The results were posted at noon, and the hallway outside the academic office filled almost immediately, students pressing forward in clusters, checking phones and printouts at the same time, voices overlapping. Kaito joined the edge of the crowd, kept his head down, and waited until there was space enough to look.
His name was there. Third column from the left, halfway down the page.
He had failed.
Around him, the noise continued as though nothing had happened, because for everyone else, nothing had.
They had all passed.
A girl two rows over threw her arms around her friend, and they jumped together, shrieking.
A boy beside him exhaled loudly and said that his score was lower than last semester, just barely, and his friend told him it was fine, that it still counted.
Kaito put his phone away and walked toward the exit.
Mr. Choi found him before he reached the stairwell.
"I'm sure you saw your results, Kaito," Mr. Choi said.
"Yes, sir."
Mr. Choi looked at him for a moment with anger, and then he said, "how long are you going to be a stupid student?"
"Every year you've failed classes and have to repeat them, clearly school isn't for you."
Kaito did not say anything.
"I know what the problem is, it's that you simply do not put in the work, you don't care if you pass or not, you're so comfortable with failure."
Kaito kept his head bowed respectfully.
"You're wasting your potential," Mr. Choi said, and then seemed to consider whether to continue, and decided against it. He walked away instead.
Kaito came back out through the main building around half past one, when most students were still gathered in the courtyard or grouped along the benches near the entrance.
No one spoke to him. He passed a group of classmates who had sat near him for two years, and they did not look up.
He walked close enough to the edge of a conversation to have joined it, if someone had made the space, but no one did, and he didn't try.
There was no gap where Kaito belonged. The courtyard functioned perfectly without him in it, and when he left through the side gate, that didn't change anything either.
xxxx
As he walked, a stray cat was tucked against the wall of the corner store at the bottom of the hill, watching the street.
Kaito stopped beside the cat.
He had started carrying a small bag of dry food in the front pocket of his school bag sometime in the second month of the year, so he could feed the cat. He took the bag out now and crouched down, and the cat came forward without hesitation, because it knew him.
He poured a small amount onto the ground and watched it eat.
"I've had a very rough day, cat," he said quietly, not expecting anything.
The cat meowed and continued to eat.
He stayed until it was finished, then folded the bag closed and put it back in his pocket. Then he stood up and kept walking.
Kaito had failed the same subject twice now. He had failed other things before that, every time he thought he had understood what he was doing wrong, the next thing went wrong in a different way.
Other people failed exams and recovered.
Other people failed and found the thing they were actually good at and moved toward it.
Kaito seemed to fail and simply stay in place, as though failure were not a temporary condition but a characteristic.
He thought about the girl in the courtyard who had jumped when she saw her score, and he tried to understand what that felt like, to have worked for something and then received it, to have a reason to jump.
He could not imagine it.
He wondered, not for the first time, whether the problem was not effort or method or timing, but something deeper, something that could not be corrected because it was simply what he was.
Whether some people were built for accumulation and some people were not, and whether Kaito had already been sorted into one category or the other without ever being told.
He didn't arrive at an answer.
Around the third block, he opened his phone and picked a manga to read.
It was a series he had been following for a few weeks, about a man who had lived an ordinary life, died without achieving anything that mattered to him, and had woken up again at the beginning, with everything he knew intact and a second chance to use it.
He read while he walked, which he knew was careless, but he did it anyway..
He thought about that, If he woke up tomorrow and he had regressed or he was transmigrated into another world, he would sieve advantage of it and never waste it
He was still reading when he reached the road.
His thumb moved to the next page. The signal changed somewhere ahead, but Kaito didn't see it, therefore he didn't see the truck coming, he later heard it but it was too late…
A drunk man was in the truck, struggling to control it as it swerved off course and headed at Kaito.
~Bam! The truck collided with Kaito, crushing all of his ribs.
Kaito fell to the ground, he stared up at the sky and realized how beautiful it was that day. He knew he was bleeding both internally and externally but he felt peace.
At the same time he felt lots of regret.. "I don't want it to end like this." He thought.
Kaito had not done anything yet, he had not become anything yet. He had failed quietly, for years, and he had been invisible, and he had fed a cat on bad days, and none of it had added up to a life he was finished with.
"What a dreadful life…" he thought. "I wish I could get a second chance."
Then he breathed his last.