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The worst year of his life does not, strangely, happen when his father’s student dies and his mother leaves them.
It doesn’t even happen the year the moon blows up.
It happens after that.
Their first year of high school, everything is a little awkward, except where it’s exactly the same as it’s always been. His father is no longer the headteacher. All the other teachers are still there, though, and the school is run the same way. Akabane is in his class. Everyone else in 3E leaves, and all of the old 3A students move up with him, give or take a few. Everyone still treats him like the headteacher’s son, even the new headteacher herself. She was his father’s secretary before. It’s strange, except for the fact that it’s not.
Gakushuu stands up in his seat, says his name, tells them he’s looking forward to working with them, and sits down. They move on to the next person.
When school ends, there are reporters outside. Gakushuu watches them from the tinted backseat windows of their car, and reminds himself to set up media protection outside when he’s elected back into the Student Council. The chauffeur cracks a joke. Gakushuu laughs politely.
There’s no homework waiting in his room. His father presents him with a perfect batch of brownies, and attempts a smile when Gakushuu says he’s not hungry. His father has probably forgotten the time he made a snide joke that Gakushuu was eating too much chocolate. Gakushuu hasn’t. He isn’t too keen to bring it up.
His guitar is still locked away, as are his training mats and chess set. His father says he wants Gakushuu to have a ‘break’ from all of it. To ‘heal from last year’s trauma’ . Gakushuu doesn’t feel too traumatised, and even if he was, he’d rather be traumatised playing chess than traumatised staring at the ceiling. It’s one thing to try to atone for your sins by letting things slide, and quite another to actively enforce the sliding. His father isn’t too good at knowing boundaries.
Thing is, Gakushuu shouldn’t feel bad. He’s lucky.
He has a house. He has friends. He’s smart, hot, talented, athletic. He has a mother who buys him expensive gifts and a father who dedicates his life to improving Gakushuu’s future aspects. He’s in the best high school in the world for him and his style of learning. He has money and connections, and a natural charisma most politicians could only dream of. Gakushuu could do anything he wants to, quite literally.
Yes, sure, his father is strict sometimes. Was strict, he should say. There were times Gakushuu wasn’t sure whether his father was so intense because he cared for Gakushuu, or because Gakushuu was his most important test subject for educational philosophy. Some things were hard to go through. Gakushuu used to reach his limit all of the time, but he’s better for it now, faster, stronger. His father rarely ever yelled at him, never hit him (except for that one time that no one talks about anyway so there’s no point in even mentioning it), and certainly never abused him. There was no neglect and no intentional harm.
Gakushuu is lucky. Not many people get to have the life he has.
And yet…
The next day, he goes out with the Five Virtuosos before going home. His father rings him. He turns his phone on silent. There’s that rushing thrill of it, the adrenaline in disobeying, the paralysing fear of being in the wrong. He clings to the feeling as best he can, ignoring the panic of what happens when you get home . It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t.
They wander around a few shops, causing the usual havoc wherever they go, buying absolutely nothing until right at the end when Teppei decides he’s craving McDonald’s. Gakushuu hates the empty taste, but eats anyway. Ren tells them his mum is going out of town at the weekend. Seo insists they get drunk together. Gakushuu’s only drank once before, at one of his father’s business events, and nearly spilled prosecco all over the carpet. His father would be horrified at the idea. Gakushuu says yes.
His second time getting drunk is more fun than he’d thought. They play games, mixing drinks while listing the chemical formulas of each one, and all of the horrid effects they cause. Gakushuu drinks gin, and water, and cider.
They play a drinking board game, which is boring at first, but then Teppei brings in a shot of vodka as forfeit. Gakushuu has five shots, and water, and gin, and gin again.
They play truth or dare. Gakushuu admits he’d had a crush on Ren two years ago, and Teppei takes blurry photos of Seo attempting a strip tease. Gakushuu drinks more gin, and vodka, and gin, and something he can’t pronounce the name of, and then a horrifying mix of almost everything in the cupboard because Nat was curious. The room spins when he stands.
