“Okay, I’m heading to the staff room.”
“See you in a bit.”
“Have a good one, Ryouya.”
I said goodbye to Reona and Riona at the shoe lockers and started toward the staff room. First day back, but nothing seemed especially different.
“Then again, if it’d been a couple of years it might look different, but for just over two weeks — yeah, no.”
I got to the staff room and my teacher ran me through the standard catch-up stuff. Apparently if I’d been gone for a few months it would’ve started eating into my attendance days, but two weeks didn’t really threaten anything.
I guess that makes sense — getting the flu or whatever can pretty easily put you out two weeks, and if every flu was a near-miss with being held back, no one would ever survive.
After getting through that, I headed for the classroom. The instant I walked in, the eyes of my classmates briefly flicked toward me. And — sadly — not one of them said a word.
”…Yeah, no, that tracks.”
I had a feeling that was going to happen the moment “no friends” entered the equation, but actually living it is genuinely depressing in a way the hypothesis didn’t capture.
I sat at my desk and slumped face-down onto it. Two weeks in a hospital had completely scrambled my sleep rhythm and I was sleepy as hell. As I was drifting off with my head on the desk, a familiar voice carried in from the doorway.
“—and so, Riona told me she absolutely had to be with Nee-chan, and—”
“Yeah, yeah. We get it. Reona loves her little sister.”
The voice belonged to Reona — my classmate. There’s also a girl named Riona at this school with the literally identical voice, so I can’t be one-hundred-percent sure, but from the content and the high-energy delivery, it’s gotta be Reona.
Their voices being identical means when both of them are talking to me at once, it used to throw me into total confusion. I’ve gotten a little better at telling them apart lately.
When I got to class earlier Reona wasn’t here — she was probably out on some errand. Worth noting: in this classroom, Reona belongs to the top-tier group, the one made up of the flashiest, loudest boys and girls — the absolute peak of the school caste.
A quarter-English girl, almost as tall as me, gorgeous on top of all that, and with absurd people skills — naturally she’s at the apex of the class. Goes without saying.
Which means an introvert loner Mob Character B at the absolute bottom of the caste — me — would normally never have anything to do with her.
Thinking those depressing thoughts and continuing to doze, I heard footsteps approaching my desk. They came to a precise halt right in front of me — and then, for some reason, the owner of the footsteps blew directly into my ear.
“Whoa—!?”
I shot up with a yelp, and standing there with the smug expression of a child whose prank had landed perfectly was Reona.
“Oh — so you were awake, Ryouya-kun.”
“Wh-what was that?!”
“Sorry, sorry. You just looked so defenseless I couldn’t resist a little prank.”
Reona said it without an ounce of contrition. I was about to object, but I noticed the room’s worth of stares now aimed at us, and the protest died in my throat.
Looking around, the entire class had turned to look at me and Reona. We were standing out in the worst possible way — probably my fault for yelping like an idiot a second ago. My classmates were watching with open curiosity.
A few of those looks had distinct hints of jealousy mixed in. The discomfort was somewhere between intense and unbearable. It made total sense that classmates wouldn’t love seeing class-idol Reona interacting with friendless me.
”…I am deeply standing out right now and it is deeply embarrassing, so — could you please call it here?”
“Hmph. Fine, fine. I’ll let you off for now.”
“Could it not be ‘for now’ — could it just be ‘I’m not going to do that anymore’?”
“I’ll take it under advisement.”
“That’s exactly what someone with zero intention of taking it under advisement would say.”
I’d whispered just loud enough for Reona to hear, and to her credit she read the room and whispered back. After that she returned to her own desk like nothing had happened.
She got immediately interrogated by the rest of her group about what had just happened, and from what I could tell she was successfully fobbing them off with vague answers.
Me, meanwhile — for the rest of the time until first period started, I plugged in my earbuds, blocked the world out, and stayed face-down on my desk. Needless to say.