by Nisioisin
001
The name Suruga Kanbaru belongs to a celebrity known the entire school over, which of course means that I too heard it my fair share of times. My classmates Tsubasa Hanekawa and Hitagi Senjogahara may be no less celebrated, but that’s strictly among third-years. Yes, despite being a year below me, Tsubasa Hanekawa, and Hitagi Senjogahara and thus a second-year, Suruga Kanbaru’s renown is so extraordinary that it reaches the ears of a senior like me who’s fairly estranged from those kinds of rumors. That’s not normally supposed to happen. You can act like a grandee and chortle that she’s sure impressive for someone so young, but in her case, the statement would be uncomfortably close to the truth.
Maybe you’d get a better sense of who Suruga Kanbaru is if I said “star” rather than “celebrity.” While Tsubasa Hanekawa and Hitagi Senjogahara are seen (despite the latter’s true nature) as so-called model students, diligent pupils with good grades and excellent conduct, that’s not the image here at all─though, being a “star,” it’s not as if she’s known as a rough-and-tumble ringleader of a gang of bad girls. In contrast to Tsubasa Hanekawa and Hitagi Senjogahara and their primarily academic dominance, her mastery is in the realm of sports. Suruga Kanbaru is our school’s ace basketball player. After she joined the club in her first year, she was on the main roster in no time at all, but if that were it, you could reason that an unknown, perennial first-round knockout of a girls’ basketball team was a joke anyway. But it would be strange to treat her as anything but a star when she ended up building a monstrous legend by leading the unknown, perennial first-round knockout of a girls’ basketball team, which was a joke anyway, to the national tournament. There’s no better way to put it than “ended up building” because you almost wanted to ask what she thought she was doing and scold her, the legend was so abrupt. Our girls’ basketball team blew up and was elevated into an honest-to-goodness crack squad that boys’ teams from neighboring high schools requested, for real and not in a haw-haw way, to play against, for practice─all thanks to one girl.
She isn’t unusually tall or anything.
She’s built like the average high school girl, too.
If anything, she’s a little on the small and slender side.
The term “dainty” would suit her well.
But Suruga Kanbaru─can jump.
Just once, a year ago, for some reason or other, I had a chance to take a peek at a game Suruga Kanbaru was playing in─and she was so quick and agile that she didn’t just pass by the other team’s defenders but threaded them, and like in the sports manga that once swept Japan, scored with a clean dunk─one dunk after dunk, dozens of them, as if it were the most pleasant activity, with comfort, with ease, with the refreshing smile of an athletic girl never leaving her face. When girls’ basketball teams make most of their shots using both hands, how many high schoolers can expect to witness a dunk of all things? From my position in the crowd, more than being overwhelmed by her, I felt awful for the players on the opposing team as they visibly lost their will to play, overwhelmed by her, and couldn’t watch anymore, it was so painful, and had to leave. I remember it like it was yesterday.
In any case, while my high school is an academically oriented prep school, it’s still a high school, full of sensitive mid-teen youths, so flashy sports heroes getting showered with more attention than evident model students who merely excel at their studies is a natural outcome─and Suruga Kanbaru doing this or that in response to whatever, every detail of her behavior that hardly seems to matter and hardly does, turns into gossip and courses through the school. I’d have enough for a book if I collected all of it. Even if I’m not interested and actively try to avoid it, information about Suruga Kanbaru reaches me anyway. If you go to our school, regardless of your year, whether she is ahead or behind you, anyone who cares to can find out, on a given day, what she ordered at the cafeteria. It’s easy, you just ask someone nearby.
But rumors are rumors.
Half-serious.
They aren’t necessarily true.
In fact, a lot of the rumors that make it all the way to me lack credibility and are difficult to take at face value─or rather, it’s not rare for two perfectly opposed rumors to be making their rounds at the same time. She’s irritable, no, she’s gentle; she cares about her friends, no, she’s cold; she’s modest, no, she’s arrogant; she goes from one wild romance to the next, no, she’s never dated a boy before─anyone who actually satisfied those conditions would be a broken person. Someone like me who has seen her but never spoken to her, who probably has never come within fifteen feet of her, has to leave it to the imagination on those points. But as a practical matter, there’s altogether no need for me to exercise my imagination, altogether none─we’re in different years, after all, and there’s no way a sports star and ace basketball player (since club activities are only for first- and second-years at my school, I feel I can at least go ahead and trust the rumor that she’s been made captain) is going to have anything to do with a washout third-year like me.
We don’t have the first thing to do with each other.
Naturally, she must have no idea who I am.
There ought to be no reason for her to know.
That’s how I saw it.
That was my assumption.
