The letter from school arrives on a Thursday morning when the sky threatens snow but can't quite commit.
Shinji finds it in the garden's mailbox—the small rusted thing Hakurage installed near the gate for deliveries. His name typed in formal characters across the front. The return address makes his stomach drop: Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education.
He opens it standing in the cold, breath visible in the air, and reads words that feel like a door closing.
Due to excessive absences and failure to complete coursework, you are hereby notified of pending expulsion proceedings. You have fourteen days to submit documentation of extenuating circumstances or arrange a meeting with the academic board. Failure to respond will result in permanent removal from the student registry.
Fourteen days. Two weeks to justify why he's been more ghost than student, why his homework sits incomplete, why he's chosen survival over attendance. Hakurage finds him still standing there twenty minutes later, the letter hanging from his hand, snow finally beginning to fall in small tentative flakes.
"What's wrong?"
Shinji hands him the letter without speaking. Watches Hakurage's face as he reads, sees understanding and anger and helplessness pass through his expression like weather.
"This is garbage," Hakurage says. "You have legitimate reasons—"
"Do I?" Shinji's voice is flat. "What am I supposed to tell them? That my father destroys me so I ran away? That I'm living in a garden with a fifteen-year-old who isn't my parents? That I've been too busy surviving and worrying about my family situation to worry about my math homework?"
"The truth."
"The truth gets me taken away from you. Gets you investigated. Gets everything we've built here destroyed." Shinji takes the letter back, folds it carefully. "I knew this was coming. You can't just disappear from school and expect no consequences."
"Then we fight it. We'll get documentation. Medical records from your injuries. Something that helps."
"We don't have medical records. The emergency room visit for your arm was the only official treatment. Everything else was self-care and ignoring it." Shinji starts walking toward the greenhouse, snow settling on his shoulders. "Maybe this is just reality catching up. Maybe I'm not meant to finish school."
"Don't." Hakurage follows, grabbing Shinji's arm to stop him. "Don't give up like this. You're smart. Talented. You deserve an education." "Deserve and get are different things."
They stand in the falling snow, two figures learning that survival isn't the same as living, that escaping one trap doesn't mean freedom from all of them.
Inside the greenhouse, they sit surrounded by plants that shouldn't survive Tokyo winters but do anyway through careful cultivation and stubborn refusal to die.
"What if we showed them your art?" Hakurage says suddenly. "Made it an independent study. Showed them you've been learning, just differently." "They don't care about art—"
"They care about education. About proof you're developing skills, gaining knowledge, doing something worthwhile for studies." Hakurage is already moving, pulling out notebooks filled with his parents' research, his own careful observations. "You've been documenting the garden. Drawing every plant species. Learning botanical terminology. That's science education. Art education. It counts."
"Haku—"
"And you've been helping me understand my parents' research." Hakurage's voice gains momentum, hope bleeding through. "We could compile everything. Make a portfolio. Show them you've been engaged in legitimate independent study. It's unconventional but it's real education."
Shinji looks at the notebooks, at his own sketchbooks filled with careful renderings of winter camellias, frost-damaged leaves, root systems exposed by erosion. Months of work he'd thought was just escape, just art for art's sake.
"You really think they'd accept that?"
"I think it's worth trying. I think you're worth fighting for." Hakurage meets his eyes. "And I think giving up now means everything you've survived was for nothing."
The words land hard. Shinji thinks about the bruises that have finally faded, the arms that no longer ache with every movement, the mornings he wakes up without fear. All of that struggle, all of that pain—it has to mean something beyond just not dying.
"Okay," he says quietly. "Okay. Let's try." They work for three days straight preparing the portfolio.
Shinji goes through months of his sketches and chooses only the strongest ones. There are careful botanical drawings labeled with the scientific names Hakurage taught him, landscape studies that show how the garden changes with each season, and a series of drawings that follow a single plant's growth from seed to full bloom over six weeks.
Hakurage writes the accompanying documentation, using formal language to explain their independent study arrangement. He references his parents' research and frames Shinji's art as part of a legitimate scientific inquiry. He's unexpectedly good at it, turning what was really a chaotic struggle to survive into something that looks like a carefully planned education.
