by Nisioisin
Come on. That made it seem like I’m super-short…
“In fact, Araragi, I have this nagging suspicion that you’re toying with Karen and shoving your crotch into the back of her head…”
What a way to put it. Some pervert she was making me out to be.
No, I wasn’t bullying or toying with Karen… But now that Hanekawa put it so matter-of-factly, I had to wonder what the heck I was doing on my little sister’s shoulders.
Uh-uh, I couldn’t be so matter-of-fact. This was no time to come to my senses. I had to embrace the fever and forget myself!
“Eikow Cram School? Yes, I do know it,” Hanekawa said.
She did know. She really did…
I’d hyped her to the lady, but Hanekawa was the self-educated variety of genius. Though I hadn’t really expected her to know where all the cram schools in the country are, now I half-believed it.
Like always, I told Hanekawa that she knew everything. Like always, she responded, “I don’t know everything. I only know what I know.”
How wonderful.
Every time I heard her say it, I was reminded that I had lived another day.
……
Well, I made her say it so often, lately I had a distinct feeling that she was just humoring me with that reply. She’d look a bit put-upon half of the time.
But how I loved the face she made!
“Araragi, you’re not having naughty thoughts again, are you?”
Wow. That was beyond sharp. That was pointed.
Piercing.
“You know,” she lamented, “I’m beginning to give up on making you turn over a new leaf.”
Don’t give up, Hanekawa! Don’t abandon me!
“Too bad,” she said, “since Senjogahara did mend her ways─humph. Well, all right. It sounds like you’re in a hurry, so I’ll save the lecture for next time.”
I had a lecture to look forward to.
A part of me thought, Crap, now I’ve done it, I’m gonna get scolded by Hanekawa! But another part of me couldn’t help but feel excited at the prospect, so I guess I was Karen’s brother after all.
The Araragi siblings. We were M cool.
“Besides, Araragi, you ought to know where Eikow Cram School is─because, you see, it’s those ruins where Mister Oshino and Shinobu lived for all that time. It’s the name of the cram school that used to be in that building.”
Hanekawa didn’t make too much of it, but when I heard her answer, I was both surprised and persuaded.
I was surprised to learn that the place I knew so well, the cram school in those memorable ruins where I spent most of spring break, (obviously) had a name.
I was persuaded─for the lady’s sake. A newfangled feature like GPS was worse than helpless when you were dealing with a school that had gone out of business years ago.
Eikow Cram School, huh? That place had such a smart-sounding name? Given that they once took up a whole building, I did figure they were fairly big even if they weren’t a famous chain.
Well, smart-sounding or not, it had since been turned into a squat by a scruffy aloha shirt-wearing geezer and served in the abduction of an innocent high-school boy, so I guess it had come down hard in the world. Sic transit, and all that.
Humph…
But I could think about that later. I didn’t want to keep the lady waiting or interfere with Hanekawa’s studies.
I didn’t mind Karen having to stand still with me on her shoulders─not one bit, I’m proud to say!
When I thanked Hanekawa, she replied, “No need to thank me, that was nothing. Okay, Araragi. Say hello to Kanbaru for me. Bye-bye.”
I hung up.
Wait a sec… I never said a word about going to see Kanbaru…
There must have been some clue in our exchange (for Hanekawa it was probably self-evident and hardly worth a remark), but still, she wasn’t just off the charts, I was using the wrong units.
All I meant to do was ask for directions real quick, and I’d surrendered my privacy.
What a terrible deal.
Now Hanekawa thought of me as a guy who fantasized about the class president and enjoyed shoving his crotch into the back of his little sister’s head as he headed to a female schoolmate’s house…
If I ever ran into a pervert like that, I’d punch first and ask questions later.
“Any progress, fiendish young man?”
I was starting to feel a little cobalt and a little blue (in other words, I was feeling cobalt blue), but the lady’s voice brought me back to Earth.
“Ah, yes… Let’s see…”
I may not have known the name, but explaining how to get to that ruined building was even easier for me than pointing the way to the station. Obviously my trips had decreased in frequency since Oshino’s departure, but I’d trekked out there countless times.
Yet three or so problems remained.
One: that building was off the beaten track, so explaining the way step by step didn’t mean that she’d get it right─it was easy to explain but hard to understand.
The barrier or whatever that Oshino had set up was long gone, but that didn’t alter the geographical conditions.
