Chapter 1: ONE

“Hello. Um, my name is Harada Kei. I hope we can all—” 

 

A wad of paper bounces off of his head.

 

“...get—”

 

Someone mutters something about how sweaty he looks.

 

“...along.” Kei finishes, his voice 10 times quieter than when he had begun speaking and sounding suspiciously squeaky. 

 

He stares out at the classroom and is met with mostly blank faces. He’s feeling distinctly uncomfortable and shoots a desperate look at his teacher. She’s standing at her podium, resting an elbow on top of her papers and holding her chin in her palm. She has long, brown hair loosely tied into a ponytail, and glasses sitting low on her nose. She isn’t that attractive, but by teacher standards, Kei knows his old classmates would’ve had a lot of interesting things to say about her. In Kei’s opinion, she looks like she might be hungover.

 

“Thank you, Harada. Go sit…” she pauses, her eyes scanning over the room like the layout is unfamiliar to her. “over there. By Hasegawa.” she waves her hand in a broad gesture, dismissing Kei. The problem is, Kei isn’t sure where she’s gesturing, there are 5 whole empty seats in the room, and he has no idea who Hasegawa is.

 

“Hi! Over here!” a cheery voice shouts, and Kei quickly follows the sound. 

 

Oh. 

 

There’s a boy, sitting smack dab in the middle of the back row. Kei’s mind realizes that 3 out of 5 of the free seats are on all sides of him— his right, his left, and his front. 

 

That’s… worrying. It’s also worrying that the entire class has gone from looking incredibly bored with Kei to awkwardly avoiding his gaze and visibly cringing.

 

But… Hasegawa looks nice enough. He’s one of those short, young-looking kids, with big blue eyes and round cheeks. He’s got short, choppy blonde hair with an electric blue streak going through it. He’s bouncing around in his seat so fast that the chair is creaking and the legs are squeaking against the floor, and he’s rapidly waving his hand back and forth in the air like Kei could somehow miss him. 

 

Kei shoots him a smile that feels very pained, and hunches in on himself as he speeds through the row towards the seat to Hasegawa’s left. 

 

Kei stares determinedly forward, but he can see Hasegawa staring at him in his peripheral. The kid isn’t even just side-eyeing him, his entire body and head are turned towards Kei. 

 

The teacher—Ms. Shinohara, he thinks?—sighs heavily and stands straight, stretching her arms over her head. There’s an alarmingly loud crack from her back, but she barely seems to notice it as she shuffles her papers around, before unceremoniously dropping the entire stack back onto the podium. Several papers fly to the floor. 

 

“Get ready to talk about subjunctives,” she says, sounding like she would rather be dead than talk about subjunctives. 

 

“Harada. Psst, Harada! Hey!” Hasegawa whispers from beside him. Well, he’s trying to whisper. It’s very loud and the entire class obviously hears him, and Ms. Shinohara doesn’t even pretend to care. 

 

Kei slowly turns to look at Hasegawa, whose face breaks out into a wide smile once they make eye contact. 

 

“Hi there, I’m Yohei! That’s my first name, but Shinohara didn’t tell you that part! Call me that, if you want! It’s my given name, and I’m sure we’ll be friends eventually if we sit together all year.” he says. 

 

“Hasegawa is fine.” Kei says stiffly. Hasegawa’s face does a very odd, unpleasant-looking twitch before his smile is back in full force.

 

“Sure! So what exactly got you sent to the Grey Box?” Hasegawa asks, leaning towards Kei. Kei leans back. 

 

And that is the question, isn’t it?

 

A little background information is probably due. 

 

Yuudai High School is a reformatory boarding school for juveniles who’ve committed criminal offenses on school property. The school operates on a mission of teaching kids to be well-behaved in the very environment that they acted out in, as well as having a sort of fear-based ecosystem. If one is there for stealing, there’s another there for assault and battery— and you don’t want to steal from a kid like that, right? 

 

Yuudai is known as the Grey Box because that’s exactly what it is. The school consists of one massive building, a perfect, grey cube, with no windows other than the three in the front above the doors that belong to the headmaster’s office. All gym facilities are underground while dormitories are on the upper floors, and the property is surrounded by an electric fence. 

 

… Kei thinks it’s a little ridiculous. 

 

Everyone and their mother knows about the Grey Box for one reason or another. Kei’s own mother would always tell him and his sister that she’d send them there if they didn’t brush their teeth or eat their vegetables. 

 

Well, he’d done those things, and look at him now!

 

Kei had done something… well, a little fucked up, at the tail end of the school year. Honestly, he really doesn’t know why he’s the only one who got in trouble for the whole thing, considering half the school was complicit. Regardless— did Kei do something bad? Yes. Was it illegal? Yes. Did he deserve to get sent to the Grey Box for it? Probably. Does he still think this is a bit much in comparison to what he did? Kind of. 

 

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Well, back to Hasegawa’s question— the entire class has obviously tuned into the conversation, not so subtly turning their heads so that they could hear Kei’s answer. 

