Chapter 1: Something Against You

Prologue

Infuriating.

Annoying.

Either the neighbors or the parents; either the passers-by or the city noise; either you yourself or the environment; either the very realization that something is infuriating or you don’t even know what it is.

It’s just infuriating.

Showing emotions just isn’t nice, so you try not to notice it. In the end, you don’t even notice how everything becomes even more infuriating.

And if you suddenly notice, it’s not clear anymore whether you should continue raging or not.

It is unclear whether you should clench your fists.

That’s how you’ll have to endure it to the very end.

There are such people.

And I - am one of them.

Chapter 1 Something Against You

1

Rails pounded rhythmically under a train’s wheels.

A lot of people were crowded within a hundred and fifty cubic metre railway carriage.

There were five seconds left before the turn.

Five, four, three, two, one…

There was a clang of metal. The carriage tilted, and the crowd of people with it.

At this moment, when everyone was a little shaken, my right hand slipped off the handrail. I chose a man with a silver bracelet on his wrist. Aiming for the pocket of his jacket, I went up to him from behind. I stretched out my hand and with my index and middle finger, I pulled out a leather purse which was instantly put inside my pocket. Simultaneously, I falsely staggered and walked away from the man.

The man didn’t notice the loss of his wallet, he listened to music in his headphones and calmly straightened his gel-packed hair.

The tracks pounded again.

I stuffed my hand in my pocket, opened the purse and checked the money with my fingers. Six banknotes of ten thousand, one of five thousand, and three of one thousand. Sixty eight thousand. Not a bad catch, for me.

There was about twenty seconds before the next turn. The railway carriage trembled.

And then, I noticed something unusual.

This senior highschool student wore the same uniform as me, with a green tie over her vest. Whether familiar or not, the girl shamefully lowered her paling face.

I realized it was due to the pervert, when I saw a middle-aged man behind the girl. His half-closed eyes ran around the carriage. He pawed the girl’s legs in the overcrowded train and forgot about everything from the pleasure.

There was a long rattle of wheels on the rails, the train approached the station.

I slipped through the crowd and approached the man from behind. He didn’t notice me and continued to stroke the girl’s hips, but tensed up when I reached my hand out and pretended to accidentally take hold of his. Moreover, I pulled out a purse made of artificial leather from the pocket of his wide trousers.

The train slowed down gradually.

I pulled out the driver’s license and bills from the wallet. I put the money into my pocket immediately, but threw a quick glance at the license.

Morita Hadzeme. Judging by the date of birth, he is forty eight years old. Someone castrate this nauseating freak.

The train stopped at the station and the doors, near which we were standing, slid sideways. The dispatcher announced the name of the station - the closest to the school, it was time to go.

When the pupils in the same uniform as me, flooded out of the carriage, I let Morita’s middle-aged wrists go. His hands, wet from sweat, trembled. I walked out onto the platform, and after a moment, the girl that was with the pervert, jumped out. She looked kind of strange, but I headed for the stairs not saying a word.

Without taking out the purse and an empty bottle from my bag, I pushed them into a bag from a supermarket and threw them into a trashcan behind a turnstile. The pervert only had twelve thousand yen in his purse; what a stingy fellow.

2

After leaving the station, I reached the school in a few minutes, an unremarkable public school, and went in through the rust-covered gate. The class teacher standing with them monotonously murmured the greetings. Good morning. Good morning. Her name was Katai. A woman of about twenty-six to twenty-seven. She was in charge of class numbers 2 and 3 neighboring my class. Everyday she smiled at everyone. Good morning. Good morning. Agony started to build up. I changed my shoes at my locker and climbed up some stairs. A pair of schoolgirls walked by, chattering loudly on the way. Stairs, a platform, more stairs, a corridor. At last, the fourth floor.

Our class was at the left end side of the corridor. There was a holder covered in tape, sticking out of the wall above the door. On it was a sign that said “2-4”. A real decoration for my school, where there was no tradition to yearly shuffle classes.

Most of the students have arrived. When the door opened slowly, loud shouts escaped the room, in which the phrases like, “shut up worm” and “oh boy” were vaguely deciphered. Today, like always, the loudest yells came from Hara, a short, frail guy.

As soon as I walked into the class, Kiyama, a guy with chestnut hair, smacked Hara on the ass. There was a sharp slap and Hara fell over, arching his back. The whole class erupted in laughter. Everyone laughed and screamed. It was habitual by now. Hara. A punching bag. The class rallied together against Hara. He became the lubricant that eliminated conflict between the rest.

Hara. After the death of the previous punching bag, he firmly took her place. Watching the action from afar, I took my spot, the last on the right, right by the door. No one noticed me, but I saw the whole class from there. Having beat Hara for everyone’s entertainment, Kiyama stood in a victorious pose. In the crowd of laughing people, I looked at a few exceptions. They lowered their gazes and pretended to be fumbling with their phone or reading a book, and one was moving his finger on the screen of a tablet. Everything went as usual.

