by Nisioisin
“What’s flooded on top and in blazes on the bottom?”
“…”
Why a riddle all of a sudden?
Wondering when she’d turned into the kind of character who asked riddles, I decided to humor her for the time being. I knew the answer to this one, fortunately.
“A cauldron, right?”
“Bzzt. The correct answer is,” Senjogahara enlightened me in the same monotone, “Suruga Kanbaru’s house.”
“What are you planning on doing to the home of our school’s basketball star?!”
Now I was really scared!
Her eyes were so still, too!
“Jokes aside,” she said.
“Your jokes are no joke, okay? Not when you might follow up on them.”
“Really? But since you insist, Araragi, I’ll keep my jokes non-practical.”
“That’s only normal…”
“Kanbaru found out about my secret a year before you,” Senjogahara told me like it was nothing special─in her usual tone, only a tad irritated. “I’d just become a second-year, so it was right after Kanbaru started at Naoetsu High. Considering its location, I’d already foreseen that a junior who knew me would be coming to our school, so I’d thought about what to do─but with Kanbaru, I guess I let my guard down a little.”
“Huh.”
Hitagi Senjogahara.
The secret she’d borne─
I’d learned it by catching her after she’d tripped on the stairs─by chance, so to speak. But on the flip side, you could say her secret was so precarious that mere chance was sufficient to expose it. In fact, Senjogahara had told me I wasn’t the first to find out─so Kanbaru…
Knowing Kanbaru’s personality.
“I bet that gir…Kanbaru probably tried to save you or something, didn’t she?”
“Yes, indeed. Though I refused,” Senjogahara replied calmly, as if coupling those phrases were a standard construction, a grammatical staple. “I dealt with her the way I did with you. You tried to get involved anyway, Araragi. Kanbaru never came back after that. That was all our relationship amounted to.”
“…She never came back.”
So that was a year ago.
The refusal─must have been thorough. It must have been immeasurably more intense than in my case since Kanbaru knew about Senjogahara’s past as a middle school track star quite well. Otherwise─Kanbaru, given her nature, wouldn’t have given up without a fight. I recalled that according to Senjogahara, at the May eighth stage, when I learned her secret─the only person who knew about it at that moment apart from me was Harukami, the health teacher.
At that moment.
In other words, Suruga Kanbaru had noticed her secret in the past, but Senjogahara had forced her to forget. One of the poor victims…no, casualties─but had Kanbaru, of all people, really been able to forget about Senjogahara?
“…You were friends, weren’t you?”
“Yes, in middle school,” Senjogahara admitted. “It’s different now. We’re complete strangers.”
“But your…situation has changed compared to a year ago. I mean, we cleared up that secret of yours, so─”
“Didn’t I just tell you, Araragi?” she cut me off. “I don’t intend to go back to any of that.”
“……”
“That’s how I’ve decided to live my life.”
“Oh…”
Well.
If that was her decision about her own life, it didn’t seem like my place to butt in─at least that’s how the logic usually went. And Senjogahara wasn’t so glib as to offer to bury the hatchet with someone she’d rejected so harshly just because her condition had become a thing of the past.
“Still…” I said. “I get your relationship with Kanbaru, but that doesn’t explain why she’s following me around, does it.”
“She must have found out that we’re going out. We started dating two weeks ago, and the stalking started three days ago, so the timing seems to work out fine.”
“What? You mean she’s curious what kind of guy Hitagi Senjogahara’s boyfriend is…and she’s checking me out?”
“I think it’s something like that. Sorry for the trouble, Araragi. I won’t mouth any excuses. This is on me for not being able to liquidate my relationships.”
“Liquidate…”
What a word to use.
Knowing her, it didn’t even sound figurative.
“Not to worry,” she assured. “I’ll take responsibility for─”
“Don’t! Don’t take responsibility! God knows what you mean by that! This is nothing, it’s my problem so I’ll take care of it!”
“Why so shy? Don’t be so standoffish.”
“I’m just afraid you’ll turn it into a different kind of standoff…”
Hrrm.
In any case, or even so, it didn’t make sense to me.
“You shooed Kanbaru away in no mild fashion a year ago, right? And it’s been that way since? Would she still care if you got a boyfriend?”
“If it were an everyday case of an estranged senior finding a boyfriend, then sure─but this is different, isn’t it? Araragi. You did something she couldn’t, so actually I’m not surprised. The way she sees it, you succeeded where she failed.”
“Ah…I get it.”
