Chapter 2

CHAPTER ONE Popular Bad Boys Do Well in High School A parade of students in blazers made their way down the high path that ran along the river embankment. A flurry of playful cherry blossom petals whirled and swirled in the air, coming to rest on their hair and shoulders. Beneath their blazers, they wore crisp white shirts with unfashionably long plaid skirts, or still-baggy pants meant for growing into. Stiff loafers, not yet broken in to the wearers’ feet, clattered with every footstep. Clunk, clunk, clunk. Scuff, scuff, scuff. The rhythm of my feet in ripped, stained, and generally worn Stan Smith sneakers was a mismatch to the heavy clunking of brand-new school shoes. All of a sudden, I noticed that my shoelace had come undone, so I crouched down. My Gregory-brand backpack, which had seen better days, slid sideways and made my square schoolbag swing off my shoulder. I gazed out across the scene, feeling a stirring in my heart as I drank it all in. The gentle springtime sun. The burbling of the stream below. The new students walking beside me, heading earnestly to school in the midst of their still-unknown peers. What unbreakable friendships would form? Who would end up dating? It was all still ahead of them. Saku Chitose from Class Five is a total man-slut shithead. High schoolers are the center of the whole world. You see it all over media, too. Think about it. Every novel, manga, TV series, and film made these days features a high school kid as the protagonist. It’s never an elementary schooler, right? And only occasionally do you see a college student or working adult. I mean, the word youth itself is synonymous with high school. It’s like when you grow up and become an adult, you want to look back on your time in high school and get all misty-eyed about it. You want to reminisce about those slightly embarrassing yet completely precious three years. …But that’s all just superficial. The truth is something everyone knows. If you’re lucky, you spend your days goofing around with your buddies, getting into silly fights, then laughing it off and throwing your arms around each other’s shoulders. You confess your feelings to that girl you’ve had your eye on. You wait for her club practice to get out, and then the two of you stop by a park bench on the way home and chat. You go to the summer festival together wearing yukatas and watch the fireworks. You stroll hand in hand to a secluded corner of the shrine, and then when no one’s watching you have your first…y’know. Stuff like that. But only a few people get to experience those kinds of sickly sweet, heartburn-inducing moments. Only the ones who manage to claw their way to the top of the school hierarchy and become the elite, the few, the popular kids. You have your popular kids and your unpopular kids. I’ve always hated those definitions, ubiquitous though they are. Ever since those terms came about, high schoolers have cared about only one thing: Please, let me be popular. Or at the very least, not at the bottom of the heap. Please. The entrance ceremony the little first-years were heading to was only the first round of the battle. By the time they came back along this pathway later today, they’d have a pretty good idea already of what was up. They’d know which of their peers was likely to be the life and soul of every class and which ones were destined to spend three years trying to blend into the walls. If they weren’t nervous right now, well, then they’d have to be crazy. Saku Chitose from Class Five is a total man-slut shithead. Don’t believe what society tells you, little first-years. Forget about who’s hot and who’s not. Forget about who’s “sociable” and who’s “anti-social.” Tell them all to go screw themselves—and just be a little stone that rolls where it wants. After a year of bumping and colliding against each other, you’ll be a nice, smooth rounded-off little pebble anyway. In my position as a second-year student, who had already been stuck with the “popular” label by everyone, I felt more than qualified to give these little newbies some advice. Clunk, clunk, clunk. Scuff, scuff, scuff. The breeze felt pleasantly warm on my cheeks as it blew away the last vestiges of the cold, depressing Hokuriku region’s winter. Spring is the season of new beginnings. The pastel blue of the sky, the fluttering black hair and the flapping skirts of the girls, the cherry-blossom pink blush of their cheeks—it all spoke to new encounters, new romantic possibilities. As I walked toward school, I had a light spring in my step, like some sprightly old dude heading excitedly to his favorite public bathhouse owned by an old childhood friend. Saku Chitose from Class Five is a total man-slut shithead. You know, I keep reading and rereading this post, but I have to say it sounds like someone might have it in for me. They used my full name and everything. I grinned wryly down at my cell phone screen. For the past few minutes, I’d been taking it out of my pocket to look at it before putting it away, and then doing it all over again. On my phone, I had the underground school gossip site open. It’s kind of like an anonymous forum, and each school has its own section where anyone can post anything they want. There’s a lot of posts. It was super popular for about ten years, but then it became this big “social issue” because of online bullying, so it started to die off and fall out of use. Well, these days we have Twitter and LINE to vent our stress on. But those kinds of social media platforms come with risk. Make one wrong move, and your true identity can be uncovered just like that. So we elite students from Fukui Prefecture’s top-level Fuji High have all taken our bitching, dissing, and trash-talking back to the underground forums, and they’ve seen something of a revival recently. “He’s a limp-dick blowhard; that’s what he is. Looool!” “Yeah, I heard he couldn’t keep it up when he was banging that senior girl lmao” Hey! I’m not about to let that one slide! I felt my spirits sinking as I scanned all the comments that agreed with the OP. Being called a man-slut, okay, I could own up to that one. But having rumors fly around about my sexual performance… That kind of thing could really affect the self-worth of a hot stud like me. And one more thing… The other kids getting dumped on at least got to have code names or were referred to by their initials. Why was I the only one getting outed with my real name while these fools raked me over the coals…? By the way, my real name first popped up on this site shortly after last year’s entrance ceremony, and it’s never dropped out of the yearly top keyword ranking, not even once. Almost all the posts about me were slanderous takedowns. Why can’t people write something nice sometimes? Like, “Chitose’s so hot! I wanna be in his arms rn!” or something? “Good morning, Saku. Why are you just standing there like that?” Someone tapped me on the shoulder, and I turned to see Yua Uchida, who had been in my class last year. She was smiling, her expression reminding me of a bright, blooming sunflower. Her long hair was pulled forward over one shoulder, fluttering slightly in the breeze. When she smiled, which was often, the corners of her eyes crinkled in this totally adorable way that could probably end all wars and bring peace to all mankind. She wasn’t exactly the undisputed beauty of the school or anything, but she was the type of girl whose name would come up on school trips when talk turned to who’s hot and who’s not. Actually, she didn’t stand out at all at first, but as the year went by, she started to blossom out of her junior-high phase. During second semester last year, she naturally started to gravitate toward us popular kids. “Mornin’, Yua. Check this out.” I waved my phone in the air, and Yua came to stand shoulder to shoulder with me so she could see the screen. As she leaned in, I got a whiff of her shampoo. Smelled organic. “Ah, that. Well, don’t worry.” Yua grinned at me, her eyes crinkling a little as she patted me reassuringly on the back.