CHAPTER 16: Bullied In Public
Back to school. Ms. Ogawa smiles brightly to see me return, and I’m early to class! “You must’ve hit your head pretty hard,” she says with a smile. I shake my head with a laugh. Mitsuko walks in class and my heart flutters. I can’t help but to grin just a little…

But she doesn’t look at me. She intentionally avoids my direction, looking above or around me. She says hello to her friends. I assume my invisibility cloak. I expected this, but a part of me was praying it’d be different. Some students are whispering behind me. They thought I killed myself. In this moment, I wish I did.

Lunch time. I finish eating my spam and rice lathered in soy sauce. I walk back to class early. Mitsuko and her popular friends are standing in the hallway, giggling about how much fun they had on Saturday. I remember that day, when Mitsuko abandoned me in the city. I turn around to go back outside, hoping they don’t notice me.

“Hey, you!” the volleyball captain says. She whispers to the group and they approach me. Mitsuko is straggling in the far back like she doesn’t want to be here. “Weird to see you back in school. So you didn’t kill yourself?”

“N-no…”

“Bummer.” The group of girls laugh, except for Mitsuko. She is strangely quiet and reserved.

“I know I’m not the only one who’d be happy not to see your face. Right, Mitsuko?”

“Yup,” Mitsuko says plainly. The implication of what she just said tears me to shreds. She… wouldn’t care if I died? I turn around to run away, but the volleyball captain skillfully steals my backpack off my shoulders. I protest, but she holds my bag behind her butt, putting a palm up to stop me.

“Ah, ah, ah! What’s the matter? You don’t have anything to hide, do you?”

“Give it back!” I say.

“Or what? You gonna hit a girl?”

I punch her in the face, or at least, that’s what I wanted to do. She’s right, I can’t and never would strike a female. I plead with her, “Please, stop…”

“I just wanna see what a dork like you carries around in this nasty thing.” The volleyball captain unzips my bag and turns it upside down. Books, papers and pens spill out on the ground, and a box…

I reach out to grab it. The volleyball captain blocks it with her muscular thighs, reaches behind them and picks up the box. “What the… Oh! My! God! ‘For Mitsuko’?! HA! AHH!”

My life is at its end. All the girls crowd around my gift box with a handwritten note, For Mitsuko :), taped on the top. The girl starts opening it, then stops. “Mitsuko, since it’s from your secret admirer, how about you open it?”

Mitsuko finally walks up to us. She doesn’t look me in the eye. She unravels the box, using her blue manicured fingernail to rip the tape like a blade. Her mouth drops for just a second at the sight of the waifu figurine of Yumeko. Her facial expression vanishes into nothingness. She sets the figurine down on the ground and raises her uwabaki to stomp it into oblivion.

The spectating girls squeal in delight. I shut my eyes. I don’t hear an impact. Mitsuko picks up the intact figurine. The girls look at each other in confusion.

“How much did you pay for this, loser?” Mitsuko says coldly, her eyes still on the anime girl.

“1200 credits…”

The other girls laugh belligerently. “Where the fuck did he get that kind of money?! And he spent it on that?! No fucking way, I’m telling everyone about this.”

“It’d be a waste not to sell it, right?” Mitsuko looks to her friends. They all agree. Mitsuko puts the waifu back in the box and in her bag. She walks in the classroom without another word. The volleyball captain flicks my forehead and tells me to stay away from Mitsuko, to give up and just keep jerking off to my ‘Chinese cartoons’. The other girls shake their head at me in disbelief. One girl uses an imaginary blade against her wrist, encouraging me to do the real thing.

I’m alone in the hallway, shaking so much my vision is fragmenting along with my heart. I feel betrayed. It’s not the way I wanted things to go, but that’s not what hurts me. It’s how Mitsuko denies me in front of everyone. How she lies and acts like she doesn’t know me. I kneel and scoop my belongings into my backpack. I feel a tear drip down my cheek, acting as a prelude for me to ditch school. There’s no way I could go back into that classroom. I run and run to my dilapidated pod and hit myself in the head for being so stupid. I don’t even care if I get expelled. I can’t go back.