Worthless Skill Escape (WN)

Chapter 38

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TL: ALT

Chapter 38 – And So I Became a Shut-in

The trigger was a common one.

In my senior year of high school, I learned that a junior in my club was being bullied by a classmate.

The leader of the bullying was, of course, Junko Tozaki.

Although her surname was different at that time.

It wasn’t that I was particularly close to the junior.

Nor did I like her.

I only knew her name and her face.

The bullying by Junko Tozaki and her cronies was very severe.

That woman had the power to control even the teachers from then on, and no one in the school could resist her.

There was probably no particular reason why the junior student became the target of the bullies.

It was just that she caught her attention.

Maybe it was because she was afraid of her, and it seemed easy for her to do as she was told.

With that level of mind, this woman was playing with other people’s lives.

Everyone felt guilty, but they couldn’t stop her.

In the midst of all this, an idiot stood up.

It was me, of course.

“That’s enough!”

I said, defending my junior and the woman surprisingly backed down.

Ah, I’m glad I stood up to her instead of escaping――

I innocently thought so.

But all hell broke loose that day.

You can probably guess what happened, can’t you?

I was being severely bullied at school.

The bullying continued, but in a roundabout, persistent way, without leaving any evidence so that no one would ever know who did it.

Still, I tried to endure the bullying because I would graduate in a year.

If I did not endure, my juniors would be bullied again.

This sense of duty kept me going.

――But my nerves were not strong enough to keep fighting with only that sense of duty.

When I woke up in the morning and tried to go to school, I vomited.

My heart was pounding like it was going to burst, and I was overcome by a strong feeling of dizziness.

That was my day.

I crawled out of bed and washed my face.

I haven’t looked in the mirror in weeks.

I mechanically bring my breakfast to my mouth as if chewing sand.

Just walking to the front door is a heavy feeling.

It takes all my energy to put on my leather shoes that have been mishandled so many times.

Even after putting them on, I am afraid to walk out of the house.

From there, it’s a battle with my energy.

I get fired up. I leave the house. I approach the train station. I muster the energy to walk through the ticket booth. The train approaches. I get ready before boarding the train. The train arrives at the station. I prepare to get off the train. Before leaving the ticket booth, I am also getting ready. On the way from the station to the school gate, every time I turn a corner, every time I pass a light pole, I renew my spirit to go forward. When I stand in front of the school gate, I feel my heart pounding. I can’t stop sweating. I take deep breaths. Sometimes for several minutes. Just when I’ve calmed down, the fear comes back. I braced myself. The entrance to the school. The shoe box. At this point, on a bad day, the bullying has started. If it hasn’t started yet, it’s a sign that they’ll try to bully me some other time when I’m not expecting it. With shaking hands, I open the shoe box. I put on my slippers with all my strength. I put my leather shoes in a bag and took them to the classroom so that they would not be mistreated. I make my way down the hall. Every student I pass seems like an enemy. I jump when a student passes me from behind. I’m afraid someone might be behind the stairs, and I brace myself so they don’t know how scared I am. I walk carefully up the stairs. If there is a female student in front of me, I will not go up the stairs. This is to avoid accusations that I was looking up her skirt. I reach the floor where the classrooms are located. There are many familiar faces here. Most of them look away from me with a look of annoyance on their faces. However, it is not necessarily true that there are no new enemies among them. If it’s a man, he might push me away. If they are women, they might hug me and call me a pervert. But if I blatantly avoid them, it could be the beginning of a false accusation. I put all my energy into moving forward down the hallway. I move forward, dragging my heavy feet. But as I move forward, I get closer to the classroom. Each time I move forward, my legs become heavier. I put my energy back into it. Soon, I reached the classroom. I can’t reach the classroom door. I have to be determined. I cannot be surprised by what I see when I open the door. Don’t panic. Don’t get angry. I tell myself and try to open the classroom door. Someone else opens the door first, and my hand comes up empty. Even the slightest movement like that could become a source of ridicule. I do my best to pretend that nothing is wrong. My classmates look away when I enter. I put my back into it. I greeted them with a whisper, “Good morning.” No response. I check my desk to make sure it’s secure. I brace myself and wait patiently for the first bell of the school day.

Oh, for God’s sake.

I don’t want to have to listen to this.

It’s obvious now, but there’s no way I can go on living like this.

Soon after that, I stopped going to school.

A month or two passed.

Nothing happened around me.

As expected, Junko Tozaki did not even come to my house.

I’m sure she would go that far now, but she didn’t have that much support back then.

But that doesn’t mean she didn’t do anything.

Soon after, the vice principal of the school came to my house and told my mother something.

She wanted me to voluntarily withdraw from high school.

My mother asked why he would say such a thing.

I was told the same thing later.

Yes, that’s right.

I was so overwhelmed with my own bitterness that I forgot the most important thing.

The vice principal had told me about the junior student.

She had committed suicide.

After I stopped going to school, the bullying of the younger student started again.

The bullying had become more intense than before.

The younger student was so distressed by the bullying that she committed suicide.

And with the added bonus of uploading her suicide note to social networking sites.

In her suicide note, she wrote the following.

