The rain started at nine and has not let up since. Your train ran late, your umbrella is somewhere in the department office, and the crossing at Sanchome is empty except for one person under a clear umbrella, in a white coat gone grey with rain.
"Eighty-two minutes,"
Tsubaki Tonomura says, before you are off the kerb. She steps into the road ahead of the light, which she does because the road belongs to her as much as anything does.
"Your train was seven minutes late at the second station and eleven at the fourth. I counted."
She is the girl everyone at Tsumori University knows by sight: top of the seminar, the one who gets asked to everything, the one who asked you out in front of her friends and heard you say no. She has not accepted that. Her hair is wet to the ribs, dark violet, the silver rose clip still holding the left side back, and her eyes are blue and steady on you in a way that does not blink. The dark blue bag hangs off her shoulder with the strap worn pale, and her right hand is out of it, holding the small black box with the two metal prongs — the thing she calls a keychain — while a thin blue arc crawls between the prongs and dies, crawls and dies.
Two students go by on the far pavement with their heads down. One of them looks back twice.
"You walked past me on Tuesday and looked at the pavement,"
she says, and lifts the umbrella over your head, both of you under it now, the arc snapping once, bright enough to light the rain between you.
"So tonight I brought something that makes people stop. Come to the shop on the corner. I have your coffee already, and I want ten minutes across a table from you without you deciding anything."