The 22nd. No idea about the time. When the tyranny of the clock had been going click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Clickity clack for minutes, tens of minutes, maybe an infinity, you stopped looking at the time and thought about ripping apart the clock's internals.

  The back alley doctor looked like one, a doctor. Years she'd been working in those stuffy white coats that they forced every doctor to wear, easily stained things, down to regulation-approved haircuts. Liberating expression sprouts forth the day that the doctor becomes free. Suddenly chokers and dying their hair becomes all the rage. If you don't think that's true, look them up after they retire early.

  Unfortunately, becoming independent doesn't make you free from all regulation. White tile—the type of white that's bordering gray, the one that always looks dirty. White walls. Gray curtains. Certainly no bedside manner, which I thought was why she'd become a back alley doctor. Blue posters that explained in excruciating detail how your body would shut down over a lifetime of smoking. Little yellow words emphasized how terrible the pain would be.

  Compare that to the doctor. Her lips were carefully neutral, though sometimes they'd curl in a sardonic smile. With excellent pattern-recognizing skills at work, I'm pretty sure that she knew my sickness was partially faked. At first I was thinking this was a good thing. Turn my head and cough. Stick the rough tongue depressor down. Cough here. Obviously there was something wrong with me but perhaps it's not a cold as I said. Who cared? She's the shady one between the two of us.

  The clipboard rested on her crossed legs. She sat across from me, toe tilting like a metronome.

  "So you're wanting me to write you up sick for those bruises," she said.

  Going to the doctor was a bit of a gamble. Hiding bruises from her was already impossible when I was limping to the examination room; the pulled muscle in my leg was only noticed when the adrenaline wore off in Leblanc, making me learn that there absolutely needed to be something to clench your teeth down when you screamed. Damage control needed to be carried out—me hiding the extent of my injuries from the man who already suspected me of dethroning Yakuza bosses. Pretend that her poking around my shoulder wasn't making a snake crawl through my muscles and suffer through my leg spasming when she tapped my knee, all for the sake of saving my hide.

  I knew the exact moment when the jig was up. A bump was around my chest from one of those brutal strikes from the riding crop. Calling it a bump was a bit crude as it was more like a bicycle ran across my body, with a long purple line running diagonally across, leaving behind the texture of a mountain range on a globe. That stethoscope bouncing against it felt like my heart was being sieged. From there on I'm pretty sure her hands were just a little more grabby, pinching with deceitfully lazy eyes watching my reactions.

  "Yes," I said unabashedly.

  She spun around towards her desk, typing on the tiny laptop that she had. "At least you're upfront about it. You have a minute to explain why I shouldn't make some calls."

  Finding a shady back alley clinic was supposed to be the same process as buying the fireworks. I come in, wave money in their face, and then leave with services rendered. It was bullshit and I considered if there was another palace that needed raiding.

  "I do a lot of sports—not school sports. I play with kids out of the prefecture. It gets a little rowdy and," my hand ran down along my battered torso, "this is what happened last time. I tried cutting class one time to play with them. Same thing happened."

  "So you get into a fight because somebody lost." Those brown eyes were staring at my chest. "That's why it feels like you've been whipped."

  Riding crop, bigger than her standing on my shoulders. "A lead pipe."

  "For a game?"

  "People get competitive." I tapped the bruise on my eye, trying not to flinch. "Obviously."

  "What sport?"

  Cheekiness was always the best route. "Volleyball."

  "Kids play volleyball nowadays? Back when I was a kid it was just baseball."

  "There's no girls there, believe it or not," I said.

  Those brown eyes were completely unconvinced. Honestly, I'm not sure where I went wrong there. Saying that I was sick after nearly tumbling down the staircase alone was enough to convince Sojiro.

  The board laid out on the desk. Most of it was empty. She'd stopped taking notes sometime through the session. "Who's your legal guardian?"

