May 18: The Singing Shortcake

Morning Labors
On a lovely late-spring day, Yuno wakes early and starts doing housework tasks like airing out her futon, vacuuming, and doing laundry. All the while she asks herself why she didn't want to do it Sunday. While she was airing out her futon, Miyako was hanging a pair of grilled mackerel out to dry. In the middle of her chores, Yuno sees the time and realizes that yes, she does have to go to school that day after all.

Yamabuki Jizu
At school, the assignment for the students in Class 1-A is to draw something on the campus grounds -- anything they choose, although Yoshinoya makes a joke about not drawing "the naked girl on the grass". Miyako meanwhile is sick to her stomach after drinking too much milk that morning, and goes home because her apartment is actually closer than the school infirmary. Before beginning work, Yuno follows to see she's OK before returning to campus to go back to work.

She soon comes to a bamboo grove she didn't know was there. Before she can draw anything more complex than a doodle.she is interrupted by a pair of girls running past, who yell at her "Don't tell anyone!" and firmly deny Yuno's speculation that this was a secret tryst. A few moments later she finds a stone statue, which she starts cleaning. Soon she is interrupted again, this time by Miyako -- who claims that by "praying to the statue" Yuno will be rewarded with good fortune -- and then places a safety cone on his head and prays to him herself. She is then promplty hit with a tennis ball, which Hiro rushes to retrieve. She explains that she had been playing tennis with Sae and the latter had lost control of a serve. Sae follows to apologize, but soon drags Hiro back to the tennis court after Miyako starts joking about her masculine qualities.

When Yuno returns she finds a package of vegetables that had been dropped off by her parents (with a caterpillar on one of the cabbage leaves), while Miyako finds her fish missing, stolen by a stray cat.

Shortcake and Singing
After school, they find an upset Hiro in her apartment. Sae invites them in, and sets out four pieces of strawberry shortcake. Although Hiro is agonizing about her weight, she had bought the cakes on sale and could not resist them. The source of her distress is a child who walked up to her and called her "fluffy", making her think she looked fat. Yuno suggests they go out to sing karaoke, and mentions a parlor where the machines count the number of calories the performer burned on the song. Claiming that if she sings thirty songs she can work off the shortcake, Hiro enthusiastically agrees.

In the booth, the girls sing a variety of songs, to varying degrees of success. At one point Yuno sings a song that is hopelessly off-key, but when Miyako copies her note for note it sounds completely different. When her own performance turns our ro be spectacular, Miyako admits that when she was a child she would sing in clubs "for snacks". When Sae temporarily absents herself, Hiro fills the girls in on the history of the statue Yuno had found, named "Yamabuki Jizu". Apparently it had been made by Yoshinoya in her student days, but had worn down since it was placed. Apparently students had been praying to it ever since, and Sae (after having seen Yoshinoya going to the same karaoke parlor) later reluctantly admits that she had prayed to it the previous year for a larger bust.

On the way home they meet the little girl Hiro had met earlier, and find out that she was actually referring to Hiro's "fluffy hair". Hiro's relief turns to Yuno's consternation when the girl calls her "little", and is further shattered when she realized she had actually gained a kilogram over the course of the day..

Episode Trivia

 * In other episodes, Miyako has been known to buy and chug smaller bottles of milk without trouble. This time, though, she'd chugged a lot of it, and that was what she attributed her getting sick to.
 * The caterpillar Yuno found in the vegetables appears several other times in the first season, including once previously.