by Nisioisin
“You’re quick to go with the flow, and you don’t want to hurt people. Being kind is usually a good thing, of course, but it doesn’t always serve the people around you. Senjogahara might not want you to become too friendly with Kanbaru, you know? But she could never tell you not to befriend her and might even end up saying the opposite─am I wrong? Like she’s fine if you’re friends, she wants you to be friends, in fact, but wants you to draw a clear line… Maybe Senjogahara wants you to choose her after you’ve compared her to Kanbaru.”
“What the hell? You’re not making any sense.”
“Don’t you think Senjogahara is in a dilemma of her own? You’re very important to her as her boyfriend, and Kanbaru is very important to her as her junior.”
“Uhh.”
In addition, Kanbaru was a sapphist.
And Senjogahara already knew that.
Our relationships were pretty complicated when you took that into account.
“And Senjogahara is a tsundere,” Hanekawa said as if to wrap up our conversation. “I don’t think you should ever try to understand her actions in a simplistic way. You need to always be looking for the reasons behind them. If Senjogahara is important to you, I don’t think you should let your heart waver over a tiny little temptation. It really is a little irresponsible to be kind to everyone.”
“Yeah… Don’t worry, that part has hit home.”
Her live-fire exercise had worked.
I felt like I now knew for sure how flimsy I was.
…Though I did wonder about concluding our conversation with “And she’s a tsundere”… Wait, so Hanekawa knew what that word meant…
She really did know everything.
Maybe she was even starting to see through Senjogahara’s feline subterfuge.
Cats were Hanekawa’s specialty, after all.
“Speaking of which,” I asked her, “where were you planning on going to university? Tokyo, I guess? Or do students who get nationwide top scores on practice tests like you end up going overseas?”
“Huh? I’m not going to college, okay?”
“………Wha?”
Where did that bombshell come from.
She’d honestly caught me by surprise.
“You’re not…going to college?”
“Nope.”
“Is it a money problem? But this is you we’re talking about, I’m sure you can get a scholarship…”
Schools would be scrambling to grab her as their first draft pick.
I could even see her getting paid to go to school.
“It’s not like that. There isn’t really anything I’d want to study in college, anyway… Yeah, I guess I could tell you, Araragi. I’m going to go on a little journey after I graduate.”
“A-A journey?”
“I want to spend two years or so seeing the world. There are a lot of World Heritage sights you need to visit now, or they might disappear. There are times when I find myself relying on nothing but knowledge, so I think I should go out and experience more things. And if I do want to go to college, I can afterwards, and it won’t be too late.”
“……”
It was the kind of idea that floats into your head when you’re daydreaming.
But that wasn’t what it seemed to be…
Hanekawa didn’t have the grades of a student who needed an escape from the harsh realities of the struggle to get into a good school. You could tell her that entrance exams were tomorrow and it wouldn’t matter, she had the chops to handle it unassumingly. You could spring the exams on her at that very moment and she’d probably waltz her way into any school you cared to name. That’s who I was dealing with, which meant these travel plans of hers must have been fairly worked out, to the point that they weren’t going to change…
“Keep it a secret for now from our teachers and others, okay? I think they might be surprised if they heard.”
“Yeah…I’ll bet.”
“My plan is to watch and wait for the right time to bring it up.”
“I see… Well, I have a feeling that no matter when you bring it up, there’s going to be a little more than a surprised commotion…”
It would be total pandemonium, I was sure.
If the top student at a prep school made that kind of decision, leaving behind a precedent, it could even affect the institution’s legacy. This was Hanekawa, someone they held greater than great expectations of. She had to know all of this full well…
“Please don’t tell,” she requested. “In exchange, this time around, I’ll keep everything about Kanbaru a secret from Senjogahara.”
“Hey, I don’t feel like I’ve done anything particularly questionable…”
“And neither have I. But, you know?”
“Yeah. I get it.”
Hmph.
Could Oshino─have influenced her?
Hanekawa treated that rolling stone with the utmost respect. You couldn’t discount his influence, at the very least. If that were the case, it felt like Oshino had a lot of blood on his hands… What a meddlesome bastard.
So…that’s how it was. I was convinced that Hanekawa would continue to be some kind of class president even after she graduated from high school, that the gods had decided her destiny was to be a class president, but she wouldn’t be a class president or anything if she went off on a journey by herself.
