by Nisioisin
“Hmmm… I mean, sure, do what you feel.”
To me, scary stories seemed like nothing but her forte…or to be honest, I felt like my first encounter with her yesterday had been one hell of a “scary story” itself.
The Madness of the Stapler Lady.
Mightn’t Oshino pay for that one?
To the tune of oh, say, around five million yen?
“You’re thinking something rude, aren’t you, Araragi.”
“So pointlessly perceptive…”
I’m not even allowed to gripe in my own head?
She was a little too worried about unfavorable reviews.
“Let me make this clear, Araragi. No internal freedom is allowed within five hundred feet of me.”
“Despotism.”
“Your unfreedom of expression, unfreedom of faith, and unfreedom of thought are guaranteed.”
“Tyranny.”
With a surprisingly wide jurisdiction!
Quite an individual.
“Some call me the Red Queen.”
“What, is this Through the Looking Glass?”
“Or they call me a red herring.”
“Sounds fishy.”
“Some also call me a red flag. A flaming red fake.”
“What kind of an alias is that? It sounds cool, but it just means you’re a pariah.”
“Huh? Right, why am I such a pariah… Will my life play out okay?”
Suddenly ill at ease, Senjogahara halted and began to worry for real.
So emotionally unstable…
I’d been relatively serious about parting ways partway home, but it didn’t seem like I could leave a girl like her alone on a public road. I figured it was my duty as a friend to see her all the way home. I mean, even if we weren’t friends, it was my civic duty.
“This is bad, Araragi. I’ve got to start getting on people’s good side. I’d hate being second only to you on the world’s shit list.”
“…Hey, do you want to be my friend, or not?”
“Of course I do. I want to be your frenemy.”
“Isn’t that a combination of ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’?!”
“Yup. In other words, we’ll be both friend and foe…”
“Wait, isn’t a friend who’s also your enemy just an enemy?!”
She was trying to make it sound like a healthy rivalry.
I so lacked any reason to compete with her.
“By the way, I can’t stand people who go around saying ‘OMG, I don’t have any friends’ but have friends they can say it to,” she declared.
“…”
So narrow-minded.
A little too intolerant.
“Makes me want to teach them what it really means not to have any friends.”
“It’s fine, ease up. Now you’ve got me.”
“Hmph.”
Senjogahara looked at me.
And what a look it was.
Like her eyes might swallow me whole─I wondered, considering what I knew of her personality, if she also hated people who claimed to be her friend, like me?
Hmmm.
Maybe this wasn’t going to go the way it did with Hanekawa…
“Feh. I suppose you’re right,” she said after what seemed like forever─without producing either stapler or box-cutter.
I was more relieved than I could ever remember being.
“I’ll ease up this time, out of the goodness of my harp seal.”
“Harp seal?”
“I thought turning a sentence ending into an animal might be cute.”
“I can’t get a read on your personality…”
A puzzling point.
Past the point of puzzling.
Then again, was this just her way of hiding her embarrassment? In which case, maybe there was some cuteness in there somewhere.
“A scary story, huh? I wish I did know one.”
Even though she’d adopted the part-time job plan, she acted as if she wasn’t done considering mine.
Though maybe that was still just her hiding her embarrassment.
“Of course we could always make one up,” she concluded.
“Nope.”
Not cute, after all.
How could she calmly discuss passing off some bullshit to my, to our, savior?
“Yeah, you’re right… If I tried to cash in on a lie, I’d be no different from that low-life jerk.”
“Huh? ‘That’ low-life jerk? Who do you mean?”
“Hm? Oh, sorry… Anytime I say ‘low-life jerk’ I mean you.”
“Even in this context?!”
“Hey.”
With that interjection, Senjogahara, who had come to a halt, suddenly started moving─not forwards, but sideways. In other words, she made to hop from the sidewalk into the street.
I couldn’t begin to figure out why she tried to all of a sudden. Still, even though we hadn’t known each other for very long, I was already somewhat accustomed to her erratic behavior after a couple of days together, and I reflexively blocked her movement.
By putting my arm around her shoulders.
I was blocking the momentum of another person’s entire body, even if that person was a girl, so as you might expect I felt a real heft─unlike.
Unlike the day before, when I’d caught Senjogahara on the stairs…
“What.”
