Seishun Buta Yarou Series - Volume 9 - Chapter 2.2

2

Perhaps inevitably, he’d had trouble falling asleep the night before. Something deep down inside was quietly roiling, and Sakuta’s mind had not drifted into slumber until well after three.

Yet he’d woken up easily. His mind sprang to life as his alarm started ringing, and he sat right up. He reached out and shut off the racket, got out of bed, and stretched.

“Hngg—yawn.”

Every muscle in him strained, then relaxed. Another step toward being fully conscious.

He headed to the living room, but only Nasuno was there. It was weirdly quiet. He could feel the silence on his skin.

Kaede’s absence alone changed the whole feel of the apartment.

This wasn’t his first time waking up alone in the house, but it had certainly not been a frequent experience, and it still felt off.

Normally, Kaede was here—and the other Kaede before her.

“Meow.”

Nasuno rubbed up against his feet, so he gave her breakfast. Then he ate something himself. Since Kaede wasn’t here, he didn’t bother toasting the bread and simply bit into a whole tomato rather than cut it up. Never even got out a plate. Ate the whole thing standing in the kitchen, leaving nothing to wash up. The bread got stuck in his throat, so he did wash that down with some orange juice.

This left him with a few extra minutes, so he turned on the TV and let the morning news fill his ears, slowly getting ready for school.

He left just before eight.

He walked the usual path to the station. This morning, he was joined by a young woman in a pantsuit and a college-aged dude. They both kept checking their phones, tapping the screen, narrowly avoiding telephone poles. The college student actually did bump one and apologized to it.

Not a particularly unusual sight. An ordinary morning scene.

Sakuta would likely see similar things on the way to school tomorrow and the day after.

He’d seen stuff like this last week, too.

Typical, ordinary, unremarkable morning sights.

A morning routine that wasn’t exactly going anywhere.

But there would come an end to it.

A year from now, Sakuta would graduate high school. And before that happened, maybe his family would decide they should live together again. He might move out of this neighborhood sooner than later.

The apartment he and Kaede shared was too small for four. But the apartment his father was borrowing from work was not exactly any bigger.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” he said, but he couldn’t stop himself from thinking about it.

Seeing Kaede and their mom together had made moving back in together seem so close he could reach out and touch it.

“Guess we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

If he was being honest with himself, he found it hard to imagine living anywhere else. He couldn’t really picture himself and Kaede living with their parents, even though that had been the routine until the bullies came after her.

“What happens, happens.”

Some things just worked that way. Like him and the other Kaede moving here two years ago. As time passed, living alone with his sister had become his everyday.

So even if that changed, he’d just have to live without regrets. Doing nothing out of the ordinary, just being conscious that ordinary days were the definition of happiness. As long as he remembered that, they’d be okay.

With these thoughts on his mind, Sakuta walked the ten minutes to Fujisawa Station.

He crossed the bridge from the JR station to the Enoden Fujisawa Station and boarded a train. It was full of students his age. He hung on to a strap, swaying with the train. The Enoden moved slowly and swayed in kind. It was downright comfortable.

After Koshigoe Station, the train hit the coast.

All this time, it had been running between rows of houses, but now the view suddenly opened up, revealing the ocean before him. The morning rays bounced off the surface, making the water gleam.

He stared absently at the sea until the train reached Shichirigahama Station, where his school lay.

At this hour, pretty much only students were disembarking. Maybe a teacher or two.

The gates stood like scarecrows. He scanned his train pass, and the attendant saw them off with a friendly “Good morning.”

The path from the station to the school gates was a river of uniforms. Mingling with the flow, Sakuta crossed the bridge and the tracks, then passed through the open gate.

He saw his buddy Yuuma Kunimi by the entrance, but he was with Saki Kamisato, who hated Sakuta’s guts, so he headed to class without calling out to them.

He reached room 2-1 without speaking to anyone.

The room was already half-full, abuzz with that pre-homeroom chatter. Friends chattered away, making one another laugh.

One eye on that, Sakuta took his seat by the window. Skies were clear, and the horizon clearly defined.

When the bell rang, student athletes came running in from morning practice. Their teacher was close behind.

“Anyone not here, raise your hand,” he said, and he quickly took attendance before wrapping up morning homeroom.

