Look Back

Look Back

Fourth grade, and Ayumu Fujino already owns the school newspaper. Her four panel comics run every issue, and everyone tells her how good they are. Then the paper gives half the page to Kyoumoto, a kid she has never laid eyes on, and the drawings that show up next to hers are so detailed, so patient, that Fujino's own work suddenly looks like scribbles. She stops going out. A whole year disappears into how to books and late nights, ink on her fingers, chasing someone she cannot even picture. She quits anyway. The gap refuses to close. Then graduation day, and there is Kyoumoto in the flesh: messy hair, stammering, barely able to look at her. Turns out this girl has been Fujino's biggest fan the entire time, reading every strip, keeping every page. Something clicks back on. What starts that afternoon turns into years of pushing each other, drawing side by side, arguing about panels, one eye always on what the other is doing. So when two people make each other better, is it rivalry that keeps them going, or something neither of them knows how to say out loud?