by Nisioisin
My─our savior.
If not for that, he’s certainly the kind of man I wouldn’t want to associate with. Past thirty but still lacking a fixed address, he was sleeping for over a month now in a bankrupt cram school. That description alone would be enough to drive away any normal person.
─I’m interested in this town for the time being.
That was his excuse.
So there’s no telling when he might disappear. He’s a rolling stone, the real deal, but Senjogahara and I had gone to him just last Monday about her problem─as well as on Tuesday, to deal with loose ends. I, myself, had seen him the day before, too. Considering all that, I was sure he would still be in that abandoned building.
That meant the only problem was getting in touch with him.
He doesn’t own a cell phone.
Our only choice was to go and see him in person.
I wouldn’t say Senjogahara has much of a relationship with him, since they only met the week before. Being more familiar with Oshino, it felt like I should be the one to go see him, but Senjogahara spoke up, saying, “I’ll go.”
“Let me borrow your mountain bike,” she said.
“If you want, sure…but do you know how to get there? I can draw you a map if you want─”
“It doesn’t make me glad in the slightest to have someone with a memory as poor as yours worrying over me. If anything, it’s making me feel sad.”
“…Is that so.”
I started to feel sad.
Really, actually, sad.
“To be honest,” she told me, “I wanted to try riding this mountain bike from the moment I saw it in the parking lot.”
“So you weren’t kidding when you were talking about how incredible mountain bikes are… I was convinced you didn’t mean it. You’re not very good at sounding honest, you know.”
“Or rather,” Senjogahara said, then practically whispered in my ear, “don’t leave me alone with her.”
“………”
“I wouldn’t know what to do with her.”
Yeah, that did seem true.
True for Hachikuji, too.
I handed the key to my mountain bike over to Senjogahara. I remembered hearing that she didn’t own a bike, so it did seem dangerous to be lending my oh-so-beloved ride─but since it was Senjogahara, I figured why not.
So.
I now found myself waiting for Senjogahara to contact us.
I was back in the park with the ambiguous pronunciation and sitting on a bench.
Next to me was Mayoi Hachikuji.
Where she sat, another person could have fit in between us.
It was as if she wanted to be able to make a break for it.
In fact, she seemed ready to.
I’d already told Hachikuji a bit about my own and Senjogahara’s past, and continuing, circumstances─but this only seemed to heighten her guard. I’d made a poor decision that backfired on me after everything I’d done to get her to open up─and now all I could do was start over from the beginning.
Trust is a very important thing, after all.
Sigh…
I’d try talking to her.
There was something I was wondering about, anyway.
“Hey, a little earlier─I want to say you were talking about your mother? What did you mean by that? Wasn’t this Miss Tsunade a relative of yours?”
“…”
She didn’t reply.
She was exercising her right to remain silent.
What I’d tried before might not work this time… It only did as a joke anyway, and if I repeated it too often, people might think I meant it─and by people, I mean myself.
And so.
“Hey, Hachikuji. I’ll get you some ice cream, so will you come a little closer?”
“I’m coming!”
Hachikuji sidled up to me right away.
…It seemed like she didn’t mind taking me at my word and waiting until later for her payment.
Speaking of which, I hadn’t given her a single yen of allowance yet, either… What an easy girl to control.
“So, what I was talking about,” I resumed.
“What was that again?”
“About─your mother.”
“……”
She exercised her right to remain silent.
I continued on, unfazed. “Were you lying when you said you were going to a relative’s?”
“…I wasn’t lying,” Hachikuji said, pouting. “Your mother counts as a relative, doesn’t she?”
“Sure, technically, but…”
It felt like splitting hairs.
And in any case─a girl carrying a backpack to head to her mother’s home alone on a Sunday was something of an odd situation…
“Also,” she continued, still pouting, “while I call her my mother, sadly she isn’t my mother anymore.”
“…Oh.”
A divorce.
She lived with her father.
It was a story I’d heard─just the other day.
I’d heard it from Senjogahara.
“My last name was Tsunade until I was in third grade. But it changed to Hachikuji when my father started looking after me.”
“Huh? Hold on.”
