Do you ever notice, when you have a really bad morning, how things just tend to get worse? That no matter what you do, everything that's shitty in the world just comes flying your way? That no matter how many hobos you give your clothing to, girls you rescue from trash cans, or drug dealers you take the hit for, your day still just sucks?

Yeah, I was having one of those days.

I was running to school because I slept through my alarm clock. Today was an all-day tennis camp, and I felt like, as the captain, I shouldn't be late. Especially since I punish so many people for being late, it was just really hypocritical for me to be late. Regardless, I was late. I was running. Next thing I know, I'm flying through the air, hands out in front of me to break my fall. OW. I rolled onto my back, facing my attacker.

Honestly I almost burst out laughing. He was about 5 foot, and probably like 500 pounds with the biggest breasts I had ever seen. A cigarette hung out of the corner of his tiny mouth, the ashes falling and burning a hole through his t-shirt that just barely covered his beer bulge. The funniest part of this man was the woman's Seigaku tennis workout tank top crammed onto his massive body.

"Give me your shirt."

What.

I took a second to straighten my glasses and brush the dirt off my shirt (which ultimately ended up more dirty because my hands were bloody) before responding. I guess he took my lack of response as an insult, because he kicked my shin, hard. I almost screamed like a little girl, I won't lie. I ripped my shirt off and threw it at his face, nursing my leg. And then, in the most adorable baby voice I've ever heard, he says:

"Thanks baby doll," at which point he crams my shirt onto his lard and saunters off like a princess. I stared for a good 30 seconds in pure shock before I pushed myself up off the ground. My leg was screaming bloody murder as I took steps, so I limped, shirtless and bloody, determined to get to tennis on time. Someone honked at me, at which point I looked at the ground and refused to look up again until I got to the courts.

"LET ME OUT YOU PIECE OF SHIT," a woman suddenly yelled. She sounded close, but I didn't see anyone, so I kept walking. "COME BACK HERE!" I jumped this time, searching for the source. My search quickly led me to a silver trash can, where the lid had been clamped down. Someone was in there! I quickly ripped the lid off only to be knocked back 10 feet with 120 pounds of girl crushing my nuts. She was shirtless as well, left with only her bra and a short pair of shorts. I might have paid more attention to her appearance if I didn't feel like I was being castrated. She shot up off the ground, glowing with anger.

Once she was done using my balls as a cushion, she was actually pretty attractive. She was tan and in shape, with medium brown hair that probably would have been really nice if there wasn't a banana peel stuck to the right side of her head. I recognized her from school, but I had never made an effort to talk to her, and she looked like I was the last person she wanted to see right now.

"Did that bastard take your shirt too?" she shouted at me. It was 7AM and I was already tired of being yelled at and beaten on. This was my first sign to just go home. Of course, saintly old me refused. Do the right thing he said, it will pay off in the end he said. Well he was a retard. And by he I mean me.

I would just like to say, in my own defense, that I am a pretty decent guy. I mean, it may seem like I'm a hard-ass, but really I only act that way because I know what it takes to be the best of the best. I'm a stickler for the rules, but what is the point of having rules if you don't follow them? And who cares if I make people run laps every now and then. Tennis was a physical sport. It's not like running's bad for you. But the way they carry on, you'd think I was making them army crawl the laps. It's enough to make any person annoyed once in a while. That being said, I didn't really think I deserved to be in jail right now.

That's right. I, Kunimitsu Tezuka, was currently sitting half naked and half-hearted in the Tokyo Province Slammer.

