by Nisioisin
“While we’re at it, ‘past’ is written with the characters for ‘mistake’ and ‘gone.’ Does that mean the past is a mistake as such, sui generis?”
“…”
I considered telling him that he wasn’t using the phrase “sui generis” correctly, but decided not to. I’d hate to be thought of as the kind of senior who puffs herself up by nitpicking a younger schoolmate’s usage.
Still, it was a magnificent self-contradiction for a conversation about a word’s meaning to include a misused phrase.
“Come to think of it,” Ogi continued, “the word ‘future’ is written with a negative prefix and ‘come.’ Is human life one big cock-up then, past and future?”
He kept pedaling backwards as he said this─kept riding in reverse. There was no rearview mirror unlike on a motorbike, so it really was quite dangerous.
It looked precarious.
I started to get this uneasy, probably unjustified feeling that he’d keep riding backwards for as long as I kept on running, so I slowly came to a stop.
“Oops. What’s wrong? Is your side splitting from running too much?” Ogi asked, and just as I’d hoped, he put on the brakes─not by squeezing either hand, but via the friction generated by letting the soles of his shoes scrape against the ground.
Every single thing he did was precarious.
I was on pins and needles.
“No part of my body would start hurting from running just a couple of miles,” I shut down Ogi’s question and strode off just like that. It seemed (the mechanism was still unclear to me) he couldn’t ride backwards at a slow pace, and so, turning around his bike─reluctantly, I imagine─he resumed accompanying me in a normal fashion.
Seemingly rebellious, an obedient kid.
Seemingly twisted, straight as an arrow.
As far as juniors these days went, he was surprisingly easy to handle─if I may be allowed to make such an evaluation as someone who coaxed on my middle- and high-school athletics clubs.
“Won’t you be late if you walk?”
“It’s fine, I’ll dash when I get to the final climb.”
“Yikes, gimme a break. In that case it’ll only be me who’s late. I’m weak on climbs.”
“Then go on ahead.”
“Please. Why would I throw away the honor of arriving at school beside the universally admired Suruga Kanbaru over something as insignificant as being marked tardy?”
“Why are you kissing up to me? It’s not like I’m a star or anything.”
“But you are a star. No, maybe mastar is more like it.”
“Mastar… In any case, that was a long time ago.”
“Well, sure, you may have lost some of your former charisma… But even now you have rabid fans who’re rooting for you.”
“That’s nice to know, if true… But what in the world are they rooting for? I don’t play basketball anymore.”
And words like “rabid” scare me.
They remind me of when I was scared of myself.
Of when I was like a rabid animal.
“A star is a star no matter what. Existing is all that matters. Existing, and shining.”
“But I’m not shining, not anymore. I’ve gone dark.”
“We’re going around in circles, aren’t we─sure, you may not be nationally famous at the moment, but you’re still quite the local celebrity.”
“I don’t remember being so tied to the area… Ogi, is there something you need to tell me? Because I don’t think we’d be having this conversation otherwise.”
“Huh.”
Ogi blinked in surprise.
He had something of a tendency to ham it up.
Even his being alive seemed deliberate.
To put it simply, it was like he was playing a “character”─which upset me.
I felt as though I was slowly being shown what I disliked about myself.
Slowly.
But steadily.
“What a cold thing to say. I might get frostbite. Can’t I talk to you without a specific reason?”
“Well, actually, I guess it’d be worse if you did have a reason.”
“Hahaha, now we’re getting warm.”
Laughing, Ogi cut to the chase. It was his peculiar conversational technique to do so with abnormal suddenness after having beaten around the bush forever, which certainly reminded me of our friend in the Hawaiian shirt.
“Have you heard the rumors about Lord Devil?”
Lord Devil?
006
I didn’t want to be late on the first day of the new term─I wasn’t anxious about my attendance record, but I was not so unfeeling as to be unaffected by the sad spectacle Araragi-senpai had presented there at the end (even “wretched” would be an understatement)─so regardless of what Ogi might say, I dashed full speed up the last hill and slipped through the school gates along with the first bell.
He was being truthful about being weak on the uphill, and I left him in the dust. Though before we even get to strengths and weaknesses, granny bikes are too heavy to be suited to climbing.