  "Sakura Sojiro," I said. What? It's not about throwing him under the bus or anything! I wasn't about to lie to the doctor after she was already suspecting me!

  Apparently that was the right thing to say as she actually sat up for the first time during the examination. "Sakura-san? I can't imagine that he likes you getting injured like this."

  A few nervous laughs slipped out, meant to make me sound like a sympathetic youngster and somehow made her start staring harder.

  "Funny thing about that." Begging wasn't beneath me, but I got the impression that she wouldn't like it. So, with my head held high and voice kept steady, I asked, "please keep this a secret from him. I wasn't supposed to be going out but I did. I'm not sorry at all. I didn't want to get in a fight but I wasn't about to ditch my teammates. So, uh, just this once, can you give me a sick notice? You won't get this from me again, hopefully."

  Her legs crossed and uncrossed again. A deep breath made her shoulders raise, hiked up to make her seem more assertive.

  "Okay. I'll play ball. Just for this once, I'll sign you off as sick. It's not as if you can go to school like this anyways. Don't consider this a favor; I'm just doing my job as a doctor keeping you from doing stupid stuff like going to school while your ribs are bruised." A pen raised up right in between my eyeballs. "But for this, you're going to sit down and I'm going to explain to you everything that I just looked over. You'll know why you shouldn't waddle over to my office when you have a sprained leg. You'll know why bruised ribs are bad. You'll know why you don't want to take any impacts into the chest."

  She made good on her promise and let me loose back around midway through the school day. With a doctor's assurance behind me, I had the rest of the week off for having a contagious sickness that could only be cured through rest. Though Sojiro was unconvinced about that tidbit, he had no way to argue with a medical professional's opinion sent through a pretty little slip.

  The sickness made me miss the confession. Apparently there was a whole conference meant to bolster the student's confidence thanks to the various tragedies that were unfolding—of which I was not responsible for most of them!—that got interrupted by Kamoshida begging for his life in front of the whole school. Every student, teacher, even a janitor who leaked a video to the press were there when he confessed to crimes I didn't even know he was responsible for. I never watched the video myself. I never really felt the need to see it.

  The shadow was no more. I had money in my pocket paying me back for my time. I was laying on my bed watching people play video games that I didn't have the means to play. Life was fine.

  Now let me be as clear as possible: I was terrified of poking around in the magical realm. I didn't like poking around in the magical realm. But, and if this deserves a palace then so be it, let me explain the room that I came back to and rested inside for that long week. Dust covered every square inch of the place. My bed was no more than a slightly raised mattress. There was a desk, a dress of cobwebs with its hem dragging on the floor, which was in the corner of my room. Boxes were everywhere and they sure as hell weren't mine. Coffee tried overpowering the overwhelming musk—tried. A single lightbulb that swung lightly from the only window's breeze left the corners lonely and created strange shapes that creeped in the corner of my eyes when night fell. Cloth was laid out next to the staircase which left my room with all kinds of tools and aging decor which Sojiro must've forgotten about.

  There was more, and I knew there was more. I was too distracted to spend too much attention on what was in that room besides the bed.

  As for my personal effects? Everything I owned was stuffed inside the dresser near the foot of my bed. My parents thought that my rebelliousness could be curbed from selling all my personal items. The attic of Leblanc was the home of a miser and I was sick of it. A nice pair of shoes that apparently didn't cultivate rebelliousness were now by the stairs, so I could stuff the money that I earned from the Metaverse inside the empty shoebox.

  A dragon's hoard of coins were the bed underneath these stranger items, leftover after buying the heisting materials and brainlessly scooped up from Kamoshida's body after I defeated him. One day I counted it as accurately as I could, sitting down at my desk and painstakingly going through each coin. It was around twenty-thousand, give or take a thousand. It wasn't just money, yet if I took every piece of treasure that I'd found in the palace then I would've had a problem hiding them. The entire time things coated in ash and tar were dropped by shadows that I defeated. Nearly every single article was left behind. Once there was the obvious form of a gun. I didn't even entertain leaving the Metaverse with that. Medicine abounded, along with metals that might've been precious, which I shoved inside the box until I could think of a way to use them. The metals might be sold to a pawn shop, as who would ever get suspicious of a kid walking in with an uncut metal? As for the medicine-looking stuff that was shoved in unmarked bottles or came in a single pill, I was shaken out of my confidence with big city questionable doctors now that I actually met one.

