He wakes up before the sun, illuminated only by the flickering street lamp in panels of butter yellow. The room is too cold, too sparse, too empty, somehow, and so he curls his arms around his knees and waits to be passed over to wakefulness.

Some days, he considers simply not going to school altogether. His backpack is heavy, the straps dig into his shoulders, and every step is the toll of his death knell, steady and resolute. The prisoner walks to the chopping block. He is decapitated on the second stroke. He toes off his shoes and prepares to hold his breath until the end of the day.

At his desk, she is waiting for him. Her smile is crooked and knowing, her posture that of a predator stalking its prey. She twirls her hair around a finger and greets him for the day, her shadow stark across the surface of his desk. She leans her weight forward until the metal creaks, looming into his space, and he stares at the wood grain and waits, waits, waits. He thought her kind, at the beginning, and maybe she is – she’s the only one who talks to him, the only one who wrenches him up by the hair and spits on him, the only one who threatens him with dull scissor blades and taunts him.

She cut off a chunk of his hair two months ago, and his mother had snapped at him for doing such a foolish thing. There are bruises on his ribs in purples and browns. She gives him something – a coiling knot in his stomach, winding tighter and tighter with no release, a breath blooming as pressure in his lungs that he can’t exhale.

“Kageyama-kun,” she says, long and taunting. She drops her pencil. “Pick it up.” Does she know she’s all he has?

He is nothing, most days. He tries to run when it starts to rain on his way home, and falls, wheezing, against a fence. Head tipped up, it’s raindrops all the way up, dizzying in the way that a fractal stretches out and out into infinity. He presses his thumb into the yellowed flesh over his stomach just to feel something, a sharp inhale and mottled skin. His clothes weigh him down. His worksheets are soaked through. They dry stuck together. She left a note on his homework, though he’s not sure when. A date and time and meeting spot. His stomach cramps for a split second and he sits and stares.

There’s something hollow in her eyes as well, something desperate and animal. She doesn’t smile when she thinks nobody is looking – her features pinch into a frown and she sits like she’s waiting for someone to activate her again. Her hair is thick, platinum-gray – purple when the light hits it just right. She likes jabbing the points of her pencils into the backs of her hands, pressing and waiting for something to happen. It’s why they’re the same.

He imagines he could take off running somewhere and nobody would care enough to hunt him down, but he ends up in the alleyway right on time. It stinks of rotting fish and wet garbage.

“Take off your clothes and sit in the dumpster,” she says like she’s already bored with him. Her skirt comes down to her thighs, and she’s bitten her fingernails down to the quick. She watches like she’d like to switch the channel, eyes dim and dull. He turns his back to her and pulls off his shirt and pants, folding them in a pile with his shoes. His underwear comes last, and he keeps his hands in place to protect his modesty, though it’s nothing she hasn’t seen.

It’s a bit of an ordeal to get into the dumpster. He has to brace himself on the flimsy plastic garbage bin that Minori makes no move to stabilize. She stands with her arms crossed over her chest, occasionally worrying a hangnail.

It doesn’t feel like an accomplishment. He thinks he’ll retch with the first slide of rotten fruit against clammy skin. His throat jumps in a valiant attempt, but he swallows hard and waits for his reflexes to settle. It’s cold and slippery and unstable, feet, thighs, groin, stomach. His stomach lurches again when something wet snakes its careful way down his leg. When he looks up, she’s already gone.

Another time, she grabs him by the wrist with both hands. Her fingers touch around his forearm, and she begins to twist his skin in two different directions.

“If I were drowning,” she says, inflectionless and deliberate. “Would you jump in to save me?”

“Yes,” he says without hesitation. When she lets go of him, his skin doesn’t fit right, tingling and burning and too big. She kicks him in the shins, one for each, half-hearted.

Many people are cruel, but not many people wear it on their sleeve like she does. She’s the bruise he can’t stop pressing, broken glass and assorted blades. She sets his clothes on fire and watches him panic to extinguish them, she asks him questions about himself, about her, about them.

They’re assigned to clean up the classroom together when she asks, “would you fuck me?” And for the first time in a while, he feels that loud, swarming humiliation like a buzz below his skin. He shrugs up to his ears, traces the seams of the floor from beginning to end. Her tone is casual. Cocky, maybe.

“Look at me. You would, wouldn’t you? You’re filthy.” She clicks her tongue. “I bet you want to, and that’s why you listen to me. Am I wrong?”

“Yes,” fragile and small.

“So you’re a pervert and a liar. Look at me. You’re disgusting. I bet you think about it all the time. Tell me you think about it.”

He says nothing.

“I’ll cut you up. I’ll slit your wrists. Tell me you want to fuck me. Do you want to die? You’re a coward. You’ll never stand up for yourself in a million years, that’s why nobody likes you. You’re a boring, stupid doormat. I don’t know why I waste my time with you.”

The broom’s handle thuds weakly against his back. She prefers blades and glass and humiliation because she’s not really all that strong. It’s another way that they’re the same. “I bet you’d do whatever anyone told you to do. I bet I could make you kill someone.” She probably could. “That brother of yours. Don’t you get mad, that he’s so much better than you?”