On the evening of the third day, Shinji's phone rings. His mother. "Your school called me," she says. No greeting. "About the expulsion proceedings. Why didn't you tell me?"
"I'm handling it." "Handling it how? Shinji, this is serious. If you're expelled, you can't get into high school. Can't get into university. Your whole future—"
"I know what's at stake, Mom." Shinji pinches the bridge of his nose, exhaustion making him sharp. "Hakurage and I are putting together a portfolio. Proof of independent study. We're submitting it tomorrow."
"Independent study of what?"
"Botanical illustration. Environmental science. Art." He can hear the doubt in her silence. "It's legitimate, Mom. I've learned more in the last two months than I did in a year of regular classes."
"Learning isn't the issue. Official recognition is. Schools don't just accept—"
"I know it's a long shot. But it's basically the only helpful shot I have." Shinji looks around the greenhouse at the work spread across every surface. "If it doesn't work, we'll figure out something else. But I'm trying. That has to count for something. Right?"
His mother is quiet for a long moment. Then: "Can I see it? The portfolio. Before you submit it." "Why?"
"Because I want to understand what my son has been doing. Because I want to see if there's anything I can do to help. Because—" Her voice breaks slightly. "Because I've spent too long not paying attention to your life. I want to start paying attention now."
Something loosens in Shinji's heart. "Okay. Come to the garden tomorrow morning. We'll show you everything." She arrives at dawn, carrying coffee and pastries like an offering.
The three of them sit in the pavilion—fully repaired now, its roof no longer leaking—and spread the portfolio across the wooden floor. Fifty pages of art and observation and careful learning. Evidence of a different kind of education.
Shinji's mother goes through each page slowly, her cleaning-roughened hands gentle on the paper. She stops at a detailed rendering of a winter camellia, its petals layered in shades of red Shinji mixed himself, the flower rendered with scientific precision.
"You drew this?" she asks. "Yeah." "When did you learn to draw like this?" "I've always drawn. You just never looked."
The words aren't meant to hurt, but they do anyway. His mother flinches, closes her eyes briefly. "You're right. I didn't look. I was too busy working, surviving, pretending everything was fine when it wasn't." She opens her eyes, looks at him directly. "I'm looking now. And this is—Shinji, this is extraordinary."
"It's just plants—" "It's not just plants. It's observation. Patience. Skill. Understanding." She looks at Hakurage. "You taught him the science?"
"He was already curious. I just gave him vocabulary for what he was seeing." Hakurage's voice is careful, like he's not sure where he stands with her still. "Your son is smart. Really smart. School was wasting him."
"School was supposed to keep him safe," she says quietly. "Supposed to be the normal part of his life when home was chaos. But I guess it failed at that too."
They sit in silence for a moment, three people connected by failure and survival and tentative attempts at repair.
"I'll come with you," Shinji's mother says finally. "To the academic board meeting. I'll testify that this was done with my knowledge and support. That you've been engaged in legitimate home education under my supervision."
"That's not true—"
"It's true enough. You're my son. You've been learning. I'm taking responsibility for your education." She straightens, and something in her posture shifts—the exhaustion falling away to reveal steel underneath. "They want to expel you? They'll have to go through me first."
Shinji feels a quiet warmth spread through his heart. This is what he needed years ago—someone to protect him, to speak for him, a mother figure who stands between him and systems that were never built to help him.
"Thank you," he whispers. "Don't thank me. This is what I should have been doing all along." The academic board meeting happens on a gray Monday morning in a conference room that smells like old coffee and institutional defeat.
Five people sit across a long table—teachers, administrators, people whose job is to process problems rather than solve them. They look at Shinji like he's a statistic, a failure rate, something to be removed from their numbers.
His mother sits beside him, wearing her best clothes—still worn, still cheap, but clean and pressed with care. Hakurage sits on his other side, the portfolio in his lap, his bandaged arm visible testimony to what Shinji's been surviving.
The head administrator—a severe person in their fifties with glasses and disapproval—opens the meeting.
"Minakawa Shinji. Forty-three absences this semester. Failing grades in all subjects except art. Multiple incidents of sleeping in class. Failure to complete assignments." They look up from the file. "You understand this is grounds for expulsion?"
