Fall Fates

Solstice Day

Friday, 9/22/12, Yasogami High School, Late Afternoon...

Chie growled as she ascended the school's main staircase, each step up compounding her nasty mood. She never liked staying after school for any longer than she absolutely had to but she had scheduled a session with the school's guidance counselor that had taken a whole hour, which had been a very frustrating experience. All she had were like two questions on how best to tailor her final year towards her intended career choice of being a police officer, and it turned into a big lecture! The counselor basically held her feet to the fire for her grades and because she never joined a club; apparently people who want to be a public servant were also expected to have good grades and a broad range of interests. As such, the recommendation was to push her grades up, at least try and join a club with what little time she had left, and push for a decent university before she applied to be an officer. Chie had pushed back since she had heard all you needed was a high school graduation, but the counselor, a stuffy older guy she had never even seen before, scoffed and told her that was the "basic requirement."

She was still so mad about it that she slammed her hand on the rail as she stepped out onto the second floor. Who the hell did that guy think he was, talking to her like that!? He didn't say it, of course, but she could totally see that he was talking down to her, acting like she wasn't good enough to be a police officer. What did he know, anyways? She'd show his stupid ass. This was why she had made it up to the second floor to look for the club bulletin board in order to see if there was anything she could join to try and improve her transcript. The middle of the year was a pretty bad spot to try and join, but there had to be something, right? Her green athletic jacket bounced against her bare legs as she turned down the hallway and saw the big board near the entrance to the practice building.

As usual, the board was a mess of different flyers of all shapes and colors attached to a plain white sheet of bulletin board paper. Next to many of the advertisements were sign-up sheets that had a pencil or pen on a string pinned to them, and to Chie's chagrin, many of them were filled with scribbled names. If she was going to take any club it would have been one of the martial arts clubs like kendo, but that was all full up, as were all the sports clubs, which were at least athletic in nature. After that, the only ones with available spots were geek clubs like calligraphy and English, which were hard passes, and the dork clubs (distinct from the geek clubs in that they were for dorks instead) like drama, yearbook, and broadcasting.

All of these sucked! Chie did not want to spend two whole hours after school learning how to write fancy or any of the other weird things the cultural clubs had in mind. Was this really it for her? The clubs themselves probably didn't want to deal with a newbie entering mid-year anyways, and in addition she wasn't going to be sticking around for much longer as a third year. Did she really need to be in a club so bad? At this rate she would have rather worried about her grades then have to put up with trying to fit in with a bunch of new people and give up all her spare time.

"Screw this," she huffed, shaking her head at the board and turning to head back downstairs and finally get home. She didn't know why she was so wound up – it was annoying to hear the counselor creep talk down to her, sure, but she supposed it was easier when she could just bitch about it to her friends instead of having to deal with it on her own. Now that everyone was hooking up, that left Chie as the odd woman out; walking home alone was starting to become a more regular occurrence when it was almost unfathomable before. Yukiko and Kanji were getting pretty cozy with one another, and although they never said it, Chie was starting to feel like a third wheel, which sucked. Obviously she was happy for them, but it was hard to not have her best friend with her all the time. Yosuke was technically in the same boat as Yukiko, although Naoto had been gone for a long time now. He was still the same as ever, and he had really taken a shine to overreacting anytime Yukiko and Kanji were being intimate, which even Chie found funny. Still, it wasn't hard for Chie to see that Naoto's absence weighed on him a lot; his cheekiness and somewhat lax attitude had regressed a bit in favor of a more blank stoicism that seemed to bleed into his eyes, making them not as mischievously bright. Their relationship was an intense, odd one that Chie didn't fully understand, but she respected Yosuke enough to give him his space while he dealt with it.