novelember A-1

November writing challenge day A-1: "how do you and your waifu meet?"

The whole school was abuzz with rumors that week. That there was a transfer student, a foreign one in the senior year.

Foreigners were nothing unusual; we had our share of exchange groups, and a few years back there was a Hungarian girl. That's not counting all the Podlachian Tatars and second-generation people, like the half-Ukrainian in a class parallel to mine. They didn't really stick out, everyone was white, much as /pol/ could disagree. Foreigners that transferred permanently, after the beginning of a school year, though? That was unusual.

Her nationality was undetermined. Some claimed she was one of the four or five sorts of British, the library's resident weeaboo club argued that she was half-Japanese. Another theory was that she was Finnish - Finnish names had a lot of "L"s and vowels in them, the reasoning went.

But what was most interesting about this girl was that she never showed up to classes. Her purported classmates had never seen her, and neither had I. Lilly - the odd spelling was notable - was, for all intents and purposes, just a name on a list. The rumors eventually boiled over, though everyone seemed to maintain an interest in her. Occasionally, on the school's website, I'd read notices about how she'd participate at the same minor English contests I did. She'd usually score pretty close to me, sometimes the same. "Anonowski 89%, Satou 87%", the score tables would read. Sometimes even a few points above me, which caused a small blow to my ego. I still never spotted her wherever they'd take place. Anyway, how would I know it were her? No one knew what she looked like, besides that she was a blonde - that much was known from the teachers. Apparently she was given an individual curriculum. That stuff happened from time to time, usually if someone was a genius, disabled, or both. Or a foreigner who was only going to spend one more year in high school, as in this case.

Weeks passed by, and I eventually stopped caring. There had been a precedent for this sort of thing, with a girl two years my senior. She'd apply for all the subject contests - English, Polish literature, biology, *Latin oratorial challenges* among others - and win almost all without fail, year after year. My English teacher said that the girl was bedridden, because of paralysis or some other such condition. If I were bedridden, maybe I'd become a supernerd of that caliber too - eventually the imageboards and videogames would get boring, and I'd read whatever books were available. Maybe not. Anyway, now she got a government scholarship and is presumably supernerding at university level. I never saw her either, and the explanation was that the exam staff would have to deliver the test to her home so she could take it, and of course she didn't attend regular lessons.

Mid-November rolled around. The big district-level contest was looming on the horizon. Come to think of it, I had never really gotten through to the final stage - I'd always wash out at the district-level oral literature discussion. It was always quite unfortunately scheduled only a few days after the district-level written test, so you had to read the required books without knowing if you'd have to use them. My level of discussion always got really low at this point, I'd go back to elementary school-level vocabulary, lapse into a stereotypical Slavic *aktsent* - think a grammatically correct Heavy from TF2 - and couldn't argue an interpretation. It didn't help that I'd gloss over or only read the synopses of the books I chose. The spaghetti spill, in any case, had always prevented me from going on to the national level. This was bad - a national-level top score would guarantee acceptance at any uni, at least for the philological faculties.

I suppose it was mostly because of a lack of regular English conversation. Little did I know this was about to change.

I passed the first two stages, at city and county range, same as every year. And, as usual, a "Lilly Satou" was with me on the list of those who got through.

One Wednesday the teacher called me over to her desk after the lesson ended.

"Anon, would you come over here for a while?"

"Yes, what is it?"

"It's about the contest. Would you mind coming here after your classes this Friday? We'd go through some vocabulary tests with the other student that got through. You know the Satou girl, the one in a class above you?"

"Well, I know that she exists. Is she like miss Supernerd? You know... disabled?"

"That's... not the reason she doesn't come to school, in her case it's more that she's foreign, hence the individual teaching for her. Anyway, will you come?"

The train schedule left me quite a lot of free time after school finished on Friday, and I had nothing else to do. Besides, the prospect of meeting the mysterious girl who had entered a month earlier was quite enticing. In retrospect, I wonder if my teacher was trying to set me up with her. She was, after all, quite supportive of me throughout middle and high school.

On that Friday, I finished my Polish literature class, entered the English class on autopilot and took my usual seat, waited for the teacher to come in (she was absent for an unusually long time), and started scribbling away at my printout after I was handed one. It was a test based on Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven", where I had to fill in definitions for the supposedly tougher words.

"Dreary"? Easy. "Yore", "lore"? Those words are in every RPG ever.

I mulled over the worksheet, slowly working through the blanks to fill, when I wondered what'd happened to Satou. I decided to ask about her later. One word diverted my attention, though.

"The fuck is a censer?" I involuntarily muttered under my nose in English.

"You don't need to swear. It's a container for incense."

I looked around for the source of the voice - it was not the teacher.

Behind me sat a girl about my height, wearing a dress blouse, skirt and the regulation necktie. Her eyes were, strangely, closed, and, sure enough, she was blonde. She looked kind of Asian, so I could understand the "half-Japanese" and "Finnish" theories.

