I Quit the Going-Home Club for a Girl with a Venomous Tongue

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T/N: Please don’t think that this is an “update” in the sense that I’ve translated it recently.
I’ve had this draft typed up since November and figured I might as well post it since it’s already translated.
I haven’t proofread the chapter either.
Also, the series (and me translating) is still very much dead as of this moment.
Like I said, I’ve had this draft since November

Title: [Side] Hiwa Arina

When a man named Sakaki Sui appeared in front of me, I was in the worst mood.

I always carry a small notebook with me.

It’s an ordinary notebook, but one that I would never show anyone.
This notebook is my proof, an important notebook that guides me.
If I lost it, I believe I would just cover my ears and crouch down.

I became aware of another me inside of myself in the third year of junior high.
No, it was the other way around.
I was the other one.

The colors exploded.

I didn’t know the world before that explosion.
For me, it was like I was just born.

I didn’t know where I was nor who I was.
There was just a high school girl[1], sweating in the midsummer sun, standing in the road.
The girl seemed to be on her way to school.

Fearfully, I opened the bag on my shoulder to check it’s contents, but none of the things seemed to be mine.
It felt like I had been robbed.

It wasn’t until the fingerprint authentication came through that I knew it was mine.
I started getting to know myself.

My name is Hiwa Arina.
My address was listed under the account information of an online shopping site.
When I looked through the contact information and saw the names, their faces didn’t come to mind.
Even the face of an important person such as my mother didn’t come up.
I couldn’t find any contact information for my father.

An unbearable feeling of loneliness overwhelmed me and I rushed to the park in order to escape and sat on a bench.
I couldn’t go to school.

I am a third year junior high school student— Hiwa Arina.

At home, there was a notebook.

In beautiful handwriting, the words Hiwa Arina were written on the cover.
And thinking it was just a study tool, I casually flipped it open.

On the back of the cover, the first thing I saw was:

[If you don’t remember writing in this notebook, it has been a long time.
What begins on the next page is your history.]

Hah…

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I thought I was down bad.
I was disappointed in myself since I thought only boys would write such news.
I stopped reading before I became embarrassed.

Okaa-san hadn’t come home yet.
She seemed to be at work.

I could see her face from the pictures up on the wall.
However, it was hard to guess what kind of person she was just based off of the pictures.
Besides, I didn’t know what kind of voice I used to use to talk to my mother or what kind of attitude I had.
Even if I met her, she would give me a questioning look.

I wanted to keep this under wraps as much as possible.
It felt like my qualia was screaming at me to not worry my mother.

So, I tried to find “me” by looking at the recorded videos on my phone, but there was nothing.
I numbly.
opened that notebook again.

I felt sick after only reading a couple of pages.

There was a detailed description of Hiwa Arina.

There was who she liked, who had confessed their love to her.

Her height, weight, eyesight, blood type, voice tone, facial expressions, behaviors, personality, relationships, favorite cafe, hobbies.

My status was completely recorded.
What happened each day was also recorded.
I hadn’t skipped a single day.
There were nine notebooks total, covering about three years.
All of the records from the latter half of sixth grade to now, the third year of junior high, was packed inside.

I looked through the ninth notebook first, which contained information about my recent activities.
In the ninth notebook, I found the record from the summer of my second year of junior high until the present.
Forgetting about the time, I traced through my life.
In the records, I put more emphasis on the emotions of the moment rather than on the events that transpired or what I did.
For each event, there were ten real-time feelings and five impressions there.
That’s how it was allocated.

I seemed to be popular.

And indeed, when I went to wash my face in the bathroom and saw my face for the first time, I said, “Wow.
I’m so beautiful.” I just stared.
It sounded like someone else’s problem, but it was definitely me.

I was horrified at the page that listed the names of the people who had confessed to me.
Their background, result, and impressions were all carefully written down.
And they were all brilliantly refused.
That firm stance was like that of someone else.
It was as if I was looking down on myself, using myself to write the diary, even.

Indeed, that’s what I felt like right now.
It was written by Hiwa Arina, not me.
I was reading these records from the perspective of a third party.

