Monogatari Series - Volume 15 - Chapter 2.03

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003

Obeying Princess Senjogahara’s command, early the following day, May tenth, I visited the rooftop of a school building at Naoetsu High.

Alone.

Given how things had unfolded, originally the plan was for her to accompany me, but unfortunately she was obliged to begin a period of regular hospital visits that very day.

So I, as her “friend,” ended up acting on her behalf─or I guess, was just getting used, but I really didn’t have any reason to refuse.

It’s not like I had anything else to do.

“’Preciate it. If things go well, I’ll show you my tits again.”

“Keep ’em to yourself.”

And “again” my ass.

Somewhere amid this back and forth I readily agreed, and found myself visiting the roof as Senjogahara had asked.

“The roof? Of which building?”

“Whichever. They were all like that.”

That’s what Senjogahara told me, so first I tried the roof of the building where my class was─though that makes it sound like I reached my destination by some legitimate means.

At Naoetsu High, however, the roofs are basically off-limits. The doors are kept locked, denying access to your average student, let alone your below-average one like me.

So how did I infiltrate the rooftop, how did I manage my illicit trespass? I went out the window of the top floor and crawled up the outside of the building, that’s how.

One slip meant instant death.

I, myself, was hard pressed to understand why I was braving such dangers on behalf of a girl I’d only gotten to know the day before yesterday, but maybe I was just starved for something like a “favor to do for a friend.”

Hrmm.

I’d already abandoned my belief that making friends would lower my intensity as a human, but confronted with this state of affairs, I had to admit I might not have been so far off the mark…

Let me note, for Senjogahara’s honor, that I’m sure she wasn’t expecting me to go to such great lengths.

Which is to say she’d suggested, “Ask your good friend Hanekawa. If she cooked up some reason to ask a teacher for the key to the roof, they’d happily give it to her.”

Sure, most of the teachers would oblige, no matter how over the top the request was, if it came from a model student like Hanekawa─but I hesitated to bring it up to her. After Golden Week, I felt kind of awkward about asking her for anything.

Sure, it was a dangerous thing to do, and climbing up the outside of the school wasn’t exactly my idea of a good time, but compared to the nightmare of Golden Week and the hell of spring break, it didn’t strike me as all that risky.

So.

“Ah…it’s true. Just as she said.”

Once I’d clambered over the fence and had my feet planted on the tiles of the rooftop, I discovered that she hadn’t been lying─did I think she had been? Well, yeah, I kinda thought she had been.

I mean, I’m sorry, but every other word out of that girl’s mouth is a lie, I can’t just blindly swallow everything she says.

Gotta keep your mouth shut and your eyes open, watch her like a hawk.

There, I got too preoccupied with having to watch her and put off explaining─I also didn’t mention it earlier because I thought she might be lying─that what was “just as she said” about the roof of the school building was a bouquet of flowers.

A bouquet of flowers.

Someone had left a bunch of flowers wrapped in plastic by the fence─left, or offered, maybe?

Anyway.

There was a fresh bouquet on the rooftop, which was supposed to be off limits.

“…”

Apparently, when Senjogahara saw those newish flowers by the telephone pole the day before, she remembered this rooftop bouquet─which meant, conversely, that it had been such a trifling matter to her that she’d forgotten about it completely.

A trifling matter, easily forgotten and incidentally recalled.

And yet.

Trifling though it may have been─it also struck her as mysterious, I suppose.

“Hang on─how come you were up on the roof in the first place?”

The previous night.

Still thoroughly doubting her claim, I was questioning her so she’d back it up a little.

“How did you get onto the roof? It’s off limits.”

“I may not be Big Sis Hanekawa, but I’m a model student, too. I’ve got enough juice to wrangle the roof key out of a teacher with the right pretext.”

“Maybe, but don’t call her Big Sis Hanekawa.”

“My, my. So you’re the only one who gets to call her that?”

“I’ve never called her that.”

Senjogahara suspects, for no good reason, that I have an unrequited crush on Hanekawa. I have no idea on what basis…

“All right, for now. We’ll drop it. When, and why, did you go up to the roof? You spoke of a pretext, so it sounds like you weren’t being entirely truthful with the teacher…”

“Whoa, lame. Mister detective, showing off his powers of deduction.”

“…”

I guess I wasn’t allowed to read too much into Senjogahara’s words. She just lay into every single word I said. If I keep going at this rate this flashback is never going to end, so abridging those bits and getting to the meat of her story─

“When I matriculated at Naoetsu High, I had to consider my personal safety, okay? So I personally took considerable steps to safeguard it.”

Leaving aside the half-assed wordplay, Senjogahara was so wary of other people that she’d even given a false address for the class directory.

Hanekawa had researched Naoetsu High before taking the entrance exam and after getting in; for reasons of her own, Senjogahara carried out an exhaustive study of where was safe and where was not, who was friend and who was foe.

We’re not just talking about right after she enrolled. She undertook continual follow-up surveys for two years─she must’ve been aware of the little shrine in the quad that I’d recently destroyed but deemed it “safe” and not paid it too much mind.

And─she’d given the rooftop flowers a pass as well.

“It’s no tale of an aberration, or a ghost story, but if you really think about it, isn’t it mysterious?”

Yup.

It was mysterious.

Because, according to Hanekawa─

In the eighteen years of Naoetsu High’s existence, there hadn’t been a single incident like the death of a student─which meant.

This.

An offering of flowers, lain as if someone had jumped off the roof─was mysterious.

“…”

This wasn’t like passersby leaving offerings of cheap sweets at some flimsy shrine. It felt formal…

I climbed up the ladder of the water tower on the roof, and from there I was able to confirm that the roofs of all the other school buildings─were also just as Senjogahara said.

A single bouquet of flowers lay on each and every roof. It was hard to say for sure at that distance, but as far as I could tell, the flowers seemed to be the same kind.

“…”

Hanekawa.

She’d wanted to repay Oshino with some “school ghost story,” but despite her research, this had escaped her notice─probably because she only investigated the legal areas of the school, unlike Senjogahara.

So Hanekawa didn’t know everything, after all…though in this case what was funny, or scary, was that Senjogahara did know.

“No one’s ever committed suicide by jumping off a building at our school, but bouquets of flowers continue to be lain on all the roofs, quietly, anonymously, unbeknownst to anyone─might this story interest Mister Oshino?” said Senjogahara, as expressionlessly as ever. In the same level tone she speculated, “Should be worth around, say, a hundred and twenty thousand yen?”

“…”

She was angling for a twenty thousand-yen kickback.

Man, she was weird…

She was warped due to her illness, or aberration, or so I had assumed, and of course she was, but it seemed like she’d been weird even before any warping.

Senjogahara said she was called the Cloistered Princess thanks to an act she put on, but if she hadn’t put on that act, I wonder what people would’ve called her…

Whatever.

I’d confirmed her story─my next move should be to report the whole thing to Oshino.

That sounds a little indifferent, like I wasn’t particularly interested in this case, but in fact I was curious how Oshino might interpret it.