by Nisioisin
This was something─that I knew.
It was also what you might call the crux of Miss Senjogahara’s scheme.
I couldn’t help but feel more than a little guilty that it took advantage of Tsukihi and Karen’s youthful earnestness and sense of justice as the Fire Sisters─but I couldn’t stand on ceremony, either, not when their favor came from a place of benevolence.
Miss Senjogahara must have called it a “scheme” because she’d foreseen my own reaction to the situation too. That’s probably why she didn’t tell me.
So I didn’t have to have known.
She’d let the villainy of it fall on her own shoulders, so to speak.
It was a complete mystery to me what kind of mental state you had to be in to place another woman (not just any, but me) in your boyfriend’s house to stay the night, but maybe her old self-punishing streak was still alive and well.
She’d done it for me.
And put up with the pain.
Karen’s earlier sentiment came back to make my heart ache when I considered that.
I was standonish─standoffish.
You shoulda come straight to me if you didn’t have a place to sleep.
I was really just waiting for you to say something.
Just like when I stayed the night at Miss Senjogahara’s, I never sought help for myself─and this seemed to be a totally different problem from what Mister Oshino liked to say about “people just going and getting saved on their own.”
Yes.
I probably─stopped caring about me.
I wasn’t even trying to get saved on my own.
I recalled what Miss Senjogahara had told me earlier in the morning.
I accepted blandness.
Dull when it comes to darkness.
A failure as a creature.
“Tsubasa? What’s wrong, why are you all spaced out? Your face looks so stupid.”
“……”
Karen didn’t pull her punches when she spoke.
My face looked so stupid?
“Is it shock from your house burning down after all? The only other case I know of is what happened to Nagasawa’s place in Chibi Maruko.”
“Oh, no. I’m fine,” I said. I’m fine, I found myself saying─though there was no way I could be. “But yes, I think I’ll take you up on your very kind offer to put up with me─until Araragi gets back, then.”
I didn’t know when that would be, but it’d probably take about as long as it took the persons who should be called my father and my mother to find a rental home.
Without the slightest idea about either, there wasn’t any point in thinking too deeply about it.
“Thank you very much.”
“No prob!”
“You’re welcome.”
This somehow led to us shaking hands.
There were three of us too, which made it look more like we were in a huddle.
Were we about to start playing volleyball or what?
I didn’t know what Miss Senjogahara had said about the Hanekawas’ domestic situation (actually, she didn’t know about the Hanekawas’ domestic situation), but I was honestly grateful that neither of them asked about it.
“Let’s have a pajama party and all, Tsubasa!”
“I think I’ll pass.”
“We could play pro wrestlers!”
“I think I’ll refuse.”
“Man, I’ve always wanted an older sister since I’m the eldest girl in our family. Can I call you Big Sis while you’re staying over?”
Karen was saying things that made her sound a little like Sengoku. Tsukihi looked on with a smile─the picture made it hard to be sure which of the two was the older sister.
That’s when I noticed.
Well, I guess I didn’t notice anything. I’d known from the start.
“Right, if I’m going to be intruding here for a while, I’m going to have to say hello to your parents.”
I’d never properly met their father or mother during my previous visits to the Araragi residence, in part because all three siblings wanted it that way─yet while the sisters could give me as much permission to stay over as they wanted, I’d have no choice but to leave if her parents said no.
Hmm. How would this go?
Faced with a high school girl walking around town from bed to bed like some kind of net café refugee, wouldn’t any sensible adult’s judgment be to simply lecture her and convince her to go back to her parents’ side?
“I don’t think you have to worry about that,” Tsukihi said. “These are the people we and our big brother call Mommy and Daddy. I think that gives you an idea of their personalities.”
“Really… Still─”
“They both have a hot-blooded sense of justice. They’re not going to look at someone in trouble and tell them to get out.”
For some reason, Tsukihi was brimming with confidence.
Now that I thought about it, I had no clue what kind of people Araragi’s parents were. I suppose that’s obvious since I’d never met them, but it was also in large part because Araragi didn’t like to discuss the topic─I didn’t pay this any particular mind, as it’s natural high-school-boy behavior to be tight-lipped about one’s parents, but…he seemed particularly gauche about them.
A sense of justice, though?
A hot-blooded sense of justice, at that?
Something about it sounded unnatural.
