Fear the Crab

I was attending a Japanese school, replete with uniformage, except I was granted some exemption because I was in jeans. Probably because I was a foreigner. I still had to wear the jacket. I was in a mixed classroom of boys and girls, probably younger than me, and we were going over some kind of philosophical question. The problem was, while I could gather that it was a philosophical question, I had no idea what the question was nor what anybody was saying. I couldn’t read the questions, I couldn’t read the responses written on the board, and I sure as hell couldn’t read what people were writing. My teammates seemed to be moving along pretty well despite my lack of performance, and I was overcome with a sense of guilt.

For some odd reason, class was dismissed, and I felt I had to catch a school bus because I had to attend another school (maybe a cram school?). During the bus ride, then the walk to this new campus, I kept thinking that everybody was talking rather badly about me. Like, why is this foreign idiot here.

I never made it to the new campus, but the neighborhood looked oddly familiar, like the back streets of Kaimuki.