Chapter 39. A Date? (3/13)

“Aren’t you afraid I’ll do something to your little brother?”

“I believe you wouldn’t do something like that. I have your secret as well, and you know I’d definitely reveal it if you touched my little brother.”

“That’s certainly true. I guess you did think about your move carefully. I take back what I said about you being brainless.”

“I may be nice, but I’m not stupid you know. It’s rude to call someone brainless to their face. I’ll also have you know, I have the highest grades in my year and at top of my class.”

“Oh? You do? That’s news to me.”

“What about you? Finals are coming up soon for the first semester, right? How are your grades looking?”

“Mine? Well, they can be considered neither particularly good nor bad.”

“Shouldn’t you be putting in more effort then?”

“Well, I do have a job after all. Besides, I'm not planning on attending university in the future either.”

“What? Why not?”

“There’s no point for me to go. I already know what I want to dedicate my life toward and university isn’t going to help me with that. Only repeated practice will. Simply put, university has nothing to offer me. There is no appeal to it at all. The only thing that will come out of it is a useless piece of paper I can’t even use to wipe my ass with.”

Her lips twitched, “but if you put in the effort you can at least get some scholarship money, right?”

“Sure, you can get a lump sum of money, but at the end of the day, you could earn just as much if not more by simply working part-time for a year while attending school. Plus, as a student working, you have the added bonus of being exempt from paying income tax.

“Looking at it from a cost-effective perspective, you spend three years working your ass off studying to get just maybe as much money as you'd earn leisurely working a part-time job for a year. Then when all’s said and done, if you worked your ass off studying, the only thing you know is that. You thus go to university as it’s expected of you by society to do so after you did so well in high school.”

“You are then guilt-tripped into spending all of that hard-earned scholarship money blindly trying to figure out what your true calling in life is. That scholarship money typically won’t end up being enough for your entire education either, and you may end up being forced to take out student loans and put yourself further into debt.”

“Then even when you graduate, after busting your ass in your field of study with only a dime a dozen bachelor’s degree to your name, if you have no related work experience and you only ever focused on studying, HAH, good luck landing a job in your field of studies. The job market is extremely saturated and there are so many graduates popping up everywhere that there just aren’t enough jobs for all of them.”

“The competition is ridiculously fierce and vicious. It is a cutthroat do-or-die situation you are thrown into without warning. Like a mother bird kicking its baby out of its nest to fly.”

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“You may then find yourself in a situation where you’re left with no other choice but to continue your education further. You’ll work yourself ragged. Your health will decline from the countless unending sleepless nights you spend researching for your thesis. Even after all of that, there is still no guarantee of anything. You will have specialized so much by that point that you may or may not find an employer that you fit perfectly with for the specific job they’re hiring for.”

“The worst part is you may get told straight to your face that you’re overqualified by that point.”

I clenched my fist under the table, tight enough to draw blood with my fingernails, all the while doing my best to maintain a neutral expression on my face.

“Once you reach that stage, you may become lost and then wonder what all of your efforts had been for. You’ve wasted so many years of your life pursuing that one thing only for your dreams to be crushed. Just to be spit on and laughed at for working yourself to the bone. You may find yourself sinking deeper and deeper into depression. The world around you as you see it crumbles into dust before your eyes.”

“The lies you were told from young all become exposed. If you work hard enough, you can achieve anything. Those sorts of lines adults spouted idealistically, you realize just how bullshit they were. The world was never as simple as that. Working hard is far from enough to make it in this world. Luck, being at the right place at the right time, connections, resourcefulness, the ability to lie with a straight face, the ambition required to step over the backs of others and crush their hopes and dreams in the dirt. All sorts of things are required to make it in the merciless world of adults. Kindness alone will only make it easier for others to use and manipulate you. If you’re only ever nice, people will walk all over you. They will chew you up and spit you out. The world isn’t a kind one, young lady, it is far from that.”

“This is why I truly can’t stand looking at the way you are. Playing nice, fair, and by the rules will only get you so far in life. You’ll eventually hit a roadblock that simply being nice will not allow you to overcome.”

She looked at me flummoxed, unsure of what to say back to me after my long rant.

It took a while before she finally opened her mouth and asked, “Uh… just making sure… but you are actually a first-year in high school and didn’t happen to be an adult dressed up as a student who just so happened to be on the roof that day, right?”

“No, I’m actually a forty-year-old man who was killed by an assassin and returned to the past when I was in my first year of high school. Would you believe me if I said that?”

“Please don’t make fun of me. I’m not a child who’d believe in such outrageous stories.”

“Then I’m obviously just a normal first year in high school. If you want to ask such a stupid question, expect to be asked a stupid question in return.” I responded, tit for tat.

“You sure do speak like you’re a forty-year-old man though.”

“I was born that way. On the way out of my mother’s womb, legends have it, my first words with a dead serious face were income tax.”

“Pffthahahaha! What the heck is that? I could totally imagine it too. You don’t seem like you’re a year younger than me at all. You must really hate income tax.”

“Of course I do. Every adult hates that cursed thing. Originally it was something that was only supposed to be temporarily implemented to deal with an emergency, but the bastards kept it in place and never got rid of it. It eventually became accepted as the norm over time, then the governments gradually raised it more and more over time until it reached the point where it bleeds people dry and forces them into borderline poverty conditions.”

“They then go and waste taxpayer dollars on the dumbest shit nobody asked for and expect a pat on the back for it. If I ever see a crappy politician, I’ll bite them in the ass.”

Somehow she was actually listening to my bitching with interest and laughing with a cheerful smile.

“It’s not funny, you know. I’m 100% serious.”

“That’s what makes it funny though. The fact that you’re serious about doing it. Just imagining you biting a politician in the ass is quite the spectacle. I’d be more than willing to buy a ticket to watch that.”

Suddenly recalling the original direction of the conversation I tried to backtrack a bit to when she mentioned her weakness, “We sort of got pretty off-topic because of my long-winded rant just now. You mentioned-”

“Alicia? Is that you? It is, isn’t it?”

I was suddenly cut off mid-sentence. Alicia? Who’s that?