“Hey, Karen? Tsukihi? I just wanted to ask─you said that both of your parents work, right?”
“Yup.”
They nodded in unison.
“I think they’ll come back at around six today.”
“What exactly is it that they do?”
The two answered in unison.
“They’re police officers.”
……
No wonder Araragi’s been so guarded about it, I thought. And also: we must be living in the end times.
026
There was, of course, some trouble.
Though the grownups of the Araragi family had been appraised by their daughters as possessing a hot-blooded sense of justice, they also possessed the kind of good sense that adults (and police officers) had, so they had to wonder.
Still, they allowed me to stay over much faster than I imagined they would, albeit reluctantly, saying, “I guess we have to if that’s your situation.”
Karen and Tsukihi’s desperate pleas were a factor as well─but this really did make them seem like Araragi’s parents.
Both of them resembled him, too.
By the way, while the fact that family members resemble one another does of course have to do with genes, it seems that similar lifestyle cycles also play a major role. If you live under the same roof, live life at the same pace, and eat the same diet as someone, the materials that go into creating your bodies are the same. It makes sense, then, that the finished result of those materials will be similar, too.
Conversely, if family members live their lives at a different pace and eat different diets, the way the Hanekawas do, they won’t resemble one another.
You could say that families with similar appearances and personalities have some degree of unity to them─and in that regard, the Araragi family was a healthy one.
Having dinner with them, and watching, I likewise felt: So this is what a family conversation looks like.
I found it refreshing and joined in─though I did feel a bit hesitant when Araragi’s mom asked me every little thing she could think of about her only son.
After that was bath time.
I realized three days had passed since my last time in a bathtub.
Maybe it’s some rule for this installment because I ended up getting in together with Karen and Tsukihi─it got pretty cramped!
“You never put on airs, do you, Tsubasa?”
What follows is our conversation in that bathtub.
The three of us were crammed in like in some experiment where you tried to stuff as many people as possible into a ph
one booth. In other words, it was amidst a thoroughly unsexy lack of elbow room that Karen said, “I dunno, maybe I just think this because I’m stupid, but talking to the smart kids at school, I end up wondering all the time if they’re really all that smart. They use weirdly hard words and quote stuff I don’t care about. But even though you’re smart, you talk to us eye-to-eye, and that makes me really happy.”
“Yeah,” Tsukihi chimed in. She had undone her braid in the bath, and her hair was quite long. It seemed to grow at an even faster pace than Miss Kanbaru’s─like she was a monster or something. “That seems to be the way it is, actually. People who’re truly smart…or not even that, people you’d call ‘first-rate,’ whether it’s in sports or whatever, can be surprisingly normal when you talk to them. It’s not like they exude auras or anything. Maybe that means they don’t need to dress themselves up because they’re the real deal.”
“……”
While I felt a little uneasy about being praised like this, and while Tsukihi was right about just how surprisingly normal “first-rate” people can be, I thought my case was different.
I wasn’t normal.
And─I wasn’t smart, either.
I doubted there was anyone more vain and adorned than me─I knew it all too well from Golden Week and the eve of the culture festival.
Enough to make me sick of it.
Enough to make me hate it.
“A lot of times, I wonder what the world looks like to a smart person,” Karen said. “I wonder if we look at the same things and just see them differently. I just see a bunch of numbers when I look at Pi, but maybe Einstein saw some kind of beautiful order.”
“I wonder,” I replied vaguely.
It was a difficult question to answer one way or another.
There were some geniuses with the kind of sensibility that allows them to look at Pi or the golden ratio or whatever and find some kind of value or meaning in its mathematically functional beauty─but I didn’t think it was a prerequisite for being smart.
There had to be some smart people who saw Pi as nothing more than a bunch of numbers. And the opposite was probably true, too.
It was nothing more than a matter of individual differences, and not some kind of requirement.
I doubted the gap between the ways Karen and Einstein saw the world was that different from how Karen and Tsukihi saw it.
“I think if you took a novel with a first-person narration and recounted it from another point of view, you’d have a completely different book,” I tried to explain. “Like how a case told by Doctor Watson and a case told by Holmes himself feel quite different from each other.”
Now that I mentioned it, there were short stories in Sherlock Holmes’s case files told from an omniscient perspective.
But you’d be wrong to call those objectively correct worlds.
