Komiko and Katie
Copyright© 2026 by Komiko Yakamura
Chapter 25
Yoko did not waste time.
Monday morning she loaded all four girls into the car and dropped Komiko, Katie, Yuki and Sandy at the entrance together. Sandy grabbed her backpack and headed inside without giving it another thought.
Yoko drove around to visitor parking.
The counselor’s office smelled like old coffee and laminated posters. The woman behind the desk — Ms. Farrell, mid-fifties, reading glasses on a chain — looked up when Yoko came in and then looked again, more carefully.
Yoko set the guardianship document on the desk. “I’ll need you to copy that for Sandy Kowalski’s file and update her emergency contacts.”
Ms. Farrell scanned the document. “Of course. I’ll take care of that this morning.”
“Thank you.” Yoko sat down and folded her hands. “Sandy is an eleventh grader. Her grades have been suffering. I believe a significant contributing factor has been her home environment, which has changed. What I’d like to discuss is whether it’s possible to align her schedule with her sister’s — Yuki Tanaka, also eleventh grade. A stabilizing friendship already exists between them. Shared classes would support that.”
Ms. Farrell pulled up something on her computer. “Schedule changes mid-year aren’t impossible, but—”
“I understand there are constraints,” Yoko said pleasantly. “I’m asking what’s possible.”
Keys clicking. A pause.
“If we move her second period and swap her afternoon elective, she’d share four classes with Yuki. That’s most of the day.”
“That would be satisfactory.”
“It would take effect Monday of next week.”
“Of course.” Yoko stood. “Thank you for your time.”
Back in her car, she took out her phone and texted Komiko.
Komiko read the text during passing period.
Schedule change approved. Sandy and Yuki synchronized starting Monday. Four shared classes.
She smiled. Texted back two words.
Good Girl, Mom.
A pause. Then her mother sent back a single emoji — the small smiling face she had only recently learned to use, deployed now with enormous dignity.
Komiko pocketed her phone and went to find Yuki.
She pulled her aside between second and third period, Yuki already reading her face.
“Good news,” Komiko said. “But wait. Tell her at lunch. All together.”
Yuki’s eyes moved with something quick and warm. “Okay.”
“How is she this morning?”
“Quiet. Watching everything.” Yuki paused. “She keeps looking at Mom’s contact in her phone like she’s not sure it’s real.”
Komiko nodded. “Lunch.”
The cafeteria was loud the way it always was — the accumulated noise of four hundred teenagers negotiating the social architecture of midday. Their table was their table, the way it had been since September, the particular geography of it so established now that other students navigated around it without thinking.
Sandy sat between Yuki and Katie. She’d been sitting there for two weeks and it still occasionally surprised her — the ease of it, the way no one performed anything, the way the table felt like an extension of the kitchen at home.
She was eating. Katie was saying something about her history teacher’s vendetta against the Oxford comma. Yuki was listening with that particular quality of attention she had, the kind that made you feel like the only person in the room.
Then Komiko looked up from her food and said, simply, “Mom got your schedule changed.”
Sandy stopped chewing.
“Four shared classes with Yuki starting Monday,” Komiko said. “Mom walked into the counselor’s office this morning and made it happen.”
The cafeteria noise continued around them. Someone dropped a tray two tables over. The ordinary machinery of a Tuesday lunch period kept turning.
Sandy sat very still.
She thought about Yoko in that office. Sitting down and folding her hands and saying I’m asking what’s possible. Rearranging the infrastructure of Sandy’s day because it would help her. Because it had occurred to her to try.
The thought never occurred to me, Yoko had said once. You should thank Komiko.
Komiko, who had suggested it. Who had thought about Sandy’s schedule and Sandy’s grades and Sandy’s stability and had handed it to her mother like a quiet directive.
The dam broke.
She didn’t feel it coming. One moment she was sitting with a fork in her hand and the next her eyes were full and her throat had closed and she turned to Yuki and Yuki was already there, already open, and Sandy went into her arms at the lunch table in the middle of the cafeteria and sobbed.
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