“Huh?”
“Getting a little familiar, aren’t you?”
“Oh, my bad,” I said, removing my arm from her shoulder. “But you tried to jump out into the street…”
“What, you thought I was committing suicide? Impulsively?”
“Impulsively, or…”
Though I wasn’t going to say so out loud, I didn’t put it past her.
Her battle with illness may have ended, but I doubted her struggles were over─even apart from still having to go to the hospital for a thorough battery of follow-up tests.
“Don’t worry, Araragi. Unlike you, with your regimen of offing yourself three times daily, at mealtimes, I’d never kill myself.”
“I don’t have a prescription for suicide, okay?”
“Wha? Then how come all the girls in our class call you Johnny Suicide?”
“Wha? The girls in our class all call me that?”
Way to make you feel suicidal.
I’m pretty sure she was lying this time, but it bothered me nonetheless. I’d have to check with Hanekawa later on…though she’d be taken aback if I asked her flat-out, What do all the girls call me?
“Fine, Johnny Suicide wants to know why you tried to jump out into the street.”
“I wasn’t jumping out into the street, I just wanted a better view of that.”
“That?”
I looked in the direction Senjogahara was pointing, at the sidewalk on the other side of the street─and a telephone pole that stood there. Well, strictly speaking not the telephone pole itself, but something at its base.
At a bouquet of flowers.
A brand-new bouquet.
There wasn’t a stand or anything, but that had to be…
“I couldn’t tell from my angle, since it was behind the telephone pole─and I wanted to get a better view. Guess there must’ve been a car accident somewhere around here.”
“Seems like it… Recently, you think?”
The road that ran from the cram school ruins to Senjogahara’s house wasn’t the one I usually took, it being outside my territory, so even if there’d been a car accident, or really any kind of accident, I just wouldn’t know…
“Anyway, if you got hit by a car because you were distracted by the flowers, the person who died would never be able to rest in peace. You’ve gotta be more careful.”
Sadly, you sometimes heard about follow-on victims─distracted by a “Frequent Accidents in This Vicinity” billboard, they end up in a head-on collision, that kind of thing.
“I made sure there were no cars coming. No need to worry, low-life jerk.”
“When that
’s how you keep referring to a friend, how could I not worry?”
Plus, I call bullshit.
She’d been totally distracted by the flowers. Taken together with her slip-and-fall on the stairs the day before, maybe she actually was pretty careless.
High-strung and careless… What a terrible combination.
She’d finally recovered from her “illness” but could still wind up dead if I didn’t attend to her─what was she, an endangered species? Perhaps seeing her all the way home didn’t cut it, better make sure she got safely inside.
Hmmm, this new friend of mine was a real handful…
“I just remembered.”
“Huh?” I cocked my head at Senjogahara’s sudden statement. “You remembered what? My dignity? The proper way to apologize to me?”
“I can’t remember something that never existed.”
“Is that right.”
“I remembered a ‘scary story’─so Araragi.”
“Yeah?”
“This is a command from Your Highness. Do what you gotta do.”
“…”
What kind of princess talks like that?
003
Obeying Princess Senjogahara’s command, early the following day, May tenth, I visited the rooftop of a school building at Naoetsu High.
Alone.
Given how things had unfolded, originally the plan was for her to accompany me, but unfortunately she was obliged to begin a period of regular hospital visits that very day.
So I, as her “friend,” ended up acting on her behalf─or I guess, was just getting used, but I really didn’t have any reason to refuse.
It’s not like I had anything else to do.
“’Preciate it. If things go well, I’ll show you my tits again.”
“Keep ’em to yourself.”
And “again” my ass.
Somewhere amid this back and forth I readily agreed, and found myself visiting the roof as Senjogahara had asked.
“The roof? Of which building?”
“Whichever. They were all like that.”
That’s what Senjogahara told me, so first I tried the roof of the building where my class was─though that makes it sound like I reached my destination by some legitimate means.
At Naoetsu High, however, the roofs are basically off-limits. The doors are kept locked, denying access to your average student, let alone your below-average one like me.
So how did I infiltrate the rooftop, how did I manage my illicit trespass? I went out the window of the top floor and crawled up the outside of the building, that’s how.
One slip meant instant death.
