by Nisioisin
That day could have arrived.
The thought struck me, and in turn, drove home another. Maybe I shouldn’t be attending school without feeling much of anything.
If the teacher wasn’t there yet when I got back to the classroom, I’d ask Hanekawa. Did my failure to be grateful for everyday life mean that I was like a stone, or that I was made of wood?
Though if stone can become statue─and wood a shrine, maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing.
“Huh? What the…this rock.”
And that’s when I noticed.
It was the texture that did it, though I hadn’t noticed two years earlier. No question about it, though, this texture, this feel.
“It’s concrete?”
001
I don’t mean to sound like a whiner, but in early May, in other words around the beginning of Golden Week, when a strange fate bound me to Hitagi Senjogahara, I was both mentally and physically spent. Mentally and physically spent, or beaten to a pulp─at any rate, I was a mess.
Or should I say a bloody mess─such a mess that the idea of an ordinary life didn’t even seem real to me anymore.
Only the deck separates us from hell─I believe fishermen on the high seas use that expression, but it seems like pretty much the same thing on land.
Only the ground separates us from hell.
I’d become painfully aware─how unreliable the ground we walk upon is, how fragile the Earth’s crust, how easily it can give way.
I’d become aware of it along with the pain.
I had come to know how precariously balanced it all is─the road I blithely take to school, the road I blithely take home, how blithely it might all collapse.
Come to know?
Uh-uh.
I don’t know anything─I don’t mean to sound like Tsubasa Hanekawa, the girl with the mismatched wings, but I really only know what I know, and what I know is that I’m a fool.
Hitagi Senjogahara.
My classmate, who some kids called the Cloistered Princess, well, she knew how fragile everyday life could be long before I learned that lesson.
You could say she’d had no choice but to learn it from her life, her lifestyle. Even lending half an ear to the more restrained rumors I’d heard about the fraying tightrope of her life thus far was enough to scare me half out of my wits.
“To begin with, it’s a mistake to imagine that there’s a wall between the ordinary and the extraordinary─you have to distinguish between the two, of course, you can’t go on living if you don’t, but they’re contiguous─here and there are connected,” she said flatly, in an even, level tone devoid of emotion. “It’s not a question of above or below─you don’t fall from the ordinary into the extraordinary, and you don’t crawl up out of the extraordinary to the ordinary. It’s more like you’re walking along and suddenly you’re somewhere else, somewhere you don’t recognize…”
Like straying from the path?
You’re walking along the sidewalk when suddenly you realize that you’ve stepped out into the street without knowing it─her analogy made sense, more or less.
It’s certainly true.
That if there were no guardrails or crosswalks, there’d be no distinction between the sidewalk and the street.
“Right. And before you know it you’ve been in an accident─though between the car and the pedestrian, who’s to say which is ordinary and which is extraordinary. And there are things like your bicycle, Araragi, that blithely move between the street and the sidewalk…”
Strictly speaking, it contravenes the traffic laws to ride your bicycle on the sidewalk, but then again, from the cars’ perspective it’s a pain in the ass to have people riding in the street. Modern problems, right?
“Yup. In other words, you can still get into an ‘accident’ even if the ground you’re walking on doesn’t collapse, even if you keep to the straight and narrow─and not because you’ve lost your footing and fallen from the ordinary into the extraordinary. But you know, Araragi,” continued Senjogahara without much in the way of emotion. “Sometimes you fall from ordinary into ordinary. And sometimes you crawl up out of the extraordinary and find that wherever you are now is extraordinary too.”
002
“Ah, that must be it. I’ve been feeling kind of nauseous, but now it makes sense, it’s because I’ve been walking with you, Araragi.”
“Wha?! You trying to breach my defenses with some inner monologue about an epiphany you supposedly just had?!”
May ninth.
Tuesday evening─I was on the way back from that ruined cram school with Hitagi Senjogahara. Like a proper gentleman, my intention was to escort the young lady to her door, but her attitude was intensely harsh and dreadfully prickly.
“What’s that? You can’t go around listening to other people’s inner monologues, Araragi. Were you raised in a barn or something?”
“I didn’t go anywhere, your shit-talking came to me!”
“Feh. And I meant it as a compliment.”
“Don’t start acting like some cynical character! I can give you the benefit of the doubt till the cows come home, but there’s no way ‘being with you makes me feel nauseous’ could be a compliment!”
