by Nisioisin
Hitagi Senjogahara.
The girl who is always ill.
She─with no weight.
Rumors are─rumors.
Urban legends.
Street gossip.
Tall tales.
Only half-serious, as it were.
“Oh, yeah. I just remembered,” I said.
“Hm?”
“Oshino wanted to talk to me.”
“Mister Oshino? Why?”
“Well─to help with his work.”
“O…kay?” Hanekawa reacted uncertainly.
She seemed suspicious at my sudden change of topic─or rather, blatant curtailment of it. My uncertain phrasing, “to help with his work,” could only have deepened her suspicion. This, I thought, is why I don’t like dealing with smart people.
Couldn’t she just play along?
Standing up from my chair, I continued a bit forcedly, “So me, I need to leave. Can you take care of the rest, Hanekawa?”
“You can for today if you promise to make up for it. There isn’t any important work left, so I’ll let you go this time. We wouldn’t want to keep Mister Oshino waiting,” Hanekawa was kind enough to say anyway.
Oshino’s name seemed to have worked on her. He had saved her ass, just as he had saved mine, so being ungrateful must have been out of the question. Well, naturally, I’d taken that into account, but it wasn’t a complete lie.
“Then can I pick all of the options for our activity? I’ll have you confirm them later, though.”
“Yeah, I’ll let you handle it,” I said.
“Send my regards to Mister Oshino.”
“I will.”
With that, I stepped out of the classroom.
003
Exiting the classroom and closing the door behind me, I took a step forward, when I heard a voice at my back.
“What were you discussing with Hanekawa?”
I turned to face it.
As I did, I had yet to grasp who it was─the voice was unfamiliar. But I’d heard it somewhere before. Yes, that reedy “I don’t know” that she uttered like some catchphrase whenever a teacher called on her during class─
“Don’t move.”
With her second line, I realized that I was dealing with Senjogahara. I also realized that the moment I turned, Senjogahara, as if aiming through a narrow gap, had stuck a box cutter, blade amply extended, right into my oral cavity.
The blade of a box cutter.
Pressed snugly against the inside of my left cheek.
“…ck!”
“Actually, no. I should have said, ‘You can move, but it would be very risky.’”
Neither held back, nor in a rough manner, but with just the right amount of strength─the blade stretched the flesh of my cheek.
All I could do was open my mouth wide like an idiot and unflinchingly follow Senjogahara’s warning─and stand there immobile.
Scary, I thought.
Not about the box cutter’s blade.
Hitagi Senjogahara, who could do such a thing and glare at me with perfectly unwavering, shudderingly cold eyes─was scary.
So she─
She was someone with such a hazardous gaze.
I was convinced.
Seeing that gaze of hers, I was convinced that the edge of the box cutter nestled inside my left cheek was neither dull from use, nor by any means the spine.
“Curiosity is such a cockroach, isn’t it? Flocking to precisely the secrets that people want untouched. How insufferable. You dare get on my nerves, the trifling insect that you are.”
“H-Hey…”
“What’s the matter? Is the right side feeling lonely? Why didn’t you say so?”
Instead of her right hand which held the box cutter, her left hand rose. It moved so fast I half-expected a slap and braced myself against gritting my teeth, but I was wrong. That wasn’t it.
Senjogahara held a stapler in her left hand.
Before I could make it out clearly, she inserted it into my mouth. Not the entire thing, of course, which would have been preferable─Senjogahara had inserted it as if to clamp my right cheek, ready to staple.
Then, gently─it clamped.
As though to staple.
“K…ha…”
It was the larger side loaded with staples that had been stuck in. My mouth was now a standing-room-only affair, and naturally I couldn’t form any words. With just the box cutter, while moving was out, I might have been able to talk─but I didn’t even want to try now. I didn’t want to think about it.
Inserting a thin and sharp box cutter first to make me open my mouth wide, then immediately following up with a stapler─it was a meticulously planned and dreadfully well-executed feat.
The last time various things had been thrust in my mouth was in seventh grade when I had a cavity on an adult tooth treated, dammit! Ever since, I’ve brushed after every breakfast, lunch, and dinner and chewed xylitol gum tirelessly, just so I’d never have to go through that again, but look where I was.
Talk about the rug getting pulled out from under me.
I blink my eyes─and this happens.