There’s no guarantee that God won’t screw up.
For example.
Take the careless creation of man.
…But now that I was stuck to Karen’s toned and firm beauty, along with Tsukihi’s contrastingly cute and childish body, it made me think, “Araragi is always getting to hang out with little sisters like these”─and couldn’t help but comprehend his eccentric behavior to a certain degree.
Or something.
We got out of the bath.
I’d run out of the underwear from the hundred-yen shop and was preparing to have to suck it up and re-wear something for just one night, but Karen let me borrow a brand-new pair of panties.
She even lent me some pajamas.
After enjoying all of their hospitality so far, it would have been strange to decline, so I simply accepted both.
“Hm? Wait, but aren’t these men’s pajamas?”
“Hmm? Oh, those are our big brother’s.”
Gurk.
I wore Araragi’s pajamas…
I checked myself in the mirror.
Why did it feel like I’d just made a big mistake?
But taking them off now would only make me seem even more weirdly conscious about it, so─no, that’s just an excuse.
Now that I’d worn them, I felt reluctant to take them off. So I just said, normally, “Huh, are they? They’re the exact right size,” which didn’t even sound like I was hiding my embarrassment, and began brushing my teeth before bed.
There was no way I could tell Miss Senjogahara about this…
From there, I let the two sisters lead me to Araragi’s room.
When I thought about it (or without really needing to), I’d invaded Araragi’s home totally without his permission, borrowed his pajamas, and was about to borrow his bed─you wouldn’t be wrong to say I was rampaging here.
I doubt he imagined permission from his family and his girlfriend could lead to all this.
Perhaps I needed to send him a message, but I hesitated to do that too since I didn’t have a clue about his current circumstances.
Hey, I’m wearing your pajamas right now!
Even if I did send such a text and he was able to receive it, it might just ruin what was surely the very serious situation he found himself in.
Also, when I looked at the clock (I’d noticed this when I’d been in Araragi’s room before, but for some reason it has four. He isn’t that punctual of a person, though…), it was already past nine. He was probably meeting with Miss Kanbaru around now, and that would be a little, you know─well.
It made me hesitant.
“Okay, Tsubasa, good night. You’re free to do whatever you want with anything in this room.”
“Good night, Miss Hanekawa. I’ll see you again tomorrow.”
The Araragi sisters left me with those words, and I was alone in his room. I didn’t know what to do.
Not that there was anything to do but sleep.
I could try to study for the day, but I only had my school textbooks─and even those were Miss Senjogahara’s.
As I thought about how I might go to the library tomorrow and borrow some study aids, my eyes began to wander over Araragi’s bookshelf.
Time to check it over.
While Karen had said I could “do whatever I wanted” with this room, it was Araragi’s, so I couldn’t really. But it seemed all right for me to peruse the books lining his shelf.
The lineup had changed quite a bit from the last time I was there─he’d told me he never threw books away, so he had to be one of those people who stocked his bookshelf with unread titles, storing the read ones in a closet.
I was surprised by how many novels there were.
I’d imagined he read nothing but manga based on the way he talked and acted.
I plucked a foreign novel from the shelf at random, sat in his chair, faced his desk, and read for about an hour. Of course, the feeling of Araragi I got from the desk and chair made it impossible for any of the sentences to make their way into my head.
It was a little past eleven by the time I turned off the lights and lay in bed.
Even then, thinking about how I was wearing Araragi’s pajamas, how I was tucked into Araragi’s bed, and how my head lay on Araragi’s pillow made it impossible for me to fall asleep. His clocks’ hands must have been pointing straight up by the time I actually did.
I could hardly criticize Araragi.
Thinking about all of that was lewd of me.
027
A little after midnight, my myaster finally went to sleep, so it was time again for me to make my appearance.
I do have to admit, back during Golden Week, I nyever would have imagined that I’d wake up in that annyoying little human’s room.
Meowsery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows, and nyow I was in a strange fellow’s bed.
What was I going to do about my myaster, too?
I had nyo idea what Hitagi Senjogahara’s intentions were when she set this all up, and maybe I was wrong about her, but I at least was frustrated by all of this.
Nyot that there was anything I could do about it.
In the end, I’m nyothing more than my myaster. I can’t go beyond her─and the thought makes me feel powerless.
“All right…”