He thinks she might be having a bad day. She’s tying herself into knots, and his heart is hammering, and he can’t move. There’s shame, and there’s something else – some giddy, nervous excitement, frantically writhing through his stomach. He can make it better. She can carve her name into his belly, and she’ll be back to the placid Minori who smiles at him sometimes. He’s terrified of her every facet.

“I’d do it if you asked.”

“You’d kill your brother?” She laughs aloud, a cutting, cruel thing. “Weirdo.”

“I don’t want to. I don’t want to, h-have sex, with you, either, but I would. If you asked.”

She goes very quiet, and very still, then there’s cold air all the way up to his ribs when she lifts his shirt up. His stomach is a bit paunchy, but his ribs still show. He’s never hungry. Sometimes, she makes him punch himself in the stomach until he doubles over and vomits.

“You’re a freak. You’re like a dog. Don’t listen to someone who hurts you,” there’s an odd hitch to her breath. “You shouldn’t listen to just anyone. You’ll get yourself killed. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“What if I told you to stab through your hand with a pencil? Would you do it?”

“Yes.”

“I could rape you.”

She fists his shirt in her hand. Her palm is sweaty against the soft parts of him, and he twitches away as a reflex. There are goosebumps down his spine, simmering through his body. He nods. She could. He would let her.

“Mob?” She asks. “Do you think I’m pretty?”

Something stutters in his chest.

It takes her asking for him to think about it. He looks away from her so often that he doesn’t even know the color of her eyes. When he does look, they’re a sea green, washed out by the classroom’s lights, brimming with the darkness that presses against the classroom windows, kept back with fluorescent wards.

He’s not sure when it got dark. He’s not sure if they’re allowed to be all alone together like this. Her friends are gone. The teachers are gone. There’s something unreal about it all, something that bothers him – it’s as though the world moves to make spaces for them to be alone together, like they’re the only living people. Here is their private universe in all of its vast, hungry emptiness. He holds onto her like a starving man – if not with his hands, then with his heart. If not with his heart, then with his soul. They’re alone together in all this nothingness, aren’t they?

If she’s pretty, it’s because she’s the only thing that’s real. It shows in her chipped nails and split ends and hangnails and gnashing teeth.

“Yes,” it’s shy and gentle. A confession. He expects her to dash it to shreds, or to take it and run, but then there are cool, chapped lips against his, and her hand over his heartbeat, a complete circuit from him to her to him. It lingers for a second or two, and then she pulls away, eyes darting through the room at the pace of his frantic pulse.

“I think you’re ugly,” her voice is low. “Your – your eyes look like a dead fish. Like the ones at the market, on ice, that just stare up through the glass. And you’re always cold.”

He nods, spurring her on. She adjusts, gripping his shoulders so hard it hurts, and his shirt stays rucked up, and she’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen, he’s certain of it now.

“Are you dead? I think you might be dead,” her brow furrows, she gnashes her teeth. “You’re a ghost and I’m the only one who sees you. You’re a corpse.”

“I think so too.”

“Nobody misses you,” she laughs. It rings in every corner of the room. “When I look at you, I want to puke. You must’ve been a nobody when you were alive, too.” She smooths out the wrinkles over his shoulders, settles the fabric straight. “Do you believe in hell? Or purgatory? I think I might’ve been sent just to torment you. You make me so cruel. I want to hurt you. It’s the first thing I want when I wake up, and the last thing I want before I go to sleep. I want to make you feel something. Like – I want you to be in pain. For real. I want you to cry. You just look so dead. You give me nightmares.”

This time, their teeth crack together, and she prods into his mouth with her entire tongue and too much saliva. He gags. He anchors himself on her shoulders as his lifeline, his tether. She grabs a fistful of his hair and yanks so hard his vision goes white for a split second.

“You make me so cruel,” she repeats against his mouth. Her breath is warm and sour. “I hate you. I hate the person you make me. Do you understand? I don’t think you do. Mob, Mob, you kiss like a dead fish too. I’m going to tell everyone you kissed me. I’m going to tell everyone that you raped me and I’m going to get you expelled. I’m going to come to your house and I’m going to set it on fire with you and your family inside. And I’m going to write you an obituary and cry at your funeral and nobody will ever know. You can’t tell anyone. They’ll never believe you.”

“I know.”

“Doesn’t that make you mad?”

“No.”

“Do you want to die?” Every time she laughs, it sounds like something breaking and shattering beyond repair. Their foreheads knock together. Trading breath is beginning to make him dizzy – or maybe it’s the way that she strokes through the hairs at the base of his neck, gentle, for once, with what is desperation in him.

“If you’ll kill me.”

“It’s just me, right?” He wonders if she’s about to cry. Her eyes are shut tight and she’s breathing funny.

“Just you.”

What does she have left to take? Is it taking, if it’s given so willingly? She kisses him again and again, breath hitching, shoulders pulling together in some secret shame.

“I hate you,” she says, pinching into his cheeks with her ragged nails. “I still hate you.”

“I know.”

“You made me this way. I’m not like this. I’m not.”

“That’s okay.”

“Why’d it have to be you and me?” She says. It’s almost a whine. “Your breath stinks, too.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re not,” she’s gentle. She’s touching him, cradling him, and he feels . . . something. A swarm. An insistent, insect hum. “You’re not sorry. But that’s okay.”