She not only broke up with me in a crowded school hallway but further drove the knife in my back by announcing that she was leaving me for another girl. This particular week, as I’ve said, had not been a good one for me: To begin with, I had been dumped by my girlfriend Noriko-chan at the beginning. But they were my friends so she tolerated them. My sister didn’t care for my friends that much, always insisting that they’d “turned me to the dork side” as she liked to say. The only thing that set me apart was that I was a bit of an otaku and sci fi geek, and hung out with a group of like minded friends. We didn’t really have a lot of money, and mom and dad worked hard to provide us with what they could, but we’d never be mistaken for rich. Apparently, Misako had come from the cool side of the uterus. I lived with dad Kenta-san and my mom Miharu-sama my as well as my older sister Misako-chan, who was everything I wasn’t: Smart, charismatic, popular and well liked. I was into a bit of sports and got acceptable marks without being too exceptional, and all in all, I was just one of the crowd, trying to make his way through his teenage years in modern Japan. I didn’t even look that much different from anyone else: I was a short, lanky guy, not a whole lotta muscle on me, with thick hair down over my ears that I had colored a brownish red color, again, just like a lot of guys my age. Up until this point, however, I had been a rather standard, unremarkable Japanese boy, going to school in Tokyo like just about a million others. My name is Hisoka Saski, I’m eighteen years old, and I was already having a bad week when everything went topsy turvey for me.