Chapter 186

The first time Mahiru was ever faced with clear hostility was around the time she turned ten years old. “Miss Shiina, you’re a sneaky one.” On the way home from school one time, she found herself alone with another classmate, who suddenly said that. Normally, she went home with one of her friends, but on that day, her friend had plans with someone else. And so, since they were headed in the same direction, Mahiru just happened to walk home with another girl in her class, someone she didn’t know very well. Generally speaking, Mahiru got along fairly well with everybody, and as they made their way home, the two of them had been chatting casually, having a harmless conversation, so the girl’s remark seemed to come out of nowhere. “Sneaky? I am? How?” Since she hadn’t initially said what specifically was sneaky, Mahiru couldn’t even begin to guess, and she waited with a questioning look for the girl to continue. The girl must have taken that for a look of calm and glared sharply back at her. Normally, the other girl was quite mild-mannered, so it was completely unexpected to face this level of animosity from her, and Mahiru couldn’t help but feel bewildered. After all, Mahiru always behaved herself at school, or at least that’s how she perceived her actions. She never excluded anybody, and she acted in a friendly way without ever letting the smile fade from her face. Her behavior didn’t change, even toward this girl who rarely talked to her. If anything, she had sometimes looked out for this girl, who tended to be excluded from things, and Mahiru did her best to make sure she wouldn’t be ostracized. If the girl disliked that, then Mahiru could understand her being angry, but the word she had used was sneaky, and it didn’t seem like she had any bad feelings about how Mahiru handled things at school. Mahiru really didn’t have any clue what the girl was talking about, so the only answer she could give was that she didn’t understand. The girl seemed infuriated by that reply and dramatically frowned as she said with a trembling lip, “Suzuki’s in love with you!” Her tone of voice was extremely sharp, and she was definitely sulking. But at least Mahiru understood why she was so upset. However, Mahiru still didn’t understand why that made her sneaky. The Suzuki that the girl was talking about was one of their male classmates. He had recently started talking to Mahiru. That had to be the Suzuki that the other girl was talking about. Certainly, Suzuki had approached her, and even asked her out, but as far as Mahiru was concerned, that was all that had happened. But the other girl’s anger seemed to escalate even more when Mahiru did not show much of a reaction. “He’s always talking to you, and inviting you to hang out with him, and smiling at you, isn’t he?!” The reason he had come to speak to her was because he was at the center of a group of popular boys, and Mahiru, being Mahiru, was at the center of a group of popular girls. So they’d happened to have the opportunity to talk; that was all.