Nekomonogatari (White)

by Nisioisin

  “Huh.”

  Miss Senjogahara’s expression said that she didn’t get it.

  She probably didn’t.

  Of course not. Even I didn’t.

  I’d blurted out the words.

  Like I was speaking to myself.

  What was your own house anyway? Yes, the Hanekawa residence that burned down had been a house I’d lived in for fifteen years, making it by definition, or by logical argumentation if we wished, “my own house”; it was “my house” just as I’d uttered as I’d seen it burning to the ground.

  But.

  Why did this place, Room 201, Tamikura Apartments, make me feel more relaxed than that hallway?

  Why did it put my mind at ease?

  “It doesn’t feel like ‘my own house’ to me, at least. It hasn’t been that long since we moved here,” Miss Senjogahara said. “But I guess as far as my last home goes, it’s gone.”

  “……”

  That was right.

  The house she used to live in, which no one would have objected to calling a mansion, famous in its neighborhood, was now an empty plot of land.

  No, it wasn’t even a plot.

  Was it─a street?

  I wasn’t sure.

  While it had been from a distance, I was able to get a good look for myself at my house burning down─I wondered how it felt not to be informed of your previous home’s extinction.

  I didn’t know.

  Another thing I didn’t know.

  I didn’t know─so I stopped thinking about it.

  Right.

  I wasn’t going to mind.

  I wasn’t going to mind about feeling at ease.

  “You should take today off from school,” Miss Senjogahara advised, taking off her sweat-drenched T-shirt.

  I knew we were both girls, but she was pretty insouciant about stripping. So much so that I admired her.

  “I’ll take the day off, too,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I’m sleepy. As you might expect.” Her eyes were out of focus when I looked more closely. “Right now, I’d sleep with anyone. Even a futon.”

  “……”

  What a way to put it.

  “I can barely move my legs. I know I used to be on the track team, but it’s been a long time since then. What about you, Miss Hanekawa? It looks like you had a well-made bed, but you couldn’t possibly have gotten a good night’s sleep in that place.”

  “Hm? Well, I guess you might be right.”

  “You have awful bedhead, too.”

  “Could you not talk about that?” Flustered, I turned in her direction. “It’s only the second day of our second term, so we ought to go to─”

  “It’d be much stranger for a girl whose house burned down to come to school the next day bright and cheerful like nothing happened. That’s where you could be a little less naïve,” she told me sternly, having taken off her jeans and turning to me in her underwear.

  She looked unwilling to back down.

  Despite being in her underwear, she couldn’t have looked any braver.

  Or less sexual.

  “You’re not even planning on going to college, right? So you don’t need to worry about your attendance record or recommendation letters.”

  “Well, that’s true…”

  But the rules.

  I wanted to follow the rules.

  They were the rules.

  “Just take the day off. If you insist on going to school, you’re gonna have to defeat me first,” she warned, adopting a kung fu pose.

  A pointlessly flawless praying mantis stance.

  “Sha-shink.”

  “Could you please not give yourself sound effects? Okay, okay. I’ll do as you say for today. And to be honest, it’d be a nice break. I’m glad you’re forcing me to do this.”

  “I hope so. Being a busybody isn’t my forte.”

  She sounded embarrassed, but actually, her way of being a busybody was very much like her.

  “Oh, but, but, Miss Senjogahara, what about you? Is it okay for you to take today off too?”

  “Me? Well, I’m planning to get into college as a scholarship candidate. Attendance is one thing, but as far as my report card─hmm, right.”

  Pretending to hesitate for a brief moment, she whipped out her cell phone. As I began to wonder where she was calling, she pinched her nose and started speaking in a hoarse voice.

  “Koff, koff, oh, Hoshina-sensei? This is Senjog…koff…Senjogahara. I, I seem to have somehow caught an out-of-season case of the flu… It could be a brand-new strain. Koff, what’s that, a fever? Do I have a fever? Yes, it’s sitting a little above 107. It broke my air conditioner just now. I’m pretty sure you could pinpoint me as the cause of this year’s heat wave. I can swim in my sweat right now. My body hurts so much it feels like it could explode… I know I’ll probably give this to the whole class, but I wanted to ask if I could still come to school today. No? Is that so. I understand, that’s too bad. I really did want to attend your lesson. Have a nice day.”

  Ending the call, she wore a guileless look.

  “I’m all good now.”

