Note: The Tokimeki timeline is slightly shifted in this story from the 90s to the 2000s (the storyline begins in 2001, which was the year Nick, Brad, Olivier, and I actually entered high school.)

The next morning, I met the others at a subway station a short walk from Kirameki.
"You guys ready to get this last obstacle out of the way?" I asked them.
"You bet." Olivier said.
"You got that right." Brad said as we slapped hands.
"Let's rock and roll." Nick finished.

With that, we walked purposefully ahead side by side onto the grounds and past the Legend Tree, turning our fair share of heads with our entrance.
It wasn't hard for people to see that we were American, because not only did we look different (with the exception of me, since both of my parents are from the Philippines and I therefore have the "yellow" skin color), but we also sported backpacks from such Stateside brands as Jansport and The North Face.

We waved at a few people that we knew as we went through the door. The first thing we did upon getting in was to check the class rosters. Over in Japan, you're placed in a class that you have all your courses with based on your record to date. Luckily for us, the names were posted in both Japanese and English so we knew just who we were up against—or alongside.

"Hey, guys, look at this!" I called. "We're all in Class A!"
"What?" Olivier asked. Seeing the list with our names on it, he high-fived me. "Oh, yeah! That's cool! Check it out!"
"Yeah—we really are going to go through all this together!" Brad said.
"Yeah, Brad, and we're with the big boys—and girls." Nick said, as he was apparently surveying the list in greater detail.
I bent over again to take in the full picture, and I found my insides feeling as if I'd hit a speed bump on a bike without slowing down.
"Hey, Shiori's in our class!" I yelled, spotting her name and quickly pointing it out.
"What?" Nick asked. "Oh, man, what a coincidence!"
"I agree, man." Olivier said. "How must you be feeling being reunited with the only girl you've been friends with?"
Before I could answer, Brad said, "Hey, someone's drawing a crowd. Who is that girl?"
"What?" I asked, turning to see what the commotion was about. What I saw ended up temporarily striking me dumb.

A familiar-looking girl was being surrounded by eight, ten, or maybe even twelve guys all trying to talk to her in Japanese. She had a slender figure, a pretty face, long, straight red hair held in place by a hairband, bright brown eyes, and a smile that put me on the edge.
"Oh, my God, that's Shiori." I only managed to say it faintly to the others.
"Oh, my God." Olivier said. "That's her?" He sounded as if he couldn't believe it.
"Yeah." I said faintly with what voice I could muster, which wasn't much, while nodding as much as I could, which wasn't much either. Not only was Shiori's beauty riveting my eyes to her, but something inside that I had never felt before had been awakened. It was a funny fluttering, stirring sensation that made it impossible for me to suppress a smile at her. Looking to my right, I saw Nick with his mouth hanging open slightly. Soon, though, a businesslike demeanor overtook me again.
"Okay, guys." I said once she had gone inside the classroom. "Time to go to work."

Well, you know how it goes the first day—not much getting covered except perhaps some math review material. At lunch, just before I sat down, I saw Shiori help up a guy who had slipped before getting a drink that a guy had paid for and left at the cashier by accident and returning it to him.

During lunch, I also found out something even more startling.
"I heard Shiori moved back here." Brad said. "I've even heard that she's in your neighborhood, Carlo."
"No way!" I exclaimed.
"I'm serious! I got the address and house number, and if I'm not mistaken, she moved into the house across the street from you."
"Oh, boy." Olivier said. "Man, I wish I could have a girl like her living across the street from me."

At the end of the day, I waited for her outside the classroom.
"Hey. Shiori, could I talk to you for a second?" I asked, crossing my fingers.
She turned to see who was trying to speak to her in English, and she promptly smiled. "Oh, hello, Carlo!" She said, waving and approaching me with almost no errors in her English. "I can't believe we're in the same class again!"
"Neither can I." I said earnestly, relieved and glad that her English was terrific.
"I see you've got some fellow Americans in the class. Are they your friends?" Shiori asked.
"Oh, yeah." I said, still using that earnest, energetic tone. "They're fellow North Carolinians, too, so we end up covering each other a lot."
"I'm glad to see it." Shiori said.
"That certainly doesn't mean I'm not glad to see you again." I said, quickly but carefully choosing my words and grinning.
"Why, thanks a lot! What a nice thing to say!" Shiori replied.

