My Youth Romantic Comedy Is Wrong, As I Expected

I picked up the backpack lying on the floor and slung it over my right shoulder. Inside were the manga I planned to read in the clubroom today, along with several textbooks I needed to review.

Today would probably be as peaceful as usual, with no one coming to us for advice.

I took a step forward, and Yuihama immediately followed behind me. If she hadn't come here looking for someone, I probably would've gone home already.

When we reached the door, Hiratsuka-sensei's voice came from behind us again.

"Oh, right, Hikigaya. I forgot to tell you—this Workplace Internship activity will be done in groups of three. You can choose whoever you like to team up with, so don't forget."

W-What?!

The moment I heard that, my shoulders drooped.

"...How could this happen...? I don't want anyone from class setting foot in my house..."

"You're still insisting on doing your internship at home...?"

Hiratsuka-sensei couldn't help but shudder at the sight of my unyielding determination.

"I thought you'd hate having to find your own group."

"Huh? What kind of stupid thing are you saying, sensei?"

I quickly turned around, swept my hair back, opened my eyes wide at her, and bared my teeth while I was at it.

"After all this time, the pain of loneliness means nothing to me! I'm used to it already!"

"That's pathetic..."

"Are you an idiot? Heroes are always alone, but they're still cool! Therefore, 'loneliness equals coolness'!"

"Yes, there is a hero who sings about being friends only with love and courage..."

"Right? So you watch Anpanman too."

"Mm. I've always been curious about how old those children have to get before they realize love and courage aren't actually friends at all."

"What a weird thing to be interested in..."

Still, Yukino was right. Love and courage weren't friends at all. They were nothing more than an illusion wrapped in sweet words; their true nature was desire and self-satisfaction, so they didn't count as friends. For that matter, soccer didn't count as a friend either.

I didn't need any of that kindness or sympathy, or love, courage, friendship, soccer, or whatever else.

Our clubroom was located on the east side of the fourth floor of the special building, in a spot overlooking the athletic field.

Music symbolizing youth streamed in through the open windows.

Outside echoed the noisy voices of boys and girls passionately devoted to their club activities. Added to that were the metallic crack of bats, shrill whistles, and the recorders and trumpets of the brass band joining in for good measure.

With such wonderful background music, what were we members of the Service Club doing?

Simply put, nothing.

I was flipping through a shoujo manga I'd borrowed from my little sister, Yukino had her nose buried in a paperback with a leather cover, and Yuihama was lazily playing with her phone.

Just like always, it was youth worth exactly zero points.

No matter the club, there were probably people loafing around in their clubrooms. As far as I knew, the Rugby Club's room had turned into a mahjong parlor. Before and after practice, they habitually played a couple of rounds, so by the next morning, we often saw Rugby Club members arguing in classrooms and hallways over club currency. Club currency was money that circulated only within their club; it looked remarkably like Japanese yen, but it definitely wasn't cash.

To me, they were just playing mahjong in the clubroom. But to them, it was surely an important means of communication, a shining and glorious page of youth.

Still, how many of them truly understood the rules of mahjong? There probably weren't many people like me who could hang around ACE in Tsudanuma and play both Shanghai Mahjong and strip mahjong. They must have worked hard to learn and memorize the rules just to fit into their friends' circle. Incidentally, although Shanghai Mahjong used mahjong tiles, it had nothing to do with mahjong rules. If you truly wanted to learn the rules, the only way was to play strip mahjong. After all, humans got serious when breasts were on the line.

Creating a shared language through things like that was an indispensable step in becoming friends.

The old Yuihama Yui had been a typical example.

Thinking that, I turned another page of the shoujo manga. After spotting some content unsuitable for children, I shifted my gaze to Yuihama. She held her phone in one hand, an ambiguous smile on her face, and let out an extremely faint sigh—almost too quiet to hear, yet somehow profoundly deep. I hadn't actually heard it, but the obvious rise and fall of her chest told me just how deeply she had sighed.

