Chapter 13

My first year of high school. My first end-of-term since my high school career had started. I was tired of being a student. Yes, I knew study was essential. But it was just so boring. I couldn’t muster any desire to actually do it, and I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I wonder how I’m supposed to find something that gives life meaning. The days were empty and frustrating, yet I knew I would never have them back, and I was fighting it all as hard as I could. At that time, I—Shuumei Sasaki—hadn’t yet found my treasure. “This sucks,” I mumbled, looking in the mirror one morning. The color in my hair was still patchy. Talk about depressing… After helping my parents with morning prep at the family bakery, I went back to our house and put on my school uniform, grumbling all the while. My older sister stuck her head into the hallway, and she didn’t hesitate to laugh at me as I stood there sighing at the mirror on the shoe rack. That only made me feel worse, but I restrained myself to an annoyed tsk. “How many times have you looked in the mirror since yesterday?” she asked. She’d laughed up a storm the night before too, but I guess she still hadn’t had her fill. Maybe it’s just amusing to see her little brother freaking out over something like this. “I wasn’t counting,” I snarled. In the mirror, my hair was a mess of black patches, sickly brown areas, and rust-colored streaks. Not exactly a natural look. Clearly, I had been wrong to try to use the black hair dye by myself. One of my sister’s taunts last night had been that I looked “like a calico cat.” It drove me up the wall. I’d drawn the teachers’ ire pretty much right away first term. Partly for my bad attitude, but they also wouldn’t shut up about my lightened hair. I knew the inspections were only going to get stricter at the end of the term, and I got so fed up with it that I’d decided to dye my hair black before the closing ceremony. I wished I could skip school, and I wished I didn’t have to take any tests. What was there to look forward to? The minute finals were over, we had the closing ceremony, and you had to take a test there, too. They said it wouldn’t affect your grades—that they were only going to use it as a reference for remedial summer guidance—but then why take it at all? Just thinking about it made my head spin. Admittedly, I was the one who’d applied to a program with lots of supplementary lectures, so as much as I really did want to get away from it all, I also had the urge to stick it out. Even without all that other stuff, though, I still would have been pretty ticked about the hair-dye situation. It wasn’t just my sister—everyone at school was gonna laugh at me. I could live with that, but it meant other students I normally never spoke to would be paying attention to me. The thought alone made me feel a little sick. “I can’t believe this…” “Grit your teeth and bear it. Maybe it’ll teach you not to treat everything like a huge pain in the neck.” “Sucks…” “You’re hopeless!” She didn’t have to tell me. I knew it was a bad habit. I was the one who had to live with it! I went with the flow to avoid anything that might involve effort or trouble, but I was the one who paid for it in the end. I already knew from my experience in middle school where it would lead: After things got worse and worse because I wasn’t doing anything about my situation, I would end up stuck somewhere I wasn’t happy about. I’d like to think I was already a little better than that. At least I was going to school pretty regularly now, not like then. I had a tendency to skip class, sure, but I didn’t feel like I was throwing away my studies in the same way. Take today: I was so bent on making the end-of-term a success that I had even tried to dye my hair. I knew perfectly well that from the outside, I didn’t exactly look like a model student. I knew I hadn’t made any huge, dramatic leaps. It still all seemed like a lot of trouble to me, but I thought I was all right for now. Just gotta give it my best shot… I picked up the schoolbag I’d tossed by the front door and shoved my feet into my sneakers. “Did you get any bread?” my sister asked. “Don’t need it. We’ve only got morning classes today. I’ll eat somewhere.” “Okay, have a nice day.” “…Thanks.” The bakery opened so early that my family was rarely around to see me off in the morning. Even my sister hadn’t said a proper good-bye in a long time. It felt strange. I gave a quick nod to hide my embarrassment. As I went out the door, the summer sun assaulted my eyes. After just a few steps, I already felt like the heat was clinging to my skin and weighing me down, almost as if it was out to sap my motivation. At school, the reaction was every bit as obnoxious as I’d expected. It started with Ogasawara remarking, “Back to black, eh? Been a while.” He was bringing up stuff from our first couple years of middle school! Talk about a pain in the ass. And what about his hair? He had streaks in it! He wasn’t even trying to follow the dress code. I should’ve told him where he could shove his “back to black.” I wasn’t surprised when he got stopped by the Disciplinary Committee’s inspectors and called out in homeroom. As for me, they stopped me on account of my patchy look, but I was exonerated by the fact that I’d been trying to dye my hair black and wasn’t penalized. They did give me a little grief about my lax posture, though. What about Hirano? He had bleached hair, but he served on the Disciplinary Committee. I guess he got away with it because otherwise he was pretty by-the-book about school rules. In other words, I could draw the line where I felt like it. It wouldn’t make sense to try to change everything at once. Ask too much of myself, and I’d never make it. The first thing Ogasawara did when he came over to my house wasn’t apologize. It was to say, “Hey, color’s back,” staring hard at my hair. After my disastrous first attempt at dyeing it, I’d finally gotten it looking neat again on the second try. I’d used up a bunch of my sister’s hair treatment trying not to damage my locks doing all this dyeing. So far, she hadn’t found out. “Yeah. And I’m never dyeing it again,” I said, grumbling about how much work it had been. Ogasawara grinned. “You’re gonna spend a lot of time at school after classes.” He was right. The penalty for dyeing your hair was to stay late for a lecture, but that was all. Just a bit of “guidance” where they browbeat you about not letting your standards slip just because it was almost summer break. When Ogasawara and my other friends told me, I almost couldn’t believe my ears. All that…for what? “It’d be worth it!” I said with a big sigh as Ogasawara started rifling through my CD collection.