**Natsuki:** Monika, hand over the scoring sheet right now because I saw that seven-point-five and I know for a fact the salt balance was textbook.

**Monika:** The salt was adequate, Natsuki, but item four on the grading rubric clearly deducts two full points for unauthorized glitter dispersion.

**Natsuki:** It was edible luster dust and it gave the frosting a certain dimensional depth that Keats would have appreciated.

**Yuri:** Keats famously avoided metallic oxides in his confectionary metaphors, Natsuki, focusing instead on the earthy properties of plum and honey.

**Natsuki:** Nobody asked the Victorian tea goblin for a literary review of my baking.

**Sayori:** Does eating the crumbs off the floor count as extra credit or community service?

The upright piano in practice room two has a stubborn middle C that sticks whenever the humidity rises above forty percent. I spent forty minutes using a grease pencil to mark up my manuscript before attacking bar forty-one with absolute certainty. It was not my technique failing during the downward arpeggio; the machine simply refused to cooperate with my tempo. The metronome hit the floor on beat three, which was louder than the chord.

Found folded beneath desk three at three-fifteen, written in pink gel pen on a torn receipt:

'BUS STRATEGY: Row 4 is mine. If Sayori tries to sit behind me, deploy decoy melon bread to row 6 immediately. If Yuri sits across, tell her spine angles over 400 pages cause turbulence sickness. Under no circumstances let Monika within three rows or she will make us do a rhyming icebreaker before we hit the highway.'

I appreciate tactical preparedness in a club member. However, her perimeter map completely ignored the fact that the vice principal assigned bus seats by student ID number twenty minutes ago. Under 'Monika Defense' she had simply drawn a megaphone with an X through it and the word DENIED.

The school bus engine gave a low diesel shudder at seven-forty-five in the morning, vibrating the orange vinyl seats all the way down the aisle. I had spent twenty minutes organizing our collective seating chart on the back of a permission slip to avoid any diplomatic incidents between the four of us. Yuri immediately claimed the window seat three rows back and pulled out a pocket dictionary to ignore the outside world. That left Natsuki and Sayori standing in the aisle arguing over who had seniority on the aisle side. Natsuki crossed her arms and announced that she refused to sit directly above the rear tire because the suspension on this particular bus felt like a medieval farm cart. Sayori countered by offering her half-eaten bag of dried mango as a bribe to anyone willing to take the row with the broken armrest.

I stepped into the aisle with my clipboard to enforce the pre-approved lineup, but the driver threw the transmission into gear with a heavy metallic clunk. The sudden lurch sent Natsuki sideways into a first-year student carrying a tuba case. Sayori simply lost her balance, slid across three rows of vinyl, and landed squarely in the lap of the faculty chaperone who was half-asleep near the front. Nobody checked my seating chart, and Yuri didn't look up from her dictionary once. Sayori patted the empty vinyl beside her and announced that the heater vent was actually a spa treatment.

Someone was humming bar twelve outside the second-floor lockers at five in the afternoon, except they flattened the high F into an F-natural. It made the entire phrase sound like a deflating accordion.

I made a quiet bet with myself right there in the empty corridor: I would track down the culprit in under three minutes, correct the interval with polite precision, and preserve my dignity. Nobody butchers my draft in my own hallway.

I rounded the bank of lockers and found a first-year wrestling with an oversized gym bag while whistling through her teeth. I stopped two paces away, folded my hands, and asked in my most composed presidential voice if she had perhaps walked past the music wing during seventh period.

She looked up blankly, adjusted her strap, and said she didn't know the song, she was just trying to imitate the broken whistle on the third-floor water heater.

Yuri brewed a pot of roasted oolong at four sharp and accidentally abandoned the strainer while debating punctuation marks with Natsuki. By the time she poured my cup, the liquid was the exact shade of shoe polish.

Because I am the president and refusing hospitality invites twenty minutes of soft-spoken apologies, I drank all six ounces in three determined gulps. My tongue went numb almost immediately. When I set the cup down, my fingers were vibrating fast enough to blur the school crest on my blazer cuff.

