A Ballpoint Pen and a Poor Blonde Girl (1)
Looking back on it, school had always been a kind of knot for me.
Some people hated it, calling it a set of shackles that bound them down, while others found joy in it because it meant getting to see their friends.
In my case, I was firmly in the latter camp.
There was something delightful about learning new things in a place devoted to learning, and once I got to university, I even received funding to research the fields that genuinely interested me.
Perhaps because that mindset was so deeply ingrained, the thought of attending the Academy left me tossing and turning in anticipation last night.
My main goal, of course, was to find a way to cross paths with that poor blonde girl—but even so, I was excited.
Yes.
That excitement was exactly the problem.
"Late on your very first day of school. Honestly, I'm impressed."
If Muriel hadn't woken me—still wandering around dreamland well into the morning thanks to my sleepless night—I probably wouldn't have stirred until the sun was nearly at its peak.
At which point I would have had no choice but to declare an impromptu day off for myself.
"Now, open up."
Muriel held a strip of crisply fried bacon to my lips as I sat in my chair, still half-asleep. The savory smell of the oil made my mouth open on reflex, and the long strip of bacon slipped right in.
"All done?"
I nodded with my eyes closed. When I opened my mouth again, a sunny-side-up egg was popped inside.
"And let's tidy up those clothes of yours, hmm?"
While I chewed on the egg, Muriel smoothed out the wrinkles in my shirt with her hands and even did up the buttons I'd left undone.
And so, about five minutes after waking, I had finished breakfast and gotten dressed without lifting a single finger myself.
I'd never once thought of Muriel as a mother—but with her handling my every need like this, I very nearly did.
Anyway.
Thanks to Muriel, I left the house a little later than planned, but looking thoroughly presentable all the same.
"Off I go, then."
Muriel waved me off from where she leaned against the doorframe.
"Take care, dear. And make some friends while you're at it."
The dreamlike weekend passes, and the weekday inevitably arrives.
Most people—the students buried under their studies, the workers ground down by their jobs—do not welcome the return of the daily grind.
Lily Elphin, a student at Trinity Academy, belonged squarely to that category.
She hated weekdays.
Not because of the mountain of assignments, or the professors' brutal pacing that filled an entire chalkboard in the blink of an eye.
"……"
Lily, who had risen early to head to the lecture hall, felt her expression sour.
It was because of the scrawl she'd discovered when she went to close her dormitory door.
Beggar, get out of the Academy.
It was a familiar sight.
Most of the Academy's students were wealthy, or nobility, or otherwise people of power—different flavors of the same privilege.
To them, the poor commoner students who had neither money nor connections were a kind of cancer, dragging down the standard of the institution simply by existing.
"Well, at least there's no magic on the door today. That'll make it easier to wipe off."
Lily fetched a bucket of water and a rag without a word, then crouched down in front of her own door. With the rag soaked through, she scrubbed at the message—written in who knew what, ink or something worse—until it smeared away.
"Look, she's at it again."
Students passing by spotted Lily and scoffed.
"……"
Lily ignored them.
Experience had taught her that engaging with people like that only made the torment worse. Refusing to react at all—denying them any entertainment—was the best way to suffer less.
"Hey."
A girl poked at Lily's shoulder as she kept scrubbing, her head firmly fixed toward the wall.
"Did you come to the Academy to study, or to clean?"
Lily's hand faltered mid-scrub.
"If it's cleaning you're after, why don't you do my room too? I never bother tidying up, so it's an absolute mess."
Clean your own damn room.
The words surged up her throat, hot and bitter, but she swallowed them down with effort.
"Oh—of course, I'm not asking for free. You know what kind of poverty you're in, right? Here. Take it."
Ting. Ting-ting.
Several silver coins flicked from the girl's fingers clattered to the floor. A couple of them rolled and rolled until they came to rest against Lily's feet, lying flat in the dust.
"That should be plenty, right?"
Lily's hand, clenched around the rag, trembled.
She would admit it.
Of all the humiliations she'd endured, that moment ranked high enough to be nearly unbearable.
Open, vicious personal attacks flung at her to hurt her—one of those, she could almost handle. But this. Being tormented as if it were only natural that she should serve them like a slave—it felt like having her pride scraped along the ground, and it was so, so hard to bear.
"Clean it properly. I'll be checking later. Understood?"
The voices of the group that tormented Lily faded into the distance.
Only after turning her head just enough to confirm they were truly gone did Lily exhale the breath she'd been holding—a breath thick with swallowed rage and tears.
"Check it? Says who? Who decided you get to—"
She looked down at the silver coins scattered on the floor.
A surge of want rose in her to pocket them—but she fought it down desperately.
The moment she let herself be used like a slave once, the rest of the students would surely pile on with the same kind of humiliation. And she had no intention of obeying that girl's orders in the first place.
