Homeroom smells like pencil shavings and detergent, with a high note of the sea drifting in when the wind remembers we're a harbor city. My window squeaks if you open it past an inch; I keep it at exactly an inch. Just enough air to pretend the world is bigger than this room. Just enough escape to calm the part of me that always maps exits.
The bus hiss outside fades. The bell rings—clear, metallic, a coin dropped into the day. Our homeroom teacher slides the door open. Shoes squeak. Chairs shift. The room calibrates to attention.
"Class," he says, "we have a transfer student."
The air tilts a degree toward the front. Not in a dramatic way. Just a tide of eyes.
She steps in with winter tucked into her posture. Neat uniform. Dark hair twisted low. Calm that looks practiced. She stands where the light from the side window touches the edge of her hair and turns it a little warmer.
"I'm Arina Volkova," she says, vowels clean, consonants careful. "I moved here last week. Please take care of me."
Half the class leans forward. A pen hits the floor somewhere. Daichi, two rows up, whispers "whoa" the way people whisper when they've seen a rare bird.
"Seat…" the teacher scans the chart. "Back row, window side. Next to Sato."
Thirty heads rotate. My elbow, which was minding the window squeak, forgets its job.
Arina walks down the aisle like a dancer who knows the space between bodies is also part of the choreography. She sets her bag down. A faint winter-floral scent reaches me. It feels like clean air after a tram's brakes—sharp, then gone.
"Good morning," she says without quite looking at me.
"Morning," I say, trying to make the word sound local to this desk.
Roll call softens into the low tide of a Tuesday. I watch the light move across the floor tiles. She underlines a header in her notebook with a ruler, the line so straight it could be a threat to crooked things. She taps the ruler twice before a hard problem—as if setting a metronome only she can hear.
Second period, she lets the smallest whisper escape. Not meant for anyone. Barely a breath.
"Ладно," she murmurs. Ladno. Okay.
If I didn't understand Russian, it would be just a shape in air. But I do. Once, in a life that feels like another person's, I washed dishes in Vladivostok until my hands learned heat differently. Another time, another name. Language crawled under my skin and stayed. I hold the memory the way you hold a warm mug: carefully, because heat travels.
I look at the attendance sheet and pretend reading is happening. New rule of the morning: pretend I don't know what I know.
Someone yells outside. A soccer ball thumps the exterior wall near our window. The glass shivers. Instinct pushes my hand up before thought catches up. My palm reaches the window frame as it rattles; I catch the wobble, steady it. The squeak doesn't turn into a screech.
She glances, just once. Then back to her notes. Her mouth is neutral; her eyes aren't. They hold a question they won't ask.
The PA chime pings, a little off-key. "Good morning, Hoshinomiya North," the office says. "Club orientation today after classes. Please remember hallway safety. Thank you."
The mic squeals for a second. Half the room flinches. Arina does, too—barely. I watch the tiny inhale she doesn't want noticed, then choose to notice nothing.
Between periods, Daichi leans back on two legs of his chair and makes every safety poster cry. "Bro," he stage-whispers, "seatmate is the transfer?"
"Seems like it," I say.
"She looks like she'll grade my soul. In a good way? Maybe."
"I'll send her your transcript," I say.
He grins. Golden retriever energy in human form. "So. You gonna talk to her?"
"We have exchanged a greeting," I say, re-holstering my pen like it's a conversation device. "And a shared proximity to air."
"Proud of you for collaborative nouns," he says, then yelps when the chair leg wobbles and claps all four down like a repentant acrobat.
The door slides open. A woman with bright eyes and a loose bun sets a stack of slim novels on the podium. Laughter lives in the corners of her mouth. She writes on the board in quick chalk: The Names We Give Ourselves.
"I'm Karina Volkova," she says. "Literature, this term." Her smile is invitation and challenge. "Yes, I am related to the new student. I promise to treat her with the same terrifying fairness as the rest of you."
