by Nisioisin
They have two sides to them.
And the obverse and reverse are one and the same, like in a Möbius strip.
Well, I guess the power of love is one interpretation, then.
It’s pretty depressing to be forgotten by someone, after all.
Thinking such thoughts, waiting for the large hole in my stomach to close up, I just decided to watch, without wisecracking, the Sapphic spectacle unfolding before my eyes. If I were Oshino, I would have put on nihilistic airs as though they suited me, perhaps stuck an unlit cigarette in my mouth, and asked the two of them if something good had happened to them, but unfortunately, I was a minor.
009
The epilogue, or maybe, the punch line of this story.
The next day, I was roused awake as usual by my little sisters Karen and Tsukihi, and rubbing my drowsy eyes, I prepared to head to Senjogahara’s house for an all-day Sunday study session as I’d promised, in high spirits, holding out hope that perhaps this was the day I finally got to eat her home cooking, but just as I straddled my commuter bicycle, the only one left in my possession, and opened the gate and left my home, I encountered a bored-looking girl who was stretching in front of a telephone pole for whatever reason. She was in casual clothes, but the combination of the short pleated skirt and the bike shorts peeking out past them made her look mostly the same as she did in her school uniform─it was the star of Naoetsu High, my junior Suruga Kanbaru.
“Good morning, my senior Araragi.”
“…Good morning, Miss Kanbaru.”
“Hm? Oh, I don’t deserve such a formal greeting. Starting with everyday good manners, you’re pure quality. Have your injuries healed?”
“Yeah… If anything, the sun is the tough part for me now, but it’s not as bad as I thought. That and my healing damage are about even. So, Kanbaru, how do you know where I live?”
“Aw, acting like you have no idea. Are you setting up the scene for me? I used to stalk you. Of course I’d have ferreted out your home address.”
“……”
Her cheerful laughter did nothing to dispel my bewilderment.
“And is there something you need?” I asked her.
“Yes. I received a call from her this morning, and she told me to come get you. Oh, let me carry your bag.” Almost as soon as Kanbaru said this, she plucked my backpack out from my bicycle’s front basket and held it in her left hand. She looked at me with a beaming, innocent smile. “I oiled up your bike chain, too. And if there’s anything else you need, don’t hesitate to ask.”
She’d gone past being friends with Senjogahara and was her gofer.
While I had no interest in having the star of the school at my beck and call, if the pathologically jealous Senjogahara had assigned such a task to Kanbaru, then was their relationship mended, and was the Valhalla Duo back together again, or was I reading too much into it? I probably was reading too much into it.
“How about a massage before we leave? You say you’re fine, but you must be tired. I’m pretty good, I’d have you know.”
“…But what about your team? You have practice on Sundays, too, don’t you? With the exam break looming, you need to hustle.”
“No, I can’t play basketball anymore.”
“Huh?”
“It might seem premature, but I’m retiring.”
Still holding my backpack, Kanbaru showed me her left hand. That left arm of hers─was wrapped tight in a long white bandage up to her elbow. You could tell nonetheless that there was something slightly off about its length and shape.
“It was all so half-baked. The devil left, but in the end my arm didn’t go back to normal. There’s no way I could keep playing basketball. Still, it’s powerful, in its own way, and actually feels quite handy.”
“…Give me my bag back. Now.”
What could I say.
If only by half, her wish had been granted.
Then that much was only fair, it seemed.
001
Nadeko Sengoku was my sister’s classmate. I have two little sisters, and Nadeko Sengoku was friends with the younger one. Unlike the current pathetic state of my personal relationships, I was a fairly normal kid in elementary school as far as how many friends I had, but even back then I suppose you could say that while I enjoyed playing with everyone, I never enjoyed playing with specific someones. So I might have had fun with my classmates during recess, but I rarely did anything with them after school. What an unpleasant kid. Unpleasant to talk about, unpleasant to think about. In fact, I would prefer to not do either. Still, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, or maybe the other way around, but either way I’m trying to say that I’ve always been like that. Which is why I’d always go home right after school, even though I didn’t take any lessons, and I’d sometimes find Nadeko Sengoku at play when I got there. My two sisters are now attached to each other, side by side no matter when, where, what, or why to the point that I am more creeped out than worried, but back in elementary school they tended to act on their own. The older one was the total outdoorsy type, while the younger mostly stayed indoors, and about once every three days she would bring a friend from school over to our home. Nadeko Sengoku wasn’t particularly good friends with my youngest sister, but more like one of her many friends, I imagined. I qualify that statement with a somewhat uncertain “I imagined” at the end because I don’t remember that time in my life very well to be honest, but when I try, of the friends my little sister used to bring home, I at least do remember Nadeko Sengoku. That’s because, coming home without having played with my friends, I ended up having to play with my little sister (My two sisters and I shared a room back then. My parents only assigned me my own room once I started middle school), mostly to liven things up by filling an open spot in a board game or the like, but I’d be called over with ridiculous frequency if Nadeko Sengoku was the one my little sister was playing with. In other words, my little sister had lots of friends (This can still be said about both of my little sisters, but they’re both incredibly talented when it comes to standing in the center of attention. I couldn’t be any more jealous, as their older brother), but out of all the classmates she brought home, Nadeko Sengoku was the rare girl who liked to do things on her own. To be frank, all of my little sister’s friends seemed the same to me, but I would of course remember the name of the girl who was always on her own, at least.
