Passion Pink

◆ Tsukasa

Every good story begins with an introduction.

At least, this is what the novelists have stated, and continued to state, for years and years now.

But it has always worked.

So, now, I do believe I should introduce myself, to whoever will see my story someday.

I’m Tsukasa Aishi. Sixteen years old, born in February 22nd, under the sign of Pisces. About to enter high school, with two best friends forever, and a mantis enthusiast. One funny thing about mantises is that, when they are mating, the female eats the head of the male, but it stays alive for a while. Strange, isn’t it?

Right now, I’m hiding in the bathroom of my warm, cozy home, while my friends Chiho and Tae call for me to come out.

Why?

Because today is the welcoming ceremony for the new first-years at Shinkō Academy, one of the most prestigious schools in Japan, with an entry exam cutoff score of 85%—the toughest ever recorded.

And we passed the exam, so, now, we’re students there.

“Kacchan!” Chiho shouts. “Come out, or we’ll miss the train!”

I met Chiho when we were in kindergarten. Being a Junji Ito manga enthusiast and loving to dress up as a gothic lolita has always made her apart from others, and back then, that was no different. But I befriended her, and I know that, behind her horror books and black eyeliner, Chiho is a gentle girl. She says that she will always be glad that I appeared to her that day.

And Tae—fashionable, popular, upbeat-with-older-sister-vibes Tae? We met her in fourth grade. She was a little older than us—delayed a year for unknown reasons—but soon she became our older sister and trend advisor. And, of course, boy scouter.

“Rainbow-chan!” Tae exclaims, loud enough to pass through a mile of concrete from the street to the bathroom. “Come out!”

Why does she call me Rainbow? Simple. Because of my eyes.

Ever since I was born, my eye color has changed to reflect my emotions. I’ve been keeping tabs on them for a long time, and now I know what color means what emotion—bright sky azure for joyfulness, pale lemon yellow for anxiety, indigo for loneliness, etcetera. So, basically, I have literally no way of hiding what I’m feeling. Even if I cover up the expression, the color of my eyes will tell the world how I’m feeling.

“TSUKASA AISHI, COME OUT RIGHT NOW OR I’LL SUE YOU!” Tae screams, so loud it almost shatters my eardrums.

“OK, OK, I’m coming!” I exclaim, finally leaving the bathroom and hurrying to join Chiho and Tae outside.

As we finally reach the subway and catch the train to the school, I get a feeling that something’s about to change. If it’s for the better or the worse, I’m not sure… maybe both.

I just hope high school is as breezy as it appears to be in the shoujo mangas.

When the bus finally stops in front of the Shinkō Academy high school building, I’m so nervous I could pass out on the spot. After all, to my shoujo-manga-addicted brain, high school is the place where real life happens. Where the joyful, timid protagonist meets the cute guy who changes her life and makes her feel butterflies in her stomach every time he’s around.

Even here, in Shinkō Academy, where only excellence has a place, romance must exist. Right?

“Wow, this place is huge!” Tae exclaims. “Don’t you agree, eh, Rainbow-chan?”

“Yes!” I reply, a huge smile on my face. “I can already guess we’ll be having a great time here, Tae, Chiho-chan!”

Chiho peeks over her Junji Ito manga volume with an uneasy look on her face. “I don’t know, Kacchan,” she says, hesitantly. “I’m getting a bad feeling about this school… Almost like we’re going to lose something important here.”

“Nonsense!” Tae says, jokingly slapping Chiho in the back with enough force to send the frail girl staggering. “This is Shinkō Academy! The place where geniuses are made and bettered! How can we lose something important here?” Suddenly her expression turns mischievous and devilish. “You aren’t talking about… our virginity, maybe?”

“What? NO!” Chiho screeches, her face fully red, before recovering her composure to speak again, still uneasy: “It’s just… I feel like something is wrong here. Like…” she pauses for a moment to think, then continues: “Like that moment in the horror movies where you are sure there’s something behind the door a character is about to open, but if you could tell them you wouldn’t know how, and then afterwards BOOM! They die gruesomely. You get what I mean, right?” She finishes pleadingly.

I smile at my gothic lolita friend and give her a reassuring pat on the shoulder. “We’ll be fine, Chiho-chan,” I tell her, looking into her violet eyes that are, as usual, lined with black eyeliner and a dash of eye makeup on her eyelids that are opening and closing rapidly. “We—me and Tae—will be okay. We won’t let anything happen to any of us, okay? We’ll be okay.”

