The Eventful Day
My name is Ichiro Suzuki, an ordinary high school student. Well, I have a close friend whose name is Dr. Brown Tabby. You might be thinking that he must be a cat, but actually he isn’t a cat. He really is a great scientist! He once was a professor at a famous university where he had great achievements and was considered to be in the same league as Einstein. On the other hand, he was known to be quite an ‘eccentric guy’. So the other professors saw him as a trouble maker and considered him to be a burden and finally they expelled him from the university. I don’t know the details of his past and frankly there’s not much point in me to know it.
As far as I know, he has been living alone. He seems to be a wealthy man as I guess he'd inherit his parent's property. So I guess he didn’t have any problems in life. Rather, he seemed to be happy since he could do research freely, as he'd expelled from the university. But I don’t know why he has been living alone and there was no telling whether he was married or had any children. He was surrounded by a lot of mystery. But I really looked up to him.
I was a sophomore in high school when I met Doc, and was on an early summer day. I was panting while I was climbing a slope on my bike. I was doing so because of my classmate that I'd called ‘Devil’. Of course he is human and has a real name. But I didn’t care to know names of such guys at that time. Well, this was what had happened on that eventful day.
I was riding on my brand new 3-speed bike. And I’d been riding it around proudly until I came across ‘Devil’ near Rabbit Park. So as soon as he spotted me on my new bike, he shouted “Hey! Lemme ride it!” and he took it off me, rode off with it. The reason why I couldn’t say “NO!” was that, he is bigger and stronger. He was a real menace!
Then he came back soon really getting angry with me and started shouting at me.
“Hey, you lent me a dodgy bike! When I was turning at the dentist corner the front wheel ran over a dog poop and it slipped sideways and I fell off. So my new Levis jeans were torn. And! There’s a hole in my new Nike sneakers that I just bought. It's all your fault! The jeans costs 11,500 yen and the sneakers costs 4,980 yen. And in total, it is, it is…anyhow! A lot of money! You have to pay!”
He hijacked my bike, rode it around and fell off. It couldn’t have been my fault! Was he accusing me? So I said, “Wait a minute!” and managed to get my bike back and rode away on it. Then he ran after me. But since the bike is faster and he's fat, he was slowing down and finally gave up. But as he is a persistent guy, if I happened to run into him, I knew he would say, “You owe me big time!” again and again. So I rode as far away as I could, thinking to myself, “How am I gonna get out of this?”
After riding for a while, I approached the slope along the Grass Skiing Park. So I tried to change gears into ‘first’ for the slope. But it didn’t work. The gearbox appeared to be trashed. And since there was no other option, I climbed the slope in top gear. And that’s why I was panting climbing the slope. But to make matters worse, as I suspected, the gearbox was completely broken and the chain came off. This meant that, the bike was totally wrecked. And this was all because of Devil. He had fallen off my bike and wrecked it. And he had the nerve to tell me ‘I’ had to pay! I couldn’t believe it. What a jerk.
So I was completely at a loss and just standing there. But the very place I was standing was in front of Doc’s house. And this was how I met Doc.
