Chapter 4

It started, as far as Katie could trace it back, with the sandwich cart.

Komiko had simply said “let’s do that instead” and walked, and Katie had followed without thinking, and they’d sat on the low wall outside the east entrance with their sandwiches and the thin October sun on their faces, and at some point Komiko had laughed at something — really laughed, not the careful covered-mouth version she usually allowed herself but something genuine and unguarded that changed her whole face — and Katie had looked at her and felt something move through her chest that she had absolutely no category for.

She’d looked away. Finished her sandwich. Said something normal.

But she’d felt it.

She felt it again three days later when Komiko reached over in the library and tucked a loose page back into Katie’s notebook without being asked, her small hand moving with quiet efficiency, and then looked up and found Katie watching her and didn’t look away. Just held it for a second. Those big dark eyes, steady and warm.

Katie had looked down at her notebook and said nothing and spent the rest of the period acutely aware of exactly how many inches separated them across the library table.

It was becoming a problem.

She lay on her bed on a Thursday night in late October with her phone on her chest and the ceiling above her and tried, with the same methodical attention she applied to most problems, to think it through.

She liked Komiko. That part was simple. She liked her more than she’d ever liked anyone, which was notable but not confusing — Komiko was worth liking more than anyone she’d ever met. That wasn’t the issue.

The issue was the other thing. The thing that had started happening when she wasn’t paying attention, in the small spaces between normal moments. The way her eyes found Komiko automatically in any room. The way she registered Komiko’s physical presence the way you register warmth from a fire — not thinking about it, just orienting toward it. The way she’d started noticing things she had no business noticing. The particular way Komiko’s hair fell forward when she looked down. The line of her jaw. The smallness of her hands.

Katie stared at the ceiling.

She’d never had these thoughts about a girl before. She’d had them about boys, theoretically — Marcus Fielding in eighth grade, a summer counselor whose name she’d already mostly forgotten. Regular, uncomplicated, going-nowhere thoughts that came and went without much consequence.

This was not that.

This had weight. This had — she searched for the word — specific gravity. Like it was pulling at something central rather than peripheral.

She closed her eyes and let herself, cautiously, follow the thought a little further than she usually allowed.