Kizumonogatari

by Nisioisin

“It’s strange that you don’t have any friends when you’re this easy to talk to. Why don’t you make some?”

  It was a direct question.

  She probably didn’t mean ill. I knew that much.

  I hesitated to give an equally direct answer: The issue wasn’t my not making friends, it was my not being able to make any.

  Which is why─I gave that answer.

  “Making friends would lower my intensity as a human.”

  “…What?” Hanekawa asked with a confounded expression. “Sorry, I don’t really understand.”

  “Er… Well, you know, it’s like…”

  Crap.

  I had tried to say something cool, but didn’t have anything to follow it up with.

  “In other words, if I had friends, I’d have to start worrying about them, right? If my friends were hurt, I’d feel hurt too, and if they felt sad, I’d feel sad too. You end up with more weak points, so to speak. I think that’s the same as becoming weaker as a person.”

  “…But you have fun when your friends have fun, and you’re happy when your friends are happy, so it’s not all about becoming weaker, is it? You might gain more weak points, but you’d gain advantages, too.”

  “No,” I replied, shaking my head, “I’d feel envious when my friends were having fun, and jealous when they were happy.”

  “…How petty of you,” she nailed me.

  Leave me alone.

  “Even if what you said was true, that would average out to zero,” I said. “It wouldn’t make a difference whether you had friends or not. No─there are more bad things that happen in this world than good─so it’d be a net negative in the end, wouldn’t it?”

  “Now that’s a cynical thing to say.”

  Hanekawa took back what she said about me being easy to talk to.

  What a limited-time evaluation, I thought─but that was fine.

  It’s best to clear up those kinds of misunderstandings as soon as possible.

  “You see, I want to become a plant,” I said.

  “A plant?”

  “That way I wouldn’t have to talk. Or walk, either.”

  “Hmm.” Hanekawa did give me a cursory nod. “But you still want to be a living thing.”

  “Huh?”

  “In that case, you normally say that you want to become something inorganic. Like stone or iron.”

  I felt as if something unexpected had been pointed out to me.

  I wasn’t lying─I had honestly felt for a long time that I wanted to become a plant─but I hadn’t anticipated a counterargument from that angle.

  I see. Inorganic, huh?

  She was right, plants are alive.

  “I was thinking of going to the library,” Hanekawa said.

  “Hm?”

  “While I was talking to you, I started to feel like I wanted to go to the library.”

  “……”

  What sort of mental circuitry was I dealing with?

  She did say that she was going to go home eventually, so she must not have had any particular plans. While she had time, just as I did, you could either kill it wandering around outside of school or go to the library.

  Maybe that was the wall separating the flunkeys from the model students.

  “It’ll be closed tomorrow because it’s a Sunday, so I need to go by there today.”

  “Hunh.”

  “Do you want to come with me?”

  “Why?” I asked with a sarcastic laugh.

  The library.

  I didn’t even know we had one of those things in our town.

  “What’re you going to do at the library?”

  “What else? Study.”

  “‘What else’?” This time I was flabbergasted. “Sorry, but I’m not enough of an oddball to study on my own during spring break when we don’t even have homework.”

  “But we’ll be taking entrance exams only next year, you know?”

  “Entrance exams… Just graduating seems like a shaky prospect for me. It’s too late for me, I’m a lost cause. The most I can do is try not to be late for school too often next year.”

  “…Hm,” Hanekawa mumbled, almost as if bored.

  Why, I wondered. It couldn’t be that she wanted me to come with her. But Hanekawa didn’t say anything more.

  Oh, well.

  I knew she wasn’t some proud, self-important character, but I didn’t know what she was.

  The light had been going from red to green to red again.

  Now it was red.

  I thought that next time it turned green would be when I should leave─yes, that would be the perfect time.

  I was sure Hanekawa thought the same.

  She wasn’t someone who couldn’t suss the mood.

  “Araragi, do you have a cell phone?”

  “Well, yeah. Of course.”

  “Can I borrow it?” she asked, then held out her hand.

  I didn’t know what she was planning on, but I obliged, taking my phone out of my pocket and handing it to Hanekawa.

  “Oh, isn’t this a new model?” she said.

  “I upgraded just the other day. It’s my first new one in two years, so it has all these new features I don’t even know how to use.”

