Summary:
Gaudy displays of wealth exhibit the vice of vulgarity, while spoiling an event through penny-pinching
is a sign of person who overestimates self-worth is conceited, and the person who underestimates
self-worth is weak and timid. The right disposition toward anger is similar to patience, though
patience can sometimes be a deficiency, as some anger is occasionally appropriate. The excess
of irascibility manifests itself in people with hot tempers, or worse, people who hold grudges.
Maki wished Rin at least, and probably Hanayo, would leave her alone.
She was working her hardest all day, every day. She was still being tutored - no time to go to a juku. She still helped out at the hospital. She needed to play piano at least an hour a day to stay sane. Her grades had to be perfect, always. She really didn't have time for friends, even though she'd been wistfully hoping to make them.
At least her little fan, whose name, she had found out, was Yazawa Nico, never bothered her. Thank goodness.
She couldn't brush Rin and Hanayo off, when it came down to it. They were too innocent, too sweet. She decided she'd work to schedule hanging out with them in somewhere. Somehow.
After the trio broke up, and everyone left the idol club, Nico didn't give up. But every time Toujou Nozomi saw her, she seemed a little less confident and a little more unhappy.
She wanted to befriend the girl - she, herself, was something of a loner, due to being moved around, and knew how painful it was - but it felt like a lot of work to break through Nico's aloofness. That was a guilty thought - it was abundantly clear Nico had no friends at Otonokizaka. People pitied her or thought she had been too full of herself. Most thought of school idols as either too frivolous for a national girls' academy or the kind of thing only a wealthy school like UTX could pull off. The sight of Nico and her fliers, and the one poster a month she was allowed on an out-of-the-way bulletin board, became a fixture, a kind of landmark you never really saw. Like a fountain or ivy on a wall.
And so the years passed.
In their final year of school, Nozomi wasn't sure if the latest development was a good sign or a bad sign. Nico spent time she would normally be cloistered in the cobwebby "Idol Research Club" room that wasn't really needed, and no one was quite cruel enough to take away from her, instead sitting outside the music room, listening to a pretty first-year play the piano and crying. Nozomi supposed it kind of counted as human interaction - at least for Nico. She'd heard that when Nico wasn't hiding in the clubroom, she would dash home to take care of her little siblings, so she must have that, as well.
It was years too late, but Nozomi resolved that she would try talking to Nico this year, and persist even if she brushed her off. But things came to a head just as she was resolving that, when a second-year named Kousaka Honoka stole Nico's musician.
