When I started high school, the first thing I felt was suffocation.
The classroom was always overflowing with rhythmic energy. This seemingly endless yet finite resource was parceled out among my classmates and me, and it felt as if we were all desperately fighting to see how much more we could take for ourselves.
I was always terrible at making an effort.
My mother didn’t love me, and no matter how hard I tried or what results I got, she only praised my older brother, never me. Even my closest family members didn’t care if I did well, so I had no reason to work harder than was absolutely necessary.
In elementary school and then in middle school, I put in just enough work, achieved okay grades, and got into an okay high school.
Once I entered high school, however, I noticed how much brighter my classmates seemed to shine.
Not that it bothered me. Things like classroom hierarchy and being liked or hated by my peers didn’t matter to me anymore.
Once I realized I was different from the others…I lost all desire to make friends and socialize with them.
During my first year, I settled into a position where I had no friends but no enemies, either. And that was fine by me. As far as I was concerned, that was much better than trying to form the sparkling friendships other students had.
I’d decided to fight hard to maintain this comfortable position for the rest of my high school career, but that plan didn’t go as well as I had hoped.
In the spring of my second year, a boy confessed to me.
He was so popular the year before that even I remembered his name. Since I spent the whole year keeping to myself and not socializing with anyone, that was pretty impressive. He was on the basketball team, and I remembered all the girls fawning over him when he was put in the starting lineup.
I had no idea why a popular guy like him had fallen for me.
He told me, “I’ve had a crush on you ever since first year.” I was unable to hide my shock.
I couldn’t believe someone at the center of attention like him had noticed someone like me who hung out at the margins. I’d never even noticed.
At the time, I thought dating sounded like a total hassle.
Rumors about romance would make the rounds in an instant. Even though I didn’t join in the gossip myself, the girls in my class would discuss these things so loudly that I knew all the details of who was dating whom and who was breaking up.
If it ended with gossip, it wouldn’t be such a big deal. But girls are terrifying. Soon, the topic would turn from who was dating whom to whether the pair was a good match, and it seemed the girls were driven to impose these nonsensical judgments on every couple.
It was acceptable for someone high in the school pecking order to date someone of similar social standing, and few had any qualms about it.
Personally, I thought that as long as two people liked each other, they should be free to date whomever they chose. But apparently, things weren’t that simple.
Taking all that into consideration, I made my response: “…I’m sorry. I don’t really know much about romance.”
I refused his advances in the most inoffensive way possible.
Being on the fringe of school social life, it seemed obvious to me that dating one of the popular students would cause unnecessary backlash.
What’s more, I really didn’t understand what romance was all about back then.
For those two reasons, I turned down the basketball star. It wasn’t until later that I found out how stupid I was.
“You know Yuzuki’s in love with Saitou, right?”
Saitou was the boy who had confessed his feelings to me. Yuzuki was a girl in my class.
A few days after Saitou told me he liked me, Yuzuki and a couple of her close friends called me out to an empty stairwell.
Yuzuki was part of the sparkling popular crowd that was always the center of attention in our class. She was pretty and good at sports, making her extremely popular with the boys. We’d been in the same class since our first year, and rumors about her being asked out by a different boy went around every few months.
As it turned out, she had feelings for Saitou.
I had no idea, so I just answered the question honestly.
Yuzuki, however, wasn’t pleased with that.
“Hmm… You didn’t know, huh?”
“No…”
I assumed she was upset that Saitou had confessed his feelings to me, so I immediately told her how it had ended.
“I turned him down.”
Yuzuki glared at me, rejecting this, too.
“I already knew that.”
“Th-then why…?”
Then why did you call me over? I thought.
Shouldn’t she be happy I’d rejected the guy she liked?
But Yuzuki flatly betrayed all my assumptions.
“How dare you turn him down? Who do you think you are?”
As I stood there, puzzled by her words, the bell rang to signal the start of class. The three girls said what they wanted and left.
It took me a few days to understand what she was trying to tell me, and by the time I did, I was completely isolated from the rest of the class.
It was true I didn’t have any friends to begin with.
But this time, people were so standoffish, I could tell they were making a deliberate attempt to alienate me. My peers started avoiding me completely without any effort to disguise it.
I had no idea what rumors were circulating about me, but the piercing gazes I received from my classmates made it obvious I had done something very wrong.
I didn’t have any friends to start with, so there wasn’t even anyone to tell me what the rumors were about.
For months, I spent my school life in solitude.
And yet.
In all honesty, it wasn’t that bad.
Up until that point, I had chosen to be alone. The only thing that changed was that I no longer had a say in it.
It wasn’t like what you see in manga or TV dramas; no one took my belongings or beat me up. I was simply shut out from the class social circle.
At first, it felt like a hassle. But within a week, I was already over it.
As long as I kept my grades up, my mother didn’t pry into the details of my school life.
Everything was fine.
I carried on, passing the weeks aimlessly. Until one day, she appeared.