When Hitoshi gets back to his dorm, he sets his notebook down on his desk and drops his bag to the floor. He takes a deep breath and runs a hand through his hair, trying (and failing) to organize his thoughts.
In a moment of frustration, he kicks his bag as hard as he could, watching it hit the wall. When it does, a piece of paper slips out. He frowns and walks over, crouching down to pick it up. It has your name on it in your handwriting, he figures he must’ve picked it up by mistake when you all were packing up to leave. He recognizes the assignment, he’d done the same one. He should put the paper back in his bag and text you. He doesn’t.
Instead, he unfolds it and reads what’s written.
Prompt: What do you plan on doing with your major after university? Why?
I want to be a literature teacher at high school level, preferably in a lower income school district.
A close friend and I grew up in a lower income neighborhood. We got scholarships for this really great high school across town, but other kids in our neighborhood weren’t as lucky. A lot of them ended up suspended, expelled, or dropped out of the high schools they ended up at. The thing is, though, I knew those kids, and they were not bad kids. A lot of them didn’t have time for the homework because they work after school or take care of younger siblings, it’s not fair to penalize them for that. I want to be there for kids like that, they deserve love too. I deserved love when I was their age and I got it, there was no difference between me and those other kids except that I got lucky. Luck shouldn’t be the decider of a child’s worth, every child deserves a chance. I got my chance, and I’m going to use it to give one to kids in similar positions to what I was in.
He smiles as he reads through it. The assignment had been a free-write, the instructions were to pick a prompt and write a maximum of three paragraphs. The goal was to get your point across using as little space as possible.
The word “draft” is scrawled across the top, so Hitoshi feels no guilt over keeping it. He sits there and stares at your handwriting for a long moment. He realizes, right there in his floor, that he is so much farther gone for you than he’d realized. It’s a little bit scary how much he likes you. It’s a lot scary how much you decidedly don’t like him, as was made apparent by the everything about your study session that afternoon.
After taking a deep, shaky breath, he pulls his phone out to text Midoriya.
