The Last Good Ticket

The turnstile at Meirin Park gave its usual metallic sigh, and Haru Someya held his wristband up like a trophy.

"That's it," he said. "That's the sound of summer. Somebody should record it and sell it as a ringtone."

"Nobody wants that as a ringtone," said Ren Kitagawa, tucking his ticket stub into his bag. "You'd answer the phone and think you were being sued."

"I'd still buy it."

"You say that about everything. You bought a keychain shaped like a churro."

"The churro keychain," Haru said solemnly, "was an investment."

Behind them, Mei Fujikawa was losing a fight with the little paper map from the gate, the one that always tore along the fold no matter how carefully you opened it.

"Okay," she announced, holding the ruined map at arm's length like a decree. "Strategy meeting. We have nine hours of daylight and I refuse to waste any of them standing around discussing where to go first."

"You're the one discussing where to go first," said Yuzu Amano, who had claimed the one patch of shade near the ticket booth and looked entirely comfortable staying there for as long as anyone wanted to argue.

"I'm not discussing, I'm briefing. There's a difference." Mei jabbed a finger at the torn map. "The Comet doesn't open until eleven for maintenance. The teacups already have a line because of the school groups. So games first. Nobody wants to line up for games at two in the afternoon in July."

"She's not wrong," Ren said.

"I'm never wrong. I'm just occasionally early."

Haru slung an arm around Mei's shoulders, which she allowed with the weary patience of someone who'd been doing this since they were fourteen. "Games it is, General Fujikawa."

"Thank you. Also I want that thing." She pointed past the churro stand toward a crane machine booth, a whole wall of stuffed animals crammed under a striped awning. "The bear. The fat one with the tiny paws. I've wanted that bear since we walked past this booth last year and none of you would stop."

"We stopped," Yuzu said. "You just refused to play because you'd already blown your budget on the ring toss."

"That's a lie about my character."

"It's not, though."

"It's slander, is what it is."

"It's an accurate accounting of your finances."

They drifted toward the booth anyway, because arguing was slower than just going. The attendant had the weathered cheer of a man who'd said his pitch ten thousand times and somehow still meant it. "Three tries for five hundred yen. Big winner picks anything on the top shelf."

Haru cracked his knuckles like he was defusing a bomb. "Move aside. I have a plan."

"You always have a plan," Ren said. "Your plan is usually just spending twice the bear's retail value trying to win the bear."

"That's not a plan, that's a policy."

He fed the machine his money before anyone could talk him out of it and squinted at the claw with the intensity of a man convinced physics could still be reasoned with. Mei leaned over the glass immediately.

"Left. No, left. Why did you go right? You had it. You absolutely had it."

"I did not have it."

"You had it and you panicked."

The claw closed on the bear's ear and dropped it two inches from the chute.

"That doesn't count," Haru said. "That was a rules violation. The claw is defective."

"The claw is fine," the attendant said, not unkindly.

"The claw," Haru said, "is corrupt."

The second try, he went for a smaller prize as some kind of decoy strategy nobody understood, including him, and knocked two keychains loose without catching either.

"What was that?" Ren said, laughing so hard he had to brace a hand on the glass.

"That was strategy."

"That was nothing. That was you panic-pressing a button."

"You have one try left," Mei said, ignoring both of them. "This is it. I believe in you the way I believe in almost nothing else in this world."

"That's the least inspiring thing anyone's ever said to me."

"You're welcome."

Haru shook out his hands like an athlete before a big play, cracked his neck, and approached the joystick with real reverence. The claw drifted, hovered, drifted again while Mei made a small strangled noise beside him, and then dropped, closed around the bear's middle, lifted, and swung toward the chute, the bear's tiny paws waving farewell to its shelf-mates the entire way. It let go directly over the opening. The bear dropped through with a soft thump.

Nobody moved for a full three seconds. Then Mei screamed loud enough that a group of passing elementary schoolers turned to stare.

"I did it," Haru said, sounding as surprised as she was. "I actually did it. Put that on my gravestone. Here lies Haru Someya, claw game champion."

"Give me the bear," Mei said, already holding out both hands.

"It's my bear. I won it."

