Blindness And Keen Insight

—Let’s have a contest, Rokurō-kun.

—If you fall in love with me, you lose. If I come to hate you, you win.

—You’re good at that kind of game, right?

I first ended up in the same class as Nene Komaki during our second year of high school.

She had been famous for being cute ever since we entered school, and apparently she had dated an upperclassman from the basketball club during our first year. But they broke up when he graduated.

When word got around that she was single again, nearly every boy in the school started getting restless.

As for me at the time, the friction between me and my stepfather had finally gotten bad enough that I genuinely feared for my life. I had no mental room to enjoy student life, and because of that, I had become something of an outsider among the other students.

I was studying because my life depended on it, yet people who chased good grades like some kind of fashion statement treated me like an enemy.

If I stumbled even slightly, they laughed at me. If I won, they talked behind my back. At a college-prep school, competing for the top grades tended to come with troublesome social politics.

…You people could survive even if you didn’t study.

…You’re going to cram school, throwing away ridiculous amounts of money, and you’re still trying to compete with me?

Those thoughts were always running through my head.

My heart was constantly in ruins.

In the first place, there had even been a chance I would not be allowed to go to high school at all.

In my third year of middle school, I raised my grades all at once and got the adults around me to say, “He’s this smart, so it would be a waste not to make use of it,” until my parents finally agreed.

I had to win everything for myself.

If I wanted someone’s cooperation, I had to deceive them into giving it.

Even the reason Kumagai-sensei started teaching me English began with a lie.

“Kumagai-sensei, you’re the easiest teacher to understand. You taught our class as a substitute the other day, remember? That’s when I realized it.”

At the time, I had never taken a single one of Kumagai-sensei’s lessons.

The class he had substituted for was one I was not in. Kumagai-sensei normally taught a different year, so I figured there was no way he would catch me in the lie.

Which naturally meant the part about him being “the easiest teacher to understand” was a lie too.

I had simply targeted him because he looked like the English teacher with the most free time and the kindest attitude toward students.

I approached Kumagai-sensei because I thought I could make use of him.

Even my meeting with the teacher who would become my mentor began like that.

To me, lies were medicine, and the truth was a poison that would destroy me.

If I wanted to keep living, I had no choice but to keep taking the medicine.

“He only sucks up to teachers. What an annoying asshole.”

People would say things like that loudly enough for me to hear when they passed me in the hallway or during lunch in the classroom.

It pissed me off, so I dug up their embarrassing pasts and exposed them.

They had sent creepy messages to girls, posted themselves drinking alcohol on social media, and once I started looking, there was no shortage of dirt to find.

After repeating things like that, at some point Keiji became the only person left around me.

And in the middle of those days, my encounter with Nene Komaki happened suddenly.

“Sorry to keep you waiting.”

The person I had come to meet arrived carrying a tray with a drink piled high with cream.

She wore lightly faded jeans and a white short-sleeved blouse. Her loosely waved hair reached below her shoulders, and makeup had made her already beautiful face even more refined. Her beloved large breasts were alive and well. The sheer impact when she bent down to sit in the chair was outrageous.

Seriously… she leveled up even more from back then?

The girl I had broken up with near the end of our third year had surpassed her old self in every possible way.

It was almost like she was saying, I’m going to make the guy who dumped me regret it—though thinking that was probably self-important.

Still.

She had become beautiful enough to make me regret it a little.

“Long time no see.”

“Yeah. After graduation, all information about you just disappeared, Rokurō-kun.”

She picked up her drink and took a sip through the straw.

Even the way she casually glanced outside looked strangely picturesque.

If someone took a photo of her like that, she could probably make the cover of a magazine.

Komaki pulled her lips away from the straw and spoke.

“Have you been doing okay?”

“More or less. You?”

“My life’s been fulfilling every day.”

“I see.”

Seeing her face-to-face like this, she radiated even more positive energy than before.

She was probably still living her life by putting herself out there and thinking about other people.

“When I become an adult, I want to do something useful for society.”

That had practically been her catchphrase.

“How’s living with Yūha-chan? You’re not doing anything weird, are you?”

“Ah… so you know.”

Given that she had called me out at this particular time, I had prepared myself for that possibility, but apparently she had found out.

It was not as though hiding it would have changed anything, but Komaki knew that Yūha and I were not related by blood.

So saying that a brother and sister were living together would probably carry a different implication for her than it would for most people.

“You’ve always been a pervert, Rokurō-kun.”

“A lovely female university student shouldn’t be saying ‘pervert’ in broad daylight.”

“Then lecherous.”

“That’s still pretty questionable.”

“Then what am I supposed to call it?”

“I’m telling you to avoid that topic entirely.”

“Tch. Boring. Then we should’ve met at night.”

“Night’s no good. I can’t leave Yūha home alone.”

“Your sister complex has gotten worse, Rokurō-kun. It was already pretty severe back then, but now it feels terminal.”

“Mind your own business.”

The ice in my iced coffee melted and clinked inside the glass.

Holding her drink in its plastic cup, Komaki gave me a faint smile.

“In the end, I never managed to beat Yūha-chan.”

“Don’t say incomprehensible things while completely sober.”

I tried to brush it off because it was annoying, but apparently she had no intention of dropping the subject.

She stared directly into my eyes, making me uncomfortable.

“Do you remember why you liked me, Rokurō-kun?”

“Why do we have to talk about something like that now, two years after we broke up? …You’re not seriously here because you want to get back together, are you?”

“No. I’m just curious.”

“Your curiosity scares me.”

Komaki’s large, round eyes had not changed at all from the day we first properly spoke.

Nene Komaki was beautiful, kind, and about as perfect a girlfriend as anyone could ask for.

But if that were all there was to her, I never would have approached her in the first place.

Back then, I was nowhere near as friendly toward sexy girls as I was now.

She was a smart woman.

—Sanjō-kun, people don’t dislike you because you have a bad personality, right? You act like you have a bad personality because people dislike you.

That was probably what it meant to strike directly at someone’s core.

She was the first person in my life who made me genuinely think, from the bottom of my heart, I can’t beat this person.

And she was also the person I first fell in love with—

Nene Komaki.