But back to this morning. After the girl calmed down, she revealed that her name was Phoenix and she was the captain of the girl's tennis team. The boys and the girls always started the morning together during the tennis camps. The morning was when we did things like calisthenics, stretches, and general gameplay. We decided to run to camp, even though we were already late, and both fretting about showing up together without pieces of clothing. When we finally got there, everyone was running, and I felt genuinely uncomfortable being there. I could tell Phoenix was feeling some heat too, because she just stared at her feet while everyone gave us the one over. Sensei Ryuzaki just looked at us, shook her head, and told us to fall in running laps. We were instructed to do a hundred, but everyone else only had to do 75, and they were already at 50. Everyone wanted to know what the heck we were doing, why we were late, where our clothes were. At this point I liked having Phoenix around because she told everyone animatedly of this gay hobo who had attacked us on the street, which people responded to with a variety of confusion, shock, or laughter. Apparently she had been running to school and got tripped as well, but instead of demanding her shirt, he simply took it and dumped her in the trashcan and clamped it shut.

When everyone else stopped running, we kept going in silence, powering through so people would stop staring at us. When we were done, Sensei Ryuzaki told everyone to begin stretching. She took Phoenix and I aside, saying we could go get a drink of water while she went and got us some clothes. So there we were, Phoenix dunking her head in the fountain, trying to scrub banana out of her hair, and me washing the cuts on my hands.

"Hey," someone called. I hadn't even noticed these two guys coming up to us. They were…punks. Punk was the only word that came to mind when I thought about them. They had baggy pants and backward baseball caps. A backpack was slung around one guy's shoulder.

The guy without the backpack had shaggy blond hair and aviator glasses. He tilted his head to see us. Phoenix finally pulled her head out of the water and slung water all over the guy with the backpack as she shook her head to get the water off. She turned around, looking equally as confused as I felt.

"You the guys?"

I looked at Phoenix. Phoenix looked at me.

"Um…no?" she said, trying to take a step back and hitting the fountain. She was trapped.

The guys weren't scary or anything. They just looked like a couple of pothead kids up to no good. They shrugged and with a "peace" they were gone.

"What the hell?" Phoenix asked, watching the guys as they slouched off. "What is up with this day?" she asked herself more than she asked me. We started to head back to the courts, which were hidden by the trees.

BAM. I fell to the ground, slamming my clean hands into the dirt. I tumbled, and it took me a second to realize that someone has tackled me. I rolled out of my tackle, but Phoenix wasn't so lucky. She hit the ground face first, earning herself a mouthful of dirt. A slightly overweight cop was sitting on her (even though she was putting up a hell of a fight), handcuffing her hands behind her back. My pursuer, who had tumbled off, was back for more, wrestling me to the ground and handcuffing me as well. Phoenix was shouting a long list of profanities at the cops, who yanked us off the ground and were hauling us off campus. I was too scared to fight back, so I just quietly walked with the cop, but Phoenix wasn't going down that easily. The guy was sweating profusely as he tried to contain her, but even with her hands behind her back, she was beating the shit out of him. He was screaming us our rights before she gave him a direct kick to the nuts, and he went down.

She turned to me and the policeman holding my upper arm in a death grip. She looked tribal, her face covered with dirt and blood which was spurting out of her nose, her eyes wild. And then, like that, the policeman pulled out his Taser and gave her a direct shot to the neck. She mumbled something that sounded like "muffins!" and fell to the ground, passed out.

"Get off your ass, Kukai," my cop, who was much bigger and stronger, scoffed. Kukai got up, wiped his brow, and threw Phoenix over his shoulder like a rag doll. Her eyes were rolled back in her head, and she was drooling all over the back of the cop's shirt.

"You two are under arrest for the suspicion of illegal drug trafficking."

"What?" I demanded, stopping in my tracks. The cop yanked at my arm, but I wasn't going to budge until I got some answers.

"Don't play dumb," he sneered. "We personally witnessed the drug transfer between you two and the dealers by the water fountain."

"You're mistaken," I said as calmly as I could muster, even though on the inside my heart bounced around in my chest in panic.

"Yeah, yeah, we'll see what you have to say behind bars."

