Nekomonogatari (White)

by Nisioisin

  That gave me an idea, and when I went over, I found it. They weren’t going to be selling pajamas (well, pajama-style sweatshirts and sweatpants) for just a hundred yen, but I was glad to find that they did their underwear. I bought both right away, and I was done shopping.

  But I can’t show underwear I bought at a hundred-yen shop to Araragi, the foolish thought ran through my head as I got on the bus as planned and returned to the abandoned cram school.

  Mister Oshino never gave off any vibes of everyday life, but he was a human, not a vampire, and when I realized he must have spent three months fighting and struggling like this, an odd wave of admiration washed over me.

  Back in the third-floor classroom, I began reinforcing my bed. I used a box cutter to slice up the cardboard, then wrapped two layers around the desk with packing tape. It’s still a cardboard box at the end of the day, you might think, but this made an overwhelming difference in comfort. I wrapped one more layer of cardboard on top just to be sure, completing my bedding.

  All of this had left me quite tired, so I decided to eat.

  I had nothing but preserved foods, which meant I didn’t need to cook.

  Of course, I didn’t forget.

  “Thank you for the meal,” I said.

  If you go far enough back, some kind of life had to be sacrificed to create even preserved food. And so, thank you for the meal.

  No, even if it didn’t contain any morsel of life, the food would become my flesh and blood, so I would gratefully accept it.

  Life is precious.

  Even if it’s not alive.

  Still, I was going to tire of such insipid fare eventually, so maybe I needed to buy a gas burner and a pot soon. While my abode was only a temporary one until those two could find a rental, they were busy too, so I could end up living here for quite a while.

  “I can just use the toilets and showers at school… And worst case, I can even charge my phone there. I should be able to study in a reading room or the library. What else do I need to worry about…”

  I brought up every potential problem and examined it─quickly coming up with a plan to deal with each.

  It began to feel less like worrying over the coming days and devising measures and more of a reaffirmation to myself that the darned house burning down didn’t affect me at all.

  It was like I was making ends meet inside me.

  Like I was solving the contradictions.

  It was very me.

  I gave my thanks again after finishing my meal.

  Summer was still going strong so the sun should have been setting late, but it had gotten pitch black out without my noticing. I changed into the pajamas I’d bought at the hundred-yen store, having changed my underwear too, and went to sleep on my brand-new bed.

  I wouldn’t quite say comfortable.

  Strangely, though, I might have slept more soundly than I ever did in the hallway.

  009

  Hm?

  Didn’t we skip over a section number?

  Am I just imagining things?

  Whatever, it’s fine.

  The ruins seemed like a place where Roomba could have really shined, but sadly he burned down with the rest of everything in the house, which meant I could no longer rely on him to wake me up in the morning. Even so, I presumed I could wake up at the same time as always.

  Humans have something called a circadian rhythm.

  This biorhythm is ingrained into our bodies and doesn’t falter easily.

  Not only that, I was someone who didn’t know what it meant to be still asleep─or so I believed until reality intruded.

  It wasn’t that I overslept.

  In fact, I woke up earlier than I’d planned─and I didn’t wake up naturally, I was woken up.

  But there shouldn’t have been anyone who would now that Roomba was gone─

  “Miss Hanekawa!”

  I was pulled from bed.

  Does being still asleep involve incredible images diving into your view? I thought lazily as I waited for my understanding to catch up to my perception─looking at Miss Senjogahara, who was right in front of me with her hands on my collar.

  I thought lazily.

  She bellowed, “Are you okay?! Are you alive?!”

  “H-Huh? Hm? Good morning?”

  I gave her a greeting─my first time doing so in a while, actually─still unsure of what was happening.

  I was even bewildered.

  After all, the normally cool and collected Miss Senjogahara had tears streaming down her reddened face as she stared at me.

  “Are you okay?!” she kept asking me.

  Still unsure why she was so worried, I nodded, overwhelmed.

  “Y-Yeah.”

  “……nkk.” In response, Miss Senjogahara finally let go of my collar, bit down on her lip, seemed to hold back an outburst of tears, and then─“Idiot!” she slapped me across the face.

  Roused awake.

  And slapped away.

  I probably could have dodged them if I’d tried, but she looked so fierce that I just accepted the blows.

  No, I probably couldn’t dodge them.

  Heat pulsed through my cheek.

  “Idiot! Idiot! Idiot!”

