Chapter 20
"Me and Fuji-senpai?! How could such a weird idea come into your head? Did you eat ramen and your brain got sucked out? This is the first time I've met Fuji-senpai today..."
When I think of Fuji Shusuke's handsome face, I feel that putting his name and my own name in the same sentence is a blasphemy to him.
After all, how can such a pure and beautiful boy who looks like a god be put together with us vulgar mortals?
Echizen Ryoma looked at me with eyes that were difficult to describe. "What do you mean by as clean and beautiful as a god? Your metaphor is disgusting. Senior Fuji is just an ordinary person."
Oops, the idea was so smooth in my mind that I accidentally said it out loud?
However, I still insisted on my own thoughts, "In short, I think Fuji-senpai is really different from you guys. It's a kind of temperament that can't be described. Do you understand temperament? You, an ordinary high school boy..."
"Everyone says that Fuji-senpai is just an ordinary person. If you must say, he's just an extraordinary ordinary person, not yet at the level of a god. Where does your strange filter for him come from? Is this really the first time you two met today?"
I nodded. "It's just the first time."
Although I often feel that the face is a little familiar, I can't remember where I have seen it... Maybe it's because he is handsome, so his memory is very deep in my brain, which gives me this harmless illusion.
He still had a suspicious look in his eyes, but seeing that I was honest and upright, he suppressed his discomfort and asked, "What's with your online name?"
I was stunned. Could it be that this guy saw that my online name contained the word "Buer" and that I said my boyfriend liked to grow cacti and thought that my boyfriend was Senior Buer?
At this point, I suddenly had an epiphany. I immediately pulled out my phone and said, "First of all, the 'Fuji' in my username refers to the confectionery maker Fujiya! Secondly..."
I didn't continue talking. Instead, I opened my phone, clicked on my homepage and started editing something. Echizen Ryoma looked at me and asked, "What are you doing?"
I skillfully clicked on the edit nickname and typed in 'Nishijo Takato's woman', then smiled and said to Echizen Ryoma, "So, you won't think I'm Nishijo Takato's girlfriend, right?"
“.......”
He fell silent for a while, and then asked after a long while:
"...Who is Saijo Takato?"
I'm tired, destroy it, you stinky straight man.
We quickly walked to the nearby station, and when we were about to leave, he suddenly asked me again.
"So, do you know your boyfriend well?"
Do you know him?
It seems that I can’t say that I know him very well. After all, what we can see is only the online side of him. What is Senior Cactus like in real life?
However, I didn't answer him directly. Instead, I stared at him with a strange look on my face and asked, "Why do you care so much about him? Or are you caring about me? Longma, you don't really like me, do you?"
Hearing this, he showed a half-smile, his green cat eyes looked me up and down, and he opened his thin lips and uttered the classic line:
“.....Madamadadane....”
I breathed a sigh of relief. "I was so scared. I thought our pure brotherhood was going to deteriorate..."
"I'm just worried that you'll be deceived again."
Echizen Ryoma thought back to a long time ago when they were still in the United States. His only impression of Koizumi Na was that she was a quiet little girl from the neighborhood who danced beautifully.
Although his mother had told him to take care of Koizumi Na when he was at school, the interactions between the two were limited to just greeting each other when they met at school.
After all, he is not an overly enthusiastic person, and Koizumi Na seems far less outgoing than she is now.
Chinese faces always receive a lot of hostility in American schools, not to mention that she is a transfer student who came in halfway. She doesn't seem to have made any friends and always keeps to herself. But occasionally he encounters white people with bad intentions who make things difficult for her. Although he will help her out, they are not in the same class, so he certainly can't help her with everything.
But we can also infer that the guy is not having a good time...
Gradually, Koizumi Na seemed to have made a new friend at school. The other person's name was Anna, and she was also a Chinese girl.
Ryoma Echizen had a vague impression of Anna, who was also a marginalized person ostracized by white children.
The two of them can be said to be huddling together for warmth.
That's what he thought.
Until one day, Ryoma Echizen happened to pass by the playground and saw Anna surrounded by two or three white people. The other group looked ferocious and she looked very helpless. Thinking that she was one of those guys' few friends, Ryoma Echizen stepped forward to help her out.