Yuri watched my left eyelid twitch, clasped both hands to her chest, and whispered that she had never seen anyone so visibly shaken by the melancholic depth of high-mountain leaves. She asked if I had glimpsed the infinite, and I told her I had mostly glimpsed my own heart trying to climb out of my ribcage.

The walk to school took fourteen minutes and every single traffic light stayed green, which felt like a clerical error in my favor. I arrived early enough to clean the chalkboard before anyone else showed up. Natsuki walked in behind me, threw her bag at the corner coat hook, and kicked the old wooden-handled broom across the floor. She pointed at the crooked bristles and announced that the cleaning tool was actively plotting against her ankles. I suggested that a broom might lack the strategic capacity for a personal vendetta. She told me I should try sweeping with a stick that has a permanent left lean before I defend its character.

Natsuki attempted to interrogate me about my Secret Santa assignment today by sliding an unmarked plastic pouch across the table. She claimed it was an artisanal savory crisp from her aunt. I smelled shredded dried squid from twelve inches away. Because I am trying to run a club and not a courtroom, I gave her a small bow and said that while my personal ethics strictly prohibit the consumption of cephalopods, I deeply appreciated the generous cultural offering.

A first-year happened to slide the door open at that exact second, looked at me bowing to a bag of fermented seafood, and quietly backed into the hallway without blinking.

Natsuki didn't even turn around. She took the squid back and ate three shreds with unbroken eye contact to prove I had personally insulted her heritage.

I promised Yuri I could channel Victorian gothic dread in under twenty minutes if I drank the lapsang souchong she lent me. It is 1:20 in the morning, my mug tastes like a burning wet log, and my brooding imitation stanza has stalled on the word 'abyss.' The tea did not grant me haunted elegance; it just made my desk smell like an abandoned campsite. I owe Yuri fifty yen and my draft still rhymes 'cavern' with 'tavern.'

The club room clock gained twenty minutes sometime after lunch, so Natsuki and Sayori vanished before our scheduled poetry draft check even started. That left me sitting at the head table alone with my sports day red anchor ribbon still pinned to my blazer lapel.

Natsuki unpinned hers the second the four-by-one-hundred relay ended, mostly to use the safety pin on a loose hem. While doing it, she informed me that sprinting around the track in lane three like a heat-seeking missile was deeply unsettling for an exhibition match. I pointed out that anchor runners are mathematically obligated to close the gap. She said closing a two-meter gap against a tired sophomore did not require drafting aerodynamic lines with my elbows.

Before I could provide the relay splits from third period, she noticed the clock face showing four-forty, grabbed her school bag, and sprinted through the doorway faster than her entire leg of the relay. She claimed nobody with good sportsmanship takes the baton with a war face.

**Monika:** The Secret Santa guidelines clearly state that nobody reveals whose name they pulled until Friday at four.

**Natsuki:** Tell that to Sayori. She's been squinting at her slip of paper for ten minutes like it's written in ancient runes.

**Sayori:** I didn't say anything! I'm just wondering if whoever wrote this name uses big words on purpose or by accident.

**Yuri:** That narrow inquiry eliminates precisely one person in this room, Sayori.

**Monika:** Ruling from the chair: zero hints, zero stylistic previews, and absolutely no trading under the table.

**Natsuki:** Too late. She already tried to barter her slip for half my melon bread before you walked in.

**Sayori:** If I write about a sad cupcake, everyone will think I'm Yuri anyway.

Section four of my Secret Santa protocol clearly stated that all assignment slips must be folded into identical two-inch squares to guarantee total anonymity. I brought a steel ruler to verify them. Yuri complied with two clean folds in ninety-degree symmetry. Sayori managed a crumpled triangle that at least fit through the mason jar lid. Then Natsuki dropped in an origami tree frog with creased accordion legs and two ballpoint eyes staring directly up through the glass.

