Slum Online Read Free Page A

steady stream of pinky nail–sized water drops dribbled from the tip of the umbrella clutched in her right hand.
    I pulled the earbud from my left ear.
    “Can I sit here?” she mouthed more than spoke. Her voice had the saccharine squeak of an anime character.
    I glanced around the room. Pairs of long, rectangular desks stretched from just in front of the lectern to the back of the classroom. Each desk sat three people, and they were all full. All, that is, except the seat next to mine.
    I moved my bag out of the seat. The girl gave a quick nod of thanks and sat down. I restored my headphone to its place in my left ear, and the music blossomed from tinny monaural to full and vibrant stereo. Resting my chin on my hands, I resumed my observation of the fluorescent lights.
    Fluorescent lights flicker off and on at a rate of something like fifty or sixty times per second. I read somewhere that there’s a tiny little man who runs electricity through the mercury vapor inside the tube to make it glow. When the light flickers, it’s the little man catching his breath. And when the light gets old and starts randomly blinking off and on, well, that’s the little man’s fault too. Sometimes I wonder if it would be possible to see each individual cycle of light—on off, on off—the way swordsmen in samurai novels can peer through each individual drop of rain as it falls from the eaves of a roof. There are people who can push a button sixteen times per second, so why not?
    I shifted my gaze from the light to the girl sitting beside me. She was still getting her things out of her bag. Her notebook was easily three times as thick as mine, and her mechanical pencil wasn’t 0.5 mm—the accepted standard—but a hefty 0.7. Clearly, she didn’t mess around.
    She opened her notebook. Neat rows of kanji filled the college-ruled pages from the top-left corner to the bottomright. Her handwriting could have passed for the work of a professional calligrapher. It was about two hundred fifty-six times neater than mine. If you measured the space between characters with calipers, they’d probably have no more than a millimeter’s variation. She had probably sent off for one of those calligraphy-writing kits they advertise at the back of manga. And it hadn’t just sat around on a shelf collecting dust once it arrived. No, this was a girl that did her homework.
    She scowled and let out a long frustrated sigh. Reaching once more into her bag she pulled out a plastic case. Within rested a pair of round, silver-rimmed glasses with extremely small lenses. She placed the glasses on her face with both hands and promptly joined the masses copying notes off the board.
    She was left-handed. Her right hand smoothed back her jet-black hair while her left produced picture-perfect characters with breathtaking speed. The silver rims of her glasses scattered metallic light as she looked at the blackboard. Still wet from the rain, the shoulders of her Naples yellow blouse clung to her skin. Her damp hair clumped together, casting a spiky anime-shadow across the back of her neck.
    She had a faint, sweet scent about her, like the olive tree growing in our neighbor’s yard. I felt my breath catch in my throat.
    This wasn’t the sort of girl who stockpiled attendance cards so she could sleep in. She highlighted passages in her textbook and notes, which strongly suggested she actually read them. She didn’t cram for a test the night before, and she sure as hell never had to do a makeup test. She’d probably graduated with honors from a private high school. Daddy’s little girl. Daddy the famously rich banker or politician. In short, she was just the kind of girl I wanted nothing to do with.
    Making no effort to be quiet, I opened my bag and shoved my blank loose-leaf paper and mechanical pencil inside. I hefted the bag to my shoulder, pushed back from the desk, and stood.
    “Mind handing this in for me?” I held out two blue attendance cards. Across one