by Nisioisin
Really? Now?
For just a moment, she took her eyes off of me and made as if to implore heaven. Then she looked at me again and said:
“Teheheh.”
A bashful laugh.
…Wow.
She laughs?
What a broad-minded woman, indeed a class president among class presidents.
“I don’t know what to say.”
Hop, hop, hop.
Hanekawa kept both of her feet together as she bounded toward me, seeming to use nothing more than the joints of her knees for movement.
We had been ten steps away from each other, but now we were down to three.
A bit on the close side.
“For something that’s meant to hide what you don’t want seen, skirts really are low security. Maybe I need the firewall of a pair of bike shorts after all?”
“Wh-Who knows…”
Her metaphor left me at a loss.
So what did that make me, a virus?
Fortunately for her─or possibly not, I’m not sure─no one else was around, including any other students from Naoetsu High.
It was just me and Hanekawa.
In other words, I was the only one to see her panties. While the fact made me feel a mild sense of superiority over the rest of mankind, let’s put that aside for now.
“A little while back, people liked talking about Murphy’s Law. Maybe I should chalk it up to that: The front of your skirt only gets flipped when your hands are behind you. You’re normally careful about the back of your skirt, but the front is actually more of a blind spot than you’d expect.”
“Yeah… Maybe.”
How should I know?
Or rather, yikes, how awkward.
I didn’t know if it was Hanekawa’s intention to make me feel like she was berating me in a roundabout way, but that’s how I felt. That said, and while it may not sound very convincing to you after I had looked that carefully at them, the fact that I had witnessed, even unintentionally, something that girls “don’t want seen” made me feel undeniably guilty.
Not only that, she was being so smiley…
Trying to make something out of it─please, stop!
“W-Well, don’t worry. I might’ve lied when I said I didn’t see them, but I couldn’t see them very well because they were shaded.”
Of course, that was another lie. I saw them ridiculously well.
“Hu-u-uh.”
Hanekawa tilted her head to one side.
“As a girl, it would make me feel much more at ease if you just said you got a good look at them if you really did.”
“W-Well, I really do wish I could say that to you, but I simply can’t tell you anything but the truth.”
“Is that so? You can’t?”
“Yeah. It’s too bad I can’t make you feel at ease. If only I could lie to you.”
Words from a man speaking nothing but lies for a while now.
“So this feeling I have that you spent about two pages giving a precise description of what was under my skirt, down to the fine details, is all my imagination?”
“Totally your imagination. Super-duper all your imagination. Until just now, I was painting a beautiful visual landscape using words pregnant with emotion.”
This, technically, was not a lie.
“Well, I should get going,” I said, casually raising a hand to sig-nal to Hanekawa that I had no intention of continuing our conversation, and began to step forward.
I walked away with quick steps.
Ah, I don’t know.
Hanekawa was probably going to head home, but I wondered if she was going to send a text message or something to her friends on her way back about how I saw her panties. While part of me doubted that a model student would do something like that, another part of me thought that she would do it precisely because she was a model student. No, Hanekawa probably didn’t know my name…but she would have to at least know that we were in the same year, no?
As rather overly self-conscious thoughts ran through my head, I began to slow my pace a bit, when─
“Wait up a second!”
I heard a voice from behind me.
It was Hanekawa.
She seemed to have chased after me, of all things.
“I finally caught up to you. You’re a fast walker.”
“…Weren’t you heading home?”
“Hmm? Well, I’ll go home eventually. And what about you, Araragi? Why are you heading back toward school?”
“………”
She had my name down.
Whaat?
It’s not like I was wearing a name tag.
“…Um, well, I was going back to pick up my bike,” I said.
“Aha! So you bike to school.”
“Well, yeah… My house is a little on the far side, and─”
Hold on, that wasn’t the issue. Though it did seem like she hadn’t known that I biked to school.
“…Why do you know my name?”
“What? Of course I know it. We go to the same school, don’t we?” Hanekawa said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
The same school…
She said it in the exact same way that someone might talk about knowing people in their own class. Who does that?
“Well, Araragi, you might not know about someone like me, but you’re pretty famous, after all.”
