Buying a Weeping Girl Under the Wintry Sky, and Making Her Too Happy. - Chapter 42: School Album.

School Album.

“Hey, Kazuya-kun.”

“What?”

“I want to see pictures of you when you were little.”

“You mean like a school album?”

“Yes.”

A school album, huh? I think it was in my room, but to be honest, I don’t think it’s interesting or anything. Because I was basically alone most of the time. It’s not that I was a loner or anything, but I didn’t like to be in contact with many people.

In short, I was hardly in any of the pictures in my school album. Except for individual and group photos, there are almost no pictures of me at all…

“I don’t mind, but I don’t think there’s hardly a picture of me in it, you know?”

“I’d still like to see them though.”

“Then let’s go to my room.”

“Okay.”

My room was on the second floor, in the corner, so I went up the stairs and opened the door to my room. Then I saw something strange on my desk.

“What’s this…? Ehhh? My school album? ….Grandma must have seen this coming…”

“Kazuya-kun, your grandmother is really amazing…”

I really think she’s amazing even though she’s my grandmother… The most important thing to remember is that you can’t just go out and buy a new one.　

“Well, let’s just say she saved me the trouble of looking for it, and let’s have a look.”

“Yes.”

Then Miyu and I looked at my school album from elementary school in order from the front…

“…Kazuya-kun, you didn’t use to skip school did you?”

“I didn’t, but…”

I’m surprised that there are no pictures of me… I thought there would be a few, but I didn’t realize that there were really no pictures of me except for individual and group photos… Even in the photos of events such as field trips, for some reason, there were no photos of me. I’m sure I wasn’t eating lunch alone or anything like that… I don’t think so, maybe?

“Huh?”

“What’s wrong? Did you see my back in the picture?”

“No, Kazuya-kun is not here… Is this Kaga-kun?”

“Kaga? Do you mean Shinya?”

“Yes.”

I had been friends with that guy since junior high school, so I thought we went to separate elementary schools, but when I looked at the kid in the picture Miyu showed me, he was, for all intents and purposes, Shinya.

“This guy…. So we had the same elementary school…”

“How come you didn’t know that…?”

Come to think of it, Shinya and I never talked about our elementary school days. We weren’t that interested in each other’s past, and Shinya was the type of person who was happy as long as he was having fun in the present. But I never thought that we went to the same elementary school…

“Unlike you, Kazuya-kun, Kaga-kun is in a lot of pictures.”

“He loved taking pictures in junior high school too. He was so stupid that he would easily forget anything, so he thought if he kept it as a photo, he would remember it when he saw it.”

“Well, that’s the purpose of photography…”

Then I also looked at my school album from middle school, and there were more pictures of me than when I was in elementary school. 

And Shinya was always in the photo with me. In other words, that’s what it is.

“…Kazuya-kun, did you and Kaga-kun have that kind of relationship?”

“Stop it. I’m going to throw up… It’s just that he likes to take pictures, and I, being friends with him, inevitably get into more of them.”

After that, I continued to roll up my junior high school albums in order, this time too there was Akikaze.

It was natural that he was in the photo because we went to the same junior high school, but the problem was that it was a two-shot of me and him… What is this picture…

I don’t remember it at all….

“…Kazuya-kun?”

“….I have no memory of it.”

“Were you dating Akikaze-san?”

“That’s definitely not true…”

What is this picture really… I think I understand now how it feels like when my current girlfriend unexpectedly sees a photo of me with my old ‘girl’ friend. Well, Miyu is my first girlfriend, so I never had any girlfriend in the past….

“…Well, Kazuya-kun is mine now, so it’s fine, but I have to be careful from now on…”

Miyu has also been blurting out something since a while ago, but I’m afraid to ask. I’m sure that’s good. I don’t know why, but I get the feeling that she’s serious in her eyes. I mean, I’m afraid to ask…

So, we looked at the graduation albums from elementary and junior high school, and Miyu’s impression was…

“I feel that Kazuya-kun has always been Kazuya-kun.”

I don’t understand what she meant, but I guess Miyu was satisfied with that, because she gently closed the graduation album and put it back on my desk.