Math club was only slightly better than tutoring days. At least we had some room to spread out and Jun wasn’t so much in my face. But so far, being mutually beneficial hadn’t gotten me anywhere in terms of understanding the more interesting math problems on my own. I was still entirely dependent on Jun. There were too many kanji involved, and my basic vocabulary was pitifully small.

At least I was able to do some real math. My brain was no longer in danger of atrophy. Regular classes in English were no help in that department. I had secured my permanent place at the top of the honor roll, with occasional dips to second place when Jun had a particularly good day. Luckily Ohara didn’t teach math or Japanese so neither of us had to worry about our deficient subjects in terms of our academic standing.

I got to the math club room before Jun one afternoon. It was a relief not to see him there. I didn’t realize how much his presence affected me until the few blessed occasions I was free from him.

The afternoon sunlight filtered through the blinds. Only about half of the people in the club had arrived. Hirota was there, of course. And the short kid who was always by his side. The two of them had their heads together laughing about something. They broke off when they saw me. Never a good sign.

Hirota stood up from his perch on the edge of the teacher’s desk. “How much Japanese do you have?” he asked.

“No more than your English.” I set my backpack down at my usual seat.

“Zannen.”

I knew that one: too bad. I narrowed my eyes at him. Why was he asking? He’d known this much from day one. “Why do you care?”

He shrugged.

“Whatever,” I mumbled under my breath.

The short kid dropped a sheaf of papers on my desk. “Hirota-san says your math is good. But no competitions in English.”

He turned his back on me and returned to fawning over Hirota. I looked at the papers. It pissed me off that I still couldn’t make any sense of them without Jun’s help, or hours of painstaking work with a kanji dictionary. For a single problem.

I wondered why I cared about participating in the club at all. Maybe it was because classes were so easy my brain craved the challenge of a difficult problem to solve. And there was always the pleasure of finding the correct answer after a long struggle. Even if I needed Jun’s help.

It was irritating to no end that language was such a barrier. If the problems could be translated into English for me, I could be an asset to the team. But in Japanese? I couldn’t imagine that I was going to be fit for competition any time soon. Well, ever.

Ohara was an eternal optimist, though. It’s what led her to believe that Jun and I could behave like adults and help each other out instead of being at one another’s throats. I could usually ignore the hell out of people. He was making that awfully hard.

Because of my weird knack for learning things by ear, I was starting to pick up on spoken Japanese. It didn’t help me at all with the academic portion of math, but during the vast stretches of time when the rest of the club socialized and Jun sat in stony silence, I started to pick up on some of the whispers.

No one here seemed to know Jun very well—no one had been in class with him—but they had more information on him than I did.

I gradually found out the following things: he used to live in New Zealand, which I’d already heard. His dad had worked at the embassy there. I think.

But as to the reason he had transferred into the International Program? The conversation was beyond my basic levels of Japanese, and also barely audible. He’d started off in the Japanese Program. That was news to me. He’d been at some other school, started the first few weeks on the Japanese campus, and then transferred to 3B shortly before I arrived.

At first I thought the math club members were avoiding me as an outsider, and maybe that was partially true. But it gradually became clear that they were really staying away from Jun.

If I arrived without him, Hirota and his buddies weren’t exactly all smiles, but they didn’t cross the room to avoid my presence. As soon as Jun showed up? Everyone scattered. Leaving me alone with the thorn in my side.

I hated my dependence on him. I hated the fact that I cared about doing a damn thing in this club. I needed him if I wanted to get any interesting math work done instead of staring off into space, or working on kids’ games. And once again, my competitive spirit had taken hold. Even if I wouldn’t be allowed to compete, it was a personal challenge to attack these problems that others in the club were unable to solve.

“Move your stuff.” Jun entered the room and kicked my backpack out of his way. “Where is your work?”

Jun grabbed one of the day’s papers and marked it up with his red pen. A few words here and there. He had started leaving out important parts of translations, leading me to come up with some wildly inappropriate solutions from time to time.

I glared at him as he handed the paper back to me. He knew what I was going to say before I even opened my mouth.

“What? It’s good for you. Spot the mistakes in my translations. Think of it as additional tutoring.” He smirked.

After about a week of this I started to get good at spotting his little translation gifts for me. Japanese for math had a somewhat limited vocabulary. Jun took credit for my improvement of course, claiming his method was clearly working.

My method seemed to be working as well, even though it didn’t involve purposely trying to trip him up. I simply refused to look his sheet over until he spent five minutes checking for stupid errors. That alone increased his level of accuracy significantly.

Maybe he was equally as motivated as I was to dissolve our partnership.