"I'm not really sure how to proceed," she says to herself. The classroom is empty except for her and the blank notebook page in front of her. Sighing, she sets down her pen and twists the metal spiral with her small, pruned fingers. Leaning back in the chair, she swipes her bangs off her forehead and looks around the classroom.

There is the blackboard, faded remnants of formulas and equations, streaks of drying wiper-fluid, some student's hand-print in the chalk dust. There is the teacher's desk with the white stacks of printer paper, the still humming computer monitor, the novelty coffee mugs stuffed tight with pens and pencils. Behind the desk is a browning fern in a pot on a tabletop with a printer below it. Next to that is a set of file cabinets with unmarked identification cards and cluttered magnets

Pasted on the magnets are photos of past students caught in frozen smiles and waves. Most of the photos are contrived: the student wearing their school uniform while standing, crouching, or leaning in the lee of a gnarled oak tree or near a tennis net or an open locker, holding a textbook or baseball bat or guitar at an awkward angle. Results of photo shoots in their third year, a spare weekend afternoon amidst the mess of studying - cram school, midterms and finals, entrance exams - and hanging out with high school friends.

That thought pricks at her.

High school friends.

The phrase implies an end.

Among her peers, she notices a sense of desperation. Everyone scrambling to be with each-other, third year girls clinging to one another in the hallways, swim team seniors going out for coffee or a study session after every practice. When they invite her, they'll sometimes grasp her wrists and make their eyes all dewy and large while calling her by some cutesy nickname. Sometimes they'll ask in passing, as their group scuttles out the locker room, chattering and waving behind their backs. Sometimes one of them will approach her in the water, touch her shoulder or snap her swimsuit before smiling sweetly and cocking her head.

Knowing she'll always decline, they always invite her. Not that they don't like her, or that she doesn't like them. They are just different. Before graduation, they prefer to spend as much time together as they can, and she prefers to go to an empty classroom to study and write. They prefer to escort each-other to the train or find boys to carry their books. She prefers to walk home by herself, escorted by a can of mace. No matter how late it is, she takes a certain, simple pride in being unafraid of walking alone and in carrying all her books in her own, small arms.

Looking back to the notebook, she picks up her pen and is surprised how light it feels, as if she expected it to be too heavy to raise. She writes in English. The sentences are blocky and slow and written in the passive voice. There is a surplus of adjectives and adverbs, some of them made up. There are misused idioms and sometimes the verb forms get confused. But, she's doing it.

There is something about the English language that opposes the Japanese language, but she doesn't understand what it is. Maybe it's the sounds of English, the way it feels in her mouth, the shapes her tongue must make. When she speaks English, it feels like her mouth is full of marbles, of as if she's biting down on a cork or like her tongue is a wooden block. Or, maybe it's how strict, but not sometimes not strict, the rules of English are and yet so random and nuanced with so many words having several different meanings. Perhaps it's because English has just the one written form while Japanese has two.

Sometimes, she wonders what English kanji would look like. In the solitude of her bedroom, she's tried to create them. Always it feels stale because it's useless. A single, English kanji.

She writes a little harder, the nub cutting a little deeper, the ink a littler darker. English so opposes Japanese because of the history. She still remembers being ten and listening to her great-grandfather, in a moment of uncharacteristic seriousness, describe the mushroom cloud. How it hung in the sky all day. How he and his fiancé sat on a grassy knoll outside their home, just beneath a ginkgo tree, and watched it together without realizing what it meant.

The next day there was another. The first was just dissipating when the second appeared. First, there was a soundlessness, then a bright flash followed by a sort of boom deep within his ears. It rang in his head, pulsing, vibrating, when it calmed down he could see again. He watched how the leviathan ballooned, bloated, quivered, wobbled, and seemingly went still, as if painted there between the land and the sky. A few moments later, he and his fiancé were hit by a gust of hot wind smelling of ash and chemical, they were blown backwards several meters, and rolled down the knoll to the bank of a nearby stream. The water was warm, despite it being winter, and it's surface reflected the ash in the sky and the vibrant white colors of the far-off explosion.

By then, he knew what it meant, and even decades past, he couldn't quite grasp it. In that small frame of time, all those people evaporated leaving behind only their shadows. In that small frame of time, an entire countryside was turned to dust, and the dust was scattered in the wind, and the wind blew far, out towards the seas surrounding their island. It was as if a western, english-speaking god had spit upon their land, and the emperor was nothing to it.

Everybody knew somebody who died in the blasts or was injured by the aftershocks or would be effected by the radiation, which was almost scarier that the bombs themselves because, unlike the mushroom cloud, the radiation was invisible. Generations later, it lingers still in the soil and the water and the bodies of children.

