My Memories Came Back, But I'm Not Telling My Childhood Friends

Chapter 2

Once I decided to get my head straight, I headed to the school store with Ryosuke.

On the way there—

“…Hey, those guys are from class B, right?”

“No way. Poor class B people…”

Whispers like badmouthing slipped into our ears.

“They’re talking about you, Reita.”

“Nah, it’s you, Ryosuke.”

We kept shoving the blame onto each other and laughed it off like always.

This wasn’t anything new. It had become our everyday life.

Even after starting high school, Ryosuke and I kept doing whatever we wanted. We weren’t causing huge trouble or anything flashy, but somehow we ended up standing out from everyone else.

Basically, we were the delinquent students.

It had been years like this, so I was used to it. The whispers didn’t bother me at all. No matter what anyone said now, it didn’t hurt or itch.

But…

Now that my memories had come back, a complicated feeling mixed in.

The old me hadn’t been the kind of person on this side, so I felt just a tiny bit out of place.

It was a weird sensation. Like I wasn’t really me…

“Man, this school’s full of honor students. So boring,” Ryosuke grumbled while looking around.

“If you hate it that much, you should’ve gone to some bottom-tier school.”

“Nah, I can’t stand stupid girls. I like taking serious girls and messing them up, you know? It’s not an exaggeration to say I studied hard and got into a decent high school just for that.”

“You… still have the same nasty taste, huh.”

Even I pulled back a little. He’d really go that far just to satisfy his own desires. Ryosuke’s bad hobbies always managed to surprise me.

It was way too late to think about it now, but how the hell did I end up friends with a guy like this…

No matter how you looked at it, hanging out with him was a losing deal. And sure enough, it had led to us getting whispered about like this. Well, that part was my own fault too, but right now a bit of regret was winning out.

It was probably all because I made the wrong choice back then…

If I hadn’t pushed my childhood friends away, maybe I could’ve lived a brighter future.

I had twisted my own life with my own hands.

While I was sinking into that regret, I remembered what happened back when I lost my memories—

It was during my first year of middle school.

After a traffic accident, I lost my memories and fell into a state called dissociative amnesia—where parts of people’s names and memories of time spent with them just fell away.

It wasn’t from damage to my brain or body. The diagnosis was that the shock of losing my father in that accident had caused it.

Luckily it wasn’t bad enough to stop me from daily life. After a short hospital stay, with support from the people around me, I was able to return to normal life pretty quickly.

But because of the missing memories, human relationships became really tough.

Of course I had forgotten my childhood friends who I used to be close with. The terror of not remembering anyone around me. It felt like I had wandered into a completely different world. Still, since they remembered me, the relationships themselves hadn’t completely disappeared.

My childhood friends would rush over from their classes to me during every break. They must have been really worried about me from the bottom of their hearts. It made me so happy. It eased my heart, letting me know that even if I lost my memories, I hadn’t lost everything.

…But that only lasted at the beginning.

At the time, I had just entered middle school and hadn’t built any relationships yet, so I ended up floating alone in class.

My childhood friends tried to be considerate. They explained the situation to people around us and tried to help me fit in…

But that backfired.

From the outside, it probably looked like “that weird guy being taken care of by three girls.”

Even though everyone knew the circumstances, human society can’t help but look at you strangely. Just like how people with disabilities or illnesses get kept at a distance, I got put in the same category.

Well, if it had stopped there, it would’ve still been okay.

But gradually my existence turned into bad rumors.

They started saying I was a player who was using my memory loss as an excuse to have girls waiting on me.

I wanted to snap back, “What kind of baseless accusation is that?” but I could see that speaking up would only make things worse, so I had no choice but to stay quiet.

Of course my childhood friends stood up for me. No matter what others thought, we’re childhood friends, they said.

But because they kept ignoring the talk, it eventually reached the point where the girls themselves started getting badmouthed too. Looking back now, it was probably the work of some rotten people.

After all, my childhood friends were all popular. They were the top one or two most beautiful girls in the grade—so the rumors were deliberately made out of jealousy and envy.

Without knowing any of that, I ended up choosing to distance myself from my childhood friends, just as the rumors wanted.

They told me not to worry about it, but I didn’t want to see anyone suffering because of me. Plus… because I had no memories, there was some part of me that felt out of sync with them.

To be honest, it felt uncomfortable. To them I might have been their precious childhood friend, but to me they were basically people I had just met.

Of course I understood it in my head. They were my important childhood friends. But feelings don’t move that easily.

The more they tried to get close, the more I felt stabbed by the stares from everyone around us. Since I was still only a first-year middle schooler with an immature mind, I couldn’t accept their kindness honestly.

And so I ended up forcefully pushing away my childhood friends who wouldn’t keep their distance.

That was my biggest mistake.

On top of that, for some reason I even said words I didn’t need to say and hurt them. It was nothing that could be excused by saying I had no memories—I said things that should never have been said.

In that way, I completely ended the bond with them by my own hands.

After that, I became alone and spent my school life in lonely gray days.

The teachers who knew the situation pretended not to see anything. I still remember the way they looked at me with faces that screamed how much of a hassle I was. I really thought the world was rotten.

My mom was also heartbroken from losing my dad in the accident, so she wasn’t any help at all.

Because I had no memories, there was no one else I could rely on either. There wasn’t a single person who could save me.

That’s when Ryosuke Yamanobe appeared in front of me.

It was like he slipped into the empty gap in my heart that had lost both my memories and my childhood friends—he just settled down right next to me.

I still don’t know why Ryosuke talked to me. We had zero connection back then, and there wasn’t any particular trigger. He just suddenly showed up.

Well, I could tell it wasn’t out of pure kindness. Ryosuke was a natural-born bad guy. He’d casually two-time girls and was the type who constantly messed with them until they cried.

He wasn’t the kind who spread harm randomly, but he had terrible tastes and lived like the whole world revolved around him.

Maybe he just wanted a convenient playmate. In fact, he dragged me into all kinds of bad stuff. Even the me back then knew that getting involved with him would only bring losses.

But at that time, I had no choice but to accept it. If things stayed the way they were, I felt like the loneliness would break my heart. Before I knew it, I had been dyed the same color as Ryosuke.

It was like pouring black paint all over the rainbow-colored canvas of memories with my childhood friends and completely repainting everything.

If someone asked if I regretted it, of course I’d say yes. But thanks to this, I gained a new self and managed to get back the will to live. I think I did the best I could in the worst situation.

That’s exactly why…

I can’t go back anymore.

Even though I remembered the normal me from before, the fact that the current me is a total asshole hasn’t changed.

The past doesn’t disappear. The fact that I’ve been doing whatever I wanted with Ryosuke will stick with me for life. The fact that I hurt my childhood friends won’t go away either.

Besides, even if my memories came back, my personality didn’t return to how it was.

My heart has already fallen into darkness.

The fact that I barely even feel any disgust toward Ryosuke right now is proof that I have no resistance to evil.

If someone like me suddenly showed up in front of my childhood friends now, would they really be happy to see me?

—No. No way. They’d definitely make a face like they didn’t want to see me.

It might be better not to tell them that my memories came back. It would probably just make us both sad.

The best thing is to keep living as the same asshole I’ve been, like nothing ever happened…