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ON A GOOD day, Mina could wake up at 4 a.m., throw her necessities in her duffel bag and make it to the dojo by 4:45 a.m. This allowed her leisure time to get her gi on and then train for an two and a half hours with Matt Park head back to her apartment and get ready for school.
On the bad days, she would skip morning practice and instead barely make it in time for evening practice, getting in any time between 6 and 6:30, even though evening practice started at 5:30 p.m. But Matt was a champ and always pretended not to notice her slip in late.
Today, Mina had decided, was a bad day. An extremely bad day. So bad that she was thinking of ditching karate class all together, taking the train to downtown Queens and just taking pictures for her college portfolio. After school of course.
She didn't know why exactly but today was determined to be one of the worst days of Mina Miyazaki's entire life.
Not only had she woken up late for school, she missed her train causing her to run to another train station (2 miles but still? Who wanted to run first thing in the morning?) Upon reaching Midtown High, her Physics teacher had chewed her out for being 45 minutes late to class and had refused to listen to Mina's very valid excuse.
To top that off, while she was getting ready for gym class, Mina had tripped over someone's discarded shoe and fallen down hard on her butt. She was fairly certain she had bruised and possibly even broke her tailbone and add to the fact she'd run about 2 miles already, the laps and final Physical Assessment of the year they had to complete were absolute murder on her. And this had only been the beginning of the day.
Around lunchtime, and after Mina had dragged herself to her usual table in the crowded cafeteria, she felt like even dying would require too much energy. So instead, she allowed herself to slump onto the table miserably.
Her best friends Peter and Ned watched her pitiful state with equal parts sympathy and amusement.
"Mina, you can't just die at the lunch table." Ned said cheerfully. Mina rolled her eyes and watched Ned picking up his carton of chocolate milk and sip it slowly, savoring the chocolate goodness.
Mina moved her head slowly to look at him, watching in jealousy as he enjoyed his cold beverage and sighed loudly, turned her brown eyes pleadingly to Peter, who clutched his milk in protection.
"Not mine, I paid with my own money for this."
Mina groaned in frustration, her thin shoulders slumping in exhaustion, before forcing her hand to reach into her pocket and feel around for change. She pulled out a handful of quarters, and with painstaking concentration, Mina counted out $1.50 and pushed it across the table, towards the boys.
"Can one of you please buy me chocolate milk?" She asked, her voice on the edge of begging. Peter, bless his heart, shrugged and set down his plastic spork, grabbing the money and walking to the now short line of people.