The same fluttering, stirring feeling that had gotten into me when I had first seen Shiori—a sensation that I had managed to stow away during the day—now came back in full force and then some.
What is going on with me? I thought almost furiously as I got home. I had managed to hold my feelings in during the school day, but I was now bursting at the seams to let them out, which frightened me because I feared falling victim to some temptation or infatuation.
Once my homework was done, I flipped on ESPN Pacific, which broadcasted in English, hoping to take my mind off Shiori with some sports, which I really liked to follow, talk about with my friends, and write about. As a matter of fact, I had even earned a place as a sportswriter for the Kirameki school paper. It worked—for about five minutes. After that, I found that all I wanted to do was either sit down or pace in silence to think about her.
I had wanted to abstain from dating until the second year, when I would be the equivalent of a high school junior back in America, so that I didn't get sidetracked too much. The amazing and almost scary thing, though, was that I was thinking about Shiori so much in terms of quantity and quality that I was ready to break that rule—and that meant that there was something about this feeling that let me know that this was no crush. This was no infatuation. This was not a case of me just being some groupie. The other thought that was making me ready to break that rule was a horrifying one. That was because another image I couldn't get out of my head was the one with Shiori being surrounded by a flock of guys. I didn't need to be an honors student to know that that meant time was running out.
If nothing else, if there ever was an exception to that rule, this is it. I thought fervently. I want her with me that bad.

The next day, after an uneasy rest but some good classes, I managed to find Shiori alone and start to try to make something work.
"Do you need a walk home?" I asked once we'd said hello and talked about the day's events.
Shiori grinned back, and I was hopeful for a minute, but then she said, "I don't think that would work today. I've got to meet with Megumi to talk about that social studies assignment."
"It's okay. I understand." I answered, grinning back. "Good luck."
"Thanks." She replied.

Thus began a stretch in which I would ask if I could somehow walk her home or otherwise get some time alone with her outside of class every three to four days. Every time, though, I found out that the time was not quite right, and every successive time I heard it was a no-can-do, it was more and more disheartening.
Days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into months. Still nothing.
By the end of July, the four of us had settled in nicely as we were often getting good and rave reviews from our teachers due to our intelligence, and Olivier, Nick, and Brad had started successfully mingling with our Japanese classmates. Those two factors assured that nobody was trying to pick on us just because of nationality, something I was happy about. The only blip on my social radar other than the guys, though, was Shiori, and it was getting farther away.
One day, we were crowding around outside our room to see the scores from our first term (Japanese schools run on a trimester system) math exam. As math had seemed to come to me extremely easy at Kirameki, it had become my favorite subject and my strongest one as well. The test hadn't seemed too hard, but I knew that overconfidence could lead to getting a bad grade and seeing everyone else find out about it. My fears, though, were thankfully allayed quickly that day.
"Hey, Carlo, you won!" Brad pointed out.
"What?" I asked. I looked over to the right where the top scores were and recognized my name with a 100 beneath it. Directly to the left was Shiori's name with a 97 under it, with Olivier, Nick, and Brad all in the top quarter (Brad was actually third with a 94.)
"Oh, yeah!" I said, high-fiving the others, taking some congratulations from them and from a couple of Japanese classmates, and forgetting about Shiori—for about ten seconds. I found her stopping briefly beside us and saying, "Congratulations, Carlo! I can't believe you managed to work out that last question!"
"Thanks." I said, going red slightly. "It wasn't that much, though-just putting it all together and thinking straight."
"I hope you get to show us how you did that today!" She said.
"Thanks for the vote of confidence-I just hope I don't mess up!" I said.
When she left and headed into the room after a last smile, though, I let out a depressed sigh that was too loud to escape my friends' ears.
"What's going on?" Nick asked in a concerned tone. "Something bothering you, Carlo?"
"Not exactly." I said. Because I was the smartest of the four of us, I was the closest thing our little quartet had to a leader, so I didn't want it to look like I was demoralized for fear of us all getting distracted. I managed to add, "Hey, we're all in the top 25 percent! Congratulations!"
Inside, though, I felt like I was on the ropes and as if so much as a flurry of jabs or one good hook would drop me for the count. Even though our crew, if you could call it that at the moment, was riding high with good academic performances, I felt like I was about to crash and burn.
The clock was almost mercilessly ticking, and I was scared to death of the buzzer sounding on me before all was said and done.

In the next chapter—"Silent Explosions":
With his hopes of so much as dating Shiori running low, Carlo makes last-ditch efforts to garner an outing with her. Will it work? And if so, how will the evening go? And how will Carlo let the others know what really has been happening to him? And also, who else in his American delegation has taken to a Japanese girl?
And as the second trimester begins, an event rocks Kirameki and the four Americans...