Her name was about it, though.
Yeah, I didn’t remember much, after all.
And so I’m going to have to apologize for appending yet another uncertain qualification, but Nadeko Sengoku was a reserved girl of few words who constantly looked down at the floor─I thought. That’s what I thought, but, well, I don’t know. Maybe I’m describing another one of my little sister’s friends, or maybe one of my own friends at the time. When I was in grade school, actually, I always found it annoying and irritating when my little sister had friends over. Add to that the fact I was forced to play with them, and of course I’d be left with a poor impression. When I look back at it, it must have been more annoying for those girls to have to play with their friend’s older brother, but in any case, that was in the past, so please understand a grade schooler’s sensibility. Once I started middle school, my youngest sister invited friends over less often, and even when she did, stopped inviting me to play with them. There was the fact that our rooms were now separated, but there must have been some other, bigger reason. That’s how things are. Most of her personal relationships must have been wiped clean when she graduated because both of my little sisters ended up going to a private middle school. Nadeko Sengoku was my sister’s classmate in grade school, but not now, because they went to different schools. So─it’s more than two years ago that I last saw her according to the most favorable estimate, and in truth it’s probably more than six.
Six years.
More than enough time for a person to change.
At least, I thought of myself as having utterly changed. Even when I say I was always li
ke that, back then and now just aren’t the same. Taking a look at my elementary graduation photo album or the like now is just too painful. I know I just said something about a “grade schooler’s sensibility,” but comparing my high school self to myself in those days, I wouldn’t dare argue that I am now better or superior. We tend to look at the past through rose-colored glasses, yes, but what’s cringe-worthy here perhaps isn’t my grade school self, but the person I am now as seen by the grade school me. No, embarrassingly enough, even if he and I ran into each other in the street, we wouldn’t recognize the person standing in front of us as ourselves.
I don’t know if that’s a bad thing or not.
Not being able to boast of my current self to my past self.
But sometimes it’s like that.
Maybe we’re all like that.
Which is why when I met Nadeko Sengoku again, I didn’t realize it was her at first─it took some time for me to remember. If only I’d noticed immediately, or even a little faster─if I’d noticed that she was entwined with a snake, perhaps this story wouldn’t have ended the way it did. A poignant thought, but it’s not as if my regrets mean anything either to her or to the aberration. To start this story off with its conclusion, it seems as though Nadeko Sengoku, a friend of my little sister’s whom I barely remembered, ended up a unique someone that I could never forget.
002
“I’m sorry I made you wait, my senior Araragi.”
June eleventh, a Sunday.
I’m not sure if “jockish” is the best way to put it, but at 10:55 a.m., exactly five minutes before we’d agreed to meet in front of the main gate of our school, Naoetsu High, Suruga Kanbaru, the former star of the basketball team and one year my junior, came dashing, and unable to stop, jumped, sailed easily past my head, landed, turned, and spoke those words with a fresh smile on her face and her right hand in front of her chest… I realized that I wasn’t particularly tall for a high school student, but I’d never considered my height a non-issue that a girl shorter than me could clear with a scissors jump. It seemed like I had some reconsidering to do.
“No, I just got here myself. I haven’t been waiting.”
“Wow… Being so transparently considerate just to avoid causing me undue mental stress testifies to your good nature. You’re just born magnanimous. The likes of me can only take three steps back and look up to take in all that you are. I’m truly stunned that you’d move me with your largeness within a mere few seconds of seeing you. Seems like I have no choice but to spend all the respect I can muster in my lifetime on you alone. Good heavens, I think I nearly resent you for that.”
“………”
She was the same as ever.
And hey, don’t go around calling people transparent.
The best response to casual kindness is to feign ignorance, okay?
“No, I really did just get here,” I assured her. “And in any case, you came early, too. There’s no reason for you to apologize.”
“I won’t have any of that. No matter what you say, the fact that I wasn’t here before my senior is cause enough for an apology. I think it’s an unforgivable sin to waste the time of someone above you.”