Since it could run backwards, I thought his bike might also be remodeled to improve its climbing power, but evidently the engineer hadn’t performed that much surgery on it.
His voice at my back sounded as though he was about to cry, and I winced as I dashed on, but it’s not like I’d promised we would “run together!”
Ogi being Ogi, I believe he didn’t end up being late. And even if he did, I’m sure that he wheedled his way out of it with his silver tongue.
So I switched gears.
The quick mental switch is my specialty.
Which probably means that I’m stupid.
Before heading to the school building, I went to the gym for my new class assignment. Who would be in my class this year, who would be in a different one? Let’s see now, hmm, okay, okay. Overall, it was a satisfying reshuffle.
I’d never really thought about it before, but do the teachers all have a big discussion and make the assignments together? Like, which students shouldn’t be in the same class, which groups should be kept together, etc.?
It was like that song, Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match.
Actually, the work of dividing up the students seems kind of fun.
Contemplating who might make friends with whom in the game of Ideal Class Assignment, I headed to my new classroom.
A third-year classroom.
Oddly enough─though that sounds overblown and staged, like I’m forcibly upping the dramatic stakes─it was the same classroom my seniors Araragi, Senjogahara, and Hanekawa had been in last year.
I didn’t─not think anything of it.
In other words, I did something.
The classroom was quiet. Everyone still seemed to be at the gym, rejoicing or lamenting. Perhaps they were having a hard time adjusting to the prospect of their new classes, and new classmates.
I wandered idly about, wondering where my senpais had sat. I figured there was no way to tell, until I came upon a desk that radiated a powerful individuality.
Which is to say.
A desk with “Koyomi Araragi” chiseled deeply into the surface─hey, hey!
For a moment I was appalled that my dear senior had been so aggressively self-assertive, but when I really thought about it, I couldn’t imagine him coming to school with a chisel in the first place.
In other words, the desk must have been Senjogahara-senpai’s.
I could easily imagine her whiling away the time during class by carving her sweetheart’s name into her desk, and that brought a faint smile to my lips.
A faint smile─you couldn’t exactly call it heart-warming.
I can’t even begin to picture Araragi-senpai’s reaction when he discovered the carving, I thought as I sat down at the desk.
It was the first day, the first class, so maybe we really should have sat by student number, but a precedent would be set by whatever rule was cemented first.
Th
e rule that I cemented by sitting down first: “sit wherever you like.”
Occupying a seat where someone I’d once longed for had thought about her sweetheart shined a ray of light into the new life I was beginning; it also brought a certain wistful feeling.
“Morning, Rugaaa! After two years, we’re finally in the same class!”
Just as I was giving myself over to sentiment, Higasa, who seemed to have appeared in the classroom out of nowhere, sat down in the seat in front of me.
She was a contemporary of mine from the basketball team.
She’d been vice captain last year, and when I quit she took over for me as captain─she insisted that she was just the acting captain, but the other day she finally retired as well, without my big comeback ever becoming a reality.
Anyone could see she was a jock, but like most everyone else around here, she entered the auspicious ranks of students preparing for university entrance exams.
Me?
I was preparing for them too, of course.
If not for my left arm, I could have gotten a scholarship to an athletic college on the strength of my basketball record. But with my professed injury, even if I were scouted, I’d have to decline. I got depressed when I thought about the bookish life stretching out before me, even though I had brought it on myself.
Studying is not my forte.
I’m stupid.
In the first place, it was only because I had a strong motivation─chasing after my senior Senjogahara─that I ever got into this prep school.
“Yup, so we are,” I responded.
Having played basketball together, Higasa and I had bonded, but this was the first time we were in the same class.
It felt somehow ironic that it finally happened only after we both quit the team.
Or maybe it wasn’t ironic?
Maybe it was commonplace?
We graduate without ever being in the same class as most of the students in our year, so I guess there’s no need to force some kind of special meaning onto it.
“Class assignment time has made me blue ever since elementary school, but I’m relieved that I’m in the same class as you, Ruga.”
“Blue? Why?”
“Oh, because I’m shy.”
“Huh.”
“The words ‘find someone you want to pair up with’ scare me more than anything in the world.”
“How come? Doesn’t being able to pair up with someone you like make you happy?”
I didn’t really buy that Higasa, even more of a jock than I am, was shy, but often our sense of ourselves is at odds with reality.
