I walk out of the club room, my back turned towards the people I had shared that room with every day after school for a month now. "B-but you can't quit! What will we do without you?" Benio Amakusa, or "Benibara-sama" as the whole school calls her, follows me, despair evident in her tone. She puts a hand on my shoulder and I smack it away.
"Survive," I answer her plainly. I turn around and look up at her, giving her my best death glare. She flinches and runs back inside to hide behind the other club members. Look what I've reduced the Lady of the Red Rose to. I'm proud of myself. "I don't appreciate you trying to force me into a blind date, and with another girl at that. I have never found other women attractive, do not find them attractive now, and will never find them attractive. In how many more ways shall I try to put this through your thick skull?" I close the door behind me and their appalled squeals fall on deaf ears.
I walk calmly down the stairs and out the door of Lobelia Girl's Academy and to the black limousine waiting for me outside. The chauffer, Michael, opens the door for me and I slide into the car, staring straight ahead. The drive passes wordlessly, and that's something I glad for. I don't want to talk about what just happened back there.
I've only been in high school for a month, and the school my father chose for me, Lobelia, is the worst place on this planet, at least for me. That's mostly because of the Zuka Club. They basically forced me to join, but I refused to be a part of their stage productions. Instead of publicly embarrassing myself, I suffered behind the scenes, planning everything. How that club went without a manager for so long is beyond me, and how they're going to survive without me…well, I'd like to see them try. But if the excessive spending and general stupidity wasn't enough, they decided to top it off by setting me up on a blind date with another club member. That was pretty much the last straw. And since that school is practically made up of Zuka Club member, I can't really go back without facing shame and never being spoken to again. Even the TEACHERS are avid fans of the Zuka Club.
We pull up in front of my sister's house and I get out of the car, still seething. My school bag weighs heavy on my shoulder with textbooks from like baking and makeup artistry that I will never use in my entire life. I'm glad that it's Friday and I don't have school for two days now, but come Monday I will not go back to Lobelia. I'll change my name and move to a different country if I have to, but I am not going back.
"Hey, Nadeshiko! How was your day?" my older sister, Fuyumi, is sitting in a very messy living room with a computer on her lap, shopping on the internet. She looks up at me with a smile that quickly fades as she sees the expression on my face. "What's wrong?"
"The Zuka Club is a ton of idiots and you can tell Father that I'm never going back to Lobelia for the rest of my life," I say quickly and sit down next to her.
"What happened?" she looks concerned and as I tell her about the day's happenings, an understanding expression crosses her face.
"Please, please don't let Father make me go back there!" I beg. "You can pull some strings for me, right?" Fuyumi's the oldest out of the five of us (oh, yeah, I have three siblings besides her) and she's probably Father's favorite, seeing as she agreed to an arranged marriage and all…
"I'll try," she says. I only hope that Father agrees. "Hey, maybe you'll even be allowed to go to Ouran!"
Ouran is a coed school not too far away from my sister's house. It's where one of my brothers goes to school and where the other two went to high school. Fuyumi went to Lobelia, like I'm supposed to. "Anything is better than Lobelia," I say and go up to my room.
I spend the weekend avoiding Shido, Fuyumi's husband, even though I have no problem with him. He keeps asking what's wrong and I don't want to explain to any more people what's going on. Fuyumi's away the whole two days, talking to Father about me. Me and her talk by email on how everything was going, and on Sunday, she tells me what I think is the best news of my life.
I'm going to Ouran. Fuyumi brings me the uniform on Sunday night. I hate it, but it's a small price to pay. It's an excessively puffy yellow dress with a little pink neck ribbon. Pink… I have to find a way to destroy that ribbon, but that's not important. What is important is that nobody finds out that I went to Lobelia.
Monday morning rolls along with the urge to murder my alarm clock. I'm not a morning person. I make a mental note to burn my Lobelia textbooks when I get home from school and head out the door, careful about the long skirt of my uniform. "Oh, you look so cute in that dress!" Fuyumi gushes and I roll my eyes but smile anyway.
"Thanks, sis," I say and slide into the limousine. I would have eaten breakfast, but I'm too nervous about going to a new school, no matter how much I wanted to go to a new school. The drive there takes only ten minutes, something I'm happy about. I don't want to have too much time to dwell on the possibilities of the many things that could go wrong today. I've planned it all perfectly, and I'm going to let nothing ruin it, but scenarios still race through my head faster than the family's private bullet train. I get out of the limo, making sure I haven't left anything inside, and walk confidently up to the entrance. The doors are open and I step inside, my white uniform shoes clicking against the tile floor. I move almost robotically as I open the door to the front office. I walk up to the desk. "Hi, I'm Ootori Nadeshiko! I'm here for my schedule and school map—"the lady at the desk cuts me off.
"No problem," she says and gets something from a file cabinet. "Here," she hands a few papers to me and I thank her, and then quickly make my exit. I find my homeroom class easily and find an empty seat near the window, setting down my bag and looking around the room. A pair of boys catches my eye. They look like clones of each other and I smile as I watch them.
"Let's play the Which One is Hikaru? game!" one says. They slap on two matching plaid hats and switch places a few times and stop. "So? Can you tell?" they say at the same time.
The crowd of girls in front of them looks perplexed and smile all together. One of them points at one of them nervously and says, "You're Hikaru, right?" she says.
"Uh oh, you got it wrong!" they say it like they're reading off of a script. I raise an eyebrow.
My phone buzzes 10 minutes before class starts. I look at it in my bag and see the text message. It's from my older brother, Kyoya. Welcome to Ouran, little sister. How'd you get out of Lobelia?
Long story, I text back.