“I’m not above you.”
“You’re a year ahead of me so you are.”
“True, but…”
That was just a matter of age.
Or how tall we were, I guess (physically speaking, I was above her).
Not that she couldn’t easily leap over me, though.
Suruga Kanbaru─a second-year at Naoetsu High.
She was our ace basketball player until just a month earlier, and her name was known across the whole school as its biggest celebrity and star. Whether she wanted to admit it or not, it was her who had led our private prep school’s weak little sports organization to the national tournament the same year she joined it. She was a frightening junior, and a half-assed washout third-year like me would normally be unable to so much as speak to her, or even step in her shadow for that matter. Just the other day, she gave her position of team captain to one of her juniors because of an injury to her left arm, then quit the basketball team early─and it was still fresh in my mind the way the whole school was shaken by the impact of the news. I doubted the memory would ever go stale.
Kanbaru’s left arm.
It was still wrapped tight in a long white bandage.
“Yes,” Kanbaru began to say in a quiet voice, “as you can see, I’ve retired. The only thing I was ever good at was basketball, and now I have nothing to offer the school. So you ought to deal with me accordingly.”
“What do you mean, ‘deal with’ you? For all the confidence you seem to have, your self-esteem can be weirdly low. What you’ve done for the basketball team won’t go away just because you’re retiring early.”
Guilt over her early retirement─wasn’t exactly it, but then again, it seemed unreasonable to expect her to stay the exact same after all that happened to her. Personally, though, I did wish that Kanbaru wouldn’t be so self-deprecating.
“Thanks,” she told me. “I couldn’t appreciate your concern more. I’ll gladly take those feelings into consideration.”
“Take the words into consideration, too. Okay, why don’t we get going.”
“Yup,” she said before scurrying over to my side and taking my open left hand into her right in what could only be described as a natural motion. She didn’t “hold my hand” as much as wrap her fingers around mine. From there, she pushed her body into my arm, sticking to me like she was about to embrace me. Her chest was right around my elbow because of our height difference, and the delicate, nerve-dense area of my body was beset by a sensation like mashed potatoes.
“No,” corrected Kanbaru, “I think the usual comparison is to marshmallows.”
“Wait, what?! Did I voice that stupid monologue out loud just now?!”
“Ah, no, you didn’t, you didn’t. Don’t worry, I only heard it telepathically.”
“That’d make it an even bigger problem! Everyone around here must have heard it, then!”
“Heheheh. Well, we’ll just have to show them, in that case. It’s not like I’m someone who worries about appearing scandalous anymore.”
“Stop smiling and saying what a girlfriend might say when you’re just my junior! You know it’s not you I’m dating, it’s your senior who you respect very much!”
Hitagi Senjogahara.
My classmate.
And girlfriend.
And─the senior that Suruga Kanbaru admired.
She, Senjogahara, was what had connected the school’s biggest celebrity and star to the ever-nondescript average student that I am. Kanbaru and Senjogahara had been junior and senior since middle school, and while this, that, and the other happened between then and now, the two were still friends as the Valhalla Duo. For a time, Suruga Kanbaru stalked me because I was the person who was dating her admired senior.
I told her, “It’s not like you ever worried about scandals to begin with. Now get off of me.”
“No. I read that you’re supposed to hold hands when you’re on a date.”
“A date?! When did I ever call this a date?”
“Hrm?” Kanbaru tilted her head as if that were the last thing she expected to hear. “Now that you mention it, maybe you never did. I was so excited when you asked me to go somewhere with you that I didn’t really listen to what you were saying.”
“Oh…I guess you were mumbling your replies the whole time…”
“Still, I don’t know about that. I’m on the open side when it comes to sex, and I do want to follow your wishes wherever possible, but you’d proceed to the deed without even going on a date first? I worry about your future.”
“We’re not proceeding to any deed so stop worrying about me! And a high school second-year shouldn’t be talking about how open she is about sex!!”
“Then again, we’ve already come this far. This pleasure cruise has already set sail.”
&nbs
p; “So you are enjoying it after all!”
I caught a look of how Kanbaru was dressed.
Jeans and a T-shirt, with a long-sleeved shirt on top. Expensive-looking sneakers. On her head was a baseball cap, probably in part because the sun was getting stronger. It suited a sporty girl like her perfectly, but we’ll put that aside for now.
“You’re technically wearing long sleeves and long pants like I told you…”
But.
Her jeans were stylishly ripped here and there, while her T-shirt was short enough to show off plenty of her curved waist. It almost seemed a little much… Of course, people were free to dress as they wanted on Sundays, but still…
