Promptober 2026 Day 13: Smile
On the last day of midterm exams, Taki finished early, and laid her head down on her desk until their teacher called for the tests to be passed up. ‘Passing’ was not a concern; Taki already had a feeling that she would end up more or less in the middle of her class ranking. She aimed for the meaty part of the distribution curve, and hit it every time.
Earbuds in. Head down. No practice tonight. Perfect.
About halfway through Taki’s first year of high school, one of her teachers smelled something fishy, and had pulled her into the teacher’s offices to give her the third degree.
Shiina-san, you have so much potential - you aren’t afraid of hard work, you’re incredibly bright. If you gave school ten percent of your max effort, you could blow the whole class away. Why don’t you?
It wasn’t that Taki didn’t care about school - nothing so childish. She recognized the importance of education. She listened attentively in lectures. She took neat, well-organized notes. She asked good questions, and was always prepared to read aloud when it was her turn. It was just that when she wasn’t at school, she found that everything else was much, much more important.
Most adults, she surmised, went to school, graduated, studied in college, and “figured out what they wanted to do.” Then, having solved that particular puzzle, they got jobs in their respective fields and poured their lives into their careers. They took on a particular shape that matched these choices, like water taking the shape of the pitcher you poured it into. These people found meaning in the twelve or fourteen or however many hours a day they spent working.
(Of course, this left them exhausted. But that was fine. Being exhausted was also, so far as she could tell, a normal part of adulthood.)
But Taki was lucky. In her mind, she had already gotten to skip to the front of the line. She didn’t need to “figure out what she wanted to do.”
She already knew what she wanted. She had tasted it. She tasted it all the time now, in the back of her throat, like bile.
Sometimes she got the impression that people saw her as scary, and she never understood why. She wasn’t a delinquent. She wasn’t mean to people who didn’t go out of their way to get on her nerves.
(Somewhere, Anon sneezed.)
She was just a realist. If she skipped school, she would be held back - so she went to class.
If she performed poorly on tests, it would cut into her time for composition, practice, production - so she studied.
She wasn’t Umiri, who was unemotional to a fault (and whose emotional outbursts, when they happened, almost always sent ripples of instability through the entire greater Tokyo area). She wasn’t pent up. There would have been something fundamentally dishonest about about hiding her feelings behind a mask - real, as in Umiri’s case, or metaphorical, as with her own band’s bassist.
(What was it about bassists? She thought that someday she might ask her sister about that.)
No, Taki’s smile was real. It was genuine.
That was the Shiina Taki promise. What you see is what you get.
Always.
Every... single... time.
She didn't have anything to hide. Why would she hide anything behind some kind of weird, cringey, extra performance?
Yesterday, today, tomorrow - THIS was what she wanted. Why else would she work so hard? She fills her ears with music for sixteen hours a day, not to drown anything out, but because a composer can't write without first listening.
The place on her thumb where other people get hangnails from idle picking is almost suspiciously smooth.
(She can count on one hand the number of meals she’s eaten in the last year that didn’t come out of a box.)
The other day, she saw a meme online about 'embarrassing things you said back in first grade springing into your mind right before you went to bed,' and was momentarily bewildered, because she wasn't sure she had ever had that experience.
(a recent Google search: “is it safe to sleep with earbuds in”)
No, there's no room in her life for unproductive crap. After all - this moment in time is perfect. It’s perfect. She’s making something that she’s proud of. She’s surrounded by people that she loves. She’s filled every hour, minute, second of her day with this feeling. Her life is full. Her heart is full, so, so full. Full like a pitcher of water, right up to the brim. Full like a stomach can be full after a meal from a box, throwing bile up into the back of her throat.
No room at all in there for doubt. For uncertainty. These things don’t exist for her.
Things could stay like this forever. This moment, frozen in time, forever. The five of them, just like this, forever.
She’d be happy. Of course she would. Of course.
(…right?)
She fumbled frantically in the pocket of her jacket and clicked the volume rocker on her phone up one more notch, but it was already maxed out. It always was.