The final exams of their second year had ended the week before, and all they were doing this week was getting the answer sheets back. Classes were only held in the mornings, and neither teachers nor students were particularly motivated. They were just running out the clock to the end of the year. The whole school was in autopilot.

Sakuta would have loved to be just as lazy. But even with finals out of the way, he had to keep studying. Get himself ready for college entrance exams next year.

He took out his vocab book and started working on his daily memorization quota. He heard someone say, “Guess we’ll be changing classes soon…” but wasn’t sure who. Didn’t really care.

It was just standard break chatter. It did occur to him that Tomoe would probably be stressing, but that thought came and went.

A normal, ordinary day. Class 2-1 was as it ever was.

And so Sakuta remained blissfully unaware of anything wrong.

The wrongness revealed itself soon after first period began.

Their English teacher passed back test sheets in order by seat number…but since Sakuta’s last name was Azusagawa, he should have been first in line.

But his name never came.

“……?”

Seat number two was called first, and three and four behind it.

He was in no rush, so he figured he’d just ask later.

Eventually, all answer sheets were passed out. Some students were pleased with their scores; others were wailing, “I’m doomed!”

Sakuta stood up and approached the podium.

“You skipped me,” he said.

But the teacher ignored him.

“Let’s start with the first problem!” the teacher said, turning to the chalkboard. He began writing on it.

“Uh, I kinda need my test back?” Sakuta said.

Chalk in hand, the teacher turned around.

“Lots of people missed this one!” he said.

His attention was only focused on the answers and what people got wrong.

He completely ignored Sakuta’s presence. No, that wasn’t the right verb. The teacher wasn’t ignoring him. Ignoring required a conscious choice. And this was a fundamentally different problem. That was increasingly obvious.

The English teacher clearly couldn’t hear Sakuta’s voice.

Or see Sakuta at all, for that matter.

Sakuta got right up in his face, waving his hand in front of his eyes. No reaction.

He put his hand on the teacher’s shoulder, but there wasn’t so much as a flinch.

Not even a reflexive reaction.

And this wasn’t limited to the teacher. Nobody in Class 2-1 was responding to Sakuta’s actions.

“Can anyone see me?” he asked, throwing his arms out wide.

No one answered. No one made a face or laughed. Some students were diligently listening to the teacher’s explanation; others were playing with their phones under their desks. Saki Kamisato was always the first to sneer at Sakuta’s antics and outbursts, but she was simply taking notes on the problems she’d missed.

“You really can’t see or hear me, then?”

He said this louder, making sure. Loud enough to drown out their teacher—pretty much just yelling.

But still nobody noticed.

Nobody asked the teacher to repeat himself.

“What’s going on…?”

All he knew was that no one could see him.

Or hear him.

Or knew that he existed.

Exactly like the Adolescence Syndrome Mai had last year…

He had to assume that’s what this was.

He wasn’t rattled by the nature of the phenomenon itself. He simply had no idea why this would happen to him.

And that left him confused and flustered.

This was undoubtedly some sort of Adolescence Syndrome. He was willing to concede that point. Clearly, nobody could see him, so he was forced to accept the truth. But he had no clue what could have caused it.

All his previous experiences with Adolescence Syndrome occurred for a reason. That was true for Mai, Tomoe, Rio, Nodoka, both Kaedes, and Shouko.

“Did something happen to me?”

Something that might accidentally trigger Adolescence Syndrome? Something that really preyed on his mind?

“……”

He thought about it.

But literally nothing came to mind.

Like he’d said when Rio asked, Sakuta was dating the cutest girl in the whole world. And Kaede was making good progress. He had no problems. He was living a rich, fulfilling life. Sakuta should have been as far as humanly possible from Adolescence Syndrome.

Yet his predicament clearly said otherwise.

Was this something like the incident with Tomoe, where he’d been dragged into someone else’s problem? He hadn’t kicked any other girls’ butts, though.

As Sakuta stood by the podium, thinking, the rest of the class were steadily working through the exam results.

“I’d better see how far this goes.”

There might still be someone out there who could see him.

Not caring that class was in session, Sakuta opened the door and stepped out into the hall. The teacher didn’t yell after him. None of his classmates sent shocked stares his way.

