Chapter 1

July came, and so did the first summer since I started going out with Shirakawa-san. The end of the rainy season hadn’t been announced yet, but the weather was clear today and the temperature was said to be over thirty-five degrees Celsius. The air felt no different from how it was at the height of summer.

And yet, as the two of us left school and walked to the station together, Shirakawa-san had an expression as overcast as a rainy day.

“Man, finals start tomorrow... I’m so totally done for!” she exclaimed from beside me, scratching her head and looking up at the sky with despair in her eyes. “I’m done like a well-done steak!”

“Steak? Now you’re making me hungry,” I said.

“Oh, come on! And what about you, anyway? Are you, like, all prepared for it or something?”

“N-Not really...”

End-of-term tests would be starting the following day. The first day’s exams were going to be English grammar, a science course of our choice, and home economics.

“There’s nothing I can do about English grammar at this point other than look up some words, and the same goes for chemistry... I do plan to memorize some stuff for home economics tonight, though,” I said.

“Oh, you’re doing chemistry? I’m doing biology, but it’s completely beyond me. Like seriously, I’m so finished I’m Finnish!”

“Do you have any Finnish relatives?”

“Huh? I don’t know...” After looking puzzled for a moment, Shirakawa-san pouted. “So, like, are you one of those super smart guys? English grammar by itself is hell enough, but you already have it all down except for some words, right?”

“Uh, no, not exactly...” I got flustered since I didn’t want her to expect too much of me.

She then stared at me with upturned eyes.

“Wh-What?” I asked.

“What was your English grammar midterm score?”

“Huh? Let me think...”

I recalled that I’d made a mistake in an important grammatical construction and got a lower score than I’d expected. Then again, it hadn’t been bad enough to keep it a secret, so I had no choice but to come clean.

“Seventy-eight or seventy-nine...I think,” I replied.

I still remembered how frustrating it had been not to hit the eighty-point mark.

However, when Shirakawa-san heard my confession, her eyes began to sparkle. “Wow, damn!”

For a moment I wondered how she meant it, but judging by the awe in her eyes, it didn’t seem to be negative.

“You really are smart, Ryuto! I only got a thirty-five... I worked pretty hard at it too...”

“Oh...”

I could tell her she’d still done better than Icchi the other day, but that would probably only confuse her.

“The stuff we’re getting tested on this time is completely beyond me,” said Shirakawa-san. “I’m totally getting a lower score on these than I did on the midterms...”

“What about vocabulary? That section always has ten questions, so if you study all the relevant words now, I think you’re guaranteed to raise your score by ten points.”

“Huh? How’s that even possible? I mean, weren’t there a hundred words?”

“Don’t you already know some of them, though? You could just focus on the ones you haven’t memorized...”

“Whaaat?! I really didn’t know anything, huh... Wow, Ryuto, you’re amazing...”

I’d meant to simply give her advice, but it seemed I ended up cornering her instead. Shirakawa-san slumped her shoulders and had a melancholic look on her face.

“Before an exam day, I always think how I should’ve studied better, or how I should put in more effort next time...” said Shirakawa-san. “But right after the tests are over, our classes start covering new topics. I’m lost and just sit there absent-minded from the very start. I can’t understand much because they continue from the previous material.”

“I see...”

“I’m sure if I was like you and actually learned something every time, tests would probably just be sort of an extension of the usual studies...”

I went silent at that. It wasn’t like I was trying to assert dominance by being better at studying because I was an introvert, but I’d still managed to completely bring down Shirakawa-san’s mood.

While it wasn’t for the sake of apologizing, I wondered if there was something I could do... Suddenly, it hit me.

“Oh, so... If you like, we could study together after this,” I suggested.

Finals began tomorrow, so we’d left school early today—before noon. We’d just been thinking of where to eat lunch, so my suggestion was a “while we’re at it” sort of thing.

“Huh?” Shirakawa-san opened her eyes wide, looking thoroughly astonished. “Study...together...?”

“Yeah. If you want, of course. I’m not perfect, but I think I more or less know all the material, so I might be able to teach you something.”

“Wait, you can study with other people? I can’t even teach you anything.”

“Don’t worry about it. You know what they say—you can only teach people if you truly know the subject. By teaching you, I might find something I myself don’t understand.”

“Oh... I guess you can see it that way...” Shirakawa-san looked up at me. “I’d be really happy to. I can’t focus when I’m alone because before I know it, I’m working on my nails or something. I think even I’ll be able to study if it’s with you!”

Her expression was full of expectations and joy, like that of a child about to head on a field trip.

However, thirty minutes later, a shadow was already forming on her face.

Shirakawa-san sighed. “What is this? I’m totally clueless about this stuff.”

Sitting across the table from me at the McDonald’s in front of Station A (the same one I’d gone to with Yamana-san recently), Shirakawa-san was holding her head. An open textbook sat in front of her.

“What part don’t you get?” I asked.

“All of it. The whole thing. Like, this sentence—does it even make sense? What is this?”

Shirakawa-san pointed at an English sentence that read “He is the last man to tell a lie.”

“Oh, this. Okay, so, do you know what ‘tell a lie’ means in English?”

“Uh... ‘Teru a rie’? Oh, I got it—is it a phone call? My grandma often tells me to ‘teru’ her if I need something.”

“Wow...”

The “teru” Shirakawa-san was talking about meant a phone call in Japanese. This was more serious than I’d thought.

“Okay, then do you get the part that comes before it?” I asked.

She read the first part of the English sentence again. “‘He is the last man’...?”

“That’s right. ‘Tell a lie’ means the same as not being truthful. A literal translation to Japanese would be like, ‘He is the last person to tell a lie.’”

“But what does that mean...?”

“Say, for example, that all people in the world told lies. If we put them in order by how many lies they tell, he’d be at the end of that list. That’s what it means.”

“Huh, I see...?”

“Do you understand? Basically, in Japanese, that man would be described by a word that means honest and faithful.”

“Yeah. That’s totally you, though, right?”

Her words prompted me to look at her.

“Huh?”

Shirakawa-san smiled at me. “If all guys in the world cheated, I think you’d be the last one to do it. That’s what I believe.” With that, she cast her eyes down and smiled happily. “I’ve never dated anyone who made me feel this way before.”

“Shirakawa-san...”

I was embarrassed and scratched my chin for no particular reason. Of course, I had no intention of cheating on her whatsoever, but having her place so much trust in me felt ticklish.

“Anyway, that covers that. Do you understand that sentence now?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Okay, let’s go to the next one.”

Since it was awkward, I tried to quickly advance things, but then...

“Hey, hold on a sec,” said Shirakawa-san. She got up, taking her notebook and a mechanical pencil in hand. Then, she got close and sat beside me.

We were at a table for two people, sitting face-to-face. Until now, Shirakawa-san had sat on a chair while I was sitting on a bench seat set up along a wall. My seat was connected to a nearby table, so there was, indeed, space for two people to sit.

“Huh...? Huh?!” I was flustered by her sudden approach.

Shirakawa-san grinned at me. “It’s easier to see like this, right?”

Just like she said, if we sat side by side, we wouldn’t need to go to the trouble of turning the textbook sideways and trying to read it like that.

“Y-Yeah. Okay, so the next one...”

I tried to move things along to hide my internal turmoil. However...

“Okay, I got it,” she would say and nod. Her hair beside me would then gently sway, and a floral-or-fruity scent would tickle my nostrils every time.

Focus, me!

Also... There was...