Monogatari Series - Volume 17 - Chapter 1.14

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“Hold on. It seems like you’ve already made up your minds that it’s one of these students─but that’s not necessarily true, is it? Even if Hayamachi wants to go home because she thinks her absence at the meeting proves her innocence.”

I didn’t think Hayamachi had gone that far, but she didn’t bother to defend herself, probably not interested in dealing with Arikure. Still, that’d cast suspicion on everyone who skipped the study session too, including Arikure. Did she love complaining so much that the cost didn’t matter?

That wasn’t the case, of course… “Anyone who got a high score is suspect, even if they didn’t attend the study session,” she argued─having gotten a 65, this put her in the clear (but not Hayamachi, with her 92). On the other hand, since the culprit might’ve done badly on purpose to avoid detection (in the extreme case, submitting a blank sheet and scoring a zero as Yuba did), it was a weak argument.

“Okay, then let’s add to the list students who didn’t participate but got…say a 90 or above,” I proposed grudgingly─a compromise if there ever was one. If anyone insisted that students with low scores were also suspicious, everyone in class would be on the blackboard─what was this, roll call?

The non-participants with scores of 90 or above were as follows, in the same order as before─since there were so few, I wrote them myself rather than bother Gekizaka.

1: Koyomi Araragi (100) 2: Okitada Koma (97) 3: Hitagi Senjogahara (98) 4: Seiko Hayamachi (92) 5: Miawa Mebe (95)

…The list made me realize it included a lot of suspicious characters, like me. Mebe, however, was the most conspicuous. She wasn’t seen as someone who got good grades. Meanwhile, my math skills were well known (and even called puzzling), Koma went to cram school, while Senjogahara and Hayamachi were famous for their excellent grades. There stood Mebe in contrast─not that her academics were always sitting below average. Couldn’t she have her good days?

Test results were posted for all to see, so everyone knew everyone else’s scores. But when we applied specific conditions to narrow it down to just this group, her score did seem somehow unnatural─and Arikure, who’d been the catalyst for this, looked perplexed too. She must not have intended to attack anyone in particular.

As for Mebe, she was at a loss. “Huh? Hold on, naw…”

This seemed like a normal reaction to being questioned, if not suspected, by her classmates. It also looked like she was acting guilty, but that was probably biased.

“No way, I dunno. I’ve got nothing to do with it.”

“Could you not finger a culprit based on nothing, Araragi?” said Oikura, like it was my fault─she was shielding one of her few friends. No one objected because she was, in fact, right: Mebe’s 95 didn’t prove she’d done anything wrong.

“Wait, hold on,” another student raised her hand. It belonged to Ukitobi, who sat behind Hayamachi. “Um…so I probably got the lowest score out of all the girls? Which is why this might sound like an excuse? But I think this math test was pretty hard─could you solve the questions if you knew the answers?”

“…?”

It took me a moment to take her meaning. Maybe she didn’t really get what she was saying, either.

Arikure spoke again. “What are you talking about? Of course you could if you knew the answers. You’d just have to memorize them…”

But it seemed she, too, understood Ukitobi’s inarticulate remark.

Right, putting aside motive, a method as blatant as getting everyone to memorize the answers didn’t work if the culprit was introducing the test’s contents to a whole study session. Maybe if it was just two or three people, but with a group of nineteen, someone was bound to report it─in common parlance, you’d have a snitch. This crime couldn’t have that many partners; the contents needed to be imprinted unconsciously in the minds of the majority of the participants.

Still, their average was just too high… I mean, everyone other than Igami getting an 80 or higher? Sharing the info in a subtle manner wouldn’t lead to such a result.

“But if we started asking that, there’d be no end to it,” Ukitobi admitted, as if to dispel the silence her comment had brought on─Kyusu Ukitobi. I want to say she got a 57─the lowest score out of all the girls, or rather, aside from Yuba. Yet she’d made the lone brilliant point in our meeting. I didn’t have any sort of impression of her until then─must’ve been one of those kids who was smart, just bad at studying. The type shows up all the time in manga, but I’d never met one in real life. I couldn’t help but stare.