Surprisingly, I felt a sense of intimacy.

I thought I was the only one in the world, but there was a girl in this notebook who had a similar situation to myself.
And it existed just for me.

I found out that I was being bullied.

The cause seemed to be jealously.
Even here, Hiwa Arina wrote everything down objectively.
Her handwriting wasn’t shaky due to her being upset, and the words ran smoothly.

Hiwa Arina was a girl who treated everyone indiscriminately, but she doesn’t step beyond a certain line and doesn’t let anyone cross it either.

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Not that there was anything wrong with that kind of behavior.
But some people were offended by her attitude.
It was natural for them to think that way.
You can’t control the discoloration of your mind.
Of course, it was impossible not to think about it.

Hiwa Arina seemed to have been the target of bullying due to her human passions.
However, she didn’t seem to be in a pessimistic mindset.
She may have just been pretending to be calm, but she looked at everything objectively.
It was like the perspective of a God in novels.
She was observing.

After reading through the notebook, I came back to myself.
Who was I in the first place? I didn’t know anything.
I’m not like a baby, but I had no links.

This notebook was addressed to me.
This Hiwa Arina knows I existed.
But I was born only a few hours ago, so how? Was she an esper or something? Did she know me even before I was born? Did she predict the future?

I didn’t know her, but she knew me.

I was like an amnesiac.

I went to school the next day.

I made sure to act and talk to my mom like it was written in the notebook and filled my head with some background info.
She didn’t seem suspicious of me.
I thought she was a very nice person.
I blamed myself for saying that like it was someone else’s problem.
I shouldn’t be saying something like that because she was my mother, my precious blood relative.

It wasn’t like I dreaded the idea of going to school.
Don’t be fooled by this.
I only know how much I am hated and loathed in writing.
After all, they’re just letters.
There’s a limit to how much you can express with them.

After a day, it turned out that the gossip was terrible.

There were whispers near me that came at a delicate volume.

“So fake.”

I knew it wasn’t me they talked about, but Hiwa Arina.
I decided to not worry about it, but surprisingly, I got angry.
Being honest, my resentment burned like a volcanic flame.
I couldn’t be apathetic towards someone who tried to undermine my only ally, Hiwa Arina.
She had been trying to support me long before I knew her.

That’s why I decided to fight for Hiwa Arina.
Although our personalities may be complete opposites, I’m also Hiwa Arina.
I’m strong-minded and outspoken.
The Hiwa Arina in my notebook was a delicate girl, but I won’t act like one.
So I can protect her.
I’ll reject anyone who tries to undermine me, and write it down in the notebook so I won’t have any trouble when my personality switches.

After I made that decision, the reputation I held at school changed drastically.
I heard that I’d become a sadist and had changed.
Indeed, I’ve become a different person.

I thought it was a good sign.
If she had continued being bullied, I thinks he would have committed suicide.
It was crazy to be able to look at myself so objectively.
Maybe it was a psychological sense of mental separation or something.
If that was the case, she must have reached her limit.
The fact that I’m here right now is proof of that.

Still, the bullying continued here and there.
The network and group of girls is a frightening thing and harassment of me quickly stepped up.
It was simple things that could only be called sordid.
Sand on my desk and in my shoes.
Stolen shoes.
I was treated like a nobody.

But not everyone in the school was my enemy.
The boys would give me enthusiastic “I love you’s” and some girls treated me without prejudice.
I have a feeling it was a different community.

After a few months of this, I had amnesia for three whole days.

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I thought it was like a time leap.
I closed my eyes and the next moment I opened them, the scenery had changed.
And three days had passed.
Even though my rational mind tried to remain calm, my instincts were fluctuating.
I quickly opened up my notebook.
And as I expected, the other me had left behind a sentence.

[I think I’m ready to die.]

I was struck by a fear that felt like the world was about to collapse.
I quickly investigated what had happened.

It didn’t take long.
My mother’s lunch was thrown.
Nothing that extreme had ever happened before.
In fact, the situation had recently calmed down.
I thought it was because I was getting tougher and they were getting boring, but apparently, they had just reached the end of their patience.
I wasn’t sure if they were trying to tell me to “get a grip” or what.
If that’s what they wanted to say, then I’ll say this back.

