by Nisioisin
Even so.
She didn’t think they were going to get divorced, she said.
In fact, the idea that they even could had been foreign to Hachikuji─she’d believed that families always stayed together. She must not have known that a practice called divorce existed.
She must not have known.
That her father and her mother could part ways.
“But in terms of what’s natural,” she said, “that’s certainly more natural. They’re human, so of course they’d argue and fight. You bite, you’re bitten, you love, you hate, that’s what comes naturally to us. And so─what they really needed was to work harder if they wanted to stay in love.”
“You have to work hard to stay in love? I don’t know─I wouldn’t call that insincere, but it doesn’t feel very sincere to me either. Having to work hard to love something─it’s like you’re making a conscious effort to make it happen.”
“But, Mister Araragi,” Hachikuji insisted, “isn’t the feeling that we call love a very conscious thing?”
“…Yeah, I guess.”
She was right.
Maybe it was─something deserving of work, of effort.
“It’s painful to grow bored of something you love, to hate something you love─isn’t it? It’s dreary, isn’t it? If you loved someone ten times over, it’s as if you’re hating them twenty times over just to hate them as much as you used to love them. That’s so─overwhelming.”
“Hachikuji,” I said, “you do love your mom, don’t you.”
“Yes, I do. And of course I love my father, too. And I understand how he felt, and I understand that he never wanted things to turn out the way they did. It was difficult for him for a lot of reasons. He was already the breadmaker of the family.”
“So your dad baked, too…”
What a guy.
No wonder he had so much on his plate.
“My father and my mother fought, and they split up as a result─but I still love both of them,” Hachikuji said.
“Huh… Okay.”
“But that’s exactly why I feel so uneasy.” The way she looked at the ground, I believed her. “My father seems to really hate my mother now─and doesn’t seem to have any interest in letting me meet with her. He won’t let me call her, and he said I should never see her again.”
“………”
“I wonder if I won’t forget her some day─if I won’t stop loving her some day if we’re kept apart like this─and it makes me so uneasy.”
That’s why.
That’s why she came here─all alone.
She didn’t have a reason.
She just wanted to see her mother.
“…A snail, huh.”
Man.
Why couldn’t she be granted her modest wish?
She wasn’t asking for much.
Aberration or whatever it was, Lost Cow or whatever it was─why was it getting in Hachikuji’s way? Time and time again, at that.
She could never get there.
She was always lost.
…Hm?
Hold on a second, I thought─Oshino had said that this Lost Cow was like what happened with Senjogahara and the crab. The same pattern…what did he mean by that? True, that crab never brought any calamity upon Senjogahara. The results of what it brought upon her were calamitous, but those were just results. In a sense, an essential sense─Senjogahara had only gotten what she wanted.
The crab had granted Senjogahara’s wish.
And this was the same pattern… If this were the same formula, only with different variables, what did that mean? What exactly were the implications? If the snail Hachikuji encountered actually wasn’t trying to hinder her─
If we were to say it was trying to grant her wish.
What exactly─was the snail doing?
What did Mayoi Hachikuji want?
If I were to look at it that way…didn’t it even seem as though Hachikuji had no interest in having this Lost Cow exorcised?
“………”
“Oh? Is something the matter, Mister Araragi? You suddenly started staring at me. Don’t you know you’re going to make me blush?”
“Um…how do I say this.”
“Fall in love with me and you’ll get burned.”
“…What’s, that, supposed, to mean?”
She was making my commas proliferate for no good reason.
“What do you find so confusing? I’m a friend fatale, it’s only fitting for me to use cool lines like that.”
“Okay, Hachikuji, so it’s obvious to me that you meant femme fatale just now, but I don’t even know where to take the joke from there. Also, isn’t it weird for you to be calling a line about getting burned a ‘cool’ one?”
“Hmph. You’re right. Okay, then.” Hachikuji struggled for a moment before rephrasing herself. “Fall in love with me and you’ll get a low-temperature burn.”
“……”
“That’s just lame!”
“And it’s still not what you’d call cool.”
So she was warm like an electric blanket?
She sounded like a wonderful person.
“Oh, I know what we should do,” she said. “We just have to shift our ground. We can keep the line and find a different description for me. While I do wish I could hold on to the cool label, I have no choice but to give it up. Like they say, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.”
“Makes sense. Actually, that might be a pretty standard move, shifting your ground to make your killer line work. Like calling a series ‘already popular’ on the cover when it’s just the second installment. Well, let’s try it out. We’ll never know otherwise. Okay, so instead of saying you’re cool─”
“We’ll call me hot.”
