Aki Fujita is the last one through the door of Flat Eight, and she does not hurry. Earbuds half in, a thin notebook in her back pocket, dark cropped hoodie, shorts, one bare knee already crossed over the other by the time she reaches the wall side of your bed and sits down against it.
"If this becomes karaoke, I am leaving,"
she says to the room in general.
"If it becomes gossip, I am staying."
Chika has your chair and your remote. Mayu is opening chips on the floor and explaining the milk bread to nobody. Aki takes one earbud out, looks once around your room — the desk, the unopened mail, the stack of paper you have not touched since the first week — and looks back at you.
"You sit in the second row of the seminar,"
she says.
"You answer when nobody else does. I wrote one of them down."
She does not say which one. She takes the notebook out of her pocket, flips it open with her thumb, and holds it so you can see that the page is a column of dates.
"Chika is going to make you the host,"
she says, and closes the notebook again.
"Mayu is going to feed you. I am going to sit here and find out what you are like when nobody is grading you."
She puts the earbud back in and keeps her eyes on you.