“Speaking of cooking!” said Bobby with speed. “Don’t tell, guys, but Dante sometimes makes pasta sauce over a burner and we have a midnight feast.”
“Fun!” said Nicholas enthusiastically. “We should have a midnight feast. That’d be a good team bonding exercise.”
“More communal meals?” Seiji said. “For a team bonding exercise. Certainly.”
“I can fix us a midnight feast,” Eugene suggested.
He’d lifted his head from the table, intrigued by this new idea. Maybe Eugene, like Dante, cooked big meals with his family. Nicholas had seen them, all Eugene’s tiny younger brothers and sisters, show up to support him at the fencing tryouts. They seemed really nice.
“Or you’d all be welcome to come by our room and eat pasta,” Bobby offered. Nicholas beamed at him.
Their exciting discussion of a midnight feast was broken up by the sound of the bell ringing for class.
Seiji rose immediately. “Good breakfast, everyone. I… enjoyed it. See you here at this table, for more conversation, at the same time next week.”
“Next week?” The question seemed to pop from Bobby’s lips with the force of sheer surprise. Seiji bent an inquiring gaze upon him. Bobby looked mortified.
“Is this not a weekly occasion?”
Nicholas hit Seiji on the shoulder, the way Harvard had hit him, so Seiji would feel included the way Nicholas had. “We have breakfast together every morning.”
“Every morning!” Seiji exclaimed, and then collected himself. “Oh. Good. Then I will see you all tomorrow morning, at this time sharp.”
Bobby gazed at Seiji with distress. “We just turn up, you know, when we turn up.”
Seiji’s expression was briefly appalled. Bobby murmured feebly about how they should learn how to keep to a better schedule.
Seiji pressed his lips together and nodded. “Understood. We’ll meet at this time approximately. Looking forward to that.”
“We might not make it to breakfast tomorrow morning,” Eugene reminded Nicholas and Seiji gloomily. “We might get eaten by bears tonight.”
7: SEIJI
Seiji was finding his essay remarkably difficult to write. There simply wasn’t much to say, and he was uncertain how to put it. In Seiji’s experience, he reported the basic facts, and people became angry with him and called him arrogant. Then they disliked him for simply telling the truth. Was he meant to lie to get them to like him? Seiji didn’t intend to do that.
My father is CEO of a zaibatsu specializing in automotive manufacture, Seiji wrote. Then he remembered that people frequently couldn’t be bothered to look up words and added (business conglomeration) after the word zaibatsu.
My parents are a hardworking and devoted couple who raised me with every advantage. I always had the best trainers—and the best of everything else, too.
What else was there to discuss about his childhood or his parents? Seiji didn’t know his parents especially well. They were always busy with work and each other. Seiji heard unpleasant gossip at his father’s parties about mistresses and divorces, but Seiji never doubted for a moment his parents would be loyal.
He’d often seen them with their foreheads pressed together, or their eyes on each other, in their own private bubble where Seiji had never been able to reach them. At family mealtimes, they became wholly wrapped up in business discussions and seemed hardly able to hear when Seiji tried to join in. His contributions hadn’t been particularly helpful, he had to admit. Then again, last time he tried, Seiji was six.
His parents were a team. Seiji didn’t think he had the same capacity for devotion his parents possessed, and perhaps they knew that. Seiji suspected his parents didn’t find him very likable, which was an opinion many people held.
They were always civil to him. They provided well for Seiji. They did everything they could. It wasn’t their fault that once they’d had a child, they discovered they didn’t want the one they’d got.
I have an excellent relationship with my family, Seiji concluded.
Surely three lines was enough chattering on about his homelife, and the rest of the essay could be about fencing.
Seiji put down his pen and sighed as he looked around. It was almost time to go into the woods. Behind the blue shower curtain, the wild disorder of Nicholas’s half of the room lurked. Outside their mahogany door, the wild disorder of the world awaited. Even if he managed to complete this essay to his satisfaction, there was the rest of the team bonding to contend with.
Kings Row was a small school compared to the towers and high walls of Exton, where Seiji had always intended to go. The fencing team at Kings Row was a stranger team than the one he’d always expected to be part of. Even their coach was strange.
Seiji respected his coach, of course, and if she felt team bonding was important, then he believed that it must be. He was still having trouble working out what the point of the exercise was, but he hoped he’d discern it with time. Until then, he was putting in his best effort.
Seiji wasn’t asocial. He was perfectly good at the social situations that had proper rules. At gatherings with sponsors, whether to do with business or fencing, he knew to stay mostly quiet, murmur in a modest way, and exhibit excellent manners. Seiji’s coaches and his father never had any complaints about how Seiji conducted himself on those occasions.
He wasn’t asocial, but he wasn’t sociable, either. Keeps a distance from his peers, a teacher had written on Seiji’s report card once. Seiji did, and felt that was sensible. Why not hold yourself apart from chaos?
Kids Seiji’s own age were chaotic. Nicholas was more chaotic than most. Seiji found him very difficult to reason with. It had been Nicholas’s suggestion that they should be friends, not Seiji’s, and it was impossible to know what Nicholas even meant by being friends. Was Seiji supposed to watch all Nicholas’s terrible fencing matches? None of this was Seiji’s idea.
Nicholas had once saved Seiji a seat on the team bus, and Nicholas took the seat beside Seiji in their classes, but Nicholas hadn’t saved Seiji the seat beside him at breakfast this morning. Of course, Seiji had to admit, Nicholas hadn’t known Seiji was coming.
Would Nicholas save Seiji a seat at breakfast tomorrow morning? There was no telling. It would be worrying if he did, since from what Seiji had observed, Nicholas stole food from other people’s plates. Seiji didn’t want anyone to steal food from his plate.
It had all been so easy with Jesse. Until it hadn’t.
Jesse had never said they were friends. He’d said they were fencing partners, and Seiji believed that was better. More important.
Seiji put away his papers and pens neatly, then checked his reflection in the mirror. There was a lock of hair out of place, so he produced a comb and made himself presentable.
Then he went out into the woods. He found Nicholas and Eugene already there—maybe they’d been socializing beforehand—at the edge of the forest, with Coach and a pile of raw steaks.
Seiji had been hoping the steaks were a joke, but apparently not. Nicholas was already wearing a steak around his neck, secured in place with twine. The uncooked meat was blue in parts, and dripped onto Nicholas’s skin. Somehow, he was managing to remain calm. Eugene looked upset, but not as upset as Seiji felt.