Arina goes still. Not dramatic. Just a tiny stilled beat, like a metronome held briefly between ticks.
"Pair work," Karina-sensei continues, ignoring the ritual groan. "No bargaining. You'll choose a passage where a character's name matters and present for Lit Circle next week. Voice belongs to text, so you'll read aloud. Ah—no fainting."
Her finger moves down the chart. "Saegusa with Tanabe. Nakamura with Kanno. Volkova—Arina—with Sato."
The back row finds a new kind of quiet. Arina's hand doesn't grip her pen tighter, but the idea of it does.
Karina-sensei hands down copies of the novel—about a boy who tries to rename his fate—and the bell sends thirty bodies into motion.
Arina turns to me, eyes meeting mine properly now. Dark hazel, like brown with a secret. "We should divide the work."
"Definitely," I say. "You pick the passage? I'll draft discussion questions."
She nods. "Tomorrow. Library, lunch?"
"Okay."
She hesitates, lips parting a fraction. Then, so soft it might be for the desk, not me: "Спасибо (Spasibo—thank you)."
My heartbeat does an unhelpful thing. I keep my face boring. This is a skill.
The corridor floods at break—voices, laughter, the squeak of a trolley full of art supplies. Somewhere a drum from the music club tries to be a heartbeat. The world is noisy and alive; I let it move around me like a river moves around a rock.
I duck into the supply room by the office to grab posters for Yumi. The place is a tower of chairs with a philosophical inequality of legs and boxes labeled things like "PA CABLES (DO NOT TOUCH)" and "A4 (NOT FOR STUDENT USE)." The air smells like dust and lemon cleaner.
I wedge a poster tube under my arm, reach for a stack of flyers, and hear cardboard scrape. A box leans, mutters about gravity, and goes.
My hand moves without me. A full case of paper is suddenly on my palm, weight biting the corner into my skin. Thirty kilos, easy. I let the force run through my shoulder into the ground the way Natsume taught me once—exhale on the catch, don't fight the fall, redirect. I set it down on a lower shelf, gentle.
The sting on my thumb wakes properly, hot and precise. I hide it against my palm, tuck the hurt into the pocket where I keep my phone, my breath, my lies.
"Everything all right?" Yumi steps into the doorway, the fluorescent light turning the ring of her hair clip into a halo. Student Council clipboard tucked against her. Calm like a lake that knows the depth is a secret.
"Gravity test," I say.
"It is thorough," she says. Her eyes hold mine for a beat longer than strictly necessary. She checks a box without looking. "Good catch."
"Practice," I say.
"Lit Circle pairings went out," she adds, as if I didn't just hear that from her lit teacher-sister. "You and Volkova will be excellent."
"Define 'excellent'," I say.
She half-smiles. "Heard, not loud." She tilts her head toward the hallway. "Don't forget orientation. Some clubs get fierce with flyering."
This is not a warning; it is a forecast. "I'll bring an umbrella," I say.
"Inside?" She laughs under her breath. "You're funny in a way that isn't annoying. Keep it like that."
I promise nothing and everything, and slip back into the corridor. The PA pings again; for a split second it shrieks, then rights itself. People flinch, laugh, return to being seventeen.
At lunch, the library breathes like the underside of a large tree. Fans hum. Dust glows in sun-squares on the table tops. Mrs. Kawabe guards the desk with the peaceful menace of a cat that has decided not to move for the next century.
Arina has already laid out her tools: ruler, slim sticky tabs, mechanical pencil with extra lead. She sits by the window, as if she and I both selected places with edges on purpose.
"You're early," I say.
"I prefer breathing time before working time." She slides the novel across to me. "Two passages. Both marked. Choose."
We read. We don't talk much while we read, which I like. The passage choices are sharp: one where a boy refuses the name given to him, one where a girl inherits a name like a burden and a crown. We pick the latter. It feels like it will matter more out loud.
