Culling Daisies

Synopsis

Kagawa Renge is the most popular girl at Misaki High. She gets good grades, she's skilled at sports, and she has a lot of friends. Renge should have an easy life, but there's a problem: her beloved grandmother has just died.

Renge can't tell anybody about her granny's death or her perfect life will be upended. She'll be forced to move out of her granny's home and taken into care, as her parents are both out of the picture. This is the last thing Renge wants, however, when she's studying for her university entrance exams.

Rather than have her perfect façade fall apart, Renge lies about her grandmother's death and becomes a recluse, dropping out of the track team and cutting off her old friends. She's determined to graduate without arousing any suspicion: especially not from her homeroom teacher, the nosy Miss Watanabe...

But Renge's life is disrupted further still when she meets a young girl washed up on the shore of her island home: a young girl just like her, with no parents to care for her, and nowhere to go. Seeing some of herself in the young girl, Renge offers the girl, Ruka, a home - but what will happen when forces conspire to tear them apart?