That worry, however, proved unfounded. Despite her funky, acrobatic entry atop a mailbox, Ms. Kagneui seemed to possess a decent head on her shoulders. I only had to explain once for her to get it.
“A-ha. Hm, I see, that way.”
It didn’t sound like she was pretending to understand out of vanity because I was a kid and a younger person. From her response, I got the impression that she already had a general idea of the route to her destination prior to asking for my help.
As for the second problem:
“It’s pretty far, though… Will you be all right?”
“Don’t fuss yourself about me. I got from home to here on foot fair enough. Anything up to fifty miles is just a daunder in my mind.”
From home… Kyoto? Somewhere in the region, at least.
Amazing. That was even more amazing than anything up to four hundred pounds not counting as weight for Karen.
Oh, uh, was it just a joke?
But if she said she was fine, then I guess she was. I decided to put that aside and move on─to the third problem.
“That cram school has gone under, though. Ms. Kagenui, what do you want to go there for?”
The last problem─which maybe it wasn’t my place to address.
I’d simply been asked for directions and had no cause to pry. Whatever she wanted to do there was her own business. I didn’t need to know.
Maybe there were reasons to visit a cram school that had gone bankrupt. Those reasons surely had nothing to do with me.
Still, try to see where I was coming from.
That abandoned building didn’t just hold memories for us, it also really meant something─and hearing that some stranger was on her way there was making me feel a little stressed.
Not so much that it was worth mentioning. But mention it I had.
“Eh, what do I want to gang there for? For starters, I might set up base there,” Kagenui deflected with a vague answer, just as you might expect.
I could hardly blame her. She was under no obligation to report her goals to me.
All I’d done was give her directions. It had given me the opportunity to talk to Hanekawa when she wasn’t tutoring me, so in any case, as far as I was concerned, I’d been paid back any debt in kind.
We were even.
“Thank you kindly, fiendish young man. Oh, by the by. If you happen across a waif this tall with the same question, show her the same generosity you did to me?”
With that─Kagenui leapt from atop the mailbox.
And onto a nearby concrete block wall─that is to say, to a more elevated point of view than my own─before strutting away like a gymnast traversing a balance beam, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Until she was lost from sight, Kagenui never once touched the ground─skipping from concrete wall
to guard rail, and so on and so forth, as she went.
Ahh…of course.
She was playing that game. The ground was a shark-infested ocean, and she’d get eaten if she descended too low… Well, I did play it, too─when I was a kid.
That’s why she’d been standing on a mailbox…
“Hm? Hey, Karen, you’ve been awfully quiet.” I conked my sister on the head like I was checking to make sure she was in working order. “What’s the big idea anyway, leaving me to deal with a weirdo all by myself? It’s your fault I’m getting scolded by Hanekawa.”
“Ah, sorry,” apologized Karen, not noticing my subtle diversion of blame, my elegant pass. “It’s just, I don’t know─she seemed really strong. I was on guard.”
“Strong?”
Huh? Since this was Karen, didn’t she mean strong in the sense of combat proficiency?
“Oh yeah? Not to me,” I disagreed. “Putting aside her speech and behavior, she seemed like a pretty lady you’d find anywhere.”
“While she was talking to you, the axis of her body didn’t bend even an inch. She has a figure skater’s sense of balance.”
“Huh…” True, even if it was a childish game, at grownup size and weight, walking along a block wall was quite a feat. “You do it all the time, though. Upside down on your hands, too.”
“Uhh, sure… But she was really built. Her fists were the perfect shape for beating the crap out of people.”
“Th-They were?”
“Yeah. At her level, if she punched a car on its bumper, she’d set off the airbag.”
“Hmph.”
Traffic-accident level.
I found that hard to believe… Astonishing if true.
Karen was in no way a good judge of character, but she did have a keen eye for physical prowess.
Barking dogs seldom bite, and perhaps the opposite was also true.
“Well, come to think of it,” I admitted, “she did seem pretty relaxed and confident─intrepid, or indomitable. She had the kind of vibe that only people who’re sure of their fighting abilities do.”
In fact, her vibe resembled Dramaturgy’s. It overwhelmed everyone and was the hardest to deal with for timid people like Sengoku.
In terms of civilians, Kanbaru, whom we were on our way to see, had a bit of that going. Or Karen, I suppose, for that matter.
They were the same breed.
“My master might be an even match,” my sister commented. “I wouldn’t be able to beat her, to say the least.”
