Daisuke here. Last time we met I joined a secret organization of exorcists who hunt down evil monsters which are disguised as regular animals. My training was going great until a super powerful fox monster attacked and my teacher tried to kill me. Now my friends and the organization are accusing me of being a monster in human form, but that can’t be possible, can it?
Chapter 10
"Despite spending over three weeks in isolation for Ebola, local high school student Daisuke Matsumoto, has made a miraculous recovery and gone on to come first in the local high school three hundred meter sprint. He also broke the record set by ex-Olympic gold medalist Charles Thomas in 1961. Daisuke always sleeps in class and sits out during P.E, so I didn't even know that he could run, said one student. He ran fast, almost too fast, said another. Daisuke is a great example of what you can achieve by just having a go, said his homeroom teacher. I hope his effort will motivate other students to participate more. WHAT THE HELL IS THIS CRAP!" Screamed my sister as she threw the newspaper down on the table in front of me.
Despite my best efforts to conceal the truth from my sister, I had forgotten that the local paper had decided to run an article on my spectacular victory. They even printed a photo of me receiving my trophy at the school assembly. I was probably the only kid at school who had to lie to their family about doing well at sports.
"I've never won anything in my life!" I said while hugging my trophy to my chest like a teddy bear. "You can't take this away from me!"
Shuro wanted to take me out for hamburgers to celebrate, so he was a little taken back by my sister's furious attitude.
"What's with you Kanako?" Asked Shuro. "He won a race, you should be congratulating him, not laying into him."
"Shuro," said my sister. "The truth is," her mouth began to open and close, and I thought it was finally the moment where my sister would come clean to her husband and I wouldn't have to lie anymore. After a minute she managed to say "Daisuke has been taking drugs."
Shuro's eyes widened in shock and he sharply inhaled. "No, you can't be serious," he said. "Daisuke would never take drugs, would you Daisuke?"
"Of course I wouldn't, but then again maybe I would, perhaps," I said. Sis was giving me her scary face and I wasn't sure which lie I was supposed to follow along with anymore. "But they can never take away my trophy!"
"I don't understand," said Shuro as he began massaging his temples. "How did this happen?"
"It all started on his first day of school," said my sister in her most dramatic storytelling voice. "He was approached by one of his classmates and led out to the back of the yard. There he started hanging out with a strange group of students, and was slowly introduced to the dark and dangerous world of performance enhancing drugs."
"A group of students?" Asked Shuro. "Wait, you can't possibly be talking about the exorcists?"
"No, they are the…the..ex…the ex-students," said my sister. "Students who used to go to Dai-chan's school until the pressure of studying and coming first on sports day finally got to them."
"Daisuke," said Shuro as he grabbed me by the shoulders and looked directly into my eyes. "I know that always coming last can be difficult, but this is not the way."
"Huh," I said.
"It's okay Daisuke," said my sister dramatically. I didn't know when she became so skilled at over acting. "We can work through this together, as a family." She gave me a giant hug, but it was way stronger than normal and it felt like a threat.
Thanks to my sister I was subjected to an hour long lecture about drugs from Shuro and his print-outs from the Internet. I'd never taken drugs in my life, and I didn't resist peer pressure in eighth grade to go smoke a cigarette behind the bus shelter to suffer through that.
Shuro was the closest thing I had to a brother/father and Sis made me feel like I'd let him down. I had instead let my sister down, but that wasn't the point. Shuro was even talking about sending me to rehab at the local community center, and I knew that's where they sent kids from my school who were caught doing drugs in the forest. Hikaru thought it was a new kind of playgroup, and she had a one hour tantrum when we told her that she couldn't come.
Sis had gone too far this time, so I confronted her on the veranda after Hikaru had gone to bed and Shuro was in the bath. I opened the sliding door to find her leaning over the railing and looking up at the stars. It was a clear night and the moon was large and bright. I was almost overwhelmed by its beauty before I remembered how angry I was.
I gave Sis my best angry face. My best friend in elementary school said that it just made me look constipated, so I had been working on it over the years.
My sister turned towards me. We locked eyes for a moment before she sighed and returned to looking at the moon. "Why are you giving me that look?" Said Sis. "I wasn't the one who broke my word."
"Hey I have every right to be-," I said before I noticed the smell of cigarettes and a suspicious trail of smoke rising up from one of the pot plants. "Have you been smoking again?"
Sis sighed and pulled a packet of cigarettes and a lighter out from the foliage of the pot plant. "Okay, you caught me," she said as she took one cigarette from the packet and light it. Sis once told me that she smoked when she was younger but had since given up. Now she never smoked unless she was stressed out. I always knew that things had to be bad when Sis started smoking. I wanted to scold her, but I had more important things to get angry about.
"I don't get it, why do we have to keep lying to Shuro?" I asked. "He already knows about exorcists and monsters, so I'm sure that he'd be open to the whole super exorcist thing."
"It's not that simple," said Sis.
"Sure it is, he plays video games all the time. I'm sure he's open to anything."
"That's what all guys say," said Sis as she exhaled and blew smoke into the night sky. "Until they find themselves faced with a three foot rabbit monster, and all of a sudden they start screaming like a girl. Then the next thing you know they're out playing around with some busty tramp that they met at a Halloween party, and you have to cancel your wedding."
I wasn't sure how to counter that, but it did explain why my sister's ex-fiance may have left her many years ago.
"Is that why that dude left you Sis?" I asked.
"That's not my point," snapped my sister. "The truth is Shuro has never seen a real monster. To him it's all just a bunch of stories I told him about my childhood. You grew up with father so you may have been more open to becoming an exorcist, but Shuro lives in a different world. To him the world is all numbers, meetings, Sunday dinners, and he seems happy that way. He won't react well if we told him the truth about you."
"You're over reacting, we're like best friends!"
"It's like nothing I say ever gets through to you!" Said my exasperated sister. "You seem to have forgotten about how the organization wants to take you away, but they certainly haven't forgotten about you. And they aren't going to anytime soon. Trying to explain everything would take forever and it would only make him worry. You'll give Hikaru nightmares if we tell her you might be taken away."
"It's all cool Sis," I said. "If they try that you and Akito can stop them!"
"I don't know if we can," said Sis. She finished her cigarette and extinguished it in the pot plant soil like an ashtray. "Anyway, the truth is that Shuro thinks of you like a real younger brother and Hikaru adores you. What's wrong with letting things remain this way for a little longer?"
"But they're going to find out eventually," I said. "We can't just keep on hiding it forever!"
"Yes, but hopefully by then they'll be older and more prepared to accept the truth! Just give me more time Daisuke," she said when she saw the look on my face. "I have been living in this world of monsters and exorcists far longer than you have, so just trust me on this."
I huffed and turned to leave. I had lived with Sis for long enough to know that it was impossible to argue with her when she became like this. I could only trust her judgement and hope that she wasn't wrong.
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