It was getting complicated, and I decided to take a moment to sort it out. Hachikuji was currently in fifth grade, and her last name until third grade was Tsunade (which must be why she cared enough about the name to yell at me), but it changed to Hachikuji once her father took her in. That meant… A-ha, so when her parents married, they decided to take her mother’s last name. In Japan a couple had to have the same surname once they got married, but it could be the man’s or the woman’s. Which meant…when her parents got divorced, her mother─Miss Tsunade─left their home and moved to this neighborhood…or more likely moved back in with her own parents. And that’s why─Hachikuji was here on a Sunday.
She was taking advantage of Mother’s Day.
To visit her mother─was that it?
Her name was─a precious gift from her father and mother.
“Yikes…and I’d tried to lecture you as your senior about being a better daughter…”
No wonder she didn’t want to be told.
Talk about being an annoyance.
“No, it doesn’t have anything to do with today being Mother’s Day. Her home is a place I’d visit anytime, if I had the opportunity.”
“…I see.”
“But I never get there.”
“………”
After the divorce, her mother left home.
She couldn’t meet her mother.
But Hachikuji wanted to.
So she came to see her.
Attempted to.
Carrying her backpack─and then.
And then─a snail came along.
“And that was when you encountered it,” I said.
“I don’t know what I did.”
“Huh.”
Ever since then─no matter how many times she tried to visit her mother.
Hachikuji couldn’t get there, not once.
I knew it’d be insensitive to ask how many times she’d tried and if she’d really failed every time─and the fact that she hadn’t given up was impressive.
It was impressive─but.
“……”
It’s not the best way to put it─nor should I be comparing it to other people’s experiences, I thought, but this feels much less dangerous than the problems that Hanekawa, Senjogahara, and I went through. It was neither a physical nor a psychological issue, but a phenomenological one where she couldn’t do something that she should be able to. The problem didn’t reside in her.
It was external.
It didn’t endanger her existence.
Her day-to-day life wasn’t severely impacted.
Which is why I felt the way I did.
But then again, even if that was true, I shouldn’t lord it over Hachikuji─no matter what. I had no right to say anything of the sort to
her, regardless of what I’d gone through over spring break.
So all I told her was, “You know─sounds like you’ve been through a lot, too.”
The words came from the bottom of my heart.
I nearly wanted to pat her on the head.
So I did.
“Grrah!”
She bit my hand.
“Ow! What the hell are you doing, you little brat?!”
“Grrrrrrrgh!”
“Ow! Ow, ow, oww!”
Sh-She wasn’t joking, she wasn’t playing around, she wasn’t covering up her embarrassment, she was honestly biting down on my hand as hard as she could… I didn’t have to look at my hand to know that her teeth had pierced my skin and entered into my flesh, or that I was gushing blood! This was no laughing matter. Why had she suddenly─or had I unwittingly triggered some sort of event without knowing it?
Did that mean a battle had begun?!
I balled my unbitten hand into a fist. As if I was crushing the air out of it. Then, I took that fist and drove it directly into the pit of Hachikuji’s stomach. The solar plexus is a major weak spot on any human body. Amazingly, Hachikuji kept her teeth firmly inside my hand, but she couldn’t help easing up for a moment. I used this opening to swing the arm that hand was connected to in every direction with all my might. Hachikuji had all but bitten off a chunk of my hand, but this had left the rest of her body open─and sure enough, it was hoisted off the bench.
I opened my fist and attempted to hold her defenseless torso in my hand─for a fifth grader, she felt surprisingly plump in my palm, but this fact had little to no influence on me as I was not a pedophile, which meant that I was able to use that momentum to flip her over. She was still biting my hand, causing her body to get wrenched at her neck. But that wasn’t a problem; so long as her teeth were inside my hand, there was a risk that any attacks to her head would deal damage to me as well. What was important was that this exposed Hachikuji’s torso as if she were a set of carefully stacked tiles at a karate demonstration. I aimed, of course, at the target of my previous strike, her solar plexus!
“Ghhak─”
It was over.
Hachikuji finally dislodged her teeth from my hand.
As she did, something resembling stomach acid came pouring out of her mouth.
And then─she passed right out.
“Heh─wait, that wasn’t funny.”
I shook my bitten hand as if to loosen it up.
“What an empty thing victories are after the first…”
There he sat, a high school boy acting like a dispassionate nihilist, having just knocked out an elementary school girl by punching her twice in a human’s vital spot, along the median line.
