Chapter 4 – I Love Crazy Girls

My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird.

The school hallway was a chaotic river of bodies and noise. Girls shouted and laughed, slinging arms over each other’s shoulders. They moved with a casual confidence that owned the space. I was just a piece of driftwood getting swept along, trying my best to stare at the floor, the ceiling, anything but them. My homeroom was at the end of the hall. The nameplate on the door seemed to mock me.

This was it. The real test.

I slid the door open and stepped inside.

The chatter in the room died instantly. Thirty pairs of female eyes swiveled in my direction. The silence was a physical weight pressing down on me. The room was bright and airy, with large windows looking out over the sports field. It was a perfectly normal classroom, except for one glaring detail. Every single seat was filled by a girl. There was only one empty desk, sitting alone in the back corner like it was in quarantine.

It was waiting for me.

The teacher, a woman with sharp eyes and a no-nonsense bun, pointed a piece of chalk toward the empty seat.

“You must be Ataru. Take your seat. You’re holding up my lesson.”

I navigated the rows of desks, feeling the burn of their collective gaze on my skin. Whispers erupted behind me like tiny sparks. I could feel them dissecting me, from my cheap sneakers to my obviously nervous posture. I dropped into my chair, the plastic protesting with a loud groan. I wanted to disappear. I wanted to become one with the wood grain of my desk.

But another part of me, the stupid, traitorous part that got me into this mess, felt a spark.

I was the only guy. The center of all their attention.

A twisted thrill shot through me. Damn, this gets me excited.

A familiar blue screen popped into view, blocking my view of the cute girl with glasses sitting two seats ahead.

《Are you for real? You just had to think that. Brace yourself, moron.》

The warning was all I got.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

White-hot fire erupted behind my eyes. My back arched violently, slamming me against the hard plastic of the chair. My muscles locked, a full-body charley horse from hell. A strangled yelp escaped my throat. My teeth ground together so hard I was afraid they’d crack. The world dissolved into a haze of static and pain.

Just as quickly as it started, the current vanished.

I slumped forward, my forehead hitting the cool surface of the desk with a dull thud. My whole body twitched, a puppet with its strings cut. Smoke, or maybe just steam, curled up from my collar. I could taste copper and burnt toast.

“Hey, are you okay?”

The voice came from my left. I lifted my head, which felt like it weighed a hundred pounds. A girl with a short, sporty black haircut was leaning over her desk, looking at me with genuine concern. It was the same girl I’d seen on the way to school.

My mouth opened, but all that came out was a pathetic wheeze.

A girl sneered from the front row.

“He’s fine, Rina. He’s just an oddball. Probably did it for attention.”

I pushed myself upright, forcing a weak smile. My face felt numb.

“Sorry. Just a really bad muscle cramp.”

Rina didn’t look convinced, but she shrugged and turned back around. The teacher was already writing on the board, completely unbothered by my little episode. The other girls went back to their own conversations, writing me off as the class weirdo on day one.

Damn, that shock again? It felt stronger than the ones on the street.

The blue screen returned, hovering judgmentally.

《I already told you. The slightest perverted thought gets a shock. That one wasn’t slight. You’re an idiot.》

This stupid system.

《Diagnosis: Masochist. Confirmed.》

The red text glowed with an air of finality.

I’m not.

I screamed the words in my head, hoping the divine malware could hear me loud and clear.

I am not a masochist.

The rest of the class was pure torture, and not the kind the system thought I enjoyed. The lesson was on the founding of the city, led by a great queen whose name I immediately forgot. My brain refused to focus. It was too busy playing defense against itself. The girl in front of me stretched, and my eyes instinctively followed the line of her back.

《Zap.》

A sharp jolt, like a static shock amplified by a thousand, shot through my jaw. I bit my tongue hard to keep from yelling.

The girl with the glasses dropped her pen. She bent down to get it, and for a split second, my brain helpfully supplied a view that wasn’t mine to see.

