"Yes."
Astoria leaned forward slightly, looking Wade straight in the eye as she said frankly:
"I know your group has never openly recruited outsiders, but since you haven't explicitly refused them either, I thought..."
She bit her lip, gathered her courage, and said, "I wanted to try and see if there was a chance... If not, that's all right too."
On the other side of a wooden partition, Ron let out a soft snort.
He thought irritably, She certainly didn't act like this when she was talking to me just now! And now she's making it sound so casual...
"But..."
Wade looked at the others, a hint of a smile appearing in his eyes. "SSC isn't really a club. It's just a few friends getting together to study, and we gave ourselves a name that sounded cool."
Astoria froze for a moment, then stared blankly.
—It wasn't a club?
Then all the serious preparation she had done to join, all the effort she had put into choosing her words and cautiously gauging the possible threshold... had been pointless?
When Ron had tried to stop them earlier, Astoria had overreacted somewhat because she did not want to be rejected outright before even stepping through the door for a reason like "House conflict."
But what was the result?
SSC had no threshold, no test, yet it was harder than any test.
Because to join, she first had to become their friend.
But even though her sister Daphne had been dating Michael for so long, she still had not grown close to the other members of SSC, much less become their friend.
And Astoria was from a different year and a different House. She had simply barged in and confidently asked to join... How presumptuous did that sound?
Astoria's face flushed bright red.