Five years ago

My life before I met Misaki Takasaki.

It was quite something.

I dragged myself onto the wooden park bench, gripping the splintering edge so hard it dug into my hands and extracted rivulets of blood. I wiped tears from my eyes, staining one side of my sleeve with tears and the other with blood dripping down from my raw palm. I hated wearing short sleeves - the long sleeves hid the purple bruises swelling along my arms. Even as I rubbed my face against my arm, it bumped against the contusions and spiked yet more pain. The harder I squeezed my hands, the less pain I felt, however. It gave me a focal point to drown out the roar of the rest of the world.

Before me, the silhouettes of the city blurred into a phantasmagoria of floating, multicolored lights. Blurred through the watery film over my eyes, then tears. I stooped my head and cupped my hands into it and began to cry. Really cry, not the tears that streamed down my face in silence for the past hour. The messy kind that caused me to wipe accidental snot dripping from my nose, the kind that made me scream like I was trying to cough out my soul, until my throat felt like a desert and I could taste the blood pooling in the back of it.

Not that anyone could hear it. I picked this spot because I had seen it empty so many times on the way back from school.

I cast a furtive glance over each of my shoulders, to check for strangers sure, but also to check for her presence. My circumspection would forbid me to do this in ordinary circumstances, but the bile had built within my raging heart and pounded from within like an overcapacity nitrogen canister.

"I HATE YOU!" I screamed at the world. It doesn't come out as impressive as I would have liked, having already frayed my voice into a hoarse thread of its former self, but I croaked it out with my remaining effort.

"What's the integral of the hyperbolic tangent function?"

"Logarithm of hyperbolic cosine!" a proud, cheery voice answered.

"Plus. C!" THWACK. "You forgot the constant, you sloppy, irresponsible child!".

I scrunched up my eyes even more, as if closing them could block the images and sounds playing through within my head.

"What is the contour integral of 1/z around the origin in the complex plane?".

A slightly more hesitant voice stuttered out, "I think it's…two…pi…i?".

THWACK.

"It's negative 2πi! The contour in the diagram is clockwise! Eugh, no wonder you haven't been able to learn the Cauchy-Goursat proof for the past hour! How will you ever do math being so careless, my own child? What a shame!".

I shook my head, trying to shake out the memories. My brain thrashed within my skull, hurting.

This time I was off by one on my index in the power series solutions to a regular singular differential equation I solved with the type II method of Frobenius.

By now I had come to expect it. My mother bemoaned nothing now. I stretched out my arms.

THWACK.

The wooden ruler shattered, digging splinters into my forearms and gashing them with the remaining toothlike edge. It raked my crimson flesh open like a tiger's claw, but in the instant after I could only feel a sting. Blood dripped, dripped, dripped down onto the textbook, moistening the pages with red.

Disarmed, my frustrated mother grunted, picked up the textbook, and tossed it at my cranium. The book split down the spine.

I wanted to stop the tears so much, I pressed my red-smeared fingers against my eyes until I thought they might burst. That maybe the pressure might dam away the effluence pouring forth. I tried to breathe, but the air passing against my abraded throat induced me to cough and made it worse, and I had to slow down.

My legs buckled under me as I jumped to bump back the volleyball. I crashed onto my ribs, ringing them with pain, although they held - I think. But I also fell onto my arms, purple splotches exposed by the accursed short sleeves on the gym uniform, and it hurt so much I couldn't use them to get up.

The other team scored a point.

My teammates mouthed things at me, but the pain filtered most of them out of my conscious focus.

"Come on scab-scum, why you got to be so clumsy all the time?".

"It's a miracle a kid as clumsy as you is still alive."

"What are you good for besides taking tests? Do you do anything else?".

"Come on, why don't you say something?".

I said nothing, and smiled back, hoping the other students looming over me go away.

Maybe they were right. What was I good for?

Taking tests. Doing homework. What did it matter, anyway? To get into a "good school", where smug kids made fun of me for my injuries and the persona of clumsiness I crafted out of lies because I didn't want my mom to go to jail.

I didn't want to go to a "good school" anymore.

I didn't want to go to school anymore.

I didn't want to…anymore.

I gazed upon the city skyline before me, beyond the railing. I rose, approached the railing, ran its cold, jagged rust underneath my fingertips.

I looked down the grassy incline - not steep enough, I thought, to do it…

"Excuse me~" a delicate voice drifted towards me, like a flower petal dancing in the breeze.

I stiffened and snapped my slouch into posture and whirled around to face the unexpected visitor. For a moment I worried it might be my mother.

Instead, the angel before me almost seemed to glow per se in the twilight's fading orange-blue light. A royal blue dress fluttered like a patriotic flag with her short black hair, the ends of which curled into a playful arcs below her chin. She was a kid back then, as was I, but even then the heavens had planted the recognizable seeds of her peerless resplendence.

