A Miserable Death
High school classrooms are pretty blah places to be. I mean, our classroom has lemon yellow walls. Lemon yellow, imagine that! Can you imagine staring at a crappy shred of lemon rind for seven or eight hours a day? It's painful, I tell you. Besides the crappy walls, our classroom has your standard two blackboards, one for the front and one for the back, two exits, windows that faced the West, and around twenty-five neat classroom desks with some amount of graffiti on each surface.
I sat at the second-to-the-last chair of the fourth row. It was cool, since it was right next to a window where I could daydream when I felt like it. It was also a great place to sneak reading the latest issue of JUMP during boring literature class.
But best of all, it was the one seat in the class where one could sneak a peek at Japan's number one student's test papers, without being so obvious.
I wasn't breaking any rules, per se, when I peeked into his notebook that time. Hey, it was lunch break. Those of us who packed our lunches should be eating, and not writing in notebooks. I was only playing the role of a concerned classmate when I disturbed him.
"Oi, Yagami. What is that? A diary?"
He looked at me with an annoyed glare. It intensified slightly when he saw that I spoke with a mouthful of rice, which was the last of my lunch. "None of your business," was all he said before he turned to his notebook again.
I saw him stare at the open page and the pen, and a moment where he actually hesitated. Huh, how rare, huh? Maybe he was writing in a diary. He definitely ain't cosplaying, that's for sure. Although, it would be funny if he did.
He closed the notebook, put his pen back in a no-nonsense black pencil case, and put these in his school bag.
I smirked. Hey, why not? I thought, as I moved to the empty chair on his right and turned it around to face him.
That exasperated look on his face was priceless. He must have figured out that my buddy Sakanaka had to be absent to day because he fell down the stairs the day before, and currently I had no-one to spend my lunch break with. Would he leave for the cafeteria, I wondered, and let himself suffer through the wanton stares and awkward passes of his fangirls from the middle school and high school?
Apparently not. He stayed where he sat. Open for interrogation.
"Yagami, do you read JUMP?" I asked.
He had the look of somebody deciding whether to 'not encourage it' or 'get the shit over with'. After a silence, he looked away and shook his head.
"Ah… I guess you've never heard of Death Note, have you?"
His eyes opened sharply. I could tell there was knowledge in those beady eyes of his, and that he was going to fake ignorance afterwards. "No. But you're not the first to ask me that question," he said.
The guy must be a closet otaku, then. "You're in luck. You happen to be in the presence of a JUMP fanboy."
"Hn," he said with distaste.
I reached out for my limp knapsack, fished out one of the copies of JUMP I had under a bunch of crumpled paperback textbooks, and threw it to him. The cover, which featured some characters from One Piece, hit his face before falling on his lap.
Some of the girls eating their lunches at the corner of the room bit their lips when they saw this, but nevertheless shot me with a dirty look: Don't bother Yagami-san, you nimrod! They seemed to say.
Whatever, you fangirls.
Yagami was already flipping through the pages of the manga, and stopped when he came across a page of Death Note. He frowned.
I let him look at a number of panels. He had the look of somebody who drank a glass of milk and only finding out afterwards that it was a month past its expiry date. Finally, he closed the manga and threw it back to me.
"Well?"
"I have nothing to say about that."
"Death Note. It's the story of Yagami Light, a megalomaniac bastard who wants to rule the world. In this manga, he is Kira, and he kills those guys who do bad things to other people. Nice, huh? Don't tell me that it doesn't affect you in any way."
Yagami Light faced me and, with a face controlled, said, "It's a coincidence, or a bad joke."
"Riiight."
With his foot, he turned the chair that I was sitting on towards the platform, where the teacher would stand later. Then he said, "This is the real world. That's Shonen JUMP. Know the difference, idiot."
Ah, Yagami. You and your anal ways. You think that everyone around you is an idiot—even the rest of us who were placed in the same advanced class as you. You think that the line between intelligence and idiocy is well defined, and that segregating people is as easy as separating your corn from your carrots and your peas.
Nonchalantly, I shrugged and went back to my place behind him. A number of our classmates were already flooding to the classroom, and at the precise moment that my ass hit the cold, hard wood of my chair, the bell rang.
Next was Civics class. Our teacher was a pathetic, balding old man with a lisp, and an ugly tycoon's mole on his right cheek. The class eventually sank into a trance state, following the rhythm of his drone and the wave of the length of hair from the centre of the mole.