She learned Hitagi Senjogahara’s secret…but was turned away, rejected, harshly and mercilessly. A little reasoning was all it took to arrive at the assumption that I, as the boyfriend, couldn’t possibly not know the secret, and seeing me by Senjogahara’s side even as I knew surely must have given Kanbaru some food for thought.
At the same time.
Kanbaru probably didn’t realize that the secret itself had been resolved. Because if her reasoning were that good, she’d have reached out to Senjogahara instead of me, or so I assumed.
“Hitagi Senjogahara was someone Kanbaru looked up to, if I do say so myself,” Senjogahara divulged, averting her gaze from me. “I knew I was in that position, and I did try to act the part. What could I do? I think there was nothing else I could do. So in rejecting her, I was extra careful to make a clean break─yes. But I guess the kid hasn’t forgotten about me after all.”
“…You shouldn’t say that like she’s annoying. She’s not doing it out of malice, right? And anyway, people forgetting you is a pretty depress─”
“She’s annoying,” Senjogahara declared without a shred of hesitation. “The presence or absence of malice isn’t the issue.”
“Come on, don’t be like that… If she looked up to you, and she’s still concerned about you…well, it might be weird to call it ‘making up,’ but don’t you have some room in your heart for her?”
“I don’t. It’s already been a year, it was in middle school that we were friends, and yes, it would be weird to call it ‘making up.’ I told you I’m not going back to any of that. Or are you saying I should walk up to her after all this time and apologize for making her wait so long? That would be the height of idiocy.”
Then, as if to close the door on that conversation, and also as if she’d just come up with something, Senjogahara changed the topic. She was, as always, slick.
“Oh, right. By the way, Araragi, do you have plans to meet Mister Oshino anytime soon?”
“Oshino? Well, I guess you could say I do…”
Maybe not Oshino─but I needed to let Shinobu drink my blood, and it was about time for me to go by that abandoned cram school. It was Friday, so I’d make some time tomorrow, or maybe the day after tomorrow…
“Okay. In that case.”
Senjogahara silently stood up, grabbed an envelope from atop her dresser, came back to me, and held it out. The envelope had a post office mark printed on it.
“Could you give this to Mister Oshino for me?”
“What is this… Ohhh.”
I realized as soon as I’d asked.
Mèmè Oshino─
That frivolous Hawaiian-shirted bastard’s payment for services rendered.
/> What he required to remove Senjogahara’s secret, the calamity that had befallen her─his remuneration, or simply put, his payment.
A hundred thousand yen, if I remembered correctly.
I checked inside to make sure, and indeed, ten ten-thousand-yen bills were inside. Exactly ten bills, crisp and probably fresh from the bank.
“Wow…you got that together faster than I thought you would. You made it sound like it would take you a while. Weren’t you going to take a part-time job or something?”
“I did,” Senjogahara said nonchalantly. “I got my father to let me help him out with his work. Well, I guess it’d be more accurate to say I forced him, but that’s how I earned the money.”
“Huh.”
Senjogahara’s father worked at some foreign company─and maybe that was the right choice for her? Regular part-time jobs didn’t seem suited to her personality, and our school forbade us from taking them in the first place.
“I was reluctant because getting help from my father somehow felt like cheating, but as someone who grew up in a family mired in debt, attending to money matters is a must. There was a little bit left over, so I’ll buy you lunch some time at the cafeteria. The food at our school is pretty good but reasonably priced, so you know, order anything you want.”
“…Thanks.”
Still, it was the cafeteria.
A weekday lunch break.
Did she not intend to go on a date with me, ever?
“But in that case,” I asked, “why not just go and give it to him yourself?”
“Nope. Because I hate Mister Oshino.”
“Understood…”
She was so direct about her savior.
What was mature about Senjogahara, though, was that she still felt grateful towards him.
Of course, it wasn’t like I loved Oshino, either.
“If I had my way,” she said, “I’d never meet him again, and I don’t want to have anything to do with him in the future. Not with someone who acts like he sees through people.”
“Yeah, I think you’re right that you and Oshino are incompatible. He has that frivolous and mocking attitude, and it clashes with your personality,” I said, placing the envelope next to my floor cushion. I slapped the envelope and nodded at Senjogahara. “Okay, I get it. If that’s how it is, I won’t say another word. I’ll take good care of this, and I’ll be sure to give it to Oshino the next time I meet him.”
“I appreciate it.”
“Yup.”
Then I thought─
Compatibility.
