by Nisioisin
“Answer me. Do you love me?”
“……”
“What’s wrong? You’re not going to answer me? Hold on, Araragi, could it be that you don’t love me?”
This was harassment… Ultimate harassment…
“I-I love you…” I said.
“Oh.” Senjogahara didn’t even smile. Ultimate expressionlessness… “I love you too, Araragi.”
“Well…thank you very much.”
“Not at all.”
…Wait a sec.
So she was unfazed by this?
Totally unfazed that she was having this conversation in front of her real-life father? No, never mind. If it meant being able to harass me, she didn’t mind taking collateral damage.
In which case, I thought, furtively casting a sidelong glance at the driver’s seat (too furtively for head-on to even be an option). Senjogahara’s father, however, had barely reacted. Driving occupied his full attention. What a cool guy… Our jeep seemed to be driving toward the highway. Highway… Were we headed somewhere far? Well, if we weren’t, not even Senjogahara would bring her father along on our date, I wanted to think…
Ten minutes later, the jeep did get on the highway. There was no escaping now. Not that I had any thoughts of escaping to begin with, really.
“You’re awfully quiet, Araragi. You’ve hardly opened your mouth, when you’re always so voluble. Are you in a sucky mood today?”
“Forget my mood…”
“Oh. Your IQ’s what’s sucky.”
“You couldn’t resist taking advantage of my confusion, could you?!”
“You’re as spry as ever with the comebacks, at least. Fine, then. As an act of kindness, I’ll introduce a topic of conversation myself. All you need to do is reply,” Senjogahara said. “What about me do you love?”
“I definitely know what about you I don’t love!”
What was she up to?
In fact, it felt like this entire date was a grand harassment plot designed to pit me.
I was starting to want to escape.
“Damn…” I muttered. “And I was actually looking forward to this… It almost felt like a dream come true!”
“Dream? Oh, don’t exaggerate,” Senjogahara said blankly. “You know, there’s no ‘m-e’ in ‘drea’… Wait, how did that go again?”
“Right now I’m wishing there was no ‘I’…”
Both were in “nightmare,” of course.
Thus a new saying was born.
“Araragi, I can tell that you’re suffering… It’s so vexing that all I can do is cheer you on from the sidelines.”
“No, you know what, I think you can also apologize…”
But.
An apology wasn’t going to do anything for me.
If apologies were all it took, who needed the police?
“And I’m not suffering,” I said, “so much as feeling very, very exhausted.”
“U V-W-X.”
“Wha? Oh, I see…”
I wasn’t in the mood to laugh for her, though.
There was no room in my heart for it.
At any rate.
“Hey, Senjogahara… Seriously, what do you think you’re doing?”
“Senjogahara? Are you referring to me when you say that, or to my dad?”
“………”
This woman… If it’s the last thing I do─
No, I needed to calm down. Giving voice to my thoughts now meant a breakup for sure…
“Araragi has something to say to you, Dad.”
“Miss Hitagi! I have something to say to you, Miss Hitagi!”
I dared not address her any more casually.
Miss Hitagi.
Just the other day, Kanbaru and I had this same moment where we decided to call each other by our first names. Who could have guessed that the same scene would play itself out like this with my actual girlfriend?
“What could it be, Araragi?”
“……”
You’re not going to say mine back?
Not that I cared.
“So, Miss Hitagi. I’ll ask you once again… Tell me. What do you think you’re doing? What are you planning?”
“I’m not planning anything. Anyway, Araragi. You know the famous mystery writer Agatha Christie, don’t you? If you rearrange the letters in her name, you get ‘a hag is theatric.’ Do you think that was on purpose?”
“Who cares about that! If anyone’s a theatric hag, it’s you!”
“I can’t believe you’d say that about me in front of my parent.”
“Urk…”
It was a trap!
I fell right into it!
“Dad, it seems like your daughter is a theatric hag.”
And now she reporting it to him…
Daddy Senjogahara, as always, had no reaction.
Perhaps he was already used to this kind of act from his theatric hag. Yes, now that I thought about it, she was his daughter…
There was no point in getting so upset, then.
She was making me dance like her little monkey, but no song was playing.