"You won it for me. That's the social contract of the claw game. You knew that when you put your money in."

He looked at Ren for backup.

"Don't look at me," Ren said. "She's right and you know it."

"Traitor."

"Realist."

Haru sighed like a man who had never once won an argument with Mei Fujikawa in his life and handed the bear over. She hugged it to her chest immediately, blazer and all.

"This is the best moment of the entire summer," she said.

"You said that about the shaved ice last year," Yuzu said.

"This is a different, superior best moment."

"You're going to say it again in an hour."

"Probably."

They wandered off after that without much of a plan, which was how Meirin was best enjoyed anyway. Ren stopped at a cart shaped like a spinning teapot and came back holding a mass of pink cotton candy roughly the size of his own head.

"You're not going to finish that," Yuzu said.

"I don't need to finish it. I need to hold it. There's a difference between eating cotton candy and possessing cotton candy."

"That's the same thing Haru said about the churro keychain."

"We're a household of philosophers," Haru said.

"We're a household of idiots who spend all our money on stuffed animals and spun sugar," Mei said, and reached over to tear off a chunk of Ren's cotton candy without asking, which seemed to be an accepted tax among them.

They ended up on a bench near the fountain with the little bronze crane that had been spitting a thin stream of water since before any of them were born, eating and watching a pack of little kids chase each other around its edge.

"Okay, hot topic," Haru said, around a mouthful of cotton candy Mei had passed him. "Does the teacup ride count as a real ride."

"It spins you," he continued, before anyone could answer. "That's the whole criteria. Does it move you against your will. Teacups qualify."

"By that logic an office chair is a ride," Ren said.

"An office chair with enough enthusiasm behind it absolutely is a ride."

"You're both wrong," Mei said. "A ride has to have a queue. No line, it's a playground."

"That's insane logic."

"It's flawless logic and you know it."

Ren had been quiet through most of that, watching the fountain with the mild, half-elsewhere look he got sometimes. "We should hit the water flume before it gets crowded," he said. "Get wet early, dry off over the day."

"Oh, absolutely not," Mei said. "I am not getting my hair wet before the Comet. I have priorities."

"The Comet doesn't open for another hour," Haru said. "You'll dry."

"I will not risk it. Do you know what humidity does to hair like mine? I will look like a startled hedgehog for the rest of the day."

"You'd still be the prettiest startled hedgehog at the park," Ren said, so casually it barely registered as a compliment at all.

"Shut up," Mei said, and she was smiling when she said it.

They split the difference, as they usually did — the boys for the flume, the girls staking out a table near the exit with the bags and the bear, ostensibly to guard the belongings.

"Really we're just here to watch his face on the drop," Mei said, settling in. "It's one of the great free entertainments of this park."

"He always screams before it even starts," Yuzu said. "Every single time. You'd think after this many years he'd learn the drop doesn't happen until the top."

"He likes screaming. It's basically a hobby for him."

"It's a personality trait held together entirely by adrenaline and snack food."

"Accurate."

They watched the flume car crest the hill, small as a toy from that distance, and heard, even over the park noise, a scream that was unmistakably Haru's, starting a solid two seconds before the actual drop.

"Called it," Mei said, and took a photo for posterity.

The boys came back soaked from the waist down, Ren considerably more composed about it than Haru, who was wringing out his jacket hem.

"That was not light splashing," Haru said. "That sign is a lie. That was a tsunami with a mascot."

"You sat in the front row on purpose," Ren said.

"I sat in the front row because you dared me to."

"I said maybe you should sit in the front row. That's a suggestion, not a dare."

"In my heart it was a dare."

They dried off over the next half hour mostly by walking around complaining about the heat that, minutes earlier, had been the thing making them miserable in the opposite direction, and drifted back toward the games section, where Yuzu insisted on the ring toss despite, or maybe because of, her spectacularly bad history with it.

"You've never won this," Haru reminded her, unnecessarily.

"I know. That's why I have to keep trying. It's a matter of dignity now."

"Your dignity took its first loss three summers ago and it's been losing ever since."

"Let her live," Ren said, grinning.

She missed the first four rings by increasingly embarrassing margins — one sailed clean over the whole display and vanished behind the booth, which made even the attendant laugh before he quietly went to retrieve it. On the fifth try, the ring landed on a bottleneck, wobbled for one endless second, and settled.

