You Don’t Know What You’ve Got Until It’s Gone - CH 1

Common Honorifics:

-san: A polite suffix, but not excessively formal.

-kun: A common suffix among friends and younger people.

-chan: A common suffix among people you’re close with, mostly used for feminine nicknames and girls, since it’s cutesy and childlike.

-senpai: A common suffix and noun used to address or refer to one’s older or more senior colleagues in a school, workplace, dojo, or sports club.

TL Note: I’m translating names as if they were western, meaning the first one you’ll see is the first name, and the other one is the last. I’m doing that for intuitive reading, but forgive me for any mistakes. I’m just another humble MTL translator.

Enjoy~!

There are two beautiful girls in my class. One is Suzuka Ichinose, my childhood friend.

Her hair is beautiful and undyed, barely scraping her shoulders. A thin nose and a fair face compliment her feminine figure, showing just the right amount in the right places. She’s bright as the sun, which only matches her appearance, resulting in her having many friends. A girl popular with people of both sexes, she is.

She and I are next-door neighbors and our parents are friends. Our families, us included, have a relationship undeniably worthy of the “childhood friend” title, and no doubt it was enviable to some around us. We’ve been glued to the hip ever since we were kids, even now.

Needless to say, we’re also good friends, not just our parents. That’s why we’d often walk to school together, and get involved with each other during classes. So much so, that our classmates started to think we were more than just friends.

Naturally, as we were just that, we both laughed it off and denied anything, but I secretly felt happy inside…

That’s ‘cause I actually like her.

I’ve never been one to stand out, admittedly. I’m not particularly good-looking, or a good talker, not even good at brightening the atmosphere around me.

The reason why I have so many friends is Suzuka, who’s always been with me. I also think there was a part of me who felt some kind of superiority for always being with her, a girl incredibly popular.

However, she wasn’t just a friend to me. She was and is indispensable.

Well, she doesn’t see me as anything other than a friend, and whenever I ask her out on dates, she always invites other friends and isn’t conscious of my advances the slightest bit. I try and try to make her look at me, but she keeps pulling others around like an oblivious protagonist from some manga. The road to getting a date with her is a difficult one, for sure.

The other girl in my class is called Mayumi Kuraki. Her hair is dyed bright blonde and done in a bob cut. Sometimes, one could see piercings through her strands. To notch it all up, she also uses her uniform in a different way, and her skirt is much shorter than the others.

Objectively speaking, she was quite gyaru-like¹, or maybe even worse, a delinquent. Sometimes, she’d even be absent from class. Due to all that, she was kept at an arm’s length from other girls in class and is usually left alone.

Due to her appearance, she’s quite popular with the boys. I mean, you could see the top of her cleavage through the uniform, and her thighs slipped from her short skirt. There are also a lot of rumors surrounding her, ones about Kuraki selling her body and how much she might get from it.

However, she’s such a good friend of mine. In fact, we’ve been going to the same school since our elementary days. I was even asked about the rumors by a classmate who found out about it.

I was very familiar with her presence from a very young age, all due to her noticeable appearance. Still, we didn’t talk much, and to be honest, we don’t know each other very well now. The only thing we have in common is that we went to the same schools.

My childhood friend, Ryoka, is bright and flirty. Her group of friends always surrounds her.

Meanwhile, Kuraki-san is a loner who’s usually by herself, and sometimes even skips class.

Although they were two very different people, most of the stories I heard from boys in class were about these two cute girls.

1 — Gyaru refers to a Japanese fashion and social sub-culture of girls who follow a certain style of clothes, hair, makeup, and activities. They’re kind of the valley-girls of Japan, some would say. Within the gyaru culture, there are countless sub-categories.