I think it's too late about that. If we're going from the colored pages which are probably a bit in the future, Ayu sees Hii and the teacher kissing.
Am I the only one who thinks the mangaka might be messing with us? That scene is certainly made to look like a kiss, to certainly be something that gives both us and the MC the impression of a kiss. But it's a bad view . . . worse for us because we can't see the contact point past the MC's head. But it strikes me as one of those things that could be angle--like their faces are very close but the impression of contact could be false.
I'm sorry to blow up your theory but this page http://dynasty-scans.com/chapters/sentimental_dust_ch01#17 is obviously jealousy because at this point they are already dating. This is not done to protect her or anything because they are quite close.
She blew it. She had her chance and blew it.
No, as of ch. 2 my notion that it was fake is pretty thoroughly blown up. But "She had her chance and blew it"? Really? I find that rather callous. But also, story's over then, is it? Don't think so.
I am now thoroughly hating on the teacher. Even if you're thinking, like lots of people here apparently, "Yeah, someone needed to tell the MC what's what because she's horrible and deserves horrible things to happen to her"--which has struck me as a really exaggerated and somewhat nasty reaction to her--it's still ludicrously vicious and immature for a teacher to be talking that way to her 14-15 year old student. Teachers have lots of students, and there may be lots of students they don't appreciate as people. It is not OK for them to just shred the kids and traumatize them for their personal enjoyment or catharsis or whatever. Even if it might be OK for someone to be saying that shit to that girl, she is emphatically not a someone who should be doing it. Really, no adult should, but it's worse for someone with a professional duty of care.
Meanwhile, while there are times when I can buy a student-teacher romance, even maybe when the student is that young, this is not one of those times. Frankly, that teacher's not "dating" Hii-chan. She's messing with her. The most un-cynical construction I can put on what she's doing is that her judgment is totally failing because the situation has her reliving old traumas, she's become obsessed with revenge against the MC for what someone she sees as like the MC did to her once upon a time, and she's just lost sight of what it's likely to do to the girl she's "dating". The more cynical construction is, she's using the secondary lead as a toy and justifying it to herself with things like her spiteful speech to the MC. There's no indication she has real feelings for her. So, what, she's helping the girl recover from her broken heart by pulling her into a rebound relationship that will break her heart in a much more twisted way? Oh, that's just grand.
As to the MC and whether she's horrible and deserves it all, I'm with the people who have a more gentle opinion of her. People can be imperfect and dumb without being horrible bitches. She's young, she's foolish, and as far as she could tell she didn't want a romantic relationship but she wanted as close and long term a relationship as she could possibly have short of that. So she tried to get that, acted like a best friend rather than a romantic partner. If secondary lead felt it was better to break off than be best friends, that is a decision she could make.
What should the main character have done? Should she have gone with the romance even though that wasn't what she (thought she) wanted? Is that how it works, people? What if secondary lead was a guy, is it a girl's responsibility to go out with him even if she doesn't return his feelings? Obviously not. OK, then should she have made the decision for Hii-chan that if she wasn't going to be her lover she should push her away and break off their relationship entirely? Would that have been an OK, right thing to do? What if that's not what Hii-chan wanted, is it the MC's responsibility to have given it to her for her own good whether she wanted it or not?
Really, there isn't a perfect solution for this kind of situation. The object of unrequited feelings is going to cause pain no matter what they do. You could say she should have had her feelings better sorted out. No doubt. But requiring that as a condition for not considering someone a horrible bitch at 14-15 basically means you have to hate every underage human being in the world and most adults. This seems an overreaction to human imperfection.