“Oh. You’ve gone quiet again. Did I bully you too much?” she said, looking at me. “You react in such good ways that it makes me want to keep putting you down.”
“That line makes me feel more down than anything else you’ve said yet…”
Honestly.
All right then, I’d try a counterattack.
I wanted to see Senjogahara feeling put down for once.
“So what about me do you love?” I asked.
“How kind you are. How cute you are. How you’re like my prince who comes dashing in to save me whenever I’m in trouble.”
“My bad!”
Why did I ever think I could fight back?
This wicked woman didn’t just have a leg up on me when it came to this, she had a mannequin factory’s worth of legs up on me. Why try to fight her ill will with ill will?
Senjogahara was calmness personified.
Did she have no emotions?
Meanwhile, even though I knew that her reply was just a riposte to my harassment, my heart was hammering…
“I don’t understand… Why… Where did I go wrong to be walking down this path of thorns…”
“What’s wrong with a path of thorns? Elegantly walking down a path filled with roses in bloom is such a gorgeous and beautiful image.”
“Don’t give it a nice spin!”
“In the language of flowers, roses mean─a foolish man.”
“Liar! Stop making stuff up just because you feel like it!”
“By the way,” Senjogahara said. She hopped between subjects as she pleased. “By the way, you garba…sorry, Araragi.”
“Did you nearly call your own boyfriend ‘garbage’?”
“What are you talking about? I wish you wouldn’t make such groundless accusations. Anyway, how did you do on the skills test the other day?”
“Hunh?”
“You remember how I minded you, at my home, the two of us alone, day and night?”
“………”
Why phrase it that way…
Why bring up being at her place in her father’s absence in front of the man himself?
“All the tests came back last weekend,” she said, “but you’ve avoided talking about it. I assumed that meant your results were absolutely miserable, so I pretended not to care, but I asked Hanekawa today and it sounds like you didn’t do so bad?”
“Hanekawa?”
“She’s tight-lipped, so of course I couldn’t get out the particulars, but she’d tell me if you actually failed.”
“………”
Senjogahara must have asked in some awful way.
When Hanekawa turned the talk to Senjogahara in front of the school gates, I did think it was a bit unnatural, but now it made sense. That was the background.
I’d told Hanekawa about my skills test results at the bookstore yesterday… But regardless of Senjogahara’s phras
ing, I probably was being a bit ungrateful not to speak a word of it to her after all she’d done. I’d somehow demurred thanks to the university issue, which I’d also discussed with Hanekawa.
“Why are you being so reluctant?” she pressed. “Now hurry up and give me the exact scores. If you put on airs, then I’ll bend every joint in your body backwards until you paradoxically look kind of cool.”
“It won’t look cool, in any way!”
“It would look uncool?”
“‘Uncool’ doesn’t begin to describe it!”
“It would look ‘lol’?”
“It’d be no laughing matter!”
“So hurry up and tell me if you don’t want to walk around in a back bridge for the rest of your life.”
“If I had every joint in my body bent backwards, I’d be even worse off!”
I would die.
I would die about five times over before she was done.
“But yeah, I should have told you earlier. Sorry, okay? I did better than I thought. Even at math, which I was always strongest in. It’s all thanks to you. Thank you, Senjogahara.”
“Dad, Araragi is thanking you about something, won’t you listen?”
“Thank you, Miss Hitagi!”
Holy mackeroo.
In any case, I gave her my detailed scores for our six courses in five subjects. Nodding uh huh, she had me tell her which questions I got wrong, what I didn’t understand, and so on… I was a little surprised to realize that she seemed to remember every question on the tests we took. Then again, she was gifted enough to get the seventh highest score in our school year even while fussing over me…so maybe my surprise was misplaced.
We were finally having something resembling a regular conversation between students.
I could relax a little, even in front of Daddy Senjogahara.
This was my chance to come across as a serious guy.
“It’s best, though,” remarked Senjogahara, “if we compared answers immediately after a test. But maybe it’s unfair to you to demand that much so soon… Anyway, you got decent scores. That’s a little unexpected, even if I instructed you myself.”
“Unexpected, huh?”
“Yes. It’s such an unfunny punch line for you.”
“I didn’t have you teach me for the laffs!”