I learned that I was mistaken as May was drawing to a close, when we’d be changing to our summer uniforms come June. By then, my hair had grown out to where it nearly hid the two small holes gouged at the bottom of my neck, and I felt relieved that wearing a band-aid for a couple of weeks should do it… Ten or so days had passed since Hitagi Senjogahara and I started seeing each other, as they say, following a chance encounter.
Already at that point, when Suruga Kanbaru approached me with ringing footsteps and spoke to me, her left hand was wrapped tight in a white bandage─
002
“Ah…Mister Ah-ah-ah-gi.”
“It’s Araragi.”
“I’m sorry. A slip of the tongue.”
As I biked down a slope getting home from school on a Friday, ahead of me I saw a little girl with pigtails carrying a backpack, namely Mayoi Hachikuji, so I hit my brakes, came to a stop to her left, and called out to her, at which she blinked and acted surprised and mispronounced my name like always.
While a small part of me was touched that my name could still be mangled in a new way, I, ever conscientious, corrected her.
“Don’t be turning me into some sidekick who takes his name from his cluelessness.”
“I think it sounded quite cute.”
“I sounded like a total loser.”
“Hmm. Well, I think that might be surprisingly fitting.” The fifth grader could let some mean words slip out of her mouth. “In any case, I’m glad to see that you’re doing well, Mister Araragi. I’m delighted that we’re able to meet like this again. How have you been? Has anything in particular happened since then?”
“Huh? Oh, no, not really. That kind of thing isn’t common. I’ve been living in peace. Peace, or maybe quiet. Oh, but I do have my skills test coming up soon, and there hasn’t been much peace or quiet in my life when it comes to that.”
About two weeks earlier─May fourteenth, Mother’s Day.
I met her, Mayoi Hachikuji, in a park that day, and found myself getting wrapped up in a bit of a case as a result… Well, what happened wasn’t concrete enough to be called a case, nor general enough to highlight or spotlight, but at any rate, I was involved in an experience that wasn’t quite normal.
When I say it wasn’t normal, I mean it wasn’t normal.
But we were able to solve it in the end thanks to the help of an unpleasant dude, namely Oshino, and Senjogahara─and everything was fine, but if what happened on May fourteenth wa
s fate and not a fluke, then spending every day of the following two weeks in peace and quiet must have also been fate and not a fluke.
As far as I could tell, Hachikuji was doing okay too─which seemed to mean that the Mother’s Day incident had come to an amicable end. This was rare since the experience wasn’t a normal one. In that regard, for me─and Hanekawa─and Senjogahara─what came after our not-quite-normal experiences, their aftermath, was actually tougher to deal with─or much crueler. More miserable, even.
Mayoi Hachikuji.
In that regard, I envied her.
“Oh, is something the matter? How indecent of you, Mister Araragi, to stare at me with such passionate eyes.”
“…What passionate eyes?” And indecent? This was some low passion.
“Stare at me with such eyes a second more and you’ll make me go hic.”
“What’s wrong with your diaphragm?”
Eek, maybe.
Well, considering her circumstances, it wouldn’t be right simply to feel envious of her…because in a way it’s Hachikuji who has it the toughest and cruelest, neither me nor Hanekawa nor Senjogahara. I’m sure many people would be inclined to take that view.
As I mused, two high school students passed to the left of my bike. Both of them were girls. They were wearing uniforms from a different school than mine. The pair looked at Hachikuji and me with clear suspicion, and unsubtly hushing their voices, whispered as they passed by, in an extremely grating display… I suppose high school senior Koyomi Araragi engaging in earnest conversation with fifth grader Mayoi Hachikuji appeared very dodgy to ordinary sensibilities.
Fine.
The cold gaze of society didn’t bother me.
I hadn’t accosted Hachikuji without the necessary resolve. Why, all that really mattered was that she and I understood the truth. Shallow prejudice was powerless against the friendship that she and I had forged.
“Oh dear, Mister Araragi, it seems those two figured out that you’re a pedophile. My deepest condolences.”
“Don’t you be saying that!”
“There’s no need to be embarrassed. Being fond of little girls isn’t, in and of itself, against the law. Your preferences and predilections are your own. It’s just that you mustn’t practice your abnormal philosophy.”
“You know, even if I did like little girls, I’d hate you!”
We hadn’t forged any friendship.
I seemed to be surrounded by people like her.
I glanced behind me.
We were alone now.
For the time being.
“…You’re a scarily promising kid, you know that? But Hachikuji, what’re you doing here wandering around at this hour? Did you get lost on your way somewhere again?”
“Isn’t that quite the rude way to put it, Mister Araragi. I’ve never been lost since the day I was born.”
