As Amu closed her apartment door and bolted it shut, she sighed. Life was not going as she'd planned these days.
She looked at her fish, Nom, and gently tapped the glass tank that was his entire world. Unfortunately Nom, like most other fish in the universe, only did very simple things; eat, sleep, and bulge his eyes every once in a while.
She opened her old white fridge and took out a glass jug of milk, and chugged it. That's one of the benefits to living by yourself, she thought, you can chug. But she had a feeling her chugging days were coming to an end.
She was already behind on her rent and money was short...either she was giving up chugging and getting a roommate or she was getting evicted. And if she got evicted she would have to live with her parents, and she had a feeling they wouldn't support Nom's eating habits for long. Fish food cost.
Anyway she didn't want to impose on them. Her sister had just entered high school and her father had gotten sick, they didn't need more bills to pay or another mouth to feed.
She flopped onto her old couch and looked at the list of potential roommates she would be interviewing the next day.
When she was done cleaning Amu realized just how little possessions she really had, it made her apartment look huge.
And in reality it was, she'd gotten an excellent deal. Her landlady was an old eccentric who wanted to spend what little time she had left on this planet traveling the world. She'd said she only needed the money to fund her trip, so Amu could have the entire 2 room, living room, dining room, plus bathroom and utilities included for $600 a month.
She could have been living in a college dorm paying half the rent she was now but Amu had never really been a people person, she found it hard to be herself around them, even her family. So she sought out somewhere else.
She changed into her least ripped jeans and a black and pink striped t-shirt just in time for the first person to ring the doorbell.
It was disastrous.
The first person was a creep.
The second was a neat freak.
The third was a druggie.
The fourth was didn't speak Japanese.
And so on...
She had given up about an hour beforehand, when she heard a knock on the door. She opened it to a tall, dark-haired, blue eyed, man in his early 20's.
A "Roommate Wanted" add had somehow managed to find itself into Ikuto's bag and he'd decided to check it out, never thinking that anything would come from it.
But when he saw the apartment, he knew that it would be perfect for him. It had big windows, wood paneled walls, red brick floor and a lot of open space.
The was something about that girl, Hinamori Amu, that made it seem as though he could have told her the truth about his needing not to live with his family or in a dorm and she would have understood. But he could trust anyone with that secret.
His family was the proprietor of a huge and well-established company in Japan, and now that Ikuto had come of age they wanted him to go and study economics so that he could run the business.
Ikuto had rebelled against the plan; he wasn't the kind of person who could be confined to a office. So his family had given him four years to study music in college. Four years to become famous and prove he could make his own name in the world without family back up. They would pay for his studies, but he had to handle everything else.
It had all happened very fast really, he was still having a hard time believing it wasn't a dream.
So, a week later, when Ikuto was laying in bed the night before the first day of the term and was thinking over the last few days he'd spent in the apartment, he couldn't figure out how he'd gotten from his privileged caged home, to living, free, in an apartment with a pink haired girl named Amu.