"You take first draft on questions," she says. "I'll refine."
"Generous," I say.
"Efficient," she replies. Then, under her breath, lighter than paper: "Он не глупый (On ne glupyy—he's not stupid)."
Heat brushes my ears. I circle a line in the passage that doesn't need circling and resist the urge to grin at the table. It is important to be boring. Boring is how you keep your life.
A ninth-grader at the next table fumbles a bottle. It tips toward Arina's notes in slow motion. My hand moves faster than sight likes to admit, and the bottle's cap kisses my palm instead of her page. I right it. The ninth-grader mouths "sorry" like a prayer. Arina doesn't look up; the tiniest crease between her brows has disappeared.
We sketch five good prompts. The questions aren't showy; they are doors. She lines her pen up perpendicular to the notebook's edge as if angles make trust. Halfway through, she rubs her wrist once, fast, like the motion is a secret.
"Old injury?" I ask, and realize too late it might be personal.
"Ballet," she says. Like gravity, again. "Ages ago."
"You still dance?"
"Sometimes." The word has a dent. "Sometimes I remember to."
We swap notes. She taps twice next to one of my questions, a private approval stamp. The library clock ticks in modest, dutiful time. Out the window, a gull floats above the school roof like it's reading the timetable.
When we stand, our chairs slide in with matching precision. "Tomorrow," she says.
"Tomorrow." I mean the word. It tastes like something I'm not supposed to want.
On our way out, the universe does what it always does when you think you're safe: produces a ladder and a person who misjudged the last rung. A stage crew boy stumbles near the auditorium door, the aluminum ladder skews, and a framed club display on a hook decides to unlock itself from gravity.
I move. Shoulder under the wobbling ladder, foot nudging its base back into a sane angle, free hand catching the descending edge of the frame. Pain blooms in my palm, bright-white. Noise does something my ears don't like for a second. I hide the flinch in a breath and pass the frame back to the kid like we rehearsed this.
"Sorry! Sorry!" the boy says, cheeks red. He moves the ladder with the reverence of someone escorting a coffin.
"Maybe a second person next time," I suggest.
"Right! Yes! Safety!" he chirps, and scurries away.
Arina looks at me, fully. Her gaze checks my shoulder where the ladder hit, then my hand. "Are you okay?"
"Aluminum is soft," I say.
"It isn't," she says, flat.
I smile a bit. The kind that hides. "I bruise secretly."
She doesn't smile. Not with her mouth. Somewhere around her eyes moves. "We're late," she says, as if reminding herself of the next motion will save her from asking questions. It will. For now.
We hit the shoe lockers and the smell of wet umbrellas past, even though the sky is a huge pale blue. The courtyard buzzes: flyering wars, an a cappella group practicing near the ginkgo tree, someone juggling stress and three pens. The harbor throws gull calls into our background like a sound editor with opinions.
"Arinaaaa," someone sings her name with the confidence of a friend. A girl with a bright scrunchie and a tote bag exploding flyers trots up, braid slightly rebellious. "Don't run away."
"Hana," Arina says, which answers several questions: the scrunchie girl is Hana Morikawa, and Arina has at least one person who knows her well enough to intercept.
Hana eyes me openly, grin quick and real. "Hi. I'm Hana. I translate Arina's face when she refuses to use words. You are…?"
"Rayan," I say. "Seatmate. Face translator not required."
"Lies," Hana says agreeably. She drops a flyer into my hands before I can dodge. "Join Culture Club. We steal good readers for recitations."
"We have Lit Circle," Arina says, as if the word "we" is dangerous and delicious.
"Oh, I know," Hana says, waggling eyebrows. "The board already moved that pairing around like chess."
A shadow lengthens at my side. Reika Tanabe appears like she was edited in: blunt bob, hoodie, disposable camera around her wrist like it time-traveled from a cooler decade. She chews gum with philosophical commitment and looks between us like a scientist with her favorite mice.
