No special event, such as accompanying Ayase to school like it was our new daily routine, occurred that morning.
After learning that she went to Suisei, I had wondered if we might, but guess what? She calmly suggested that we act like total strangers for the time being so that people wouldn’t gossip about us. There was no denying that she was right.
Dad and Akiko appeared to have considered this and left us with different surnames so our situations would stay the same.
If Ayase’s name had changed, the resulting paperwork and suspicion from other students would have been a hassle, so that was a big relief.
Anyway, we left home at different times and went to school separately, both headed to Suisei Metropolitan High School.
Society was fiercely competitive, and in order to survive in this world, we needed to achieve results, both academically and in sports. That was our school’s doctrine.
Suisei emphasized results over effort. Turning that around, it meant you wouldn’t get in trouble if you got a part-time job or missed classes as long as you got good grades. That freedom was what had appealed to me when I chose this school.
Though I was attending an elite prep school, there wasn’t a particular college I wanted to get into or a big goal I was working toward. I did want to enroll at a good college, but that wasn’t because I was conscientious or had a positive attitude. On the contrary, all I’d been doing my whole life was avoiding anything that seemed like a hassle.
Once, when I was in elementary school, I was told to go to a cram school.
This was before my dad’s divorce. The woman who had been my mother was determined to make me someone better than my dad, with more influence in society, and tried send me to a famous cram school.
…I started having problems during my trial admission.
It was surprisingly agonizing to be around and study with unfamiliar kids from other schools, and I actually felt like throwing up. It was the first time in my life that I realized I was an introvert.
So what did I do, you ask? Well, I studied so hard that I thought I’d die, and my grades rapidly improved. Now that I was attending a prep school, my rank was around the middle of the top half of my grade, but back in junior high, my grades were first-rate.
I didn’t do any of this out of ambition, however. My efforts stemmed from a simple desire to stay away from cram school. It was all just a reaction—I was fleeing from the pressure I was under to attend those extra study sessions.
The only reason I was doing part-time work while putting in the effort to maintain my grades was to show Dad how independent I was. It’d be annoying if he worried about my future, so once again, I was simply doing it to avoid hassle.
That was why I had the deepest respect for genuinely conscientious, positive people who worked hard to achieve their goals. My best friend, Tomokazu Maru, was just such a person.
“Heya, Asamura.”
“Hey, Maru. Did you have morning practice today?”
I was sitting in my classroom, waiting for school to start, when Maru arrived ten minutes before homeroom and sat heavily in the seat in front of me.
He wore glasses that made him look smart, and he had short, unruly hair and a meaty middle. People would take one look at his build and call him fat, but that wasn’t the case. I, too, was surprised when I heard it was mostly muscle covering his huge body. I later learned that sumo wrestlers’ bodies were also mostly muscle. You really can’t judge a person by their appearance.
“That’s a silly question. I always have morning practice,” Maru said with a sour look on his face.
He was on the baseball team—the catcher, as you might guess from his looks. He was enthusiastic about playing baseball but wasn’t too happy about having to attend practice day in, day out.
“Our baseball team is practically a sweatshop,” he continued. “They expect you to come in early and stay late. There’s abuse of power and seniority, not to mention infighting and jealousy. Merit hardly counts for anything. Frankly, they should call it and hand me the win already.”
“You’re winning in this scenario?”
“You raise a good point. But unless you truly love the sport, you lose the moment you join the team. Once you’re in, the feeling of total exhaustion can really grow on you…but I don’t expect an outsider like you to understand.”
“Ugh. I could never handle that.”
Maru took off his glasses and pulled their case out of his bag. Inside was another pair, which he took out and put on.
He said one was for sports and the other for schoolwork, and he would switch depending on what he was doing, as if he were a character in an RPG. He broke his glasses once during practice and had been carrying around an extra pair ever since.
“Oh, by the way, how’s your new life?” Maru asked out of the blue.
I had told my best friend that my dad was getting remarried and that my family would be growing.
To be honest, I had barely any friends at school. It came down to how much trouble I had with meeting new people. After all, I was so antisocial that cram school had been a nightmare.
But Tomokazu Maru and I had sat near each other since we first entered high school, and because we were both interested in manga and anime, we’d talked a lot. Before I knew it, we’d become friends. You may think it’s weird for a jock to be into nerdy stuff, but it happened the other way around. Maru started the sport after reading a popular baseball manga, making him an “active geek” rather than an “introverted athlete.” He was the type of nerd who would start going to a gym or get hooked on camping after seeing an anime on the topic.