Fireworks From the Rooftop

The festival was sold out.

Not the fireworks — you couldn't sell out fireworks, they happened whether you had a ticket or not — but the riverside viewing area had gone to a lottery system two years ago and none of them had won, which was how the four of them ended up on the roof of Haru's apartment building at eight fifteen on a Saturday night in late July with two convenience store bags between them and a collection of folding chairs that didn't quite match.

It had been Yua's idea, which was fitting because Yua's ideas were always the ones that sounded like consolation prizes and turned out to be the actual thing.

"The roof is better anyway," she had said, when the lottery results came back empty. "No crowds. No standing for three hours. We can bring food."

"We can bring food to the riverside," Riku had pointed out.

"Not konbini food. Not properly. You can't spread it out."

This was true. There was something about convenience store food that required a surface — the specific pleasure of opening everything and arranging it and eating across multiple containers rather than from one thing at a time. It was a different mode of eating and it required the right setting and Yua had correctly identified that a rooftop with folding chairs was the right setting and the riverside was not.

So here they were.

Haru had gotten permission from the building manager, who was his uncle and who had said yes with the resigned affection of a man who had been saying yes to Haru since he was seven. The roof itself was flat and practical — ventilation units, water tanks, the usual infrastructure of a building that had never expected to be used for anything recreational — but it faced southwest, which was the direction of the river, and the city spread out below it in the warm summer dark, orange and white and restless.

They had brought: two kinds of onigiri, edamame still in the pods, a bag of chips that Riku had selected based on the bag design rather than the flavor and which turned out to be excellent anyway, four cans of ramune, one container of pudding with four spoons because Yua had insisted on the pudding and Haru had insisted on not carrying four separate containers, cold udon from the prepared foods section, and a bag of ice candy that was already starting to lose its structural integrity in the July heat.

They arranged it all on the low wall that ran around the roof's edge, which served as a table, and pulled the folding chairs into a loose semicircle facing southwest, and Riku connected his phone to a small Bluetooth speaker and put on something low and unhurried, and by the time they had settled and opened their ramune the city below them was doing what cities do in summer — breathing warmly and glittering and generating the particular ambient noise of several hundred thousand people all choosing to be outside at the same time.

"This is better than the riverside," Haru said.

"I said that," Yua said.

"You were right."

"I know."

Riku opened the edamame. Saki tucked her feet up under her in the folding chair with the practiced ease of someone who had spent years making impractical furniture comfortable through sheer force of habit, and looked out at the city with the expression she had sometimes — quiet and receiving, like she was trying to keep the whole view somewhere safe.

Nobody said anything for a while and it wasn't the silence of people who had run out of things to say but the other kind, the kind that only existed between people comfortable enough to share it without filling it.

The fireworks started at nine.

Not with a bang — with a low concussive thud that you felt in your sternum before you heard it, and then the first bloom opening in the southwestern sky, red-gold, petals of light spreading and fading at the edges while the next one was already rising below it.

"Oh," said Saki, quietly, to nobody.

That was the correct response. The fireworks from the rooftop had a quality the riverside crowd would not have — distance that made them slower, somehow, more deliberate, each one given space to fully open and fade before the next demanded attention. No announcer. No commentary. Just the sky doing what it was doing and the four of them watching it do it.

Riku lowered the music without being asked.

Haru passed the onigiri around. Yua ate edamame with the focused efficiency of someone who had strong opinions about the pod-to-bean ratio and was achieving her preferred results. Saki accepted an onigiri without looking away from the sky.

"Tuna mayo," Haru said.

"Perfect," she said.

A green one opened above the city, brighter than the ones before it, and its reflection appeared briefly in the glass faces of the office buildings to the west — multiplied, fragmented, a dozen versions of the same light in a dozen different windows.

"I didn't know you could see the reflection in the buildings," Riku said.

"I didn't either," Haru said.

"That's the best part."

"Better than the actual fireworks?"

Riku considered this with genuine seriousness. "Different. The actual fireworks are the fireworks. The reflections are — the city watching the fireworks."

Yua pointed at him with an edamame pod. "That's the most Riku sentence you've ever said."

"I stand by it."

Sometime around the midpoint of the show — the pace had quickened, the launches coming faster now, overlapping, the sky busy with simultaneous blooms — Saki said, without particular setup: "I got the apartment."

The others looked at her.

"In Osaka," she said. "They confirmed it this week. I move the first week of September."