“Oh my,” I answered teasingly, but Karen, who belonged to the same breed, speaking in such a way was quite surprising to me. “Why so humble?”
“I know when I’m out of my depths─as long as the opponent isn’t evil.”
“I see.”
In other words, if the opponent was evil, she couldn’t tell anymore and charged in whether she was dealing with a monster or at her worst condition.
What a dangerous little sister. She and Tsukihi shouldn’t be the Fire Sisters but the Danger Sisters.
“Not that we’re sure,” Karen went on, her head moving just a little as she glanced somewhat disgustedly in the direction of Kagenui’s exit, “that she isn’t evil.”
005
That reminds me, I have some good news.
Rejoice.
A few of the more overenthusiastic fans might be disappointed, but the vast majority of people, I’m sure, will consider it a positive development.
Hanekawa touched on it during our conversation─but Hitagi Senjogahara.
A fellow third-year and classmate at Naoetsu High, the school that Hanekawa and I attend, and my so-called girlfriend, she turned over a whole new leaf.
Yes, the happy news I have to share is that the woman known for catchphrases like “Roll over and play dead, doggy” or even “Roll over dead and play, doggy”─the second coming of Tiger Jeet Singh, the fierce tiger─was reborn.
From a naughty girl into a good girl.
How could I not feel happy even if it makes me a happy fool?
It goes without saying that a grand banquet was held among friends, but I will leave it to another time to regale you with stories of those raucous celebrations, and for now relate the rebirth itself.
The events leading up to it were as follows:
You’re all aware of Senjogahara’s vicious personality─or perhaps I should say, the almost otherworldly effrontery and despotism with which she indulged herself. It hardly bears mentioning at this point. But her venom was not a wanton quality that she displayed from birth. There was, in fact, a perfectly good reason for her maliciousness.
She had been emotionally traumatized.
Put that way it might sound trite, but it was pressing for her.
Nothing is more pressing in this world than the trite stuff.
We might all bear scars pertaining to our birth or upbringing, but the main reason that Senjogahara’s axle snapped in the way it did was that she tried too hard, in my opinion.
Trying hard can be a sin, for which you are punished.
A crab.
She met─encountered a crab.
Met with and robbed, she lost it.
In the end, I can only vaguely imagine what high school must have been like for her─vaguely imagine, despite being classmates our first and second years as well…
Those two years would have been more than enough to close her heart. Let alone a couple of years, one day─might have done it.
Rejecting anyone who approached her.
Viewing generosity as aggression.
Opening her heart to no one.
Allowing no one into her heart.
Making no friends, barely speaking to her classmates, always answering teachers who called on her with a cold and curt “I don’t know”─
Withdrawn.
Distrustful.
Aloof.
As a sort of joke behind her back, she was dubbed the cloistered princess─but for those who knew the truth, that nickname sounded terribly ironic.
Discovering her secret entirely by accident, I found myself serving as an intermediary between her and Oshino due to that knowledge. As a result, for better or worse, we were at least able to resolve her problem with the aberration.
But so what?
Even with the aberration resolved, even liberated from the crab.
Though released from turmoil and parted from her troubles.
While she opened her heart and let people in…
That didn’t mean─her broken heart had been mended.
Her wounds could heal in time. The scars, too, might fade, in time─but that didn’t erase the fact that she’d borne them. Old wounds could still be fresh memories.
Her manners and person, covered all over in bristles like a cactus, touchy from head to toe, couldn’t easily return to normal─or rather, it was her new normal.
The touchiness was now her.
The venom and malice, the withdrawal and distrust and aloofness, and even her hostile nature were her actual personality─a troublesome situation.
Scales might fall from one’s eyes, but the ones coating Senjogahara didn’t.
Even after she began dating me, and even after she reconciled with Kanbaru, her personality didn’t experience any essential or fundamental transformation.
That said, only ever showing her true colors to me and Kanbaru, she continued to act like a shy kitty at school─but after the crab issue was solved, maybe her motivation to play the part was beginning to wane, and her “actual personality” became known to our cat specialist Tsubasa Hanekawa.
Since then, unbeknownst to me, Senjogahara had been subjected to Hanekawa’s personality rehabilitation program (supposedly an enhanced version of the one administered to me since April, the mere thought of it makes my hair stand on end), but with all due respect to Hanekawa, this rebirth I’m talking about had nothing to do with it.
Deishu Kaiki.
A colleague, so to speak, of Oshino─and a competitor
.
