Book 12: Chapter 3: “The Problematic Group of First-Years”
Dozens of students, both first and second-year, had gathered together in the gymnasium. The majority of those in attendance were first-year students. Most of them probably saw this meet-and-greet as an important opportunity to meet other students. Since I wasn’t acquainted with any of the attending first-year students yet, the first thing I did was check to see who among the second-years had decided to participate.
The leader of Class A, Sakayanagi, was nowhere to be seen. I did, however, catch sight of Hashimoto Masayoshi, but it wasn’t clear if he was here as her substitute or not. Sakayanagi’s legs weren’t very strong. Her range of motion was limited, and she couldn’t move very fast. Hashimoto played an important role in helping her compensate for that. As far as I could tell, Hashimoto was the only member of Class A who was here. Moreover, he didn’t seem to be going out of his way to speak to anyone in particular.
He was probably here on some sort of reconnaissance, figuring out who everybody got into contact with during the meet-and-greet.
As the organizing class of the event, about half of the students from Class B were present, Ichinose included. I could see Kanzaki standing together with her to support her. However, I didn’t get the impression that, as a group, the rest of Class B was academically insecure or influential. If anything, it seemed like the students in attendance were the more sociable students in their class. On the other hand, there didn’t seem to be any students from Class C participating in this event. It was as if they had completely disregarded the idea of the meet-and-greet from the very beginning. From this one gathering of students, you could roughly grasp the intentions of each of the different second-year classes. But for Horikita, the second-year students weren’t the important ones today.
The important ones were the first-years we hadn’t had much of a chance to get to know yet.
As first-years who had only just enrolled in the school, they shouldn’t know their left from right yet.
The fact that they were suddenly being asked to pair up with second-year students probably put many of them at a complete loss about what to do. During the event, they latched onto their classmates, that is, the students they were already familiar with.
Seeing this, Ichinose decided to avoid bringing up the special exam in the first place. Instead, she focused on trying to make friends with the first-years by introducing herself and sparking up casual conversations with them. Of course, this didn’t mean that everyone opened their heart to her right away.
Having understood this, Ichinose didn’t rush the process. She approached them with a gentle smile on her face, slowly melting away the walls of ice that had closed off their hearts. It only took a few minutes of close observation to get a rough idea of what would happen next.