Attitude.
Personality.
Wasn’t that second-year Suruga Kanbaru’s out-of-left-field character─the exact flip side of Senjogahara’s? In terms of compatibility, attitude, personality, and everything else.
Senjogahara had been the star of the track team in middle school.
Moreover, she’d been admired. The worshipping gazes that she’d drawn─couldn’t have been Kanbaru’s alone. In that position, Senjogahara had played a certain character─she must have played a character that was the polar opposite of her current verbally abusive, acid-tongued self.
Abuse and flattery.
Acid tongue, soothing tongue.
Polar opposites.
Flip side.
Which meant.
“So, Araragi.” Senjogahara’s eyes were devoid of emotion. “Let’s get back to studying. Are you familiar with Thomas Edison’s famous observation? He said that genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. A great quote, worthy of a genius. But I bet he thought the one percent was more important. Don’t they say that’s about all that separates a human’s genes from a monkey’s?”
004
It was two years for Senjogahara─and two weeks for me.
The start of Golden Week to its finish for Hanekawa.
For Hachikuji, who knows. I can’t say exactly how long.
I’m talking about the periods we were in contact with aberrations─the amounts of time our abnormal experiences lasted. It was over those periods, those spans that our improbable, dreadful experiences, which were anything but normal, lasted.
Take Koyomi Araragi.
My case.
In this day and age, amidst our twenty-first-century civilization, it’s so embarrassing that it makes me want to find a hole and jump in it, but I fell victim to a venerable old vampire─a bloodcurdlingly scary terror, a traditional and legendary vampire, sucked every last drop of blood from my body.
She sucked me dry.
And I became a vampire.
I was afraid of the sun, hated crosses, avoided garlic, and kept my distance from holy water, and in return, gained physical abilities that were tens, hundreds, thousands of times greater than a human’s, but once again in return, I felt an absolute hunger for human blood─like one of those nightwalkers so popular now in manga, anime, and movies. Really, it felt unfair to have become such a true-to-form vampire. These days they were fine walking around in daylight, wore crosses as accessories, ate garlic bread and washed them down with holy water, but still had absurd physical abilities─wasn’t that just mainstream now?
And yet.
A vampire having to suck human blood seems to be the one constant.
They’re bloodsucking demons, after all.
In the end, it was a dude passing by, not a vampire hunter, not a Christian spec ops team, not a vampire who hunted his own kind, but a regular dude passing by, a frivolous Hawaiian-shirted bastard named Mèmè Oshino who saved me from that hell─but that did nothing to erase the fact that I’d lived through those two weeks.
A demon.
A cat.
A crab.
A snail.
Still, I couldn’t allow myself to forget that there was a decisive difference between me and the other three. An especially large one, in particular, between Hitagi Senjogahara’s case and Koyomi Araragi’s.
I don’t mean the length of time, but the depth of our loss.
She didn’t intend to go back to that─she said.
But despite her talk about there being no need or necessity, didn’t she mean that she couldn’t go back to that time in her life even if she wanted to?
I say that because…for two years, she’d refused anything and everything you could call social contact. Hitagi Senjogahara had spent two years associating with no one in her class─and now that those two years were over, nothing had changed.
Aside from me, nothing had changed.
Koyomi Araragi was merely a unique exception for Senjogahara, and she hadn’t changed at all aside from that.
There was no difference between her before and her after.
She just stopped going to the nurse’s office.
She just started participating in P.E. class.
She sat in the corner of the classroom─and read silently. As if reading a book, in our classroom, was a way to build sturdy walls against her classmates─
She talked to me now, but that really was it.
She ate lunch with me now, and that was it.
A quiet model student prone to illness─that was still the position she occupied in our class. All that our classmates thought was that her condition must have improved somewhat, to whatever degree.
Hanekawa, our class president, innocently welcomed it, however, as a major change─but I couldn’t share her simple optimism at the new picture.
Maybe Senjogahara hadn’t lost anything.
Maybe she’d thrown it away.
But you ended up with the same result.
I absolutely don’t want to sound like I know it all, and I probably won’t learn the truth no matter how I relate to her going forward─and I bet I shouldn’t be second-guessing her.
Interfering, meddling, all that doesn’t seem right.
But I can’t help but wonder.
What if.
If Senjogahara not carrying a stapler around anymore is progress…if that is a change, then might not there be
a furthermore?
Not just in relation to me.
About the other stuff, too, if─
“Hello?”
