"11: I wish this place called school would just disappear.
Don Protector (Fox): yeah, yeah.
Jangalian: This is a jail. We're under house arrest five days a week.
Bang bang. Let me out of here.
Polaris: That sounds pretty good.
Should we get rid of it, then?"
"Try to imagine it. One day when everyone goes to the school, it'll be a mountain of rubble. The place will be totally destroyed."
"Just like that? Sounds like magic."
"That's right. Just like magic."
A manga by Setona Mizushiro. The main characters meet in a chatroom on their school computers and discuss how much they hate school, then they decide to blow it up. One of the users, Polaris, creates a private chatroom for them and they become online friends. Each of the characters has a serious problem in their life: the main character, Rika, is known by the username "11" because she used to be a star pole vaulter for her school's team but she was injured and decided to quit the team. Her locker number, 11, as well as her staring spot on the team and her boyfriend were taken by another girl, and she feels as if she has lost her place. The ringleader of the group, Polaris, is a shy girl who only feels normal and able to take part in social situations when dressed in the Gothic Lolita style she wears to feel closer to her favorite band, Jupiter's Tale. Mr. Money is a boy in the year below Rika's who is abused by his mother and bears a scar in the shape of cherry blossoms on his shoulders, like the Japanese fairytale "Mr. Money from the far mountain." (I was unable to find anything about this fairytale, but the characters all seem to know it. The translation was probably done strangely or something. If you know what it's referring, to, please let me know.) The final member of the group is the biology teacher, who is known as "Jangalian" after his favorite hamster breed, is unable to deal with the politics at the school and the unwanted advances of the school chancellor's daughter.
As the story goes on, the characters slowly collect fireworks while they become closer to one another, and the manga focuses more on the reasons behind the decision to try to blow up the school and how those problems can be solved than actually committing the act. Blowing up the school becomes kind of an excuse to bring them together, they never actually do it. It's a very good interpersonal manga i'd recommend to fans of series' like Confidential Confessions or Paradise Kiss or people who like teen "issue" novels and are looking to start a manga collection. The series is two volumes, making it a cheap buy at around 20 dollars in the U.S. and includes an extra story called "The Last Supper" about a young boy who has a pet anthropomorphic cow who can be eaten to cure a plague that is ravaging the countryside.
"Our lives were probably meaningless to most people... Still, at any moment one of us could commit an X-day."