Kushida Kikyo

My name was Kushida Kikyo, and I was a first-year student in Class 1-D at Advanced Nurturing University.

In everyone's eyes, I was always smiling. I went out of my way to help my classmates and remembered everyone's little habits. They all liked me very much.

But no one knew what kind of person I was beneath that gentle, adorable mask.

Since elementary school, I'd realized that whenever I did something small, people praised me.

Each time I achieved something, I could clearly feel that I had value.

So I became very conscious of what other people thought of me.

But...

As I grew up, I learned where my limits were.

No matter how hard I tried, there was always someone better than me. I could no longer win praise through my grades or athletic ability.

So I thought it over. I could only do the things no one else wanted to do.

Help others study!

Run errands for them!

Comfort them!

Be kinder than anyone else! Be more understanding than anyone else!

Thanks to all that, I became "number one"...

I became the most popular person!

The thrill of being relied on and trusted felt absolutely amazing!

But...

Being the first to do the things nobody else wanted to do... was actually incredibly painful...

Of course it was painful.

So painful...

So painful.

So painful!

But...

I had to endure it!

To preserve my popularity, I had to let go of some things I'd already gotten my hands on.

So I endured it, again and again... I kept enduring...

But...

It was impossible to keep suffering forever.

So I found something that could support me emotionally—my blog.

I could vent all the pressure I couldn't share with anyone else.

Once I'd let it all out, I felt so much better!

But one day...

A classmate happened to find my blog.

Even though I hadn't written my name, anyone could tell it was mine just by reading the posts.

They saw all the countless insults about everyone in the class and crowded around to question me. I couldn't really blame them for doing that.

But I was the one who got mobbed. (Scoffs)

Back then...

I'd helped everyone so many times! And they just turned around and treated me like a stranger!

The boys who'd confessed to me! The girls I'd kindly comforted after their boyfriends dumped them!

But...

That boy was seriously disgusting. I'd wanted him to drop dead anyway!

And why had that girl been dumped? All you had to do was look at her face.

At the time, almost the entire class bullied me. I could feel that my life was in danger.

After all, I'd infuriated almost everyone. (Indifferent)

So I brought out my weapon.

I spilled everything.

I revealed the sides of them they hadn't put on their blogs.

For example, who he'd been cheating with, or how she'd badmouthed another girl on an underground website.

All the truths they didn't want anyone to know!

And then...

All the knives that had been pointed at me were turned toward other people instead!

I couldn't help it! (Cute tone)

They should've praised me, shouldn't they?

The class fell apart, but graduation was already near. There wasn't much they could do about it.

After graduation, I finally escaped that place and came to this isolated Advanced Nurturing University.

But...

Why... why... why!

Why wouldn't you leave me alone!

Uesugi Hara! Horikita Suzune!

Why did you have to show up here!

Why did you have to stand in the way of my popularity!

Horikita Suzune alone would've been fine, but what gave you the right to be here, Uesugi Hara! With your grades, you could've gone to the most prestigious school. Why did you come to Advanced Nurturing!

Uesugi Hara had been my classmate in high school.

When we first met, he was a strange person. He was handsome and did well in class, but he knew almost nothing about common sense. It was as if he knew about something, but had never seen the real thing before. There was something oddly awkward about him.

He became more or less like an ordinary person in less than two months, but he still left me with a strange impression.

He either daydreamed or slept in class, yet his grades were always at the top of the year.

When girls gave him love letters, he'd open them, take a look, and toss them aside. Every now and then, he'd even comment, "How shallow," or, "Doesn't anyone care about his inner beauty?"

But after watching him for three years, I couldn't say I'd found any inner beauty in him.

He rarely took part in class activities, and I never saw him with any close friends.

I'd heard he used to belong to some prominent family, but after the family went bankrupt, he was all that remained.

I'd wanted to get along with him, since he was very popular with the girls.

I often invited him to hang out, but he always turned me down. Eventually I gave up, and we remained nothing more than ordinary classmates.

Once, a boy who was upset on behalf of a girl Uesugi had rejected tried to pick a fight with him—in Uesugi's words, the guy was a "simp." But the next day, both of the boy's legs were broken. Apparently, the local gang had done it near Uesugi's home the night before.

Something similar happened again later, but the result was more or less the same: the person ended up with both legs broken by a gang.

I didn't know whether Uesugi had anything to do with it.

I grew more and more curious about him. I desperately wanted to know his secrets.

But even by the time the class fell apart, I still hadn't heard anything about him.

All I knew were a few useless things, like that he was interested in money and had a part-time job.

After the class fell apart, he was the only one who stayed out of it. He spent every day watching the drama unfold, which infuriated a lot of people.

But that day, I saw with my own eyes as he took down over twenty people in front of the entire class, one after another, men and women alike, then dragged them off to throw them in the bathroom with a big grin on his face. The memory still made my scalp crawl.

But what frightened me even more was what he whispered in my ear on graduation day: "Girls shouldn't be so curious about boys."

He knew everything. He just didn't care. I never wanted to feel that suffocating sensation of being constricted like a python again.

I'd thought we'd never meet again, but that familiar voice on the bus had thrown all my plans into disarray.

I didn't think he'd go out of his way to tell anyone what had happened, but I was afraid that if someone brought me up, he might say, "Kushida? She was my high school classmate," then blab about everything.

The person sitting across from me was Uesugi Hara.

The warm light of the Palette Cafe fell on him. He held a jar of sugar cubes and kept adding spoonful after spoonful to his coffee. He didn't stop, and the cubes in the jar visibly dwindled.

"Kushida, what did you want to see me about?" He finally put down the jar and picked up his coffee, which looked sickeningly sweet.

I stared at the coffee, which was nearly "sugar water," and couldn't help twitching my lips. Would it even taste good with that much sugar?

I didn't ask, though. I clenched my palm and looked at him, trying to keep my voice calm. "I just wanted to ask you to keep my high school secrets to yourself."

"That won't be easy." Uesugi stirred his coffee and raised an eyebrow. His "reluctant" expression made my blood boil, and my fingers curled into a tight fist. But I needed his help, so no matter how angry I was, I had to hold it in.

"I'll give you thirty thousand Points a month." I bit my lower lip and made the offer outright.

"Thirty thousand Points?" He drew out the words as if weighing them. A moment later, he asked, "I suppose I could. But what if you can't come up with the thirty thousand one month?"

I froze, not expecting him to ask that. I reflexively protested, "That's impossible! The school gives us a hundred thousand Points every month. How could I not have enough?" I really didn't understand why he'd worry about something like that.

"What if?" he asked softly.

"What if... What if..."

I didn't know how to answer him. That was true—what if I really couldn't pay? Would I have to... use my body? But I'd watched him for so long and never seen him show interest in any girl. He tossed aside the love letters girls gave him, so that probably wouldn't work anyway.

I clutched the hem of my clothes, my thoughts a mess. For a moment, I couldn't think of a single thing to say.

"We'll talk about it if you can't pay later." He took a sip of coffee and spoke indifferently.

"Okay."

I breathed a sigh of relief, quickly opened my Terminal, and transferred thirty thousand Points to him without the slightest hesitation.

"I'm leaving."

With that, I grabbed my bag and got up to leave. Even looking at him for another second made me feel annoyed.