A smile too perfect for reality, the kind I would only see on TV, adorned her face, until she saw me and modulated it into the exact appropriate frown of concern that I needed in this moment. Her wide-open eyes, dark and abstruse, relaxed to match. She took a seat on the bench, careful to avoid the bloodstains, and beckoned me to join her.

"Is something wrong?" she queried. A plainly nugatory inquiry, as she could tell just from looking over me, and yet I needed it.

I could only nod. Tears and grief so clouded my vision and mind that I couldn't even bring myself to feel embarrassed presenting myself like this in front of a stranger. Oh sure, I've seen her before, in the distance, as an unreachable background character of my life. A cheery, popular girl at my school from afar, always smiling and laughing and surrounded by friends. Two feet away, however, her beauty nearly suffocated me, and I wondered how I never remembered or interacted with her.

She gazed down at the city with me, her countenance melting into a distant melancholy, almost as if she forgot my presence.

Yet somehow, something about her mien reassured me that she didn't.

"Yeah," she continued, "something is wrong." She craned her head to look up at the sky, swinging her legs from the bench. "You understand, don't you?".

I didn't. I didn't even know what she's talking about.

"I'm a loser," I admitted, albeit with some difficulty next to this angel on Earth. "I think you're the most popular girl in our year. What could I understand?".

"Hmmm…" she hummed, before turning her starless night-colored eyes towards me. So deep, so large - I almost wanted to step into them and discover what's behind them.

"More than you think," she replied. "Sometimes, at home…with my family…I also want to cry and scream like you."

"Why don't you?" I asked.

"I think…" she began, trailing off to find the correct way to finish her thought. "I think, if you have a choice between doing that, and something else, then surely something else is better?".

"And what is that something else?" I pleaded, inching closer to her in desperation.

"Hmmm…"

She dropped silent for a good half-minute, tracing the bands and swirls of clouds in the starless firmament into patterns only she could see. I dared not interrupt, when she broke it with a nervous laugh.

"I don't know if you'll understand…it's not very logical…maybe I was just desperate…" she disclaimed. "But there's this boy…he gave me an eraser in fifth period once when I forgot mine."

"I don't get it," I replied. "Is it somebody I know?".

"Probably not, although I don't know who you know," she answered. "I…think I love him. And whenever I feel down, I try to think of him, and even when things are really terrible, it warms me up and makes me smile. It's like turning on a flashlight in the dark, or a lighter in the cold."

"It's useful," she added. "It's precious."

"Huh," I mused. "I'm sorry, I don't get it."

The girl smiled. "Maybe one day you'll get lucky too, and you will. Maybe you'll be better than me and have enough courage to…tell whoever it is about this."

"Gah!" she exclaimed, "Why am I telling you this!?". She extended out her pinky towards me. "Promise me you'll never tell anyone else, or…that's evil!"

I wrapped my pinky arounds hers and shook on it. "I promise - what's your name, actually?".

"Takasaki," she provided, with a grin and a head tilt.

"Reader," I replied.

"Reader-kun…" she enunciated. "Hey, I don't think we've met, but I always see your name at the top of the exam score lists! I don't know about you, but I think that's really cool! You should be proud of it, it's not easy. I should know, I'm not all that much good at studying myself…just never seems to stick."

"Love is just one example," she concluded, "just find something positive to be thankful for in your life that'll bring a smile to your face!".

"You think…it's cool?" I repeated, savoring the unfamiliar word.

"Yeah," she confirmed. "You should keep up the good work, it'll make you successful one day."

I couldn't help but crack a smile even in my despondency and my disheveled state, causing Takasaki to reciprocate.

"Well, I hope that helped." She rose and took a bow, hands together.

"Yeah…thanks, Takasaki-san."

"No problem. I always want to make people happy…even if myself - actually, forget that, bye!"

She nodded one last time, and then turned away, as my tears dried and long-unused, fatigued muscles contorted my mouth into a smile.

"You mixed up your totally antisymmetric Levi-Civita tensor of rank three again! How are you ever going to express cross products in Einstein notation!"

THWACK.

I gripped the ruler in my hand, arresting it mid-strike. The metal straight-edge dug into my palm, but I ignored it to wrest it away from my mother. Examining the instrument in disgust, I threw it away and it clattered against the wall.

I thought I could hear applause, and I turned. My mind could almost see Takasaki on a fold-out chair, rising to clap and smile for me. She mouthed some words - my best guess was "good job".

For the first time in my life, I wanted to hug a girl.

Author's Note: This is a crosspost of "The Optimal Girl", edited into first person to comply with FFN's policies.

Disclaimer: I do not own Koi to Uso & will comply with any legal order from its creators. Any reference to real life entities not intended to convey author's opinion outside storytelling purposes. This fic is not investment advice, solicitation of securities/derivatives business, or a campaign contribution. By reading, reader absolves author of all criminal/civil harm under laws, regulations, or SRO/firm rules, etc. Disclaimer applies to all chapters or reproductions even when not included.