Chapter 17: Junpei Stops Sleeping

The vending machine outside Junpei's window had been broken since July, the kind of broken where it still lit up but wouldn't take money, and the blue-white glow of it came through the curtain at three in the morning and laid a pale stripe across his bedroom floor that Natsuko watched without blinking.

She had been sitting in his desk chair for four hours. The chair had a loose left armrest that she'd learned to favor, and she held her complaint log in her lap though she hadn't written anything new since one-fifteen, when Junpei had said the thing about making it easier and she'd stopped being able to decide what category to put it in.

He was on the bed. Sitting, not lying. This was the compromise — he'd allowed her presence in exchange for her allowing that he would not lie down, and they'd reached this agreement without either of them saying it aloud, the way you can sometimes negotiate things with people you've known long enough. His pajama top was the same blue-and-white striped one from the night at the shrine. He'd washed it twice since then and it still carried the smell, low and persistent, the particular cold salt of something that had never been on the surface long enough to dry.