by Nisioisin
001
Hitagi Senjogahara occupies the position of “the girl who’s always ill” in our class. She’s not expected to participate in P.E., of course, and is even allowed to suffer morning and school-wide assemblies in the shade, alone, as a precaution against anemia or something. Though we’ve been in the same class my first, my second, and this, my third and final year of high school, I’ve never once seen her engaged in any sort of vigorous activity. She’s a regular at the nurse’s room, and she arrives late, leaves early, or simply doesn’t show up to school because she has to visit her primary care hospital, time and again. To the point where it’s rumored in jest that she lives there.
Though “always ill,” she is by no means sickly. She’s graceful, like her thin lines could snap at a touch, and has this evanescent air, which must be why some of the boys refer to her as “the cloistered princess” half-jokingly, half-seriously. You could say earnestly. That phrase and its connotations aptly describe Senjogahara, I agree.
Senjogahara is always alone reading a book in one corner of the classroom. At times that book is an imposing hardcover, and at others it’s a comic that could permanently damage your intellect to judge from its cover design. She seems to be one of those voracious readers. Maybe she doesn’t care as long as there are words in it, maybe she has some sort of clear standard.
Apparently quite smart, she’s among the top in our year.
Whenever test results are posted, Hitagi Senjogahara’s name is one of the first ten on the list. Whatever the subject. It’s presumptuous of me, who can’t pass a non-math test, even to compare myself to her, but our brains must be structured in fundamentally different ways.
She doesn’t seem to have any friends.
Not a single one.
I have yet to witness Senjogahara exchanging words with someone─the shrewd take might be that her constant reading is a behavior intended to tell you not to speak to her because she is reading, a way of building walls around herself. In fact, I’ve sat in the same classroom as her for two years and change, and can state with certainty that I’ve never spoken a word to her in that time. I can and do. Senjogahara’s voice is synonymous, for me, with the reedy “I don’t know” that she utters like a catchphrase whenever a teacher calls on her in class (whether or not it’s a question she clearly knows the answer to, she only ever replies, “I don’t know”). Schools are strange places where people without friends routinely form a sort of community (or a colony) of people without friends (myself included, until last year), but Senjogahara seems to be exempt from this rule too. Of course, it’s not like she’s getting bullied, either. She isn’t being persecuted or avoided in any deep, or light, way as far as I can tell. Like that’s her natural place to be, with a cool face, Senjogahara goes on reading in one corner of the classroom. She goes on building walls around herself.
Like it’s natural for her to be there.
Like it’s natural not to be here.
Not that it’s any big deal. At our three-year high school, with two hundred students in each grade, you end up sharing a living space with about a thousand people in all during your stay if you include the graduating and incoming classes and the faculty. Start wondering how many of those people mean anything to you, and the answer is going to be bleak for just about anyone.
Even if I meet the odd fortune of sharing a class with someone for three years, and still don’t exchange a single word with that person, I don’t find it sad. I’d simply look back on it someday and think: Oh, yes, I guess that’s how things were. I have no idea what I’ll be doing a year down the line, after graduating from high school, but I certainly wouldn’t be conjuring up Senjogahara’s face─I probably wouldn’t be able to.
And that’s fine. Senjogahara must be fine with that, too. Not just her, but everyone at my school has to be fine with it. Actually, it’s feeling gloomy about the matter that’s fundamentally misguided.
That’s what I thought.
But.
One such day.
To be precise, the eighth of May, after my hellish joke of a spring break came to an end, I became a third year, and my nightmarish fantasy of a Golden Week wrapped up.
I was dashing up the school stairs, latish as usual, and just reached a landing, when a girl came falling down from the sky.
That girl was Hitagi Senjogahara.
Again, to be precise, she wasn’t so much falling down from the sky as simply falling backwards after having missed a step─and I’m sure I could’ve dodged her, but instead I reflexively caught Senjogahara’s body.
It was probably the right decision over dodging her.
No, maybe it was the wrong one.
Why?
Because Senjogahara’s body, which I reflexively caught, was so─incredibly light. Unfunnily, bizarrely, eerily light.
As if she wasn’t here.
That’s right.
Senjogahara weighed so little that she nearly didn’t at all.
002
“Senjogahara?”
Hanekawa tilted her head in response to my question. “Is something the matter with Senjogahara?”
“Nothing like that…” I answered vaguely. “I was just kind of wondering about her.”
“Huh.”
