June 27th, 2024

Rika couldn't quite remember when she had started, but she was fairly sure that she got the idea from Irie.

She'd been waiting patiently post-checkup, she forgot which one, and in answer to some question about his research she'd also long since forgotten, he mentioned that the way to avoid getting frustrated by lack of progress was to focus on a hobby. His, unsurprisingly, had been something related to maids, but Rika had still gone back home that day deep in thought.

And so, her scrapbook was born.

It wasn't an evidence scrapbook, or anything like that. It was a memories-and-hope scrapbook.

The first thing she always did was tear out the calendar date and, if she was only a year or so old, crawl off to hide it until she was old enough to hold a pencil and have a notebook. Then she'd tear off the date marking that day, and paste both into the first page of her notebook.

As the years marched on afterwards, she would add little bits and pieces –flowers she and Satoko had pressed, an origami creature they'd folded in class, a scribbled score chart from one of the club's first games.

Akasaka sometimes brought her candy in June 1978, and Rika carefully flattened the wrapper and taped it into her ancient notebook.

In one of the worlds, he bought her a cheap plastic hair clip –a cute little black and white cat mascot– and when Rika awoke in the fragment after that, her first action was to scramble for the drawer where she kept her journal.

It was empty. Completely empty: bare wood, no notebook, much less that precious hair clip tucked away at the end of the first fourth chunk of the pages. Both notebook and hair clip were gone, as if they never existed. In this world, they never had.

Her parents had thought her breaking down, screaming and thumping the floorboards as she wept, had just been a three-year-old's typical baseless tantrum.

Rika had refused to speak to Hanyuu for a week afterwards.

She still kept patiently recreating and refilling her notebook, though. As the years went on, it became less of a hobbyist distraction and more idle daydreams; here was the page with Akasaka's candy wrapper, with age, no longer crinkly, and it was bordered on nearly every side with doodles and notes about what to do in Tokyo, what kind of person Akasaka's child might be, if Rika might ever get along with them.

There was the rudimentary origami she and the other children had done, flattened into the pages between two paper folds, with a list of maybe-future schools she might get into, what she wanted to learn, what she might plan to do when she grew up.

Here was the post-it note that labeled Keiichi's things on his first day at the Hinamizawa Branch School, carefully preserved amongst doodles of their club and what lives they might lead someday, when they all grew up, when they were all alive.

It was a tether that helped her from breaking down, these fantasies, but Rika still felt a sharp pang every time she opened a fresh notebook, remembering all the memories she had carefully curated, now completely erased from all history. Everything ran on the same path, but the world was full of random chance and change, and she couldn't save or keep anything. Not a single scrap of paper, not a single plastic hair clip.

But if this time –this time, this time, this time, this time– it was her final run, her final painful cycle, she would be devastated if she didn't have this collection of memories to warm her heart and ease her nostalgia moving forward into the future.

So every time, Rika Furude cracked her fingers, then crawled over with her toddler's body to snatch the latest page from the calendar.

11.49 AM, USA Central Time