Miori had never been timid or hesitant, and even in this new classroom, she always spoke her mind. Kokoro, and the others who’d come from her elementary school, were more diffident. It felt as if Miori and her group owned the place, and Kokoro and her circle were merely tenants. Kokoro didn’t understand why things turned out this way, but that’s how it was from the very beginning.

They were all the same age, but it was as if Miori and the other girls in her group held all the power in their class.

They seemed to have first dibs on whatever club they wanted to join, and when other girls tried to join the same club, Miori and her gang had the power to spread rumours that these girls weren’t up to it, and prevent them from joining – the power to decide who belonged, the power to decide what nicknames to use for their teachers, the freedom to choose which boys they liked, and which to fall in love with.

THE BOY THAT MIORI SANADA liked, and started going out with, was Chuta Ikeda, a boy from the same class in Kokoro’s elementary school.

Kokoro and Chuta had just been friends, nothing more. When they were preparing the traditional appreciation dinner for their teachers just before their graduation, Chuta complained it was all a stupid waste of time, but Kokoro was impressed how, despite his complaining, when things needed to be done, he stepped up. It wasn’t as if she fancied him, or thought he was handsome or anything, just that she now reassessed her earlier impression of him as irresponsible.

‘I always thought boys just couldn’t do these things properly,’ she said, as a sort of throwaway comment.

‘Eh?’ Chuta said. ‘We just don’t want to complicate things. But I reckon any boy would step up and do his part. We’re not so lame, you know, and you’ve no right to say that.’ Their conversation petered out after this.

‘YOU KNOW WHAT?’

This was in the middle of April, in the bicycle parking area at school. Kokoro turned around when she heard a voice. There was Chuta standing in front of her.

‘Ugly girls like you are the pits.’

‘What?’ The word rose up in her throat, but got stuck halfway.

Her field of vision, with Chuta at its centre, seemed to quake and swim before her eyes.

Chuta’s face was inscrutable.

Kokoro sensed the presence of other bodies, that someone was crouched down a short distance away, waiting with bated breath.

She stood frozen to the spot as Chuta proceeded to walk off, hands in his pockets. When he got near the hiding place where she knew her classmates were lurking, she heard laughter.

‘Are you kidding?’

‘Didn’t it seem like she thought for a second that Chuta was actually going to tell her he fancied her?’

‘Oh my god, she got that so wrong.’