Natalie

Chapter One

This is a fictitious work written by E.A. Norris. All characters and events portrayed in this story are fictional and all likenesses of characters to any real persons deceased or living are coincidental. All rights are reserved to the author and no part of this story can be produced or used for any means without prior consent from the author, herself.

Natalie

Chapter One

My name is Haruka but everyone knows me as Ruka, the wakagashira, or second in command of the Kokoro-en gang. I’m sixteen years old but don’t let that fool you. I’ve been on my own since I was thirteen. My parents had gotten tired of me. They were pissed off about my attitude and how much I got into fights and expelled from school, so they sent me to a boarding school. They said it was to try to straighten me out and make me more disciplined or some bullshit like that. It only made my attitude worse, sticking me in a school full of preppy bitches and assholes whose parents gave them whatever the hell they wanted.

Still, my rents would rather have paid the school about ten-million yen extraa year on top of the six million yen a year tuition to deal with me so they didn’t have to, so I started my first year of high school in one of Japan’s most prestigious international boarding schools just outside of Saitama. There was a small group of girls like me who didn’t give a rat’s ass about the rules, the school, or the fake bitches that went there and whose parents also paid the school out the ass to keep them. They became my gang and named me wakagashira under Rin, the oldest and reputed toughest chick in school.

The Kokoro-en was a pretty new gang, having started during Rin’s second year when the rest of us started showing up. There were about ten of us and we all wore tattoos, piercings, and the gang’s trench coat—a black coat with red lining that had “hate is love” in huge, flaming, red letters on the back above an even bigger black and silver broken heart in blue flames— with pride because they represented who we were. Our trench coat and some kind of tattoo of the gang’s symbol—the heart and flames— and slogan were our gang’s identification. If you had them, you were a Kokoro-en and you weren’t someone to be fucked with… unless someone knew better.

Even our hair defined us as Kokoro-en. All of us almost completely ignored the dress code, but most of us took it a step further by dying our hair in a bunch of loud, flashy, attention grabbing colors. In any Japanese school, dying your hair anything other than a natural color is enough to get you expelled, but nobody fucked with or said anything to us about it. They’d have gotten their asses kicked. Mine was to my shoulders, layered and black with red streaks— not too bad. Rin, on the other hand, had short, cornflower-blue hair with long bangs in the front and cerulean-blue streaks (she’d taken the crayons out of the box and showed them to her hair-dresser, telling him that those were the exact colors she wanted).

Rin was the baddest bad-ass of us all. Nobody fucked with her and got away with it. Even the teachers didn’t wanna look at her the wrong way. She was more vicious than a Pit-bull, Rottweiler mix, and once she was set on destroying you, there was no way you could escape it. Rumor had it that she’d gotten expelled from every other school she’d been at for fighting. She even almost killed one of her teachers by beating him with a pipe for calling her “little.” Rumor had it that the only reason she was still at our school was because her parents paid the school almost twenty-million yen more than anyone else to keep her. That was double what my parents paid to keep me there.

Rin and I had gone to the same middle school, but we’d never actually met until I showed up here at the boarding school.The boarding school was much smaller than our middle school and it was almost impossible not to know everyone, even if only by face. The entire student population was only about one thousand four hundred with about sixty more guys than girls. Anyway, when Rin and I met, shit hit the fan. We instantly hated each other and fought constantly. One day when we’d beaten each other to a pulp again behind the girls’ dorm hall, she smirked, and wrapped her arm around my shoulder saying, “You’re all right, kid. I like your spark. Whattaya say about joining me and tearin’ this shithole apart?” We were inseparable and unstoppable from that point on. No one was safe from our wrath—no one.

Anyway, that’s a whole other story. The real story that I wanna tell you about started on the first day of the fall semester of my second year at the school. Everyone had been woken up at six to have time to shower, get dressed, and eat before classes started at eight, and I rushed to the bathroom to take a shower before they got too crowded and the hot water ran out. Like every day, as I was getting out, the morning crowd was rushing in. When I got back to my dorm—which I had to myself (not that I minded) — I got dressed in the stupid uniform, adding my own personal Kokoro-en flare to it. I’d had a roommate at one point. Her name was Chika and she was one of the imouto, or “little sisters,” the lower ranked girls in the gang.

Chika was about one hundred forty five centimeters tall—tiny and unimposing compared to some of the other girls— and had hair down her back almost to her ass. It was black with bright pink and purple streaks in it and she always wore it down or in a ponytail. Her “Kokoro-en flare” was all pink, purple, glittery, and girly. She had bows and barrettes and pink skull-and-crossbones with bows on them, too. Her make-up was bright, flashy, and gaudy, along with the rings that she had in her lip and ears. She was a disgrace to the gang, in my opinion. She’d gone through the initiation so Rin saw her as a member just like everyone else in the gang, but I couldn’t stand her. Her music, her style, her attitude—it was all preppy as fuck and I hated it. When the semester started and she’d been assigned to room with me, I was pissed, so I bitched out the headmaster and told him that if he didn’t get me a room to myself, he was going to have a dead body to deal with. After that, I got my own room.

Anyway, the uniform was a red plaid skirt that all the girls rolled up past their knees and black pants for the guys, a white button down dress shirt, a black and gray plaid tie, white knee high stockings with bows on top with the same pattern as the tie or just plain white socks for the boys, and black flats or dress shoes. I thought it was too formal, so I loosened the tie, replaced the knee highs with fishnets and the flats with my favorite belted platform combat boots, and wore my Kokoro-en trench over everything. Just ‘cause I knew that there were people that didn’t like me, like a few of the guys in the guys’ gang the Jigoku Ryouken, I slipped a knife into each of my boots and another one in the waistband of my skirt. They’d come in handy the year before, so I didn’t go anywhere without them.

It was still a little plain to me, so I added my accessories— my own personal touches that separated me from the other Kokoro-en. Everything I wore was black, red, or silver, and fire, skulls, studs, and/or spikes were on all of my accessories. Everyone had their own favorites in the gang, but if someone claimed something or had higher status in the gang even if they hadn’t claimed something first, no one else could have it. It was all about originality and if someone copied your style when you claimed it, it was enough to mark them for a beat down and a stripping of their rank. I was wakagashira so no one else could have my colors or my designs, even if they’d claimed them before I had, just because I was second in command.

I finished my make-up— black eye liner, mascara, and black outlined dark red lipstick— and walked to the cafeteria to eat my usual breakfast of tamagoyaki, rice and miso soup with a cup of tea with the rest of the gang before we separated until lunch. Everything seemed normal. There weren’t any fights to be had or people to put in their place, the guys from the Jigoku Ryouken left us alone, the preps avoided me, the teachers scolded me, and I ignored everyone. Since there wasn’t any gang stuff to be done and I was tired of all the noise, I decided to actually go to my class in Academic Building A next to the guys’ dorm hall and get some peace and quiet for once. I could fall asleep and nobody would mess with me, and the gang wouldn’t know where I was. I was sitting in the spot in the back corner next to the window in class and everything changed when I walked out of the classroom to go to the bathroom. That’s when things got weird.