There I stood in the kitchen, questioning how it came to this. How did fun girl time turn into baking cookies for Rui?!

"My mother is going to have a freakout..." I muttered. Emu had spilled nearly half of the flour on
the counter, which caused me to throw a sneezing fit.

"It's okay! We can clean it up." Emu brushed the flour off of the counter and onto the floor with her hands, then ran off to go find the broom.

Honoka sighed. "This isn't going well..."

"Emu, what if he doesn't like me? Hm? Then what am I gonna do?" I questioned her as she swept up the flour.

"He'll like you, everybody likes you. You just never realize it." Honoka reassured me.

"If he doesn't like you then everybody's going to be all sad-sad glub-glub." Emu answered.

I stood there looking like I was thinking about something important, turns out I wasn't. "Do you think the cookies will make him fall madly in love with me?"

Honoka grumbled. "How would I know?!" Emu constantly spilling things was making her upset.

"That's not very realistic..." Nene commented.

So I shut myself up, only feeling stupid. "Sorry, I was only trying to be funny..." This kind of embarrassment was something I felt way too often, because I was always trying to make jokes, and sometimes they failed. "Nene, would you say you know Rui well?"

Nene looked up from making sure Emu didn't spill anything more. "Yes, we've been friends ever since we were very little. We're next door neighbors, our parents would always let us play together because we didn't have any siblings." She replied.

"Oh wow. That's nice. What did you two play together?" I asked, very interested in her story. I forgot all about asking what Rui would like as a gift.

Nene smiled just thinking about all of the fun times she had with Rui. "We would put on shows together. Rui would try to get his classmates to join us, and sometimes they would, but his ideas would get a little dangerous at times... so they stopped doing shows with us."

"Why were his ideas dangerous? Would he tell the kids to jump out of a window for a show?" I jokingly asked.

Nene looked uncomfortable. "Well... he did once. But it was perfectly safe, there was a mattress for them to land on. He even proved it was safe by jumping out of the window himself. Either way, they still didn't want to do a show with him." She was playing with her fingers again.

I was speechless. Sure, jumping out of a window is extremely dangerous. But I was busy thinking about how brave it was of him to do that. "Wow..."

"What are you girls doing in the kitchen over there?" My mother yelled across the room. She sounded annoyed, like usual. I could hear her footsteps coming around the corner.

"We're making some wonderhoy chocolate chip cookies!" Emu hollered.

Mommy stood in the kitchen, she had a smile that I believed was forced onto her face. "Oh... You must be Honoka and Setsuko's friends." She concluded.

Emu nodded confidently, bouncing around as usual. "We're the bestest of buddies!" She exclaimed happily.

"Mhm!" I agreed with Emu. I liked that she thought of us as good friends, so I smiled.

My mother stood staring at us four girls. "Alright, have fun. Try not to make a huge mess..." She told us as she walked off.

We continued baking cookies, and while we waited for them to come out of the oven we resumed in our fun girl time. Emu had found the shooting game I had on my computer.

"You play video games?" Nene asked, she seemed very curious.

My eyes lit up, perhaps Nene and I could play together? "Yeah, do you wanna play together? I can put it on splitscreen..." I suggested.

"Okay, that sounds fun." Nene accepted my offer to play together with a smile.

So I put the game on splitscreen, and we kept getting thrown into matches where we were on different teams. Nene played surprisingly well! Though, right when I was finally about to kill her as payback, the alarm I had set on my phone for the cookies went off.

"AAAH!!" Emu screamed in surprise, then immediately started giggling, running to the kitchen to get the cookies out.

"Aw, man..." I said as I turned the alarm off, I had lost again.

Nene smirked. "Good game." She said to me.

"Heh... Good game. But how do you play so good?! I wasn't expecting you to be the gamer kind." I questioned while we walked to the kitchen. Honoka was sitting in my room drawing.

"Owie!" Emu had burned her hand on the hot pan, she wasn't wearing the oven mitts for some reason. She turned around to look at my mother who was passing by. "Mrs. Ito! Can you please get the cookies out of the oven for me?" She requested, doing big puppy eyes.

Mommy rushed to grab the oven mitts and took the cookies out of the oven. "Why were you trying to take the cookies out of the oven without wearing the oven mitts?"

