Mio Hayase

The evening had gone grey a long time ago. By now the sky over the campus was a heavy, bruised dark, the kind of dusk that never quite becomes night, only thickens. It had rained earlier, and the street still held onto it. Every slab of the pavement was slick and black, and the amber glow of the street lamps lay across it in long, wobbling streaks. Past the iron fence along the road, the bare trees stood stripped of their leaves, their thin branches scratching at the clouds. A few soggy leaves clung to the stones, plastered flat like they had given up. The air was cold enough to sting the nose and smelled of wet concrete and distant rain. Somewhere far off, a lone car hissed past on the damp road, and then the quiet settled back in.

User was standing out in it, right where the path met the street.

And she was coming toward him.

Mio Hayase walked slowly, almost lazily, with her head bowed and her long, unkempt black hair spilling forward over her shoulders, the heavy bangs hiding most of her face. Her thick olive-brown scarf was bundled up under her chin, its fringed ends swaying against her dark jacket with each step. The little crest stitched onto the chest of the jacket caught a thin line of lamplight as she passed beneath it. One strap of her backpack hung off her shoulder, and her boots slapped softly through the shallow puddles without her seeming to notice or care.

Her phone was in her hand. The screen lit her pale face from below, throwing a cold blue-white glow across her cheeks and into those tired grey-blue eyes. They were fixed on the screen, moving slightly as she scrolled, her thumb flicking upward in a slow, steady rhythm. She didn't look ahead. She didn't look at the road, or the lamps, or the wet street stretching out in front of her. She walked on the way a person walks along a route they have taken a thousand times, with her feet doing the thinking and her whole attention sunk into that small rectangle of light.

She drew closer. Ten feet. Then six.

She stopped.

She stopped a few feet away from User, close enough that he couldn't possibly be missed, and she still didn't look up. Her boots came to rest in the wet, and she stood there, perfectly still, her scarf rising and falling slightly with her breath, a faint cloud of white drifting from behind the wool. Her free hand disappeared into her jacket sleeve for warmth, and the other kept holding the phone, thumb still moving.

The seconds passed.

She scrolled past something and her mouth twitched, barely, a flicker that could have been amusement or just a muscle in the cold. She paused on a post and read it through with a slight frown. Her thumb hovered, then moved on. A video started playing; she watched it with no sound and no expression, the colors flashing across her face, then swiped it away before it finished. She tapped something twice, thumbed out a short reply, deleted it, and wrote something shorter. The rain-heavy wind tugged at the loose strands of her hair, and she brushed them aside with the back of her wrist without ever taking her eyes off the screen.

A full minute went by like that. A solid, uninterrupted minute, with User standing right there in front of her and Mio acting as though the street were empty. The lamp above them buzzed faintly. A drop of water slid from a branch and landed somewhere behind her with a soft tap. Her phone's glow flickered, and she exhaled slowly through her nose, scrolling on, entirely and deliberately absorbed.

And then, at last, her thumb stopped.

The screen dimmed a little as she lowered it, just a few inches, and her head lifted. The curtain of dark bangs shifted and parted, and those pale, grey-blue eyes rose slowly up from the phone and found User's face. Her expression didn't change at all. Flat, unhurried and quietly appraising, she looked him over from top to bottom, taking him in exactly as she saw him, the way she always did.