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There’s a liar in my skin weaved from misused power; I’m a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Man is easily convinced that Eden's whisper lies just beyond their reach, that once they reach horizon’s edge they will reap their payback. Time is key, they say, they keep weaving until the wool covers my body and the form of Mr. Hyde is completed. It hurts…..but even then there is light—
A girl. She is giggling at me. Perhaps one day I can see her body rise again, moving all faultily and daintily like a marionette. And then I no longer have to ask: where is that smile from before?
“Ayanokouji Kiyotaka-kun, are you listening to me?” The stern woman’s voice brings me back to the present. She’s sitting right across from me on a cozy couch-chair - I’m so jealous - one leg crossed over the other. Her thighs are plump, and the way they’re being situated makes them look like squished brioche buns, the emo-version they sell during Halloween. Ugh, how did she find out my love of black satin? “Ayanokouji!” she snaps again.
“Sorry sir. I was just so… caught up in the moment…” I ramble.
“Yes, well, please treat this session with the gravity of seriousness it deserves,” she snarls. “So, tell me again, why did you write what you did?”
“Which… thing?” I wince. I’m hoping it’s one of my tamer works… who knew the school administration was tracking my computer activity? (Did they do something to Ike and Yamauchi? They’ve been acting differently since the last time they got called to the office…)
“Ayanokouji!”
“Sir yes sir!” I salute her with youthful vigor.
“How about we begin this… explicit work of yours…: The Spoiled One. What impulses drove you to write such a thing?” My shoulders lose a little tension. Thank god it wasn’t Lurking Psychopath or… my armpits bristle… Kiss Aftermath… (FUCK ICHINOSE SHE IS GROSS!)
I do my best to blush like a little girl in front of Epstein. “Sorry. I’m just a teenage boy trying to explore his relationship with sex.”
She blushes and scowls. As expected, trying to explain why your dullheaded hands wrote about yourself fucking your teacher is incredibly hard to do.
Externally, I smile and wink, hoping it’ll calm her nerves; while internally, I hide the inner darkness generated from repeating so many ‘your’s in my head. What a tongue twister!
“Don’t make me whack you with my clipboard.”
“I would find that to be incredibly hot, actually.”
Chabashira recoils visibly in disgust. The couch-chair tilts backward so much that I almost think she’s going to tip over and expose her ass. Sadly, my desires are thwarted as she backflips and her skirt remains an impenetrable fortress.
“Fine,” she responds, going back into her zen-state of teacher bitchiness, “then I’ll get Chairman Sakayanagi to smack you.”
This time, I’m the one recoiling. “Eugh. No thanks.”
“Then behave.”
“Whatever you say, sir.”
My homeroom teacher readjusts the chair and slams her bottom back down with haughty pomp. I especially like the velocity of the action; it really makes things move. Like her hair. Her hair was very magical.
“Ack-hem!” She clears her throat. “While it is not unnatural for a boy your age to have these kinds of thoughts, it is incredibly abnormal behavior to excrete them in such a… visceral manner.”
“Sorry.”
“That’s the third time you’ve used that word; it’s getting old.”
“Uh, so sorry?”
Chabashira narrows her head and tilts her eyes. It’s pretty obvious that her patience is getting low on blood sugar. “Have you ever heard of the rule of three, Ayanokouji?”
My thinking pose rivals that of Greek statues; I find such a tableau to be effective in conveying emotion, as when I say the standard - “Sorry, I’m afraid I haven’t.” - my voice is soaked to the brim with smoky alcohol, the purest essence of an addict’s passion.
“That means, when you’ve repeated something three times, you need to shut the fuck up.”
“Okay.”
The beautiful, busty, alluring, hyper-matured, anti-pre-pubescent very-woman - with two Dole plantation mascots creating that wonderful perfume I wanted to inhale - hung her head and sighed. “Alright. I’m not asking you to dump anything personal, since we hardly know each other, and I DO NOT wish to get to know you like I did in The Spoiled One.”
“Okay.”
“However, we have reason to believe that you are a disturbed and troubled individual. For example – writing about butchering and eating a classmate. You need to start talking to trained adults about your issues, starting with me.”
Jesus Christ, they’ve read Lurking Psychopath… I need to keep my face blank so that she knows it’s not me who wrote it at all…
Chabashira glares into my non-existent soul as I effortlessly hold her gaze (because I am the Demon of the White Hell frfr). “Doesn't ring a bell?” she laughs mirthlessly. “How about this one – where you kill the school administration and your father?” Nightmare… “Or… the one story where you waterboarded Yamauchi!” Villainkouji?
I rack my lasagna rack of brain muscle to find the reason why I wrote those stories; eventually, the best I can come up with is: ‘I don’t know, it sounded so ungodly badass at the time I was writing it’. I probably shouldn’t say that aloud. I need something more tactful, more nonchalant–
“Okay…?” I drawl, implicitly telling her to speed up and get to the point. “Post hoc ergo propter hoc— faulty reasoning.” A most intelligent reply, I must say. This is how my big brain subtly manipulates everyone around me; aren’t I just so cool?
“The school has more evidence, but your… written fiction was the one procured under legal circumstances.”
“I appreciate the honesty.”
Purposefully concealed information, eh? As expected of the government. But if she knows about that place or that man… I’m afraid I’ll need to dispose of her…
“So what’s troubling you? What drove you to write these stories?”
I stare; she stares; we stare.
“Why does anyone do anything? Sheer, absolute boredom!” I clasp my hands on opposite sides of my head. Chabashira looks at me like they’ve fallen off.
“You’re giving that look. Maybe you’re putting exclamation marks in your narration. Trust me - that sentence does not meet the requirements of an exclamation.”
“Understood.”
My teacher grumbles.
“Are you sure you’re trained? Because we’ve just been going in circles.”
“I have a degree in teaching, at the very least.”
“I see you’ve put it to great use, allowing your homeroom class to deteriorate like that.”
“You can’t fix what’s already doomed,” she shrugs. “The best thing you can do for your mental health at that point is to stop caring about it.”
She taps a black pen against the clipboard that miraculously appeared in her lap. The page attached to it was most certainly blank.
“Say, Ayanokouji, was it because of the adult websites Ike and Yamauchi showed you?”
While I had fallen in love with the actress Mika, the beautiful yet nostalgic woman was definitely not the one driving the impulse.
Or was she?
I shake my head.
“Did you have an unstable childhood?”
I shake my head.
“Did you get kidnapped?”
I shake my head.
“Abducted by aliens?”
Okay, now she just wanted me to break the rule of three; what a sneaky teacher. It’s time to pull off a big brain move — I shake my hips instead.
“What are you doing now?” she asks, voice wielding more judgement than a Supreme Court justice.
“These hips don’t lie.”
“And they’re saying yes?”
“No.”
“No?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” She writes it down on the page. “We’re finally getting somewhere.”
“Really.”
“No. That was sarcasm.”
Skkrrrr! An unseen blade of metal scraped the ceiling. Did the air conditioning just break?