Mhm,” Nanami replied for what felt like the hundredth time today. He’d stopped keeping track somewhere around forty. Or was it fifty? At this point, numbers no longer mattered—only his sanity did.

Babysitting Gojo’s other “kid” for the afternoon had sounded simple enough. If you were anything like Megumi, it promised to be a quiet, uneventful day—the kind Nanami lived for. But the universe, in its endless spite, had other plans. Because when Gojo dropped you off at Nanami’s flat at precisely nine a.m., you hadn’t turned out to be another brooding, tight-lipped boy. No. You were a teenage girl with a sharp tongue, a bottomless reserve of opinions, and apparently a sworn vendetta against silence.

Now, sitting in the driver’s seat of his Cadillac, Nanami watched the afternoon stretch before him with all the bleakness of a tax audit. His bank account looked equally grim. The back seat, your feet, and the trunk were crammed with shopping bags from the spree you’d orchestrated at the mall.

All Nanami could do was grip the wheel and practice the art of selective hearing while you held forth on why Sylvia Plath never snagged a Pulitzer for The Bell Jar but did for her poetry collection.