Bakemonogatari Part 3 Read online

  001

  Tsubasa Hanekawa is a very important person to me. No one, no thing could ever hope to replace her. I owe her a lot─no, I nearly owe her everything. I doubt I can ever repay this debt of gratitude, no matter what I do for her. When she reached her hand out to me as every part of my body and soul experienced what felt like the deepest and darkest of depths during spring break, it was as if I saw, and I am not exaggerating in the slightest, the hand of a goddess offering me salvation. Even now, when I recall what happened about two months ago, I feel something hot welling up in my chest. Talk about one person saving another might sound contrived on second thought, but I still believe that Tsubasa Hanekawa saved me that spring break. If there’s any belief or feeling I have that I would call steadfast, this is it. Which is why─which is why once my personal hell of a spring break came to an end and I started my third year of high school and was placed in the same class as her, I won’t lie, I was so happy I was almost grinning. Not to bring up a line Senjogahara used on me once, but I wondered if that was how it felt to be placed in the same class as your unrequited crush. Even when she forced me to take on the position of class vice president due to a little misunderstanding after she was voted class president, I accepted it without much protest, only because Hanekawa was that important a person to me.

  Tsubasa Hanekawa.

  The girl whose first name means “wing,” and whose last name starts with another character for the same, a pair of mismatched appendages.

  Then again, it wasn’t as if I had never heard the name Tsubasa Hanekawa until my second-year spring break─I confess that I snuck over to get a peek at her class when I was a first-year, hoping to catch a glimpse of the most gifted young lady in the history of Naoetsu Private High School. Even at that time her appearance, glasses with her hair neatly braided, bangs in front, pegged her as a model student. I could tell at once that she took school seriously. People who look smart aren’t entirely rare, but that was the first time I ever saw someone who had to be smart. You hesitated to say a casual word to her, that’s how solemn and dignified a freshman she was. She wasn’t hard to approach as much as a thing apart that you weren’t permitted to stare at even from a distance. I’d pushed myself too hard to get into Naoetsu High, so I was already starting to understand my position at the school, but you know, maybe it was the moment when I saw Tsubasa Hanekawa that it really sank in. Not only had she never ceded the title of top of her class, she apparently hadn’t been left in the dust when it came to anything related to grades since her time in elementary school. It was hard to believe that she and I belonged to the same species.

  That isn’t to say Tsubasa Hanekawa is stuck-up, she’s nothing of the kind. I wouldn’t want you to get that impression because I’ve never met a more decent human being, in fact. I’m afraid I actually misunderstood her until last spring break, but when I spoke to her up close and in person, she seemed to address everyone on almost excessively even ground, to the point that I felt she needed to be more self-aware of her skills and talent. The so-called model students at Naoetsu Private High School tend to consider smarts as something you use to differentiate yourself from others, but not Tsubasa Hanekawa. That sense of being a thing apart that I got when I first saw her was totally not her own view. It turns out she is fair, and open. A class president among class presidents, a class president elected by the gods themselves─the school seems to like her, plus she is popular in class. She has a serious personality, but more than that, she is caring. It can get out of hand and yield misbegotten assumptions like the one that made her appoint me vice president, but that’s about the only fault I can find with her. I’ll admit that working with her as class president and vice president has its fair share of annoyances, but more often I’m impressed by her character.

  I realize it may not be the best way to put this, but it’s incredible considering her family situation, which I learned during Golden Week─the nine days from April 29th to Sunday, May 7th, which is where the vacation fell this year. If my spring break was like hell, those nine days were like a nightmare, the memories of which Tsubasa Hanekawa herself has already forgotten. To the extent that dreams are something that you usually don’t remember, “nightmare” seems quite appropriate.

  For nine days.

  She was bewitched by a cat.

  Just like I was attacked by a demon, she was bewitched by a cat. There’s a fitting reason for every aberration─and in this case, the strained and warped family life that she was bearing was it. Yes, speaking of misunderstandings, it was a huge misunderstanding. Until then, maybe I saw the world in black and white and believed that good people are happy people and that bad people are unhappy people. That there might be people whose unhappiness gives them no choice but to be decent─I hadn’t been able to wrap my head around so simple a notion.

  And yet.

  Tsubasa Hanekawa reached her hand out to me.

  That spring break, too, she couldn’t have been in a place to be helping me─yet she pulled me out of the deepest depths.

  I won’t forget that.

  No matter what may happen.

  002

  “Oh…Big Brother Koyomi. I was waiting for you.”

  “………”

  I’d been waited for.

