Ch.338IF Side Story: Seems I’ve Arrived a Bit Early (35)

Time passed both quickly and slowly.

Each day seemed to flow leisurely, but when I came to my senses, a week or a month had already passed.

Kagami and I went out for Christmas one more time, and we had two Christmas parties with Yuu and Harumi.

We celebrated New Year’s twice more and experienced two more summer vacations.

During winter break, I built snowmen and had snowball fights with the children.

Fortunately, my grades didn’t drop much and managed to stay near the top. Well, I could still handle the studies with just my original memories.

Time flowed slowly, but the children grew quickly.

It felt like the children grew every time I blinked. Even though I saw them almost every day.

Harumi and Yuu both grew taller than me. Among them, Yuu was the tallest.

As time passed, the children’s personalities changed subtly, knowingly and unknowingly.

Harumi still liked manga quite a bit, but she didn’t run around playing like before. She still enjoyed going places, and among the three of us, she was still the one who decided where to go, but she had become somewhat calmer than before.

She read manga less frequently than when she was younger. Instead of magical girl stories, she read more romance manga, with some dramas mixed in between.

She no longer went around catching insects.

She started paying attention to her figure. Kids around us began talking about who was fat or skinny, and some became conscious of boys.

Well, most of it was still at a cute level for now.

Yuu’s personality changed more than the two of us.

Yuu became calmer overall. He had a calm demeanor in the past too, but how should I put it?

He seemed to be gradually understanding what kind of world surrounded him.

That’s not to say he’d gone astray yet. He always looked happy when talking with Harumi and me.

But relationships changed a bit too.

Yuu used to follow Kagami very well, but at some point, he began to feel somewhat uncomfortable with Kagami’s presence.

Perhaps the young Yuu really did identify Kagami with his mother. Maybe he just learned why his mother disappeared at some point—making Kagami’s existence uncomfortable.

And for some reason, his relationship with Miho seemed to be deteriorating little by little.

I don’t intend to meddle in other people’s family affairs, but high school student Miho was spending noticeably more time around Mr. Yamashita.

Mr. Yamashita still seemed to maintain some distance from Miho, but well, hmm.

…Right, it’s not my place to judge.

And as for me—

I still lived with Kagami.

The days I slept in Kagami’s arms decreased. Kagami understood this change. Though we couldn’t have separate rooms, she didn’t seem to want to prevent my personal independence.

I no longer visited Harumi’s house every day. I was now old enough to stay home alone without it being strange.

I didn’t feel lonely. Though it’s not for me to say, having lost my entire family in my previous life and lived so desolately, I came to think that it wasn’t bad to relax alone sometimes when I was otherwise surrounded by people.

I started enjoying the comedy routines on TV, and I began to have dramas that I liked.

The year 2000 had not yet arrived.

People were slowly talking about the “end of the century.” The visions of the future shown on TV seemed rather fanciful to me, who knew that “future,” and honestly, it was a bit funny.

The future will, yes, flow in a much less interesting and more convenient direction than imagined. There won’t be all-purpose devices with many buttons on large machines, but you’ll be able to look at everything in the world on a small screen the size of your palm.

Thinking about it again, well, they just didn’t predict it perfectly, but the incomprehensible madness remained.

In America, banks that should have been solid would collapse after lending money recklessly, and people would buy and sell currency with no physical form that was too expensive to use as money.

Hmm, maybe this era was much simpler and better.

1998, when I entered the fourth grade of elementary school.

I had completely adapted to this body now. Sometimes when I was bored, I would visit Kagami’s workplace. At first, Kagami didn’t want to tell me, perhaps not wanting to show me how hard she worked, but when I stubbornly insisted, she finally told me.

Kagami worked at a small restaurant. She helped out from busy mornings until afternoons, and afterward, in the evening, the shop owner would just accept customers as they came and serve whatever food he felt like making.

The ramen wasn’t particularly delicious. To be honest, it had a bit of a pork smell that didn’t quite suit my taste.

But still, I would occasionally go there, eat a bowl, and then go home with Kagami.

Well, now I’m at the age of an “upper grader,” aren’t I? In just two years, I’ll graduate from elementary school.

“Want to eat ramen?”

As we were walking home from school together, Harumi suddenly asked.

From a very young age until now, especially when we were younger, we met and played together almost every day. It was even my daily routine to wait for my mom at Harumi’s house.

No matter how long you try to hide your circumstances, eventually they’ll be discovered.

Harumi and Yuu know how Kagami and I live.

They don’t look at us with contempt or pity. Both of them are so used to Kagami and me that there’s nothing left to be surprised about.

No, perhaps they saw it when they were too young and accepted it as natural.

Yuu and Harumi seemed to envy me subtly. That is… I don’t have a “father,” but I have a “mother.”

If they were sons, it might have been different, but they were daughters. Well, we never openly talked about it.

Having already lost everything in my previous life, I didn’t need to envy other families when I already had one person, and I wasn’t tactless enough to bring up such topics in front of them.

“Huh? Huh?”

Actually, when Harumi said this, she didn’t really want to eat ramen; she just wanted to go to that shop and hang out.

I opened the coin purse attached to my bag strap.

One 500-yen coin, two 100-yen coins, and a few 50-yen coins. Enough for a bowl of ramen.

“Shall we?”

I asked, looking at Yuu.

“Sure.”

Yuu answered plainly as always.

It was a bit sad to see him becoming increasingly adept at hiding his emotions. At such a young age, it’s a bit… well.

But I didn’t want to dig too deep and hurt him. It should be enough to make sure he knows he has two best friends beside him who he can always confide in.

We headed to the ramen shop where Kagami worked.

This time of day was an odd hour, so there probably wouldn’t be many customers. Usually during these in-between times, not quite lunch or dinner, it’s often a break time, but that place doesn’t close just because there are no customers.

We often went there during such times and hung out.

Both Harumi and Yuu like Kagami, whom they’ve known since childhood. Of course, their feelings are different. Harumi sees her as a friend’s mom who’s really nice and good at cooking, while Yuu… well, I don’t know if he knows the whole truth, but he seems to have figured out something.

If Harumi likes her purely, Yuu feels somewhat uncomfortable but doesn’t want to give up being close to her.

Kagami is still in her early twenties.

It was an age where she could easily be misunderstood if she went around with Mr. Fukuda. …If they were to get married, I would absolutely oppose it, but if Harumi is okay with it, well.

It takes longer to get from school to the ramen shop than it does to get from school to our house. We made idle conversation along the way. Some of it was talk that imitated “romance stories.” Like who in our class was handsome, or who liked whom.

As I was walking and responding appropriately, I suddenly felt something strange.

A feeling like someone was staring at me.

It felt like something I had experienced a very long time ago.

When I turned my head, there was someone in the distance. They were too far away to see clearly, but it was a person with beautiful long black straight hair wearing a wide-brimmed hat.

Wearing a white dress too, how should I put it.

It resembled the eight-foot ghost I saw in my previous life. Though it didn’t seem to be that inhuman in size.

“Kotone?”

“Huh?”

I quickly turned my head at Harumi’s words.

“Geez, are you listening?”

“Yeah, ah, sorry.”

I answered like that while glancing sideways at the spot that had been bothering me.

The person who had been standing there was no longer visible.