There are a lot of things like trial classes or free tryouts out in the world, but not all of them are made with good intentions.
There are many unexpected pitfalls. For example, subscription services that declare the first month free, but if you read the contract carefully, they’ll casually stick in the condition that you have to continue for two months or more; or if you apply for some supplement that says, like, “Act now and you get a free gift,” then you’ll never find the cancellation page for your whole life and they’ll just keep sending it to you. You can apply so easily online, but then you have to cancel over the phone. What’s up with that? Thanks to that, we’ve got a lifetime supply of some supplement my dad ordered that’s, like, supposed to be an amazing combination of soft-shelled turtle and black vinegar and something something. This stuff is gonna make the turtles go extinct soon, come on.
As they used to say way back when:
Nothing is more expensive than free.
Free services will generally have a catch. The free service exists because there is some return exceeding the sunk cost in some form, and someone, somewhere, is losing out. The turtles are getting saddled with the risk of extinction, after all.
That’s exactly why, even if it’s just a prep school tour and trial class, I make sure to read though all the detailed regulations in the school brochures they give you. I read them deeper than textbooks or reference books.
From what I’ve read of such material, what with the unstoppably declining birth rates of our times, any prep school these days will have enacted various policies for gaining new customers.
At the prep school I was touring that day, aside from having regular lecture-based classes, they also incorporated a generous and courteous support system, with online classes, archived class videos, and an associated smartphone app for academic help and whatnot, as well as mentors attached to each individual for whatever.
Checking over all that stuff with the staff and asking questions ate up quite a lot of time. So by the time I left the prep school, the sun had completely set.
That’s not good—I’ve gotta hurry, or I’ll leave her waiting…
We were taking different classes. And then, if you considered the time after that for asking them questions about the tour and such, we would be leaving the prep school at different times. So it would be natural for this to move to meeting somewhere else afterward… Although the conversation we’d had trying to figure out whether we would do so had felt incredibly unnatural.
Regardless, we’d decided we would be meeting at a café that was pretty close to the station.
I headed there at a trot.
The café windows were west facing, so at sunset, they had the blinds inside the window lowered to keep you from seeing into the shop from the outside.
But I had the feeling she would be at the back there, waiting and reading a book.
When I entered the café, it was just as I had imagined, and I found Yukinoshita in a corner at the back, quietly turning a page in her paperback.
She looked hazy under the indirect lighting and the evening sun peeking through the blinds, just like a painting. Even though she was just sitting and reading a book, the girl called Yukino Yukinoshita was picturesque.
I’d seen a very similar scene before.
But one thing about her now was very different.
Her lips were split in a smile, and her eyes tracing the characters were gentle.
The feeling I’d had back then that she was hard to approach, that if I were to step into that space I might ruin it, was no more.
I quickly ordered just a coffee at the counter register and headed for that seat.
“Sorry for making you wait,” I called out, and Yukinoshita popped up her head.
Then she smiled softly. “Oh, no. I only just arrived,” she said, closing her book and tucking it into her bag. But her royal milk tea on the table had gone cold, and it looked like its volume had significantly decreased.
When she saw me observing the cup, she cleared her throat quietly as if to distract from that and picked it up for a sip. “My class was pushed back a little… You too?”
“The class ended on time. But there was a bunch of stuff I wanted to check—what it’s like studying there and scholarships and stuff.”
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