My Life is Not a Manga, or maybe...

Harem Scarem: 020

I stared at Mom, completely nonplussed for a moment. "How—" But I couldn't finish the sentence. I just started silently crying.

Mom moved so fast I could barely track her, and an instant later she was embracing me, hard.

There's something uniquely horrible about suffering alone. I'd known that I was under heavy stress due to this whole stupid situation. I'd been living through the mood swings from anger to helplessness and back. I'd railed against my fate, I'd tried to live with it, I'd done my best to distract myself. But I'd done it all alone. There was no one I could even talk to about it, because they would have rightly assumed that I'd gone 'round the bend and I'd likely have some very interested psychologists to add to my problems shortly thereafter.

I hadn't realized quite how much emotion I had been repressing, but now that I'd started crying I was finding it incredibly hard to stop, which was super embarrassing. Not least because I was still suffering from a head cold, and my sudden bout of waterworks was causing all sorts of fluid-related issues in my sinuses and nose.

I dripped and sniffled and failed to adequately deal with the situation, and throughout it all Mom just held onto me with a grip of iron, ear up against my chest while I leaked onto her hair.

# # #

After far longer than it should have taken, I finally calmed down, we removed the tea bags from our over-steeped tea, and sat down at the kitchen table.

"How did you know this is a manga?" I managed to get more than the first word out the second time around.

Mom looked grim. "I've been wondering if something is up for a while now, but I was nearly certain when all those girls came by to see you when you'd missed a single day of school."

"Yeah, that was pretty weird, huh."

"Your reaction, though—how long have you known you're in a manga, Peanut?"

"I broke the fourth wall back in early summer. You know, the day Seamus invited me to Tracy's?"

"How long had it been going on before then?"

"I think it had just started. Mom, how did you even notice? Has—something like this happened to you?"

Mom looked away. "I—shortly before I met your father in college—I was trapped in a death game."

"Shit!" Mom doesn't like swearing, but she didn't bat an eye at that. There's not a lot of genres that would be worse than a death game. As the name suggests, it's a literal battle to the death, typically between normal, or mostly normal, characters who are somehow coerced into participating. Death games never end well, and typically explore the levels of depravity and insanity that people can descend to in horrific, no-win situations. Suddenly Mom's weird emotional hang-ups when it comes to conflict resolution were making a lot of really scary sense.

"I'd rather not talk about it," she said quietly. I could completely respect that. I wasn't sure I wanted to, either, despite my horrified curiosity. "Do you know your genre?"

"I'm pretty sure it's a seinen rom-com harem."

Mom frowned, drumming her fingers on the side of her mug. "I don't have any experience with harems. What else do you know?"

"When I broke the fourth wall, I saw the title, but I don't know the author."

Mom waved that aside. "Author doesn't matter. When you say you broke the fourth wall, what specifically happened? What did you see?"

"Well, I tripped, then the next thing I know I'm standing in this weird gray nothingness with a giant page of manga behind me depicting the scene I'd just lived through."