  Not content with hitting me once, Miss Senjogahara did so again and again─her slapping stance deteriorating until she was just popping me in the chest like a child having a tantrum.

  It didn’t hurt at all.

  But it hurt so much.

  “Y-You’re a girl! By herself! A-And you’re staying in a place like this?! What if something happened to you?!”

  “…I’m sorry,” I apologized.

  Well, I should say I was made to─this miniature Boy Scout experience only felt like I was having a bit of fun, and I’d been free of regret or remorse.

  Even so.

  I was certain I had made Miss Senjogahara, yes, that Miss Senjogahara, terribly worried─

  And inappropriately enough, that made me feel a bit glad.

  I was happy.

  “Uh-uh. I’m not forgiving you. I’ll never forgive you,” she said, snuggling, clinging, nestling into and hugging me.

  She was never going to let me go again.

  “I’m not forgiving you. I’ll never forgive you, not even if you apologize.”

  “Okay…understood. I got it. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  I still reiterated my apology.

  I put my arms around Miss Senjogahara and returned her embrace.

  And I continued to apologize.

  In the end, it took about half an hour for her to stop crying, which brought us to the time that I normally woke up.

  010

  “I called you constantly since last night, you know,” Miss Senjogahara then said, having turned back into her beautiful, nonchalant self. It was incredible how speedily she could switch over. Still, she wasn’t quite put together since she couldn’t do anything about her red, puffy eyes.

  Meanwhile, apparently my bedhead was awful, probably because of my bed (she called me Super Saiyan Hanekawa), so in terms of how put together we looked, the two of us must have been on about the same level.

  I couldn’t help but be amazed, though, by how normal she was acting, as if all that bawling until a minute ago had just been for show.

  I simply found it adorable.

  So adorable I almost didn’t care about my bedhead.

  She told me, “I couldn’t even imagine what it’d feel like for your house to be on fire… I thought you might not want to talk to anyone, and I considered not calling you, but I was just too worried. I decided, ‘Whatever, just call her!’ but you never picked up.”

  “Oh. Sorry. I had my phone off,” I said. “I thought I should try to conserve as much as I can in light of the survivalist lifestyle I’m going to be living.”

  I hadn’t used my cell phone as an alarm clock partly because of my faith in my circadian rhythm, but I also did have another, more pragmatic reason. There was no guarantee that I’d be
able to use a power outlet at school (I’m sure my teachers would let me if I explained, but generally, phones are banned at my school).

  “God, you’re always such a stickler for the rules… Just grab whatever random outlet you find, you don’t need to ask,” coaxed Miss Senjogahara.

  “But that would be stealing electricity.”

  “I ended up running all around town thanks to that honesty of yours. I talked to various people to come by the intel that you were probably staying over at a friend’s house─but no one in class said you were staying with them.”

  “H-How many people did you talk to?”

  “I went through my network.”

  “……”

  Compared to her days of being not just shy but out-and-out paranoid, how she’d grown. But it also meant the whole class now knew I’d gone missing…

  My goodness.

  “Actually, I should apologize, Miss Hanekawa. I went and met your parents, too.”

  “What?”

  I was surprised.

  In other words, had she visited the hotel where those two were staying?

  It did seem possible to figure out where they were if you were patient enough… It wasn’t as if they were in hiding, and they would have had to inform places like the post office.

  Though Miss Senjogahara probably went to the hotel sure that I, too─that I’d be there.

  “Oh. You met my dad…and my mom.”

  “Do you really need to call people like them your ‘dad’ and ‘mom’?” Miss Senjogahara asked bluntly.

  Bluntlier.

  She seemed disgusted.

  Her expression used to tell you nothing about her mindset, but recently her feelings were starting to show.

  Whether it was joy or sorrow.

  Or anger.

  …It seemed like she’d had quite the meeting with those people.

  If only they tried a little harder to keep up appearances─they’d been awful towards Mister Oshino over Golden Week, too─but then again, maybe I had no right to think so when I couldn’t come up with any appropriate reply.

  I wasn’t able to paper it over.

  “It looks like there’s a lot going on. I don’t mean to pry, though.”

  Unlike Araragi, she barely knew a thing about my domestic situation, about the warped and disharmonious Hanekawas, but uninterested in digging any deeper, she put us right back on track.

  An impressive feat.

  I even felt admiration for her.