It was difficult to believe that Hanekawa was picking out candidates for the culture festival on the other side of a measly wall when an otherwise nondescript private school hallway formed such a bizarre space.
Hanekawa…
Senjogahara’s family name “might make her seem fraught with danger at first”? She lived up to her name perfectly…
Hanekawa was a worse judge of character than I thought!
“Now that you asked Hanekawa about what I was like in middle school, who’s next? Our teacher, Hoshina? Or would you like to cut straight to the chase and go to our health teacher, Harukami?”
“………”
I couldn’t speak.
However she took that, Senjogahara let out a huge exasperated sigh. “I can’t believe how careless I was. I try to be twice as careful as the average person when I climb stairs, but where did that get me? They’re not kidding when they say a single fart can ruin a hundred days of sermons.”
“………”
Even though I was in a fix, hearing a fair teenaged maiden utter the word “fart” felt wrong to me. Maybe I’m a sweet guy after all.
“An actual banana peel on the floor right then and there. Who would have imagined?”
“………”
My life was now in the hands of a girl who had slipped on a banana peel.
Wait, why was it even lying on a school staircase?
“You’ve noticed, haven’t you,” Senjogahara asked me.
Her gaze was still hazardous.
A cloistered princess? Yeah, right.
“That’s right─I don’t weigh a thing.”
She weighed nothing.
“Well, it’s not as if I don’t at all─a girl my height and body type would have an average body weight in the high forties, in kilograms─”
So fifty kilograms.
My left cheek was pushed outward, and my right cheek was compressed.
“……gh!”
“No funny thoughts. You were imagining me in the nude just now, weren’t you?”
That was completely off the mark, but she was sure sharp.
“An average body weight in the high forties, in kilograms,” Senjogahara insisted.
She wasn’t going to budge on that one.
“But my actual body weight is five kilograms.”
Five kilograms.
Not much more than a newborn baby.
If you think of a dozen-pound dumbbell, that number isn’t quite close to zero, but considering that the mass is distributed across the size of an entire person, in terms of density─of how it realistically feels, it was as good as having no weight.
Catching her would be a piece of cake.
“Now, if you want to be completely accurate, it’s only that a scale displays my weight as five kilos─I personally don’t notice it. Nothing has changed for me from my
high-forties days.”
Did that mean…
Gravity affected her less than a normal person? Not just mass, but volume─if I remembered correctly, the specific gravity of water is 1, and since the human body consists mostly of water, its specific gravity and density is also about 1─in which case, simply put, Senjogahara was only a tenth as dense.
If that was her bone density, she’d get osteoporosis in no time at all. Her heart and her brain wouldn’t function correctly either.
So it couldn’t have been that.
A question of numbers, it wasn’t.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said.
“……”
“Staring at my breasts like that. Disgusting.”
“……ck!”
I wasn’t thinking about that, I promise!
It seemed that Senjogahara was a pretty self-conscious high school girl. Who could blame her, with how pretty she looked? I wished the class president working a wall away from us would take a cue.
“This is why I can’t stand superficial people.”
Clearing up that misunderstanding seemed impossible at the moment─in any case, what I was thinking was that far from being always ill, Senjogahara found herself in a body that completely belied the package description. Weighing five kilos should have made her more than ill, and downright feeble, but not here. On the contrary, if I may, she was like an alien who had come to Earth from a star with ten times the gravity. You’d expect her to have excellent athletic skills, especially if she used to be on the track team. Sure, collisions weren’t her strong suit, but…
“It happened after I graduated middle school and before I came to this high school,” Senjogahara said. “During that fuzzy, in-between period when you’re neither a middle schooler nor a high schooler, nor even on spring recess─I turned into this.”
“……”
“It happened after─I met a crab.”
C-Crab?
Did she just say “a crab”?
A crab, like the ones you eat in the winter?
Those arthropods, classified under Crustacea Decapoda?
“It took my weight away─all of it.”
“……”
“It’s fine, you don’t have to understand. I’m only telling you this because it’d be a huge annoyance if you kept sniffing around. Araragi─listen, Koyomi Araragi.”
Senjogahara spoke my name, and repeated it.
“I weigh nothing─I have no weight. Nothing at all you could call weight. What a fiasco. It’s like I’m a character from a supernatural manga series. Do you like Yosuke Takahashi?”
