I hadn't planned on updating until this section was entirely finished, but I received a few more subscription alerts, so I thought I'd extend my gratitude for anyone reading by proving that I haven't let this story go! Thanks for watching!

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No amount of prayer could make the clock move faster for Minako that night. Enduring the study group to its end had wasted her resolve, emptied her of energy through a thousand tiny fidgets. She accomplished almost nothing in those four hours, left with as little knowledge of linear equations as she'd had to start, and the evening's conversation was a blur, indefinable.

The sullen blonde boarded a bus with her two companions like always, lost them both to the first stop like always, but for once, she was glad to see them go. Her body knew its destination well before it was realized, and she passed the place where she normally exited in a cloud, coasting quietly along with newborn gratitude for friends who lived nearer to Rei than she did. Friends might talk you out of strange decisions if they knew that you were making them.

Usagi's accidental clairvoyance followed her on the journey. As they'd descended the stairs of the shrine, the pig-tailed girl folder her fingers across Minako's shoulder and insisted, "I'm sure she's alright, Minako-chan. We'll all go visit tomorrow, okay?"

The sentence sounded strongly off the walls of her brain, her smile so bright that you'd want to hide from it if you were unhappy. That was Usagi, so vivid, unstoppably cheerful.

Sometimes it was enough that Usagi was sure of something. The occasion was rare and she was so often correct that to mistrust her seemed silly by now.

But Minako had her hunches, too, and on the walk from the bus stop closest to Makoto's apartment, she considered why the visit felt so necessary.

The longer her blood beat calmly, the further she wandered from the irrational; was it so likely that Mako had been hurt? Arrested? Harmed? Of course not. But the feeling of swampwater that churned in her stomach persisted, and it was with a self-reflective heave of breath that she saw which option upset her the most. What if they'd spent the night together?

Even the casual thought of sex seemed still like a drug, a taboo not to be broken, a world belonging to remote, elegant others that none of the five dared enter. It was something they hadn't done yet, it carried a newness that was alien and intimidating, yet it was such a positive something to those who'd already chanced it! The ultimate expression of romance, one that swore you into a new way of approaching relationships like taking an oath, it wouldn't require the comfort or support of a friend to be worked through as an accident or a hardship might.

But what wove anonymously through her brain just out of comprehension's reach was that it was, more importantly, more horribly, something that would divide them if one should take the plunge, it would set her apart from her partner in adolescence. Because they shared their innocence with one another, one of them trading it for experience instead would eliminate a bond created thereby, an eagerness and a curiosity more interesting when it was shared between those who traded their anticipation.

Minako would be left sullen and unaware while Makoto, in breaking one bond, would go on to form another with her new lover, a bond that Minako could never participate in. An unmistakable twoness that once had belonged to them as friends would reform as something else, with someone else, and it was with a clarity made painful by guilt that she realized her jealousy was not toward Mako for doing something first, but toward her potential lover, for taking her away.

Lagged by the realization of her shallowness, it suddenly felt impossible to make the 6-block journey from her bus stop to Makoto's apartment. Why wouldn't she be happy for her first, happy for her before anything else came to mind? She'd looked tirelessly for love since they'd met her, and that the possibility of her finding it inspired not joy, but sadness felt to Minako like a betrayal. At length, slumped against the door's thick frame, she knocked against its bold black numbers, by now red in the face and wondering what she would say to explain her arrival.

With a gesture of luck's miserable hand, she was released from having to explain herself at all.