Meanwhile, I watched in mild amusement as Yagami took out his diary and wrote some things in it.
But let me tell you about me. You probably don't need my name or demographics: god knows where you'd go with that. Ah, heck, I change my mind. I'll only tell you what I feel like telling you. That's the thing with my life, anyway. Everything flows because I felt like flowing in that specific direction. It's like a splash of water, dripping down a concrete downwards slope with inconsistent speed and direction. It goes where it feels like going.
My father and mother? They left me when I was little. My father died from choking on a pretzel, which was bought by an aunt of mine who came back from a long vacation in Florida. My mother was a bit sad about this, but she took this opportunity to run off with her lover of three years: a Geography teacher from Osaka who was seven years her junior.
In light of this events, my pretzels-loving aunt took me in and raised me all by herself in her house in Tokyo. Why she stepped up to the challenge, I had no idea. I certainly wouldn't want to take care of a kid who's been left alone because of a bad pretzel and a promiscuous mother.
In any case, there. It's a funny story if you look at it from this far back, but you could imagine how miserably I spent the years in between my fifth and seventeenth birthday. Besides being all angsty and shit about it, my aunt isn't a great caregiver at all. She has the money, true, but she doesn't have the brains to take care of a kid. She would make dates with one of her multiple boyfriends and forget to contact a babysitter who would take care of me. She'd leave all sorts of inappropriate stuff, like medicines and pornographic videos and sharp objects, at the exact places where I'd find them. And so on and so forth. Sometimes it would be fun, but a lot of times, I got hurt and so on and so forth.
Heck, I don't know how I stayed alive, because apart from having a place to live in and some food to continue living, I spent a good part of my life alone. And I guess I have a screwed-up way of looking at the world because of this.
So it's no surprise at all when, right before graduation, I dropped out of high school and spent my time doing small things that amused me. You could guess what they are. "Money, babes, alcohol," as Dryzen from Makai Kingdom said.
But those things bored me, and I wanted excitement. I eventually discovered that excitement came from breaking the law. Too bad I only got to do it once. Here's how it happened:
I walk in a convenience store. I have not come back to my aunt's house for three days, and by this time, I only have enough money for a can of coke and a bag of seaweed-flavoured potato chips. I grab these and figure that I'll have to go home later.
I walk up to the counter and throw the last of my coins and bills towards the bored-looking convenience store clerk. I nonchalantly gaze at the display of magazines on the side. Oh, a new release of JUMP. "Oni-san, you sell JUMP," I say nonsensically. No-one needs to say those kinds of things, but everyone ends up saying them anyway.
He nods and says, "That's the last one, dear customer."
The last one… oh, yeah. They release JUMP on days like today. It was evening already, and it probably is the last one I'll see for a long time. Damn, I gotta have that JUMP, I think. It would suck if I missed a chapter of Strawberries 100 percent.
But, shit. I don't have any money, do I? Even if I skip on the coke and potechi, I wouldn't have enough to buy the issue.
Wait, maybe I do, I think. I put my hands in my pocket and find a knife there.
Oh, a knife. I don't remember why a knife is in my pocket, but I decide not to think about it too much. A strange surge of adrenaline rushes through my veins, through my heart, and then reaches my fried brain. Grip the knife, the adrenaline tells me, like a good shot of shabu. Take it out, stab that guy, grab your chips and JUMP, and make a run for it!
I know, I know. If I sat in the same class as Yagami Light, I probably shouldn't be stupid enough to just go ahead and stab a bored convenience store clerk for an issue of JUMP. But I guess I am.
Long story short, bam bam bam. Dead convenience store clerk, happy shithead.
Scream. Shocked shithead. Bam. Dead seven-year-old boy with a chocolate bar in his hand.
Scream. Confused shithead. Bam. Injured devoted father of seven-year-old boy.
Bam. Two burly guys forget themselves and rush towards shithead with a knife, throw him to the ground, and disable him from running away.
Bam. Japanese Police are called.
Whee. Shithead is arrested for murder of a clerk and a child, and frustrated manslaughter of a father.
Some time later, I sat inside a prison cell in who-knows-where. I'm not sure what kind of prison cell that was, but I was alone, a bored guard sat on a stool not too far away from me, and I could hear the television that he was watching.
