“Williams-san, I hope you will have a successful first meeting of math club. Please let me know if I can assist in any way,” Ohara said the following day at the end of class.

“Yeah, thanks. I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

I hadn’t been looking forward to my first club meeting. I spent all day thinking about it off and on. I wasn’t sure I dreaded math club more than tutoring, necessarily, but discomfort with the unknown certainly came into play. I was the only person in 3B who had signed up for the club. Not surprisingly, since they were all rubbish at math. At least I’d get a break from Nakatomi.

One of the drawbacks of math club that Ohara had chosen not to share with me, was that it combined the Japanese Program with the International Program. No, that wasn’t true. I was the only foreigner involved. So really it only combined me with the Japanese Program. She’d let this slip when she was explaining what to expect at my first meeting.

Clubs were one of the few times that the school encouraged mixing between the two programs as a way to promote school unity—that and gym class. It probably had something to do with “moral education” as well. Most things seemed to come back to that eventually, which was funny. It wasn’t like they were going to make good Japanese citizens out of us.

“I realize there may be difficulties at first, but your language will improve little by little, and your math skills are well suited to the team,” Ohara said prior as I prepared to join my Japanese counterparts for math.

“I’m sure I’m very well suited to this,” I muttered to myself at the end of the day as I left the International building. It only took a few moments to cross the courtyard, but the Japanese campus might have been miles away for all the traffic that went between them.

The buildings looked similar on the outside—red brick with white trim—but the interior revealed a number of differences. The buildings were clearly much newer than ours. Wider hallways. Larger classrooms. Actual single-person desks. No ancient, unused chalkboards hiding in janitor’s closets I was willing to bet.

When I found the right room and walked in, the other members of the math club turned to look at me. There were about two dozen of them. I ducked my head in what I suspected was an insufficient bow. “Hey. Uh. Williams desu.”

Everyone in the room looked at me for a fraction of a second before returning to whatever they’d been doing. Well, most of them did. A kid about my height with his uniform shirt half untucked and his tie missing walked over to me. A little bit of a swagger. Wannabe bad boy vibes.

“I’m Hirota. Do you know Japanese?”

“No.”

Hirota smirked. “Do you know math?”

What a stupid question. Of course I “knew math.” Why else would I have signed up for math club? Other than the fact Ohara forced me into it. “Yeah. I mean I’ve never competed before and I’m not sure what math club entails here. But I was in second year Calc back home and I’m certainly top of the class over at the International side so…”

My host was looking at me blankly. Right. English.

“Yes. I know math.”

Hirota nodded, then dug through a pile of papers on a nearby table. He scowled until he came up with a half-finished book of sudoku. He handed it to me. “No Japanese.”

All other papers on the desk were complex problems and logic puzzles that were much more appealing than fucking sudoku, but they were not in English. And therefore completely unintelligible to me. Well beyond my reach.

I looked around the room at the other people. All male. All pointedly ignoring me. They were definitely not doing math. They were on their phones, playing cards, and eating snacks. It made sense. There were no teachers in sight. Nothing to prompt any kind of math-related activity.

Someone handed me a can of pop and a bag of chips.

“Thanks.” I’d been mildly interested at the prospect of snacks, but looking at the prawn-flavored crisps I couldn’t imagine anything I wanted to eat less. The Coke was fine, though. In the absence of anything better to do, I sat there working some of the more complex sudoku. It passed the time, anyway.

After twenty minutes or so Hirota rang a bell and called a meeting to order. People stopped what they were doing and gathered around him. I stayed in my seat and continued with what I’d started. What was the point of even pretending to pay attention? I couldn’t understand a damn thing.

Every now and again he would look at me and say something in English. “Surplus budget” or, “As we have in the past.” Nothing that helped me understand what was going on. Occasionally there would be a chorus of groans, or a wave of laughter. I had no clue why.

Once their meeting was done, Hirota sent over someone to assist me. He was the smallest in the group. I think he was the youngest too. It seemed like a good reason to stick him with the foreigner.

The poor kid seemed terrified. His English was about as good as my Japanese. “It’s okay,” I told him. “You don’t need to translate. I’ll just do these.” I pointed at the wordless sudoku.

The kid looked quite relieved, although he still sat beside me working on his own problems that were clearly a lot more interesting than my assignment. I didn’t know why I cared. I had to show up to math club as some sort of graduation requirement, but Ohara didn’t say I actually needed to do anything.

I took a break and stared out the window at the flowering trees on campus. While I was zoning out, the door opened and someone new came in.

I heard the whispers before I saw his face.

No.