...okay, so the Seven Seas published translation of that page reads as following:
Yamada: If you leave too, then I...
Yamada: I dunno, if I can make it by myself next year.
Mikawacchi: You'll be fine.
Mikawacchi: I mean, we've been doing this kind of thing for a while!
Mikawacchi: Did you forget?
Mikawacchi: "We only became friends in tenth grade. Three years ago we haven't even met yet. We've done this a million times since elementary school. You'll be fine.
Yamada ("voice-over"): Right...
Yamada (thought): I guess so.
Yamada ("voice-over"): Did I feel like this in Junior High, too?
---- soo, yeah, the bold and cursive was that way in the book.
I think, that translation makes it a little much clearer, but I understood it that way in the translation we have here (which is interesting because the "we hadn't seen each other in three years" tells a different narrative - maybe my non-native-english brain just skipped it for not making much sense in the given context and rewired the wordstring to a wholy different sentence that coincidentally matched the other translation / original intent? ...weird. But I swear, I always read that to mean this):
The context is them starting a new school year, enrolling in the next higher school / at university at that; everything new, new people, loosing some old friends, new schedules, new surroundings, all that jazz.
Yamada is scared of that, her insecure gold-fish-memory-self can only think of the past three years, where she had Mikawacchi to fall back on.
But Mikawacchi reminds her (paraphrasing) "Kid, this is not the first time. We [not together but, both you and me] have been doing this rodeo [getting into a new school year, feeling a little lost, finding new friends] since elementary, since [each] our first day of school. It keeps repeating once per year. It's nothing new. You managed, even before meeting me. You will manage again. It'll be fine."
...in short, this is a translation-thingy at best. It was not meant to imply they have known each other since elementary. They became friends in the first year of High School. No contradiction here.
Phew.
last edited at Dec 1, 2019 3:53PM