Thanks to yesterday's flood of information, I woke up the next day with a splitting headache, my mind filled with those so-called instruction sets brimming with surreal implications. I was so dazed I felt like walking into a wall. The symptoms were exactly like a hangover, so much so that when I got up that morning, my sister thought I'd spent the night before last chugging pure alcohol.
"If I'd known it would be like this, I should've just skipped school. Why did I have to pretend to be a good student..." As I walked to school, regret washed over me. I couldn't help envying those students whose homes were elsewhere and who lived on campus. At least when they skipped class, it wasn't so troublesome—they could just hole up in their dorms and lock the door. But me... My sister's instincts were superhumanly accurate. I didn't have the guts to skip school in front of her. Besides, I was already in my senior year of high school, and my grades weren't great to begin with. If I skipped class too... things really wouldn't look good.
Of course, I could look at it another way: with my current grades, things didn't seem all that optimistic even if I didn't skip class... Fine, forget I said anything.
I trudged down the road in a haze, occasionally shaking my head hard in an attempt to wake myself up. There weren't many cars on this relatively secluded street, but if I got into some kind of traffic accident, that would be a real disaster. Unfortunately, my head wasn't a dustpan. No matter how hard I shook it, I couldn't fling out all the messy stuff inside.
Then I suddenly felt something strange, as though someone was watching me. The feeling jolted me awake,