  “You’re still young, don’t be so pathetic. If you’re saying things like that now, civilization is going to pass you by all the more once you become an adult. If you’re already on the wrong side of the digital divide, you won’t even be able to live a decent life in the future.”

  “Well, in that case, I guess I’ll have to go live up in a mountain somewhere. Then, once civilization crumbles, I’ll come back to this town.”

  “Exactly how long do you plan on living?” Was I immortal or what, she sighed.

  Moments after our exchange, Hanekawa began messing with my phone.

  While she may have been a class president among class presidents, the very picture of a model student, she was still a high school girl, and thus ridiculously fast at typing on a phone.

  It wasn’t as if my phone contained any kind of personal information that I didn’t want other people seeing, but…don’t be messing with people’s phones, all right?

  Or, I wondered, could she actually be suspecting me of having used my phone’s camera to sneak a picture when her skirt was flipped? If so, I wanted her to scour the thing. I wanted to wipe out such a disgraceful suspicion.

  But at any rate, it must be hard being a girl, worrying about so many things all the time. If a guy had his fly open, all he had to do was claim that he was being a Sexy Commando or something.

  …Or maybe not?

  “Thanks. Here, you can have it back.”

  Hanekawa returned my phone to me in no time at all.

  “No pics, right?” I prompted.

  “Huh?” She tilted her head. “Pics?”

  “…Er, nothing.”

  Oops.

  Had I misread her?

  Then what exactly had she been up to?

  Hanekawa seemed to pick up on my puzzlement, because she pointed to the phone that I still held, unable to return it to my pocket, and said, “I put my number and email address in there.”

  “You did what?”

  “Too bad for you. You just made a friend.”

  And then…

  Before I could say a single word in response, she ran to the other side of the crossing; the light had turned green without my noticing.

  That was how I was planning on leaving, and now it felt like she’d stolen my thunder─wait. Wasn’t she going to go to the library? No, since she’d decided to go to the library mid-conversation with me, her heading in the opposite direction now wasn’t strange at all.

  When she crossed to the other side, Hanekawa turned back to me and waved a “See you later.”

  I reflexively returned her wave.

  Once she saw me waving my hand (like an idiot, I assume), she turned back around, made a right in front of the school gate, and walked off in a cheerful mood. She soon turned th
e corner and went out of sight.

  After I was sure she was gone, I checked my phone.

  To see it was true.

  A “Tsubasa Hanekawa” had been registered in my contacts list.

  A phone number, and an email address.

  I had never used the contacts feature on my phone before. I remembered all the numbers I needed─though I don’t say this to brag about my memory. It’s not something I could brag about since the only ones I had memorized were my home phone number and my parents’ cell phone numbers. My sent and received call history was enough for any others.

  I simply didn’t have many friends.

  And that’s how “Tsubasa Hanekawa” became the first number to be registered on my phone.

  “What’s her deal?”

  Her actions─hovered beyond my comprehension.

  A friend?

  Is that what she said? A friend?

  Did she mean it?

  To begin with, while we may have known each other’s names, what was a young lady like her doing casually handing her contact info out to a guy she’d basically spoken to for the first time? Or was I just being old-fashioned about this?

  I didn’t know.

  But as much as I didn’t know, there was one thing I did know now.

  Tsubasa Hanekawa: the model student among model students, the class president among class presidents, not only wasn’t a stuck-up, self-important character─

  “…She’s pretty damn cool.”

  A class president among class presidents.

  Tsubasa Hanekawa: It was her, whom I happened across the afternoon of closing ceremonies, that I would meet again during spring break, though I had no way of knowing it at the time.

  I didn’t even feel a sliver of a premonition.

  003

  And then─

  And then night came, that day’s incident still fresh in my mind.

  Night.

  I was walking around the town after it had become totally dark. While I’d walked, not biked, around school for no particular reason earlier, I now had a clear motive.

  I own two bicycles, by the way.

  One is a granny bike that I use to go to school; the other is my pet mountain bike.

  The latter is my companion to such a degree that I wish I could ride it everywhere, yet at that precise moment, I could not. If my securely locked bicycle, stored in the entrance of my house, was gone, someone in my family would notice that I had left the house.

  Putting aside when I was younger, my family’s current approach to me could be described as completely hands-off.

  You could even say that they’ve decided to neglect me.