I couldn’t help but go, “Huh?”
No, you’re the famous one.
And me, of all people? My position within Naoetsu Private High School was like that of a rock on the side of the road─I wasn’t even certain if my own classmates knew my full name.
“Hm? What’s wrong, Araragi?”
“…”
“Araragi, with the ‘A’ written with the left radical for ‘mound’ together with the first character in ‘possibility,’ the two ‘ra’ written with the ‘good’ in ‘good boy,’ and the ‘gi’ you use to write ‘arbor.’ Your given name is Koyomi, as in the character for ‘calendar,’ right? So, Koyomi Araragi.”
“………”
Not only did she know my full name, she knew the exact characters used to write it.
Seriously?
She knew my name and my face. If she had a Death Note, I’d be dead…
Well, I was in the same position with regards to her too.
“You’re─Hanekawa.”
It wasn’t in the way of retaliation, nor was I trying to hold my own, but what I did was to utter those words to her without even acknowledging what she’d said.
“You’re Tsubasa Hanekawa.”
“Wow!”
Hanekawa looked honestly and plainly surprised.
“I’m amazed that you know someone like me,” she said.
“Tsubasa Hanekawa, who during final exams of the first trimester of our second year got only one answer wrong, a fill-in-the-blank, across every subject including health and PE as well as art.”
“What? That’s…hey, why do you know so much about me?”
Hanekawa grew only more surprised.
It didn’t seem to be an act.
“Wait… Are you stalking me, Araragi? Hah, maybe putting it that way makes it sound like I have too much of a persecution complex?”
“…No, not really.”
It seemed as if she didn’t realize she was famous.
She thought she was “normal.”
A regular girl who had nothing to recommend her but being on the serious side? Was that it?
Add to that the fact she was treating me like I was someone famous and it got a little nasty─of course, I did recognize that I had somewhat of a reputation as a washout.
But even so, why call her out on it?
I decided to just give her a bullshit answer.
“I heard about you from an alien friend.”
“What? You have friends, Araragi?”
“Ask about the alien bit first!”
I’m not the kind of person who normally flings retort
s at people I’m meeting for practically the first time, but she managed to draw one out of me.
Even if she didn’t intend any malice by it, what a terrible thing to say.
“Er, well,” Hanekawa said uncomfortably. Even she must have realized what she’d just said. “You’re always alone, so I had the impression that you lived up in a world apart from everyone else.”
“You don’t actually think I’m that cool, do you?”
She did seem to know a little bit about me.
But not too much.
“Well, you’re right that I don’t have any friends. Which makes you so famous that even a friendless loser knows who you are,” I said.
“Oh, stop it.”
Hanekawa sounded a little bothered by this. Her, a woman who quickly shrugged off with a single embarrassed smile the contents of her skirt being exposed for the world to see.
“I don’t like jokes like that. Please don’t make fun of me.”
“…Oh.”
I decided to just nod, as objecting seemed likely to launch a full-on argument.
Sheesh.
The pedestrian crossing facing the school gates was red, and so I stopped there─and Hanekawa stood next to me.
…
Why follow me?
Did she forget something at school?
“Hey, Araragi,” she began to speak just as I was wondering why. “Do you believe in vampires, Araragi?”
“………”
What in god’s name was she talking about?
Then, a moment later, I came upon the answer.
Oh. While she was acting calm, she was actually embarrassed that I’d seen her panties.
That was no surprise, of course.
While I was not by any means famous, Hanekawa did know who I was─and she even understood the state of my personal relationships (that I had no friends).
She had probably heard rumors, and not good ones.
So it wasn’t strange for a model student to feel as though she’d made a slight blunder in allowing me a close, hard look…er, a happenstance glimpse of her underwear.
I came to the conclusion that she was following after me in order to deal with it.
Instead of parting ways right after I’d seen her panties, she was plotting to overwrite my memories by following me and talking to me like that.
Hah.
Nice try, model student.
Tossing out a bizarre topic like vampires wasn’t going to erase my memories.
“What about vampires?” I asked.