  After classes were over on Tuesday, June thirteenth, which promised to become a memorable day for me, I used every minute available after school to prepare for the last culture festival of my high school career that weekend, and the time was a little past six-thirty p.m., the place the front gates of Naoetsu Private High School. There, looking bored as she waited for me, was Nadeko Sengoku, one of my younger sister’s old friends, with whom I’d spent several aberration-related hours until the morning of that day, along with my junior Suruga Kanbaru.

  The girl was wearing─a school uniform.

  A middle school uniform that took me back.

  Her uniform was a dress, rare for these parts.

  She had a belt clasped around her waist─to which she’d attached a small pouch. And yes, given the circumstances, it only made sense, but I realized it was my first time ever seeing her in uniform. The dress looked good on Sengoku, with her generally childish appearance.

  She wasn’t wearing a hat.

  Her eyes, though, were still hidden by her long bangs. It seemed to be her default hairstyle…Whether it was pulling her hat down or letting her bangs overhang her face, she seemed thoroughly shy about making eye contact or even letting others see hers. Her shyness approached historic levels.

  “H-Hey there.”

  My greeting rang somewhat hollow, Sengoku’s sudden appearance having surprised me more than you’d expect. She was standing in the gate’s shadows, and her timing had been like a “Boo!” from someone lurking in a corner, though I was sure that wasn’t her intention.

  “What’re you doing over here?” I asked.

  “Oh, uh…Big Brother Koyomi.”

  Sengoku seemed to be looking away from me as she spoke.

  With her hair covering her eyes, I couldn’t even tell if she was.

  Did she, at least, see me from in there?

  Hmm… I have to admit, being called “Big Brother Koyomi” right outside of my own school was somewhat embarrassing… But if I told her to stop calling me that, I ran the risk of hurting Sengoku, as delicate as a newborn fawn…

  While my reaction to seeing her was surprise, seeing me clearly put her at ease. Naturally, it took a decent amount of resolve for a second-year middle school student just to visit a high school, but she’d been feeling way more frightened than necessary. I couldn’t deal her a final blow… Luckily, the time of day was on our side. I’d stayed at school late, even among the students preparing for the culture festival, so
the chance of any I knew passing by was close to nil. If someone did, my nickname would most definitely become “Big Brother Koyomi,” but the risk had to be slim.

  “U-Um,” Sengoku said before falling silent.

  I knew that she wasn’t talkative and that I had to bear the silence. If I couldn’t stand it and tried to fill the void, she’d just clam up even more. Still, and this is only a figure of speech, it was as if I was dealing with a timid little creature like a rabbit or a hamster…

  Hmm.

  It made me want to spoil her.

  “I wanted to…thank you again,” she said at last. “You…really helped me.”

  “Ah, I see… You were waiting all this time not knowing when I’d leave, just to tell me that? How long have you been here? If you came right after middle school─”

  “Oh, no. I took today off. From school.”

  “Huh?”

  Right, of course.

  Being in uniform didn’t mean that she’d been to school.

  “Okay, so you didn’t go there afterwards.”

  “No…I was sleepy.”

  “……”

  That line on its own, well, it made her sound like the carefree princess of some tropical island… While she’d technically gotten some shut-eye at the abandoned cram school the night before, in that awful environment, with only a plastic bottle as a pillow and other people right beside her, no wonder the utterly delicate Sengoku couldn’t sleep well. Even I couldn’t and went back to bed after getting home… Kanbaru was the weird one to sleep soundly in that environment. So then, afterwards, Sengoku had gone home and fallen asleep just like me─but unable to get back up, unlike me─had come to these school gates around the time I would be leaving. It was a weekday, and the uniform must have been her attempt to ward off any truancy officers.

  “Yikes, today was the worst timing,” I said to her. “Didn’t I tell you? This high school is having a culture festival over the weekend, and we’re right in the middle of getting ready for it. Which is why I ended up leaving so late, my bad. Um, did I actually make you wait for more than two hours?”

  “N-No.” Sengoku shook her head.

  Huh? Classes normally ended at half past three, so I’d come up with that number assuming that she arrived at around four… Could she have gone off somewhere in between because I was taking so long?

  “I started waiting at around two, so it’s been more than four hours…”

  “What are you, stupid?!”

  I ended up shouting at her with everything I had.

  Waiting in front of the gates for over four hours… If anything, the uniform made her seem all the more suspicious in that case. It’s not like any high school’s classes finished at two. What were the security guards the place spent a fortune on doing all that time? Feeling soothed by a cute middle schooler?

  “I-I’m sorry for being stupid.”

  I’d been apologized to.

  I’d never been apologized to before for such a reason…

  “Still…I wanted to thank you… I just wanted to so much…so much that I couldn’t sit still…”

  “What an upright girl you are…”

  The word I really wanted to use was uptight.

  To thank me, huh?