“I mean, you know, isn’t that a weird and interesting name? Hitagi Senjogahara?”
“…You do realize that Senjogahara is the name of a place.”
“Er, no, not that part. I was talking about, um, her given name.”
“Senjogahara’s? You mean Hitagi? Is it that strange? I want to say it’s a term related to construction.”
“You know everything, don’t you?”
“Not everything. I just know what I know.” While Hanekawa didn’t seem fully satisfied with my explanation, instead of pressing me any further, she said, “You’re interested in someone other than yourself, Araragi? That’s unusual.”
Mind your own business, I told her.
Tsubasa Hanekawa.
The president of our class.
More than that, she’s a girl who embodies what a class president should be. Her prim and proper braids, her glasses, her good manners and good behavior, how incredibly serious and loved by the teachers she is, puts her on the endangered species list in this day and age even if you count manga and anime. The way she holds herself makes you wonder if she’s been a class president her entire life and is going to be one in some capacity even after graduating. In other words, a class president among class presidents. Possibly a class president chosen by the gods, as one person has been rumoring like it’s the unvarnished truth (that would be me).
We were in different classes our first and second years, but for our third year, we were placed together. Though I had heard of her before that, of course I had. If Senjogahara’s grades are among the top in our year, Tsubasa Hanekawa’s are at the very top. She regularly pulls off unbelievable stunts like scoring a perfect 600 across six courses in five core subjects, and yes, I still remember her utterly monstrous results for the first semester finals our second year like it was yesterday, when across every single subject, including P.E. and Art, she missed only one question, a Japanese History fill-in-the-blank. You hear about celebrities like that whether you want to or not.
And.
The nastiest part─okay, I know it’s a good thing, but either way, most annoyingly, Hanekawa is a very caring and decent person. What is actually nasty about her is that she’s very single-minded. As is often the case with too-serious people, once she decides on something, no lever will ever budge her. I already had a brief encounter with Hanekawa during spring break, and afterwards, as soon as our new classes were announced and we found out we’d be together, she declared to me, “I’m gonna make su
re you turn your life around.”
I’m no juvenile delinquent, nor really a problem child. I was a mere class ornament, according to my own assessment, so her proclamation struck me like a bolt from the blue. But no amount of convincing could halt her single-minded delusion, and before I knew it, I was appointed class vice president, which is why, at that moment, after school on the eighth of May, I was still in my classroom alone with Hanekawa hashing out what to do for the mid-June culture festival.
“Culture festival or not, we’re third-years now,” Hanekawa said. “We won’t be doing much. Studying for college exams is more important.” Prioritizing exam prep over the culture festival, without batting an eye, indeed made her a class president among class presidents. “With a vague survey, the suggestions would be all over the board and just a waste of time. We could go ahead and narrow down the options between us and have everyone vote on those. Are you good with that?”
“Why not? It has a nice democratic veneer.”
“You always make things sound so awful, Araragi. Such cynicism.”
“That’s not cynicism. Hey, you’re making me feel like a cartoon sidekick. Tongari, to be exact.”
“For reference, Araragi, what did your class do for the culture festival last year and the year before?”
“A haunted house and a cafe.”
“How standard. Too standard. You could go so far as to say commonplace.”
“I guess.”
“You could go so far as to say vulgar.”
“Don’t go that far.”
“Ahaha,” she laughed.
“And anyway, wouldn’t it be a good idea to do something commonplace this time around? It’s not all about our visitors, we need to enjoy our day, too… Oh. Come to think of it─Senjogahara didn’t participate in the culture festival either.”
Neither last year, nor the year before.
Well, it isn’t just the culture festival. Anything you could call an event, anything other than regular classes, Senjogahara basically skips. Sports day, of course, but also school trips, field trips, educational visits, the whole bunch of them. Her doctor forbids her from partaking in any strenuous activity─or something. It seemed strange now that I thought about it. Strenuous exercise, I could understand, but the weird nuance of “strenuous activity”─
But if─
If that wasn’t some illusion on my part.
If Senjogahara does not weigh anything.
That ban would definitely apply to any activity at all outside of the classroom, including P.E., where she was liable to come in contact with a large, unspecified number of people.
“Are you that interested in Senjogahara?” Hanekawa asked.
“Not really, but─”
“Well, boys do like girls who’re prone to illness. Ugh, yuck. Filthy, filthy,” she teased me. She sounded more sincere than usual, though.
“Prone to illness, huh?”