"I did it," Yuzu said, staring at it like she didn't believe it. "After three years. I actually did it."

The other three lost their minds like she'd won an Olympic medal.

"We should get that bottle bronzed," Haru said. "Put it in a museum. The Yuzu Amano Ring of Destiny."

"You're never going to let me forget this."

"Absolutely not. I'm bringing it up at your wedding."

"You're bringing up a ring toss at my wedding?"

"I'm bringing up your triumph over adversity. It's inspirational. Grooms love that stuff."

Her prize turned out to be a small plastic goldfish keychain, which she clipped to her bag immediately with the pride of someone accepting an award, and they moved on, Mei still hugging her bear, Ren still nursing the sad remnants of his cotton candy.

By the time they found the food court, the sun had climbed high enough that the shadows had shrunk to almost nothing, and they claimed a table under a striped umbrella like it was an oasis. Haru went to line up for takoyaki, Ren tagged along for yakisoba, and the girls stayed behind, actually resting this time instead of strategizing.

"You've been quiet," Mei said, once the boys were out of earshot, the bear tucked under one arm like a small, furry chaperone.

"I'm not quiet. I'm digesting cotton candy trauma."

"You're quiet in the specific way you get quiet when you're thinking about something."

Yuzu picked at a loose thread on her sleeve. "I ran into Ren's mom at the station yesterday."

"Oh."

"She asked if I was excited for him. About the transfer."

Mei's face did something complicated, half wince, half fond and resigned. "Did you tell her you weren't planning on making it weird today?"

"I told her I hadn't decided yet how weird I was going to make it."

"Please don't make it weird."

"I'm not going to cry into the takoyaki, if that's what you're worried about."

"That's exactly what I'm worried about." Mei readjusted the bear in her lap. "He said, and I quote, 'I don't want today to be about that.' Three separate times this week. If we turn this into some big tearful send-off, he will actually die of embarrassment right there on the Comet."

"I know. I'm not going to say anything."

"You say that, but you have a face."

"I have a face?"

"You have a very specific face you make when you're being brave about something. It's happening right now, a little."

Yuzu laughed despite herself, because it was true, and because there was no pretending otherwise with someone who'd known her since middle school. "Fine. I'll work on the face."

"Good. Save it for tonight, alone, in the privacy of your own room, and feel your feelings as intensely as you want. Today we ride the Comet and eat too much fried food and pretend it's a normal Saturday."

"It is a normal Saturday."

"Exactly. Let's keep it that way."

The boys came back with more food than four people reasonably needed. Haru's idea of "a little bit of everything" from the takoyaki stand had apparently meant three separate little-bits, and Ren had somehow returned with two orders of fries nobody remembered agreeing to.

"Pineapple belongs on takoyaki," Haru announced, sitting down. "Fight me."

"It does not," Mei said. "That's not even the same category of food."

"Sweet and savory. Classic combination."

"Sweet and savory is teriyaki. This is just wrong."

"You've never even tried it."

"I don't need to try wrongness to identify it."

Nobody was going to win that argument, since nobody ever had in the two years they'd been having it, so it dissolved the way it always did, into other things — Haru telling an extremely long and almost certainly exaggerated story about a coworker who'd once tried to return a half-eaten sandwich, until Mei was laughing too hard to hold her chopsticks.

"He said it was for quality control," Haru said. "He'd eaten half of it and he wanted a refund for quality control."

"That's not a real thing."

"That's what I said. The manager said the same thing. He still asked twice."

"What happened?"

"He left. Furious. Took the other half with him."

"So he did get to keep his quality control sample."

"I hadn't thought of it that way, but yes."

Ren mentioned, almost as an aside, that his new apartment had a balcony just big enough for one chair.

"That sounds like exactly the kind of place you'd pick," Yuzu said. "Small and specific and entirely yours."

"Yeah," Ren said. "Probably."

And that was the whole exchange, brief and unweighted, exactly the way you'd want it.

"Okay," Haru said eventually, checking his phone with theatrical seriousness. "Comet opens in twenty minutes. We go now, or we get there after the school groups and we're looking at an hour wait."