  It wasn't enough. I still get shakes when I'm too far from my phone. And perhaps it would've never turned into a problem if I sucked up my baby nerves and went to school in the first place, but the inevitable conclusion, the type of thing that would make a villain, is that life kind of sucked. When you couldn't really move and didn't have any entertainment besides occasionally talking to people over the internet or watching stupid videos, sometimes dropping connection midway, it started emphasizing certain things.

  What did I do now that the palace was cleared? I still had a shitty room, no belongings, no friends, a shitty reputation.

  There's one thing that could easily fix one of those problems.

  Once the idea entered my head, it wouldn't be shaken. Nearby there was a door that didn't exist. Everybody walked by like there wasn't a glowing door floating in the middle of nowhere. I saw it. I saw it when I'd been walking back from Tae's place. I thought that I wasn't going to need it. Only when I snuck out in the middle of the night, on the fourth night I think, did I finally turn the knob and walk inside.

  Moving between "reality" and "non-reality" or "irreality" or whatever you wanted to describe the Velvet Room is just as indescribable as the Metaverse. Little details became blurry inside there. Not as if I didn't remember them as if in a dream; even while inside, I could only notice my clothes peripherally, note how specific details such as smells became indistinct. Those three became another set of fixtures among the furniture.

  "Welcome to my Velvet Room," Igor greeted.

  "How do I find more palaces?" I asked.

  Igor readjusted his hands. He didn't seem surprised. "The path of rehabilitation was not made to be easy. If it were, then we wouldn't be in this situation. Palaces float like universes of their own within the Metaverse without any grand scheme connecting them. Wandering with the intention of finding the palace for its own sake will do nothing in bringing you closer to your rehabilitation."

  "Cool, so you can't help?"

  The baton banged against the bars. Saying, "I got used to it," would make me sound cool and also be a lie.

  "There is a productive way you can spend your free hours. Normally I'd be hesitant to reveal it to you, but I believe that it'd do well reforming your mindset. You may become more amenable to our way of thinking if we have more reason to work together."

  My phone was in my hand, unbidden by me. The screen was already on the front page of the app. "M E M E N T O S" was written out.

  "Our master is giving you leeway. Do not waste it," one of the twins said.

  "Yeah! And while you're here, you should do some fusing!"

  I ignored both of them. "Anything that I should know about this?"

  "What knowledge that comes through adversity tends to stick better than if handed out freely."

  That translated into "no".

  The last day of my sickness, when I suddenly got better yet couldn't go outside per Sojiro's rules, I snuck out again when midnight had fallen. Four hours of sleep and the leftovers from my grand heist ready, I punched in the coordinates and settled for whatever was going to come.

  Grayness washed over the world. The blue of the sky drained out until a grainy red had sucked up the atmosphere. Breathing didn't taste the exact same as it did in Kamoshida's palace, with it being more of a steel taste blown through the back of your gums, what I imagined the air would be in an industrial vent. By far the oddest was the feeling of the floor. You didn't know how much you were used to the solid floor until every surface felt like it was slipping underneath you, the arches of my foot tingling in anticipation for the concrete to rip apart.

  Each muted color seemed to pop out that much more while each vibrant color turned dull and lifeless. Sliding my hand on the railing as I descended down the staircase made me realize that it had the same feeling, though I was more familiar with it when my fingers were wriggling into the body; what could've been Play-Doh, something which clearly had a form that it would hold onto yet collapse upon the slightest of pressure. Realizing this made the downstairs feel eerie. There were the red cushions which always had at least a single customer relaxing on which had turned more the color of red bean paste. No coffee lingered in the air. The television was emitting static. This effect became even worse when I walked outside, seeing that horrible graininess instead of the cheery advertisements that were always playing everywhere. Going outside made blurry shadows travel along the roads, making me avoid anywhere that would still have people out at the horrible hour.