They leave the apartment building and walk to a corner shop to get sweets. Seo is incredibly loud. Gakushuu tells him so, and Seo says Gakushuu is loud too. Ren says they’re all loud. Teppei tells them to shut up in case they’re caught, but a police officer ignores them as they pass by, so Gakushuu reckons they’re safe. On the way back, Nat starts talking about how shit elementary school was, which Gakushuu of course has to join in on. They’re on the topic of ‘how to tell if that girl is laughing at you when she gives you a compliment’ when they arrive back at Ren’s.
Seo throws up. He says he shouldn’t get drunk on an empty stomach. Gakushuu wonders how many times they’ve been drunk before, each of them, how far behind them he really is. The school can admire him all they like. He knows he’s not one of them.
When he gets home the next morning, he feels fine, if a little gross. His father asks if he had a good time with his friends. Gakushuu tells him they studied hard, and lists a few chemical formulas because that’s the only thing he can think of at that moment. His father nods, pats his head awkwardly, and leaves. Gakushuu feels awful for lying.
Time slides by. There’s an earthquake somewhere, so Gakushuu arranges a charity collection to provide emergency relief. It goes well. The school gets sent some kind of great thank you, which couldn’t feel less empty when his father tells him he didn’t really need to organise it. His father says he needs to focus on his studies and his social life. His father tells him he needs to be a proper teenager.
Gakushuu tries.
He goes out another couple times, until something about the alcohol and Ren’s friend with tourettes sets Gakushuu off. Seventeen minutes he spends alone, headphones on, trying to calm down in a fuzzy tipsy state of constant painful twisted neck. Gakushuu fantasises, briefly, about going home and telling his father he had a tic attack. He thinks of the trips to the doctor, the piles of books, the checking and double checking and triple checking, the chaperone he’d be assigned, the tests he’d have to go through. He thinks of sitting in class, stuttering out half-words, the horror he’d be faced with.
He gets home, and tells his father they studied integration. There are no more incidents.
It’s not until January that he realises Teppei never talks to him anymore. They weren’t ever a close-knit group, exactly, just five students thrown together out of a combined need to survive. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. Gakushuu sits next to Ren at lunch, watching Teppei and Seo playing football with some B-class students, and wonders for the first time if he’s actually a good person.
His father leaves a plate of cookies outside his door. Gakushuu slides it under the bed to get rid of later, and spends the rest of the night staring at the ceiling.
And
Well
He’s not, as it turns out.
A good person.
Nat says the scratches on his arm are from his cat.
Gakushuu says ‘ok’. They talk about the upcoming exam instead. He doesn’t know what to say. You aren’t supposed to force people to talk about it, right? What if they are actually from his cat? Gakushuu doesn’t want to look paranoid, or controlling, or make Nat uncomfortable.
Ren says he finds a suicide note in Nat’s bag. The four of them make a pros and cons list of telling someone, and Gakushuu knows they have to, so they do. The teacher tells them she has it sorted.
Nat doesn’t show up for school.
He sends a long message about friendship and betrayal and privacy into the group chat, then leaves it. Teppei sends ‘???’. Gakushuu doesn’t know what to do.
Most of the time, he sits in his room and stares at the floor. Or the wall. Or the ceiling. Most of the time, he screams at himself in his head to get up and do something to no effect. All of the time, his body aches. He feels so fucking guilty, thinking of everything he used to be able to do, and everything he forced other people to do. He thinks of his foot connecting with another student’s face on the pole-toppling field, and wonders why he ever did that. He has no idea. Power? Brainwashing? Anger? Gakushuu tries so hard to remember.
He gets into an argument with Seo. It’s just a stupid joke, except Seo calls him a cunt, and Gakushuu hates him. Hates him, with a fury that stabs at the space behind his eyes and makes his teeth split through his lip. They don’t talk anymore. Ren can talk to Seo, fine, but Gakushuu can’t stand to look at him anymore. He wants to make it worse. He wants to ruin Seo’s life. He wants to ruin his own, and he is, and he hates himself for it.
His father asks him what he did today. Gakushuu says something about physics. He goes to his room to stare at his hands.
