The morning Kei Morimoto arrived, the sea was loud.
Ezra sat in the back corner of Class 3-B, chewing the end of his mechanical pencil and pretending to be interested in conjugating English verbs. Outside, the ocean churned like something alive. Storms had swept through the coast all weekend, leaving behind salt-stung windows and the smell of wet kelp. Ezra liked it. He liked things that reminded him of endings.
"Everyone, this is our new classmate," Ms. Nakamura said, gesturing to the boy beside her. "Morimoto Kei. He's transferred from Sapporo."
Ezra looked up.
The boy was tall, pale, with hair that curled slightly at the ends like he'd just woken up. He had a band-aid on his knuckle and eyes like he'd forgotten how to sleep. When he bowed, he did it half-heartedly, like he didn't expect to stay long.
"Yo," he said.
There was laughter, murmurs. But Ezra watched him carefully. Not the way the girls did—curious, whispering—but like a reader studying a new paragraph. Kei's eyes swept the room, disinterested. Then they stopped—on Ezra.
Their eyes met.
Ezra looked away first.
Later that day, Ms. Nakamura paired them together for a group project on romantic poets. Ezra suspected it wasn't random. She always looked at him the way she looked at old books—gently, like they were one bad day away from falling apart.
Kei dropped his bag beside Ezra's desk without asking.
"You like poetry?" Kei asked, not looking at him.
Ezra nodded. "I write it sometimes."
"Huh. So you're that kind of guy."
"What kind?"
Kei smiled—tired, amused. "The sad kind."
Ezra didn't answer. He just flipped to a blank page in his notebook and started writing the word Keats in the margin, even though he wasn't thinking about Keats at all.
He was thinking about how sometimes, you meet someone, and nothing happens.
And sometimes, you meet someone, and everything begins to unravel.