"Chemistry club meets chemistry class," she says, deadpan. "Film at eleven."
"Ignore her," Hana says, without much conviction. "Reika says what the audience is thinking. It's a disease."
"Self-awareness," Reika says. "Terminal."
Her camera clicks without lifting properly. "For the zine," she adds. "We do an issue on 'Names.' You two can be our 'assigned at seatmate' spread."
Arina looks like she wants to evaporate into the nearest correct answer. "No."
"Consent respected," Reika says instantly, and slides the camera back down. She's chaos, but she's kind about it. Interesting.
"Lunch tomorrow in the library," Hana says, backing away. "Arina, text me if you need… pep. Rayan, don't let her do all the work."
"I'm trying to be a cautionary tale," I say.
"You look like a cautionary poem," Reika says, then disappears in the direction of a drama poster like she smelled a plot.
We exhale something that feels suspiciously like laughter. The wind flips a strand of Arina's hair; she tucks it behind her ear with a movement that could file paperwork.
"Your friends are…" I start.
"Loud," she says. Then, softer, in Russian, almost to her sleeve: "Хорошо." Khorosho. Good.
I pretend to be pathetically monolingual and fail very convincingly.
After classes, orientation turns the gym into a polite marketplace of ambitions. Drumline rattles the rafters at the exact moment the table for the Astronomy Society tries to be heard about the moon. The PA system from the corner squeals twice, recovers, and whispers something about sign-up sheets. I thread the edges, stay near doors, and wave at Daichi when he wrestles a volleyball into a net without using two hands.
Yumi floats through the crowd like the concept of order, checking that no club has replaced their sign-up sheet with a poster of a cat. She catches my eye, points her clipboard, and mouths, "You'll be fine."
Karina-sensei appears near the staff entrance, silk scarf and conspiratorial smile, and intercepts me like I wandered onto her page on purpose. "Mr. Sato."
"Sensei," I say, trying to look like a student and not a department head in another, older building in another century.
"You handled the board rescue earlier with suspicious grace," she says.
"Lucky angle," I say.
"Mmm." She hums like a person who collects clues for pleasure. "Lit Circle is next Thursday. You and Arina will lead third slot. Tell her I said she's not allowed to be perfect; she is required to be present."
"That's a terrifying grading rubric," I say.
"Good literature is terrifying," she says, cheerful. "One more thing." Her tone softens, the smile turning sisterly. "Arina is good at being strong. If something about voice scares her, make sure you're the one she's looking at when she remembers to breathe."
It lands like a folded promise in my hands. I nod, because it's the only respectful answer to someone handing you a piece of their family.
On the way home, the bus doors sigh. The harbor wind smells like old ropes and salt and something sweet from a stall doing business in grilled things. I take the train instead; the view out the window is all rooftops and laundry lines and a sliver of water, with gulls pacing us like they own the line. The carriage rocks gently. Reflections stack: my face now overlaid on my face then. Seventeen. Twenty. Thirty. One hundred and something. I breathe in on four, hold two, out on four, as Natsume taught me when the world was made of different walls.
The throb on my thumb has already softened. By the time I ride the curve past the wharf, the skin is unbroken. If I press hard, I can remember where the edge was. Memory is funny. Sometimes it's the only scar.
At home, Aunt Aiko has left curry on the counter with a sticky note that says "Don't study too hard" and a doodle of a carrot for no reason. I leave a thank-you in the sink shaped like clean dishes. My room holds a desk, a bed, a window, a plant that forgives negligence. I put the slim novel down and the sticky tabs look like a row of small birds resting.
I write questions for Lit Circle. Good ones. Not clever. Doors, not mirrors: "When a name feels heavy, who is holding it with you?" "Who benefits when you rename yourself?" I find my pen writing a line of Russian in the margin, just to see what it looks like in my hand: "Почему мы носим имена, которые оставляют следы? (Pochemu my nosim imena, kotorye ostavlyayut sledy? Why do we wear names that leave marks?)"