Seo texts him an apology. Gakushuu can’t even remember his anger. He wants to cry, sometimes, but he doesn’t think he can, so he sends a meme and asks Seo to pass a ruler in the next class. That’s it. Apologies aren’t something he does, himself. It’s probably something his father gave him.
And then.
(And then.)
Nat tries to kill himself.
He texts them from the hospital. Sends a selfie in the bed, smiling awkwardly, saying he’s all fine. Apparently he tried to do it in the school bathrooms. Their formroom teacher found him there, dragged him out, blocked off the corridor. Gakushuu remembers peering past the blockades, seeing something happening there, but being moved on by the teachers.
Gakushuu doesn’t know what to say.
‘Get better soon x’
‘School is dull without you’
‘Sorry that I didn’t help…’
‘Sorry you want to die’
‘What was it like?’
What was it like?
He sends a heart.
Ren is the one who visits Nat first, once he’s out of hospital. No one at school talks about it. They sit together at lunch, mindless chatter about food and the latest TV show. No one says anything. Nothing that means anything. Are they sad? How do you show that you’re sad about it? His mother once told him that everyone processes grief differently, that there is no one way to express it. Gakushuu doesn’t think he is grieving. He doesn’t think he’s anything.
His father asks him how the test went. Gakushuu says he doesn’t know, and goes upstairs.
The walls keep closing in on him. He wonders if there is anything outside of them. His room is all there is, and when he closes his eyes, there is nothing. He’s heard of a philosophy that there is no material world, there is only the mind, that everything you see is created by you. His hands don’t look real. Gakushuu doesn’t know if he is real, only that he doesn’t feel anything anyway, and then he’s not sure if it really matters.
His shaving razor sits on the bathroom shelf.
Nat comes back into school again, sits with Ren on the rooftop while the others eat downstairs. Gakushuu doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t know what he expected. Everything carries on as normal, as though they hadn’t narrowly avoided losing a member. The time passes by like an elastic band, stretching out for eternity and whipping past in a heartbeat. It’s December again. The elections for the student council slip past before he can summon up enough energy to care, and Ren looks at him funny when the results are announced. He says something witty about the events of last year, and Ren says something back, and nothing changes.
Gakushuu’s mother drops by a few days before Christmas, to the joy of the rare few paparazzi that still haunt Kunugigaoka. She’s always a horrible gossip. He watches her touching up her lipstick as the balding one shoves a microphone in her face, the smug look on her face, and wishes she’d picked him up from home.
She takes him clothes shopping first, by which he means she drags him to her favourite tailor to get him a fresh new suit. It doesn’t matter that he has ten at home already. She doesn’t have time to swing by his house, apparently, though she does have time to waste on getting an extra suit for herself, despite the fact she brought one along. Gakushuu smiles and says thank you.
It’s a movie premier. That’s why. Neither of them know what it’s about until they arrive, posing for the cameras, Gakushuu the perfect son for his perfect mother. Someone says something about his father. His mother laughs. Gakushuu wants to tear his own spine out.
When she drops him back home, his father is hovering in the doorway. He asks Gakushuu if he had a good time.
Gakushuu says he did. The look on his father’s face twists his gut, so he tells him he’d rather have stayed home, and his father brightens up like Gakushuu had called him his favourite human being on the planet.
They eat takeaway pizza, curled up on the floor of the living room, playing endless rounds of card games. His father lets him win. He’s not sure how he could have ever hated his father, this father who loves him so deeply he’s willing to change decades-old habits. Things are getting better. Gakushuu is lucky to have him.
He’s lucky.
He is.
He holds a tissue to his stomach and hopes there wasn’t anything infectious on the razor.
Seo is going to move schools in February. He says he has a scholarship, that his mum has found a nice apartment for the three of them. His sister doesn’t want to go. Ren asks if he wants to go, in a voice oh-so-gentle, and Seo says it doesn’t really matter. It’s the best thing for his future, isn’t it?
“Besides,” Seo says, “it’s not like staying here is an option.”