“……”
“The only person at school who knows about this is our health teacher, Harukami. Just our health teacher Harukami, so far. Not Principal Yoshiki, not Vice Principal Shima, not Irinaka in charge of our year, not Hoshina, our homeroom teacher. Only Harukami─and you, Araragi.”
“……”
“So, what should I do to make you keep my secret to yourself? What should I do, for my own sake? What kind of deal are we going to have to cut to staple your mouth shut?”
A box cutter.
A stapler.
Was she in her right mind? What a way to corner a classmate. Did she still call herself a human being? Knowing that I’d sat in the same room with such a terrifying person for over two years sent a real shiver down my spine.
“The doctor at the hospital says that the cause is unknown─or rather, that there might not be a cause. Such a lame conclusion to come to after fiddling around for ages with a stranger’s body in humiliating ways. You know what he said? ‘It is as it was, as it is now.’ How ridiculous,” Senjogahara said, self-mockingly. “Until middle school, I was a normal, cute girl.”
“………”
Putting aside for now the fact that she called herself cute.
It was true that she made regular visits to the hospital.
Arriving late, leaving early, simply not showing up.
And─the health teacher.
I tried putting myself in Senjogahara’s shoes.
Unlike me, who just coped with it for two brief weeks over spring break, ever since she entered high school, it had stayed that way.
What did she resign herself to?
What did she give up on?
She’d had more than enough time to do so.
“Are you feeling sorry for me? Oh, how generous of you,” Senjogahara spat as if she’d read my mind. Disgusting, I could all but hear her add. “But it’s not generosity that I want.”
“……”
“I want your silence and your indifference, nothing more. If you have those, could you give them to me? You value your cheeks, as free of pimples as they are, don’t you?”
And then.
Senjogahara smiled.
“If you promise me your silence and your indifference, Araragi, then nod twice. I’ll consider any other action, even freezing, as hostile behavior and promptly move to attack.”
There wasn’t a shred of reluctance in her words.
Having no choice, I nodded.
I nodded to her twice.
“There.”
Upon seeing this─Senjogahara seemed to relax.
Despite the fact that I had no choice, that it was neither a transaction nor an agreement and I could only consent to her demand, she seemed to relax when I went ahead and complied.
“Thank you,” she said.
Then she detached the box cutter from the inside of my left cheek and withdrew it slowly, more languidly than cautiously. I did sense from the movement of her hand that she was taking care not to scar me inside my mouth by mistake.
She retracted the box cutter’s blade.
Click-click-click-click.
Next, the stapler.
“…Ngeek?!”
Ka-chunk.
I couldn’t believe it.
The stapler─had clamped down hard. Then, before I could react to the immense pain, she handily popped it out of my mouth.
I crumpled into a ball on the spot.
Cradling my cheek, from outside.
“Gh…urrk…”
“You’re not going to scream? Impressive,” Senjogahara said above me, as if she hadn’t done a thing.
Looking down on me.
“I’ll let you off at that for today. I hate being so lenient, but you did promise, so I ought to show you some good will.”
“…Y-You─”
Ka-chunk.
As if to talk over me, Senjogahara made an overlapping sound with the stapler, clamping it in the air.
A deformed staple fell before my eyes.
I couldn’t help but flinch.
A reflex, if you will.
I’d been classically conditioned in a single go.
“Okay, Araragi. Be sure to ignore me starting tomorrow. Fare thee well!”
With that, uninterested in my response, Senjogahara turned her heels and began walking down the hall. Before I could even get up from my balled position, she turned a corner and vanished from sight.
“Sh-She’s like some devil.”
Our brains were structured in─fundamentally different ways.
Despite the situation and despite her words, some part of me had assumed that she wouldn’t really. In which case, maybe I should be blessing my good fortune that she had chosen the stapler and not the box cutter.
I gently brushed my cheek again, not to ease the pain this time, but to check on it.
“………”
Good.
I was okay, it hadn’t punched through.
Next, I stuck my own finger in my mouth. Using my left hand, since this was my right cheek. It didn’t take long to come upon what I was looking for.
Although I could guess from the sharp pain, which neither vanished nor receded, this did away with my peaceful line of thinking that maybe the first staple actually hadn’t been loaded, that it had been no more than a threat designed to threaten… To be honest, I’d gotten my ho
pes up for that one.