“S-Sorry, Araragi. That wasn’t my intention,” she apologized. I was admiring, not accusing, her─a sad misunderstanding, but not one I could clear up.

“Actually, why are we assuming there was foul play in the first place?”

This was Daino. It was as if she’d been waiting for everyone to settle down so she could launch into one of her eloquent speeches.

“As someone who worked very hard for this test, I’m finding this very unpleasant, to be frank. The average score of students who participated in a study session exceeding the rest by twenty points is eminently possible. Not to mention, the latter’s average was dragged down by a certain somebody.” She was referring of course to Yuba─the air grew even chillier when she jerked his chain, but the class menace didn’t seem to mind at all. His chin propped in his hand like always, he only glanced at Daino.

“You had Araragi to make up for all the points Yuba lost,” Oikura said, her voice dripping with sarcasm─why, I wanted to ask. Me, just an innocent bystander! “Still, Miss Daino, you are right. It certainly is unpleasant to be suspected of something you have absolutely no recollection of. That’s why we need to clear ourselves of such suspicion.”

It was a non-answer─she’d agreed without amending her own view. When you did that, the individual in the weaker position could only back down, and indeed Daino shut up. Reluctantly.

…I’d later come to learn that the meeting hadn’t been summoned at the school’s behest. It was Oikura’s idea from start to finish. She saw the posted test results, felt like something was wrong, calculated the averages herself, compared them, analyzed them, deepened her suspicion─and decided to clear herself of any doubt before any could surface.

As if she couldn’t allow even the possibility of suspicion in her life─hence she was dragging all of her classmates into it. How unreasonable, and two years later, I still didn’t support her, but I had to acknowledge her sense of pride. Otherwise, she’d come up empty─given the sorry outcome of all her pride, maybe she did anyway.

“‘If we started asking that, there’d be no end to it’? Well, then I find it hard to believe that any study session took place to begin with.”

The outrageous words came from the mouth of Marizumi, one of the students on day duty. A girl who wore a baggy uniform allegedly handed down from an older sister who was on the large side─she didn’t seem to care much about fashion, and her hair was as disheveled as if someone had taken random snips at it with a pair of scissors. Normally treated as a weirdo and kept at a distance. Her statement hushed us for a different reason than Ukitobi’s.

“There isn’t a single thing in this world that we can know for certain. Maybe there wasn’t actually any study session at all. How can we be sure those nineteen people aren’t colluding to tell the same lie?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Marizumi.”

“I’m not being ridiculous. I’m totally serious.”

Not even Oikura’s glare could move her─while Hyoi Marizumi could interact with our class president and not flinch, the rest of us did. We knew there’d be collateral damage.

“Say something, Araragi… Aren’t you the chair?!”

What’d I tell you.

“Um…while I do agree that we should consider all possibilities, the idea that the study session never occurred does seem a little too fantastical…”

“It’s the logically improbable truth.”

“What?”

I was flummoxed for a moment, unsure of what Marizumi had just said─she was trying to shorten one of Sherlock Holmes’s famous lines, but abbreviating it to that degree altered its sense.

“Come on,” intervened Oikura, irritated at me. “You’re both weirdos, you can communicate.”

How Much was going too far with that.

But Marizumi kept a straight face as she responded to the transgression.

“Please don’t lump me together with Araragi.”

It was a lot to take in.

This was becoming a meeting where we took a close look at just how isolated, or even segregated I was from the rest of the class─when a student quietly raised a hand. I assumed she’d speak next, but she remained silent, her hand up. I realized she was waiting to be called on, so that’s what I did as chair.

“Sunahama, do you have something to add?”

“I know it’s an aggravating theory to have to refute, but I thought I’d give testimony that the meeting did take place.”

