“Can you cover a smidge more of rent this time?”

“I’ll see what I can do,” he tried to mumble quietly on the phone hidden in an alcove between two school buildings.

“Oh honey thank you,” his mother replies with breathiness. Exactly did she expect him to do? He had school and then had to go to work immediately after. 

Seemed the only thing he had to himself these days was this stupid deck and even that didn’t seem like it was worth anything. A few kids had already begun to talk about the past, which is the reason why he wasn’t in any clubs. He was called The Student Killer Transfer Student. Long winded titled that irritated him.

“Yeah no problem, I’m at school though so don’t call me in class,” Katsunosuki told her. He hears his mother scoff on the other end.

“I am your mother, I’ll call you when I want,” she tells him.

“And that gets my phone taken away then you can call me all you want, but that time I really won’t answer,” he tells her.

“When did you get so rude?”

When did she gets so naggy? When he was younger he was the one taking care of her. He remembers her coming home drunk and how them living together now was some kind of redemption for her. And his second chance for her. She may not be drinking any more, but she always found a way to dodge responsibility. Nothing seemed to have changed and he felt rage boiling over at every slight indiscretion.

“I’m at lunch, I want to enjoy it,” he tells her and hangs up before she can say anything else. When he was younger he probably would have sought to seek hitting some punching bags. But these days that didn’t seem to do it with being overtired from school and juggling work. Paying the bills and other adult responsibilities. Maybe he should drop out?

But imagine how he’d look in Japan then? The things people would say about him then. They already called him a lazy student, who didn’t care about his education. Who didn’t put any effort into his work? Yet here he was trying to take a call from his useless mother and study for this next big test. He spent most of his lunch hour trying to catch up.

But it was tiresome and he couldn’t focus because he was tired and unfocused. How did they expect him to get home at 9 pm, to do homework, and somehow manage four to five hours of sleep and focus in class? Fuck them all. Fuck them. He wished to see them get their just desserts. Or something in this world to make them understand his position.

They try being a student, an employee, doing homework, taking care of their mother, making dinner, paying the bills, and then ask them to focus in school when you have all these other worries. He needed something to punch or beat on. He felt so bottled up most of the time.

What was this dumb card deck anyway? And why couldn’t he throw it away? He had never had interest in this sort of stuff before. Now he was holding onto in his backpack as if it were anything important. Maybe he should join that stupid Trading Card Game Club. The very thought made him laugh though. What a lame thought.