It wasn't necessarily that she was, like, bitter or anything about not getting a position in Anime Club? She was a freshman, and freshmen didn't get much, and that was sort of the typical way of things, and Clementine knew that; and besides, elections had already passed. What she was actually upset about, she knew, was the fact she missed Alise; the world itself had gotten overwhelming lately, and she'd found her temper sparking at every accidental brush and her eyes watering at every imagined reprimand. Her grades hadn't been as good as she had wanted them to be, come winter break, and Clem could make whatever excuses she wanted but she knew some of it was her fault. Inevitably, most of it was her fault. She was drifting away from the material, she was sleeping in class, she was skipping out on doing her homework -- intellectually she knew these were things she needed to work on, but there was no real impetus for it, because she had never done that sort of thing before and she had nothing to compare it to.

It was kind of a nightmare? She felt like it was a nightmare. There was something she could do about it, but her heart was in her stomach every time she so much as looked at her henshin pen; all she could think of was the hundred ways she could have died. It made her sick. Intellectually she knew this, too, knew that it was impossible no other senshi had ever gone through this, knew that if she used her phone to contact Scylla or Lepus or anyone she could talk about it -- but it wasn't going to happen.

What she could make happen -- what she could slip past the nagging voice in her head telling her it was stupid, it was pointless -- was to change up a detail or two and talk to someone else.

She'd been close to Zee, back in kindergarten, when the two of them had been paired together based on arbitrary things; they'd drifted apart before she'd ever met Alise, but they still talked every now and then, the way you did when you'd been friends with someone since you were little enough to feel legitimately infuriated at someone's favorite color or favorite number. And Zee hadn't changed that much from those years, because she still had too-curly hair and the most understanding voice Clementine had ever heard, and okay she was kind of pretty??? But that was, like, super irrelevant to any of the issues at hand, so she felt free to ignore it. There was nothing weird about texting her to say 'hey, I was almost in an accident a while ago and it's still freaking me out when I think about it, and that's normal, right?' It was normal, and everything was fine, and she didn't have the pointless urge to visit Onnie at all.

Maybe she needed to talk to Lepus-not-Alise again. Maybe that would make it a little clearer what she needed to do. Everything was too ******** up right now for her to see any way out of it, because there was so much going on she didn't understand and didn't want to understand -- it was like seeing the movement of the world, or it was like overhearing her parents fighting. Maybe she just needed to go to Onnie and sit in those flowers and cry it out.

(She didn't go to Onnie. Not now. Not yet. Maybe -- maybe sometime. But not yet.)