It was the kind of crush where you already knew how it’d end from the start.
It began in my second year of high school. I fell for someone for the first time. The guy was in the same grade as me.
That would have been fine.
People are made to become interested in each other, one way or the other. Anywhere you find humans, you’ll find relationships. There’s nothing sad or inconvenient about that.
But things were slightly different in my case.
I had a crush on my best friend’s boyfriend.
His name was Tooru Kamiya.
He was taller than average, but he wasn’t particularly good-looking. He was lanky and pale and used to being alone, and sometimes he looked sad when he smiled. His mother died when he was young, and he lived with his father, an aspiring novelist, in an apartment in a housing development. For different reasons, I also lived in a single-parent household, and while I don’t know this for sure, I think he’d given up on certain things and accepted reality, like I had.
I first met him in high school. We weren’t in the same class, though. Because of his family situation, Tooru wasn’t planning to go to university. Instead, he’d decided to get a municipal job after graduating from high school. My best friend and I were both in the advanced class, which was part of the reason we didn’t cross paths with him.
At least, not at first. But one day in late May, a few months after the start of our second year, Tooru told my best friend, Maori Hino, that he liked her.
So there was me, Izumi Wataya.
Tooru Kamiya, who I barely knew.
And my best friend, Maori Hino.
If he hadn’t asked Maori out, the three of us would have never ended up meeting. Tooru and I would have been strangers forever. Just simple passersby in life. But meet we did. Each of us with our own peculiarities.
“Excuse me, can I talk to you for a minute?”
I still remember it like it was yesterday. Maori and I were chatting in the hallway after school when Tooru suddenly came up and started talking to Maori.
When I think back on this…I become somewhat sad.
Tooru only had eyes for Maori from the start. Of course he did. She was the one he needed to talk to, not me. I was only the sidekick. Maori’s friend, Female Student A.
I probably don’t need to tell you what became of Female Student A’s crush. She fell for the male lead, that’s all. Nothing would come of it, of course. I’m not much for love stories, but in a typical one, my role would have been to make the heroine look good.
I didn’t fall for Tooru right away. My initial reaction was a far cry from that. When he came up to Maori, I could tell from his expression that he wasn’t excited about it, even though he was the one approaching her. He struck me as having a backbone, but there was something suspicious about him.
Maori agreed to go with him behind the school.
She and I arranged to meet later in front of the school library. I considered secretly watching them, but even best friends need to maintain some basic courtesy. I waited anxiously for her to return.
“I decided to date him,” she told me when she arrived at the library. I was shocked.
Maori’s genuine personality and pretty face made her popular. And since she didn’t flirt with the boys, the girls held no ill will toward her. She was the kind of person everyone liked, but she had always turned down guys who asked her out in the past. This time was different.
“How come?” I asked.
“He asked me out. I thought I’d give it a go.”
“I don’t understand. Kamiya, was it? Did you tell him about your memory loss?”
“I didn’t, and I don’t plan to. I thought I could try something new even with my current condition.”
Memory loss.
If Maori had still been her old self, I might have taken the news more calmly. But there was a reason I couldn’t. Maori had a secret that none of her classmates other than me knew about.
She had amnesia. A particular kind called anterograde amnesia. It posed no major obstacle to her daily life, but ever since that accident during Golden Week in our second year of high school, she’d stopped being able to remember things that happened the day before.
When she went to sleep, her brain would begin to erase her memories of the day instead of processing them, so new memories could never accumulate.
And now she was saying that this guy Tooru, who she didn’t even know well, had asked her out, and they had started dating. Later, I learned that she had given Tooru three conditions for her to agree. First, he wasn’t allowed to talk to her until after school. Second, when they contacted each other, they would keep it short. And finally…he wasn’t allowed to fall in love with her.