  It took a lot of walking before I found a red light emitting from a subway entrance. Standing there made it feel more real than anywhere else in this hellscape. It was like jumping onto the concrete after playing on the beach, feeling the mist on my back leave little kisses as I went down.

  One of the twins was waiting for me. Red. Red. Red. Velvet Blue. The door was standing there next to the black roots which grew out from the inert escalators which led deeper. Just being at the bottom of the staircase exposed me to a strange draft coming from above which ruffled my Metaverse outfit that had come into existence…sometime. Learning that the magic stuff plays with your ability to focus had been a horrifying realization.

  "Finally! You know how long I've been waiting here, inmate? Long enough that I've forgotten the spiel that I was supposed to give you and had to make a new one. So listen up!" She smacked her crop on the ground. "From here on there's going to be shadows! Every so often there'll be a rest area where you can spend a moment to catch your breath, which I expect you'll need often. Okay? Good! No more questions unless you have some about fusing."

  I didn't think that dignified an answer, so I just walked down the staircase.

  If it weren't immediately obvious, I did not get any explanation as to what a 'Mementos' was. 'Mementos' was long, dark circular hallways. Past the station which I stepped down were tracks that snaked down these places with no discernible purpose. Track ballast would crunch underfoot. Plain ol' concrete that looked to be washed recently laid down for some of it. Turbulence that could wreck a plane made me unsteady, as if there were an insistent hand pushing my back. Black fog that would flash red occasionally settling over the far distances like the pictures I've seen of China's pollution. I had no idea what 'Mementos' was. Because Mementos shouldn't exist.

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  Walking just down the first tunnel made me turn back immediately when I saw the first fork in the road. The little girl had been replaced by her sister.

  "I don't think you'd give me an explanation of what this place is. No? Okay. How long is Mementos?"

  "Nobody knows the true length of it," she answered.

  So I left Mementos and fell asleep the second my head hit the pillow. And then I didn't visit Mementos.

  The first day I went back to school was normal, almost hideously so. The girl in front of me didn't look any happier. Those people who I'd seen bruised haven't healed even with a week behind them. Teachers looked behind themselves. Worst of all, the school felt the same. Gossip continued. Clubs played. Children laughed.

  I understand being carefree, but even now I think of that as hideous pretending that everything is alright. I'm not asking for people to be dragging their knuckles around while leaving behind little carpets of tears, yet it feels blasé to continue living normally after the havoc that created an aftermath. Already I could imagine the consequences rumbling underneath: students which were left bitter, teachers paranoid, the higher ups freaking out, the press keeping an eye pressed against our windows.

  In front of me during lunch there was a boy who came up and apologized to the girl. He said her name again, but I forgot it, again. I was too focused on my little notebook.

  Here's the chain of logic: I needed to spend money to make money. Getting a bike would allow me to travel down the 'nobody knows the true length of it,' Mementos. The only qualification is that it needed thicker tires for when the terrain became bumpy. Problem was that I didn't have a great way to justify how I suddenly bought a bike, nor the funds to do so. So that meant I needed a front, like a part-time job. Problem then became finding a part-time job.

  Checking on my phone in between classes brought up hundreds of results. I first scanned for something which I may be interested in, such as gaming, or cards, or anything "nerdy" which I already had some sort of basis in. When my dream job obviously didn't waltz in, I begrudgingly just set the standard as "nearby" and "not constructing another corporate automaton". As a result: still too many! There were a lot of options! So I made a tier list of the ones that sounded interesting with an entire nineteen jobs still listed as GOD TIER. Then, and class had started at this point, I further narrowed them down by putting numbers next to each one and getting rid of those that had my least favorite ones: six and seven.

