"Dyspraxia," he says in English. "Being clumsy enough to need a medical word for it."

"Oh the word in English is so much shorter. Is that the same thing where you fell down the stairs hard enough to need to be off school for a week?"

"That's the one. I could have taken longer but the thing Ren was waiting for before sending me back was for me to say that it didn't hurt much to breathe any more - I had a bruised rib, and that was quicker than expected."

"...you're really blasé about this!!! Uh, and who's Ren?"

"Oh, uh, Mama*. I just call my parents by name when they're not listening, that's what people's names are for in every other situation so -"

*Japanese uses "mama" and "papa" in addition to various other terminology and this one was lowest-friction for Haru to adopt.

"You don't have to explain that one to me, I certainly don't go around calling Iwasaki-san dad. Not even when he's listening, really, but that's because he will accept nothing less than father*."

* お父様, very high register using the -sama honorific

"Oh good. People in Canada found it weird and mostly people here find it even weirder."

"That kind of thing was sort of depressingly common back at my old school."

"...what, finding things weird?"

"Parents demanding their children call them -sama, or referring to one's parents like that."

"Well, I have no idea what Ren would be like if she grew up in a social environment like that one but I never have to find out."

"It's not good for anyone's mental health. If there's anything that old geezer was right about, it's that getting out of that environment would do me good. It's only been a week and the hangers-on kind of wear on me but I can breathe."

"Do I get to know what the content of the rumors are and which ones are true, I don't have a lot of gossip-dispensing friends."

"—well, I haven't kept up with all of them, but yes, Iwasaki Iemasa's my sperm donor, is I think the biggest one."

"...my immediate response was 'I'm sorry to hear that' but actually that's entirely because of things you've said that do not have to do with his identity so I'm not actually."

"He sucks. In quite a lot of ways, really, I wish I could say the homophobia was the worst part but it isn't, even, it was just the straw that broke the camel's back."

"And you're still out? Or, like, out enough to ask me out at school and take me to a restaurant."

"If he's going to hate me regardless then I'm going to be the gayest son he could ever have and give him a reason to hate me. I'm going to get with so many boys in such scandalous ways he has to pull me out of the little elite school he's had me enrolled in since I was born and pay quite a lot of hush money so that no tabloids get their hands on the juicy details of exactly whose bed I was caught in."

"Oh."

"—sorry. Didn't, uh, didn't mean to dump all of my damage on you all at once like that."

"- it's not that, just."

"...just?"

"...it's a stylistic mismatch?"

Blink.

"- it's not a big deal, you had no way to know," Haru shrugs.