The first time it happened, nobody noticed.

  Not even Mitsuo.

  He was nine years old, sitting in the back of a classroom that smelled of pencil shavings and old paper, staring at a math problem he didn’t understand. The numbers blurred together—6, 8, 9 all looking the same—while he doodled characters from yesterday’s television show in the margin.

  Then his nose started bleeding.

  It wasn’t dramatic. Just a thin, warm line that slipped down his skin and dripped onto the desk with a soft pat. He pressed two fingers to his nostril, the way his mother had taught him, and raised his other hand.

  “Teacher…”

  She sighed the tired, pitying kind of sigh teachers save for repeat offenders. She walked over, pressed a wad of tissue into his palm.

  Stolen story; please report.

  “You need to take better care of yourself, Mitsuo.”

  He nodded the way children do when they don’t really understand, just know they’re supposed to agree. The other kids were already staring. Not disgusted—just curious in that loud, obvious way kids have. He hated it.

  He held the tissue tight, head tilted back the way he’d been told: pinch near the nostrils, lean back, wait for the clot. The bleeding slowed. Then stopped.

  That should have been the end of it.

  Three rows ahead, Aiko shifted in her seat.

  She had fallen off the swing at recess that morning. Scraped her knee badly enough to cry, the kind of wail that brought the whole playground running. The nurse had cleaned it, bandaged it, sent her back with a sticker. But the bleeding had kept going all afternoon, slow and stubborn, soaking through the gauze.

  Until now,

  The wound was still open, pink and jagged, but the blood had vanished. No clot. No scab forming. Just gone, like the body had forgotten the procedure.

  Aiko poked at it with one finger. Nothing. She frowned, confused in that wordless way children are when something feels wrong but they can’t explain why.

  She didn’t know.

  Mitsuo was staring at the red blooming across the tissue, slow and warm.

  This would slip out of his mind by about next week.

  He wouldn't have another nosebleed for some time.