  So that still left fifteen jobs. At that point I had to just go out and scope them out myself.

  As to my unfamiliarity with the area, I learned that five of those jobs were wholly unrealistic for me to have when I was a student. Too far, the transit made it too complicated, etcetera. At the very least this was the first time that I took the city by the horns. Tokyo. Effervescent crowds. Stars pounding against glass panes. The sun obscured by a dense web of canopies and light poles. Sleekness which hadn't been perfected anywhere else. Every single exit at the metro was a new place which thought they were much better than the last one. Sure, the illusion was broken the first day that I walked to school, But the storefronts without flickering signs and transition towards the byte, everything made to be done on a screen—hallelujah! Stores could be stuffed in shoe boxes as their paper-thin walls stuffed fishing rod shops with the smell of next door's tempura.

  The first day I'd traveled to the places furthest from the school, intending to narrow down the remaining places by those which had the longest shot. I bought an extra drink for a homeless guy and sat on the curb with him. My face pressed against the glass of a store with a new edition of Terra Formars on a shelf. "All the editions I missed" went onto the list of "things that I needed to buy with my money" at the third most pressing thing. Two jobs, a ramen shop and bicycle store, were rejected. The one at a mall lemonade stand wasn't hiring. I bought another drink and shared it with some lady who was feeding the birds while she talked about her late husband. I spent a long time on another seat admiring that even a crappy neighborhood dedicated to the night life looked pretty alright when it was daytime.

  The seat was small and it was uncomfortable having people walk so near to my back. The lady in front of me had her hair tied close to her head with a black band wrapping around like a tiara. Long hair spilled onto the rest of her body without much care. She was a bit teacher-like, or at least her fashion-sense was. I didn't see teachers as being fashion aficionados and I will not apologize.

  "Welcome! I don't see many young men come to my stand. May I ask for your name?"

  Her voice had some kind of accent, poorly hidden, or at least I could detect it. Trying to hide it just made her intonation into some unrecognizable parody. I've never tried to hide that I talk differently from Tokyo-ites, though I didn't have much opportunity to really talk in the first place.

  "Kurusu," I said.

  "Kurusu. What a lucky name!" she exclaimed without any thought. Lucky didn't describe me. Neither did I think daybreak was lucky. It's why there was a term 'get lucky' and you only 'got lucky' during the night. Simple math. "That aside, what kind of consultation can I give you today?"

  "The full package."

  "Very well. I suppose the life of a high schooler is difficult, after all."

  Whatever that was supposed to mean, she continued on without giving me a chance to respond, "o divine power, bring forth this boy's fortune!"

  There was a single card in the center of six cards. Two cards were in the same column as the center, the furthest away, with the four others split evenly at the sides. She flipped over everyone except the center. I had no idea if there was some significance with the order.

  A sudden chill ran down my back. For a very, very brief moment, the world took the same qualities that I described in Mementos. My balance was lost as the seat beneath me seemed to sink like jelly. Chihaya's pale skin became nearly blinding as did the wall behind her. Pretending that I was readjusting came easily, but that didn't stop me from freaking out. I probably could've pulled out a gun and she wouldn't have noticed. Her lips quivered as she stared hard at the cards before the same salesman expression (sans the closed eyes which were definitely a her thing) rebalanced itself.

  Some mystical bullshit came out of her mouth before she got to the meat of the fortune. "Head down to the Shibuya Underground Mall. Good fortune will find you there."

  I couldn't stop myself from making a face. That was one of the places which had a part-time job I listed out. Pretty popular, so there was no reason to believe the fortune was true per se.

  "Hm? But what's this? A…" Whatever she saw disturbed her enough that I was convinced her frown was genuine. "Ruin? A lonely cell. Lonely twins. It's all…hm. That can't be right. Disconnected from Tokyo, yes. Chains that lead everywhere. Kurusu-san, are you with the right crowd? This isn't a happy ending. You're alone, dead, with nobody who will remember you."