I kind of felt like sighing.
Things never went smoothly.
I, a washout, was deciding this late in the game to try to go to college.
Tsubasa Hanekawa, a model student, aspired to become an outsider.
Suruga Kanbaru had retired from the basketball team early.
Mayoi Hachikuji couldn’t go back to the way things were, either.
The only one who could go back was─
Hitagi Senjogahara.
“…Ow!”
Then.
Hanekawa suddenly placed her right hand against her head.
As if to support it.
“Hm? What’s the matter?” I asked.
“No, it’s just─I’ve got a headache.”
“A headache?”
I recalled how Kanbaru had suddenly started to feel unwell the day before at the shrine, and I instantly began to fret. But Hanekawa soon raised her head.
“Oh, I’m fine, I’m fine. They come now and then, I started getting them a little while back. My head starts to hurt out of nowhere.”
“Whoa, hold on… That doesn’t sound fine at all.”
“Hmm. But it gets better right away. I don’t know what causes it, though… Maybe it’s because I’ve been so busy preparing for the culture festival lately that I’ve slacked on my studies.”
“You get headaches when you skip out on studying?”
How exactly did her body work?
Was she wearing some ring on her head like Monkey in Journey to the West?
She deserved to be in the diligence hall of fame.
Down to her marrow.
“Do you want me to walk you home?” I offered.
“No, it’s fine. My home─”
“Oh…right.”
A blunder.
I shouldn’t have said that.
“Sorry, I’m going to head back,” she announced. “You stay here a little longer and pick out study-aids. The ones I gave you are my suggestions, but personal preference ends up playing a big role in that kind of thing.”
“Okay. See you…”
“Yup.”
With that, Hanekawa left the bookstore like she was fleeing.
Maybe I should have walked her back until she was in the general area of her home anyway─but she was pretty headstrong, or rather, she didn’t like the idea of showing weakness to others. Since she said she was fine, I shouldn’t be a busybody.
But.
A headache…
It made me wonder a little.
For Hanekawa, a headache meant…
“………”
Hanekawa knew nothing about Senjoga
hara’s crab, Hachikuji’s snail, or Kanbaru’s monkey, nor anything about her own cat, at this point─
But she did know about my demon.
Not that it meant anything.
But nothing could change the fact that I owed a debt of gratitude to Hanekawa. It wasn’t simply over my aberration─I couldn’t begin to tell you just how often her words had saved me.
Like today.
That was why I always wanted to help her out in some way…
Sigh.
I’d have loved to be a busybody.
“…Might as well check out some of the other sections.”
Though I heeded Hanekawa’s advice and continued to flip through study-aids, I just wasn’t used to it, and they all looked the same to me. I decided to go ahead and buy the ones she’d picked out (It ended up being six books in total. I did take the time to add up the prices, which did come out to ten thousand yen on the dot. Wow) and left the study-aids section. I was at my budget exactly so I couldn’t buy anything else, but the great thing about books is that it doesn’t cost a thing to peruse them. I’d look stupid checking out the latest manga with my hands full of study-aids, but on the other hand, I felt smarter just carrying them around, so maybe spending some time there wasn’t such a bad idea… Actually, I was already thinking stupid...
“…Hm?”
While I didn’t have a destination yet, I decided to start moving─and that’s when I froze. Having seen something impossible, I couldn’t help it. I nearly dropped all the study-aids I was carrying.
No.
It wasn’t exactly impossible.
The chances of two people living in the same town encountering each other at the largest bookstore in town couldn’t be particularly low─at least, it was far more likely than passing by each other on a path that you could easily miss, on stairs that led to a deserted shrine.
And even the probability of that wasn’t zero.
So─if they occurred on consecutive days.
It wasn’t a mystery.
“…Sengoku.”
There in front of the sorcery and occult shelves, located just next to the study-aid section, and reading a thick book, was Nadeko Sengoku─my little sister’s old friend, Nadeko Sengoku.
She was wholly focused on reading the book─so she hadn’t noticed me. It’s not as if I could pass directly in front of her, so I could only see her in profile, but…I could tell it was her. Sengoku, who’d come to my home to play when she was in grade school…or who’d been brought to my home to play. It was an unusual name, Nadeko Sengoku, so I’d remembered it in full. Especially the name “Nadeko.” Anyone else whose name was written with those characters would be named “Nadeshiko,” and even as a grade school kid, I’d wondered where that one syllable had gone…
She was the same age as my youngest sister.
