I Made Friends with the Second Prettiest Girl in My Class

Maki Maehara has been the class's quiet outcast for most of his three years of high school. The first day of his second year, he sits beside Umi Asanagi — the school's second-prettiest girl by an unspoken classroom consensus — and discovers, slowly, that she is funny and weird and willing to be friends with him in public. Maki spends the year sure that the friendship is the entire payoff. Umi, for reasons she keeps mostly to herself, is taking her time arranging a different conclusion.