← The Studious Boy and the Secret Account Girl

Volume 1

Chapter 03: A Crane Cries in a Trash Dump – Part 1

Chapter 3: A Crane Cries in a Trash Dump – Part 1

As one fact that hardly needs to be put into words: for a student, lunch break is a precious thing.

Needless to say, its importance as a time to eat is a given, but the simple fact that it’s the longest break is a very big deal.

How one uses it varies — studying, time with friends or with a sweetheart, club activities, and so on. Of course, sleeping is also an option.

‘Time is money,’ and it’s a high-grade rarity. And during that precious, precious lunch break, Tsutomu had been summoned to the staff room.

—I really can’t stand this.

For a student, the staff room is another name for hell, or the torture room.

Unless they’re particularly odd, no one wants to set foot there of their own accord.

For one thing, when a student is summoned to a place like this, it’s almost never for a good reason.

Lunch break and staff room.

The combination of those two words could be called about the worst possible thing in a student’s life.

And that ‘worst’ was exactly the situation surrounding Tsutomu right now.

—Honestly… I can’t watch this.

A frown creased his brow. His temples began to throb with pain.

Along with his irritation, he pushed the frames of his glasses, which had slipped down, back up with his middle finger.

Tsutomu kept his silence, but inside, he’d sighed more than once.

He even felt like patting himself on the back — ‘I’m the one who’s patient enough not to let any of this show.’ Because… what had spread out before him in that lunch-break staff room was a scene no ordinary high schooler could let slide.

The teachers, lounging around each in their own comfortable way, were frankly sloppy.

The papers stacked up in disarray and the desks left a mess were hard on the eyes.

A teacher was stuffing his cheeks with snacks that were supposed to be forbidden on school grounds.

A teacher was fiddling with his smartphone, his face flickering through joy and gloom.

All while a notice hung on the bulletin board proclaiming, ‘Turn off your phones inside the school.’

—And these are the ones acting so high and mighty…

‘These people’ — the teachers — with smug faces would go on about ‘dress checks~’ and ‘cleanliness and order~’ and ‘don’t forget your belongings~’.

To Tsutomu, ‘adults’ were supposed to be more put-together, more impressive.

He’d always thought so ever since he could remember, and even now he didn’t think he was mistaken.

But in this staff room, there was no one like that.

Everyone here was, no matter how you looked at it, just a child whose body had grown big.

A child lecturing another child from on high, going on and on about all sorts of things. It was enough to make him give a wry laugh just by imagining it.

That such a chaotic mess with zero persuasive power was tolerated — that was the school space Tsutomu knew.

…Which was why, from the very day he entered elementary school, Tsutomu had never once felt a shred of respect for a teacher.

“Kariya-kun, are you listening?”

“I’m listening.”

He was dragged back from his thoughts to reality by a cloying voice. It was an unbearably grating voice.

The owner of the voice was his homeroom teacher (age 25, female), who was currently pouting in front of him.

She was still youthful and energetic, and it was easy to see she put effort into her appearance.

Popular with students and teachers alike, and today, as always, her makeup was perfectly done.

The reason he’d ended up having to burn his precious lunch break and come to the staff room was her doing.

A young teacher whose 1000% enthusiasm was spinning its wheels was, to put it mildly, a nuisance.

Because she demanded all sorts of things from Tsutomu, yet was never able to meet what Tsutomu wanted from her.

Student and teacher were not on equal footing. And — she wasn’t even aware of it. Truly maddening.

For the record, what Tsutomu wanted from teachers wasn’t enthusiasm, but competence.

“There have been complaints from all sorts of teachers about your attitude in class, Kariya-kun.”

“Hah.”

That was the most deflated reply he could manage.

Complaints from teachers — he couldn’t have cared less.

The reason was extremely simple: there was nothing wrong with Tsutomu’s grades.

No, not just ‘nothing wrong’ — if you limited it to academics, he was the runaway top of the class.

Since enrolling, he’d held first place in every regular exam, and he always appeared in the upper ranks in nationwide mock tests.

This school claimed to be the number-one college-prep school in the prefecture. Though that was ‘as a public school,’ to be fair.

Since he’d set entering university as his number-one goal, academics should be prioritized above all else, and there was no reason to be criticized for his current grades.

So — there was no need to listen in class. That had been Tsutomu’s conclusion after a year at this school.

That doing his own outside study was more efficient was proven by his results on every regular exam so far.

Tsutomu was now a second-year high school student. Around now, he could start to hear the sound of university entrance exams approaching.

Studying must be built up efficiently and effectively. To repeat myself — he couldn’t care less about teachers’ complaints.

Not only his grades, but his behavior was nothing to complain about, either.

He attended school every day without fail, and in class he kept quiet.

His after-school part-time job was properly approved by the school.

Of course, he’d never committed a school-rule violation. Doing something like that wouldn’t give him any benefit.

He wasn’t about to say something as brazen as ‘I am nothing less than a model student!’ but being nitpicked over trivial things just annoyed him.

“In the first place, Kariya-kun, your distance from everyone around you…”

As he kept his mouth shut, looking thoroughly fed up, his homeroom teacher finally touched on his relationships.

If he were being seriously bullied, that would be one thing, but this was entirely meddling in his business.

It was true that Tsutomu barely had anyone he could call a friend. That was a fact.

—So what if I don’t have friends?

Friends you make during your student days get cut off after a few years’ time anyway.

He’d had some fairly close classmates in middle school, but not a single one of those connections had continued.

Even if he made friends in high school, the result would probably be about the same. History repeats itself.

Tsutomu, living alone and aiming for university, had no time to spare. And no energy to waste on pointless things.

Being lectured by a homeroom teacher who couldn’t even understand that, while standing at the front of a college-prep school, left him with nothing but a speechless sigh.

“Kariya-kun, from now on you’ll be going out into society and interacting with all sorts of people. If you keep thinking it’s fine as long as you can just study for yourself, that kind of selfish thinking, then…”

The homeroom teacher, apparently taking Tsutomu’s silence as an admission he couldn’t argue, kept laying out her theories with a ‘just as I thought’ air.

—For the words to come out of the mouth of a teacher, who would spend her entire life in the narrow world of a school cut off from society…

As a joke, it’d be funny. It wasn’t a joke, so he couldn’t laugh.

Either way, Tsutomu never showed expression on this kind of topic.

No matter how far it went, it was nothing but a waste of time, and an endless annoyance.

“Are you kidding me!? What is this, anyway!?”

It was around the time he was getting tired of holding his deadpan poker face.

A voice that cut through the heavy, stagnant air rang out across the staff room.