"I have talked it over with Umi — don't worry, we agreed not to talk about the details of our weeks till both people are done with them. But this will spill over into her week so I had to clear it with her. I don't know who's after Umi, but it will still be going on in their week so she said she cleared it with them, too," Kotori told her.

Kotori and Nico had somehow managed to wake up early so they could talk over breakfast before going to school. Kotori wanted Nico to go to a different club for a surprise after practice today. Apparently something she wanted Nico to try doing for more than a week.

"So Umi is 'next'," Nico asked?

Kotori laughed. "Hah. Yes, she is. We planned this out. Do you object?"

Did she? No, not really. The absurd girlfriend-for-a-week thing with Kotori had actually put her in a more stable mood than she had been achieving on her own.

"Well, that should give me time to sort of ponder what you and I are doing, I think. Since we certainly won't be ... "

"Oh?" Kotori asked, amused. "Possibly, possibly. But like I said, don't make assumptions about Umi till you get to know her better."

Nico looked at Kotori accusingly.

"Nico, the main problem might be that now you seem more sober and cool, so she might think you look too much like a little Umi-sister. I admit Umi wouldn't go for incest." She smiled and even laughed.

They made it to school in plenty of time, holding hands and taking a different route from the one Nico used to meet up with Maki on. Nico found she could concentrate better in school today, even though she was eaten up with curiosity over what Kotori could have in mind. Being less depressed trumped being curious. At practice, Rin made a point of partnering with Maki for stretches. Hanayo partnered with Honoka, and Eli alternated stretching with Umi and Nozomi. All of which left Kotori and Nico as partners. Nico made a point of being as friendly with Maki as she could be. However, in return, for the first time, she felt Maki had a certain coldness to her. She couldn't tell for sure, but it didn't seem like jealousy. More like Nico had done something to offend her.

Because of that, it was with a fair amount of distress that Nico went with Kotori. First she made Nico change quickly into a somewhat strange outfit. A flowing white shirt that secured with a blue sash over flowing white trousers, topped with a hat that was like a lace-and-knit version of a swimming cap. As soon as Nico was barely done changing, Kotori pulled on her hand, and off they went. They ended up in front of the drama club. Through the door, Nico heard a girl singing:

Kokode wa, kono benchi ni, sakunen,
Otokonokotoon'nanoko ga suwatta.
Kare wa kanojo no te o totte,
Yasashiku hohoenda.

Karera wa hotondo hanashimasendeshita
Soshite kanojo no kokoro wa me o samashita
Kanojo wa kesshite shiranakatta koto ni.

Watashi wa ano sakunen no otokonokodatta
Soshite on'nanoko wa anatadatta.

Then another voice said "Okay, stop. It's fine, but I think we should go with the English start. I didn't work very hard on that part."

The singer began again, with respectable pronunciation.

Here on this bench last year sat a boy and girl.
He took her hand in his and she gently smiled.
They hardly spoke …

Nico didn't want to interrupt anything, but Kotori knocked.

What turned out to be the director of most of what the drama club did opened the door.

"Oh, this is Yazawa, right?" She turned away and made a gesture with her hand to beckon them in behind her. "Hey, girls, you mind if I work with Yazawa? Her time is tight, and we have to figure out if she works for this."

She turned back toward Nico and Kotori. "Yazawa, you mind coming over here? My name's Kaneko, by the way.

Nico heard another girl there laugh and say "Kantoku Kaneko Kanako!"

The director, indeed named Kaneko Kanako, said "I go by "directa" not "butaikantoku." Since Hana has time to make jokes, she can bring up the music. Minami says you're a good, fast study learning songs, I sure hope so or none of this will work.

They had a small karaoke program on the computer in the drama club, which had good speakers plugged in to it. the director mentioned in passing that it was a great help for musicals. The song was in English, and it had Japanese subtitles. It was quite a strange song.