I, myself, was hard pressed to understand why I was braving such dangers on behalf of a girl I’d only gotten to know the day before yesterday, but maybe I was just starved for something like a “favor to do for a friend.”
Hrmm.
I’d already abandoned my belief that making friends would lower my intensity as a human, but confronted with this state of affairs, I had to admit I might not have been so far off the mark…
Let me note, for Senjogahara’s honor, that I’m sure she wasn’t expecting me to go to such great lengths.
Which is to say she’d suggested, “Ask your good friend Hanekawa. If she cooked up some reason to ask a teacher for the key to the roof, they’d happily give it to her.”
Sure, most of the teachers would oblige, no matter how over the top the request was, if it came from a model student like Hanekawa─but I hesitated to bring it up to her. After Golden Week, I felt kind of awkward about asking her for anything.
Sure, it was a dangerous thing to do, and climbing up the outside of the school wasn’t exactly my idea of a good time, but compared to the nightmare of Golden Week and the hell of spring break, it didn’t strike me as all that risky.
So.
“Ah…it’s true. Just as she said.”
Once I’d clambered over the fence and had my feet planted on the tiles of the rooftop, I discovered that she hadn’t been lying─did I think she had been? Well, yeah, I kinda thought she had been.
I mean, I’m sorry, but every other word out of that girl’s mouth is a lie, I can’t just blindly swallow everything she says.
Gotta keep your mouth shut and your eyes open, watch her like a hawk.
There, I got too preoccupied with having to watch her and put off explaining─I also didn’t mention it earlier because I thought she might be lying─that what was “just as she said” about the roof of the school building was a bouquet of flowers.
A bouquet of flowers.
Someone had left a bunch of flowers wrapped in plastic by the fence─left, or offered, maybe?
Anyway.
There was a fresh bouquet on the rooftop, which was supposed to be off limits.
“…”
Apparently, when Senjogahara saw those newish flowers by the telephone pole the day before, she remembered this rooftop bouquet─which meant, conversely, that it had been such a trifling matter to her that she’d forgotten about it completely.
A trifling matter, easily forgotten and incidentally recalled.
And yet.
Trifling though it may have been─it also struck her as mysterious, I suppose.
“Hang on─how come you were up on the roof in the first place?”
The previous night.
Still thoroughly doubting her claim, I was questioning her so she’d back it up a little.
“How did you get onto the roof? It’s off limits.”
“I may not be Big Sis Hanekawa, but I’m a model student, too. I’ve got enough juice to wrangle the roof key out of a teacher with the right pretext.”
“Maybe, but don’t call her Big Sis Hanekawa.”
“My, my. So you’re the only one who gets to call her that?”
“I’ve never called her that.”
Senjogahara suspects, for no good reason, that I have an unrequited crush on Hanekawa. I have no idea on what basis…
“All right, for now. We’ll drop it. When, and why, did you go up to the roof? You spoke of a pretext, so it sounds like you weren’t being entirely truthful with the teacher…”
“Whoa, lame. Mister detective, showing off his powers of deduction.”
“…”
I guess I wasn’t allowed to read too much into Senjogahara’s words. She just lay into every single word I said. If I keep going at this rate this flashback is never going to end, so abridging those bits and getting to the meat of her story─
“When I matriculated at Naoetsu High, I had to consider my personal safety, okay? So I personally took considerable steps to safeguard it.”
Leaving aside the half-assed wordplay, Senjogahara was so wary of other people that she’d even given a false address for the class directory.
Hanekawa had researched Naoetsu High before taking the entrance exam and after getting in; for reasons of her own, Senjogahara carried out an exhaustive study of where was safe and where was not, who was friend and who was foe.
We’re not just talking about right after she enrolled. She undertook continual follow-up surveys for two years─she must’ve been aware of the little shrine in the quad that I’d recently destroyed but deemed it “safe” and not paid it too much mind.
And─she’d given the rooftop flowers a pass as well.
“It’s no tale of an aberration, or a ghost story, but if you really think about it, isn’t it mysterious?”
Yup.
It was mysterious.
Because, according to Hanekawa─
In the eighteen years of Naoetsu High’s existence, there hadn’t been a single incident like the death of a student─which meant.
This.
An offering of flowers, lain as if someone had jumped off the roof─was mysterious.