A pause. Not uncomfortable — they had known this was coming, had known since spring when she had gotten the job offer and spent two weeks walking around in the distracted state of someone running a large calculation — but the confirmation of a known thing still had its own weight, landed differently than the possibility had.

"That's good," Haru said. He meant it. It was audible that he meant it.

"It's a good apartment," Saki said. "Third floor. There's a konbini two minutes away."

"Essential," Yua said.

"Non-negotiable." A pause. "I keep thinking about how I'll have to find new places for everything. A new konbini. A new spot to watch fireworks." She looked at the sky. "A new everything."

"You're good at that," Riku said.

She looked at him.

"Finding the good version of things," he said. "You found this roof."

"That was Yua."

"You said yes immediately," Yua said. "With energy. That counts."

Above them a white firework opened into a perfect circle, hung for a moment at its full diameter, and then began its slow dissolution, the outer edges going first, trailing downward like something being gently unraveled.

Saki watched it go.

"I'm not worried about Osaka," she said. "I'm just—" She stopped. Tried again. "This specific thing. This exact thing. You can't take it with you."

Nobody argued with that because it was true and arguing with true things was its own kind of disrespect.

"You can come back for the festival lottery," Haru said. "We'll probably lose again."

"And end up back on this roof," Riku said.

"With konbini food," Yua said.

"Worse chairs, probably. These are already bad."

"Mine's fine," Yua said.

"Yours has a wobble."

"I've adapted to the wobble."

Saki laughed — a real one, sudden and unguarded, the kind that arrived before you could decide whether to have it. And because she laughed the others laughed too, the way laughter moves through a group of people who are comfortable enough with each other that one person's joy is everyone's immediate reflex.

The finale built the way finales always did — the launches coming faster and faster, the sky increasingly full, each new firework competing with the afterimage of the last until the whole southwestern horizon was a continuous bloom of light, gold and red and silver and green, the concussive thuds arriving in rapid sequence and merging into something that was less like sound and more like weather.

The four of them stopped talking.

You couldn't talk through a finale. The finale was not for talking. It was for watching with your whole attention, the ice candy forgotten and the ramune empty and the chips abandoned, just four people in folding chairs on a rooftop in July looking at a sky that was doing its absolute best.

Haru thought: I want to remember exactly this.

Yua thought: the reflections in the buildings really are the best part.

Riku thought: I'm going to miss her.

Saki thought, looking at the city she had grown up in spread out below the exploding sky, at her three friends in their mismatched chairs with the convenience store food between them and the summer heat still rising off the rooftop concrete: I'm going to carry this one.

The finale ended with one last enormous white bloom that hung longer than any of the others before it finally, slowly, let go.

Then the sky was just the sky again — dark and ordinary and full of stars that had been there the whole time, invisible behind the light, waiting patiently to be seen again.

Nobody spoke for a moment.

Then Riku said: "Okay that was better than the riverside."

"I said that," Yua said.

"We all said it."

"I said it first."

"You did," Haru agreed. "Credit where it's due."

Saki unfolded herself from the chair and stood at the roof's edge and looked southwest toward the river, where the smoke from the finale was still drifting slowly above the city in a long pale line, lit faintly from below by the streetlights.

"Same roof next year?" she said, without turning around.

"You'll be in Osaka," Riku said.

"Osaka has trains," she said. "I checked. Two hours forty minutes. If I leave by five I'm here by seven thirty."

A pause.

"Same roof," Haru said. "Same konbini run. I'll enter the lottery again just so we can lose."

"Lose together," Yua said solemnly.

"It's a tradition now," Riku said. "You can't break a two-year tradition."

Saki turned around and looked at the three of them — Haru leaning back in his chair with his arms folded and his face tilted up at the cleared sky, Yua already investigating the remaining pudding container with a spoon, Riku with his elbows on his knees looking back at her with the expression he had when he was thinking something he wasn't going to say.

She picked up her ramune can. Empty. She held it up anyway.

"Next summer," she said.

They picked up their cans — empty, all of them, the ramune long gone.

"Next summer," they said.

The smoke from the fireworks drifted slowly east.

The city hummed below them, warm and continuous, indifferent and beloved.

They stayed on the roof until the building manager texted Haru at eleven, which was later than any of them had expected him to last, and when they finally folded the chairs and gathered the convenience store wrappers and went back down the stairs into the building's fluorescent ordinary light, Saki was the last one off the roof.

She stood at the door for just a moment and looked back at the southwest sky one more time.

Still dark. Still just the sky.

She went inside.