"..." Sakayanagi Arisu didn't even raise an eyebrow. She simply asked calmly, "Need points? How many?"
Hashimoto Masayoshi waved his hands frantically. "No, no, no. I don't want Private Points or anything like that."
"Um, I just wanted to ask... Little Princess, are you really a lesbian?" Glancing around to avoid the eyes of their classmates, Hashimoto quietly asked the question he'd been curious about all night. "I won't tell anyone else. Just quietly tell me if it's true."
The moment the word "lesbian" came out, Sakayanagi Arisu's normally calm expression stiffened completely.
She wanted to curse him out.
Who Should She Use as a Mirror?
Was Sakayanagi Arisu a lesbian?
On this question, plenty of people had their own answers.
Some thought, "Long live pretty girls getting together!"
Some thought Sakayanagi Arisu's sexual orientation was probably normal, but her poor health had forced her to compromise and choose a woman as her partner.
Others thought she'd been a lesbian for ages. She was stuck to Kamuro Masumi all day long, and who knew how many times they'd gotten all over each other in private?
Still others thought, "Yuri? Lesbians? Great! If we can just win Sakayanagi Arisu over, won't we be flying off together as a pair?"
In response, our Miss Horikita Suzune had this to say:
"Boring."
She couldn't care less what happened to the Nepo Baby.
Right now, there were only two things that mattered to her.
One was "Horikita Suzune in other people's eyes," and the other was "Kushida Kikyo, who was called a Two-Faced Person."
...Oh, there seemed to be one more thing: the limited "loan service" someone had mentioned to her at the end.
Loans—the very embodiment of spending money before you had it. Horikita Suzune had never intended to touch such a dangerous thing.
But perhaps, for Class D right now, it had a special significance.
"Please, really, just lend me ten thousand points. I'll pay you back next month. I'll do my best to hang in there until then, and once I have points again, I'll repay you!"
"You can look at me all you want, but I'm still not going to lend you money. Stop staring, or I'll call Hirata!"
"...Honestly, with Kushida gone, there's no one left to borrow points from."
Their classmates' casual voices drifted in from all directions. Though they'd only staged that farce yesterday, after a night's sleep, they acted as if nothing had happened and went about their usual business.
Those begging to borrow money tried their best to look pitiful. They might change their tune once they got their hands on the money, but at least for now, they were willing to play the supplicant for it.
Yamauchi Haruki should have been one of the people humbly asking others for money. He should have been paying for his own behavior, going around trying to sell the brand-name game console he'd just spent a fortune on.
But now, he was one of the few people in class with plenty of money.
Most of his classmates still held a grudge against him, but he protected himself by invoking Hirata's name, and Hirata tacitly allowed him to throw his weight around like that.
All in all, they hadn't changed at all. They showed no sign of reflecting on what they'd done.
If there was any other change, it was probably that they'd all tacitly chosen to ignore Horikita Suzune.
Horikita Suzune had already believed she didn't need friends and had no intention of talking to her classmates. Still, after yesterday's events, the atmosphere of isolation had grown even stronger.
It was obvious. She could sense the faint beginnings of something that might turn into bullying.
But with Hirata Yosuke around, it would remain nothing more than an atmosphere. It wouldn't actually turn into bullying.
...Probably.
After hesitating for a while, Horikita Suzune still chose not to take Asakusa Toru's advice and use his loan service as an opening to talk to her classmates.
First, she felt that if she used her classmates as a mirror, the mirror would be too poor quality. She'd still have trouble seeing herself clearly.
Second, if Asakusa Toru really lent them money, her classmates had such poor credit that he probably wouldn't get the principal back.
He was a bit foul-mouthed and had gone a little too far, but Asakusa Toru was probably a good person.
At least, she thought he was.
A good person's money shouldn't be wasted on scum.
After weighing everything, Horikita Suzune decided to keep quiet.
She had already decided who she should befriend and who she should use as a mirror.
Dormitory building.
With a soft ding, the elevator opened on the ninth floor, and Horikita Suzune quickly stepped out.
Before long, she stopped in front of the room she was looking for.
There were several bags of what looked like gifts from visitors outside the door. Unfortunately, judging by the way they were sitting there, the person inside hadn't opened the door at all.
But that was all right. Horikita Suzune had plenty of ways to get her to open it.
"Ding dong, ding dong, ding dong—"
The doorbell rang noisily as she pressed it again and again, but no matter how many times she rang, the other side of the door remained as silent as the grave.
It seemed this girl had made up her mind to play dead.
"..." Horikita Suzune took a deep breath and glanced around.
The ninth-floor hallway was empty for now, so in theory, there was no chance anyone would overhear.
Fortunately, she didn't need to worry too much about someone hearing anything they shouldn't.
Because she suddenly remembered the proper way to use the Diary's distortion of spoken words.
"Open the door. If you don't, I'll copy the messages from the Diary and post them all over the school." Horikita Suzune's voice echoed softly through the hallway, perfectly calm.
Anything that revealed the Diary's existence would be distorted into something unrelated people couldn't hear.
She didn't yet know whether someone else who knew the Diary existed would be able to hear her, but that didn't matter.
Even if the other girl couldn't hear her, she'd only be taking a risk by removing the Diary from the threat and saying it again.
