The poster and signup sheet had attracted crowds all day—one of those crowds was a group of four First Year girls, about half from Class B and half from Class A. Among them, Kozue stood out, but only as much as she ever did in any crowd. The miniscule, blonde<, and giant hair thing always made her easy to spot.
"Come on, let's all sign up," one said, grabbing the pen. "I mean, it's not nearly as bad if we're all doing it, right? It'll be fun." The words most stressed were punctuated by snaps of her chewing gum (contraband, but Hitomi was a professional at sneaking slightly contraband things into school).
"I don't know…" Kozue peered out from between the shoulders of Mariko and Mikiko, her face slightly scrunched.
"Come on," another snap of gum from Hitomi, but the sentiment was echoed by the other two girls; Mikiko turned, speaking up. She and Kozue had been classmates since kindergarten and (as far as Mikiko knew) more-or-less nearly-best-friends for most of that time period, save for a brief interlude when Kozue had accidentally stolen the boy she liked in grade seven. Peace had resumed, until earlier this year, when the tiny, half-American heiress-to-something-or-others had fallen in with what Mikiko considered a truly strange crowd. Well, maybe not Ikeda, Ikeda had been a perfectly normal girl, in fact better than normal, until that kind of psychotic break or whatever the hell had happened in June... but some of the other ones?
"We never do anything together, you're always so busy with your boyfriends," and that was another freakish trend in Kozue's recent social life. Had she really been dating Oubai Kouchisei over the summer? Surely someone had just made that up as a joke. Ito Keiichi alone, though, was enough to make anyone acknowledge that perhaps something bizarre was happening.
"So we've got to do this," Hitomi provided. "And we are not taking no for an answer."
And knowing they would not take a no, Kozue provided nothing of the sort.
After lunch, the signup sheet had four new names on it: Inoue Hitomi Maruyama Mikiko Yamada Mariko Kondo Kozue