"Agreed," Mei said, already standing, bear tucked under one arm like a football. "Also I need to walk off the takoyaki before we get on anything that flips upside down."

"The Comet doesn't flip upside down," Ren said. "It's a wooden coaster. It's from a more dignified era of amusement park engineering."

"It has that one hill that makes you feel like your organs are rearranging themselves."

"That's the good hill."

"That's the terrifying hill."

"Same thing."

The walk to the Comet took them along the older section of the park, weathered wood and hand-painted signs instead of the sleeker plastic near the entrance, and all four of them slowed a little as the coaster came into view, its lift hill the tallest thing around, without anyone quite deciding to.

"We rode this the first time we all came here together," Yuzu said, mostly to herself.

"Middle school trip," Haru said. "You threw up afterward."

"I did not throw up."

"You went very green and sat very still for like twenty minutes."

"That's not the same as throwing up."

"It's the opening act of throwing up."

"I recovered admirably, thank you."

The line was mercifully short this early, mostly families debating height requirements with the harried patience of people who'd already had that debate at every other ride today. Mei narrated increasingly elaborate backstories for the people ahead of them — that one's definitely a spy, that one's clearly on a third date — while Haru tried and failed to guess how many hills the track actually had.

"Front car," Mei said, as they neared the platform. "It's tradition. We always do front car."

"We do not always do front car," Haru said. "We did it once, in ninth grade, and you decided it was law."

"It became law the moment we did it the first time. That's how tradition works."

"That's not how anything works."

"Front car," Ren said, settling it with the mild, unhurried authority he used when he wanted something without needing to fight for it. "Let's do front car."

Haru threw his hands up in surrender. They wedged into the first car — Ren and Mei up front, Haru and Yuzu behind — the bear stashed at Mei's feet, where the ride attendant confirmed, with visible amusement, that it was secure enough not to become a projectile. The safety bar came down with its familiar rattling clunk.

"Last chance to back out," Haru said.

"Never," Mei said.

The train lurched forward, clattered along the flat stretch, and started its slow climb, the chain underneath clacking out a rhythm that always sounded to Yuzu like a held breath being counted. The whole park spread out below the higher they climbed — the Ferris wheel turning lazily on the far side, the carousel's gold trim catching the light. Near the top, right before the crest, there was always that brief flat stretch where you could see clean over everything, and every time, without fail, one of them said something.

This time it was Ren.

"Good view," he said, calm despite the height.

"Best in the park," Haru agreed.

"We should come back here even after — " Mei started, and caught herself, the sentence hanging unfinished for a beat too long.

"Even after I move," Ren said, without turning around. "Yeah. I'm not planning on never coming back. It's a train ride, not the moon."

"I know that," Mei said, a little too quickly.

"It's fine," Ren said, and it wasn't performance, it just sounded true. "I like this part too much to give it up. I'm not going anywhere important enough to skip the Comet."

Then the car crested the top, and there wasn't room for anyone to say anything else, because the drop swallowed whatever might have followed — Haru's scream starting a half-second early as always, Mei shrieking with real delight, Yuzu laughing so hard on the first turn her stomach hurt more from that than the ride, and Ren, silent through the whole thing, saving his one low whoop for the very end, when the brakes caught and the train rattled back into the station.

They stumbled off with the particular loose-limbed, windblown giddiness only a good wooden coaster produces.

"Again," Mei said immediately, bear clutched to her chest. "Right now. No arguments."

"We're doing everything again," Haru said. "That's just the rule of the day."

They rode it twice more — the second time back to back, the third an hour later, after cooling off with shaved ice from a stand shaped like a snowman that had clearly seen better decades.

It was Mei who spotted the haunted house on the walk back, tucked between a shuttered arcade and a maintenance shed, its crooked sign reading THE WEEPING HALL in dripping red letters faded to an almost embarrassed pink.

"We're doing this," she said, already changing direction.

"We are not doing this," Haru said, though his feet had already started moving toward it. "That place looks like it hasn't been cleaned since the Heisei era."

"That's the aesthetic. It's supposed to look like that."

"I don't think it's supposed to. I think it's just old."