This afternoon, a young man stabbed a convenience store clerk, a young boy, and the young boy's father, which led to two deaths and a serious injury, respectively. The reason? The latest issue of Shonen JUMP.
"Damn, I'm a freaking celebrity," I told the guard.
He frowned at me, but didn't say a word. He kicked a discarded issue of JUMP on the floor, away from me. There was a self-righteous disgust in his facial expression, and I wanted badly to beat that ugly mug of his with my right hand.
Instead, I asked him lazily, "Onii-san, come on. All I wanted from the beginning was JUMP. That's all. I don't want to rob a bank for its money or anything. Can I please have the small, insignificant privilege of reading JUMP while I'm waiting for whatever it is I'm waiting for in this crappy jail cell?"
"… Death Penalty, maybe," he grumbled. He shifted his stool away from me and arranged himself to face nothing but the television set.
I heard them mentioning my name on the TV. So, is that it, my so-called fifteen minutes of fame? Andy Warhol, I could kick your ass right now if you were alive and in the same jail cell as I. I groaned and muttered indistinguishable curses under my breath. I've gotten fluent at it, after dropping out of high school.
"Ah, fuck you too. Bastard," I told the guard. I spat on the floor for added effect. "Dammit. All I wanted was JUMP. I didn't think I'd actually kill the guy, you know. And that kid came out of nowhere—for a moment, I thought he was a freaking mushroom. You would have done the same thing as I did if you were in my shoes, onii-san."
He didn't reply. Or maybe he did, but I didn't notice.
Because the moment I uttered my last syllable, my heart suddenly jumped inside my chest.
I didn't know what happened, but it was painful. I tore my shirt open because of the pain. I screamed, but I didn't even know what I screamed.
And then I just dropped dead there, froth bubbling uselessly over my lips.
Later, within-between-and-among nothingness, I stared at this image and shook my head in disgust.
He sat calmly on his desk chair, flipping through the pages with fresh ink on them. He prided himself on his precise yet casual handwriting, and ran his fingers over the pages, feeling the indentations caused by the pressure of the nib against the supernatural paper.
His finger stopped over a seemingly random name, and he said, "Look, Ryuk. Remember this guy?"
Ryuk cackled much like an old man. "Ah, that guy. He was your classmate in senior year high school, ne, Light?"
"Yeah… that jerk who showed me that chapter of Death Note," he said, with an evil smirk on his face.
"I had fun that day, Light. I kind of liked that classmate of yours, actually. Eh, I wonder why he stabbed those people in the convenience store."
"You like JUMP though, Ryuk."
"I like videogames too," the shinigami answered, his voice strangely innocent and childlike. "But Light, haven't you wondered or at least worried about this manga? I don't know how these guys did it—I mean, getting your name and knowing about the Death Note and shinigami and all that. Maybe this Ooba person is psychic, but that's besides the point. I mean, what would you do if L read this manga?"
Light narrowed his eyes at his supernatural companion. "Somehow, I find that hard to imagine… although, he has been known to read girly magazines from time to time."
"Yeah, they wrote about him and Misa too, huh?"
Light nodded. "I have nothing to worry about, Ryuk. Death Note is not the only manga released that is based on speculation about Kira's powers, and then including L and Amane Misa as characters. Look at Schizophrenic Agent, for one thing."
"Yeah, that was pretty cool, although imaginary boys borne out of mass hysteria are less believable than Death Notes."
Light only stared at him with an incredulous look on his face.
"Anyway, Ryuk. It doesn't matter. Let people know about Yagami Light, who cleanses the world in a manga called Death Note. So long as they bend to the will of Kira, I could care less."
The shinigami grinned wider as he watched the distortion on Light's face. Yeah, Obata drew that ugly mug of his right, at least.
- end -
Note: Um. So. I looked at all the other stories and decided that I want an original character too. But I don't like Mary Sues, so I wrote a shithead. Er. Yeah. XD I'm sorry for being bored, really. This at least ought to give you some insight on how unjust or just Light is for killing those criminals who aren't evil per se, but are prone to not thinking about their actions.
Ah yeah. "Schizophrenia Agent" is a parody of "Paranoia Agent." Its story is far from Death Note, but the mass hysteria thing is so similar that I had to mention it.
I highly doubt it at this point, but... if you have an impulse to review, then by all means please do. :)