"Mimi?" The voice of her mother brutally woke Mimi up. "Come on, princess, rise and shine, or you'll be late for your first day at school." Mimi groaned. "I'm up!", she called, as she spottet her school uniform, lying neatly on a chair next to her bed. "At least you have now no excuses anymore to buy new clothes for school", as her father had joked. Yeah, great!
As Mimi got up and into the bathroom she could feel the nervousness inside her growing. How would the Odaiba High be like? She was used to an American High School with cheerleaders, football captains and "freaks". Mimi hated this word. And she hated this superficial classification of people. Just because someone likes books they can be called nerds? Or being interested in science makes someone a freak?
Not that Mimi had any reason to complain. At her old school in New York she had been the trendy and pretty Japanese girl with a handsome boyfriend and dozens of friends (or people who had liked to call themselves her friends). And Mimi had played her part well. But now she didn't want to play anymore. She just wanted to be Mimi Tachikawa. Was that so hard?
At this point, Mimi started thinking about the boy she had sung with yesterday. Izzy … He had looked so cute with his red hair and the black eyes. He was small, not taller than her and her former schoolmates probably would immediately had classified him as a geek. But Mimi didn't care. Izzy was so complete unlike the boys she had met before. Okay, she didn't really know him that well. Or did she? This moment they shared, singing with him … In this seconds Mimi had been closer to Izzy than she had been to anyone else. Including her American boyfriend Michael.
Mimi splashed water in her face. "Stop thinking about this!", she advised herself. She didn't know anything about the boy. Izzy, was that even his real name? Where did he live, who was he? "Maybe I should just call him", Mimi thought. She did have his number after all. Now she only had to work up the courage to actually use it …
All in all, Mimi's mood wasn't the best as she entered the Odaiba High School, feeling nervous, alone and wearing a hideous green uniform. It only got worse when Mrs. Sakurada, her new Math and English teacher looked at her disapprovingly.
"You should know that at our school we tolerate no highlights or curls in the hair of our students", she told her seriously. "But this is natural!", Mimi assured her. "My hair has always been like this!" Mrs. Sakurada wrinkled her nose, but finally, she seemed to believe her. "Follow me", she told Mimi. As her teacher guided her to the classroom, Mimi was glad that her hair wasn't pink anymore, as it had been shortly before they moved back to Tokyo.