"Hey, Kamikita-kun, where are the vending machines? I need something to drink."

A chill breeze ruffled my long blond locks as I sat with my back pressed against the rough bark of a tree, so intently focused on what I was sketching on the glossy white sheet of paper in my sketchbook. The sudden, deep voice startled me a bit, causing my pencil to go awry and make stray marks on the paper. Luckily, I hadn't been pressing down too hard with my pencil, so it wasn't a problem that my trusty eraser couldn't fix. I looked up to find the source of the voice, then smiled warmly.

"Oh, good morning, Sato-kun. The vending machines should be over there." I pointed toward the door that was supposed to lead in to the school's electrical room, four vending machines beside it. Without another word, Sato strolled off with his hands shoved in his pockets. He pulled a hand out and began flipping a yen coin in the air, catching it almost perfectly every time it came back down to him.

"Hey, Takuya! Are you going to sit there and draw animals all day? Come on, we've got stuff to do!" Another voice graced my ear just as I was about to erase the stray marks on my paper. I recognized the voice as Haruki Nakagawa's, who was one of my close friends at the school. We had met during our last year of junior high when he kept accusing me of stealing his chocolate milk every day, so I ended up just buying him a container so that he would stop bugging me. From then on, he insisted following me almost everywhere I went. It was a strange friendship but it turned in to a strong and rather touching bond.

I closed my sketchbook and tucked it under my arm, sticking my pencil, sharpener, and eraser inside of my small pencil pouch and sliding it in to my back pocket, before standing up. "Do we actually have things to do today that are important to our education or are we just going to goof off in the room again?"

Haruki walked up to me and furrowed his brows as if I had just said something totally unbelievable. "What kind of question is that? The last one. Do you really think I'd do something like study?"

I chuckled and shook my head.

"Well then shut up and follow me! The others are already waiting for us, so we've got to be quick."

Haruki turned around and began to jog toward the front doors. I got a better hold on my sketchbook before I followed close behind, though my pace could hardly match his. The thin cloud covering the sun slowly rolled to the side, allowing the sun to cast a golden glow upon the school and it's many students, it's hot rays making me feel warm inside.

My name is Takuya Kamikita. I'm eighteen years old, and I attend an art school in Japan with my friends Haruki Nakagawa, Kichiro Suzuki, Ayaka Nakajima, and Mikuru Okamoto.

But…there's quite a bit of a story behind why I decided to come to an art school in the first place.

When I was a young boy, I was diagnosed with an illness that had the potential to and very well may have killed me. I was hospitalized so that the nurses could drag my time alive out as long as they could and work on finding a cure for the illness that I had. Around the time I was diagnosed, I started to spend a lot of time with my little sister Komari.

I was her not so strong big brother. When she wasn't at school, she was always by my side at the hospital. We'd talk the day away and play games together, then when night fell, I'd take her to the roof of the hospital and tell her a story. I made one up every night because I knew that she loved them. When I felt my weakest, I knew that my time was going to come soon, so I decided to make something for Komari that she could have and always remember me with. A picture book.

The book was about a hen who lays an egg. The egg hatches in to a chick, then the chick becomes a hen and forgets that it was once a chick. That process repeats over and over again until the hen finally realizes that it was a chick at the end of the story. I worked through the days writing it, and on the last night when I felt I could no longer go on, I read it to her, and she loved it.

I remember what I said to her that night. I told her that I might not be there when she wakes up the next morning, but that everything was a dream so she didn't have to be sad when she woke up. I fell asleep knowing that could be the very last time that I would see my sister…

Then, I miraculously woke up the next morning feeling perfectly fine. The nurses told me that my disease had somehow cured overnight and that I was healthy again. I had never felt so lucky in my life.

And now I feel even luckier.

I decided to start writing children's books based on the stories I told Komari when we were kids, which lead up to me applying for an art school and meeting my friends. We always spent time together and drew pictures together. I was so glad that I had somehow beat that disease, because the thought of not meeting any of my friends scares me. The thought of never seeing Komari grow up in to the remarkable woman she is today is even scarier.

I suppose I should tell you a bit about my friends, right? Let me start with Haruki. As I said before, we met due to a mishap with milk in junior high. Despite being pretty opposite of each other, we get along pretty well and I can trust him with anything. He's quite the slacker and never does his classwork or homework despite the fact that he loves to draw. I've seen his drawings, too, they're pretty amazing. He has an eye for darker art, the kind where someone can paint a picture of a woman with her head falling off and somehow give it a peaceful aura. He usually does black and white drawings, but when he's feeling extra creative he'll break out the watercolours and not talk to anyone until he's finished with what he's doing.

Then, there's Kichiro. He's here to learn how to make 3d models with computers and stuff of the sort since he wants to become a video game designer. He's the liveliest one of the group, always cracking jokes or showing us all the light whenever we become sad. He can always make the worst situation in to the happiest funfest anyone has ever seen. In the six years that I've known him, I've never ever seen him shed a single tear or frown. It's quite shocking to know someone can control their feelings like that and be happy when they decide to be happy. It makes me worry about him sometimes since I hear people like that usually have a terrible past, but as far as I know, Kichiro's life has always been sunshine and rainbows.

Is it even possible to forget someone like Ayaka? She is not only the friendliest and kindest, but shortest of all of us. I met her in my second year of junior high when I saw her working on a rather intriguing piece of artwork during art class. I asked her what she was painting, and she explained that she was painting a haiku. It took a few months of observing her pieces to figure out what she meant, before I finally connected the dots and realized that she painted pictures based off of haikus she wrote and wrote the haikus in hidden places on the painting. She really had a way with both words and her paintbrush. It was almost satisfying to watch how gracefully her hand swooped across a blank canvas to awaken a whole new world of colour. Somehow, her smile can always light up a room and her voice can bring joy to even the most depressed person in the world. Right next to Kichiro, she's always doing her best to make us feel better though she has issues with feeling sad herself.

And last but not least, Mikuru. She is definitely a character. I met Mikuru in my first year of junior high when I caught her putting tacks on the teacher's chair and threatened to report her for doing so, though the threat ended up with us becoming pretty great friends. She's a huge prankster and thinks that everything is a joke, which often gets her in trouble sometimes. She's tomboyish and has even gotten mistaken for a boy due to her flat chest, short hair and deep-ish voice. She's usually riding her skateboard around school grounds and likes to graffiti some parts of the school building. While I don't support it, I don't tell anyone. Mikuru is here to study pop art, which is art with a style that reminds me of a comic book. She's got enough of those lying around.

All of us are great friends and we usually hang out in an unused classroom on the third floor with permission from the school staff. Though we're a pretty diverse bunch, we get along well despite our differences. I don't want it any other way.

This is the story of me. The story of all the hardships I faced with my friends and all the happy times we had.

I hope you like to hear about it just as much as I like to reflect on it.