  My eye twitched. It was mostly trying to suppress my real reaction. "What a cheery person you are."

  "I'm only reporting what I've seen. From what I can see, there's no way that you can avert this dark future." She put a hand to her chin. "Now that I think about it, there may still be hope for you yet."

  Whatever credibility that she'd built up completely shattered with the red stone that was laid onto the table. Suddenly her closed eyes made sense: either a terrible actor or some shred of empathy inside of her was threatening jailbreak if she saw my reaction to the scam.

  Don't misunderstand me. I'm not inundated with all the vaccines that people living in the city would have. Troubles such as getting hustled and being entranced towards the most pretty-looking advertisements and being disgusted by the rats that I occasionally saw creeping on the fences were abnormal. Scams were universal. I thought that hers was pretty novel for the city, in fact. New deals offering new ways to pay and strange currencies were constantly tempting me if I had any prerogative to buy expensive crap. Selling some sort of magic cure? That's pretty much just the things they do at any temple imported into the city's atheistic walls, except I'm biased towards temples. Why? Simple: my parents like them, the temples actually host festivals unlike a random bozo selling wrinkle-cures, and shrine girls are cute. I've never seen one but I'd rip my heart out on the spot if that got me a shrine maiden girlfriend.

  So I just crossed my arms and nodded along as she explained the same old tripe: magic, fate averted, only for certain customers but you're special, wave your hands around and chant a sutra, and whatever. There was a kernel of truth in there at least. Let me break down some science to you: the Metaverse is based on cognition. The stone is supposed to be magic. Whatever I felt earlier was actual magic (which sent my mind reeling for the entire meeting). Ergo, take the stone, become a god in the Metaverse.

  But then I'd be vindicating somebody who thought they were scamming me.

  Also it was one hundred thousand yen.

  In the end, I decided to take the high road: spite. It's my default option if you haven't figured that out yet.

  "'Holy stone', eh? What, does it glow in the dark like a night stick? Absorb the bad energies of the planet? Recenter my magnetic poles? Definitely need some of that. Feel like I'm a pole bent out of shape lately, though isn't that what yoga is for?"

  "N-nothing so crass!" Despite obviously selling a scam, she didn't have the decency to acquiesce. "Think of it as a good luck charm!"

  I scratched my chin in exaggerated wonder. "Yeah, but how does it provide good luck? Is good luck provided or is it the absence of bad luck? I think it's provided, because otherwise there wouldn't be neutral luck, or I guess the absence of both good and bad luck?"

  "It's naturally providing good luck."

  "Then what does it do to the bad luck? Does it make it good? Or do they counteract each other? Either way, I've got way too much bad luck. Maybe I'll need two or three. Oh, but what if they run out of power? Then all the bad luck will rush back in like a cracking dam. Guess I'll also need to buy three more, making that six, so I'll have a constantly regenerating stream of good luck. Hey, can I reach Enlightenment if I buy enough of them?"

  She slammed her hands on the desk and stood up. "You're making fun of me!"

  "Well, not really. I think you're pretty good. I'm more making fun of," I poked the stone, "this thing."

  That seemed to mollify her enough that she was able to sit back down, crossing her arms. She pouted. I actually got somebody to pout. "I can see why you're alone in the future."

  "I firmly believe in that. The rest though? Not in the slightest. I bet that your fortune telling was slightly modified to make buying this stone more urgent. No matter what skill you have, I'll beat you."

  "Oho? You think that you can beat fate?" she asked, sweeping her hand over the cards.

  "Better than beat fate: I'll beat you."

  "I hope that you don't expect any help from me."

  "That's fine. I'll come back alive, and probably alone within six months. Then I'll check up on you again later and prove that you don't need a bogus rock."

