"I dunno about back home, but here... no." He didn't have the chance to really react before he got pulled from Iwatodai. SEES put him in his room until the funeral was over and they could figure out what to do with him, but he climbed out his window and ran. Then he showed up here, and, "Here, that guy's alive. They can bring people back from being dead here. I don't know how, but... he's here, and he was the one who helped me my first day."

And it turned out that he had friends. Lots of friends. People who told Ken repeatedly how good of a person he was, and Ken voiced his agreement because he found it to be true. And some people knew and they still accepted him, and that was the hardest part.

"It felt wrong like I was intruding on the life he got here, whenever I was around. And I always felt, if you do something bad, you have to pay for it, no matter what the reason. So, um." Here, he pauses, and here he breaks his posture so that he sinks a little further into the cushions, drawing his feet up. "Monday. When I came home at night. I... tried to pay for it."