Sunahama─Ruise Sunahama sounded absolutely fed up. Like she should never have had to carry out the task. As someone who’d been appointed chair against his own wishes, I wanted to express my sympathy. I kept the feeling to myself because she’d probably reject my overture. “What is it?” I instead encouraged her to continue.

“Well, I was on day duty the day of the math final…so I had to get to school early and get the classroom ready. I remember very well how all of you in the study session,” she said, throwing an annoyed glance at Oikura, “had left without cleaning up your mess. I was burdened with putting everything away. Nagagutsu, the boy on day duty, was nowhere in sight, so I ended up getting help from Whip, and Joe, and Hooky, who were also there early. We lined everyone’s desks back up, wiped the blackboard clean, took out the trash, and more. Seriously, can’t you at least clean up your snacks before going home?!”

This was enough to silence even Oikura─up against the school’s closing time, they must’ve just grabbed their things and headed out…

Sunahama, generally the lazy type, couldn’t let the mess stand when it came down to it─the girl was a clean freak, though probably not a germophobe. The study session was inconsiderate to leave the classroom in such a mess the day before a girl like her was on cleaning duty…

Sunahama could be lying had she been all alone, and Marizumi would have cross-examined her, but even the die-hard skeptic would shelve her excessive suspicion if Mebe and Tetsujo (“Joe”) and Fukuishi (“Hooky”) all gave the same testimony. Testimony from Tetsujo, the class mediator, would be especially credible.

Yet none of the three, namely Miawa Mebe, Komichi Tetsujo, and Tenko Fukuishi, backed up Sunahama with any vigor─they didn’t deny her claim, but that was all. Though a little leery of their muted reaction, Sunahama seemed to chalk it up to their fear of Oikura, the leader of the study session. While that made sense for Tetsujo and Fukuishi, what about the sociable, friendly, precious girl on good terms with the class president? Mebe shouldn’t have been afraid of Oikura.

“Is that correct, Fukuishi?” I tried to verify just in case. Asking Mebe directly would have been too obvious─as I expected, Fukuishi nodded meekly. She tended to keep to herself and was never assertive, so you could say a simple nod from her signaled strenuous agreement. This was someone so introverted that it took her more than two months into the school year to correct either her teachers or her classmates on the pronunciation of her name, which had mistakenly been entered as Fukuseki.

Should I seek Tetsujo’s verbal confirmation as well? Or should I go straight to Mebe? She might not go into much detail thanks to the awkwardness just moments ago. In which case, she could remain silent even if I asked her.

As I sat there, lost on what to do, a voice cut in: “Let’s say there really was a study session─well, I know it did, since I took part in it.”

Higuma hadn’t even raised his hand. Was he finally making good on his middle-school stint as student council president? Maybe he couldn’t bear to watch my hopeless attempt to lead us forward. I was all for it. In fact, he could take my place if he wanted.

“Let’s say someone─directly or indirectly─leaked the answers to the study session. The practical issue with that scenario is that we’d notice. It would feel blatant.”

“Not necessarily,” Waritori disagreed. Having gone to the same middle school, the grumpy girl was relatively mellow towards him (or at least spared him the rod). “Maybe they did it in a natural way so no one would catch on.”

“That’d be possible in a group of two or three, but we’re talking more than a dozen people. Someone’s going to think it’s strange. Getting everyone to memorize the answers outright is clearly out of the question, but slyly imprinting the answers on our unconscious also sounds like a tall order. You can’t fool so many people at once.”

Higuma, who once dealt with the hoi polloi, which is to say an entire student body when he was student council president, would think so─but in that case, we were left emptyhanded. It’d be like the crime never happened.

But maybe that was fine─and the reason why Higuma was speaking up. Maybe he wanted to settle our meeting that way.

Yet Oikura wasn’t having it. She was dead set on continuing the search for the culprit.

“Then let’s go over the actual contents of the test. We’ll use testimony from everyone who participated in the study session to see how much of what we discussed there appeared on the final.”

In order to identify the culprit.

No one leaving the classroom until we did.