I was, to say the least, freaked out. I walked with my head down, but I really felt like screaming. I was so scared. I couldn't go to jail. What would my parents say? I'd be kicked off the tennis team! My entire life flashed before my eyes, and it sucked! They escorted us to their squad car, throwing Phoenix in behind me. We sat in dead silence as we drove through the city. I was going through my entire life in my head, trying to figure out what to tell my parents, how to explain this to Ryuzaki. I was so screwed. This was ridiculous. Phoenix finally came about, sitting up. She was mumbling to herself, playing with the handcuffs behind her back.

"You should really think about the way you treat an officer," the fat one said, turning in his chair to look at Phoenix. She didn't even acknowledge him. She kept her head down, still rotating her hands and tugging on the handcuffs. "Though I wouldn't expect anything better, with kids these days," he said, and both the officers laughed. "Parents just don't know how to raise their kids anymore."

And then Phoenix did the worst possible thing. She spit on the guy, right in the face. He flung himself backward against the dashboard, wiping his face with his shirt.

"You brat!" He reached through the bars, trying to grab onto…what. I didn't know. She rolled back in her seat, stomping the bars, crushing the guy's hand. He shrieked, and the driver swerved into traffic from the guy falling all over him.

"She fucking broke my hand!" the cop shouted at the driver. The driver shoved the guy back into his seat.

"Say another thing about my parents and it will be your neck," she said. What was super creepy about her statement was that it didn't even sound angry. She just stared at the guy with absolutely no emotion for a few seconds, and then she returned to fiddling with the cuffs.

"We'll drop them off at the impound and then we'll take you to the hospital," the driver stated gruffly, sounding annoyed. And that's exactly what they did. They dumped us off in a cell, locked the door, and left.

Phoenix sat still just long enough for them to leave then ripped her hand free from the cuff. Her wrist was circled by a black and purple bruise, but she just shook it off and started examining the door.

I was still in shock from being arrested. I just sat while she paced the cell, occasionally tugging at a random piece of the door. She took a hairclip out of her hair, which was stained with blood and dirt from rolling around on the ground. She jammed it in the lock and began twisting it wildly.

"What are you doing?" I finally asked.

She looked at me incredulously. "You're seriously going to sit here until those retards come back to arrest us officially?"

Well, I was planning on it.

"We can't just break out of jail. Then we'll be in even more trouble," I said, trying to reason with her. At least this way there was a chance we could get out of this with clean records.

"Tezuka," she said as if she was annoyed that I was trying to restrain her from becoming a criminal. "I just broke an officer's hand. I'm not coming out of this with a clean record." I got the feeling she was hiding something from me, but I honestly did not care because I was in jail.

And that's where I was now. Sitting in jail, half naked, all panicked.

There comes a time when a man must choose what is right and what is wrong. I was all set to choose what was right, and just wait for the officers to return. But when a pretty girl asks you to help her break out of jail, there was no saying no. Also I was scared to be in the same room with her after what I just saw.

She had constructed a makeshift key, and all she needed was to offset the door. She told me to lean while she pulled up, and then the door swung off its hinges, just like that. I stared in disbelief. She ripped her bobby pin out of the key hole and returned it to her hair, and quietly opened the door to the main office. I followed begrudgingly. There was one plainclothes officer sitting at the desk, his head slumped back. He was asleep. Phoenix crawled to him, unhooking his key ring and motioned for me to move. I quietly made my way to the door, and then…

Ting!

The door had a little jingle bell attached to it. Phoenix shot me an "are you freaking retarded look", and then slowly backed away. The officer stirred, and Phoenix bolted out the door before it could even shut behind me. "Run!" she shouted to me, and took off down the road. I followed her, my arms still pinned behind my back, adrenaline coursing through me. I just escaped from jail! JAIL!