Gakushuu can’t stand it. This is his school, his friends, his city, and they are all slipping away from him. They should be begging to stay here, with him. He’s the fucking prince of Kunugigaoka.
And yet.
He says something he’s going to regret, and Seo does the same, and they don’t talk. Ren doesn’t have the guts to tell him to apologise. Gakushuu hates him too. He hates everyone. He hates the reporter at the front gate, he hates the teacher who knocks off two marks from his paper, he hates the monster that took over his school and ruined it before dying in a way so spectacular no one will ever forget it.
He hates his father when he asks him how school has been.
“Maybe you’d already know, if you hadn’t chosen money over me.”
“Gakushuu.” His father says.
Gakushuu puts a door between them and covers his ears.
For his birthday, he hosts a sleepover, and invites all of them. Seo doesn’t come. Nat and Teppei and Ren do, the four of them watching films and eating as much sweet stuff as they can, and then when they’re all asleep Gakushuu locks himself in the bathroom and gasps for air. He turns 16 on cold tiles with red eyes.
The bleach sits by the toilet. He doesn’t drink it.
It never ends. He used to be so proud, unapologetically cruel, selfish, a master in the art of putting yourself first. He still is, except now, he doesn’t get anything out of it. His heart thumps to the rhythm of vengeance. So much is wrong with him, and he desperately needs someone to blame. The creature inside of him keeps pushing out, stronger everyday, and the Gakushuu he used to be is a faded shadow in comparison.
Is he worse? Worse than the kid who relentlessly bullied an entire class? Worse than the boy who pushed his father to slap him? Will he ever change for good?
Gakushuu gasps in a breath, throwing himself onto the bench beside the pitch. His lungs burn from the long sprint, horrible nausea in his throat, but at least there’s no longer that frantic fear flooding through him. Somewhat.
Ren glances up from his book. “Good run?”
He nods wordlessly, pulling his water from his bag and taking a swig. His stomach stings as he moves, reassuringly familiar by now, not nearly bad enough to show through his top. It’s March. He hasn’t yet reached out to Seo, though the last day of term they’d done their best to ignore the argument.
“We’ve got physics next with Mr Higasa.”
Gakushuu groans, dumping the bottle back. “Ugh, I’d rather kill myself.”
Ren snorts, gathering up his things. “Sure you would. Come on, we’ll be late.”
He doesn’t have the heart to tell him he means it.
When he gets home, his father is in the kitchen, finishing up a homemade meal from scratch. He grumbles about the ridiculous recipe he’d found, serving it out onto two plates, and he hums doubtfully when Gakushuu says it tastes nice. He asks how school was.
“Same as ever.” Gakushuu says, and laughs as his father accidentally spills wine all over the table.
Nat gets a girlfriend. None of them are as shocked as he is, having somehow done something to attract this stunning girl from C class. Gakushuu doesn’t understand how it’s only happened now that the Five Virtuosos no longer exist. Wasn’t that the only reason Nat avoided bullies?
Although, thinking about it, he avoided bullies because he was the bully. They were the bullies, the five of them, as ugly as it sounds. They weren’t good people. Gakushuu was the worst of them all.
Ren has a girlfriend too. That’s less surprising. Gakushuu shoves his hurt deep down inside of himself, and wishes he were less of a coward.
Gakushuu is… single. Of course. He’s too focused on his work for romance, too dedicated to his future. The rest of them would be too if they had a fucking brain in their head.
Nat’s smile slides off of his face. He starts eating lunch with his girlfriend from then on. Or with other A-class students. Or anyone else, really, anyone but Gakushuu. Ren tries to bring it up, but Gakushuu has had enough with these traitors, and he tells him to shut it. He feels guilty enough.
Guilty?
Nat was the one who suddenly decided he had a problem with Gakushuu’s honesty. Nat is in the wrong.
Gakushuu stabs his fork into his food and goes to the bathroom, already fumbling in his backpack for his razor. Ren doesn’t ask where he’s going. He stays behind dutifully, and does not question Gakushuu’s reddened eyes when he comes back.
A month passes.
