by Nisioisin
“But…” said Sengoku, “I’d be bothering you.”
“Don’t stand on ceremony. I wouldn’t even think of it as a chore, so leave it to me.”
“Oh…then maybe I’ll ask you, Big Brother.”
Sengoku took two small, folded pieces of clothing out from the bag she carried.
Volleyball shorts and a school swimsuit.
“………”
Forget not having thought of them, I’d erased every trace of that business from my memory…
“I washed them, and wanted to give them back to Miss Kanbaru when I saw her…but if you can return them for me, please do. The sooner the better, after all.”
“Yeah…”
What a high bar!
Now this was a trial.
A guy receiving volleyball shorts and a school swimsuit from a middle school girl right outside his high school… If anyone I knew saw me, my nickname would somersault past “Big Brother Koyomi” and be, without question, “Pervert”!
But given our conversation, I couldn’t say no!
If this was a trap someone had set for me, how clever it was! O heavenly lord, the deeds you force upon me!
“O-Okay…I’ll hold onto these.”
Sure that I’d never see another occasion to receive the like, I took the two articles of clothing from Sengoku. As she handed them to me, for a brief moment she seemed somehow reluctant (perhaps she felt that she ought to return them herself, after all), but in the end she let go.
Hmmm.
This was a somewhat strange turn of events, though.
Today─was supposed to become memorable for me.
As our conversation ended, Sengoku began to blush, her eyes to the ground. Freed from the snake aberration, the gloom that enveloped her had thinned, but her naturally quiet nature seemed unchanged.
On a vague impulse.
I reached out toward Sengoku’s bangs.
“…Wha?”
I missed.
My hand touched nothing but air. Sengoku had pulled her downcast head to the side to elude me. I went after her bangs again, on another vague impulse, but this time she took a step back to shun my pursuit.
“…Wh-What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I dunno, just…”
Did she have to act so bothered?
These were quick movements that you’d never expect from the usually mild-mannered Sengoku. They say bangs can diminish your vision, but it didn’t seem to be an issue for her at all.
“…Hmm.”
I thought I’d try something.
I slipped my other hand downward to grab the hem of her one-piece uniform. The way she’d moved to keep me from touching her bangs reminded me of how a grade school girl might evade attempts to flip her skirt, so I was conducting a little experiment.
Yet Sengoku didn’t react to that hand. All she did was tilt her head to the side, as if she found it strange.
A thought came to me that I’d also had the day before.
This girl was far too pure for a middle schooler…
She was defending herself in all the wrong places.
I let go of her uniform right away.
“Facing you,” I said, “feels like a test of my mettle as a man…”
“…Because I don’t talk very much?”
“No, it’s not that…”
Because she doesn’t talk much, huh…
Oh…speaking of which.
“That’s right, Sengoku─there was something I wanted to ask you. May I?”
“Hm? What is it?”
“Nothing big… It’s about Shinobu.”
“Shinobu?”
“You know, that cute little blond girl at the ruined cram school. Maybe I never told you her name. Whatever. Anyway, did she say anything to you when I wasn’t around?”
“………?”
Sengoku made a puzzled face like she didn’t understand the point of my question before going ahead and replying in the negative.
“Uh-uh.”
Okay.
Well, I’d expected as much… I thought there might be some kind of shared ground between two silent girls, but upon further consideration, there was none between Shinobu, who used to be loquacious, and Sengoku, who’d always been taciturn…
Shinobu Oshino.
Blond hair and a helmet with a pair of goggles on top.
The beautiful girl who, along with Mèmè Oshino, my savior, currently called that abandoned cram school home─though their life there was too hollow to describe it as a home.
“That girl…is a vampire, right?” asked Sengoku.
It wasn’t something I could hide if I were to heal the wounds I’d suffered from exorcising her snake, so I’d already told her last night before going to bed with plastic bottles as our pillows. Since she’d been told about Kanbaru’s left arm to an extent as well, I didn’t have to tread lightly on the topic of aberrations around Sengoku.
Except when it came to Hachikuji.
And Hanekawa─but that aside.
“Ah… Well, now,” I answered, “she’s more like a mockery of a vampire than an actual vampire.”
Just as I was more a mockery of a human than an actual human.
That─was who she was.
“So it’s because of her─that you…”
“It wasn’t anything she did,” I denied. “I did it to myself. And─it’d be a mistake to hold aberrations accountable for anything. All they do is exist as they are.”