"I understand." "Do you have documentation of extenuating circumstances? Medical reasons for the absences? Family emergencies?"
Shinji's mother speaks before he can. "Family circumstances. Shinji has been feeling pure torture of his own home life. Shinji has been living elsewhere for his safety. The chaos affected his ability to attend school regularly."
The administrator's expression shifts slightly—not quite sympathy, but acknowledgment. "Do you have documentation of the problem? Police reports?"
"No. We've been handling it privately."
"Then we have no official record to justify the absences." The administrator's voice is not unkind, but inflexible. "Without documentation, we can't make exceptions. Policy is policy."
"We have documentation of his education," Hakurage says, sliding the portfolio across the table. "Independent study in botanical illustration and environmental science. Supervised by me. I'm the curator of the Shizu Botanical Research Garden. My credentials are included."
The board members exchange glances. One of them—a younger teacher, maybe early thirties—opens the portfolio and begins looking through. "These are impressive," the teacher says slowly. "Very detailed. Professional quality almost."
"Shinji has been conducting field research," Hakurage continues. "Documenting winter-blooming species, studying facts about plants themselves, learning scientific illustration techniques. It's legitimate education, just not classroom-based."
"Homeschooling requires registration," the head administrator says. "Approved curriculum. Regular testing. This is—" They gesture vaguely at the portfolio. "This is unstructured. Unsupervised."
"I supervised," Shinji's mother says firmly. "I approved this course of independent study. My son was learning valuable skills in a safe environment. That's what education is supposed to provide."
The younger teacher is still paging through the portfolio, stopping at a detailed cross-section diagram of a camellia blossom, each part labeled in both Japanese and Latin. "The botanical terminology is accurate," they say. "And the artistic technique is beyond high school level. This shows significant self-directed learning."
"Self-directed isn't curriculum-directed," another board member counters. "We have standards. Requirements. He hasn't met any of them."
The meeting devolves into bureaucratic debate—policy versus exception, documentation versus reality, the system's inability to recognize learning that happens outside its narrow definitions.
Shinji sits listening to people discuss his future like he's not there, and feels familiar hopelessness settling. This is how power works. They ask for your story, then ignore it because it doesn't fit their forms.
"I learned more in two months at that garden than in years at this school," Shinji says suddenly. His voice is quiet but cuts through the discussion. "I learned to identify fifty-seven plant species by sight. Learned that survival requires both strength and flexibility. Learned that broken things can grow back stronger if given overall... proper care." He looks at each board member in turn. "Maybe that's not on your standardized tests. But it's education. Real education. And it saved my life when this school didn't even notice I was dying."
Silence falls. The younger teacher looks at him with something like understanding. The head administrator sighs. "We'll take this under advisement. You'll receive our decision within a week. Meeting adjourned."
Outside the school, snow is falling again—heavier this time, accumulating on sidewalks and cars. "That went badly," Shinji says. "Maybe," his mother says. "Or maybe it planted seeds. Sometimes that's all you can do."
They walk to the nearest train station together, his mother heading to work, Shinji and Hakurage returning to the garden. At the platform, she hugs Shinji—brief and awkward, but real.
"I'm proud of you," she says. "For fighting. For learning. For not giving up even when giving up would be easier." After she leaves, Shinji and Hakurage ride the train in silence, watching Tokyo slide past the windows, everything covered in white.
"What if they say no?" Shinji asks quietly.
"Then we figure out alternative education. GED programs. Online courses. Something." Hakurage's voice is firm. "You're not stopping your education just because one school is too rigid to recognize legitimate learning."
"You have a lot of faith in me."
"I have faith in what we've built. In what you're capable of. In the fact that you taught yourself scientific illustration in two months because you cared enough to try." Hakurage looks at him. "That's worth more than any diploma."
The train rocks gently, carrying them toward the garden, toward home, toward whatever future they can build from the wreckage they've survived. Outside, snow continues falling on Tokyo—covering the ugly parts, making everything clean and new for a moment before the dirt bleeds through again.
But for now, in this moment, everything is white and possible.
TO BE CONTINUED...