Hold on, that was me too.
……
Sure, I could understand smacking her, grabbing her, and tossing her, but hitting a girl with a balled fist? Seriously?
There was no need for Koyomi Araragi to have Hitagi Senjogahara apologize to him on all fours while naked. He already had what it took to be an awful human being.
“Agh… Still, I didn’t know she was one to chomp on people out of nowhere.”
I decided to take a look at the bite wound.
Wow, yikes… I could see my bones… I never knew that could happen when a human being bit another hard enough.
Of course, this was me we were talking about.
The wound might have hurt, but it wasn’t so serious that it wouldn’t heal immediately─without any special care at all.
It crawled and oozed shut─at a speed visible to the eye, almost as if it were taking place in fast forward, or rewind, and when I saw that─it made me realize all over again how much of a wrong turn my life had taken. I began to feel down─even gloomy, all over again.
Honestly─how small I was.
An awful person, in my state? I made myself laugh.
I actually thought I’d turned back into a human?
“…Ooh, what a scary look that is on your face, Araragi,” a voice abruptly called out to me.
I thought it was Senjogahara for a moment─but it couldn’t be. Her words would never sound so sunny.
There stood the class president.
Tsubasa Hanekawa.
The fact that she was wearing the exact uniform she wore to school despite it being a Sunday must have been natural for her, part of her charm as a model student─her hair and her glasses were the same as well, and the only difference in her appearance I could detect compared to when she was at school was a handbag she carried.
“H-Hanekawa.”
“You look surprised. Well, I guess that’s preferable.”
Heh heh heh─Hanekawa showed a smile.
Yes, just like the one I’d seen on Hachikuji’s face a moment earlier─
“What’s going on?” Hanekawa asked. “Why are you here, of all places?”
“W-Well─I should be asking you the same question.”
There was no way I could hide how shaken I was.
The only question remaining was how long she’d been watching.
If Tsubasa Hanekawa, the embodiment of decency, the breathing textbook of moral behavior, the living exemplar of purity, had witnessed me inflicting violence upon a grade school girl, that spelled trouble, but in a completely different way than if Senjogahara had seen me do the same…
I didn’t want to get expelled during my last year of high school…
“What do you mean, asking me? I’m from this area. If anyone deserves the question, it’s you, Araragi. Do you sometimes come over here?”
“Um.”
Oh, right.
Senjogahara and Hanekawa had gone to the same middle school.
And it was a public school, which meant─of course. Considering how school districts were drawn, it wasn’t odd at all for Senjogahara’s old home turf and Hanekawa’s habitat to overlap. Though they must not have matched perfectly, because it sounded like they’d gone to separate elementary schools…
“Not really, but, well, I didn’t have anything to do, so I was just passing the time here─”
Oops.
I’d said I was “just passing the time.”
“Ha hah. Just passing the time? Sounds nice. It’s nice to not have anything to do. It means you’re free. I guess you could say I’m just passing the time, too.”
“……”
She and Senjogahara were fundamentally dissimilar organisms.
Or maybe it was the difference between someone who was smart and someone who was the smartest?
“You know, Araragi. It’s hard for me to be at home. And the library isn’t open on Sundays, so I walk around all day instead. It’s good for my health, too.”
“…You don’t have to try so hard to be considerate.”
Tsubasa Hanekawa.
The girl with a pair of mismatched wings.
At school she’s an embodiment of decency, a breathing textbook of moral behavior, a living exemplar of purity, a class president among class presidents, a flawless girl─but her home is a troubled one.
Troubled, as well as warped.
Which is why─she was bewitched by a cat.
It found its way through the smallest crack in her heart.
Perhaps it was an instance of the fact that nobody is totally perfect, but─while the problem was solved and she was freed from the cat, while her memories had vanished, the troubledness and warpedness of her home had not.
It was still troubled, still warped.
“It’s kind of embarrassing to have your local library closed on Sundays, though, isn’t it? It’s like a symbol of how uncultured your area is.”
“I don’t even know where my local library is.”
“That’s no good, you shouldn’t sound so resigned. You still have time to study for entrance exams, Araragi. You can do it if you try.”
“You know, Hanekawa, groundless encouragement can sometimes hurt worse than having insults yelled at you.”