  “In that case,” I said, “you should be thanking Kanbaru. She must have passed by here already, right? Did you not meet her? You and I are old acquaintances, while she did everything she could for you when you two barely had anything to do with each other. There aren’t a whole lot of people out there like her.”

  In more ways than one.

  I won’t go into detail, but it was the absolute truth that Kanbaru had worked selflessly to solve Sengoku’s case.

  “Yes…I thought so, too,” Sengoku said timidly. “You and Miss Kanbaru saved me at the cost of your lives─”

  “Hold on, hold on! We didn’t exactly sacrifice our lives to save you! Look, I’m alive right now!”

  “Oh…that’s true.”

  “Don’t just say stuff guided by your feelings… You surprised me there.”

  “Yes… So I wanted to thank Miss Kanbaru again, too, but…”

  “Huh? Oh, has Kanbaru not come by yet? I thought my class was the last to leave…but I guess it’s second-years who can put the most into culture festivals. First-years don’t know how things work, while third-years are busy preparing for entrance exams. She does seem like the type to find herself at the center of her class whether she likes it or not…”

  “N-No. Miss Kanbaru came by here just half an hour ago or so.”

  “Oh, she did? You didn’t call out to her because she was with her friends or something? She must have many.”

  “No…she was alone, but…” Sengoku made a difficult face. “Before I could say anything, she ran past me so fast I almost couldn’t see her…”

  “……”

  Kanbaru must have been in a rush…

  I assumed it was to do something immeasurably sublime, like finish reading the mountain of boys’ love novels she’d bought the day before, but Sengoku, who hesitated even to catch the attention of people she knew well, wasn’t going to stand in the way of a running Suruga Kanbaru.

  “I thought she might run me over…”

  “Yeah, I understand… I really do. I wouldn’t dare call out to Kanbaru while she’s speeding, either.”

  “Yes… It was as if she was using takkyudo.”

  “Why would you compare something she did to a special attack used by Prince Yamato, one of the main characters in Bikkuriman, of all things?! Not only are you making the situation harder to understand, you’re forcing my retort to essentially be straight commentary!”

  “Yes… I didn’t think you’d get it.”

  She seemed honestly surprised.

  Man, it appeared as though she’d underestimated my abilities as the designated quipper… Okay, wrong time to be boasting.

  “Still, middle school girls these days know about Bikkuriman? Maybe the characters’ names thanks to the new set of chocolates they’ve been selling, but the names of special attacks?”

  “I watched it on DVD.”

  “Ah, I see… We live in such a world of convenience. But either way, that’s a difficult reference to get. You could have at least compared it to a flash step.”

  “Flash step… Um, is that when…flashing images begin to look like motion?”

  “That’s called persistence of vision!”

  “Oh, is it? But they’re similar.”

  “Not one bit! Don’t lump together one of the most closely guarded secrets in all of martial arts and a basic optical illusion!”

  When I yelled at Sengoku, she turned her back to me, and her shoulders began to quake. I fretted that my harsh comeback had made her cry, until I realized that she was desperately stifling a laugh. She was gasping for breath.

  Right, she was quick to laugh.

  Even when she was part of the exchange, it seemed…

  “Big Brother Koyomi…you’re as funny as ever…”

  So she said.

  …I couldn’t remember well, but had that been my role as far back as elementary school?

  The thought was kind of depressing…

  Either way, Sengoku had it in her to be a fun conversation partner, after all. Maybe I wasn’t going all out with my comebacks, but I was quipping just fine. In fact, she’d been at the peak of her aberration troubles the day before…maybe she simply hadn’t had the necessary peace of mind. I was starting to want to test this introverted girl’s ability to draw out my skills.

  She confided, “I was worried her shoes might not last if she ran at that kind of speed…but Miss Kanbaru did look very cool when she was running.”

  “You’d better not fall for her. I don’t mean to take back what I said, but she’s a handful in her own way. I will admit, she’s as cool as they ever come nowadays… Fine, I’ll set up a chance for you to thank her properly, so you can─”

  “Y-Yes. But…I also had another
reason to see Miss Kanbaru.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hmm…”

  I couldn’t think of any business Sengoku might have with Kanbaru other than thanking her, but then again, they’d spent no small amount of time together. Maybe they had made some kind of promise.

  “If you want,” I offered, “I could handle it for you. I need to go thank Kanbaru, myself.”

  Sengoku’s case─the case of Sengoku’s snake.

  Had Kanbaru not gotten involved─it was dubious whether I’d be standing there talking with Sengoku. It had to be irritating to be on the receiving end of the same repeated apologies and thanks, but one last show of gratitude once we’d both settled back down didn’t seem out of the question.