How to Kill a Phoenix

1: EMILY FUJIMOTO

"Normal people pray to be strong. Me? I pray for strength, and power, and freedom. Oh yeah, and the guts to hold all three at the same time. That's how you own the world. You lose one of them, it's the world owning you." – E. Forstner

***

"Miss Fujimoto," the male teacher addressed with a frown, sitting behind his desk with his fingers crisscrossed.

Emily Fujimoto stood with her hands behind her back, her dark brown eyes brightening behind her glasses. "Yes, Mr. Tanigawa?" she asked without any hints of guilt.

Tanigawa heaved a sigh. "I received reports that you were going around... trying to be an information vendor. 500 yen per info or something."

"Oh, so selling information is wrong then?" she asked cheerfully, her head of flowing black hair bobbing.

"It's not right, the way you did it." The young teacher took of his glasses, wiping them. "It's irresponsible and is socially harmful. It's about respecting other people's privacy. As your class teacher, next time, I wouldn't hesitate to take disciplinary actions if I have to call you into my office for the same reason."

"Okay, maybe I'll turn up here with a different reason then."

"Fujimoto," Tanigawa continued, throwing a stern gaze. She avoided eye contact. "I have no idea why you would start something like that. I don't think you're hard-pressed for money, your father is a CEO."

"Eh, you don't know my father," Emily drawled, but the teacher ignored that statement.

"And you're not the kind of rowdy student who cause mindless trouble either. Your grades are not bad and you don't really flunk classes - just that the teachers mention that you always seem bored during lessons. You're just an oddball sometimes, like... I heard that you offered to do paid work for the Student Council."

"Eh, been doing odd jobs for them for two months already, you have no idea how lazy they are," Emily added.

"And you tried to bribe Mrs. Kotomori into allowing you to flunk her classes."

"It's charity with mutual benefits, my investigations told me that she was having financial troubles. Ten thousand yen per class, I didn't try that with any other teacher..."

Tanigawa paused, scratching his head of curly hair. "For heaven's sake, why won't you act or think like other fifteen-year-olds?"

"Does your expectation of how a fifteen-year-old should be like exist in the real world?"

"And then there's that one time you tacked an advertisement for 'paid private video actor wanted' in the girls' bathroom."

"Eh... I wanted to teach some people a lesson. You have no idea how many people answered that, Sir, and who - or what they thought the advertisement meant." And I gave them the address to the Principal's house.

The teacher paused. "Are all those your way of doing social experiments?"

"Wanna see the experiment reports?" The teacher didn't respond, so Emily continued, "Eh, I won't have the chance to do any of those other than at school. One day I'm going to turn eighteen, and my father would probably monopolize any decisions on my future, and hello, Vanity Fair, the cruel cruel world of adults! Why, oh why am I born in this age of rising modernity but degrading humanity...? I'll probably end up married to some husband two or three times my age with sexual impotence to boot. Then I'll be contemplating suicide, or turn into an unfaithful woman, luring young men into my fancy apartment..."