Undercurrent

At school, Mei Kadowaki is the untouchable beauty everyone admires from a distance, and Yuu Sasabe is the gloomy loner nobody bothers to know. Both faces are lies: Mei is the exhausted teenager quietly holding her family together, and Sasabe hides a body covered in piercings and ink beneath his shapeless uniform. When Mei's little brother Kai comes home scraped up, escorted by a kind, pierced stranger, Mei invites the good Samaritan in to thank him — and freezes when the punk greets her by name. Neither recognized the other, because neither had ever seen the other's real face. Now Sasabe braces for the popular girl to recoil, and Mei has to decide what to do with the boy who just saw straight through her.

Play on Narratives.