“Hot-pot Mayoi.”
“I still sound like a wonderful person!” Hachikuji lamented exaggeratedly. But as if she’d realized something, she paused and said, “You’re trying to change the subject, Mister Araragi!”
So she’d caught on to it.
“We were talking about how you were staring at me, Mister Araragi. What’s the matter? Could you have fallen in love with me?”
“……”
She hadn’t caught on to it at all.
“While I don’t really appreciate being leered at, I will admit that I have very attractive upper arms.”
“That would be a unique proclivity.”
“Oh? You’re saying you don’t feel a thing for my upper arms? You do see them, don’t you? Their functionary beauty?”
“What, did some bureaucrat decide that they’re beautiful?”
Functional, maybe.
“Are you being bashful, Mister Araragi? So you do have a cute side. All right, then, I’ll try to understand. I can wait. Please hand out the rain checks.”
“Sorry, but I don’t have any interest in pipsqueaks.”
“Pipsqueak!” Hachikuji looked at me with such shock I thought her eyes might pop out of their sockets. Next, her head started to sway back and forth, like she was having a dizzy spell. “What a terrible insult… That word is so awful I wouldn’t be surprised if it were banned from the airwaves some day…”
“I guess it was pretty mean.”
“You’ve wounded me, gravely! I’m developing quite well, I really am! For goodness’ sake, Mister Beast Alike!”
“Hey, don’t act like it’s okay to bring that one up again. That’s just as terrible of a thing to call someone, if not worse.”
“Fine, then. I’ll call you Mister Man Alike instead.”
“Now it’s like I’m not actually human!”
In fact, calling me that was no laughing matter when I’d been attacked by a vampire and was semi-immortal. The insult stung because it hit way too close to home.
“Oh, that’s it. I know what we can do. We just have to look at it a different way, Mister Araragi. We’ll come up with neologisms. Society will always try to police what words can and can’t be used since people do tak
e offense to them, but there’s always the chance that neologisms might be accepted.”
“Makes sense. Yeah, you’re right. Introducing a new word lets you start off with a fresh slate, so it might not sound as offensive. Like how ‘lolicon’ doesn’t sound quite as bad as ‘pedophilia.’ All right, let’s give it a shot. So we need to come up with brand-new words for pipsqueak you and man-alike me─”
“Urchine and Beastus.”
“Whoa, now we sound like a crime-fighting duo!”
“We do! The scales are being peeled from my eyes!”
That sounded painful.
Well, not as painful as listening to us talk, I bet.
“Anyway, I’ll take back what I said. But you know, Hachikuji, for a fifth grader, you’re pretty well, uh…”
“You’re talking about my chest? You’re talking about my chest, aren’t you?!”
“Just in general. But even so, you still are on a grade-school level. I don’t think I’d call you super-elementary.”
“Oh. So to your high school eyes, my elementary-school body cuts a slider figure.”
“Can’t touch them when they break off the plate.”
She didn’t exactly have curves, either.
Even if she was developing fine, as she said.
She’d meant “slender,” by the way.
“…So then, Mister Araragi, why were you looking at me with all that passion in your eyes?”
“Well, you see… Wait, passion?”
“That look you were giving me made my diaphragm go pitter-patter.”
“That’s called hiccupping.”
It was getting hard to keep up with her.
This was turning out to be a test of my stamina as the designated quipper.
“Oh, it’s nothing worth worrying about,” I said.
“Really. Are you sure?”
“Yeah…I guess.”
Was it─the other way around?
Could it be that deep in her heart, contrary to what she was saying─she didn’t really want to see her mother? Or perhaps she wanted to but was afraid that her mother would reject her? There was even the possibility that her mother had told her not to come see her─and it seemed like a very real one given what I’d heard so far about Hachikuji’s family environment.
If that were the case…things weren’t going to be easy.
You wouldn’t even have to look at Senjogahara’s example to─
“…It smells like another woman here.”
Hitagi Senjogahara appeared, completely unannounced.
She’d entered the park still on my mountain bike, displaying her full mastery over it. She was pretty versatile.
“O-Oh… That was quick, Senjogahara.”
Her trip back had taken her less than half the time she’d spent to get to Oshino’s.
Her entrance was so sudden I didn’t have the time to be so much as surprised.
“I made a few wrong turns on my way there,” she said.
