[KH] Onami Kouhei

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As a young child, Kouhei's life was close to perfect -- so his innocence believed. His parents were infallible, his older sister Aya was the perfect playmate, and their two-story house on the outskirts of the city was, in a four-year-old's words, "the coolest thing ever". The first few years of Kouhei's life were an idyllic existence, punctuated only by concerns over whether the kid next door would share his new toy or not, or if the convenience store across the street were sold out of his favourite chips.

Then school began, and exposure to other kids just like him began to shatter Kouhei's perfect perception of the world. Not only was his family not godlike, but they were in fact extremely ordinary, and even paled in comparison to the families some of his new classmates came from. A father who worked for the newspaper and a mother who was only finding a way to occupy her time now that both kids were in school were nothing to brag about. So the lies began. Small at first -- little things, like how his mother once won a baking competition, or how his father definitely totally saw a bear one time -- but as he grew older and his peers became harder to impress they became larger, more fanciful. His family's careers, pasttimes, even their history were at his discretion. The lies earned him some raised eyebrows from his folks when his school friends brought them home, but otherwise he found them harmless. They became, in an odd sense, a sort of fantasy world from which he found himself unable to divorce. Here, he was still "cool". He was interesting.

By the time he started junior high, Kouhei needed his fantasy world more than ever. He was twelve years old when his sister Aya ran away from home, and the resulting frenzy left him nearly detached from his parents, whose every waking moment for those first six months was spent frantically reaching out for their daughter. After that they began to expect the worst, and Kouhei was expected to mourn along with them. He couldn't. He couldn't explain how or why -- perhaps it was the innocence, the naivete, or just pure wishful thinking -- but something inside him was positive that Aya was alive and well, happer than she'd ever been. She was free. Heck, a handful of bad days had left him wanting to do the same thing, to run away from it all. But no matter what he believed, her absence left a profound mark on the family. His father was estranged, his mother distant, and the pair of them only remembered their son in between alternating bouts of mourning and promoting Aya's case.

In junior high, Kouhei was approached by his cousin to join the school baseball club. Though reluctant at first, Kouhei eventually caved and became fairly good at the sport. He couldn't say he was enthralled with the sport -- he'd already become entranced by archaeology, and was unwilling to give the hobby up -- but participating did wonders for both his physical and mental health. He stuck with the team, almost as an afterthought, throughout junior high, and similarly gave little thought toward continuing to play in high school until his mother gave him the idea. She was the one who suggested enrolling in Kokoro High, on the grounds of their baseball club -- "you like baseball, don't you?" she'd asked, weakly attempting to connect with her son despite the hole left by her daughter.

Now, Kouhei wastes away his high school years in the same idyllic fantasy world from his childhood, exaggerating achievements and fabricating stories in hopes of outrunning his family tragedy. Academically, Kouhei is a mixed bag. He's incredibly studious and an avid reader... as long as the subject matter appeals to him. At home his shelves are crammed full of books on archeology, on ships and shipwrecks, and on entomology, but he consistently struggles with getting his schoolwork up to a passing level. Kouhei's dream is to become a maritime archaeologist and put all his presently-useless shipwreck knowledge to good use. Unfortunately, if he wants to get that far, he'll have to get his math grades up out of the negatives...