The students filed out of the classroom the moment they were given free reign to leave.

I felt a heavy slap against my back and a deep masculine voice call out to me, breaking me out of annoyed stupor. I turn around to see Hayato, a tan, taller guy with dark brown hair cut into a crew cut with front hair long enough to sweep just over his brow. He not only had a scar on the bridge of his nose, but he also had a fresh bandage on his left cheek.

Every time I saw him, he had a new bandage on another part of his body. He had this reckless, but hard-nosed style of play about him as an athlete. Even though we were only briefly teammates, he’s continued to be a team player to me on and off the court.

By the looks of the basketball in hand, it looked like another attempted recruitment attempt.

“Hey, bro, you feeling up for a pick-up game,” he asked with no irony whatsoever and a smile on his face.

“Bro, Hayato, what are you doing? You know what happened the last time we played.”

“I’ve developed a more methodical game since we’ve last played,” he said, spinning the ball on his index finger, an uncharacteristically subtle smile painted on his face.

“I have no doubt you’ve improved while I’ve been sitting at home, but I don’t feel like explaining to your folks how you nearly broke one of your ankles again.”

“Since you’ve been sitting at home, huh? Does that mean you’re interested, then?”

“The answer’s no.”

Somehow he goaded me into being mesmerized by the basketball in his hand. If I were still in my usual game shape, I’d be tempted to snatch the ball from his showboating finger.

“Alright, I get it, you’re not interested,” he said, sighing.

After rejecting his proposal for the seventh time in a semester, I switched my focus to the blackboard ahead of me. Since classes had concluded, Kotonoha should be heading to the classroom we shared a homeroom in. After lingering on the subject for a bit, I felt it was only fair to ask her some questions as long as she was probing for personal information.

Maybe I could ask her what exactly she scrawls in her notebooks during homeroom.

Hayato sat down on the desk chair next to me and set down the basketball next to one of the chair’s legs. He looked in curiosity at the space I absent-mindedly honed in on. I felt compelled to explain myself now that Hayato was scratching his head and squinting his eyes, trying to view it from a different perspective to understand.

“What are we looking at here,” Hayato asked.

“It seems I’ve caught the interest of someone undesirable,” I said, strumming the black bangs that hovered over my eyes.

“Interested as in they want to fight you in a cage match to the death?”

I delivered a clean punch to his upper arm. He winced as he gripped the reddest part of his arm.

“Agh, well, can you at least tell me a name,” he said.

“Fumiko Kotonoha. I can’t even begin to imagine what she would want with me,” I said.

The statement raised a genuine interest from Hayato. The shock forced him to sit down and cross his arms as he meditated in his seat more than at any point in class. He eventually formed a social hypothesis for her behavior after a set of varied hums.

“Well, there’s a recent theory going around the school that she’s conducting a series of social experiments with guys around the school. No one knows why, though.”

“What kind of experiments?”

“Something about her testing to see how people fall in love. The rumors were all pretty contradictory, some downright insane.”

There’s no way that the intense white-haired girl in my homeroom period that scrawled in her notebooks every day had any interest in love.

“Just so I can confirm, we are talking about Fumiko Kotonoha, right?”

“Hey, maybe you’ll be the Blue-Eyed Terminator’s next test subject,” Hayato said, ribbing me with his elbow and laughing through a small corner of his mouth.

“Yeah, no thanks,” I said with an exasperated breath.

“Kenta, I understand Fumiko is a little weird, but is it really bad that a girl with a pulse has an interest in you,” Hayato asked.

There it was. Ever since the end of our freshman year, he’s had that deliberate way of laughing then subtly rolling his shoulders when he said something serious. Seeing his intent, I tried to answer as sincerely as I could.

“I already told you, Hayato. I’m enjoying the single life. Surely you understand.”

“Well, I’ve noticed you sulking in the back of the class while watching other students enjoy their school days.”

His heavy shoulders relaxed as he scoffed and chuckled, releasing all the gravity from his previous serious gesture. But in all honesty, I found his serious side to be really unnerving. He never used to do this in practice.

“Haha. Anyways, even if I started dating again, shouldn’t I be more carefully vetting my dates?”

“I don’t know, man. I say just talk to her and find out what she’s like. Maybe you’ll warm up to her.”

I gave a resigned grunt after running out of my usual repertoire of snarky comments. There was just no winning with him when it came to this subject. That was just perfect, a friend that doubled as a moral compass.

Hayato and I lifted our book bags and left the classroom. The two of us traveled to the stairwell located to our right at the end of the school hallways. But instead of taking my usual route with him outside the gates, I decided to head upstairs.

“Hmm, so you’re going after all, then,” Hayato said.

“Eh, may as well find out if there’s any truth to these rumors,” I said, tilting my gaze towards the flight of steps leading to the third floor above us, my hands tentatively in my pockets.

We waved each other off, my friend wishing me luck with my unusual circumstances.