“I was looking forward to a development like, ‘He studied so hard but ended up doing worse than usual!’ I’m disappointed in a way.”
“And you don’t think looking forward to such a development is unfair to me?!”
“Is that so.”
With those words.
Senjogahara plopped her hand down on my leg.
Around my thigh.
……
What was she trying to pull?
By the by, the car we were in may have been a jeep, but it wasn’t that big. The two of us were actually pretty close to each other as we both sat in the back…enough so that our bodies touched when the car turned a corner.
Be that as it may, I didn’t know how to respond to her going out of her way to touch my thigh…
“Well, that was impressive,” she said. “You did a good job.”
As if her right hand’s movement were completely outside her jurisdiction, Senjogahara advanced the conversation without batting an eye. Why didn’t her expression ever change? I had to wonder if she was wearing a well-crafted mask.
“I rarely tell people they did a good job. I wonder how many times I’ve told people that in the past? You know, I might not have since sixth grade, when this classmate who sat next to me won three times in a row at Reversi.”
“That’s ages ago, and it’s not that impressive!”
“I lied.”
“Well, I figured…”
“But it’s true that I rarely praise people.”
“Yeah…I believe you.”
“Of course in this case, I’m only telling myself that I did a good job in a roundabout way. I’m terribly proud that my sage advice lifted up a dummy like you, Araragi.”
“……”
Well.
That was also technically true.
“If I do say so myself,” she added, “how did I ever manage to improve a dummy like you who used to spell ‘mandrill’ as ‘man drill’?”
“I’ve never made that mistake in my life!”
“And it seems like a lot of your wrong answers were due to careless mistakes… Hmm. At this rate, Araragi, you may be able to aim even higher.”
“Even higher─you say.”
College entrance exams.
Post-graduation options.
“Araragi, I don’t mind continuing to help you study as long as that’s what you want.”
“I couldn’t─”
Realistically speaking.
I was still nowhere near the stage where I could tell Senjogahara that I was considering the national university she hoped to get a recommendation to─but that didn’t mean I had any reason to turn down her offer.
“─hope for anything more.”
“Is that so,” Senjogahara said with her composed expression, and nothing more.
A thought ran through my head.
Hanekawa was tight-lipped, plus I had made her promise up, down, and sideways not to tell. There was no way she’d let Senjogahara know about my intentions, but maybe this woman had figured them out anyway.
That would be that. Even if she did know, she seemed ready to wait until I told her myself─
It was like we could communicate wordlessly, which felt good.
“……”
More importantly, not satisfied with touching my thigh, Senjogahara started to caress it, working all the way to my inner thigh. What could it mean?
Wasn’t this like groping?
Is it something you did in front of your father?
…Well, behind your father, to be precise.
“In that case,” she said, “you’ll be studying at my place every day.”
“E-Every day?!”
I never wordlessly communicated that to her!
Wait, hold on…
Could that be how much I needed to study? But every day… Every single one? I did study during classes, didn’t I? Was I going to have to after school and on Sundays as well?
“What? Is something the matter, Araragi?”
“W-Well…I was just thinking that I guess smart people do study that much.”
“Nope. I don’t, it’d be a pain. It’s a program designed for you, who else.”
“………”
A natural…
She with the seventh best grades in my year just told me that studying was a pain…
“Smart people are smart from before they study,” she said. “Grades only measure your ability to understand and memorize.”
“Huh… Oh, but what about Hanekawa? She said she comes down with a headache if she doesn’t study, or something.”
“What she means by ‘study,’ Araragi, is sadly on a different level from what we mean by it.” Senjogahara paused before continuing, “Hanekawa is the real deal. She exists in a different world than the one you and I live in.”
“…Huh.”
So─even Senjogahara saw her that way.
So there was a divide.
Seventh in our year, and first in our year.
Both in the single digits, but a difference that vast existed.
“The real deal─huh.”
“Maybe more. Unreal, or ‘monster’─might be a better way to put it. I mean, doesn’t it creep you out? When someone is that sharp, we’re no longer talking about wits.”
Senjogahara’s usual venom─
This didn’t sound like it.
She was always this way, somehow, when it came to Hanekawa.
It wasn’t antipathy, but─