And besides—money that wasn't earned through honest labor wasn't money she would take.
Carrying them around in her pocket would only give someone an excuse to make trouble, so she'd have to return them later.
Time slipped by, and Lily, scrubbing at the graffiti in a daze, finally straightened her back and wiped the sweat from her brow.
"What time is it?"
The very moment she reached for her watch—
Bong─ Bong─ Bong─
The Academy's bell tolled, as if in answer, announcing the start of lectures.
"Ah!"
Lily hastily shoved the bucket and rag into her room, grabbed her things, and bolted for the lecture hall.
She was already late—running her hardest wouldn't change that.
But who knew? If she strolled along at her leisure, the professor might let slip some genuinely useful information in the meantime.
And so, as she ran toward the lecture hall, she spotted a male student in the distance.
Probably another latecomer, just like her.
Except his attitude toward being late could not have been more different from hers.
He strolled along at a leisurely pace, enjoying the sunlight through the glass-walled corridor, taking in the scenery like a man out for a morning walk.
And so Lily, sprinting from far behind, and that male student arrived at the door at the same moment.
Despite the urgency gnawing at her, Lily did not reach for the handle first.
How dare someone like you enter the lecture hall before me?
There had been more than one occasion when a noble picked a fight over something this trivial.
But then, there had also been the opposite.
Do I really need to go to the trouble of opening this door with my own two hands?
She'd been accused of picking a fight once, just for standing there staring at a door without opening it.
The truth was, no matter what she did, they would manufacture a reason and pick a fight regardless.
While Lily's thoughts churned, the door slid open with a groan.
"Go on in first."
Lily's eyes darted about.
She'd been burned so many times by now that receiving a kindness like this made her downright suspicious.
Warily, she stepped through the door into the lecture hall.
Thankfully, the male student did not grab her by the hair, nor did he stick a foot out to trip her.
Maybe he's just a kind person. He's a face I've never seen before—maybe he doesn't know who I am, that's all.
Lily slipped in through the back door and quietly took an empty seat.
And the male student sat down in the seat right beside her.
She didn't need to turn around to know that countless stares were fixed on this spot—she could feel it as a prickling sensation at the back of her neck.
Why is he sitting next to me?
Nothing good could come of this.
Was he really that oblivious?
She was in no position to be worrying about anyone else—but worry was exactly what she felt.
Lily quietly pulled out her cheap, low-grade paper and a quill for taking notes.
Scratch, scratch.
She pressed the quill to the paper and began to write.
─ There's nothing good about sitting next to m—
Pop—
Mid-stroke, the nib tore straight through the paper.
She'd been in such a hurry that she'd soaked it with too much ink—and besides, the paper was trash to begin with.
"Try this one."
At that moment, the male student beside her slid something over toward her.
It was, presumably, a pen.
A pen with a nib shaped a little different from a fountain pen's.
She had no idea why he was suddenly handing it to her, but he kept giving her looks that seemed to say go on, use it, so she had no choice but to take hold of it.
And then.
Swish.
"Huh?"
Unlike the quill she'd always used, the ink glided onto the paper as smoothly as a ball rolling across the floor.
It didn't flood with too much ink, didn't blob or smear—writing with it felt far better.
The male student in the next seat suddenly leaned in and asked:
"Pretty good pen, isn't it?"
Lily froze, flustered.
That's— that's not what's important right now……
What comes to mind when you think of school?
There are the people, of course—teachers, professors, students—but really, what school simply cannot do without is school supplies.
The memory comes flooding back: pocketing the allowance your parents gave you for supplies, heading to the stationery store to buy what you needed, then blowing whatever was left on cheap junk food.
But I digress.
What are school supplies, exactly?
Pencils, notebooks—things you need for learning, no more and no less.
And the school supplies in this world are garbage.
The quality of the paper is incomparably worse than anything from my old world, and the pens that students use day to day are every bit as dreadful.
Honestly, after a few years of using them I had adapted—but I could never quite forget the feel of the paper and the ballpoint pens I'd used in my previous life.
So I made one.
A ballpoint pen.
Since these were so cheap you could buy them for pennies back home, most people probably have no idea just how sophisticated the engineering behind one actually is—
Tap, tap.
The poor blonde girl in the next seat tapped my arm with her finger.
Then she slid her paper over to me.
Written there was the following:
─ There's nothing good about sitting next to me. Why don't you go find another empty seat?
I looked at her.
She stared fixedly at the professor as though nothing had happened, listening intently to the lecture.
It seemed like advice offered out of concern—worry that I might get bullied the way she did.
I wrote my reply on the paper she'd handed me and passed it back.
It read:
─ Let's be good friends from now on ^_^
"……No."
Having received my reply, she turned to stare at me with an expression that plainly said, are you serious?
I flashed her a big, cheeky grin.