“I can’t stand looking at your heart.”

The main offender was taken aback when I told her that.
She got upset that I talked directly to her since I had ignored her for a long time.
The other party got quite bullish.

“I said I was sorry.
I didn’t bump into you on purpose.”

I hit her as hard as I could.
Time inside the classroom stopped for a moment.

My divorced mother wakes up early every day to make lunch for me.
In order to support her only daughter, my feeble mother desperately works every day.
Even when she’s tired, she smiles and says, “Have a good day,” thinking of me, her daughter.

She treated my lunch box as if it were just an object, the kind lunch box from a kind mother who always took care not to make me anxious about my father’s absence.
She has no idea how frustrating it is.
She doesn’t know the mother who nods at the family accounting book or the mother who yawns while getting ready at five in the morning.
For the first time, I thought ignorance was a sin.

After graduating from junior high, my attitude remained the same.
The people against me were gone, but I couldn’t trust people anymore.
The only people in the world I could trust were my mother and Hiwa Arina.

As soon as I entered high school, people started to whisper about me.
It was not about the bullying in junior high, but rather a beautiful first year.
I continued to turn down confessions, as Hiwa Arina had done, and sent them away with a harsh line.
Isolation didn’t make me feel better, but I can’t fix my personality.
This is who I am.

The day had come where whispers of bullying started happening in high school.
I was impressed that there were such people everywhere.
And then I realized that I had been thinking about this whole past as if it was someone else’s problem.
In junior high, I had an attitude because I thought the bullying was aimed at Hiwa Arina, not me.
I had realized too late and there was nothing I could do about it.

At the same time, I wondered if Hiwa Arina was using me as a replacement.
I thought that she had created me out of a desire to push the unpleasantness onto her other-self.
But, strangely enough, I didn’t resent that.
I believed that I was here because of what happened.

I was aware that I would need to become whole at some point.
I was aware that I needed to become an unwanted existence, so I had to at least create that environment around me.
But there was no way to do so.
I was trapped in the confines of high school.

When Akakusa-sensei appeared, I became worried.

“Arina-san, how long have you been here?”

I told her about my true feelings.

I told her that I needed to change in order for the other me to come out and that I needed her help.
I asked about what I should do to make that happen.
I believe I was saying a lot of crazy things.
At any rate, Akakusa-sensei was the first person I told my secret to.
I let it all out.

A male student named Sakaki Sui showed up.

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That day, I was feeling awful.
My skirt had been torn.
Obviously, it wasn’t a natural tear.
The cloth had been cut in a straight line.
I didn’t know who it was, but it seemed that my enemy was still desperate for my attention.

I got fed up with this guy Sui who was approaching me.
I was thinking, “I’m gonna have to look up your real name to put in the list of confessions inside the notebook,” but then he said something unexpected.

“I’m going to rehabilitate you.
Come on, sit down.”

Rehabilitation.

I believed a turning point had arrived.

Something was going to change.
I was sure of it.

Just like me, Sakaki Sui was a strange person.

However, he was also a fresh and inspiring person that could show me things.

Surely he would be able to put Hiwa Arina at ease.

I analyzed things objectively.

‘I wonder if it’s okay for me to have a good time with him until I’m gone.

What do you think? Arina.’

I wrote that down and closed the notebook.

Today was finally the day of the festival.
I borrowed a dress my mom used to use when she was a model, and I had to win because I’m participating in a fashion show.
I wanted to show it to my mom, but she would have to be satisfied with the pictures.

I told him not to come, but I had to wonder if he really wouldn’t come.

I put my shoes on and checked to see if I left anything behind.
Okay, they’re fine.
I raised my toes, checked that they were comfortable, and thumped them on the ground, casually signaling to my mom I was leaving the house.
The sound of my mother rubbing her slippers always made me feel at peace.
It was my favorite sound.

Mom came out of the kitchen.
Wiping her hands on her apron, she gave her usual gentle smile.

“Have a good day, Arina.”

“Yeah, I’m heading off!”