“Oh, yeah. That cram school can be pretty hard to find. Guess I should’ve drawn you a map or something.”
“And after all of that boasting I did. I feel ashamed.”
“I guess you were bragging about your memory or something, weren’t you…”
“I’ve been humiliated at your hands, Araragi… I can’t believe you’d get your jollies by disgracing me like this.”
“Hold on, I didn’t do anything? You only have yourself to blame!”
“So that’s what you’re into, Araragi. Forcing girls into humiliation roleplay is what excites you. I’ll forgive you, though. I can’t blame a healthy young man for having those kinds of interests.”
“No, that’s a pretty unhealthy young man!”
Listening to her, I recalled that Oshino had spoken of a spiritual boundary─a barrier or something─around the cram school. Maybe I really should have been the one to go instead.
But whatever the case, Hitagi Senjogahara was acting awfully brazen for a disgraced woman. Or rather, there was no way she was embarrassed. If anyone was being subjected to humiliation roleplay, it was starting to feel like me…
“I don’t mind…” she said. “I can take anything, so long as it’s you doing it to me, Araragi…”
“Listen, you need to stick to one personality! You’re not adding any more breadth to your character by breaking it entirely! And if you really do care about me, Senjogahara, you need to be warning me as soon as I exhibit such unhealthy traits!”
“Well, I don’t actually care about you, Araragi.”
“I didn’t think so!”
“If it amuses me, then whatever.”
“You’re being refreshingly honest right now, in fact!”
“And also, Araragi. If we’re being honest, then yes, getting lost was part of why it took me so long to get there, but it was also because I had to eat lunch.”
“So you did… You always live up to my expectations. Not that it bothers me, that’s your own choice, plus it’s who you are.”
“I ate a lunch for you, too.”
“Did you, now… Well, I hope you enjoyed it.”
“I did, thank you. It smells like another woman here.”
Senjogahara rushed through our pleasantries so that she could drag our conversation back to her very first line.
“Was someone here?” she asked.
“Umm…”
“This scent─Hanekawa?”
“Huh? How are you able to figure that out?” I was honestly astonished. I’d assumed Senjogahara had asked on a lark. “When you say ‘scent,’ do you mean…like her makeup? But I don’t think Hanekawa wears any makeup…”
She was wearing her school uniform, after all. I wouldn’t be surprised if you told me chapsticks were off-limits in her mind. When she was in those clothes, at least, she was like a soldier in uniform. Hanekawa would never stray from the school rules in such a flagrant manner, not even by accident.
“I’m talking about the scent of the shampoo she uses. I want to say the only girl in our class who uses that brand is Hanekawa.”
“Wait, really? Women can figure that out?”
“To some degree,” Senjogahara said in an explanatory tone. “Think of it like your ability to identify a girl by her hips, Araragi.”
“I don’t remember ever displaying that special ability!”
“Oh? Wait, you can’t do that?”
“Stop acting surprised!”
“But you were kind enough to tell me the other day, ‘Ah, that nice, seated pelvis and those motherly hips of yours. I bet you’ll give birth to a bouncing baby boy, geh heh heh heh!’”
“That’s what a dirty old man would say!”
Also, it would take a lot more than that to make me go, “Geh heh heh heh!” And while I’m at it, I thought, I wouldn’t describe your hips as motherly.
“So, Hanekawa. She was here.”
“……”
Did she realize how much she was scaring me?
I almost wanted to run away.
“I guess she was here,” I said. “She already left, though.”
“Did you call her here, Araragi? Though now that you mention it, she does live in this area, doesn’t she? She’d be good to have around as a guide.”
“No, I didn’t. She just happened to be passing by. Same as you.”
“Hmph. Same as me,” Senjogahara repeated. “I guess that’s how coincidences are. You never know when they might come in pairs. Did Hanekawa say anything?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Anything.”
“…No, not really. We talked a little…and then she patted Hachikuji on the head and went to the library…no, not the library. But she went somewhere.”
“Patted her on the head. Hm─okay… Well, I could see Hanekawa doing that─I suppose?”
“Huh? You mean she likes kids, unlike you?”
“Yes, Hanekawa and I are certainly unlike each other. Yes, we’re not the same. We’re not the same─so if y
ou’ll excuse me for a moment, Araragi,” Senjogahara said, before moving her face close to mine. I wondered what she was trying to do at first, until I realized she seemed to be checking what I smelled like. No, it probably wasn’t me she was trying to smell─it was probably…