"What is it?"

It wasn't me who asked. Yukino hadn't taken her eyes off the paperback in her hands, yet she had still noticed that something was off with Yuihama. Had she heard that sigh? As expected of a demon girl with demon ears.

"Ah, um... it's nothing. I just saw a slightly strange message and was a little surprised."

"Hikigaya-kun, if you don't want to end up at the police station, stop sending obscene things."

She had immediately decided the message was sexual harassment—and treated me as the culprit.

"It wasn't me! Do you have any proof? Show it to me!"

At my protest, Yukino wore a victorious expression and brushed aside the hair draped over her shoulder.

"That line alone is enough proof. A criminal's lines never stray from 'Where's the evidence?', 'What brilliant deduction. Don't you think you should become a novelist instead?', and 'How can I stay in the same room as a murderer?'"

"The last one is something the victim would say..."

That was practically a death flag.

When I pointed that out, Yukino tilted her head and wondered, "Is that so?" Then she flipped rapidly through the paperback in her hands. Apparently, she was reading a mystery novel.

"No, I don't think the shut-in is the culprit."

Yuihama defended my honor several beats too late. Hearing that, Yukino stopped flipping through her novel and asked with her eyes, "What's the evidence?" Hey! How badly did you want to make me the culprit?!

"Um... how should I put it? This message is about something in class, so it probably has nothing to do with the shut-in."

"I'm in the same class as you, at least..."

"I see, so Hikigaya-kun isn't the culprit."

"That can actually count as evidence..."

Hello, everyone. I was Hachiman Hikigaya from Class 2-F.

I'd been hurt again, prompting another self-introduction in my mind. Still, at least I wasn't being treated as the culprit. That was something, right?

"...This kind of thing happens all the time anyway. I won't worry about it too much."

Yuihama-san snapped her phone shut, but the heavy feeling of it was like she had closed off her heart at the same time.

So this kind of thing happened to her a lot... For the record, I'd never received a message like that.

...Having no friends was really great!

But seriously, the more friends someone had, the more they had to constantly face these complicated problems. It was exhausting. From that perspective, if you cultivated a state of mind like mine, you could free yourself from the filthy notions of this worldly life. To use a Buddhist analogy, I was practically Buddha. How magnificent.

After Yuihama-san closed her phone, she didn't touch it again.

I could only guess what the message had said, but it probably hadn't been anything pleasant. Besides, she was an idiot—a straightforward, big-hearted idiot—and a Nice guy who was always worrying about Yukino and me, so she might have started fretting over things she didn't need to.

She leaned back against her chair and stretched widely, as though trying to force herself to shake off those unpleasant feelings.

"...I'm so bored."

Having sealed away her phone, her usual means of killing time, she slumped casually in her chair as she spoke. The posture made her chest stand out rather noticeably, leaving me unsure where to look. In the end, I shifted my gaze toward Yukino's chest, where I didn't need to worry about such things.

Yukino's chest was like a sheer cliff face. It was completely safe.

Hearing Yuihama-san say that, Yukino closed her paperback and advised her, "If you have nothing to do, hurry up and study. There isn't much time left until the midterms."

However, she didn't sound as though she meant to force Yuihama-san to study at all. Her tone was entirely detached. That was understandable, though. To Yukino, midterms were as ordinary as eating and drinking. In every test, large or small, she always ranked first. The upcoming midterms couldn't possibly affect her.

Yuihama-san probably knew that too. She awkwardly looked away and muttered, "Don't you think studying is pointless? You won't use it after you enter society anyway..."

"There it is! The thing idiots say most often!"

Her response was so completely predictable that I was startled into shouting. Hey, seriously? Were there still high schoolers who said that?

Yuihama-san was probably annoyed at being called an idiot, so she protested heatedly.

"Studying really is pointless! High school life is already so short, so isn't spending all that time studying a waste? You only live once!"

"That's exactly why you can't afford to fail."