Those white people bullied the weak and feared the strong. Echizen Ryoma had become notorious for being a bad guy after he used tennis to teach a few guys who came to cause trouble to him a lesson a few years ago. No one dared to mess with her, so she gave Anna a warning look and left angrily.
After the crisis was resolved, Anna seemed to be hesitant to speak, and finally uttered a dry sentence: "Thank you, Echizen-san..."
He just glanced at her, then left with a "you're welcome" and didn't take it to heart.
Because he practiced tennis for a while on the school playground, it was almost dark when he left school and there were not many people in the school. When he walked to the school gate, he saw Koizumi Na hurriedly running back to school in slippers, and greeted him when he saw him.
"What are you doing back here?"
Koizumi Na's expression was a little hesitant, and she stammered, "...Um, I left something in the classroom, I need to go back and get it."
Without waiting for his reply, she hurriedly walked towards the classroom. Although Echizen Ryoma felt a little strange, when he saw that she was indeed heading towards the teaching building, he gave up the idea of chasing her.
It was not until the evening that he took the prepared sushi to the Takahashi family as asked by his mother. He knocked on the door for a long time but no one responded. The whole house was dark and no one was at home. He realized that something was wrong. He put the sushi at her door and hurriedly ran towards the school in his slippers.
Ignoring the security guard's obstruction, he rushed into the teaching building and searched for Koizumi Na in every classroom. She was not in the classroom, nor in the experimental classroom, nor in the music classroom... Until he passed by the girls' bathroom, he keenly heard a slight sound.
Only then did they discover Koizumi Na trapped in the toilet cubicle.
Masako Takahashi happened to be out of town that day. If Ryoma Echizen hadn't discovered it, Naka Koizumi would have had to stay in this dark little cubicle of less than one square meter for the entire night.
The one who invited her to this place was none other than Anna.
Anna was instructed to approach Koizumi Na, and at the instigation of those people, she asked her to come to the bathroom after school on the pretext that she had difficulties in the bathroom, and then locked her there.
The white girl who instructed Anna was also a dancer. She was dissatisfied because she lost to Koizumi Na who appeared halfway in the school team selection, so she took the opportunity to teach her a lesson.
This is the origin of the whole thing. The so-called friends were actually all lies. It was a scam carefully arranged for her from the beginning to the end.
Only that guy was stupid enough to believe it and paid the price for it.
He should have noticed the subtlety of the matter and reminded her.
But he didn't either.
*
Honestly, I hadn't expected Echizen Ryoma to remember this. Looking at his earnest gaze, I felt strangely irritated and flustered. It was like someone suddenly rubbing an old scar. Even though it no longer hurts, I still feel the itch and the vague phantom pain, reminding me it once existed.
But when the words came to her lips, she couldn't say anything. She could only stare at him blankly with her eyes blinking.
Just at this moment, the train arrival signal sounded, and the train that Echizen Ryoma was going to take had arrived.
"...In short, don't be too trusting of others before you thoroughly understand them... I'm worried that you won't be able to judge people well, and then suffer losses..."
Echizen Ryoma lowered his hat, and the shadow cast by his hair and the brim of the hat covered his eyes, making it impossible to see the hidden emotions in his eyes.
"...You... Never mind. If someone really bullies you, I will definitely..."
He walked past me and was about to get on the train. The loud noise of the train's automatic door opening made it difficult for me to hear the second half of his sentence, but I could probably guess what he meant.
This brat has always been tough on the outside but soft on the inside since he was a child, and I felt inexplicably warm in my heart.
He got in the car and faced me.
"The train doors are about to close. Passengers who have not yet boarded please board as soon as possible and stay away from the doors to avoid being pinched... Ten..."
As the train doors were closing, I suddenly asked him:
"Have you ever thought that maybe I knew from the beginning that this was a scam?"
He was obviously not expecting what I said, and was taken aback. He subconsciously said: "Then why...?"
Halfway through his words, he already had the answer in his mind.
"At that time, I was thinking that if I didn't become her friend and let this drama continue, she would probably be bullied terribly... I've seen it, I've seen how those people bullied her..."
That's why I didn't just stand by and watch, but I wasn't brave enough to stand up for her.
Finally I chose the dumbest method.
Just think of it as atonement for your own powerlessness.
The door slowly closed in front of me, trapping Ryoma Echizen in the speeding train before he could even finish his words.
He said: "That's exactly why I'm even more worried..."
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