Her words echoed softly as Horikita Suzune waited patiently for a moment.
Before long, the locked door obediently opened a crack. A girl appeared behind it, her hair hopelessly disheveled and her face especially unpleasant. She looked gloomy, nothing like the beloved girl she usually was.
"...Come in." A hoarse voice, not the least bit sweet, slowly slipped between her lips. The girl named Kushida Kikyo moved her left foot away from the door and opened it wide enough for someone to pass through.
So Horikita Suzune accepted the invitation and went inside.
To be honest, at first Horikita Suzune had thought Kushida Kikyo had simply been absent because she was unwell, so she hadn't given it much thought.
But when she realized that the Two-Faced Person mentioned in the Diary and Handprint Sister on the message board were Kushida Kikyo, she finally understood.
The real reason Kushida Kikyo had been absent.
Despair at the class points hitting zero, and the urge to run away from the fact that her true face had been completely exposed to her and the others.
There were plenty of eyes on the message board.
It wasn't completely public, but it might as well have been.
Although no one had been named, anyone could probably identify the Two-Faced Person as Kushida Kikyo just as easily as they could identify Little Princess as Sakayanagi Arisu.
She didn't know exactly how many people there were, but no matter how she looked at it, more than just the two of them had copies of the Diary at this school.
So she'd chosen to curl up in her own little space and say nothing.
The Person She Hated Most
When it came down to it, did it really matter whether her true face had been exposed?
So what if people saw what she really thought inside?
Horikita Suzune could understand the conclusion Kushida Kikyo had reached, but she couldn't understand why she'd made that choice.
More importantly... wasn't that self-incriminating message something you'd written yourself?
That was what baffled her most.
You posted the message on your own, exposed yourself on your own, and then shut yourself away on your own?
What was that supposed to mean?
She wasn't Kushida Kikyo. She had no way of understanding Kushida Kikyo's thoughts.
But in her own eyes, Kushida Kikyo's behavior really was baffling.
She gently took off her shoes and set her little feet, covered in black socks, on the floor. With a slight sense of nervousness, Horikita Suzune stepped into someone else's territory.
...This might have been the first time she'd set foot in a female classmate's room, and the first time she'd seen the room of a girl her own age.
Should she be nervous?
She didn't know.
She simply followed Kushida Kikyo's footsteps, slowly making her way into the other girl's dim dorm room.
Even with a guest like herself inside, Kushida Kikyo still didn't seem inclined to turn on the lights.
The door behind her slowly closed, leaving the room lit only by a little sunlight that slipped through the curtains, which didn't quite block it out.
"..." It wasn't bright, but Horikita Suzune could still make out the room well enough.
The bed was somewhat messy, but the floor was still clean. There were just a few empty instant-noodle cups piled on the desk. Though Kushida Kikyo had shut herself away in her room, she didn't seem to have gone so far as to starve herself.
Kushida Kikyo pulled over the chair by the desk, propped one hand against her cheek, and spoke with a dark expression.
"Talk."
"If you don't have anything to say, then get out already."
Nothing like her usual friendly self in class, Kushida Kikyo had completely revealed her true nature.
"..." Kushida Kikyo's words were rude, but Horikita Suzune didn't mind at all. She simply sat down on the bed opposite her, then raised her head.
Looking at Kushida Kikyo's pretty face, she spoke, word by word. "You hate me."
"Tch. Are you stating the obvious?"
Horikita Suzune shook her head. "No. I'm just stating my judgment."
"You hate me. You've hated me ever since the day we enrolled."
"But even so, you've kept trying, in all sorts of ways, to get closer to me and become my 'friend.'" She said.
"That's impressive. It's something I could never do."
"...Flattery won't do you any good." After a moment of silence, Kushida Kikyo turned her gaze away.
Seriously, what was this woman here for?
She hadn't come to visit on the day she was absent, unlike those people who only pretended to be her friends in class. Instead, she'd shown up today, after most people had already made their visits and demonstrated how much they cared about Little Kikyo. And when the doorbell had gone unanswered, Horikita Suzune had threatened her without the slightest hesitation, right out in the open.
She'd thought Horikita Suzune was here to use her message and her dark past to threaten her. But after coming in and sitting on her bed, Horikita Suzune had inexplicably started praising her instead.
What was she here for?
"This isn't flattery. It's just the truth," Horikita Suzune said. "That's why I find your reason for being absent even harder to understand."
"Besides, weren't you the one who wrote that message?"
If she'd dared to write something like that, then she should have been prepared for the consequences.
Besides, the message itself wasn't all that explicit. Apart from her, probably only the person behind the Diary could identify Kushida Kikyo as the one who'd written those words.
Others might be able to tell from the difference between the people insulted in black and red that Handprint Sister was a student in Class D, but they surely couldn't connect her to the Two-Faced Person and Kushida Kikyo.
—Unless the Diary said more than it should again.
"...What could you possibly understand about me?" Kushida Kikyo bit her lower lip.
By now, she knew that writing the message didn't mean her past had been completely exposed to everyone.
But when the Diary's cold "Uploading message" had sounded in her ear, she hadn't been able to think any further.
Her old trauma had been ripped open, and on that night, there had been only one thought in her mind.
Before you continue