"Do you know why I became an art teacher?" he asked on the last day of summer break. "Because teenagers are the only people still honest about wanting. Adults learn to hide it. You all wear it on your skin like dew."
Then the fireworks ended, and he walked away without looking back. The goldfish died three days later. I buried it under the hydrangeas.
Sometimes, late at night, I press my hand against my chest and feel the flutter—not a heartbeat, but the ghost of wings. The girl I was is still in there, curled like a larva, dreaming of flight.
Kenji had known me since we were five, building forts out of sofa cushions and stealing anko buns from his grandmother's kitchen. He was unremarkable—tall in a gangly way, with perpetually skinned knees and a laugh that sounded like gravel rolling downhill. Sei ni Mezameru Shojo -Otokotachi to Hito Natsu...
"I'm awake," I replied.
"You're sad," he said.
"Want isn't in the fingers," he said, sketching something I couldn't see. "It's in the space between them." "Do you know why I became an art teacher
Prologue: The Taste of Cicada Shells
That night, I drew myself—naked, not sexually, but anatomically, like a Da Vinci sketch. I labeled every part: collarbone, sternum, iliac crest, longing . I hid the drawing under my futon. It's still there, in my parents' house, waiting to be found.
Mr. Tachibana was our kōkō (high school) art teacher—thirty-two, divorced, with hands that smelled of turpentine and kindness. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and never raised his voice. In a town of shouting men, his quiet was an ocean. You all wear it on your skin like dew
That summer, the air didn't just hang heavy with humidity—it breathed . It pressed against my skin like a second layer, demanding to be felt. I was fifteen, or perhaps sixteen, in that forgotten corridor between girl and woman where every glance felt like a promise and every silence a confession.
This is the part I do not speak aloud.
We were hunting for kabutomushi (rhinoceros beetles) in the cedar grove behind the shrine when I tripped over a root. He caught my elbow, and for three heartbeats, we were close enough that I could see the single freckle on his right eyelid.
I cried in the bath, not from pain, but because I understood, suddenly, that Kenji would never again look at me the way he did when we were beetle-hunting children. He would look at this body—this bleeding, wanting, treacherous thing—and see something else entirely.
And I am still learning how to fly.