Objectively, he knows what happened. Work. School. Tests. Ren. Lunch. His father. ‘Movie night’ on fridays with pizza and a revolving door of sweet snacks that he can’t bring himself to touch. Everything else is…
Well. It isn’t, to be precise. Everything else is nothing, and it slips through his mind like sugar through a sieve.
One day, he goes into school, sits for a class test, and stops halfway through.
He’s not sure why he does. Only, he’s tired that day, and when he flips to the fifth page he suddenly wonders why it even matters. No one is counting. He could fail every test for the rest of the year, and it won’t affect him. He won’t be around for the consequences anyway.
Gakushuu lays his head on his test paper, and falls asleep.
He gets 41%. A pass, barely.
He didn’t even try.
What is the point? He worked so hard before, and for what? What is the actual point of being extraordinary? No one was ever satisfied. Barely passing is the most extraordinary thing he can do now. He could do this every time. He could become a normal student, endure the disappointment of the teachers and his father to slide into obscurity. He’s no better than them anyway.
“How was the test?”
“I failed.” Gakushuu says, dropping his coat and bag on the floor. “Total dud. 13% overall.”
His father sways a little, hand gripping onto the doorframe. “What?”
“I failed.”
“You failed.” His father stares at him, wide-eyed. His face is oddly pale. “You failed a school test.”
Gakushuu looks back at him blankly. It’s interesting to watch his father when he’s like this, battling the urge to fly across the room and punish Gakushuu so severely he can’t think of anything but work for a month. Except now he’s trying to be a father. Pathetic.
His father takes a deep breath. “You know. My son. You know you can, well. Talk. Son. Talk to me, I mean. About anything that you… need to. Or want to, I suppose. Son.”
Gakushuu rips the razor from his backpack pocket and launches himself forward. His father’s eyes widen, but that is all the time he has before the blade sinks into his neck. Blood spills out over Gakushuu’s hand. It pumps to the floor, sickly sweet, a steady gushing stream that loosens his father’s knees, and soon there is nothing in the hallway but Gakushuu’s dead body and his father, both sitting in a pool of blood.
“I know.” Gakushuu says. He goes upstairs.
Time slips.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
“Then what?”
Gakushuu stirs his drink. “Oh, lots. Probably. I don’t quite remember.”
“You must remember something.”
“You’d think.” Gakushuu chuckles, setting down the spoon. “I know my father found out what I was doing to myself. I remember he hugged me.”
Mia doesn’t say anything. She’s watching him with that look in her eyes. She always gets it when he talks about… well, anything before university. Apparently, MIT is the best thing that could have happened to him.
He sighs. “Nothing. I just stopped then, somewhat, because I was scared of the judgement from him. Things… drifted in that state, you know? Fermented. Eventually, I woke up and found I was eighteen, and still alive. I suppose that means I survived it.”
“You went to therapy, though?”
“Oh, yeah. All that. It came afterwards, of course, when everything was already said and done and it was too late to stop the real damage. Apparently, it permanently alters your brain.” Gakushuu takes a long sip of his drink, only half-listening to Mia’s cautious reassurances. “It’s fine. I’m good now, right?”
“Are you?”
He takes a moment. He’s certainly not… brilliant. Deep-rooted anxieties take a toll when you move so far away from the tattered remains of your support base. But he’s fine. He’s happy, actually, most days. He’s alive. He’s present. He’s got friends he likes, and who like him. A boyfriend, if he himself can actually believe that, who he loves more than the world and everything beyond. He has clean skin, eyebags from long nights out rather than long nights in. So, yeah. It’s not perfect. It’s perfectly imperfect, in all the best and worst ways, and the best part is that he’s actually living it.
“Yeah.” Gakushuu smiles. “I think I am.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
24th June
I know it’s kind of silly, but I feel so proud of myself. I remember that feeling that I’d not make it to sixteen, let alone eighteen. I believed so utterly that I’d be dead before then, somehow.
But I’m here. I made it! Eighteen years old. I survived school, it’s over. I’m happier. I’m healthier. I’m going to uni in September. I made it. I got through it.
Who I am now seemed impossible to younger me. But I did it.
I actually did it.
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