in the glittering lights. The recessed spot barely had enough room for us to nudge inside shoulder to shoulder and would be inhumane to expect a person to live inside.

  Now, it was not my first time working there, and I'm not sorry if my narration was misleading. It was my first time working by myself. My coworker, Hanasaki Eiko, the angel who'd trained me, happily stood in the back while I stood pretty in front of the plant stand. Plants needed to be watered, tended to, arranged when they fell out of place, rearranged so we could make the hole as appealing as a hole could be, so many things which needed to be done despite our collection being barely enough to brighten a room.

  She was better at arranging, obviously. I'd been shadowing her and still shadowed her, listening to her talk aloud about what train of logic she was following. Only when customers came did I reluctantly part from her side. Good thing I memorized which kinds of flowers went with roses instead of learning useless things like what emperor initiated the Meiji period.

  Most customers were rather low maintenance. They came, saw, and bought. Apparently we were a floral society considering the amount which already knew which kind of flowers they wanted. I could very well be handing them a flower that meant "I will strangle you, violently," and then another one which meant "I will strangle you, sexually," without knowing the difference. Only two customers came which were higher maintenance. The first was an old lady. She only wore pink and violet.

  "No, a little brighter."

  I shoved a red plant in there.

  "No, that's too bright."

  I replaced it with a violet one.

  "I liked the red actually. Can you keep the red?"

  I put the red back in and put the violet one back.

  "It's still too dark."

  An angel named Hanasaki swept down and took the old lady off my hands. I pretended to be busy with a plant in the corner until the old wratch's imperious presence left our little slice of heaven. Hanasaki giggled when she was sure the woman left.

  "Chin up. Making a bouquet is an art which you only learn by doing."

  "Meaning that's going to happen a lot before I actually make a good one," I said.

  Hanasaki's smile got bigger.

  One of the last customers (life rarely worked out so conveniently. My deus ex machina was all used up with my Persona saving my life, I think.) was a girl who also had fluffy hair. Most of it laid flat down on her scalp while the ends were poofed up. It reminded me of a sheep. Baaah.

  I was still manning the front. Glancing me back rewarded me with Hanasaki giving two thumbs up. I couldn't disappoint that.

  "Welcome to Rafflesia. What…" I needed to stop myself from acting like I was online. Customers were not your friends. Stop, smile, and be overly formal rather than not at all, "can I do for you?"

  The girl was trying to crawl out of her own skin. She had been frozen in front of me, giving me ample view of yet another person that I towered a head over. I glanced back at Hanasaki and gestured to the girl. She made a gesture that probably meant agreement or maybe that it was rude to ignore a person even when they're transported into a PTSD vision.

  Eventually those brown eyes blinked with the speed of a hummingbird's wings. Perhaps she was using her Thief's Eye, maybe. That's a big maybe. I'd prefer not. I like having a unique superpower like I was a main character.

  "...ma'am?" I asked when the wait became too much.

  Once again her eyes shot rapid fire. Cats stole tongues but hers might've been scratched off. Stuck in her throat maybe. Because when she finally spoke, it was a bit guttural like she just finished crying.

  "Uhm, this is a flower shop, right?"

  We had a single bookshelf in there that wasn't even used for books. "Yeah."

  "Wonderful!" With a false cheer that car salesmen envied, she sidestepped so that she was facing Hanasaki. "I have a problem with my plants. For some reason despite being far away from any nature, snails are getting all over my poor plants. I come back a day after they've sprouted and their leaves are already chewed. Is there anything that I can use to scare off the snails?"

  Let's not even imagine the diplomatic response that Hanasaki was going to give. Well, we could take a moment. It'd be softly spoken yet firm, stating that "we specialize in making bouquets and giving out flowers. We don't actually grow any of our own in-house," and then we'd look around in this concrete nightmare that didn't have any sunlight as a bit of a hint.

  "Try eggshells. Crumple them up and spread them out on the ground. Some plants prefer that kind of fertilizer but don't be using them willy nilly. I've heard that it's a myth but it's always what I've done, so yeah. If that doesn't work then try baking powder. Sprinkle it lightly around the plants, use a flour sifter if you have to. My neighbor does that and swears by it. There's a bunch of other stuff that you can do but it starts being specialist stuff that you have to go out and buy, so stick with those two solutions. If they're still bothering you then maybe you should go out and buy nematodes. Little shi—dudes are probably expensive around here though."

  Both of them were looking at me weird. I had to defend my manly honor. And what about this is even not manly? Working outside was manly. Being in nature was manly. Once upon a time we all farmed to live. So what's so weird about a guy who knows how to garden? Anybody who disagrees should go explode.

  "I live out in the boonies. We garden. Not all of us, but most the people around me." They still didn't respond. I added a feeble, "yeah."

  Hanasaki broke it by clapping while laughing. "Wow, Kurusu-san. I wasn't expecting you to be mister green thumb!"

  "Not really. I only know this because I was forced to work outside back home," I said with a grumble. "Can't say that I dislike it. I just like doing other stuff more."

  The girl was finally looking at me without the anxiety of disarming a bomb. Her fingers were up while she was counting down on them. "Eggshells, baking powder, nematodes, okay! Um, I know that I should've gone to the gardening shop instead, but thanks for answering anyway."

  "No problem."

  Unfortunately I didn't have the true values of a service worker so we went back to the awkward staring match as she apparently didn't have an easy way to say that she wasn't going to buy anything. She at least didn't stare like I was a hair away from shanking her.

  "Um, sorry. Where is the nearest gardening shop? I still need fertilizer."