"Same thing, if you squint."

"Have you been in this one?" Ren asked, studying the entrance.

"It's terrible," Yuzu said. "In the specific way that makes it good. There's a guy who does the exact same jump scare from the exact same spot every single time, and it still works because you forget where it is by the time you're through the door."

"That's not an endorsement."

"It's the highest endorsement I have for a haunted house."

They paid at a window manned by a bored teenager who slid four tickets across without looking up from his phone, and filed into a narrow hallway lit by a bulb that buzzed like it was seriously considering giving up. Mei went first, on the grounds that she'd suggested it, though she also grabbed a fistful of the back of Haru's jacket almost immediately.

"I'm not holding on for safety," she said, when he pointed it out. "I'm holding on so you don't wander off and get us both lost."

"We're in a hallway. There's nowhere to wander."

"There could be a fork up ahead. I'm being strategic."

Somewhere in the second turn, a recorded voice began moaning from a speaker hidden badly enough that Ren spotted the wire along the baseboard and pointed it out under his breath, which made Yuzu laugh at exactly the wrong moment and nearly walk into a hanging plastic skeleton with one arm dangling at an unconvincing angle.

"You're supposed to be scared of that," Mei whispered.

"I'm scared of tripping over it. That's a different, more reasonable fear."

The jump scare came exactly where Yuzu had promised — a panel banging open, a man in a tattered costume lunging half a step into the hall with a sound less like a scream than a committed groan. Haru screamed first and loudest, a full half-second before the panel had even finished swinging.

"That startled me," he said, voice cracking slightly. "That's different from being scared."

"You screamed like you'd seen a ghost," Mei said, delighted.

"I did see a ghost. Technically."

"That was a man in a costume."

"A ghost costume."

"That doesn't make him a ghost, Haru."

"It's ambiguous."

Ren hadn't made a sound, just gone very still for a second before letting out a short breath that was almost a laugh, more amused by Haru's reaction than the actor himself.

"You didn't even flinch," Yuzu said to him.

"I flinched internally."

"That doesn't count for anything."

"It counts to me."

They pushed on into a room dressed as a dusty parlor with a cracked mirror on one wall, and it was there that the evening's actual mishap happened, when the lighting dropped low enough that Mei, still gripping Haru's jacket, reached blindly for what she assumed was Yuzu's sleeve and instead closed her hand around the arm of a total stranger, a middle-aged man who'd wandered in with his own group a few paces back.

"That's not Yuzu," the man said, more startled than offended.

Mei let go like she'd touched a stove. "I am so sorry. I thought — the lighting is terrible in here."

"It's fine," the man said, already laughing, his friends laughing harder behind him. "Happens more than you'd think, this place."

By the time they stumbled back out into daylight, blinking like they'd been underground for hours instead of ten minutes, Mei had already started rehearsing the story for retelling.

"I grabbed a complete stranger," she announced. "A grown man. In front of his friends. I have never been more humiliated in a haunted house, and I have been in a lot of haunted houses."

"You've been in three," Yuzu said.

"That's a lot, for me."

"You also screamed at the skeleton."

"I did not scream at the skeleton. I made a small vocalization of surprise."

"That's what screaming is."

"See, this is why I don't feel bad about my reaction," Haru said, still slightly pink. "Mei grabbed a stranger. I simply expressed appropriate alarm at a professional startle."

"You screamed before the door even finished opening."

"I have excellent reflexes."

"You have excellent panic."

They walked off still arguing, laughter dissolving the whole thing into something that needed no resolution, and somewhere between the haunted house and dinner the afternoon finally softened into evening — the light going gold, then rose, the lanterns strung between the game booths flickering on section by section as the daytime crowd thinned out.

They ended up back at the fountain, this time with dinner instead of lunch — yakitori and a shared plate of okonomiyaki that Haru insisted on cutting into four precisely equal pieces with the seriousness of a surgeon, an effort that failed the moment Mei stole a piece before he'd finished measuring.

"You've ruined the geometry," he said.

"The geometry can survive one theft."

"The geometry is a house of cards, Mei. One theft and the whole system collapses."

"Then I've done you a favor. No more pressure to get it perfect."