  So unlike my two little sisters, I don’t have anything like a cur-few or a ban on going outside at night (not that my sisters care about such rules), but there are times when I want to go out without my family knowing.

  For example, when I want to go buy a porn mag.

  “………”

  No, uh.

  It won’t be a pleasant sight, but allow me to defend myself.

  I couldn’t get the image of Hanekawa’s panties I had seen that afternoon out of my head.

  …Am I digging my grave in quicksand here?

  Either way, that was the truth.

  Though I said that I would likely never forget the image, I didn’t actually expect it to get seared in my memory so vividly.

  Even after I parted ways with Hanekawa that afternoon, her panties stayed with me, never leaving my mind. I had thought at the time that were my retinas to be transplanted to another person, that person would suffer hallucinations of Hanekawa’s panties. Over ten hours later, my hypothesis still obtained.

  Dammit.

  I was sure we’d talked about a lot of things after that, so what was I to make of the fact that her panties had left the strongest impression? While my memories of those panties refused to recede, I’d forgotten nearly everything else.

  This, when she was cool.

  Hanekawa was a cool person!

  That fact only added to a guilt that I had no business bearing.

  It needled my heart.

  Hanekawa was so cool, yet the feelings that I harbored toward her bordered on lust…

  But then again, I wondered.

  How long had it been since I’d last seen panties in the wild? While Naoetsu High may be a prep school, half of its students are still high school girls. Some of them wear their skirts short for fashion reasons. While there were close shaves where I got glimpses, I probably hadn’t seen panties worn on a girl in such a naked and perfect form…even in middle school.

  Thinking back to elementary school… Well, no point in counting those.

  Ah, then it was for the first time in my life…

  I mean, it had felt like an ’80s rom-com manga or something. And in a way I hadn’t even imagined, a flag had popped up for me, like in a dating sim, over Tsubasa Hanekawa, a girl I’d assumed stood beyond my sphere of connections.

  Dammit.

  Wasn’t that foul play? As in, I doubt a girl who saw a boy’s underwear would start feeling the way I did?

  No fair.

  Of course, while I likened it to a sign popping up over her head, on further consideration all that had happened was that the two of us passed by each other.

  We hadn’t even truly met.

  Surely Hanekawa didn’t even remember talking to me a little past noon that day. So there really was no need for me to feel guilty, but…that’s another way I was a petty fellow.

  But anyway… As I finished my dinner, I began to think that I couldn’t leave things as they were. When I realized that I might be living with a guilty conscience for a long time, perhaps for the rest of my life, I shivered.

  A cool person.

  And even if she wasn’t, as “friends.”

  See, I thought, this is why I hate having them─my intensity as a human had dropped considerably.

  I was having to worry about this?

  And that’s why once it was completely dark outside my window, I put the “studying” sign on the door and snuck out of the house.

  To buy a dirty magazine from the one place in town you could call a major bookstore.

  I completed my mission and began to head home, having bought two.

  Naturally, I never try to do something as unmanly (?) as buy a dirty magazine together with a regular book to put on a show for the bookstore employee. I’d buy two magazines rather than do such a thing. That’s the kind of man I am. If Hanekawa is a class president among class presidents, I’m a man among men.

  Though I do check to make sure there isn’t anyone I know in the store, at least.

  Anyway.

  My plan was to read the dirty magazines so thoroughly that the images in my head would be overwritten. It was my own take on the idea Hanekawa must have had when she’d come chasing after me. While I ended up thinking that Hanekawa’s ruse never had a chance of working (though I now realize, that probably wasn’t her intention), overwriting one dirty thought with another was certainly a plan.

  Erasing a memory might be impossible, but overwriting it maybe wasn’t.

  The issue was that it was the only one, unique. If it was one among many, then its presence would fade as a result. There had to be a large difference between naked flesh and photos, but quantity could make up for that.

  Taking the nature of the earlier situation into account, both of the magazines I purchased had a primary focus on high school girls and their underwear. Since I had already bought a number of dirty magazines in the beginning of March, spending any more was a burden on my wallet, to be honest, but desperate times called for desperate measures.

  Better a wallet-ache than a headache. I didn’t have a choice in this matter. I couldn’t allow myself to keep having such indecent thoughts about Hanekawa.

  The guilt would kill me.

  People talk about dying of boredom, but guilt can kill you too.

  Oh, boy.