“I wonder, do you think it might be morning sickness?”
“So being with me makes you feel pregnant?!”
No.
That still didn’t sound like a compliment.
“It was just a token of my desire to tout your manliness to the wider world.”
“That’s one hell of a negative campaign. That’s only promoting my cons.”
“But you know, Araragi, your own inner monologue’s been making a real racket this whole time.”
“Huh? That’s odd, I could’ve sworn I was talking with you…”
Felt like I was taking a wound about once every five seconds.
What the hell was I chatting with?
A girl, or a sword?
“…”
Well.
Nevertheless, a thoroughly gentlemanly interpretation would be that this attitude of Hitagi Senjogahara’s─of this classmate of mine─was understandable. I really did have to plumb the uttermost depths of gentlemanliness, but I managed to understand it.
She’d been in constant misery, after all─so miserable that she couldn’t even experience misery.
Misery so constant that she wasn’t even numb anymore, she’d become an addict.
The misery of illness.
She’d been constantly struggling with illness─and thanks to her accidental brush with me the previous day, a period had been put at the end of that sentence of struggle.
Though saying it was thanks to her brush with me sounds kind of self-aggrandizing. Even if she’d never met me, I’m sure she would’ve rescued herself from her own plight eventually─but that’s neither here nor there.
With Oshino’s help, we’d more or less taken care of her aberration-based malady─that had been just last night, and today we’d gone to see him again to tie up the loose ends, or to deal with the final cleanup, or to take care of the last few minor issues that had cropped up.
And now we were headed home.
For Senjogahara, it was all so new─it made sense that she couldn’t just turn off this prickly personality, cultivated to combat her illness, like flipping a light switch. As her friend, I simply prayed that at some point her thorns would be blunted.
“But you know, they say that you really learn to feel grateful for good health when you recover from an illness, but after having been sick for so long, even ‘walking along’ like this feels totally novel to me.”
“Hmm, I bet.”
“I feel like I’m in a completely different world.”
“A different world, huh?”
The part about walking feeling novel sounded like an exaggeration, but maybe that was her genuine impression after having been mired in fakeness.
Incidentally, I’d ridden my bike to the ruined cram school the night before, but
that day I walked there and back with her. Circumstances─or inconveniences stemming from the previous night’s resolution had ruled out my bike.
Happily, those inconveniences had been taken care of once and for all, so starting the next morning I’d be riding my beloved mountain bike around town again, the thought of which made me want to skip all the way home.
But I couldn’t even imagine the lengths to which Senjogahara, walking along beside me, would go to mock me if I did, so I settled for walking.
“By the way, Araragi. Since by some miracle you’re walking with a girl, how about you walk between her and the street. You really are a tactless piece of shit, aren’t you?”
“…”
I didn’t even have to skip for her to mock me.
She was right, though, I was being thoughtless, so I went around to stand on her left.
And I told myself, What’s this, she’s trying to raise me to be a proper gentleman, so it didn’t even hurt my feelings.
“Do you mind not standing on my left? I see what you’re up to, you’re after my heart.”
“…”
She’d set me up.
It was a little too predictable.
As her friend I’d wanted to pray for her thorns to be blunted, but never mind the prayer, the friend part was starting to come into question.
“You seem plenty lively,” I said. “Maybe you don’t need me to walk you all the way home. See you around…”
“What are you talking about? If you’re going to walk me home, walk me all the way home. What if word got out that a boy only walked Hitagi Senjogahara partway home? My reputation as the Cloistered Princess would be ruined.”
“Self-involved much?”
“If you bail on me here, I’ll spread the rumor that you tried to kill me.”
“I see you’re not too worried about other people’s reputations.”
Plus, who the hell would believe it?
I’m not exactly renowned as an assassin.
“You don’t have anyone to spread rumors to anyway.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll just mutter endlessly to myself about it in our classroom and all around school.”
“Hard not to worry about a girl like that.”
I’ll walk you home already, I shrugged.
I’d intended to do it out of the goodness of my heart, but it somehow ended up feeling more like an obligation─that was fine, though, it’s not like I had anything else to do.
I didn’t care to be “silenced” for saying the wrong thing like the day before─I’d already given her back the arsenal of office supplies I’d confiscated.
“Now then… What about it, I wonder.”
“Hm? What about what?”
