It's not a complete immersion school - the language of instruction in about three quarters the classes is Japanese - but it does really push the English. There's the usual complement of uniformed girls and boys in all his classes. This one's cute, but he's not paying Yutaka much attention.

(Speaking of sons to corrupt.)

The teachers are having him introduce himself at the start of every new class, so he's doing that here, too, with one of his best smiles and bows. "My name is Iwasaki Yutaka. I'm a new transfer student. I'm looking forward to getting to know everyone; it's nice to meet you all!"

Now, is there a free seat near the cute boy?

Yeah, he's on the far left in the second row and the spot right behind him is open.

Excellent. Yutaka makes a bit of a small show of looking for places so that it doesn't look like he's homing in on the gorgeous boy and then decides to go there.

"Hello!" he says to the boy, bowing. "Is it okay if I sit behind you?"

"Sure. I'm Suwan Masaharu."

"It's nice to meet you!" he says, bowing again, then he takes the relevant seat and drops his bag next to his chair.

And they return to their regularly scheduled lesson. Suwan-san is passable when he's just saying stock phrases but he does have a noticeable accent when he is called upon to say anything more substantive.

...huh! Yutaka would not have expected him to be foreign. Does that mean he's less likely to be homophobic and/or willing to experiment and/or gay and not closeted about it? Yutaka can't wait to find out~

None of the teacher's questions are about that! The teacher does say something about Suwan-san taking good notes and asking him to lend the ones from yesterday to the new student, so he tears them out of his notebook to do that.

"—aren't those yours? I can just copy them, you don't need to tear them out."

"You can give them back when you've copied them, it's fine."

"Alright. Thank you." Deploying charming smile #7.

That gets - blinked at, but then he returns his attention to taking notes for today on the pages after the torn ones.

That looks like a gay blink, in Yutaka's opinion. But he shouldn't get ahead of himself, he know he's got a bias towards thinking gorgeous boys are gayer than they actually are. But it would be good if he were right.

Anyway, uh, he's gotta, like, take notes, right. The less interesting part of school. Yawn.

They have their next class together too. It's math.

Cool! So he gets to ask, "So, sorry if I'm being rude, Suwan-san, but are you from abroad?"

"I'm from Canada. Was it the accent?"

"Yeah," he says, sheepishly. "My accent in English is really bad, though, so I can't say anything."

"Well, try retroactively having moved to an English speaking country when you were eight and then people will still notice."

"Accents are hard. My English teacher always used to say that if I don't put in the effort to get rid of my accent then just learning won't be enough."

"Well, enough for what? If you just want to watch Hollywood movies in the original you don't need a polished accent."

"You know, she never said? Enough for sounding like I'm native, at a guess."

"There aren't a lot of purposes you need to sound like a native for. In English. I think it matters more here."

"No, but she was a perfectionist."

"Can you say 'squirrel'?"