  “I went around everywhere after that, until this morning, when I finally thought of this place. Well, no, I’d thought of it from the start but didn’t want to believe that a young lady would choose to spend the night in these ruins… I thought you would never, that you would never ever, and put if off until last.”

  “Hm. Hmm? Wait, don’t tell me you were up all night, Miss Senjogahara?”

  “Even if I didn’t tell you, Miss Senjogahara was. Not a wink, it was an all-nighter, in shining armor.”

  Which is why I cried when I found you─I was so worked up, she explained.

  What a cute excuse.

  She was playing on “knight,” of course.

  “It’s plenty dangerous for a young lady to be wandering the streets so late, too,” I retorted.

  “I have nothing to say in my defense.”

  I’m not the type to ponder the consequences, she added.

  Dressed in a very casual outfit, jeans and a T-shirt, she was drenched in sweat. She hadn’t been wandering around all this time so much as dashing about as if she were Miss Kanbaru.

  “Thanks,” I expressed my gratitude as briefly and undramatically as I could before getting off my bed.

  My body didn’t hurt.

  I don’t think of myself as particularly talented, even though Araragi insists that I am, but I do seem to have a knack for crafting beds.

  Maybe I ought to become an expert craftsman of sleeping beds.

  Does that require an apprenticeship in Germany or thereabouts?

  “It’s fine,” Miss Senjogahara said. “It was my own decision─and by the looks of it, I was wasting my time sticking my nose into your business.”

  “That’s not true. I’ve finally realized how dangerous this was now that you’ve told me. They say fire drives people mad, and it seems like the house fire got me all weirdly worked up, too.”

  “You think? I hope that’s what it is─but you do terribly dangerous things even when you aren’t worked up.”

  “Do I?”

  “Like seduce Araragi.”

  “Guh.”

  Guh, indeed.

  I didn’t know how to rebut that.

  I didn’t, even though I never seduced him.

  The theory that I’d made him the way he was had become surprisingly entrenched out in the world.

  “He really was cool…when he first got mixed up with me,” Miss Senjogahara mused. “There’s barely a trace of that left now, though.”

  “Is that…my fault?”

  “Well, there was also that tiger─I did get excessively worried, true. I’m sorry, it wasn’t like me to lose it. Now why don’t we get going.”

  “Get going? To where? School?”

  “To my home,” she answered as if she were stating the obvious. “And I’m declaring in advance that if you try to resist, I’m going to stick a stapler inside your mouth and whack you on your neck. Is that what it’s going to take to bring you with me?”

  “……”

  When she’d done exactly that to Araragi in the past, there was no way I was going to defy her.

  011

  Although she’d told me as much, the Tamikura Apartments, where Miss Senjogahara lived, were a terrible sight. Nothing short of decrepit, it was enough to make you think they predated the war.

  But while Araragi once made a mean remark about being more worried for its earthquake-proofing than for the abandoned cram school’s (his way of showing concern for Miss Senjogahara, in my opinion), the structure felt unexpectedly sturdy as I climbed the stairs.

  Maybe old buildings are more reliable that way than the pre-fabs you see these days.

  Also, its security features were on another level.

  There was even a lock on the apartment door!

  Now that I was at a home, I was realizing just how unsafe those ruins were.

  “My dad won’t be back today because of work. You should stay over tonight.”

  “What… Really?”

  “You see, um…my parents won’t be home tonight.”

  “Why are you rephrasing it like this is a rom-com?”

  Miss Senjogahara had a subtle sense of humor both before and after her rehabilitation.

  Room 201.

  I took off my shoes and entered.

  She was telling the truth. There were no hallways.

  It was a tidy little, hundred-square-foot room─a bookshelf and a clothes drawer accounted for most of the furniture. She probably made an effort not to own too many things given the place’s size, but then Miss Senjogahara never seemed to be someone with many possessions to begin with. Her dad was probably the same way.

  “The truth is that I used to live in a mansion─I’d let you have borrowed a whole room back in those days, but alas, my princess, this is all I can do for now.”

  “Could you not say that like you’re Lupin?”

  “What would you think if I told you I went to every convenience store I could find and spent a total of ninety thousand yen on a Lupin toy lottery because I had to have a model of his car?”

  “I would think you have terrible luck.” I sat down and glanced around the room. “You know, it’s kind of calming in here.”

  “Really? Araragi always seems uncomfortable.”

  “What kind of boy stays calm at a girl’s house? But I think I like it here.” I was speaking my unfiltered thoughts as they came to me. “It’s like my own house.”