Not to mention the fire-bombings. Before the war, this was an island composed of wood.

She shivers, breathes in.

"Of course English feels opposed to Japanese," she says, her voice small and quiet, almost transparent. Staring at the half-finished sentence in the half-finished paragraph, she sets down her pen and it sits there on the note-paper, limp and still, unusable.

Her handwriting is tiny, uniform, neat, but the sentence itself is awkward, stumbling, stuttering. An English-speaking sentence written by a Japanese hand. An English-speaking book read by a Japanese girl. An English-speaking friend, an English-speaking cell phone, an English-speaking restaurant chain.

Leaning back in the chair, balancing on the hind legs, she stares out the windows lining the wall of the classroom. There is the empty baseball yard with the sandy, almost orange infield, the white bases and pitcher's mound, the backstop fence, the dugouts with their seed-shell scattered benches.

Past that, is a small woods encasing a small lake. The tops of the trees look like an odd, curly head as it sits against the washed out blue of the sky. And, there is the sun, peering down like a white, blinding buzz-saw. Behind her, a voice calls out. She does not flinch. She just watches the sun-haze, the way it lingers in the wall of windows, glaring in and exposing all the dust in the air.

"Whatever do you mean, Ruri-ruri?" he says, something similar to glee in his voice, "You writing a love letter, is it a love letter!?"

She does not turn around, but she can see his vague reflection in the window. Just the form of him, the shape of him, his height and his posture. And, she can hear him. His voice curls at the ends, his inflections bound up and down with ceaseless, possibly hormonal, energy. But, inside that energy, there is a watchful quite. He observes her.

It's tiring to listen to him speak. And, sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's the opposite. And that dichotomy itself is tiring. Closing her eyes, she rubs her forehead and swivels around.

"When did you get here?" she asks. He stands in the doorway, leaning against the door-frame, his arms folded, one knee pointed out. His characteristic sheep's-grin sits on his face like clothing, like something he put on in the morning.

"I don't think Japanese and English are so opposed," he says, pushing himself off the doorframe and stepping towards her, stopping as he sees her expression tense, "Don't let Kirisaki hear that, at least."

"Right," she says, looking back to the notebook, feeling him watching her, and feeling herself watching him. In her periphery, he leans back against the doorframe.

His body is lanky, his shoulders are wide. His hair is thick and sometimes looks already grey, depending on the lighting. He reminds her of a satyr, and she almost chuckles at the idea of cloven feet in his shoes and little horns hidden beneath that hair.

She compares herself against him.

Back in middle school, boys would pick her up just because they could. They'd lift her into the air and run around, and she would just wait for them to get bored. She'd stare off into the distance and sometimes just keep reading unless they took her book away. If she ignored it long enough, they would leave.

But, this doesn't work on Shuu. No matter how much she ignores him, he doesn't leave. He doesn't take her book either, and he doesn't lift her or touch her. He talks too much and makes lewd jokes, but he never touches her, there's a certain personal space he does not broach. Maybe there's an honor in that. In fact, only she broaches it. She frowns.

Glancing back at him, she sees that smile again, that shift in his gaze, the way the dipping sunlight reflects off his glasses. She decides that's worse than just taking her books or lifting her into the air.

"What are you doing here?" she asks, feeling like she's playing a role in a game. A part of her even enjoys it. She can fall into the rhythm of their interactions and be at ease there.

"Well," he starts, and she sighs audibly, "I was just finishing my classroom duties for the day, and happened upon a troop of sexy ladies with wet hair. I could faintly see the outlines of their bras beneath their school shirts. Like you, Ruri, they smelled of chlorine. And so, upon offering my personal cleaning servi-"

"Just stop," she interrupts, holding up a hand, "Fine. I don't need anyone to walk me home."

"Obviously, obviously," he says, waving his hand and holding the other to his chest while laughing a hearty, contrived laugh.

"So, what are you doing here?" she asks, resting her cheek on her fist, her elbow on the notebook, the English language receding to the back of her mind. She hates that too, that way he subverts all her contemplations and makes himself the center of things.

He just looks at her.

Folding up her notebook, she sighs again but knows he knows it was forced. Standing from the chair, she slings her carrier bag around her torso and lifts the flap, placing the notebook inside. The bag is heavy, full of textbooks and binders. It bulges like an odd rock against her small body, and when she walks it bangs against her waist. Everyday she rubs ointment on the bruise it leaves. This is also an act of pride, not just of academic pride, but of something more inherent and important.

"Don't forget your pen," Shuu says, smiling. Saying nothing in response, she grabs the pen off the desk-top and tosses it into a small nook in the corner of the bag. Setting off, she passes him into the hallway. A moment later, he jumps off the door-frame and catches up.