Koharu had found herself in a situation she was unfamiliar with. She had snapped on someone, to the point of assault, when she had never thought of violence as an answer before. She loved when people fought, but the feeling she received after everything was settled and over with was nothing more than a lump of pure bile that was stuck on her throat. The constant barrage of scolding she had received from the principal himself, alongside her homeroom teacher, while alone in a big room that seemed to stretch forever was torturous.

Nothing came from her mouth when she wanted to speak, not even a squeak, she was constantly trying her best not to explode in a burst of wails. Tears and snots trickled endlessly down her cheeks, as if they were an unending waterfall. Her hands were shaking, with every loud outburst from the teachers before her constantly making her jump.

She wanted everything to stop.

Had she known what awaited her were a wave of scolding and two weeks of suspension, she would never hurt Kuroki.

However, it was too late, and comeuppance was the only one waiting for her.

So the stream of tears and incoherent sobs continued as the sky outside turned yellow, then orange, then black. Until her parents entered the room, slapped her tear-stained cheeks, and forced her to bow furiously toward the teacher, her surface expression of guilt finally stopped. Then it turned into a mountain of shame that weighed on her shoulders.

The walk to her family car, the ride to her family home, and the journey to her bed was equally awful; her parents had constantly scolded, berated, and criticized her current situation. She was too old to get into fights, considering how critical this point of her life was to her. There were little outbursts from Koharu herself, as she had known how her parents would react if she were to rebel at this point. Everything they launched at her she took it full force, though the pain never let off even when she tried to shrug it off.

Her parents were angry at her, that much she knew. However, the one she was angry with, Tomoko Kuroki, wasn't clear of any fault either. She had thought about how demented her dialogue was as she simmered inside the bathroom, fully supervised by her mother outside of the glass sliding door. She had remembered how her word stung her so fervently, and snapped her so vividly, as if it was a gunshot that pierced her heart and broke it into pieces. It hurted more than anything people had ever thrown at her, nor had it come close to what insults she had ever hurled throughout her life..

"I thought you have friends, Minami-san."

Yet

Koharu wondered.

What did it mean to be friends? What constituted as friends? When did she make friends? Why did she look friendless? Where did her friends go? How did she make friends anyway?

As the glass sliding door was knocked by a subtly kinder voice who told her to come out of the bath, her mind had wondered somewhere else. The thought of Kuroki's face, bloodied and battered, came to her mind. A single tear trickled from the tears that welled inside her eyes and fell inside the bathtub.

…

Her feelings turned complex, everything blurred into abstraction. She did not know what to do, say, feel, or think. Finally outside the bathroom, her mother gave her a towel and a set of clothes on top of the drawer. Her father wanted to talk to her, to discuss what happened at school, she said.

At that moment, Koharu Minami realized something. As she was about to have an eye-to-eye discussion with her father, she had realized something crucial. This would be the turning point of her life, and there was no turning back. Yet, deep down inside her heart, she knew she had it coming for her.