Haruka caught them at the door. "Lockers left, shoe boxes right." She pressed two wrapped onigiri into Kai's hands before he'd finished lacing his shoes. "Kai, your papers? Daiki, the old ID for the office?"
Daiki patted his bag. Kai held up the folder Coach had prepared the night before.
"Good." She straightened Daiki's collar, which didn't need straightening, inspected him for a second, and let go. "Both of you. Eat the onigiri before first period."
Morning air, cool enough that Kai's breath didn't quite show. The streets were empty at this hour. Light came in low and gold through gaps between houses, catching wet pavement where a shopkeeper had hosed down a storefront. A cat sat on a concrete block wall and watched them pass with the blank authority of an animal that owned the street.
Daiki ran through the list again. Shoe locker protocol. The classroom order for second-years. Where to put gym clothes. He said the words the same way he'd said them at dinner and again at breakfast, his voice on autopilot, and his eyes were doing their own work. He kept scanning shop fronts, slowing at a corner where the road forked, his hand tight on his bag strap. A bakery stood where he'd expected a different storefront. A vending machine hummed where a bus bench had been. The town had grown around his absence, and Kai could see him noticing the seams.
They walked. Kai didn't know these streets, and Daiki barely recognized them. The difference was smaller than it looked.
At the gate the crowd thickened. Uniforms and book bags and the particular noise of a hundred students who'd rather be asleep. Daiki's posture tightened, a centimeter of height added through his shoulders. He looked at the gate, then at Kai.
"Viel Glück," he said. Good luck.
Kai nodded. They split toward different corridors and Daiki disappeared into a stream of uniforms heading left.
Coach Nishimura was already sitting in the administration office when Kai arrived. A plastic chair across from a woman behind a desk, papers fanned between them. He sat where parents sat. He answered questions in Japanese that Kai couldn't follow, signed forms where the woman's finger pointed, nodded when she asked a longer question with a glance between Coach and Kai. She looked at Coach, late forties and Japanese, then up at Kai, sixteen and two hundred and ten centimeters, and asked what sounded like a polite question. Coach answered without pause. His tone was practiced. A man who'd explained this arrangement to doctors, airline staff, school boards, and now this administrator.
"All set," Coach said to Kai, in German, as they left the office. "Your homeroom teacher is expecting you. Room 2-3, second floor."
Kai found the shoe lockers organized by class number. He pulled his open. The shelf was sized for shoes that existed in this country. His uwabaki, borrowed that morning from a supply closet Coach had raided before breakfast, pinched across the bridge of his foot and left his heel floating past the back edge. He wedged them in. The locker door wouldn't close flush. He pressed it shut with his palm and the latch caught on the second try.
Then the hallway.
Narrow was not the word. His body knew narrowness in the way tall people learn every new ceiling and doorframe within the first ten seconds, and this hallway was built for people who didn't need to learn. Students moved past in clusters and each cluster split around him, reformed behind him, and looked back. Heads tipped. Conversations dropped to a different register. Two girls flattened against the lockers to let him through and whispered into their hands after he'd passed. A teacher coming the other way looked up at him and missed a step.
Laughter from a group near the stairwell. He didn't know if it was directed at him or if laughter just sounded pointed when you couldn't understand the words before it. The ceiling light fixtures were close enough that he watched for them from the corner of his eye, ducking once where a fluorescent tube hung lower than its neighbors.
He climbed to the second floor. More hallways. More heads turning. A boy carrying a stack of textbooks saw Kai coming and pressed himself against the wall with enough force to scatter two books across the floor. Kai stopped, picked them up, handed them back. The boy stared at his hand, then at his face, bowed three times in rapid succession, and hurried away.
His classroom. The teacher was a thin man in a brown cardigan with chalk on his fingers. He said words to the class. Kai caught his own name and "doitsu" and a sentence structure he recognized as introduction. He stood. He'd practiced the self-introduction phrase with Daiki until the syllables felt smooth in his mouth. They came out now, correctly shaped, and the room was quiet after. He bowed. The angle was wrong. Daiki had drilled it at the kitchen table, hands pressing Kai's shoulders to the right depth, but the memory lived in Daiki's hands, not in Kai's spine. The class watched a two-meter-ten foreigner fold himself into a shape that wasn't quite a greeting and wasn't quite an apology.
He sat. His kneecaps hit the underside of the desk with a crack that silenced the front row. The chair, built for someone forty centimeters shorter, groaned under the redistribution. He shifted back. The desk settled.