  Hanasaki gave the directions and the girl left with one last thank you. The last customer was a guy who wanted a singular rose. His face looked like somebody smooshed his cheeks into his head.

  While my part-time job was a fun distraction, eventually Damocles' Knife glinted. My room was the exact same. Dust kicked up as I went to a place rarely traveled: the bookshelf. Some of the textbooks that I hadn't cracked open once during the year were carted over and thrown onto the desk without caring about my Mementos notes beneath it. Notebook open, I sped along the half-filled pages which had thoughts that I left for later—so many tools which would never leave writing—until there was a solid ten page interval where I could write.

  I studied. In class I ignored the teachers and studied. After school I studied. Though there's a proper term for this, I'm not calling it that because I actually started studying with an entire day left, which really was 1.5 because I was going to stay up late before the finals and we could also extend it to 1.6 because I was studying on the metro which I took instead of biking for the sole purpose of adding more study time, which showed my forethought which meant that I was not doing the c-word. Preparation could've been my middle name when I got snug in my seat. Ignore that my palms were sweaty because those didn't matter in the grand scheme of things. Nobody remembered your stained pants or red eyes when you got a good grade that, allegedly, would follow you past your grave since the ferryman would double-check if you remembered question 5 from your 5th grade math class.

  I didn't want to have horrible grades. It's embarrassing. That's it. So when I study—not the c-word—I make sure that it's done right. My phone is locked away in an alternate dimension of a shoebox, turned off. An energy drink is slowly sipped as I squint in the darkness, blinds drawn so nothing outside is distracting. Usually soft music from a twelve hour classical playlist would be playing; with my parents stealing all my stuff, I was forced to just ask Sojiro for ear plugs so any noise downstairs wouldn't bother me. All the food that I'm going to eat that day sat below my desk. To doubly make sure that I could stay focused, I shoved all my materials to the side every two hours and made alternate plans that would've had the Kamoshida infiltration go smoother as a 15 minute break.

  The first round of tests came and went. I guessed that it would be my worst one since I had the least time to memorize all the information and already prepared for that to tank my overall score no matter if I suddenly was transplanted with the brain of Ted Fujita. Studying went on. My dreams became restless. Velvet overtook them, though when I woke up I couldn't remember exactly what happened unlike when they called me. Everyday was a gloomy cloudiness where the sun never peeked through the perfect blanket over the atmosphere. Eventually I stopped studying on the metro and just watched the people skulk around in the early morning. Nobody looked any happier than I was.

  On the 13th, the third day of testing, we had an assembly. Do I have to describe why that's stupid? Either you're interrupting the actual testing or you're cutting into people's study time. We filtered in, us little toy soldiers in our prim uniforms, until there was a pervasive feeling of my neck being breathed on. My class was at the front because my teacher hated me specifically, or she could've also hated the class as a whole with the way that she acted, which meant that I had to feel the weight of the entire school's eyeballs kneading into my back as we anxiously waited for the principle to get on with it.

  Let's be perfectly honest with ourselves: if you care about the tests, you don't think about anything else than the tests. So I could try to sum up the conversations that happened in there and the announcement but it'd devolve into gibberish. I could say that things happened during it. The principal was up there. Each breath of air came with a convulsion of the fat around his neck. Years of training had him the perfect distance away from that specific microphone to be heard yet not look as if he were licking it. There was also a guy. He bonked his head on the microphone. I chuckled and got a glare from Kawakami.

  I had fully detached from reality into the realm of abstractions where I forgot most of the things that happened that week. No longer was my day morning, afternoon, night but a continuous series of history, language, English, and so on and so forth until any practical uses of these ideas had become lost. Being snapped out of this mindset is not a good thing! It's exactly where you have to exist to remember everything. Once I read that you remember things better underwater if you learned it underwater—more simply, you remember things more easily if you learned it in the same situation. Since I was studying at home, it was better for me to imagine the world as ones and zeros instead of physical matter.

  It's partially the reason why I got angry when there was waving a hand in front of my face. Slowly the world came back into focus. It was still gloomy. I was standing in one of the school's courtyards for some reason. People were around, most whispering to each other while blatantly staring at the little group that we made. The 'we' part took me a moment too until I realized that the guy had dragged over another person. Blue hair. Meek face. Looked like he wanted to be anywhere else. Didn't ring a bell.

  "Sorry for budging in like this. I know that I wouldn't have wanted any interruptions during the exams either. You're Mishima-kun and Kurusu-kun, correct?'

  Mishima looked like the world had ended. His lips pulled back just as his entire body leaned against one of the metal railings. "H-How did you know?"

  The guy had the tendency to look sheepish, meaning that wool drooled out his mouth when he was genuinely apologetic. "To be frank, I've been informed about certain students before beginning my tenure here, mostly students who've had close encounters with Kamoshida."

  "What? Was he an alien?" I asked.

  The man laughed.

  "Of the first degree indeed!" He coughed into his fist, regaining the genial smile that seemed default to his whole look. "Sorry, that was in poor taste. From what I understand, there were rumors about the both of you suffering abuse from him. I was wondering if either of you wanted to talk about it. I know that it's awkward to talk with a stranger about these things, but everything that you say is confidential. Unless it's actively threatening you with harm, I will never tell a soul about what we speak about unless you want me to. Oh, and there's snacks!"

  "Snacks?" I broached.

  "Snacks!"

  "I like snacks." I looked over to the other boy. "You like snacks too?"

  He nodded. Snacks were important. Screw interrupting my train of thought. I didn't even know this guy's name and he was already one of the best teachers in the world.