Chiho finally returns my smile, but I can tell by her body language she’s still not so sure. “Okay, Kacchan,” she says. Then, looking up defiantly at the towering onyx-color building and the blood-scarlet anemone flower at the heart of its school emblem, she adds, “Let’s get going. We shouldn’t be late for the welcoming ceremony, lest risk anger our future senpais.”

At this, Tae grins. “I hope we have some hot senpais this year. Then, maybe Rainbow-chan will find the guy for which her eyes will be pink, like the cheeks of our favorite shoujo heroines!”

“I hope so too,” I say. But I don’t tell Tae what my type is because then I’d have to tell her about the dreams I’ve had since childhood. The ones with that boy with soft-looking black hair and brown eyes warm like hot chocolate.

Back then, I didn’t know why I had these dreams, but now I’m sure of the reason.

Because those dreams show me what my soulmate—my fated one—looks like. Black hair, not swept with hair products but instead naturally messed yet beautiful. Warm brown eyes, and a smile that invites me closer, lights up inside of me a fire I don’t know yet.

Maybe—just maybe—I’ll find him here. Find him, and then know what does romantic love truly feels like.

Hopefully.

I’ve been sitting in the plastic chair for exactly five minutes according to Chiho’s pocket watch when someone walks to the stage. The three stars in the collar indicate it’s a third-year student. He stands behind the lectern and starts speaking into the microphone.

“Good morning, everyone,” he says. “My name is Manabu Hakanagi, and I’m the vice-president of the Shinkō Academy student council. I am here because the president has had an emergency and therefore could not come to the ceremony, so I shall take his place for now.”

He clears his throat again, then continues:

“As a senior, I am glad to welcome new students into the bright halls of Shinkō Academy, but is also my duty as your senpai to inform you that there are rules you must obey, lest risk stains on your school record or even expulsion.”

I can feel the sudden change of airs in the room as everyone takes in his words. Next to me, Tae, who we know is somewhat of a troublemaker, sucks in a sharp breath.

Apparently unfazed by the tension in the hall, Vice-President Hakanagi-senpai continues his speech:

“Such rules include, under any circumstances, not leaving the classroom at any moment during class. This is a major rule of the school and any infraction of it will hand you a one-way ticket to the headmaster’s office. Three infractions, and expulsion is what you get.”

A collective gasp. I can’t help but be shocked too. Not being allowed to leave the classroom until the bell rings means no bathroom breaks at all. This might cause some issues, particularly for Chiho, whose kidneys are perpetually suffering from some sort of workaholic’s syndrome.

“It is also prohibited under any circumstances to bring any sort of recording devices to school, or to talk about the school’s policies to students or faculty from other schools. It is forbidden as well to criticize or ridicule the school’s policies.”

This lengthy announcement basically announces one thing to us first-years: what happens in the school stays in the school. It basically forbids, though Hakanagi-senpai hasn’t said this, to denounce bullying or any sort of abuse to adults outside the school. So, essentially, a female student could even be raped within school property and be forbidden to tell adults about it—not by the rapist, but by the school, the people who were supposed to help the student.

I can see Tae clench her hand into a fist and know that she’s come to the same realization as me. That we’ve been thrust into a black box—a place where everything can happen, and nobody would know unless they looked inside, which is forbidden.

Hakanagi-senpai seems unfazed by what he’s just said—what only scares me even more—and adds, as if that wasn’t already enough:

“Any infraction of the first major rule will result in a written alert to parents and a register in your school record. But an infraction of the second major rule will result in immediate expulsion and damage control.”

By ‘damage control’, he most likely means taking measures outside the line of the law—but he probably doesn’t know that himself, as a fellow prisoner. I wonder if he’s just reading from a speech someone wrote him, someone who actually knows what can happen within the walls of the school.

Finally, after what feels like a lifetime of minor rules and the distribution of the rule book—what looks more like an accordion than an actual book—the welcoming ceremony ends and the students are allowed to go.

I finally get it now—why only the students were allowed to go to the ceremony. It was so that the parents were not aware of the actual reason why does Shinkō Academy boast a 100% rate of famed college enrollment.

It’s because this is not a school. It’s an academic boot camp, a place where the phrase ‘forging great minds’ is given a new meaning: the literal one.