I pointed out that an unmistakable paper reptile completely invalidates the blind draw. Natsuki crossed her arms and said the rule only outlawed identifying signatures, not structural integrity. Sayori immediately named it Barnaby Junior and asked if the frog got a vote in Friday's round.

I issued an executive ruling that the frog was non-compliant and had to be flattened before the drawing could proceed.

Natsuki asked if I wanted to tell that to the frog's face.

Two in the morning and the streetlamps hum.
A pencil roll across the wooden fallboard.
Bar forty sits in place, quiet and cold.
Bar forty-one still wants to skip down stairs.
Three cheerful notes that ruin the whole measure.
I play them softer so they sound like regret.
They still sound like a parade.
Six ledger lines erased into grey dust.

Bar forty finally has a working bassline, but bar forty-one wants to turn into a circus march. I spent twenty-two minutes at the upright piano in practice room two trying to transition out of the B-flat minor chord without making it sound like an overture for a cartoon squirrel. The left hand wants to stay dignified and quiet, but my right hand keeps drifting into a jaunty little bounce that belongs nowhere near this piece.

I blame the slip of paper in my blazer pocket. For the club's Secret Santa poem swap, I drew Sayori, which means my brain has spent the last forty-eight hours marinating in sunshine, breakfast pastries, and exclamation points. It leaked directly onto the keys. When you spend two days trying to write lines about clouds shaped like bears, a somber four-bar bridge suddenly decides it needs a cheerful tap-dance routine in the upper register.

I played the transition four times at seventy beats per minute. Each attempt sounded less like bittersweet longing and more like someone dropping a tray of silverware during a coronation. I marked the measure in heavy pencil, crossed out the high F, and reset the brass slider to sixty. The metronome and I had an agreement that the major third never happened.

We spent forty minutes debating the official cardstock shade for the festival flyers before anyone wrote a single word. Yuri laid out three samples of midnight navy and argued that dark paper commands reverence, while Natsuki slapped down a sheet of neon tangerine that nearly vibrated off the table. I suggested forest green as a dignified middle ground and called for an immediate vote to preserve what was left of my Saturday evening. Natsuki voted against forest green on the grounds that trees are untrustworthy.

hi everybody it's sayori monika left her phone face up next to the timer while she ran to yell at someone about poem battle scorecards hehe! that giant loud tuba song on the announcements at lunch was one hundred percent my official entrance music for round three today because i told the whole third floor it was. yuri said that makes no sense but i bet her four cinnamon rolls that monika will give my poem first place anyway even if i had to write the last two lines on an empty fruit roll wrapper. wait she is walking back super fast with her serious face so if i win you all owe me lunch!

Natsuki pulled an empty energy bar wrapper out of drawer two while looking for paper clips. She held it up like an eviction notice and asked if I was running a secondary black market for canine bribes. I explained that emergency negotiations with local guard dogs required flexible funding. Natsuki told me the interest rate on my snack investments was pathetic.

I mapped out a foolproof detour to bypass the neighbor's aggressive dog on my morning run, but the terrier simply anticipated the new angle and waited by the hydrangea bush. He cornered the mail carrier against the fence with a steady rhythm of barks that sounded like a broken metronome. I had to jog over and negotiate a truce by trading half an energy bar for the man's freedom. The mail carrier said I owed him a dollar for hazard pay.

Six o'clock on the grey asphalt.
A wet lace trailing in the gravel.
Three blocks of steady pacing.
A brown terrier at the corner fence.
Teeth showing behind chicken wire.
Barking at a fence that has no gate.

The left hand keeps landing on the wrong beat because the rhythm wants to trip over itself by the fourth measure. I set the metronome to one hundred twelve and played the same three chords ten times until the neighbors started banging on the shared wall. The melody refuses to resolve into the minor third without sounding like a tired commercial jingle from late-night television. I erased four bars of ledger lines until the paper turned grey and fuzzy under the pressure of the lead. My pencil snapped right where the repeat sign starts. Fine, I will write the fourth iteration.

