“That’s gotta suck. I guess if we hadn’t majored in East Asian Studies, that’s what we’d probably be doing, too. I mean, the hours are so horrible, and you don’t have, like, any say in who you teach!”

“That’s true,” Yoshino replies with a congenial tone. “We were just talking about that. Cybelle has a young student who screams every time he comes to our school, and —”

“Well, that makes sense. I mean, he’s probably never seen a — you know, person like you before. So yeah, I understand that can be pretty terrifying! But no, I’m talking about when you have to teach, like, the really crazy, sketchy people. I would die if I had to teach English here.”

“Oh …” Yoshino looks crestfallen. “It’s not that bad … is it?” She turns to me, like I’ve been hiding some dire secret of hating my job from her all these years. Like I’d step over an unconscious body to work with shitheads like this girl.

“It isn’t,” I tell them firmly. “I mean, yeah, it’s hard. Long hours, back-to-back classes with kids who never get tired. But it’s fun. And at the end of the day I don’t regret it. I’m fucking exhausted, but I don’t regret it.” I smile as the words pour out and I realize it’s all true. I’ve been rolling with all the crap that happens. If it were really all that awful, I’d have left years ago.

But Ailsie has other things on her tiny mind. “So, you’re probably into Japanese guys,” she points to Yoshino. “But what about you?” she asks me. “Because those guys, they’re freaks. Tell them, Lacie.”

Her friend Lacie, who has been flirting with a salaryman all this time, reacts to her friend’s elbow in her rib cage. “Oh my gosh, those pervs? Get this: every Monday, the short one, Matsubara, harasses me about my weekend. Where I went, who I was with, if it was a guy, is he your boyfriend, ‘do you go to love hotel?’ Every weekend. And then they spend every lunch hour looking at porn on their computers, and they sit, like, right next to my cubicle!”

“Oh!” Yoshino says. “That’s horrible. Can’t you tell your boss?”

“Our boss is just as disgusting,” Ailsie cuts in. “Geez, it took, like, three months when I first started for him to stop putting his hands up my skirt.”

“Let me get this straight,” I interject. “You work with jerks who goof off with porn, you get harassed every week, and you can’t take up any of this with your boss, who is clearly a sex offender … but you’d rather die than have our jobs?”