Chapter 97

“High School Boys and Secrets” is the 97th chapter of the manga.

Cover Page
End scene of Chapter 96. The mathematics teacher hides behind a wall as the boys chasing him run past it.

Detailed Summary
A few students of Sanada North High's Class 2-A are seen seated together in a classroom. Hidenori, who is part of this group, asks around if anyone had interesting stories to share. Yoshitake and Chapatsu answer that no one did. Hidenori then asks everyone to share secrets they had been holding. This proposal makes some of the others uneasy.

Motoharu volunteers first. He asks the others if they’ve noticed that his hair had been left out long and tells them it was because he had to cover up a zit on his forehead. Hidenori finds this boring, while Yoshitake isn’t sure if it even counts as a secret. Hidenori says he’s next, and tells them that even though he wears glasses, his visual acuity was actually 2.0.

The others are confused by this. Chapatsu asks him why he wears glasses and Motoharu tells him it hardly counts as a secret either. Megane then pipes up with his secret, dismissing it as not really being a secret but just something he had never mentioned. He goes on to say that he’s actually a retained student, leaving the others astonished.

As opposed to the first two secrets, they find the third too grave to have been shared openly. Moving on, Hidenori says he’s next again, despite protests from the others. On his phone, he shows them a picture of himself and Emi and tells them he has a girlfriend. They react with no emotion whatsoever, stunning him.

He demands to know why there’s no reaction from their side, but they tell him they’ve suspected it for a while and seen him with lots of girls. Hidenori tells them it’s just a joke on his part and that the girl was his relative. To his greater anguish, they show no reaction again. Worried that they aren’t believing him, he pleads that they wait and let him clear up his story, but the others ignore him and breeze on.

Chapatsu asks if anyone else was willing to go, despite not having contributed at all, and Yoshitake says it’s his turn. He tells them that he had a strand of hair on his nipple which had been annoying him. He is about to recount a related incident, but the others cut him off. Motoharu tells him they all knew that he took a razor to it, Chapatsu adds that they also knew he shaved his nipple off by accident, and Megane tells him to tell them some real secrets.

Yoshitake then says he knows he told them all that. He confesses that it was all really a lie, leaving them astounded.

Characters
In order of appearance:
 * Mathematics teacher (cover)
 * Motoharu
 * Chapatsu
 * Yoshitake
 * Hidenori
 * Megane