There’s a reason for every aberration.
It’s as simple as that.
“Yes, you’re…right,” Sengoku agreed with a solemn nod.
She seemed to be thinking about my words in relation to her own case. According to Oshino, hers had quite a different significance from the other instances I’d experienced until then, so it wouldn’t do to generalize…
“But unlike me and Kanbaru, you’ve been completely freed from your aberration. You shouldn’t worry yourself too much about it. All you need to do is go back to living a normal life.”
Because you─can go back.
She had to go back.
“Yes… That’s true, but now, I know that these things happen…that these things exist…and I doubt I can pretend that I don’t.”
“……”
Well, yes─I doubted anyone could.
It wasn’t as if Sengoku was uniquely timid. All in all, not many people are able to fight on a field where the rules of common sense don’t apply. Maybe in that regard, taking a step toward that world and staying there, like Kanbaru and me, was easier on you.
“For the time being,” I advised, “stay the hell away from ridiculous curses─that’s all I can say.”
“Yes…”
“I feel like Oshino said that people who become involved with aberrations are more likely to draw their attention again, but still, it has to do with your mindset. It sounds like things can balance out if you choose to avoid them. Well, just talk to me if anything happens. Did I give you my cell phone number?”
“Oh… No, not yet.”
I don’t have a cell phone, anyway, she said.
Right, maybe she’d told me that before.
“But,” I insisted, “you could still call me on mine. Here, take this down.”
“Okay…”
Sengoku looked bashful.
She also seemed somehow happy. Could it be that getting someone’s cell phone number felt pretty grown-up to her? She was in her second year of junior high, when you start wanting to act more mature. Of course, since I don’t have many friends and can’t deny feeling a little nervous when I exchange numbers even now, it’s not like I had any right to be poking fun at Sengoku.
She wrote my number on a fancy notepad that she carefully placed back in her waist bag. Wearing such a bag definitely clashed with her uniform, but she’d had it on even when I met her in the mountains, so it had to be a favorite item of hers.
“Then─let me give you my home number in return,” she s
aid.
“Much appreciated.”
“If you need help, please call me, okay?”
“Uhh… Do you see that ever happening?”
“Big Brother Koyomi.”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever. I will.”
“You only need to say ‘yes’ once.”
“Do I now? But actually, if you’re ever in serious trouble, it’d be quicker if you went straight to Oshino… Though I guess a middle school girl visiting a shabby old dude unaccompanied is a little much.”
That awful man making an exception for Sengoku and acting oddly generous was still bugging me. It was probably nothing, but I wouldn’t want her going to that abandoned building alone, just in case.
Pedo suspect Mèmè Oshino…
“I-I don’t think…” stuttered Sengoku, “it’d be a problem.”
“Yeah, maybe not. But he just reminded me. We can’t go to him for every little thing that happens─like in that anime, always counting on Doraemon and his secret gadgets will make you as helpless as Nobita.”
“Y…es.” Sengoku nodded. “That amulet Mister Oshino gave us really was like a Doraemon device… Yup, like the Genius Helmet and Technology Gloves.”
“Why go out of your way to choose obscure ones that only ever appeared in the theatrical feature for your comparison?! Why not the Bamboo-Copter or the Anywhere Door?!”
“Wow, your comebacks are always so timely and precise…”
Sengoku seemed impressed.
The light of respect gleamed in her eyes.
What a thing to be respected for…
“By the way,” she continued.
“What?”
“People say that in the movie versions of Doraemon, Giant suddenly becomes a weirdly grownup and good-natured character, but shouldn’t they be saying that about Nobita more than anyone?”
“Where did that even come from?!”
“Huh? I don’t feel like I spoke out of context.”
“It might be connected, but it’s only connected! It’s a total tangent! Why would you go into greater depth about the Doraemon movies?!”
Though she was right, Giant barely grows at all in the films compared to the progress Nobita makes!
“I think,” she said, “Suneo is the one character who never experiences any growth, no matter what.”
“True, given his positioning as the local bully’s sidekick, it’d be hard for him to change, even in a negative direction… Wait, why are we going on about this?!”
At that, Sengoku fell silent.
