The second day was different in the way that second days always are — the novelty of arrival worn off, the reality of being somewhere setting in. Yesterday he had been new. Today he was simply there, which is a more demanding thing to be.
He arrived early enough to watch the classroom fill. This was a habit he'd developed over years of moving between schools, social circles, cities — arriving before the room did so he could learn how it arranged itself before it learned how to arrange itself around him.
Manami came in at 8:04, bag over one shoulder, the morning's conversation already visible in her expression — she'd been thinking about something on the way here and hadn't finished yet. She sat, placed her things in the order that suggested she'd done this in the same way many times, and then looked up and found him already looking.
"You're early," she said.
"Habit," he said.
She accepted this, which told him something — she wasn't the kind of person who required more explanation than was offered. He appreciated that more than he would have expected.
The person who arrived at 8:09 and dropped into the seat directly in front of him with the energy of someone who had been awake for an hour but ready for twice that was Ken. He turned around immediately, as though the concept of settling in before engaging with people had simply never occurred to him as an option.
"Ead," he said. "You eat breakfast?"
"Yes."
"Good. You're going to need energy. My friend Riko is joining us at lunch and she talks a lot, but she's hilarious, so it balances out." He paused. "Actually — we should do karaoke today. You free after school?"
Eadlyn considered whether he was. "Yes."
"Perfect." Ken turned back around with the decisiveness of someone who had just resolved a complex logistical problem. Then immediately turned back. "Manami, you in?"
Manami, who had been watching this exchange with the quiet amusement of someone who had witnessed Ken operate before and found it consistently entertaining, said, "I was going to be anyway."
History started. Eadlyn didn't have a textbook yet and Naomi-sensei, noticing this without making an event of it, asked Manami to share hers. She slid her desk slightly closer, the textbook open between them.
She said something quietly in Russian — clearly, comfortably, with the light tone of someone accustomed to having a private aside that no one nearby would catch.
He's shy underneath all that. Cute.
He kept his expression completely neutral and continued reading the page.
His father had spent two years in Moscow before Eadlyn was born and had insisted, with the peculiar certainty of people who speak a second language badly but enthusiastically, on teaching him enough to follow along. It wasn't enough to have a conversation. It was enough to know exactly what she'd said.
He had a feeling he would continue not telling her this for some time.
By the afternoon's PT period, the basketball court had become something like a theatre with no one quite willing to admit they were watching. He played with the same instincts he'd developed over years of losing to faster, bigger players and learning that anticipation was the only equaliser — and played well enough that he heard things from the sidelines he also pretended not to hear.
Afterward, sitting on the bench with sweat cooling in the breeze, Ken appeared and sat beside him with the completeness of someone who had simply decided this was where he was going to be.
"You know you just made half the basketball club nervous, right?" he said.
"I wasn't trying to."
"That's what made it worse." Ken grinned. "I'm serious about karaoke. You in or not?"
"I said yes already."
"I know. I just like confirming things."
This, Eadlyn would come to understand, was entirely accurate.
The karaoke room smelled like artificial fruit, old carpet, and the particular warmth of a space that had held a lot of laughing. The four of them — Eadlyn, Ken, Manami, and Riko, who turned out to be a small person with extremely efficient comedic instincts — had barely sat down before Ken grabbed the microphone with the confidence of someone who had never in his life been embarrassed by his own singing and did not intend to start now.
He chose an anime opening theme. A famous one.
What came out was not so much a performance as an event. He was off-key in different directions in the same line. He was also completely, genuinely committed to every syllable, and there was something in that — in the total absence of self-consciousness — that made it impossible not to laugh, not performatively but actually, the kind that comes up before you decide to allow it.
Manami went next. The room adjusted. Her voice was not the voice of the girl who had been teasing in Russian three hours earlier — it was quieter than that, and more precise, and when she hit the chorus of the ballad she'd chosen there was something underneath the technique that was simply honest. He watched her without staring and thought: there are more rooms inside her than she opens at once.
Riko dragged Ken into a duet he had not agreed to and didn't resist, and the resulting chaos filled the remaining oxygen in the room with something that wasn't quite music but was definitely joy.
Then they all looked at Eadlyn.
He took the remote, scrolled, found an English song he'd grown up with and a Japanese one from an anime OST he'd listened to so many times on long flights that he could find the melody without thinking. He sang both imperfectly. His accent warped the Japanese lyrics in places that made Riko cover her mouth and Ken make a sound like a seal being surprised. He laughed before the song finished. That, more than anything, felt new — laughing at himself in a room of people he'd known for thirty-six hours as though he'd known them long enough for it to be easy.
Maybe this was what belonging started as, he thought. Not closeness exactly. Just the willingness to be imperfect in the same space as other people.
During a break, Manami leaned toward him.
"So," she said. "Sayaka-senpai."
The room got slightly more attentive in a way it was pretending not to be.
"We're neighbors," he said. "She showed me around the town."
Ken let out a breath like a man accepting a fate he'd anticipated. "Ead. Buddy. She's the school's — how do I explain this —"
"He knows," Riko said.
"He might not fully know."
"He knows," Manami said, with a certainty that suggested she had already formed an opinion about how much Eadlyn understood about the situation he was in. She glanced at him sideways. "You're going to have a difficult spring."
"I wasn't planning on having an easy one," he said.
She looked at him for a moment. Then smiled — very slightly, the kind that's a response to something being said correctly.
They left the karaoke shop into streetlamp light, exchanging numbers, making plans no one was entirely sure would happen but everyone genuinely wanted to. He walked to the station with his hands in his pockets and the warmth of the room still in his chest.
He had read, once, that the difference between being alone and being lonely was entirely dependent on whether you had chosen your solitude. He had spent most of the past year choosing it, or at least telling himself he had.
Tonight had not been solitude.
Tonight had been something that made solitude feel like the thing it actually was — a long preparation for something worth arriving at.