There seem to be a lot of shots of the white-haired girl looking kinda conflicted about the treatment Lyu Geyang is getting from the rest of the group, but she doesn't stand up to them. She carries her own bag in ch.1 and is not shown making fun of her in class or make her run errands, is always just shown in the background of bullying, sorta as a spectator. It feels like her wanting to get closer might have been genuine but was torpedoed by the rest of the clique. Instead of 3.5 being a snippet of the future I would rather see the author explore that part if all of the above was intentional.
If it wasn't intentional then the author should work on that, because it really feels like there is more to be told there.
Yeah, I noticed that too. Even during the final argument that broke the camel's back, she was just standing in the background with an obviously conflicted look on her face. So the ending felt somewhat incomplete, I genuinely expected to see more about her.
And this actually plays into another problem I have with this. If you cut out the first chapter, you would have a hard time figuring out she was crushing on Chen Yue. This started out as blatant romantic angst, Liu Geyang was tormented by her feelings not only because of her low self-esteem, but also because she fell for another girl, which seemed to outright double her insecurities.
She then settled on thinking that being friends (specifically with Chen Yue) would be "more normal" and would at least allow her to spend time with the girl, which seems like pretty standard "I will take any crumbs I can get" line of reasoning when an outright romance seems impossible.
But this gets pushed one step further into wanting more friends in general, and the rest of the story from then on focuses on that aspect.
The central premise that the first chapter introduced was Liu Geyang's angsty crush on Chen Yue, it was not her general lack of friends and loneliness, but the latter ideas end up as the focus of the last two thirds of the story, with the romantic aspect never really brought up again.
You can still glimpse that she felt more than just friendly attachment for Chen Yue purely from the focus of some of the panels, but after spending literally the whole first chapter setting these feelings up in copious detail, mere glimpses seem somewhat inadequate.
I still overall liked the story, it depicted both the bullying and Liu Geyang's reactions and thoughts in a very realistic light, and the rejection of the apology felt immensely satisfying. But narratively speaking, I feel it could have been better structured. As it is, the first chapter sets the central premise, but that central premise goes literally nowhere (in the sense that it is never again brought up) and the story shifts its focus on other themes.