005
“Please, Hanekawa!”
“You’re just unloading it on me?”
That night, I called Hanekawa. I’d decided to give her a full rundown on the old tree and Karen’s dojo, and to ask for the benefit of her wisdom.
“I did everything I could, but I hit a wall. Please, do something for Karen. Help me, Hanekawa, you’re my only hope.”
“Aren’t you giving up a little too easily?”
I heard her sigh.
Lately Hanekawa had stopped even trying to hide her disappointment in me.
“Please. I’ll do whatever I please with your boobies if you do.”
“My boobies are my own, thank you very much…but fine. For Karen’s sake, not yours, Araragi. If I think of it that way, I can find the motivation.”
“So, what do you think?”
“Hm? Hmm? About what?”
“I mean, first off I’d like to hear your thoughts on the matter─who are you with, Karen or everybody else?”
“Karen, of course. You can’t just dispose of a living tree for no good reason. You don’t agree, Araragi?”
“Let’s see…that’s my gut feeling, but if I were actually involved, who knows─I probably would’ve gone along with everyone else’s opinion, whatever my own feeling might’ve been.”
“And there you go.”
“Hnh?”
“That’s how everyone besides Karen must have felt─what I mean is, I don’t think the majority of them actually want to dispose of the tree like you and your sister think they do. If you can just get the opinion leaders to change their minds, everything’ll be taken care of.”
“Hmm…”
Hanekawa’s done it again.
My faith in her is not misplaced.
“And I think you were exactly right about the reason no one noticed that tree up until now, Araragi─it wasn’t a question of noticing or not noticing, it was just that nobody was really aware of it. But once it’s on your mind, it’s really on your mind─it ends up catching your eye more than it would otherwise. Like your bed head, Araragi.”
“Like my bed head, huh…”
If it’s catching your eye, say something.
At the time, I mean.
“When you learn a new word, it starts cropping up everywhere─that sort of thing?”
“Yeah, I suppose so,” Hanekawa said. “Or like how nobody remembers every single shop on a street even if it’s one they walk down all the time.”
“Except for you.”
“Ahaha, as if,” Hanekawa laughed.
To cover up the truth, probably.
“This goes back to what we were talking about earlier, but I wonder if some of the disciples at the dojo actually had noticed the tree before. But once everyone started talking about the ‘tree no one had noticed,’ they felt like they couldn’t speak up. Doesn’t that seem possible?”
“Like they didn’t want to spoil the mood? Definitely seems possible.”
“But even if that explains the phenomenon itself, we still need to figure out how to spin it. It’s only natural for people to see it as a mysterious phenomenon, as a mysterious tree.”
“I mean, this confluence of coincidences might get passed down to future generations as the tale of an aberration. Who knows what kinds of stories get popular, or how…”
We can theorize about it.
But a theory is just that.
It can never be anything more.
“Just to be clear, Araragi, there’s a pandemic of panic sweeping the dojo now, right?”
“Panic is kind of an exaggeration…but yeah, there’s something of an outbreak.”
“So we just need to bring that to an end.”
“Hm? Well, sure. But countermeasures are ineffective against pandemics, aren’t they? That’s the whole problem.”
“No, that’s not necessarily true. There is a way to stop a pandemic.”
“Huh?”
“A way to stop one, or a way for one to stop─”
I guess this time there’s nothing for it.
Hanekawa made it sound like she’d prefer it to be otherwise─and once I’d heard the “wisdom” she was about to share, I understood why.
This time, even I couldn’t bring myself to say─you know everything, don’t you.
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