As great or as awful a time it might be, highschool eventually ends. It’s… hard to describe when that end finally comes, but from what I experienced, it was sort of like a Fading Summer. You can do whatever you want, whenever you want, and that’s when your parents should get you on your way to college, or just kick you out of the house.

The score on the board said that college was impossible.

It wasn’t like I had been a bad student or anything. I did the homework on time, got on with my teachers, and some of my peers even thanked me for helping their grades out.

Somehow… they got better grades than me. Seeing them smile and cheer, while I realized my own place in the world…

I went home and crawled into my bed.

My Mom made quite a fuss. She blamed my friends, my PC, and my Silicon Valley father for bringing all those American games over. My Father found her assertions absurd, but his help was misguided at best. Their love felt as empty as that scrap of paper my score had been written on.

I rolled my covers over and over again as if it was my entire world, searching for some sense of place in the patterns I had slept in since middle school. I curled away as they became louder and louder until I was rolling through the covers of every minute of every day.

My parents, grandparents, extended family, argued over me for an entire year.

The only chance I had was not engaging with them, with anything.

That was good, to be honest. I was quite happy just being in my room. It was safe there, until I realized it wasn’t. They were trapping me here, inside this house, feeding me what they wanted, ordering me to do what they wanted. That was the last thing I wanted to happen.

Eventually I took the train to the city to get away from this suburbian hell. Introducing myself as a statistician at a town on the opposite side of the mountains, the aging local just smiled and shook my hand. I emailed my Mother asking to help out with rent while I managed to get the money coming in, to which she replied:

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

“I’m so thankful that you finally managed to make your way out of the house! :smile:”

Years melted away like butter, and a few seconds later it was my 22nd birthday. It was then that I got an email from my old school. They were having a 5 year anniversary.

The sun was scorching my black suit and boiling my insides.

I swigged my water bottle once more. 

The train station thankfully wasn’t busy, or else I’d probably be suffocating as well.

Something splatted a meter or so behind my seat.

“My Ice!” one school girl in the pack cried out, on the verge of tears at the small puddle of melting blue, “Mio, watch it next time! Ugh… I’m a couple yen short of another too…”

She looked up at the group of her supposed highschool friends who didn’t even register her complaint. She drooped her head over her phone and began to walk after them.

The next thing I knew I was counting coins. Obviously, a six foot man in a suit openly giving money to a highschooler is definitely the worst look imaginable, but surely I could just buy a bottle and leave it behind? No, it’d just be considered litter, and some environmentalist mother would rag on at me for polluting. My Mother definitely.

My Dad, meanwhile, had once told me that when you make dollars it's okay to not care about dimes, and I’d made money. My boss had figured out that I, as a Half-American, could sell cleaned up houses at several times the market value to Americans who really wanted the Japanese experience. I didn’t like it, and I had more money than I knew how to use.

But here I was, questioning whether I should buy another water bottle so that I could leave it behind for a Highschooler.

I looked down at my hands again, examining the coins until I saw past them to a blister.

That’s odd…

The train notice blared my line, and I instinctively got up from my seat, my eyes still focused on my blister. It hurt, and its color was changing from a fairly neutral skin color to almost a green.

That wasn’t good.

Out of concern, I poked it with my other hand.

It burst… into a dirty green flame.

I staggered backwards, but the flame had already spread to both my hands 

My blister frothed like a jet engine, burying the flame underneath my very skin, my blood vessels bloating as the blue was replaced with the molten green, carrying the flame further through my body with each heartbeat.

I didn’t realize I was screaming. I didn’t realize other people watching me. I was doing only what I thought I should do.

Flail, and roll.

Only when I felt that there was no ground beneath me did I understand what was about to happen.

I crashed down onto the train tracks, hard, right in front of the rapidly approaching train.