The next day, Mom and Dad drop me off in front of the building for my first day of school. They look so happy, what they have a right to be—I got accepted into Shinkō Academy, the best school there is in Japan and maybe in Asia. But they don’t know the truth about that place. It angers me that they think it’s a normal school, when it’s actually a totalitarian black box where the only information that gets out is that everything is OK or a pink slip for a dubious offense.

“I hope you have a nice day, Tsukasa!” Mom says, giving one last tug on my ribbon. “You look so good in this uniform, you know. Next thing you see there are boys all over you, so watch out.” Her expression turns fierce. “I don’t want any wolves lurking around my daughter!”

“Now, now, Ayahi, please don’t make a scene.” Dad pulls Mom away from me and then smiles. “But she’s right. If I see any man with dubious intentions near you, I might just have to dig out the result of my old habit of collecting shotguns.” He’s still smiling, but I can see the threatening undertone in his smile. I mentally pray for the soul of the male teenagers in this school and smile back at him.

“OK, Dad, I’ll keep that in mind when a boy asks me out.” I tuck some hair behind my ear and then wave at them. “See you later, Mom, Dad!”

“Bye, Tsukasa! See you later!”

I watch their car pull away and disappear in a corner of the street, then hurry towards the building because class is about to start.

I speed up the stairs like the devil is after me and then dash through the corridors, madly shaking my head to find my classroom. If I had to bump into someone, the perfect opportunity would be right—

“Ah!”

I collide with something soft and warm, and reflexively take one step away, my hand still pressed against whatever I crashed into. Then, a voice, coming from someplace above me:

“Are you alright?”

I look up. Who’s possibly the cutest boy I’ve seen in my whole life stares back at me, with gentle brown eyes that make my knees weak almost immediately. He has soft-looking, slightly wavy black hair with some bangs falling over his forehead. Up this close, I can even see his eyelashes moving as he blinks.

“Um… I…” My brain grapples for an answer, but everything about this boy simply shuts down the entirety of my language processing center. “Y-yes,” I finally manage to stutter. My eyes catch the vision of two stars in the collar of his blazer. One of my senpais. “I’m sorry, Senpai,” I say, wanting to bury my head into the ground. I’m sure my eyes must be orange by now.

He raises one eyebrow at me. “Um… Is it just me, or… did something about you just change?”

He’s noticed my eyes. This ridiculously cute senpai has noticed my eyes. Orange surely isn’t a normal color for an eye to be—

“Did your eyes just become pink?”

Wait.

Pink?

“P-pink?” I squeak.

“Yes, pink,” he replies. “Like a cherry blossom. A beautiful color, but… I could swear your eyes were pale lemon until one second ago.”

My brain doesn’t exactly register this, as right now I’m grappling with what he’s just told me. My eyes are pink.

If I remember correctly, pink stands for romantic affection—something I’ve found out by elimination process, as I’ve never felt like this before.

In my sixteen years of life, I’ve never felt romantic affection for anyone. Sure, there were boys who were reasonably attractive in other stages of school, but never once I have reacted like this.

Wait. Black hair. Brown eyes that make me want to melt. Could it be…?

Yes. This is him.

My soulmate.

The one destined for me, who has been guiding me in my dreams.

“What-What’s your name?” I ask.

He smiles—clearly amused by my antics—and I almost faint on the spot, because his smile is the brightest thing I’ve set my eyes on. Brighter than the sun on a kind summer day.

“Haibara,” he says. “Yukiteru Haibara. I’m a second-year, and the president of the student council. I couldn’t attend the welcoming ceremony because of family issues, but else you would have seen me there. Pleased to make your acquaintance, um…”

“Aishi!” I squeak. “Tsukasa Aishi! Tsukasa writes as ‘color’ and ‘eye’, because of, well, um, my eyes. I’m, um, a first-year. Pleased to meet you, Haibara-senpai!”

I feel a glitching pain in my eyes, indicating that my eyes are flickering between colors—a.k.a. feeling more than one thing at the same time. Probably, pink—pink!—and orange for embarrassment. And something else. Not something in my eyes, but inside my heart, my soul.

I’ve found my destined one.

Yukiteru Haibara… A beautiful name, just like you.

Don’t worry, you will love me too. After all, it’s set in stone that we will be together.

As soulmates.