These chapters show how the narrator’s self-consciousness comes in the way of his Navigating Adolescent Friendships. In the first two chapters, the narrator comes across as a cautious but generous young protagonist, yearning for the warmth and comfort that his friendship with Kojima offers him. These later chapters complicate this initial characterization by capitalizing on his self-consciousness as his primary character flaw. The narrator is constantly thinking about the ways he conveys himself to the world. With Kojima, however, he becomes especially self-conscious, and he constantly second-guesses the way she perceives his appearance and behavior. While reflecting on his lazy eye, the narrator begins to fear that Kojima is embarrassed to be seen with him. The fact that his self-consciousness threatens to get in the way of his connection with Kojima is symptomatic of adolescent friendships. On the other hand, the narrator is never embarrassed about Kojima, despite the characteristic messiness that her bullies use against her.

The narrator yearns for Kojima’s approval. This is why he is very affected when she comments that she likes his eyes. The narrator hasn’t yet defined his feelings for her as being romantic, but the fact that she has complimented the part of him that makes him the target of bullying motivates him to continue pursuing her approval. However, when she gives him the attention of a long letter that has taken her nearly all day to write, he becomes overwhelmed, unsure how he can reciprocate her attention without disappointing her. His desperation to please her ends up paralyzing him.

The narrator’s self-consciousness also extends to Kojima’s absence over the summer. Considering the intimacy of their trip to the museum, as well as the act of self-sacrifice he’d engaged in by offering his hair for her to cut, he is surprised by the fact that he doesn’t see Kojima again for the rest of the summer. This dampens his enjoyment of the summer vacation as a time spent away from Ninomiya and the other bullies. The narrator cannot reconcile the intimacy of their summer encounter with its lack of continuity. Hence, he decides to act on it by visiting Kojima himself. However, he plans to go about this surreptitiously since he doesn’t want Kojima to judge him for seeming desperate or pushy. As a result, the narrator decides to go by her house with the intention of pretending to bump into her. The narrator’s insecurity leads to his dishonesty with the one person who treats him with respect and understanding.

When Kojima and the narrator meet at the end of summer, Kojima tells him details about her past that reveal her attitude to Solidarity Versus Apathy. Her backstory also explains her motivations for befriending the narrator. Kojima tells the narrator that she maintains an attachment to her estranged father. His divorce from her mother has profoundly affected Kojima by shaping her understanding of pity, sympathy, and solidarity. Kojima’s mother radically distanced herself from her previous life with her father, and this makes Kojima sympathetic to her father. She sees the power dynamics of bullying replicated in her home life through the behavior of her mother and her father. Her father has no particular fault other than his own bad fortune; his failed business landed him in debt, which caused strain in her parents’ marriage and ultimately caused her mother to leave him. In Kojima’s eyes, this makes him an innocent victim, and she feels her mother abandoned her father. Kojima explains that she even dresses messily as a sign of her solidarity with her father, since he is still struggling with finances and does not have a luxurious lifestyle like her mother and stepfather.

Kojima believes that empathy stems from personal suffering, which is why she thinks that the narrator’s own experiences with bullying and exclusion will help him understand her pain. She even imagines that the hardships experienced by her stepfather—whom she dislikes—might be a gateway to understanding him.

What this ultimately suggests about her dynamic with the school bullies is that she might not even resent them. She thinks that they cannot sympathize with the people they bully because they fail to make the effort to understand them. The privilege that they enjoy is that they do not go through enough hardship to make them understand other people’s suffering. Thus, Kojima says that the bullies need to experience their own forms of trauma and suffering in order to understand the narrator and Kojima’s pain and discover their shared humanity.