Sure, if that was going to make her feel better, I’d play along and discuss whatever she wanted. Talking to her for a short while about a fruitless topic was a small price to pay for getting to see her panties.
“Well, there have been some rumors lately that there’s a vampire here in town. They say not to walk around alone at night.”
“What a vague…and phony rumor,” I said, letting slip my honest impression. “Why would there be a vampire in a town in the middle of nowhere like ours?”
“Who knows.”
“Vampires are foreign yokai, right?”
“I don’t think that’s exactly what they are, but go on.”
“Whether you walked alone or with a group of ten people, if you had to face a vampire, I don’t think the outcome would change very much.”
“Well, that’s true.”
Ahaha, Hanekawa let out a little laugh.
A lighthearted laugh… It somehow didn’t seem like the kind of laugh she’d have.
I realized that I’d been feeling as though something was off for a while now.
I’d imagined Hanekawa to be a more self-important type after hearing people call her a model student, a class president among class presidents and all that.
If anything, she was weirdly affable.
“But there’ve been a lot of eyewitness reports,” she said.
“Eyewitness reports? Now that’s funny. Round up these gentlemen.”
“Well, these aren’t gentlemen.”
She explained that it was something being said among the girls at school.
“And not just the girls at our school─all the girls who go to school around here have heard about it. Actually, it’s a rumor that’s only spreading among the girls.”
But a vampire?
I was amazed that a rumor like that had taken root.
“They say the vampire is a beautiful blond woman, but with eyes so cold they make your spine freeze.”
“Those are really specific details, but how does that make her a vampire? Couldn’t she just be a normal person who stands out because she has blond hair?”
After all, we were in a boring suburban town.
A town out in the sticks, away from everything else.
You didn’t even see people with their hair dyed brown.
“But,” Hanekawa said, “according to them, when she was under a street lamp, though her hair was blindingly bright…she didn’t have a shadow.”
“Ah…”
Vampire.
While the word sounded old and hackneyed to me, it wasn’t as if I was that familiar with vampires. But I did recall hearing something like that, now that she mentioned it─vampires don’t cast shadows.
Why was that again? Because they don’t like the sun?
But then this had been at nighttime.
So she was in the light of a street lamp, but it still sounded like some trick of the eye─and besides, didn’t that very street lamp cry out that it was a made-up piece of scenery?
Made-up, or maybe just cheap.
“Well, yeah,” Hanekawa agreed. Despite my churlish reaction, she didn’t seem particularly offended.
She was good at talking and at listening.
“I think it’s a ridiculous rumor, too. But it’s good from a safety standpoint. Thanks to it, girls aren’t walking around by themselves at night anymore.”
“Well, I guess you’re right about that.”
“But personally,” Hanekawa said, lowering her voice a bit, “if there’s a vampire, I’d like to meet her.”
“…Why?”
It seemed as though my prediction may have been off.
I’d assumed she had brought up a fruitless topic in order to erase my memories of seeing her panties─but Hanekawa was sounding a little too enthused for that to be the case.
And anyway, telling a uniformed male student about a “rumor that’s only spreading among the girls” seemed odd when I thought about it.
“Won’t she suck your blood and kill you if you do?”
“Okay, I don’t want to get killed. So maybe it’s not accurate to say that I want to meet her. But I just thought it’d be neat if someone like that existed─an existence greater than humans.”
“An existence greater than humans? Like a god?”
“It doesn’t have to be a god.” Hanekawa went silent for a while, as if she was trying to pick her words carefully. Eventually, though, she said, “Because in so many ways, where’s the reward otherwise?”
Without my noticing…
The light had turned green.
But Hanekawa and I both stood there.
To be honest?
Not only did I have no idea what Hanekawa was saying, I didn’t even know what she was trying to say. It felt almost as if her reply had nothing to do with my question.
“Oh no, oh no,” she began to say, flustered. Had my expression betrayed my thoughts? “You know, Araragi, you’re surprisingly easy to talk to. My tongue slipped and I feel like I ended up saying something that didn’t make much sense just now.”
“Y-Yeah. Well, you don’t need to worry about it.”