That meant─she was now in the second year of middle school.
I couldn’t tell because she wasn’t wearing her uniform, but she probably went to the public middle school that I’d graduated from. Few kids all the way out where I lived chose to go to private school like my little sisters did.
“………”
I remembered Sengoku.
But did she remember me?
She looked surprised when we passed each other the day before─but that could just have been the sight of people other than her climbing up that mountain. Your friend’s older brother isn’t normally the kind of person you remember…which would make saying something to her odd.
But.
Snakes.
Yes, snakes─
As I was thinking, Sengoku returned the book she was reading to its shelf and began to walk. I promptly hid myself so as not to be spotted. There wasn’t any particular reason for me to hide and I’d only done so reflexively, but I missed any chance I might have had to call out to her. I took a detour, using the bookshelves as walls, made sure she was gone, and stepped over to where she’d been standing until moments earlier.
I wanted to know what book she’d been reading.
I looked at its title.
“Hold on… This is─”
The book─was a hardcover priced at twelve thousand yen.
Not a book a middle schooler could buy. Even a high school kid like me couldn’t purchase it with the cash I had on hand. I wouldn’t be able to buy any of the study-aids.
That must have been why she contented herself with reading it in the aisles.
But─more than that.
The issue was the book’s title.
I left the section in the back of the store to look around for Sengoku, but she was already nowhere to be found. Maybe she was hiding somewhere in another section, but it seemed more likely that she had exited the store. And those clothes she was wearing…
Long sleeves, long pants.
A hat pulled far down on her head, and a bag around her waist.
If my intuition was right…then yes.
“Damn… Give me a break.”
I decided to go to the cash register and pay for the time being. There was a long line of shoppers waiting, but I toughed it out. Nothing good could come from getting flustered and rushing. I needed to start by calming myself down. Still unsure what to do, I placed a ten-thousand-yen bill on the cashier’s tray. The clerk seemed surprised that my total came out to ten thousand yen on the dot, but what did I care. The honor didn’t belong to me.
Hmm.
She was an old acquaintance…but me alone might not do.
There’s only so much you can do on your own.
I had to seek someone’s assistance…and the circumstances led me to just one person. Someone who might be particularly suited to this case… Hanekawa had just warned me, but I couldn’t help it.
With a bag filled with study-aids in my left hand, I took out my cell phone as soon as I left the store and called the number I’d learned after we were done the day before. I was reminded again of how nervous I felt about calling a new number for the first time, just like two days ago when I’d called her house.
The phone rang about five times.
“This is Suruga Kanbaru.”
No sooner than it connected, she answered with her full name. The oddly uncommon act surprised me a little.
“Suruga Kanbaru. My special move is double jumping.”
“Liar. No human can do that.”
“Hm? Judging by that voice and the quipping, I’d say it’s my dear senior Araragi.”
“You’re right, but…”
That voice and the quipping? That’s how she figured it out?
I’d given her my number the day before, too. Hadn’t she put it into her contacts list? Now, that was sad… Well, never mind, she just hadn’t mastered using a cell phone. She didn’t seem too good with tech.
“If you have some time, Kanbaru, there was something I wanted you to help me with… What are you doing right now?”
“Heheh,” Kanbaru laughed daringly for some reason. “Whether I have time or not, I’ll go anywhere you ask me to, no matter how far. I don’t even need a reason, just give me your location and I’ll be there right away.”
“No, putting all that aside… If you’re not free, you don’t need to force yourself. I dragged you along with me just yesterday, so I’m already feeling bad. Where are you right now, and what were you doing?”
“Umm…if you must know, well…”
“That’s a pretty half-hearted reply. So you’re busy? In that case─”
“No, uh…yes,” Kanbaru said as if she’d made up her mind. “I can’t keep any secrets from you. I’m in my room at my home right now reading dirty books and indulging in dirty fantasies.”
“………”
I shouldn’t have been so insistent.
Now I felt like a sexual harasser.
“Oh, but don’t get me wrong,” she cautioned. “They might be dirty books, but it’s all boys’ love.”
“Please, why couldn’t you at least let me get that part wrong!”