They ate slower than at lunch, nobody in any hurry, talk drifting through smaller things — a show Mei was watching that she insisted everyone needed to start immediately, a video game Haru had been stuck on for two weeks with a solution so obvious once Ren explained it that Haru nearly threw a skewer at him.

"You've known the answer this whole time?"

"I told you last week. You weren't listening."

"I was listening. I chose not to hear it."

"That's the same thing as not listening."

"It's a distinction with real emotional significance to me."

A stray cat wandered up to the table and accepted exactly one piece of chicken before leaving without further comment.

"Rude," Haru said, watching it go. "We fed it and it didn't even say thank you."

"It's a cat. It doesn't owe you gratitude."

"It owes me basic manners."

The lanterns had all come on by the time they finished, the Ferris wheel lighting up too, its spokes traced in soft white against a sky fading from rose into deep blue. They were clearing their trays when Mei stopped dead in front of a small booth wedged between a shooting gallery and a shuttered ice cream stand, its front plastered with sample photo strips of grinning strangers under a recurring illustrated shrimp for reasons nobody could explain.

"Purikura," she said, like she'd spotted a lost relative in a crowd. "They still have one of these."

"Isn't that what the phone booths do?" Ren asked, peering at the samples.

"This one's the old kind. You actually have to pose. It's an art form."

"It's four teenagers making the same peace sign for a hundred yen," Haru said.

"It's an art form that happens to involve the peace sign, yes."

She was herding them toward the booth before anyone had formally agreed to it, feeding coins into the slot with the brisk efficiency of someone who'd clearly done this before. All four of them crammed into a space built for two, elbows overlapping, the bear wedged into the gap between Mei's knees and the wall so it wouldn't be cropped out of the shot.

"Everyone needs to be in frame," Mei said, studying the preview screen. "Haru, you're too tall, get down. Ren, stop standing like you're being interviewed for a job. Yuzu, you're perfect, don't move."

"What am I supposed to do with my face?" Haru said, already crouching.

"Something other than that. That's not a pose, that's a symptom."

The countdown hit zero before anyone had settled on a plan, and the first flash caught pure chaos — Haru's mouth open on some half-formed protest, Ren's eyebrows raised in alarm, Yuzu laughing at both of them, Mei the only one actually smiling at the camera.

"That one's ruined," she said, watching it load.

"It's not ruined, it's honest."

"There's a difference between honest and ruined, and that photo is squarely in ruined territory."

The second flash went better. Haru finally committed to a peace sign held next to his own face with real solemnity, and Ren, apparently deciding to lean into the bit, put an arm loosely around Yuzu's shoulders and gave the camera his usual unhurried almost-smile — which turned out, on the little screen after, to be the best photo of the whole strip.

The third caught Mei mid-sentence, narrating instructions for photo four that nobody had asked for. The fourth, after a scramble that ran right up against the countdown, caught all of them looking in slightly different directions — except the bear, which stared dead into the camera with the flat, unbothered confidence of a professional model.

"The bear photographs better than any of us," Yuzu said, watching the strip print out.

"The bear has no anxiety about being perceived," Mei said. "It's very zen."

They passed the strip around while it was still warm, each claiming their favorite frame like art critics at an exhibit. Haru insisted the peace-sign shot was the definitive image of the entire day. Ren was quietly pleased with the one where he actually looked normal. Mei agreed, after negotiation, to let Yuzu keep the physical strip as long as everyone photographed it on their phones first, which took considerably more arguing about lighting than four printed photos strictly warranted.

"Ferris wheel," Yuzu said finally, tucking the strip into the pocket with her goldfish keychain. "Before it gets too crowded."

Nobody argued. The line was short this late, mostly couples and sleepy families, and the four of them piled into one gondola despite the attendant's mild protest that it was meant for two — an argument Haru won through sheer determined cheerfulness and a promise they'd all sit very still.

The gondola rocked as it lifted off, the park spreading out below, smaller and softer under the lantern light — the Comet's white frame glowing faintly, the carousel's tinny music drifting up in fragments.

"This is my favorite part of the day," Ren said, looking out rather than at any of them. "Every time. Doesn't matter what else we did."

"The overpriced slow ride where nothing happens?" Haru said.

