Chapter 14

Midterms. One of the deciding factors for whether school life at Hizuru High will be heavenly or hellish. It gauges the student's academic abilities. The school uses this test to decide which student needs to be tended to. In short, if you get high scores, you get less workload, and if your grades are below average, you get more work assigned to you. Everyone in the school knows of this information, yet some still remain carefree. One such student is Tomori, who remains ignorant of her own shortcomings. She was packing up her things, ready to leave class as usual, though she was stopped by a familiar voice.

" Have you studied anything for midterms, Tomori-san?"

"Hah, I don't even need to."

"Is that so? Shouldn't you still do some revisions?"

"Thanks for worrying, Haku-kun, but I've done plenty of revision already."

She had a smug face, even though she just lied through her teeth. Tomori has, in fact, barely done any revisions due to her being preoccupied with stalking a certain someone. 'This will be easy, it's just midterms after all.'

2 weeks has passed since then. While everyone was busy studying for the tests, she alone was the arrogant one. She had truly believed that the answers would come to her naturally, forgetting entirely about the importance of this test. Tomori continued on with her usual shenanigans like reading shoujo mangas and stalking a person of interest.

The first day of the exam season, she came to school calm, contrary to almost everyone else. As she was putting her shoes away, she heard everyone's voice grouped together up ahead, so naturally, she checked it out.

"Haku-chin~ You've turned my brains to mush with all the knowledge you crammed into my head!"

"It only turned to mush because you didn't know anything from the start"

"I-I think that the group study sessions went pretty well."

"I mean I expected Kurosawa-san to be the smart type, but it's surprising to see Haku teaching us."

"You didn't know? Shousuke scored pretty high during the entrance exam."

"Really? How high?"

"None of your business."

"Weren't you in second pla-"

Once again, Kuroki didn't get to finish his sentence.

This time,however, he was getting choked by Haku before his words could escape his mouth.

"Hi guys! What were you talkin' about?"

Haku's head instantly turned towards Tomori's direction, as if he could sense her presence.

"Oh nothing, it's just revision stuff. Did you do any studying, Tomori-san?"

"Y-yup."

"Is that so?"

"And by the way, you guys had a group study?"

"Yeah, it was Kuroki's idea. He had nothing in yhat empty skull of his, so he thought 'might as well invite everyone!'"

"And why didn't I know of this 'till now?"

"You said you already did revisions right? I didn't want to intrude into your personal time so I didn't ask you."

"Oh… Welp, guess that's that. I'll head to class first, you guys have fun revising ok?"

"Sure, I'll see you there."

Tomori walked away as calmly as she had arrived, but inside she felt a plethora of emotions: hate, sadness, and the strongest of all, jealousy. When she found out that they didn't invite her, she was so overwhelmed that she didn't even listen to Haku's explanation. Everything Tomori heard and see at that time was blurry at best. 'That @*#*^, she got invited, even that stupid Yoshinaga was invited too. Am I not good enough? That must be it! Oh I'll show them. I'll show them that I'm worthy enough to be invited.'

As Tomori reached the classroom, she prepared everything for the test, with a dead but obsessive look in her eyes, determined to show Haku that she's the only one worthy.