Mostly.
Thirty faces. He looked at none of them directly. In the mid-rows, one boy wore white over-ear headphones around his neck, the cable threaded through his bag strap. He was the only person in the room not watching Kai. His eyes were on a book balanced under his desk, and his fingers tapped a rhythm on the desktop that had nothing to do with the lesson.
Through the window to Kai's left, the school's baseball diamond sat behind the building. Dirt infield, chain-link backstop, grass that needed cutting. Beyond the outfield fence, the ocean stretched out grey and silver under morning haze. A smaller field than Regensburg's. Closer to the water than any diamond he'd played on.
The teacher resumed. Kai understood maybe one word in four. He understood that the desk was too low, the chair too narrow, and the window view included both baseball and the Pacific Ocean, and he wasn't sure what to do with any of it.
Break between periods. The boy in front of him turned around and assembled his English carefully: "You. Basketball? Play?"
"No," Kai said.
The boy nodded, turned back. A silence opened between them that felt wider than the desk.
At lunch he found a dead-end corridor near a ground-floor window and sat against the wall with his legs stretched across the floor. The window was propped open and carried warmth from outside, cut grass and garden soil mixing with the stale concrete smell of the hallway.
His bento was wrapped in cloth. Inside: rice, grilled salmon, pickled vegetables, a wedge of egg with the yolk still soft. Three sticky notes on the underside of the lid in Haruka's handwriting. "Sake" with an arrow to the fish. "Tamago" to the egg. Then, in German, smaller: "Iss alles."
Eat everything.
He ate. The salmon broke apart against his tongue. The pickles were sharp and cold and tasted like Haruka's kitchen twelve hours ago, the same jar she'd opened while telling Daiki to stop hovering and go to bed.
Footsteps, then a pause. A first-year in a uniform a size too big stood at the corridor's entrance, holding a convenience store bag like a ticket he wasn't sure was valid. He looked at the floor, then at Kai, then at the floor again.
"Is it okay if I sit here?" Slow, careful Japanese. The kind Kai could follow without guessing.
"Yeah," Kai said.
The boy sat down against the opposite wall. Not close, not far. A distance that said he wanted to be near another person but hadn't committed to the asking. He opened his convenience store bag and pulled out a tuna onigiri.
"I'm Tanaka Sota. First-year." He glanced at Kai. "You're the transfer student?"
"Kai."
Sota nodded like this confirmed a rumor he'd been sitting on all morning. He ate his onigiri in small careful bites. Kai worked through Haruka's salmon. The corridor was quiet except for the sounds from the open window and the distant noise of the cafeteria somewhere below them.
Sota leaned forward and pointed at the bento. "Did you make that?"
Kai shook his head. "My host mother."
Sota read Haruka's Japanese labels, then pointed at the German sticky note. His eyebrows went up.
"German," Kai said.
"You're German?" Sota's eyes went wide. "I've never met a German person before."
Kai held out one of Haruka's onigiri. Sota took it with both hands. "Thank you. Thank you." He said it twice, the second time quieter, like the first hadn't been enough.
They ate. Sota's Japanese was clear and unhurried, and Kai followed most of it. He was from Nobeoka, up the coast. He'd transferred in. He didn't know anyone yet either. When Kai answered in short phrases, Sota didn't slow down further or switch to gestures. He just listened and kept going. It was the easiest conversation Kai had had all day.
Sota smiled, and the smile didn't want anything from Kai except to exist in the same hallway.
A door banged open at the far end of the corridor. Another first-year rounded the corner wearing a windbreaker with MINAMISAKI BASEBALL stitched across the back. He was already talking before he stopped walking, Japanese pouring out so fast that the words blurred together and Kai lost the thread after the first clause. The kid's eyes found Kai and went round.
He caught fragments. Pitcher. Coach Nishimura. Velocity, 140, German league stats, sample size. The rest was a wall of sound, technical and rapid, syllables piling up without pause. The kid bounced on his heels and kept going.
Sota glanced at Kai. "Too fast?"
Kai nodded.
"Oi," Sota said, louder. "Slow down."
The kid stopped. Blinked.
"I'm Endo Satoshi." Deliberately now. "First-year. I'm on the baseball team." He pointed at Kai. "I saw your name on the roster."
Kai looked at him.
"Practice tomorrow," Satoshi said. "After school. You're coming, right?"