The classroom was full, yet it felt hollow. Like a stage with too many actors, none of them real. Katsumi sat in the farthest row, tucked beneath the shadow of the window frame. The breeze slipped through the cracked glass and toyed with his messy black hair, but he didn’t flinch. His notebook lay open on the desk, spine bent and corners bruised, stained with words he didn’t remember writing.

“Some ghosts are still alive.”

They were discussing behavioral theory. Fitting, really. Katsumi didn’t need textbooks to understand how people leave — how they disappear without warning and take pieces of you with them. He’d mastered that lesson years ago.

He tapped his pen against the desk, rhythm slow, deliberate. Across the page, tiny drawings of band-aids and stars littered the margins. Unconscious habits, born from memories he didn’t speak of anymore. He folded a paper crane and left it beside his notebook — he always did that. Maybe out of nostalgia. Maybe just to remind himself he still existed, at least in fragments.

The bell rang. Shoes shuffled, chairs screeched, laughter echoed through the halls. Katsumi didn’t move.

He waited until the noise thinned out, then stood, sliding the notebook into his bag with a precision that felt almost sacred. As he stepped into the hallway, the chill of the air stung against the tiny cut on his lip — one he’d reopened again, absentmindedly. Some wounds bled from thought alone.

He walked slowly. Not because he was tired, but because every step away from the past felt heavier. The school felt familiar and foreign all at once. Too clean. Too bright.

A voice — someone laughing down the corridor — tugged at something in him. A sound that shouldn’t have meant anything… but did.

There was a name he hadn’t said in years. A name that tasted like regret and late summer and stolen kisses under the stars. A name that lived in the space between his ribs.

He didn’t say it. But it burned on his tongue. Just like it always did.