Komiko and Katie
Copyright© 2026 by Komiko Yakamura
Chapter 26
It was Sandy who brought it up.
Tuesday morning, backpack over one shoulder, walking with Yuki to second period — their second period now, the new schedule three days old and already feeling like it had always been this way.
“I want to go back to the table,” Sandy said. “At lunch. To tell them.”
Yuki looked at her. “Tell them what?”
“That I’m okay.” She paused. “That I’m more than okay. That they don’t need to wonder where I went.”
Yuki considered this for half a step. “Okay.”
“Will Komiko mind?”
“Tell her at breakfast tomorrow. She won’t mind.”
She didn’t.
They came to the table as a household.
Komiko first, the way she always moved through a room — unhurried, taking up exactly the space she occupied, no more and no less. Katie beside her. Yuki with Sandy a half step behind, the position already natural, already home.
Reese saw them coming.
She had good eyes, Reese. She’d built a table worth sitting at by developing the ability to read people accurately and quickly, and she exercised that ability now, scanning the four girls crossing the cafeteria toward her.
She had met Sandy Kowalski before. Had seen her at this table — quiet, watchful, present but barely, the specific quality of someone who had learned to exist at the edge of rooms rather than the center of them. A girl with good instincts and no confidence, navigating the school day the way you navigated something dangerous — carefully, alone, without a net.
The girl crossing the cafeteria toward her was not that girl.
Same face. Same small frame. Same dirty blonde hair. But she walked differently. Sat down differently — pulling out her chair and settling into it like someone who had decided she was allowed to occupy the space. She looked up when Reese met her eyes and didn’t look away first.
Reese glanced at Komiko.
Komiko was already looking at her with that expression — patient, faintly amused, waiting.
“Sandy,” Reese said. “You look different.”
Sandy smiled. It reached her eyes. That was new. “I feel different.”
“Tell me.”
Sandy wrapped both hands around her lunch tray and thought about it for a moment. Not performing the thinking — actually doing it, finding the words for something she’d been turning over for weeks.
“I spent my whole life being told I wasn’t worth much,” she said. “Not in words. Nobody said it out loud. They just — didn’t notice. My parents. My sister. Every school I went to.” She paused. “You can tell yourself that doesn’t affect you. You can tell yourself you’re fine. But you’re not fine. You’re just used to it.”
The table was quiet. The girls who had been half-listening were fully listening now.
“And then I walked into a house,” Sandy said, “and someone handed me tea before I asked for it. And a woman I’d just met rearranged my school schedule because it might help me. And someone held me in the dark just to let me know I was worth holding.” Her voice stayed even. She had cried enough. She was past the part where it came out as crying. “They didn’t tell me I mattered. They didn’t make speeches. They just — acted like I did. Every day. Until I couldn’t argue with it anymore.”
She looked around the table.
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