The letters fit easily. Too easily. I scribble it out and rewrite in Japanese. I take a photo I will never send. I delete the photo I will never send.
My phone buzzes. Daichi: "Bro did you just catch a ladder with your shoulder." Another ping: Reika, a text I didn't give her permission to have, which is Reika in a sentence: a photo of the Lit board with The Names We Give Ourselves and under it, a caption: "Assigned at seatmate. Tune in." She's not starting a rumor; she's winding a music box. The song is soft. For now.
I put the phone face-down. The plant forgives me again.
Later, when the lights are off and the city practices lullabies—buses breathing, a scooter's last complaint, the gulls finally conceding that night is real—I lie on my back and count breaths. Quiet is not just a place. It is a thing you can make when the world won't hand it to you. I learned that on floors harder than this one. I learned it in kitchens where the steam turned the air into another skin. I learned it at windows in schools that smelled like chalk and youth and the first rain.
Somewhere, in a room with books aligned by height, a girl who pretends winter is easy is probably underlining a passage and telling herself it's just a voice exercise. Somewhere else, her sister is planning readings like chess moves that teach mercy. Somewhere, Yumi is thinking about pairs like a general thinks about bridges.
And somewhere uncomfortably near my sternum, something old and cautious is doing what it hates: wanting.
The next morning, homeroom repeats its ritual: chairs, chatter, gulls. My thumb has no memory of yesterday's corner. Arina sits, lays her pen parallel to her notebook, and says "Good morning" like it's the correct answer to a test I didn't know we were taking.
I match it. Karina-sensei passes by and drops a sticky note on our desk—Lit Circle slot: next Thursday, third. Hana breezes in late with a tote that says "books are snacks" and salutes us with a doughnut she definitely didn't get permission for. Reika knocks a knuckle on the doorframe like she's in a sitcom and smirks at nothing. The PA chimes. A gull argues with a crow outside. The world lines up its noises, and for once, they make a song I want to keep.
We don't talk much. We don't need to.
On the way to third period, a first-year loses his grip on a stack of glossy club posters. They fan across the floor like a messy paper peacock. I kneel, stack them in clean bundles. Arina kneels without a sigh and lines the edges. Our hands don't touch, which, for some reason, feels deliberate. When he thanks us, she says, "Be careful," in teacher-voice that isn't unkind. He nods as if blessed.
"You're good at catching things," she says, not looking at me.
"Gravity has bad manners," I say.
"Names too," she says.
We make it to the end of the morning without the ceiling falling or the PA developing a personality disorder. The day builds a rhythm of small usefulnesses. That's my favorite kind of rhythm.
The bell for final period releases the building. Feet swarm the stairs. The courtyard tastes like coming rain, even under a blue sky. I wait by the shoe lockers; Arina's step is precise. She shifts her bag higher on her shoulder and stops half a pace from me like leaving room is good manners.
"Library again tomorrow?" she asks.
"Yes."
She nods. She looks at me, then at the window above the lockers where sunlight makes dust look like confetti. She speaks to the glass, soft as breath: "Ему можно доверять (Emu mozhno doveryat'—he can be trusted)."
I let two seconds pass. Then three. Then four. I look in exactly the wrong direction so my face won't betray me and say, "See you," like it's the easiest sentence in the world.
She walks away with that measured stillness. Hana intercepts her like a cyclone with manners. Reika falls into step like a moral support gremlin. Karina-sensei's laugh drifts from the staff room. Yumi's clipboard crosses the hall. Daichi throws me a peace sign with a mouth full of something from the vending machine and nearly crashes into a first-year, then apologizes so sincerely the kid levels up emotionally on the spot.
Hoshinomiya takes a breath.
Okay, Rayan. Don't mess this up.
And when the rain comes—because it will—remember to be the person someone looks at while they remember how to breathe.
To be continued.