Sure, she was prone to it.
But was that really an illness?
Was illness it?
Her body being weak, and her being light as a result, made sense─but that went beyond such an explanation.
Thin girl or not, a human being had fallen from close to the top of the stairs to the landing. Normally, it was a situation where even the person catching her could get hurt pretty badly.
And yet─there had been barely any impact.
“But don’t you know Senjogahara better than I do, Araragi? Why ask me? I mean, you’ve been in the same class three years in a row, haven’t you?”
“If you put it that way, yes─but I thought a girl might know another girl’s circumstances a bit better.”
“Circumstances…” Hanekawa chuckled drily. “If a girl had any, wouldn’t that be the last thing I should go around telling a boy?”
“True,” I said. Of course it was. “So, um, think of this as the class vice president asking the class president a question, as the class vice president. What kind of person is Senjogahara?”
“So that’s your move.”
Hanekawa stopped scribbling out the list she had been making as we conversed (endlessly jotting down and erasing candidates since “haunted house” and “cafe”) and crossed her arms in thought. “Because her family name means ‘battlefield,’ it might make her seem fraught with danger at first, but she’s actually a problem-free model student. She’s smart, and she takes, say, her cleaning duty seriously.”
“I’m sure. Even I can tell that much. I want to know something I can’t figure out on my own.”
“But we’ve only been in the same class for about a month. I guess I really don’t know her. We had Golden Week off in there, too.”
“Yeah, Golden Week.”
“Hm? Did something happen then?”
“Nope. Keep going.”
“Ah…all right. Senjogahara doesn’t talk much─and it seems like she doesn’t have any friends. I’ve tried talking to her a number of times, but it’s like she’s put up these walls around her.”
“……….”
What could I say, Hanekawa lived up to her caring reputation. Of course, that was why I was asking her.
“It’s─a tough case,” she said. In a grave tone. “Maybe it’s because of her illness. She was so much more cheerful and energetic in middle school.”
“In middle school? Wait, Hanekawa, you and Senjogahara went to the same middle school?”
“What? Isn’t that why you’re asking me?” Hanekawa made a face like she was the one who never saw it coming. “Yes, we’re from the same middle school. Kiyokaze Public Middle School. We used to be in different classes back then, too, but─Senjogahara was famous.”
More famous than you? I almost said that, but I caught myself in time. Hanekawa hated being treated as famous more than anything. Personally, I thought she needed to be more self-aware, but she seemed to think of herself as “a regular girl who had nothing to recommend her but being on the serious side.” She wholeheartedly bought the cant that anyone who tried hard enough did well in school.
“She was pretty, and she was a good athlete, too,” Hanekawa said.
“An athlete…”
“She was the star of the track team. Some of her records should still be standing.”
“The track team, huh?”
In other words.
She wasn’t like that in middle school. Cheerful and energetic─two more qualities I couldn’t imagine from the Senjogahara I knew, to be honest.
“So I did hear a lot about her,” Hanekawa told me.
“Like what?”
“How nice and sociable she is. How kind she is to everyone alike, all this almost excessive talk about her being a good, hardworking person. Like how her father is some big shot at a foreign-owned company, but her not being stuck-up one bit despite living in an amazing mansion and being amazingly rich. How despite her greatness, she still reaches for greater heights.”
“She sounds like some kind of superwoman.”
Those stories must have been only half-serious.
Rumors are rumors.
“That was all back then, of course,” Hanekawa noted.
“…Back then.”
“I did hear after starting high school that she’d fallen ill─still, to be frank, when we became classmates this year I was shocked. She wasn’t someone who would sit in the corner of the classroom like that, even by accident.”
Though it had been just my image of her, Hanekawa added.
It certainly had been just her image.
People change.
Your middle school days and high school life are worlds apart. That went for me, and for Hanekawa, too. It had to be the same for Senjogahara. She must have gone through a lot, and maybe it was true that she was simply ill. Maybe she’d lost her radiant personality for no other reason. Maybe she’d lost a lot of her fill of cheer. When your body weakened, your spirit tended to sag too, especially if you used to be active. So Hanekawa’s speculation was probably on the mark.
“But─and I probably shouldn’t be saying this─Senjogahara…” resumed Hanekawa.
“What?”
“Compared to then, she’s so much prettier now.”
“………”
“Her presence is so─evanescent.”
The words were enough to silence me.
That…
Evanescent presence.
As if─she had none.
Like a ghost?