I had no idea where we were, and I was pretty sure Phoenix didn't know either, because she kept stopping and going, looking for a place to hide. We finally reached a park, and she dove behind some bushes, breathing hard. I collapsed to my knees, panting heavily. She pulled the keyring out of her pocket, and started to fiddle with my handcuffs. After an excruciatingly long couple of minutes, they slid open. There is no more glorious feeling in the universe than being able to move your arms after being handcuffed. I rubbed my wrists in relief, and for a minute I forgot all about the fact that I was now most likely a wanted criminal.

"Let's go home, dude," Phoenix said after a while. She looked totally beat, and I didn't blame her. She had taken most of the heat this afternoon. "I think we came from the south. So let's just start walking."

I didn't argue. When we made sure we didn't hear any sirens, we started to walk back the way we came. We walked in silence for a good two or three miles. The sun beat down on our skin, which was turning red as the day passed on. It was 9AM, and I had already gotten mugged, arrested, and broken out of jail. How could this day possibly get worse?

I should have not even thought that. As soon as the thought crossed my mind, an ancient car, probably older than Phoenix and I combined rolled up. A girl and a guy were sitting in the front, smoking a joint. They looked at us for a few seconds then the girl in the passenger seat said:

"Get in."

"Go fuck yourself," Phoenix said. She didn't even look at the girl, just kept walking.

"Hey, girly," the girl called. Phoenix didn't stop. "Come back here or you can kiss your boyfriend goodbye." I stopped dead in my tracks, whirling around. The girl lifted her hand out of her jacket pocket just enough to let us see a 32 caliber pistol. Phoenix stopped too, and I could tell she was quickly thinking through the situation.

"Now I said Get. In. The. Car." The girl said, real slowly. Phoenix looked at me, hopelessness plastered all over her face. She shook her head, and pulled open the door, getting in the car. I followed, a fresh wave of unease churning in my stomach.

We must have driven 10 miles before either of our kidnappers said a word.

"Do you know what you've done to us?"

Phoenix was staring at the floor, unresponsive. So I said "No."

The girl laughed at Phoenix. "Scared, baby? I ain't gonna hurt you." Still, Phoenix did nothing. So the girl turned to me. "See, we had a big drug deal goin' down today. Do you know where this was supposed to happen?"

I shook my head.

"I'll give you a hint. When we got there, a couple of retards were rolling around in the dirt, beating up a police officer. Yeah, you remember now, huh? Those two scumbags coming up to you with a backpack? That was meant for us. But they got real scared when the cops showed up, and they dumped the backpack way in the middle of Timbuktu. Well we already paid these morons, so now we gotta go get the pack. In a way, it was real lucky that you dumbasses got picked up by the police, because now the heat's on you, and if you get caught, it will only confirm that you two are the ones they're looking for."

"What do you mean, if we get caught?"

"It means, you moron, that you're going to get the stuff. And you're going to bring it back to us." She handed me a slip of paper with a meeting place. "You get back by 4PM, and we don't kill you, aight?" '

I gulped and nodded.

"Now get out." She said. I opened up the door, and stepped on the gravelly road. There wasn't a car in sight, even though I could see a small town way in the distance. I looked back for Phoenix, but she was still sitting in the car, head down.

"Did you not hear me? I said get out."

Phoenix uttered two words.

"Make me."

The girl pulled out the gun, this time pointing it at Phoenix.

"If I get to 3, you're dead. 1….2….Thr-" In the middle of 3, Phoenix kicked the gun out of the girl's hand with lightning speed. The gun went off, startling everyone, including Phoenix, but she picked it up and pointed it at the girl.

"Still think I'm a baby?" she asked, getting out of the car. "Get your shit yourself. Let's go Tezuka," and with that, she started walking down the road into town. She looked like a total badass, walking down a dirt road into the distance, a gun in her hand, hair blowing in the wind. I looked to the guys in the car, who were in shock, mouthing wordlessly to each other. I jogged after Phoenix, who was walking at a brisk pace.

Not soon after I caught up to her, I could hear the car roaring behind us. The guy was talking this time.