She wasn’t trying to stifle a laugh this time. She really seemed down. Oh no, maybe I’d gone a little too far… Maybe she’d been trying her best, her quiet-person best to keep the conversation going, and yet, childishly enough, I’d yelled at her even if it was to play the straight man.
“I’m sorry,” Sengoku eventually said.
Agh. I felt awful.
“No, it’s not anything you need to apologize for…”
“I wanted to see how far you’d go making retorts, and I got carried away…”
“Well, if that’s the case, you ought to be saying a lot more sorries!”
She was the one testing me?!
My quipping was unlimited, but my patience was.
Look at this introverted girl, having her fun.
“When I said ‘by the way,’ I actually wasn’t planning on talking about Doraemon.”
“Oh… Aren’t you the little improviser. Okay, start again from there.”
“Okay. By the way.”
“What?”
“Well, it’s about Shinobu.”
Sengoku didn’t seem to know that repetition was key to playing the fool in a comedy duo, so she actually went back to the meat of our conversation instead of continuing to talk about Doraemon.
Hmm. I felt somehow unsatisfied.
If it were Hachikuji, she might have gone beyond repetition and even come up with something snappy to turn the tables.
Maybe we’d touched the limits of Sengoku’s abilities.
“What about her? You two didn’t talk.”
“No, but…” Sengoku said, “that girl was glaring at me the whole time.”
“…? Oh, don’t worry about that. She’s always looking at people that way. She glares like crazy. At me, and at Oshino, and at Kanbaru. It’s not just you, Sengoku.”
Getting stared at by a vampire, even a child vampire, might have been tough on the timid Sengoku. Then again, even I find that gaze dreadful, filled as it is with the kind of spite you’d expect from the classic ghost of Oiwa… So much more Nadeko Sengoku.
But she said, “No. I know that she glares at everyone… But she doesn’t look at me and Miss Kanbaru the same way she looks at you and Mister Oshino─I thought.”
“…Hm?” What the heck? I didn’t get it. “You’re saying she looks at men and women in different ways?”
“Yes… That’s it.”
“Huh.”
“I’m…sensitive to the way people look at me, so I can tell… It felt like for some reason, she hates Miss Kanbaru and me.”
“She hates you? That’s funny.”
Maybe not funny, but strange.
“Impossible” would be another way to put it.
Despite her current cute-kid appearance, on the inside she was an aberration, period, and at bottom she was a vampire, period─she basically wasn’t interested in humans. Whether it was Sengoku or Kanbaru, or me or Oshino, she’d see everyone the same way. I wasn’t sure if she actually differentiated between men and women.
Likes and dislikes, on top of that?
…Well.
I was an exception─maybe.
“But Sengoku, if you say so, I believe you… Why would that be, though? Maybe I’ll try asking Oshino next time I see him.”
“Mister Oshino? You’re not going to ask Shinobu directly?”
“She used to talk a lot, you know,” I said with a bitter smile. It was the only expression I had for the situation, really. “But now she’s closed her heart off and locked it tight. I haven’t heard her voice in over two months now. She’s kept mum the whole time.”
For over two months─ever since spring break.
Not a word had come from her mouth.
I hadn’t checked, because what would be the point, but I assumed it was the same for Oshino.
It couldn’t be helped.
There was no helping it.
“I see…”
“I find it impressive,” I said. “She has to have a lot to say, but she’s keeping it all in. Especially when it comes to me, there’s probably no end to what she’d like to tell me, and yet─”
Like her resentment.
Like her hatred.
She had to be bursting with it─but never put it into words.
Or maybe there were no words for how she felt, but she never confronted me with those unspeakable feelings, either.
“…Isn’t it the other way around?” asked Sengoku, puzzled. “Aren’t you actually the victim─”
“I’m the guilty one,” I interrupted. “I really am when it comes to Shinobu─I was a bigger perpetrator than you were a victim, Sengoku. I’d prefer not to go into details, if we could─but please, at the very least, don’t blame Shinobu for it.”
“Oh, okay…”
Sengoku nodded, but looked somewhat dissatisfied. I couldn’t fault her for not understanding how things stood between Shinobu and me, though. Even I don’t, not all that well.
There is one thing I do get.
I have to devote my whole life to Shinobu─because that’s the only way I, the guilty one, can atone for what I did.
Still─even though it can’t be helped.
Still, I do think.
I can’t help but think.
Will I never hear that vampire’s beautiful voice─ever again?