“Hey, Hara, why are you whining?” asked Fushimi, who was standing near Kiyama, when Hara, wriggling in pain, continued to lie on the floor without trying to rise. An informal class leader, he contrasted with Hara. No one ever called him the leader aloud, but everyone recognized him as such without any words.

“Come on you’re not in pain, stop fooling around in front of everyone, you hear me?” barked Fushimi while looking around. The students smirked. “If you moan like that, someone will think that I’m making fun of you.”

And then everyone gave Hara a judgmental look. It’s all your fault. Pretending that you’re hurt, disrespecting the foundations of the class. This is how they looked at him.

“Th...is....” Mumbling incoherently, Hara jumped in convulsions, with his eyes twitching from nervous tics.

Chuckles were heard in the classroom.

“What, you think it’s funny?”

“N-no…”

Tanabe Kyoko, Fushimi’s girlfriend, the guy that started this fight, laughed along with another girl. Her golden-black, dirty hair stuck out in different directions. Pleased with the position of the leader, Kiyama proudly demanded:

“Apologize,” getting carried away, he went completely crazy, “Get up on your knees — naked of course!”

Definitely got carried away. The fun hit him right in the head and didn’t let him stop. That and how was it possible to calm down here. If we were in a third-rate movie, now a character full of sense of justice would appear. He would scream something in the spirit of. “Hey, what are you doing?!” or
“You went too far!”. Shortly speaking, a fellow who is messed up in the head. In reality, this doesn’t happen. It does not happen, therefore such events became daily.

“Agreed”, “That’s all you do, standing naked on your knees. Come up with something new, Kiyama”, “Come up with it yourself”, “Oh, how scary”, “As if he wants to apologize, make him get on his knees”, “Naked”.

The crowd yelled everything it pleased. As always. As always. I imagined that the cries of the crowd was distant and that noise had no relation to me. Just in order to get through this.

“If you’re apologizing, strip naked”, “Be careful”, “Wow, he really is”, “He-he-he, ha-ha-ha”, “You’re so funny,”

I seemed to be sinking in the sea, and the voice became blurred. I gave up on what was happening in the room and waited for it to end. From time to time, the sound of clapping hands reached my consciousness submerged in water. Clap-clap-clap. I put up with it as much as I could, waiting for the applause to finally stop beating in my ears.

I don’t know how much time had passed, but soon, the bell rang. The teacher entered, nicknamed Bison, and my consciousness swam back to the surface.

The cool hour ended, and here a waste of time began, divided into parts of fifty minutes each. The teachers and the students were nothing but an external entourage for lessons, which took time for nothing. After the recess bell, Hara’s execution was resumed, and cheers were heard from the class once more. The cycle was repeated until the sixth lesson, and until half past four I was abstracted from the school.

A meteor. A truck. A plane. Terrorists. Anything. If only something hit the class and killed everyone. What a ridiculous dream. I’m being foolish. I just need to take a breath. What is this nonsense coming into my head. I put my index and middle finger together and dragged them across my neck, as if cutting my carotid artery. Of course, I did not die.

3

After being stuck in that play centre, I sat in the clerk-filled train. A man, devoured in trash, flew at me, and even snorted unpleasantly, but I turned away indifferently. And though I looked calm, I was furious. I struggled with all my might to remain silent. I tensed up and waited for my station. I calmed my emotions, as if lifting a sinker from the pendulum of a metronome.

Calm down.

Having cooled down, I imagined myself as an external observer. But I still didn’t put out my anger completely, so I stole the wallet of the impudent.My attack was finished before the victim even noticed anything. There were only four thousand yen inside the wallet. Carry more, bastard.

I barely noticed how the train arrived at my station. I went out of the train. And I was home almost right away. The house was quite spacious, a 3LDK. I opened a box of fast food that I bought along the way. I swallowed the cold potatoes and hamburger.

It’s not that I lived alone: my father was stuck in a hospital bed, and my mom was having fun with insurance money and was always disappearing somewhere. Relations in my family didn’t work out from the very beginning, but I still checked on my father. And that’s it. This is how I’ve been living for the past three months.

After several minutes, I stuffed the hamburger package and the disgustingly cold potatoes into a paper bag and threw it into the trash. I never liked to wash the dishes, so I switched over to conveniently buying the food. Everything was taken for one use. Disposable paper bags, in which I threw away the garbage. Disposable cups, disposable straws, disposable chopsticks. Everything was thrown out daily, and new ones were bought the very next day. Even my disposable parents, for whom I turned out to be a disposable child, disappeared like that garbage.

After taking a shower, I got stuck in the internet and then went to bed.

Thus my day ended. And this is how everyone of them passed. Not a single detail has been kept in my memory. Wake up, go to school, eat. The days flashed by like monotonous items on a shopping list. Shower, search the net, sleep. Another day has come to an end. The next is no different.

Repeat. Repeat.

A day, a week, a month, a year.

I didn’t notice how I grew up to become a seventeen-year-old.

Copy-paste, copy-paste, copy-paste.

And here.

Minato Rica.

She appeared out of nowhere.