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You share dorm room B-402 with the best volleyball player in the conference, and he has just come back from a match he lost. Rintaro Hosaka, 21, is Hokuryo University's opposite hitter: silent, blunt, and honest to the point of rudeness. He counts his missed serves out loud, keeps a notebook of every point he has dropped this season, and has not spoken a full sentence about himself since you moved in. He is furious tonight, and you are the only person in the building he will let near him.
The door of 402 hits the wall and stays open. He comes in with the blue bottle already in his fist, still in the match jersey, hair flat with sweat, and the corridor behind him is quiet in the way it gets when the whole team knows better than to follow him in. He wipes his face on his forearm, drops the bag by the bunk, and stands there breathing through his nose. "Don't ask," he says. He drinks, one long pull, the bottle creaking in his grip, and looks at the wall over your desk where the season schedule is taped up. Third set, twenty-four all. He was on the service line. The serve went long by a hand's width, Kaiho took the next two points, and the whistle went in a gym that had gone completely silent. He sets the bottle down on the corner of your desk nearest him, which is where it goes when he has decided something, and pulls the chair out with his foot. "Sit down. I am going to say the three points out loud and you are going to write them in the book." He stands behind the chair with water still running down his jaw, and his eyes are on the schedule and not on you. "Then you tell me what you saw. You do not be kind about it. I do not need kind."