I have kissed one or two
maybe three - well, a few
Thanks to Elinor Glyn
You can count me in
On your tiger skin

It didn't take many passes for Nico to get the gist of the song, and everyone there helped her with a few pronunciations so she could concentrate on how to sing it. The director stopped her right away and said not to use her upper register or force her voice into her idol persona if she could help it. Their computer program was very sophisticated, and she was able to transpose the song until it all fit into the lowest part of Nico's range. As she'd realized right away, the song, "Sinner Me," was very strange. It seemed to be a woman bragging about her loose morals, and Nico couldn't imagine where, or what time period the character was, and who Elinor Glyn was.

The director turned to the music technician, Hana. "Is it good enough?"

"It's more than good enough for a high school audience. She sings pretty well, and you can understand it unless you're crappy at English," Hana replied.

"Minami said you had a strong but untrained voice, and I think that's about right, Yazawa. Kind of funny for a school idol, but that's your business," the director began. "Anyway, that's probably the hardest song, and it's in English - I do translate the songs, but original language is best at least for the first verse. So. We want you to play the lead. We're doing an abbreviated version of "Chrysanthemum," with narration to replace some of the scenes."

Nico had a lot of questions, and to her dismay, Kotori said she had to go back and work on µ's costumes. She'd gotten a little behind making an audition costume for Nico. The director told her that Elinor Glyn wrote sexy women's romance novels in England 100 years ago, and that people had blamed her for making the morals of young women erode in both England and America. That the heroine, Chrysanthemum, was kidnapped, forced into prostitution and fed drugs by traffickers, escaped and became a famous cabaret singer in Brazil. When she finally got back to England, she was considered a "loose woman" - a fushidarana jo. Her first big song, Sinner Me, is her defying anyone who would condemn her, basically. Her goal in England is getting revenge on a woman there who sold dozens of girls like Chrysanthemum to traffickers. "And yet, it's a light-hearted musical, as well as a melodrama, Yazawa. Chrysanthemum is what they called an "it girl" then. Elinor Glyn said if you had "it," whatever it was, you win all men. Or all women. Her words. It can be a quality of the mind as well as a physical attraction. The guy Chrysanthemum ends up with dumps her at first when he finds out she's a 'slut,' but he gets over it. She saves another girl from the traffickers and that girl ends up with another one of Chrysanthemum's old boyfriends. The two main girl parts and their boyfriends and the villain, Ma Carroty, are the only real characters we need. We'll cover the rest in narration. I wanted to do a play that had never been done in Japan before, and as best I could find out, this one fits the bill."

Nico told her, honestly, in the past she'd never have considered doing something like this, but right now she had made a resolution to try new things that people suggested to her, so if they would have her, she was in. She collected some audio on a drive and some lyrics sheets from Hana and put them in her bag.

The director looked at her. "Yazawa-san," she began, finally addressing her more politely. "When the idea of you playing someone being called a fushidarana jo got across to you, you looked very unhappy. I want to say inherently she's pure by our modern standards, really. What bothers you about that?"

Nico didn't know what to say or how to explain, especially given her resolution to appreciate Kotori fully in the week they had together and not insult her by feeling guilty.

"Wait, I think I get it. But I would understand more if it was Nishikino that got upset over that. I understand you want to enter an industry that's very hypocritical about that, and expects you to still be a virgin at 17. You should realize that drama is not the realm of extreme purity. Most of us have kissed more than a few." She laughed.

"Well …" said Nico. "Actually it is three, not a few. Just to set the record straight." Nozomi, Maki, Kotori. Not so many she couldn't keep the number straight.

"Is that so? Well, when you're singing Sinner Me, feel free to reflect on who you WOULD have kissed, if you had your courage up. And who you'd join on a tiger skin - that was the sexiest bedding they had in England at the time. You're basically mocking all the people blaming your status on sexy novels, given what you've been a victim of."

Who WOULD Nico have kissed? She had been quite annoyed at how obviously and quickly Nozomi had preferred Eli to her, so Eli was out. She hadn't really considered the other µ's girls anything but semi-rivals until fairly recently. So who? ARISE? Definitely ARISE. She could picture herself doing pretty much anything with any or all three of them, if she was being honest. Worse, the all three felt like the most appealing. Images of flashing eyes, flashing breasts, and perfect butts came to mind, and Nico blushed. Maybe she wasn't as pure in her sex-only-with-love attitude as she thought.

