When I entered high school, the two freaky students floated. One dropped out of school after the school camp in April. He sort of stood out; stating messages clearly and lacking the ability to read between the lines. Not saying something directly is a core part of Japanese culture. Every time he uttered some words, the others had virtually fallen silent, with several jaws hanging slightly agape.
The other was an introvert, who spoke little retreating into a shell. On top of all that, he had a strong body odor. When the boys walked by him, one sniffed the air and pinched his nose, grinning, Before physical education class, you have to do change into your gym uniform in the jam-packed locker rooms. As he had his clothes off, the boys covered their noses and mouthes, making comments about him being smelly. And then one day, I happened to see him weeping alone in the locker room. “What’s wrong?” I asked in a small voice. He said nothing and left the room. During lunch and recess, he hung back and kept to himself, and he concluded that he was chronically absent from school.
I suppose the freaky boys were very sensitive and felt alienated from the class, where a sense of comradeship began to grow. Unfortunately both of them could hardly contain or express themselves. As a result, they quickly ran into problem. They were shunned in the class where in less than a month the hierarchy would be determined by simply conversational skill―or the lack of it.
Unlike the students of the highest rank casually talk with anyone, the serious student―such as a boy belongs to a student council―often talked to the teachers. He was the the kind of boy who even in his shirt buttoned all the way to the top and tucked into his pants. He was quite a bore who snitched to the teacher on the boys who did not follow the rules of the school; isolated, he subsequently transferred to another school.
With a twinge of guilt, I had felt relieved those had not been me. However, I had fantasized about the student life in the higher rank earlier that month. I was not appealing when I was a junior high school student. I was a nerdy studious boy with only two friends who talked about nothing but study. Of course I was in the low rank, so I was going to change myself dramatically in my high school, where nobody know me.
In the beginning, I worried about student’s perception of me studying hard in my junior high school. I wanted to avoid the label like a nerd. In whispers: Outcasts, The introverts. The others. “Studying is the only thing you’re good at,” equipped a girl, the former classmate. Her words has been echoing in my mind ever since she said that.
Apart from that, I hated the rules of the school: no dyed hair, no perms and no piercings. Interested in fashion, I had wore a fluorescent colored T-shirt beneath my high school uniform―the way the cool boys of the high rank do―so that you caught a glimpse of my neckline. And then I pretend to be indifferent to studying lest I was defined as a nerd. Actually, I had studied a little, but at the same time getting bad grade seemed very cool. I had never seen a boy who was good at studying dating a good-looking girl.
I felt especially strange, as if I was the other. In the first month, I was pleasing to the girls in my grade and the next thing I knew I was in an influential group of several boys, with whom I enjoyed taking some Purikura(you pose with your friends on a photo booth that dispenses very small photo stickers), which was swapped with the hot girls whose notebooks were full with its stickers. Girls approached me everyday. I was elated.
The members of that group were from the high rank. Maybe I was the only person from the low one. Beyond my ability, I could not have caught up with the things around me, learning how they blended. I was shy, so there was an awkward moment whenever I talked with him alone with fear that my true colors might expose. Can you imagine a studious boy in a corner of a classroom surrounded by the extroverts?
A month later, I was standing by myself in the back of the classroom during recess, watching the others laughing and talking. In this morning, when I was about to join the group saying “Hey, dude,” the silence dropped, no one paid attention to me, and no one spoke to me. I was very sensitive to my feeling that things might never really change. I knew that an amorous boy, who confined himself to pleasing girls, did not like it that I was popular with the girls. Perhaps he would had spread bad rumors about me. He had a way with words, which brought home to me the reality that I was not the kind of person in the high rank. I found myself disappearing into aloneness as though the tide ebbed away.