  Nope, that was hardly all good. “The flu? Why would you go out of your way to tell such a lie? What’s wrong with just saying you have a cold?”

  “The bigger the lie, the less likely you’ll be caught. Don’t worry, my primary doctor of long standing can forge a note for me.”

  “I seriously doubt it.”

  What sort of doctor jeopardized his or her medical career to help a high school girl play hooky?

  For how good of a liar Miss Senjogahara was, she was awful at telling lies.

  “And anyway, won’t you put on some clothes already?” I requested. “It’d feel awkward if you kept on standing around in your underwear.”

  “What? But I was planning on taking a shower in a second.”

  “Ah, got it.”

  “Will you be taking one too?”

  “Ah, yes. If you don’t mind.”

  Now that she mentioned it, my whole body felt like it was covered in dust. I must have sweat a good bit while I was asleep, and the underwear I’d bought at the hundred-yen shop seemed to be in pretty bad shape. The size was a little bit off, to begin with.

  “Please go first, though, of course,” I said.

  “Why are you acting so reserved? Let’s get in together.”

  My prompting was met with a proposition.

  With a big smile on her face, too.

  A smile as bright as the sun that not even Araragi could have seen before.

  “There’s nothing to be embarrassed about,” she maintained. “We’re both girls.”

  “No, hold on a second. No, no, hold on a lot longer than that. I’m getting a bad feeling about this.”

  “Oh, you. I’m not planning anything underhanded. Or are you saying you don’t trust your friend, Miss Hanekawa?”

  “I might not trust a friend who uses that line in this situation…”

  “Don’t get the wrong idea. I’m not like Kanbaru,” she said, her expression turning serious. “I just want to see you in the nude and don’t intend to do anything more.”

  “……”

  Miss Senjogahara was starting to take on some new character traits.

  While I’d heard about Miss Kanbaru’s preferences before, I was beginning to think that their middle-school relationship as the Valhalla Duo may not have been as one-sided as I’d been led to believe.

  “Please, Miss Hanekawa. Please take a shower with me!” she entreated, bringing her palms together.

  Her new character traits were just so cutting-edge. Was anyone going to be able to keep up?

  “I know you and I, as a team, can defeat Sengoku!”

  “You’re not supposed to know about her yet, in-story…”

  There it was. A meta-remark.

  We needed to be careful.

  About as careful as I was of Miss Senjogahara.

  “Well, fine,” I rele
nted. “We’re both girls, sure, and I’m not particularly opposed to it.”

  “Oh. I didn’t expect you to get on board.”

  Miss Senjogahara reverted to her usual self.

  I really had no idea how serious she was ever being.

  It was so ambiguous with her.

  “I know I was the one to make the offer, but I always thought of you as someone who’d never cross certain lines, even with a friend.”

  “Haha, ‘certain lines’? Like never letting anyone into your room or never hanging out with anyone outside of school?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I don’t deny it.”

  I had that side.

  Maybe you could describe it as trampling into someone else’s life but hating it when others try to intrude on my own─that seemed to be a perfect description of my relationship with Araragi.

  And that’s why things turned out the way they did.

  “But,” I reminded, “how would it make me look if I tried to distance myself from a girl who cried and pummeled me?”

  “Guh.”

  Miss Senjogahara blushed.

  She pouted her lips, almost like she was sulking.

  She was already wonderful back when she never displayed any emotions, but she was even more wonderful now that she showed a full range of them. It was to the point where I wanted to be the one asking her to take a shower together─or maybe that’s going a step too far?

  “Oh.”

  Just then her cell phone, still in her hand, went off. I thought it was our teacher calling back, having realized just how unnatural the excuse had been, but that didn’t seem to be the case. To begin with, it was a text.

  I asked, “Who’s it from?”

  “Araragi. Hmm. Judging by what it says, he probably sent it to your phone, too.”

  “Huh?”

  “Why don’t you check? Use the outlet over there. Don’t worry, I won’t bill you for the electricity.”

  “If you’re trying not to sound stingy, that last bit was counterproductive…”

  As she suggested, I took my phone from my bag and turned it on. Rather than wait for an incoming message, I manually checked for new ones.

  New messages─957.

  “Oh,” said Miss Senjogahara, “forget all the ones from me. I was so worried.”

  “Nine-hundred and fifty-six in one night?!”

  Nearly all of my inbox’s previous messages had been crowded out and was gone from the phone’s memory.