The me in my mind is probably different from the way other people think of me, but at the same time, I feel like it’s not a question of one or the other being right.
Rightness wavers according to perspective.
Last year taught me that.
“It’s about a month after class assignments that I really get blue, though.”
“How come?”
“Because I’m forced to watch people I felt close with in my previous class becoming close with other people from their new class.”
“Forced…”
“Your friends making other friends is always kind of a bad feeling. The friend of my friend is my enemy,” remarked Higasa, her shoulders sagging.
Coming out with an audacious line that everybody thinks but can’t actually say made me think she was definitely a jock and not really shy at all, but maybe she just couldn’t hide her true feelings.
At first.
I’d probably felt the same way─upon witnessing the relationship between my seniors. So I understood all too well when Higasa put it into words.
…But it was a pretty selfish feeling.
Though feelings are all basically selfish.
“Don’t you make new friends too, Higasa?”
“I will. Still… All through life we’ll have to keep dealing with new class and seat assignments, so to speak, and we’ll become estranged from good friends, from people we like, people we love, even though we never had a falling out or anything. When I think about that, my mood doesn’t get blue, it gets pitch black.”
“Hmm, for sure,” I nodded at Higasa. Her words made all kinds of sense to me. “Life is nothing but new class and seat assignments.”
My ties with Araragi-senpai and Senjogahara-senpai had made for such fun that it seemed like it could go on forever. But forget about forever, it couldn’t go on in the same way the moment they graduated.
They had to forge new relationships in new places─and it was more pressing for them than for me, continuing on in the same high school as I was.
Araragi-senpai seems like he might be the worst in the world at that kind of transition.
Even now he sends me texts with astounding frequency.
And over half of them are dirty jokes.
I may be largely to blame, but he nevertheless seems to be harboring a gross misunderstanding about me.
Our new classmates began to trickle in after that. Our homeroom teacher arrived last, a touch on the late side, and began pouring forth a veritable fountain of what you might call Exam Prep for Dummies.
Study like you’re going to waste an entire year of your life.
The teacher slipped that in to get a laugh, I imagine, but his words of course reminded me of my mother.
“Rugaaa, walk home with us,” Higasa invited me to join her and the new group of friends she’d already made (definitely not shy), but I politely excused myself.
There was somewhere I had to go, but I couldn’t tell her, so I made up an appropriate excuse: “I need to pick up some study guides on my way home.”
I can lie with total composure.
And not much in the way of guilt.
“What? Ruga, did you actually swallow everything the teacher was saying? You gotta just let it slide.”
“No, it’s not like that. But if I don’t try and make up for how behind I am, I definitely won’t have the grades to get into college.”
“Right, ’cause you’re stupid.”
She just came out and said it.
How does she know?
It’s supposed to be a secret!
Higasa’s shrewd in her own way, so she’s figured out how to get decent grades. She shared with me once that her goal was to just keep it up and get into a decent college.
A decent life.
That’s her motto.
Since she doesn’t seem to be particularly set on an athletic college or playing for a corporate team, I guess basketball will just be a “high school memory” for her.
No.
Not just for her.
For most people, high school is nothing but a time to create memories─to be perfectly honest, it’s three years wasted, not just one.
Anyone who spends these three years trying to find themselves instead of creating memories belongs to a tiny minority─I thought I was a member of that minority, but apparently wasn’t, and in fact, my three years seem like they might come to a close without much in the way of memories, either.
Seriously, though, these past two years.
What have I been doing?
And this remaining year─how was I going to spend it?
“’Kay, see you tomorrow.”
“Yup─oh, hang on, Higasa.”
I asked her. Just to be sure, as casually as possible.
“Have you heard about Lord Devil?”
“Whun?” From that initial reaction I was worried that she hadn’t, and that I shouldn’t have asked, but the next words out of her mouth were, “How does an optimist like you know about that rumor?”
007
Lord Devil has an odd ring to it.
Why address the Devil, in all his accursed unholiness, with an honorific title? But I suppose if you simply think of the Devil as God’s opposite number, then just like you call God “Lord God,” it makes sense to call the Devil “Lord Devil.”
And while he may be the Devil, he certainly
occupies a superior position to humans, so I guess it’d be pretty rude to talk about him without showing some respect.