"Your way of thinking is way too negative!"

"Please call it 'risk avoidance.'"

"I'd say your entire high school life has been a complete failure."

Yes, in fact, I hadn't avoided any risks at all. Hey, hey, cut it out. Had my life hit a dead end? Was this what they meant by "check out" in English? What did that have to do with hotels?

"No, that's not it. I've never failed; I'm just a little different from everyone else. It's called individuality! 'Everyone is different, and everyone is wonderful'—that's what it means!"

"R-right! It's individuality! Being bad at studying is one kind of individuality too!"

Yuihama-san and I played off each other, uttering the second thing idiots said most often. Come to think of it, "individuality" was a really useful word.

"Kaneko Misuzu would definitely be angry if she heard you say that..."

Yukino sighed and pressed a hand to her forehead.

"Yuihama-san, you said studying has no meaning, but that isn't true. The meaning of studying is something you should find for yourself. That is why each person may have a different purpose for studying, but there is no need to deny studying as a whole."

It was a reasonable argument, though it could also be called the sort of nice-sounding thing adults said—in other words, something that only made sense among adults. It was the conclusion they reached when they looked back on the past and discussed, "What was the meaning of studying, anyway?" Put another way, it didn't make sense to those of us still becoming adults.

In fact, the only person who could reach that conclusion—and sincerely mean it rather than just trying to sound cool—was probably someone like Yukino.

"Yukino's smart, so it's not a problem for her... But I'm not suited for studying, and nobody I know studies either..."

The instant Yukino heard that quiet mutter, her eyes sharpened. Yuihama-san noticed the room's silence had lowered the temperature considerably and hurriedly shut her mouth. She probably remembered the harsh things Yukino had said to her over this before, and tried to salvage the situation.

"N-no, I'll study properly... Oh, right, does the shut-in study too?"

Oh, she changed the subject before Yukino could get angry. It looked like she wanted to shift the focus onto me, but unfortunately—

"I study properly."

"You betrayed me! And here I thought you were my idiot ally!"

"How rude. I'm third in the grade in Japanese, and I'm not bad at the other humanities subjects either."

"No way... I never heard about that..."

For the record, our school didn't post everyone's grades. It only handed each student their own scores and rankings. You could still learn other people's rankings by asking around, but since I had no connections in that area, naturally no one knew mine. It wasn't as if they would come ask me, after all. Of course, rankings weren't the only things they never came to ask me about.

"D-don't tell me the shut-in is actually really smart?"

"I'm not that smart."

"...Why are you answering for him?"

Although my grades might have been a little worse than Yukino's, there was no question that I was smart. Which meant Yuihama had very obviously become the idiot among us.

"Ughhh~~ So I'm the only one stuck playing the idiot..."

"That's not true, Yuihama-san."

Yukino's voice was rather cold, but there was a hint of warmth in her expression, and her gaze was firm. Yuihama's whole face immediately lit up.

"Y-Yukino!"

"You're not playing the idiot. You were already an idiot to begin with."

"Waaah~~"

Yuihama pounded Yukino's chest with her tiny fists. Yukino let her do it with an annoyed look on her face, sighing softly.

"What I mean is, judging a person's worth by test scores and rankings is an idiotic thing to do in the first place. Some people do very well on exams, yet are complete disasters as human beings."

"Hey, why are you looking at me?"

Yukino wasn't merely glancing at me. She was staring straight at me.

"Let me make this clear—I study because I like it!"

"Huh..."

"Because you don't have anything else to do besides studying."

Yuihama looked startled, while Yukino tossed that in from the side, making my facial muscles twitch.

"Oh my, just like you."

"...I can't deny that."

"At least try to deny it! I'm starting to feel sorry for you!"

Yukino looked completely unconcerned, but Yuihama's sympathy overflowed. Not only did she protest on Yukino's behalf, she tightly hugged her too, as though trying to draw closer to her pain.

"...How sad."