"Exactly that one."

"You're a simple man."

"I am. I like slow things where you can see everything at once."

Mei was quiet for a moment, turning the bear over in her hands, straightening one crumpled ear. "You're going to like the view from your new place too, probably. Different, but you'll find something up there you like this much."

"Probably," Ren said, easily. "Doesn't mean I won't miss this one."

"You don't have to make a whole thing of it," she said, her voice a little softer than usual. "I just mean — you'll be fine. Wherever it is. You're annoyingly good at being fine."

"That's the nicest insult you've ever given me."

"Don't get used to it."

The gondola paused at its highest point, the way it always did, and for a few seconds nobody said anything at all.

"I'm glad we did this," Haru said finally, breaking it in his usual way — light, asking nothing back. "Even if you did make me ride the water flume twice."

"You volunteered the second time."

"I was defending my honor after the first ride humiliated me."

"Your honor remains thoroughly unhumiliated," Yuzu said. "For the record."

"Thank you. I needed to hear that."

The wheel started down, the park's noise returning gradually — distant music, the Comet clattering somewhere to their left, laughter carrying up from the food court. By the time the gondola touched ground, the mood had folded itself back into easy conversation without any effort at all.

"Fireworks," Mei said, checking her phone as they climbed off. "Fifteen minutes. Weekend show."

"Best spot's near the old fountain," Ren said. "Less crowded than the main gate."

They wove back through a park filled in nicely with the evening crowd and claimed a spot on the same low stone wall from earlier. Mei propped the bear beside her so it could theoretically watch too, which Haru said was an unnecessary courtesy to extend to a stuffed animal, and which Mei ignored completely.

"Remember the year it rained during the fireworks," Haru said, "and we all just stood there getting soaked because nobody wanted to be the one to suggest leaving?"

"That was a terrible decision," Ren said.

"It was a great decision. Best fireworks I've ever seen. Wet, but great."

"You got sick for a week afterward."

"Worth it."

The first firework went up without warning, a single streak bursting gold above the trees, scattered applause rising with it. The show built slowly — single bursts, then pairs, then clusters overlapping against a sky gone properly dark. Nobody talked much during it. There wasn't a need to. They sat shoulder to shoulder on the wall while colored light flickered across all their faces in turn, and when the finale came in a rush, lighting the sky almost continuously for a solid half minute, the crowd's noise swelled with it before the last echo faded out over the trees.

"Okay," Mei said, into the settling quiet, hugging the bear back to her chest. "That was a good day."

"A great day," Haru corrected.

"Fine. A great day."

They gathered their things without any hurry and fell into step toward the gate, past booths shuttering for the night, past the carousel making its last slow, empty circuits, lights still glowing gold even with no one riding it.

"Same time next month?" Haru asked, mostly joking, mostly not.

"I've got a three-hour train ride between me and this park now," Ren said. "So maybe not next month."

"Every couple months, then. We'll work something out."

"Yeah," Ren said. "We will."

Mei bumped her shoulder against his, casual as anything, bear still tucked under her other arm. "You better actually come back for the Comet. I mean it. If you skip it I will take a train up there myself just to yell at you."

"I believe you would."

"I absolutely would."

They reached the gate as the last staff were lowering shutters, the turnstile giving its familiar sigh in reverse. Behind the fence, the park still glowed warm and lit-up, already halfway into memory even though they'd only just left it.

"Same station?" Yuzu asked, falling in beside Ren while Haru and Mei walked ahead, still arguing cheerfully about something — the correct number of games they'd played, or maybe just for the sake of arguing.

"Same station," Ren said. "Figure we've got a couple more weeks of this before I actually have to pack anything."

"We'll make them count."

"We already did, I think." He glanced sideways at her, something easy in it. "This was a good one. Today."

"It was," Yuzu said, and left it right there, because that was exactly as much as the day had asked for.

Ahead of them, Haru had apparently lost the argument about the games, loudly declaring a rematch at some unspecified future date, and Mei was laughing at him with the bear riding along under her arm like it had been part of their group from the start. The four of them walked on toward the station under a sky finally free of fireworks smoke, ordinary stars showing through at last, in no particular hurry to get where they were going.