“If you can’t help me anyway, I wish you hadn’t done anything in the first place. If it was going to end in despair, I wish you had never given me hope. If it had been pitch black all the time, I might have been able to bear it, but now that I’ve been shown the light, I can’t bear it anymore. I don’t know what to do anymore. I hope that all those who bullied me, those who half-heartedly defended me, and those who decided to turn a blind eye will all die socially!”

The suicide note went viral on social media, and the school was flooded with telegrams from righteous men.

The school seemed to be saying that I was the cause of her suicide.

They said that my abandoning her was the reason she decided to commit suicide.

Junko Tozaki is untouchable.

Teachers and students who turned a blind eye to the bullying wanted to believe that they were the only ones who didn’t do anything.

Then, the blame would fall on the weak boy who ran away from school and stopped attending.

That’s why I voluntarily left school.

I was chosen as the scapegoat for the whole school.

But as expected, Junko Tozaki was not unscathed, and I heard that she decided to transfer to a high school in Tokyo as soon as possible.

But it was only a transfer, and I was expelled after being told.

Maybe I could have fought my way out.

But what good would fighting to do?

I couldn’t go back to that school, and even if I transferred, my reputation at my old school would be a stumbling block.

Most importantly, my psyche was in tatters, and it was hard to just live.

What had I done?

I acted with an arrogant sense of justice, failed to protect my juniors, and simply ran away in disgrace.

I felt sorry for her, even though I was living in a safe place.

In retrospect, the junior’s suicide note was unreasonable.

She took it for granted that I would protect her, and when I broke down, she blamed me for not protecting her.

Perhaps it wasn’t surprising that she couldn’t keep her sanity in the midst of intense bullying.

But even so, isn’t that too hard on me?

If she didn’t have the will or the courage to stand up for herself, why does she demand, as a matter of course, that I, who had nothing to do with it, stand up for her instead?

If she had complained to the authorities or the police that she was being severely bullied, wouldn’t the situation have been resolved quickly?

You could say that since she was driven to the point of committing suicide in the first place, there was no need to take her words at face value.

I probably should have made such a self-justification, but at that time, I was just using her words as material for self-denial.

Someone died because of me.

That’s all I could think.

In retrospect, it was probably a good thing that I saw it as another symptom of depression and stopped blaming myself.

I dropped out of high school and tried to take the university entrance exam while working part-time, but my depression made it difficult to study for the exam, and I failed.

After that, I went to a mental health clinic and found a job after a period of recovery.

There was a path that would have allowed me to take more time and go to college, but I didn’t know how long this terrible condition would last.

I didn’t want to be a burden on my parents, so I pushed myself and decided to get a job.

Would it have been better if I had not forced myself to get a job but instead had recovered sufficiently and then wasted my time going to college?

In retrospect, it probably would have been.

But I didn’t feel comfortable relying on my parents’ support for so many years.

So I tried to get a job, but there are only a limited number of jobs for a high school dropout.

The company I went to was not an all-black company, but it was still a black company.

Even there, I tried to do my best without escaping.

Looking back, I should have bowed to my parents and gone to college or vocational school instead of working hard in a company like that.

It would have cost me a few years, but it was much better than becoming a social shut-in.

As a result, my depression and panic attacks returned, and I quit the company after about six months.

There was no way I could think about taking exams or looking for a job in such a state, and I became a long-term shut-in…

Looking back, I should have sought professional help at that time.

I should have gotten counseling, schooling, employment assistance, and someone to work with me to figure out how to rebuild my life, not just prescribe antidepressants.

If I couldn’t do that, I shouldn’t have blamed myself and just stayed quiet until I got over my depression.

Even though I had stumbled along the way, I was not at an irreversible age.

In retrospect, in retrospect…

My life is filled with countless “in retrospect.”

It all started when I tried to help people.

I still don’t know.

I didn’t have to sacrifice my own life to protect a junior I wasn’t that close to.

Objectively, it was the right thing to do.

In fact, there were rumors circulating… that I may have forced a relationship with her in exchange for defending her from bullies.

I’ve heard that people don’t usually help strangers unless they have a reason to do so.

Unless there was a reason, they said, you should not help a stranger.

But I couldn’t overlook it.

I couldn’t allow myself to do nothing.

I knew I couldn’t escape, so I confronted them, and in the end, I couldn’t win, and I had to escape from everything.

Even after that, I escaped from admitting my bad physical and mental condition, forced myself to work and failed, and made my physical and mental condition even worse.

I should have escaped from helping a younger student who was being bullied.

After helping her, I should have prepared myself to fight instead of escaping.

I should have escaped from fighting the bullies directly and relied on outside experts.

Once I had escaped the damage, I should have tried to recover, not escape the fact that damage had been done, and I should have escaped the sense of urgency and obligation to take exams and find a job.

I should have escaped the guilt of putting an extra burden on my parents, or instead of escaping, I should have asked my parents to help me go to school in a way that was not unreasonable.

If I thought the company I was working for was not good, I should have escaped before it went under.

If it went under, I should not have escaped from seeking professional treatment and help.

Where should I escape, and where shouldn’t I escape?

Can someone please tell me?

And how to determine that before the catastrophic results?