Things Can Go Wrong

Chapter Twenty Nine

JACK

It's Monday morning again in Koenji High, and school is the same as usual. Yesterday, Kirai and Aisuru explained what the "big stuff" was to me and to be brutally honest, I commend Aisuru for having to put up with Suji. I'm glad that he is doing OK now, as things seemed fairly rough for him (and it also explained the awkward staring between him and Kirai) so it's good to see the two of them openly telling others about their relationship.

As for the gang, we've grown hugely in terms of members; Kirai and Aisuru have officially joined, along with another girl named Sora, who has especially taken a liking to Tanoshi after he saved her from Suji (I can sense the stereotypical 80s rom com tropes from miles away!) and overall things seem to be going fairly well for the majority of the gang.

However, there is a slight catch.

Me, Danny and Tsuki have been getting these random texts from unknown numbers, each of them proclaiming that they know personal info about each of us, and that they will kill us if we say anything about the texts. Obviously, we have told family and friends, and they all had the same advice - just block them and move on.

And, we all understand that, however these texts have gotten more serious over time. It started simply with stuff like what our favourite foods were. Then it got to favourite TV shows, then it went to what was in our photo galleries to what was in our WhatsApp chats to death threats. All of this is happening for unknown reasons, and from my knowledge we haven't done anything wrong at all to deserve this.

While the gang have tried to figure out who this could be, we don't think we can really figure it out. I mean, there's been one obvious contender, Suji, but we haven't seen him around Koenji high for weeks at this point, and while he does have Satsujin, we haven't seen a set of chain-smoking teenagers with t-shirts with brandishing people being brutally shot or beaten, either. Besides, how in the world can someone access our private WhatsApp chats? I mean, Suji's pretty good at being a dickhead, but he doesn't strike me as the type to learn how to hack into people's computers.

So, we've had to just get on with our lives and try not to worry about the concerning texts. I've been trying my best to work hard in school and that's gone well so far. Call me a nerd all you want, but I'm not ending up like the chavs that want to earn minimum wage and spend all of their money on vapes or the new iPhone.

The only problem I've encountered school-wise, is that Tsuki's been looking really good. Like, jaw droppingly good. In fact, that's an understatement, she's been looking so good to the point that I'm genuinely considering asking her out.

This has built up gradually over this first term and I'm not sure why I feel this way, but I am definitely crushing on Tsuki. Sure, there's other boys who also seem to like her too (Look at how I reacted at the start of the year with those lads in English class!) but they all seem to be looking at her in more of a perverted nature than me. Keep in mind, none of those students actually know her.

Very luckily I do, and while I don't want to get my hopes up, I have a strange feeling that she might like me too. It's definitely a bit cheesy and this scenario feels as if it's from a terribly written American drama, but it's real for me, and I have to deal with it. I just hope she feels the same way.

On a different note, the school festival is this week, and things are beginning to wind down. Even though the school year is not over, it definitely feels like it (the Japanese school year is from April to March, rather than September to July like in the UK)

We get around eight weeks from the summer holidays, from July 16th to September 13th, and it's the longest holiday any of us have had, as just last year there were only six weeks before heading back to school. Us high school students are very lucky.

We've not made any plans yet, however we do plan to have a packed summer with the lot of us. I've been thinking of lots of different ideas and they all seem fairly possible, so hopefully we have a lot of fun this summer thanks to my (very stupid) ideas.

Right now though, I'm just trying to focus on schoolwork and hopefully this week goes by fairly fast.

After our first few lessons, we have lunch inside for a change and we sit at what is now our gang table rather than the infamous "foreigner table" and it feels pretty good knowing that when I walked in here on my first day, I was only with Danny, and now there's a good seven or eight people all following me (That sounded really badass)

Anyway, we do our usual things, chat amongst ourselves and have fun as usual, until Tanoshi's, Sora's and Kirai's phones all buzz simultaneously and as they all check, they all have received the same message, a snapshot of our private group chats once again. At first, we believe that someone's just trying to joke with us in the group, however that doesn't last long upon analyzing the number.

Tsuki gets a virtual phone book and types in the number on her phone, and upon it being analyzed, it is an anonymous number on a different phone network all the way in Osaka, which confuses us greatly.

We try looking up the number secretly on our phones during lessons, but nothing comes of it, and we walk home pondering on who is accessing our chats and messages. There isn't much input from all of us, as we can't really figure anything out. At first, I potentially think that someone's downloaded something from a dodgy porn site which in turn gave someone's phone a virus, but how can that virus spread to all of our phones? We haven't transmitted any data from our phones at all, seeing as the majority of us don't have cases full of USB sticks with the exception of Tanoshi and Sora.

In the end we give up, block the numbers and pray that nothing happens to us.