 

And— okay, Kei isn’t an idiot. He sort of has an idea of how this works. If he says what he’s here for and it’s lame, people are going to take that as an a-okay to pick on him. If he says what he’s here for and it’s scary, people are going to leave him alone. He doesn’t really know where what he did falls on that scale, but he also doesn’t want to get caught in a lie. He’s also really not sure how he feels about telling anyone about it. It’s sort of embarrassing. 

 

“Don’t worry about it.” Kei says resolutely.

 

There’s a collective disappointed sigh throughout the room, and Kei isn’t sure if that’s because he sounds boring, or if it’s because the newbie didn’t fall for it. 

 

“If you’re so curious about me, what are you here for?” he asks. 

 

Suddenly, there’s a tense aura in the room. Everyone has very quickly turned back to Ms. Shinohara, with high shoulders and rigid posture. Kei shoots Hasegawa an alarmed look. Hasegawa doesn’t appear oblivious to the shift on energy in the room, and laughs awkwardly, rubbing the back of his neck. He looks a little red in the face. 

 

“Well, I was sent here last year because I had been selling girls’ panty-shots so I could pay for tickets to a metal concert,” Hasegawa starts, and Kei has to process that information a bit. Selling panty-shots? A metal concert? Hasegawa really doesn’t seem the type… for any of that. 

 

“But do you see that boy up there? With the dark hair?” Hasegawa continues, pointing through the row to a bow in the front corner by the door. He clearly knows he’s being talked about, because he whips his head over to glare at them, his mouth twisting into a sneer. He’s got a sort of delinquent look to him, with his black hair pulled back into a ponytail at the base of his neck, and a narrowed purple… eye. The other eye is covered with a black eye patch.

 

Hasegawa smiles sheepishly at the boy. Kei shoots a bewildered look between the two of them.

 

“Well, that’s Tsuji Hideki. He got all mad at me and called me a creep when someone told him what I had done, and didn’t listen when I told him I’m not like that! I don’t care all that much about girls, and I really wanted to go to that concert. They’re American and don’t perform here all that often. You get it, right, Harada?” Hasegawa asks. He’s practically on top of Kei with how far he’s leaning towards him. Kei just stares at him— what does he even say in this situation? 

 

“Right, of course, you get it, Harada! Well, I got irritated with him, and since he had barged into the baking club to harass me about it—I love baking you see, you should really come to check the club out since a lot of our members graduated last year— well, I had a spoon in my hand. So I lifted up the spoon, and I sort of just… lunged! Moved the spoon in a circle like I was scooping ice cream, and scooped his eye right out. He was freaking out, and I didn’t know what to do with the eye, so I just threw it in the mixer. Then everyone got mad at me, and… long story short, Tsuji has an eyepatch, and I got another year at this school!”

 

Hasegawa does fucking jazz-hands at Kei. 

 

Kei doesn’t… he doesn’t know where to start. What? What? His—his eye? With a spoon? In the… in the mixer? Was he planning on eating it? What?

 

No wonder no one was sitting around him. And no wonder he was so willing to share the story— Kei doubts anyone would want to fuck with this psychopath. 

 

… Wait.

 

Kei continues to stare at Hasegawa, who has the gall to look awkward at Kei’s lack of response. 

 

Kei clears his throat and leans in towards Hasegawa a little bit. The blonde perks up in response. 

 

“You uh, you mind if I eat lunch with you?” he asks. (His new classmates make several noises at that, ranging from gasps to whispers, to some girl going “What the fuck?” to his left. And, yeah, Kei could’ve probably waited until a time when the last thing Hasegawa said wasn’t that he put somebody’s eye in a mixer.)

 

Hasegawa gasps, and Kei jolts in alarm as he flings himself towards him, wrapping his arms around Kei tightly

 

“Yes, you can! No one has ever asked me that before! I knew we’d be friends! Everyone is outright staring at them, and Kei struggles for just a moment before Hasegawa’s hug tightens in warning, and Kei relents and gives Hasegawa an awkward pat on the back.

 

… He’s still hugging him. Kei’s arms are dangling uselessly at his sides, and he doesn’t know what to do, until—

 

BAM!

Hasegawa lets out a yelp, crashing onto the floor and gripping his head in his hands. His eyes look awfully teary. Kei looks up, and sucks in a breath. 

 

There’s a girl standing above Kei’s desk, holding a massive textbook in her hands, which he only can assume she just beat Hasegawa with. She has long black hair with bangs and a crimson red headband atop her head. She has heart-shaped pink lips and moon-pale skin. She's... the prettiest girl Kei has ever seen in person. Is she even wearing makeup? It doesn’t look like it. She scoffs at them.

 

“Some of us are trying to pay attention. Stop being so loud.” she snaps, before dropping the book onto Hasegawa’s head. Kei stares at her as she returns to her seat, by the window, and dutifully begins taking notes. 

 

“Sasaki is so mean…” Hasegawa wines as he crawls back into his seat, burying his head in his arms like a scolded puppy. Kei turns his gaze back to the girl. Sasaki, he supposes. 

 

If she was willing to do that to Hasegawa, what the hell was she in for?

 

After a few minutes of (probably creepy) staring, Kei turns his attention toward Ms. Shinohara.

 

 She’s still talking about subjunctives.

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