Let's play Monkey in the Middle with Dotty's cellphone.
Summary:
Futaba has a habit of using her cellphone to take photos of everything she thought was wonderful. One day while hanging around with fellow club members Hikari, Ai, and Makoto, Futaba discovers that her cellphone has run out of storage space. The problem can be solved by moving some of the pictures to a memory card, but doing that would mean a portion of the photos cannot be viewed. All of these photos carry great sentimental value to Futaba, and she doesn't want to put them into storage where they cannot be easily viewed. The dilemma with the photos reminds Futaba of her experience moving away from Tokyo and parting with her old friends. She keeps many photos of her old friends so that she'll always remember them, and she thinks that putting their photos away will cause her to forget.
It's not as if Hikari was inexpressive, but Ai thinks that Hikari can do better with her facial expressions.
Later in the day, Futaba is wondering about the photo situation when she gets a text message from Hikari who tells Futaba to go to a foot bath. At the foot bath, Futaba meets up with her diving club buddies plus Katori-sensei. While everyone is soaking their feet in the bath, Hikari suddenly gives Futaba a present which Ai reveals to be originally meant for Futaba's birthday which was a month ago. That little detail aside, the present turns out to be digital photo frame, and this solves Futaba's problem nicely since she can move her photos to the frame and still be able to look at them. Futaba thanks everyone for the present, but Hikari states that it's the givers who should be doing the thanking as giving a gift that someone appreciates brings even more joy to the giver. This statement cause tears to stream down from Futaba's eyes, but her expression soon turns to one of happiness.
The next day, Futaba is hanging around the shoreline taking pictures with her cellphone. After scrolling through photos of her old friends, Futaba decides to give a call to her friend in Tokyo for a chat.
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A classic slice-of-life setup. At the start I thought the the subject about Futaba's cellphone running out of space was kind of insignificant (I am more cynical these days than the days when I was reading Aria), but then I realize it's about the photos. Photographs are one of those objects with special properties: they might to totally worthless to stranger, but for the keeper the photos can hold great sentimental values as in Futaba's case. Thanks to the marvels of modern technology, Futaba's dilemma didn't turn out to be much of dilemma as Hikari's digital photo frame came to the rescue. Futaba can also get a new phone with more storage space or ability to do slide shows off of memory cards (I think that was what she was doing with her phone).
An interesting revelation in this chapter is that Futaba actually had two good friends back when she was in Tokyo. This means that Futaba wasn't really a loner at the start of the story and had experiences with friends, but for some reason she was still swept off of her feet by Hikari. I guess that says a lot about Hikari's ability to brighten up the people around her.
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