A Catgirl's Last Chance for High School Romance - COMPLETE

[X] Stroll into the room as if nothing out of the ordinary is going. Normalcy is the way to go!

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It's okay Hanako. You got this. You take a deep breath to ready yourself for whatever is going to happen and slide the door open. You step inside with a sort of confidence you're not sure you actually feel. But that's the point, isn't it? Act like you have everything under control, even when you don't. You glance around the classroom. It's bright in here, the afternoon sunlight streaming through the windows. As you move back towards your desk, you catch classmates hurriedly looking back at their work or resuming conversations that seem to have paused when you re-entered. Snatches of words that hang just at the edge of hearing.

"Did you see--?"

"That was weird--"

"--hope she's okay--"

"--fighting over a boy?"

Mari and Yui are both still sitting where you left them. Yui glances at Mari, then to you, then back as you settles yourself back into your chair. Slowly, the buzz of normal conversation begins to resume. Mari leans forward, brow furrowed.

"...Hanako are you okay? I'm so sorry! I didn't mean to make you upset. I just..." She speaks quietly, so as not to attract extra attention but you get the feeling the students sitting closest to you are all listening intently anyway. Before Mari can continue, you reply in a hurried fashion.

"Y-yeah! I'm fine. Don't worry about it, okay? I just. I just needed to get outside for a minute and clear my head. You know how I am about... boys." That's a lie. You've literally never been flustered about a boy in your life but you try your best to sound genuine. Just pretend to be normal, you think to yourself. If I pretend long enough maybe I'll just BE normal. Mari's voice breaks into your thoughts.

"Are you sure? If you're mad you can say so."

"I think we should probably get back to our studying, don't you?" Yui chimes in. Heh. She just wants this awkwardness to pass but you're not sure if it will. So you smile and nod and agreement, like a normal person would.

"Yui-chan is right. We should focus on our work. Please don't worry about it, Mari!" Your words sound stiff and formal even to you and you feel certain that Mari caught it as well. It's almost as if you can feel a wall building up between you, brick by brick, and you don't know how to stop it. It wasn't there before and now it is. You do your best to just smile and it works, you think, because Mari smiles back after a long, awkward moment.

"Okay. Let's get back to it..." she says in a quiet voice and bends back over her books. You join her and soon enough the three of you are back where you were before, focused entirely on your studying. You could almost think that whole mess before hadn't happened earlier. But it did. Thankfully the rest of the school day passes by with relative swiftness and you can say goodbye to Mari. Normally you might walk with her down to the yard before you go your separate ways for clubs and what not, but today you make a beeline out the door and head to your club room. Erika has, unsurprisingly, beaten you there. It's a cozy space that you've managed to cram into with one of those fancy digital projectors hanging from the ceiling and even a beat up couch that some previous iteration of the club managed to squeeze in here. How they convinced the school to let them use it, you don't know. You're grateful for it today, though. With a groan, you collapse onto it, secretly thankful your new members don't seem to have arrived yet. You're supposed to watch some sort of ghost movie today and discuss local folklore but you're not sure you have the energy. Or the enthusiasm.

"You alright over there, Hanako-senpai?" Erika looks up from where she's fiddling with the DVD player attached to the projector. Probably getting it set-up. She's good with computers. As always, you feel grateful to have someone attentive who's NOT going to bug you about boys or anything like that.

[ ] No. Mari was being really pushy today.
[ ] Yeah! I think I made friends with Akane.