Emu had a moment of realization. "Ohh! So that's what I forgot! Sorry..."

My mother seemed worried about her. "It's okay. Did you burn yourself?"

"Only a little, but I'm okay!" She reassured her, then while humming skipped away to my room to get Honoka.

Mother stood there with a very confused look on her face, then she walked away to go do who knows what.

Emu had dragged Honoka all the way to the kitchen, and we cleaned up our little mess together. I was peacefully carrying the big glass bowl to the sink, when I dropped it on the floor by accident, it shattered into a bunch of tiny peices. Just like my heart.

"Oh no!!" Emu exclaimed. "It's okay we can clean it up!" she started run to go get the broom, but Honoka stopped her in her tracks.

"Mom wouldn't like us cleaning up glass." Honoka said sternly.

"Well, why? It's okay, we just sweep it up! Simple, simple!" Emu said, trying to get past my sister.

"Because we could hurt ourselves. Especially you... you're always bouncing about, not paying attention to anything." Honoka didn't mean this in a mean way, but she was saying this out of concern for Emu's well-being.

My eyes were brimming with tears while all of this happened. My head filled with thoughts saying how stupid I was, all over one minor inconvenience. "Why can't I do anything right?! I can't even take three steps and put a glass bowl in a sink without messing something up!!" Now I was standing there frozen, crying. "I'm stupid and I don't know anything..." I angrily mumbled to myself.

"いいえ！それは真実ではない！You're not stupid!" Emu protested.

Nene looked distressed. "Setsuko, you're smart... who told you that you weren't?" She asked, obviously going to launch into some kind of big speech about how I was a good person and to stop believing terrible lies about myself.

"I told myself I was stupid! I did!!" I motioned to myself aggressively. "No matter how many times somebody tells me I'm not stupid, and all of these nice things... I can't bring myself to believe it!" I started sobbing, taking a step over to Nene and hugging her.

Emu started looking sad as well. She hugged me tightly, trying to comfort me. "Setsuko... You're smart, kind, important, and beautiful! All of the good things! Don't believe the lies you tell yourself, because they aren't very nice." She gripped onto me tighter.

I sniffled, starting to smile at all of the compliments Emu had just generously given to me. Part of me actually believed them, and it made my heart happy. "Thank you..." I let go of Nene, and she started gasping for air.

"Yaaay! You're happy again!" Emu let go of me and jumped up and down, nearly stepping on one of the very sharp shards of glass.

Honoka rushed to go wake up our father so that he could sweep up the glass, but when she was going up the stairs, he was going down.

"What are you all being so loud about? I heard something break." He didn't sound mad, just a little confused.

"Oh... Setsuko and our friends were making cookies and she broke the big glass bowl." Honoka explained while they walked down the stairs together.

Daddy went to go get the broom and swept up the glass for us. He had done exactly what Emu said to do, and that confused her greatly. "Can I have a cookie?" He asked, jokingly reaching for one of the cookies on the pan.

I wanted to stop him so badly, but I didn't know how to tell him they were for Rui. "Oh! Umm... they're for--" I stopped for a moment, trying as hard as I could to think of something. "Uhhhhhhh..."

Emu jumped over to my father. "They're for Rui!! He's going to be--" Honoka put her hand over Emu's mouth, muffling her speech, then gently pushed her away.

"He's going to be very happy! They're for him, Tsukasa, Emu, and Nene. We're going to give the cookies to them when they're done performing today!" I was so glad Honoka managed to shut Emu up.

I quickly took one of the warm cookies from the pan and held it out to Daddy. "But you can have one! Here."

He took it and ate it in one bite, how he usually ate cookies. "These are good, girls. I'm sure they'll--" My mother's angry footsteps interrupted him.

"Yukio! What are you doing up?! I know it's your day off but you have to sleep!" When Mommy saw me, Honoka, and our friends she stopped yelling at him. "Go back to bed." She ordered him nicely.

"I already woke up, I can't fall back to sleep now. I want to see this show Setsuko keeps talking about, when does it happen?" Father asked us.

I told him it happened this afternoon, at Phoenix Wonderland. He said he would go.