"Look," he said. "We have bad track records. If you just find the pack, we'll pay you. Handsomely." After no response, he just said to me, "Here. If you find it, call this number." And then they drove away. As soon as they were out of sight, Phoenix doubled over, crouching on the ground, letting loose a whole list of swear words.

"When I took the gun from that bitch I fucking shot myself," she said through gritted teeth. She pulled up her pant leg to reveal a bloody mess. The bullet had torn right through the side of her leg, probably embedded in the seat of the car.

"Why didn't you say something before?" I asked, kneeling down to examine the wound. It wasn't that bad, and could easily be stitched up, but it was still bleeding profusely and probably didn't feel too good either.

"Because I was trying to look hardcore so they wouldn't freaking kill us!" She shouted at me. "You were just going to sit there and take it!"

"So?" I asked defensively. "I didn't want to die! We aren't dealing with kids anymore. We're criminals thanks to you!"

She shot me a look that that made my insides crawl. "We didn't do anything. They had no reason to treat us the way they did."

"No. They had no reason to treat ME like they did. I wouldn't even be in this situation if it weren't for you," I said. It just slipped out. I didn't even mean to say it.

Instantly her face shifted from angry to hurt. She looked as if I had just slapped her across the face. And at that very instant, I realized everything she had put us through was for me, because she was right. If it had been up to me, we'd still be sitting in jail, charged with drug trafficking and God knows what else.

"Look, I'm sorry." I said, trying to backtrack.

"Screw you," she said, not even looking me in the eyes. She stood up with a fresh wave of blood rolling down her leg and started to walk to town. I followed, keeping an arm's distance away from her in case she felt like punching me.

We walked about a mile before she stopped. I could tell her leg was killing her from the way she was walking, so I figured she just needed a break or something. She just sat down on the ground, pulling her good leg up to her chest, burying her face. And then her body started shaking, and it took me a second to realize she was crying. I had no freaking clue what to do. I had seen girls do this at school before, but there were normally a hundred other girls that were instantly at the crying one's side.

Lucky for me, she started talking first. "I don't want to go to jail."

Well. That makes this conversation easier.

I sat down next to her and put my arm around her shoulder. I didn't want to asked why, because duh. There had to be some kind of rule about asking girls questions, and I'm pretty sure "Why don't you want to go to jail?" is on the do not ask list.

"How come?" Oh yeah Tezuka. That's a way better question. I'm pretty sure that was even dumber than "Why?"

Obviously she didn't care, because she responded with "Because they'll take me away."

"Huh?" Oh man. I was killing it. I must have sounded like a class act genius to her.

She looked up to me, and it almost broke my heart. Any trace of anger had left, leaving just pure sadness on her dirty face. She wiped at the tears, but all it managed to do was smear the mixture of crap that had built up over the course of the day.

"My parents," she said, letting out a shaky breath. "My father died in a motorcycle accident a year ago. I don't even know where my mother is."

It was hard for me to wrap my head around this. I had no idea. "So you…live alone?"

"Yeah," She mumbled, sniffling. She had stopped crying, but didn't look any happier. "When I first found out my father had died, I didn't know what to do. The police had returned my father's motorcycle to the house and asked me if I knew anything about the accident. I said no, and then they asked me how old I was. 18, I said. They didn't ID me or anything, but I knew they were suspicious. I was so scared when the social worker came to my doorstep. I told them Phoenix wasn't home. And then I slammed the door in their faces and packed up as much of my shit as I could into a duffle bag and a backpack, waited until late at night, and took my father's motorcycle and drove as far away as I could. I didn't even know how to drive and I drove hundreds of miles on the machine that my own father had died on. By morning I was in Tokyo."

"So what do you do now?" I asked.

She shifted uncomfortably. "Well, I go to school."

"Where do you live?"

"You are nosy. Let's keep walking," she said. She stood up, stretched, and continued hobbling toward town.

I had a bad feeling that she was keeping something from me. Something bad.

And let me tell you, I was tired of being right.