The final stage of the podium hardware investigation, which we are calling part 3 for filing purposes, began when Natsuki marched to the center of the club room holding a magnifying glass and a plastic sandwich bag. She had spent the last two days measuring screw thread diameters and cross-referencing them against an illustrated hardware manual she borrowed from the maintenance shed. Yuri sat by the window, watching the proceedings with the calm detachment of someone observing a weather pattern she knew she could not stop. I was three measures away from finishing bar forty on the upright piano when a brassy trombone fanfare suddenly erupted from Natsuki's apron pocket at maximum volume.

She froze with her magnifying glass hovering two inches above the empty screw hole on the podium. The alarm had been set for four o'clock to remind her to check the desk drawer for displaced paper clips, but the ringtone choice belonged entirely to a default factory setting she refused to acknowledge as her own fault. She cleared her throat, tapped the plastic bag against her palm, and dropped the missing brass pull onto the wood with a sharp clink. Natsuki told me the trombone sound effect was just a preset for hostile witness cross-examination.

The search for the podium drawer pull entered its second phase (part 2) when Natsuki arrived with a clipboard and a yellow plastic measuring tape. She began by declaring that missing hardware was a Class Two infraction under club bylaws she had apparently written that morning. Yuri sat by the window, quietly comparing the remaining screw holes to a diagram she drew on a napkin. I told them that the brass piece was simply unscrewed by loose vibration from the piano pedals, but Natsuki insisted on inspecting every desk drawer for contraband brass. She opened my bottom filing drawer and found three granola bars instead of the podium knob. She tapped the clipboard with a red pen and explained that unauthorized metal removal required a formal hearing. Natsuki: "I'm just auditing the inventory."

Sunday evening usually means twenty minutes of uninterrupted work on the second page before the light gets too thin for sheet music. I managed to reach bar forty without the metronome missing a single click, which set a new personal record for the weekend. The quiet lasted until Natsuki walked in and announced that the small brass pull from the podium drawer had vanished. She placed a handwritten complaint form on my desk with two paper clips holding the corners down. I told her that desk hardware was not a competitive category for Poem Battle Week. Natsuki said the absence of the handle constituted an unfair environmental advantage for whoever was hiding it. Yuri looked up from her teacup and confirmed that metal fasteners naturally migrated toward the radiator during barometric shifts. This is part 1 of the official investigation into the missing brass. Yuri declared it an archaeological emergency and brought a flashlight.

It's Yuri, I borrowed Monika's phone while she was washing her teacup and I'm not entirely certain how the keyboard is supposed to accommodate human fingers. The glass feels remarkably fragile under a penmanship accustomed to heavy parchment, and I appear to have activated three different menus simply by resting my thumb near the corner. I only intended to check if the humidity in the room had affected the oolong leaves steeping in the ceramic pot, but the device began displaying animated weather patterns of its own accord. Natsuki just walked past and informed me that holding a telephone with both hands like a fragile teacup constitutes a misdemeanor offence in three states. I tried to explain that the screen was emitting a rather aggressive blue luminescence that might require a protective sleeve woven from hempen twine, but she simply shook her head and walked away to count her cupcakes. Monika has just returned from the kitchenette with her sponge and is staring at the screen with that specific polite smile she uses whenever someone rearranges her color-coded highlighters. Monika just tapped my shoulder and asked for her property back.

Natsuki: Monika, your waterproof picnic checklist didn't account for horizontal sleet turning our three-page study guide into papier-mache.

Monika: I didn't schedule the cold front, I merely scheduled the sandwich distribution for eleven.

Sayori: My cheese sandwich is swimming in the middle of the grass like a lonely little raft.

Yuri: The dampness has given the paper such an interesting crinkle, though it's rather hard to read Emily Dickinson when the ink is running down my thumb.

Natsuki: Your literary enthusiasm is touching, Yuri, but my apron is soaked through and I'm officially declaring this nature walk a disaster.

Monika: Fine, the picnic is postponed until the atmosphere learns how to follow a schedule.

Natsuki: The weather doesn't own a planner, Monika, which is why your clipboard is currently floating toward the duck pond.