“That’s an impressive memory you got there.”
“You’re making me blush with your compliments.”
“No, it really is impressive. Being able to forget all the stupid, inconvenient stuff.”
“Oh, not at all. By the way, who are you again?”
“I’ve been forgotten!”
It was a pretty neat riposte.
She had good taste.
“…Really, though, even if it’s a joke, it’s depressing to be forgotten by someone, Hachikuji.”
“I forget all the stupid, inconvenient people.”
“Hey, I’m not so stupid that you can call me that! And I said stuff, not people!”
“I forget all the stupid, inconvenient...stuff.”
“Good, good, that’s…not right! It’s not right at all! You shouldn’t go around calling people ‘stuff’!”
“But you said to, yourself.”
“Be quiet. No playing gotcha.”
“You’re very self-centered, aren’t you, Mister Araragi? Very well, then. I’ll be considerate and put it another way.”
“Let’s hear it…”
“Stupid, convenient people.”
“………”
It was a fun conversation.
To be honest, I did have some reservations about myself, this high schooler named Koyomi Araragi who chatted with a fifth grader like we were peers, but it did feel pretty similar to talking to my sisters, who were in middle school, so… Plus, maybe it was the difference between elementary and middle school girls, but Hachikuji wasn’t strangely touchy or oddly cynical, and our conversation had a better flow to it than when I talked to my little sisters.
“Haa…”
With a sigh, I got off my bicycle.
Pushing its handlebars, I began walking forward.
Talking with Hachikuji was fun, but standing around and running on for too long could have an adverse effect on my later plans. Not that I was particularly pressed for time, but I still decided to push along my bike as we spoke. Better to walk and talk than stand and talk. Hachikuji must have been wandering around without a specific destination because she strolled alongside my bike without a word or gesture from me. I bet she just had nothing to do.
There was another reason that I chose to get going─I glanced behind again, but it looked like I didn’t need to worry on that account for the time being.
“Where are you headed, Mister Araragi?”
“Mm. Home, for now.”
“For now? So will you be going out after that?”
“Yeah, I guess─remember what I just told you about the skills test being soon?”
“Your skills, which is to say your very worth, will be facing a moment of truth?”
“It’s nothing that big… The moment of truth is simply whether or not I’ll graduate.”
“Is that so. The moment of truth of whether you’ll not graduate.”
“………”
It meant the same thing, but the nuance was so different.
Such a tricky affair, this language thing.
“Mister Araragi, you are, after all, a convenient person mentally.”
“I’d honestly be happier if you just said I was stupid.”
“No, I’d never. There are some things that are better off taken for granted.”
“But not better off left unsaid, I see!”
“Oh, um, don’t worry. I don’t have the best grades either, so we’re in the same boat, the same boat, okay?”
“……”
I was being comforted by an elementary schooler.
In the same boat as an elementary schooler.
Not only that, when it came to herself, she wasn’t stupid but merely didn’t have “the best grades.” Mayoi Hachikuji was slyly deceptive.
“Well, it actually hits close to home for me,” I said. “I’m seriously going to be in a bad spot if I bungle this skills test.”
“Will you be expelled?”
“No matter how preppy of a prep school it is, I’m not going to be expelled over a low test score. I mean, any prep school where I would sounds like a setup to a joke. So the worst that can happen is that I’ll have to repeat a grade, but… But I do want to avoid that.”
If I could.
No, not if I could. I had to.
“Hm. In that case, Mister Araragi, are you really in a position to be going out again today? You should hurry and lock yourself in at home and study for your test.”
“Surprisingly solid advice, Hachikuji.”
“‘Solid advice’? That’s two words too many, sir!”
“But ‘surprisingly’ was fine?!”
What a born entertainer.
“Well, there’s no need for you to worry, Hachikuji, if anything you’ve hit the nail on the head. I don’t need to be told. You see, I may be going out, but it’s not to play or to shop. I’m going out to study.”
“Hrm?” Hachikuji tilted her head like a grownup. “So you’re saying you’re going to study at the library or something? Hmm. I personally think that the best environment for studying is a familiar one where you can relax, like your own r
oom… Oh, or will you be going to a cram school or something?”
“If I had to say, cram school would be closer to the mark,” I answered. “You remember Senjogahara, don’t you? Well, she gets some of the top grades in our whole year, and she promised to coach me at her place today.”
“Miss Senjogahara…”
Hachikuji folded her arms and faced down.
Wait, had she forgotten? Not because it was inconvenient, but possibly out of fear?
“Her full name is Hitagi Senjogahara,” I tried to remind her. “You know, the lady with the ponytail who was with me the other day, who helped─”