*Penis to Brain: Cute face and healthy hair detected, requesting authorization to engage!*

*Brain to Penis, abort, I repeat - abort!*

*Brain to Face, Penis is not responding to orders, begin blushing protocol!*

*Face to Brain, the blood is flowing backwards! We're losing control!*

*Brain to Ego, GREAT FIRST IMPRESSION, ANON.*

*Brain to all personnel, going into damage control mode in 3, 2, 1.*

The above more or less sums up my thought process at that exact moment.

"Uuh... sorry about that. Anyway, you must be..."

"Satou. Lilly Satou."

She blinked, though the rest of her face didn't shift into any easily recognizable expression. For all I knew she could have been anywhere from pissed or amused. The eyes were something different, though, for sure. They were bright blue, and, interestingly, crossed. She closed them quickly, as if ashamed.

And then it all clicked. Her individual schooling. I saw some sort of - blank? no, Braille - print on her desk - that must have been why the teacher took so long fetching the papers. She was able to get behind me without alerting me with a cane, so she was obviously quite adept at navigating rooms and somewhat independent. I could see why that - possibly - wouldn't require a curriculum with the teachers visiting her, but the language barrier still warranted it. "Not the reason", indeed.

"Anyway, I'm Anon." My life wisdom taken from /b/ instructed me to shut up after that so as not to spit out too many long noodles.

"Pleased to meet you." She actually smiled while saying that, and reached out to me with her hand.

I relaxed a bit, knowing that the blind upperclassman girl could not see the rapid influx of blood to my face or elsewhere.

"Likewise", I responded and shook her hand.

The teacher soon excused herself, and I asked one question that came to my mind.

"Why are you here? I thought foreigners couldn't take part in those contests."

"As in, why am I in the competition, or why am I in this classroom?"

"The actual rules only forbid citizens of English-speaking countries from participating. I'm a citizen of Japan. As to why I'm taking this extra class with you, my English is a bit rusty.", she continued.

So the weebs had been right all along. I decided not to prod at why she was in this country in the first place, or what was the non-Japanese influence on her looks.

"Ah. I hope the Fantasy Club hasn't been giving you trouble?"

"The what?"

"The... anime enthusiasts, they usually gather after school in the library. Every Western country has a subculture like that. They're known to do horrible things to Japanese people they catch alive." I omitted the fact that I had watched Welcome to the NHK and a few other titles of the genre.

"What things?" I could have sworn she looked genuinely worried.

"Oh, ask you to translate stock phrases out of a phrasebook, yell 'SUGOI DESU KAWAII' at you, or whatever it is they yell..."

She giggled at that.

"Oh, that sort of thing. Back home I'd get the same treatment with English."

"Why?"

"I thought you'd ask. I'm half British, well, Scottish to be precise." I hadn't seen many blonde Scots on my trip to the country, but that explained her looks. They did exist.

"So why aren't you a British citizen?"

"Mother renounced her nationality for some reason when she married my father. I don't think it was required by law, but I've never asked her why she did it."

*Interesting.*

The teacher's sudden entrance cut our chat short. It could honestly have been for the better, I might have told a blind joke out of carelessness.

She handed Lilly some more Braille-punched paper and glanced over my worksheet while dumping yet another.

"You're making a lot of progress here, but you need to practice actual conversation more, since that's what you always get stuck on at these oral examinations, right?"

"Right. Is that all?"

"Yep. Review the pages I gave you, you'll be discussing them next week. You two are free to go now."

"Goodbye", I said, switching to Polish.

"Dou wajena" was more or less how Lilly sounded trying to repeat it. I managed to stifle a chuckle.

I gathered my things and slung the backpack over my shoulder. Lilly did likewise with her purse, though she took out a white stick - as I quickly realized, a retractable cane - out of it.

*Tap. Tap.*

The sound was novel and I couldn't tune it out while walking down the stairs alongside her. I noticed that she actually grabbed the handrails. I wondered if interwar-period German architects had had blind people as a design consideration. Probably not, but it seemed to give the rails a purpose 90 years later.

"Bye", I threw when we split ways at the exit.

"Goodbye, Anon."

"Ey, Lils!", I heard in the distance when I'd walked away a bit.

I couldn't help but look back to see what was happening. Lilly went into a black car that looked like a newish Mitsubishi. At least it was new, only particular kinds of people drive old Mitsubishis in this country. The same kind of degenerate that blasts music out of a Boomer that remembers the GDR, the music's lyrics usually roughly translating to "MARIGUANA DINDU NUFFIN, FUG DA BOLIS".

*She's foreign, those stereotypes may not exactly apply if it's her family's car. T. common sense.*

*Duly noted.*

The source of the shout was a short-haired blonde girl - I think a girl - dressed in a suit. Maybe it was her sister? Definitely too young to be an eighteen-year-old's mom.

I looked away and continued to my train station.

*Interesting day.*