Kotori had faith she could do this, Nico reminded herself. She pledged to reward her faith by making this a good performance. As was the pattern even with some pop songs, the numbers would mostly start in English and continue in Japanese, depending on how well the director felt she'd translated them and how well the actors were doing with singing English. Also, this way the girls in the audience who were good at English would get a thrill, and the others could still understand the play.

Nico was beginning to get ready to go home when the door opened again, without knocking.

"Hi, hi," a brash voice called out. Three girls came in. The one who announced herself looked at Nico. "Whoa, is that Nico-nii? Seriously? She's part of this?"

The other two new girls did a double-take and said "Wow!" too.

"Wait," said one of them. "She isn't the lead, is she?"

The director said she was, in fact.

The girl continued. "I mean, no offense, Nico-sempai, but just look at you. You are obviously more cut out to be a Mary Ann than a Chrysanthemum. Mary Ann is the cute little thing Chrysanthemum rescues. She has way fewer lines, too, and time is short. We've all already been rehearsing without a lead because SOMEONE said that would work out. She's just been reading Chrysanthemum's lines and replacing her numbers with recorded music."

"That's no way to talk to your future wife, John," the director said. "In all seriousness, Sana, there's a reason it's called acting, isn't there? Yazawa-san, I think she just wants to be paired with her best friend instead of you. Even though she claims to only be interested in boys, the way she gets jealous about Kanna is pre-ety suspicious."

"Fine, fine," Sana said. "I am in your care, Nico-sempai. Umm you will have to memorize a lot, because you're not just an actor, you have to do some of the narration in the whisper box. It gives you that dreamy narrator voice-over sound."

The girl who had greeted everyone when they came in spoke up. "I guess you are stuck with me for Bob, Kanna-chan. For your sake, so Sana won't kill you, I promise no tongue in our kiss scene." Kanna hadn't said anything but she punched the girl in the side. "Ow! Husband-beating! Scandal! I'm Hinata, Nico-sempai. But you have to call Kanako 'directa' or she'll pout."

Nico was beginning to flash back to when she had her first idol group. She was going to have to re-learn how to juggle her school, extracurricular activities, and family time. Well, she was just about to graduate from high school, so maybe it was about time. She'd go back to looking over song lyrics while cooking. She probably wouldn't have any time at all for surfing on the web or buying idol merchandise or haunting idol shops. Kotori had mentioned that this morning, in fact. That as Nico had more things outside the idol fan scene going on, she might not need as much of it as she did before, because the gap in her life would be filled in other ways. It certainly wasn't quite true that she only did that to take her mind off her problems, it was genuinely fun, but there was an element of that. She would have to keep current with fads and fashions and memes in a more rapid, sketchy way, and probably lean on poor Hanayo a great deal. She resolved to say that was what she was doing on her blog. Wouldn't it be a nice surprise to have the champion idol fan Yazawa Nico acknowledge prominently that Koizumi Hanayo was her current go-to source on all things idol? The old Nico wouldn't have had a thought like that in a million years.

Still, she was going to be stressed, and with less time to de-stress, so … oh. She blushed again. Collecting her script and putting it in her bag, she bid them farewell and the director said they'd negotiate her schedule via text and email. Then she went home to her lover.

They retreated to the bedroom right after dinner. It was late, and using the hand shower to clean up afterward was more efficient than a bath first. As Kotori had hoped, the second time had cleared up most of Nico's reservations. Nico admitted she'd thought about "de-stressing" earlier in the day. Kotori laughed and said she hoped this was better than hitting reload on internet auction sites for hours, and Nico said of course it was. They focused on further exploring what things made Kotori hot, and Nico felt gratified when something worked. Kotori definitely had the best night so far, and after they cleaned up and went back to bed, she said, "Nico, that was very de-stressful."