  Was this my fault?

  Shouldn’t I actually be demanding an apology?

  Thinking so, I rushed to check the newest message─and indeed, the sender was Araragi.

  “Not coming back for a while. Dot worry.”

  No subject, no signature─to be frank, it was utterly bare. Not only that, he seemed to be so pressed for time that he couldn’t type out the word “Don’t” correctly or fix the spelling. It was a tense message that made you think he mashed it out under pressure.

  “While it was expected, he’s up to something again─and it looks pretty serious this time,” Miss Senjogahara, who seemed to have gotten the exact same message, said with a sigh. She seemed appalled, even. “I don’t know the details about spring break, but judging by the text, could this be as bad as then, or worse?”

  “You think so too?”

  “Yes. But I guess he’s grown in that he did send us this message… He used to be really blinkered.”

  “You’re right.”

  Could it have to do─with Mayoi?

  Sure, she was only looking for Araragi to retrieve her forgotten backpack from him, so it might have nothing to do with what he was involved in now, but─

  I just had that feeling for some reason.

  And I was sure of it.

  “No luck. I tried calling him, but I can’t get through.” Miss Sen-jogahara, who had started calling him before I noticed (she was way too unhesitant), folded her cell phone shut, not looking particularly let down, and placed it on its charging stand. “He is a boy, after all. I guess I don’t have to worry…too much about him. Once he gets back, I’ll just force him to hear me brag about how we showered together.”

  “That doesn’t sound like an effective way to harass him.”

  “I can tell him about how your lines are like this and this, and that is how you are here.”

  “Please stop gesturing.”

  It was indecent, or rather, erotic.

  “In any case,” she remarked, “it seems like we’re going to have to take care of this tiger ourselves.”

  “This tiger?”

  The tiger─I’d seen on my way to school.

  The gigantic tiger.

  The speaking tiger.

  Now that she mentioned it, she’d said the incident was what had made her excessively worried about me─

  “But that tiger─”

  “Hm?” interrupted Miss Senjogahara. “My assumption was that the tiger caused the fire, but…did it not? Do you know what caused it?”

  “No, they don’t know yet─” It might have been arson, a firefighter had told me─the tiger, the tiger as the cause─“so we don’t know.”

  “I see. Then maybe I was jumping to conclusions. Being a former member of the track-and-field team.”

  “That hardly merited saying it with a dashing look.”

  “All right, Miss Hanekawa. Why don’t we go take that shower. We’ll even take Araragi’s for him.”

  “Let’s keep Araragi out of it.”

  “I’ll get a good look at your nude body, enough for both me and him.”

  “Could you just get enough for yourself, at the most?”

  “Fine,” she agreed readily.

  Then again, any resistance would have been troublesome.

  “In fact,” she conceded, “now that I really think about it, naked girls or their underwear don’t excite him anymore.”

  “Is that true?”

  “Yup. He’s at a new stage after all of his experiences in the last few months. Now he says just seeing a girl in a skirt turns him on.”

  “A gaze against which no girl can protect herself.”

  “He says the cloth swaying in the wind is almost too much for him.”

  “It doesn’t even need to get flipped…”

  He really was on a different level.

  Or rather…

  Yeah…

  “Okay, let’s get in there and have fun washing each other’s chest.”

  “Don’t you mean back?”

  “Um, Miss Hankeawa?”

  I’d started to peel off my clothes, concerned about this conversation getting dragged out any longer, when Miss Senjogahara abruptly asked me a question, her expression somewhere between smiling and serious.

  “Do you still love Araragi?”

  “Yes. I still do.”

  I answered immediately.

  012

  I think this is a good time for me to discuss Araragi a bit.

  To discuss Koyomi Araragi.

  Koyomi Araragi, Miss Senjogahara’s boyfriend and my friend.

  I actually knew about him from before spring break─I don’t know everything, but I did know about him.

  He doesn’t realize it himself, but he’s quite the celebrity at Naoetsu High.

  He stood out, you might say.

  Like a sore thumb, to be honest.

  He loves to treat me like a celebrity, but we could go toe-to-toe as far as that goes.

  Though it’s more correct to say he’s feared.

  Yes, people are afraid of him.

  Just as I hated being treated like a model student, he hates being treated like a delinquent, but really, if you’re skipping school whenever you feel like it, not taking classes and tests seriously─or not even taking them at all─then I’m not the only one who’ll start thinking of you that way.