Chapter 4
Thursday after school, Naoki headed to Junes for a group study session. Naoto had told him in class that some of the third years might come. Rise was still out of town, and all of their other classmates had declined. It would just be Kanji, Naoto, and their senpai. And Naoki. He wasn't really looking forward to it. He was curious to see if any of the older kids would really show up, though.
He left school a few minutes behind Naoto and Kanji. He must have taken longer than he thought, because he was the last to arrive. All of the senpai had shown up. Chie, Yosuke and Yukiko.
"Oh, Naoki-kun!" Yukiko said brightly. "There's an empty seat over here beside me."
"Oh.. alright," he answered, taking the seat. It still surprised him when people genuinely wanted his company, and didn't just offer out of pity.
They were doing a poetry unit at school, so Naoto pulled out a love poem they would be working on in class tomorrow. It should be review for the third years, but Chie and Yosuke looked like they had never seen it before in their lives. Yukiko seemed familiar with it, so it was a review for her. Naoki was pretty sure that as badly as Kanji needed the help, he mostly came to hear his girlfriend recite love poems, but whatever. Naoto recited it flawlessly once, then had each of them attempt to say a stanza at a time. Chie sounded like she was reciting from a vacuum cleaner manual. Yosuke did nothing but stutter. He barely got a word out. "It's not fair!" he whined. "I hate this stuff!" Chie elbowed him. Kanji actually did pretty well. It was clear they had been practicing pretty regularly. He took it really slow and made only a few mistakes. Yukiko was nearly flawless as well. She definitely had read the poem before. Naoki's performance fell somewhere right in the middle. He wasn't a train wreck like Yosuke, but he wasn't even as good as Kanji. He just simply hadn't cared about anything school related enough to have practiced much English on his own time.
"Crap," he muttered softly after he had finished. Yukiko met his eyes. No one else seemed to have heard him.
"Great job everyone!" Naoto encouraged. "Keep practicing at home and we'll go over it again the next time we meet."
"Oh man," Yosuke complained. "I don't ever want to do that again."
"That's because you completely sucked at it!" Chie said, laughing. "If you actually practice you'll get better."
"Oh yeah? You sounded like a mail order catalog. Or.. or a robot reading a mail order catalog!" Yosuke laughed in return.
"Hey!" she said, getting up and chasing him to the other end of the food court when he ran out of the reach of her raised fists. Naoki shook his head at them. They were ridiculous.
"I think you did very well," Yukiko said to him softly.
"What? Oh, not really… but thanks," he replied.
"No, I mean it," she said. "It takes a long time to master a language like this. You just haven't had enough time to practice yet."
"Yeah… I guess that's true," he said.
The study group broke up when everyone started heading off to get snacks, and then Teddie came over on his break to visit. "I wanted to join in the fun! You all looked like you were having a beary nice time over here!" It was starting to feel like one of their uneventful team meetings. Naoki sighed in relief. Studying with his friends wasn't too awful if they were going to be this casual and relaxed about it. He glanced at Yukiko and she smiled. Maybe he could deal with coming to these study sessions more often.