  She took the rock and pocketed it again. With a roll of her eyes, she said, "sure, if that's what you think. I can't say that I'm looking forward to being proven right, but I would happily accept you coming back to accept my help in averting this 'ruin'."

  And that's how I got kicked out of the most genuine fortune teller that probably exists in the world. I walked away while noting down her name into my phone.

  Even with her fortune, I didn't head straight over to the place that she suggested. One day's job search turned into three as I continued wasting my time meandering. Most of that was free time which isn't too interesting to hear. On the third day, at the end of my Sojiro-allotted time frame, I finally decided to stop messing around.

  Only afterwards did I realize that I was stalling so I had an excuse to continue exploring.

  It was a tiny hole in the wall manned only by girls. The place was airy, fresh, felt like you'd stepped inside a seasonal heaven while still being flanked by nine to nine workers who looked like their soul had been vacuumed out. This was a problem. If it hadn't become obvious, that wasn't my scene. I was a little bit too snarky to be considered wholesome and a little too nerdy to be considered safe. Each of the workers excitedly talked to me about my requests and I walked out of there with a bouquet that was more a work of art than simple duty. It sat in the corner of my room, letting me contemplate while falling asleep.

  Rafflesia. It was near enough to the metro that I could easily make it there after school, especially if Sojiro stopped being a prude and let me stay out late. The place was novel enough that I was interested in working there for the sake of doing so.

  Thankfully, even if my parents had excommunicated me, they couldn't scoop their own lessons from my gray matter. My dad loved talking about how he and mom met, searing the story into my head. What stuck out was the description of my mom as a shrinking violet (which I did not want to hear her described as) who would've been scared off from a date by the guy's shadow falling on her wrong. Coming from that was my dad's routine when he first became interested in her: a specific type of cologne which evoked the image of a river, dressing in form-fitting clothes since he wasn't a big guy, wearing fake glasses, and drinking a specific type of coffee.

  I didn't want to buy cologne and I didn't want to shell out money for fake glasses, but the rest of the list was attainable. Instead of my normal outfit I wore a droopy shirt with slightly tighter jeans. Sojiro raised a brow when I sat at the counter, acting like a regular with my arms propped up.

  "What do you think of Chagall Café?"

  That actually got him to chuff out a laugh, giving me a stink-eye that I assumed was directed at the chain. "That place? The lifeblood of mediocre coffee everywhere. When it first came out everywhere scrambled to have their own take on their 'pheromone coffee'. Let me tell you something: a man's skills include what he eats and what he smells like. That means you don't ever settle for second best unless you have no other choice."

  He walked over to the coffee machines. It was fascinating watching him in his element, not wasting a single movement when operating all those dials and pulling out specific beans.

  "Second best? Are you talking about their coffee or the pheromone coffee's effects?"

  "Both. Don't believe what any manager or advertisement tells you about serving the best brew they can. That's what they're all trained to say. I won't deny its effects, but they're misers at heart. Skimping on the ingredients always comes out with a second-grade cup."

  We fell into silence, me watching him work and him moving around the most familiar place in the world to him. Steam wrenched from the sides, the smoke seeping between the rafters and stinking up my room. Eventually a cup was slid in front of me with coffee that looked as if milk had already been poured into it.

  His fingers tapped on the table. "That's what pheromone coffee could be."

  This was the moment where somebody would start crying. A whole new world would open up to them and—let's skip the bullshit I was not buying. I don't like coffee. Coffee is bitter. Bitter is fine to a point, but coffee is the type of bitter where I wished it stayed in Brazil or wherever it came from. Coffee coats the sides of your mouth. Coffee is strong, with only a single drop of it being infectious. The drink stained which gave another chore while washing dishes. While the drink poured down my throat at a temperature slightly above what I was comfortable with, I could only think about how it tasted like car oil with an herb on top.

  I gave a thumbs up.

  "It's good," I said, sounding as if my throat was contorting into itself.

  I don't think that earned me any points. I had to pay for it. I got the job.