Warnings: None

"The Girl Who Could Have Been"

This is deleted material that I scrapped from early chapters of Lucky Child.

In Lucky Child canon, Keiko defends Kuwabara from some punks (during the arc in which he couldn't fight for fear of expulsion from school). The next day she goes to school and Kurama sits with her at lunch. Then the fangirls start picking on her, and then Amagi steps in to put that drama to bed.

However, in an early draft of that arc, I wasn't going to use those fangirls at all. Instead I created a girl-gang-leader who went to Meiou and got angry that Keiko had beaten up some of her cronies while defending Kuwabara. Keiko would've been picked on by HER instead of Kurama's fangirls.

Meet Homura Mai, the girl who could have been, below.

She wore a Meiou uniform, unlike the guys, who wore clothes I vaguely recognized from a school across town. I vaguely recognized the chick, too, though more distinctly than the uniform. We shared one class, maybe two? Whatever. It wasn't like I knew her name. The girl—about my height with bleached hair and a mouth-morphing scowl—looked me up and down as she smacked on a piece of gum. One of her unbleached eyebrows rose.

"That her?" she said.

The punks (who had been staring at me with ill-disguised malice) looked down at their feet as one and mumbled an affirmative.

"Ha! She doesn't look so tough," the girl said. She marched right up to me, paying not a lick of attention to our classmates as they walked past us and onto the school grounds. "Yukimura Keiko, right?"

I squared my feet under my body. Nodded curtly. The girl's lips curled at the corners.

"So you're the bitch you beat up my boyfriends," she said.

Boyfriends, plural? Interesting. And if I hadn't known any better, I would've sworn she looked impressed—only the predatory glint in her dark eye promised retribution, not compliments.

"You weren't hard to find, y'know," she said. She blew a large bubble with her gum, then popped it. "Name-dropping Urameshi Yusuke like that? Rumor has it a friend of his just transferred here. Wasn't hard to put two and two together. You should try t' be less obvious next time."

"It's rude to ask for my name and not give yours in return," I murmured.

The girl blinked. Behind her, the three punks stiffened. They relaxed when the chick started to laughing, though, mouth so wide I feared she'd drop her bubblegum.

"Sorry, sorry!" she said. She stuck out her hand, American-style. I took it. Her grip was firm, far firmer than any typical Japanese handshake. "I'm Homura Mai." Her grin widened. "And I'm sorry to say that I've gotta pay you back for what you did to my boys. Woman to woman, ya get me?"

Around us, classmates chattered as they walked onto the school grounds. We stood a few feet outside the gate on the sidewalk. Some students walked past us without sparing us a second glance, but some of the upperclassman…their eyes darted toward Homura and darted away just as fast. No one outright ran away, or looked scared of her, but those telltale shifted glances spoke volumes.

This girl had a reputation, it seemed. One I knew nothing about. Best play this carefully, Keiko…

"Sorry," I said. "Your boyfriends were picking on my friend, and I'm afraid he can't fight at the moment. Call it transferred self-defense." I shrugged, maintaining a neutral mask as Homura narrowed her eyes. "They started it. But I won't go near them again, if that's what you want."

I caught Amagi at the lockers. She listened to my story—the punk-ass girl at the gate, getting tripped by her cronies during class—in polite silence (I mean, it wasn't like we were friends or anything) until I name-dropped Homura herself. At that Amagi gasped, one hand covering her pink lips in horror.

"Homura? Oh god. You didn't run afoul of her, did you?"

"Seems that way."

Amagi took me by the elbow, tugging me to the end of our locker row by the windows, where no one could sneak up on us. "Keiko, listen, you should just do what she said. You're new here, but her brother used to be king punk around here, and she's taken on that mantle since his graduation—with gusto."

I sighed. "So even fancy schools like Meiou have their fighters, huh?"

"Unfortunately. When her brother graduated she started giving orders to his…cronies? She calls them her boyfriends now. Most of them have graduated, but she's managed to amass a bit of a following despite that." Amagi shrugged. "She is far less threatening than her brother, but…"

"But now she's on my case." I breathed upward through my mouth, bangs fluttering atop my brow. "Great."

"What did you even do to her?"

"Um…I beat up some of her boyfriends?"

Amagi's jaw dropped. "You what?!"

Amagi, I'm sorry to say, never quite looked at me the same way again.

Afterword:

And that's the deleted material that's been sitting on my hard drive for the better part of a year. Nothing too noteworthy, but I rather like Mai and wanted to share her with you. The fangirls seemed more interesting than Mai since they helped me deconstruct/examine a fandom cliché, but I'll always think warmly of the Girl Who Could Have Been.

NEXT TIME I UPDATE, it'll be with a chapter from Botan's POV, relating to events in chapters 55-56 of Lucky Child. Be on the lookout for that!