“Uhh, give me a second. I’ll think of a way to put this that even Araragi will be able to understand.”
“How about thinking of a way to put it that won’t piss Araragi off instead.”
“Look, Mister Oshino demanded a fee for this, right?”
“Oh. Yup.”
One hundred thousand yen.
It might not be a huge sum in comparison to the five million that I owed him, but it was still a lot for a high school girl.
The thing that somehow felt worst about it was that one hundred thousand yen seemed calculated to be just within reach, even considering Senjogahara’s family circumstances─it made you think I’ll work it out somehow.
“Do you have any savings or anything?” I asked.
“None at all. In fact I’m in the red.”
“Huh? Your parents would be one thing…but you, yourself? Not counting Oshino?”
“Uh huh. My team finished last year’s pennant race with a four-game deficit.”
“Do you own a professional baseball team or something?”
She was a multi-millionaire in that case.
Just pay off the hundred thousand right now.
Put it on your credit card.
But even if she didn’t have other debts, I believed the part about not having any savings─in which case Senjogahara was going to have to find a way to save up a hundred thou.
“I guess I’ll just have to get a part-time job at a fast food joint like Mister Oshino said.”
“Well, he didn’t say anything to either of us about a deadline, so I don’t think you need to be too worried about coming up with a plan to get the money.”
“Unlike you, Araragi, I try to be scrupulous about money.”
“Don’t just assume that I’m careless with it.”
“If I’m going to default on my loans, I’ll default on them properly, and if I’m going to pay them off, I’ll pay them off properly.”
“…”
Is there a proper protocol for defaulting on your loans?
In any case, I had a hard time picturing Senjogahara working part-time at a fast food joint…
“Hi, welcome. You’re taking this to go?”
“Offer them the option to stay. Don’t be so eager to send ’em on their way.”
“Would you like fries with that?”
“Why say it like a native English speaker?”
“Would you like some potato with that?”
“Now it sounds like I’m going to get a raw potato…”
“Hmm. Sounds like I’m not cut out after all for a part-time jibe.”
“If it’s jibes we’re talking about, you’re cut out for overtime.”
And then─something occurred to me.
Something I’d talked about with Hanekawa the previous month, about how Oshino’s “line of work” was collecting tales of aberrations and selling them off for a pretty penny…
“Senjogahara. Do you know any scary stories or anything?”
“Sure, if you count walking with you like this.”
“That doesn’t count.”
“Then no, I don’t.”
What a harpy.
I’ve heard of abusing the kindness of others, but being abused before you’ve even gotten the chance to be kind? A rare bird indeed.
I said, “Listen, I was just thinking. As an expert, Oshino’s doing his part to collect tales of aberrations─so if you know any unusual ones, any rare urban legends or anything, you might be able to take care of your debt that way.”
“Hmmm, like a barter, you mean. That’s not a bad idea, Araragi, especially given that it came from you. I shall grant you my praise.”
“…”
A simple thank you would’ve sufficed.
Of all possible expressions of thanks, “I shall grant you my praise” has to be the least gratifying to receive.
“Unfortunately, though, I don’t know any above and beyond the one I personally experienced.”
“I don’t think there’s any above or beyond when it comes to aberrations.”
“Ooh, thy words come from on high. Not for nothing has he associated with the king of aberrations, his esteemed lordship Araragi’s pronouncement is precious, so very precious.”
“Esteemed lordship…”
“Indeed, from the lofty perch whence his lordship condescends to view the world, all aberrations, all mysterious phenomena, must appear equal, but for a lowly worm like myself, crawling through the mire, the difference is quite pronounced, O Araragi the Great.”
“O? The Great?”
Hmm, she was usually domineering, but this submissive act really worked for her…
“Greek mythology tells of Ajax the Great and Ajax the Lesser, but what a title to append to a person’s name…” she observed. “I would never call anyone the Lesser.”
“Sure, calling someone the Great is all well and good, but Lesser is just cruel.”
“Isn’t it, Araragi the Tiniest?”
“My name’s one thing, but if you’re talking about my height I must protest in the strongest possible terms!”
“What, should I call you The Grand Araragi, then? O Grand Araragi.”
“…”
Obsequiousness suited her…
This could
be a problem.
“Anyway, I don’t know any tales of aberrations. I’m fundamentally no good with scary stories. Even worse than I am with mindless labor, so I guess I just need to find a part-time job.”