He calmly opened the next door over, room 2-2. He slammed it on purpose, but nobody turned toward him.

Same for 2-3, and 2-4.

Rio was listening to the physics teacher, looking rather bored. Yuuma was stifling a yawn, struggling to stay awake through the Japanese teacher’s drone.

He hit up every class in his year without a single person seeing him.

“So much for that.”

He left the last room, 2-9, and headed down the stairs to 1-4.

Tomoe’s class. They’d kicked each other’s butts before, and that gave him hope.

“Hellooo,” he called, opening the door. He figured if Tomoe could see him, she’d be pretty shocked, so he could demonstrate some basic courtesy. But he needn’t have bothered.

The first-years were no different.

No reaction at all.

Sakuta’s entrance didn’t make the teacher stop writing on the board, and the thirty-six first-years didn’t kick up a fuss.

Tomoe was no different. Sakuta peered at her 62 percent grade, and she didn’t look peeved at all. Shame.

“If Koga’s out, this is pretty damn bad…”

But even as he said it, it didn’t feel real.

No wave of panic hit him. It seemed too late to be all shocked.

“Well, guess I’ll do what I can.”

He left Tomoe’s class and headed for the entrance. Outside the offices, he stretched. The staff lady was sitting at the desk behind the office window, but she didn’t look up when he passed.

You’d think wandering around the halls while classes were in session would at least earn him a query.

But he wasn’t exactly here to talk to her, so he didn’t mind.

He was after the phones next to her desk.

Sakuta picked up one of the receivers and dropped in a ten-yen coin. He punched in an eleven-digit number.

He’d long since learned Mai’s number by heart.

He hit the last digit and put the receiver to his ear. But there was no dial tone. He hit the switch and tried again. Still nothing.

He gave Nodoka’s number a shot with the same result.

The ten-yen coin went back in his pocket.

“Well, shit.”

Not much else he could do now. No signs of the situation improving or even changing. He’d learned nothing and figured nothing out.

Maybe outside the school someone would see him, but he was already past being that optimistic.

Mai was in Yamanashi, filming a TV series. If he couldn’t even place a call to her, there was no point hoping.

“It comes down to why.”

If he could figure that out, a solution might present itself.

If he couldn’t, there was nothing he could do.

Once again, Sakuta searched within for answers.

At the very least, everyone had seen him yesterday. He and Kaede had visited their mother, and Mai had called that evening.

The change had happened overnight.

Had anything changed in that time?

“……”

There was one thing that came to mind.

One big change yesterday.

His family reunited after two long years.

Quite frankly, there were few things in life that were quite that big a deal.

But he couldn’t see a connection to this Adolescence Syndrome. A family coming back together was certainly a major trigger. They’d taken that step the day before.

And how was that a bad thing?

After two long years, all the problems he, Kaede, and their parents had were finally moving toward a real resolution. Kaede had worked real hard for it, and their mother had likely overcome her own share of struggles. Sakuta and their father had helped them through it. Hoping their family could be together again someday, taking it one day at a time…

And their wishes had finally started to come true.

Sakuta just couldn’t imagine that would lead to Adolescence Syndrome.

But it was also true nothing else had happened to him.

Emotions aside, based purely on the facts at hand…that was definitely the biggest difference between yesterday and today.

They’d met their mother.

“…I’d better go.”

Staying at school was not improving anything. He was out of options here.

Kaede must still be with their mother. He’d have to check if she could see him.

Sakuta went back up to 2-1. The English teacher was still going over exam problems, but he sailed right past him and grabbed his bag.

“Leaving early,” he said and then was out the door.

At the lockers, he changed into his shoes. He put his school slippers inside, closed the door, and felt a shiver run through his gut.

He was all tensed up.

But why…?

“……”

Sakuta didn’t voice the answer, not because he didn’t find one, but because he found it already waiting inside him.

 Meeting his mom made him anxious.

He let that echo through his mind. His body had already known. He could feel the shock waves spreading out through him. Rushing through every inch of him, like they were carried through his veins. Weighing him down.

He could feel his field of vision narrowing.

It was hard to breathe.

Turning his eyes away from the emotions that bound him, Sakuta started walking.