《Bzzzt.》

My right leg kicked out, hitting the desk in front of me. The girl whipped around and glared. I mouthed an apology, my leg still twitching.

This was impossible. It was a minefield. Every glance, every movement, every stray sound was a trigger for a thought that would lead to pain. I spent the next forty minutes staring at a single knot in the wood of my desk, reciting the multiplication tables in my head. I focused on the boring, the bland, the beige. It was the only way to survive.

The final bell was a get-out-of-jail-free card.

I was out of my seat before the echo faded. I practically ran out of the classroom, ignoring the stares and whispers. I didn’t stop until I was out of the school gates and back on the familiar street. The walk home was a blur. I was a zombie, a robot programmed with one mission: get home. Don’t look at anyone. Don’t think about anything.

It almost worked.

My apartment door slammed shut behind me.

I leaned against it, my chest heaving. I was safe. I was finally, blessedly alone. No girls. No triggers. No shocks. I dropped my bag on the floor and let out a long, shuddering breath. The silence of my empty apartment was the most beautiful sound I had ever heard.

Then I saw them.

Neatly placed by the door were a pair of shoes that were definitely not mine. They were bright pink sneakers, scuffed around the edges, with the laces untied. My blood ran cold. My entire body went on high alert. Someone was in my apartment.

I crept into the living room, my heart pounding a frantic rhythm against my ribs.

A figure was lounging on my couch as if they owned the place, casually scrolling through their phone.

It was a girl. She had bright pink hair tied into two messy buns.

It was her. The girl from the crepe stand.

She looked up from her phone, her expression a perfect mask of boredom. The same cold, unimpressed eyes that had dismissed me so easily yesterday scanned my apartment before finally landing on me.

“Took you long enough.”

My brain short-circuited. A million questions crashed into each other, forming a traffic jam of pure confusion. How did she get in? Who was she? Why was she here? Was she going to insult my shoes again?

But one thought rose above the noise, clear and undeniable.

Systema, I love crazy girls. And this girl, with that defiant pink hair and that impossibly cool, detached attitude, was the craziest of them all. I love her.

I braced myself for the inevitable, all-consuming agony. I clenched my fists, waiting for the lightning strike.

Nothing happened.

Not a flicker of pain. Not a single jolt. The air remained still.

The girl tucked her phone into her back pocket and stood up. She wasn’t smiling, but the corner of her mouth twitched, like she was enjoying my complete and utter bewilderment.

“Nice to meet you. My name is Sakura.”

I finally found my voice. It came out as a squeak.

“How did you get in my apartment?”

She held up a small, silver key and dangled it from her finger. It glinted under the light.

“My aunt is the landlord. She mentioned a new guy was moving into this unit and asked me to drop off a spare key, maybe make sure you hadn’t burned the place down yet.”

Her story sounded plausible. Too plausible. It didn’t explain why she was sitting on my couch in the dark like some kind of pink-haired ninja. She took a slow step towards me, her eyes never leaving mine.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Rough first day at school?”

Her walking toward me, the smirk on her face, the fact that she was here, in my space—it flipped a switch in my head. The fear and confusion were replaced by a wave of that old, stupid confidence. She broke into my apartment. She was waiting for me. The game had completely changed.

She was clearly into me.

The blue screen flickered into existence right in front of her face.

《You’re beyond saving.》

A vicious, targeted jolt shot straight into my spine. It wasn’t the convulsive, full-body seizure from the classroom. It was a sharp, nasty spike of pain that made my back arch and a grunt of pain escape my lips.

Sakura stopped, raising a perfectly sculpted eyebrow.

“You okay? You keep twitching like a weirdo.”

I straightened up, rubbing the back of my neck and forcing a laugh that sounded more like a cough.

“Yeah, fine. Just a pinched nerve or something.”

She didn’t look convinced. She closed the distance between us until she was standing right in front of me, forcing me to meet her gaze. Her eyes glinted with a mix of amusement and something else, something I couldn’t quite read.

It looked a lot like trouble.