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1- A dream?

As far as I can say, my life is one huge vulgar mess. And it's probably very safe to say that things are only going to go downhill.

One particular morning, I woke up to my phone buzzing in its usual obnoxious fashion to notify me that someone has messaged me. Damn. I had forgotten to mute it. I reluctantly moved my hand around the corner of my bed until my sorry fingers gripped my Samsung. It wasn't the latest model, but I can live with it. I wiped my eyes with my left hand, trying to wake them up properly in vain.

Groggily and very ruefully, I looked at my notification bar and saw that it was Hachiro who messaged me. This immediately made me glance at my alarm clock, which annoyed and surprised me further. It was 6 am. What the hell could have happened to make someone like Hachiro to be awake at this hour?

I must say this, however: Hachiro Naomi is my closest friend. Or maybe the closest person to ever receiving that title. I won't say he's my "best" friend because I hate that label almost as much I hate being woken up in the morning with some half-assed message.

Right, so I was sitting there, somewhat startled that it was him who took the time to message me. To my absolute horror and frustration, he had sent me artwork.

Let me get this straight. I am an art lover, and Hachiro's work impresses me a lot, but criticizing them in the morning isn't the ideal day starter. Good grief, if it were ANY other time of the day maybe I would have responded a bit more positively. I chose to ignore it and made my way to the bathroom to brush my teeth and get the sleepy-zombie look off my face. I had to prepare for school. It was actually a Saturday but school had been scheduled to take place in the morning anyways for several reasons I wasn't able to fathom. It was to start at 9am (an hour ahead of when school usually starts on weekdays), but I had homework due that day. Alas, homework due that I wasn't done with.

At this point you're probably wondering why I choose to describe this seemingly normal boring day, right? Il tell you why.

It was the day it all started. I could still recall what happened with even the minutest details if I wanted to.

Fast forward a couple of hours on that day and I was stuffing notes in my bag, trying to take off to school as soon as possible. I had to skip mom's well-made breakfast but a grown ass teen has to be ready to make sacrifices, right? Oh well. That's what I kept telling my empty stomach anyways.

Making it to school on time wasn't easy, but I made it. And since I walked there, I took pride in this fact. Trying to avoid annoying juniors, I quickly slipped inside the assembly hall. Taking a seat in my grade bench, I made myself comfortable so I can ignore the principal's stupid pointless speech in peace. I was about to glance around to see if any of my friends were here yet, when someone started talking to me.

"Do you have a moment?"

It was Hachiro, much to my surprise. He's usually at least 10 minutes late. And when exactly did he think it was perfectly fine to sneak up on me?

"Uhhh sure. What is it?" I responded, noticing how tired and pale he looked. I could tell that he didn't get much sleep last night from those black bags of skin under his eyes. Well, he never did sleep early but I could tell that the night had been troubling him in some way in the last 12 hours.

"Did you take a look at the sketch I sent you this morning?" He asked me with a hoarse voice that really didn't belong to him.

Shit. I didn't.

"Sorry man, I didn't have the time to. I wanted to look at it and give a thoughtful response so I left it for later. Is everything all right?"

"Oh.....I see. Well then please meet me during lunch. I have a few things to discuss with you.", he hastily hurried away further across the bench without any further discussion to join Troy, another friend who I didn't notice was there until then.