With a clipboard in hand and a pen in the other, Shinobu’s path eventually led him around the corridor of his classroom. He didn’t need to walk around when doing basic administrative work of the student council, but Shinobu wanted the exercise.

It was by pure chance that he passed by his own classroom when the ‘new girl’ introduced herself. Just barely out of sight and in a corner, Shinobu saw the brown-haired, green-eyed girl standing in front of class.

“Cute pigtails,” muttered Shinobu to himself.

His path led him directly to the entrance to his classroom when the bombshell dropped. The ‘new girl’ introduced herside as Akina Miyata; she had the same surname as Akito. A pair of alliterative names generally meant siblings. Shinobu guessed that.

And in a single sentence, the ‘new girl’ dropped the bombshell. She was Akito Miyata, she said.

Shinobu’s clipboard clattered onto the floor, and his pen followed in quick succession. The homeroom teacher, Mr. Smith, looked towards him.

“Shinobu, you look pale.”

Shinobu squatted downwards to pick up his items, and found time to direct a smile upwards. “I apologise for the interruption.”

His demeanour belied his thoughts. Akito, a 15 year old boy, ended up emerging. Most emergences happened before a boy’s 10th birthday, and for Shinobu, it happened on sometime after his sixth. He eventually got used to it, just like everyone else who emerged.

10 years later, however, his mind would still remain a boy’s. If Shinobu spoke Japanese regularly, he would have used the ‘僕’ pronoun to refer to himself. It was fortunate that only his father and the headmaster knew. The doctor called it a ‘possible case of partial emergence’, and that Shinobu might ‘outgrow this tomboyish fad’.

These thoughts came bubbling to the surface of Shinobu’s mind as he rushed off into a corner of the school.

“Damn it. Damn. It. Damn. It,” Shinobu clutched his head and began to laugh. This was one of the things he could not change. His thoughts wandered to Akina, and how h—she was dealing with this.

Popping his phone out of his pocket, Shinobu shot a message to the number labelled ‘Akito Miyata’. She would have kept the phone, he reasoned.

[i]”Hey. How’re you feeling?”[/i]