My name is Hiiragi Seiichi, and I was an eleventh-grader at a pretty unusual school. Now, just to be clear, there weren’t any psychics or superpowered people or anything weird like you’d find in a manga. No, this school was home to idols. Teen idols, girl idols, guy idols—you name ’em, we had ’em.
Does that mean I was as hot as your average boyband member? Well, that was a no. A big, fat no.
I had all my hair, but that was my most charming feature. Even I knew I was super ugly, and I reeked. Like seriously. It was bad enough that nobody could sit too close to me in class without gagging. Even my teachers begged me to do something about it, but nothing I tried worked. Thanks to that, I was famous in the worst possible way.
I’d also been putting on weight to boot. Literally, I went from about 150 lbs at the start of tenth grade to over 240 lbs now. See, ever since my parents passed away, I forgot all that stuff they told me about eating healthy and exercising, and I just let it all go. Sorry, Mom and Dad.
Now, I’d given up on my looks, but there was one thing about me that I just couldn’t stand—my name. Seiichi sounded like such a cool name, like someone who was actually handsome might have. I didn’t deserve a name half that good. I wished I could apologize to the whole world for being such a letdown. Sorry, world.
It probably wouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that I got bullied like nobody’s business. It was like the gods themselves wanted to punish me. I could’ve gone to a different school, of course, but this one was closest. Besides, given what the other students were like, you didn’t exactly need to be an academic genius.
All this makes me sound like trash, right? Go on, laugh. I laughed at myself every minute of every day. I mean whose great idea was it to let someone like me be born? Even if I could have gone to a better school or something, new bullies would have found me in no time.
Thinking back, I was bullied on the day my troubles really started too.