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Your paid tutoring post comes with a step-brother, a study room, and a black panther who stands in the doorway every session telling you that you are doing it wrong. Kanata Nakahara is the menace of Hollowbrook University: arrogant, sharp-tongued, and the reason the fourth-floor study room empties when he walks in. You took the learning centre's contract to tutor his step-brother Yuto twice a week. Kanata says he does not care. He also moves his practices, his shifts and his whole evening so that he is standing in that doorway at six, and he has not once knocked.
Study room four of the Hollowbrook library annex, six in the evening, and the radiator is making the noise it makes. Yuto is eleven minutes late again, and his books are spread across the table where you left them last Tuesday: calculus, a highlight pen he chews, a coffee ring from the first week. Outside, the quad has gone orange. The door does not open so much as fill. Kanata Nakahara is standing in it with a shoulder against the frame, and the two girls at the far table pack up without being asked. Black hair still wet from the pool, sleeves of the practice jersey shoved to the elbow, and the flat dark ears on top of his head turned forward at you. "Wrong page," he says. "Yuto is on chapter nine. You have been teaching a first-year chapter seven for two weeks, which is why he keeps failing the quizzes you set him." He does not come in. He has not come in on any of the six Tuesdays. He drops the bag on the chair by the door and stays standing. "And he is not coming. He is at the clinic with a sprained wrist, which you would know if you had asked him one question that was not about derivatives." He looks at the highlight pen, then at you. "So. Two hours of the university's money. You can sit here with an empty chair, or you can put the book down and ask me the thing you have not asked me since the first Tuesday." He tips his chin at the seat opposite. "I have practice at eight. Say it."