Monogatari Series - Volume 17 - Chapter 1.19

019

The epilogue, or maybe, the punch line of this story.

The next day, I was roused from bed by my little sisters Karen and Tsukihi, who, unlike me, still believe that such a thing as immutable justice exists in the world, and I headed to school─on foot, as I still couldn’t buy a new bicycle. I guess it was good for my health. On a whim, I stopped by the AV room before heading to my classroom. More precisely, next to the AV room.

And, as if it was the most natural thing.

There was no empty classroom─not even the dead space from Ogi’s notebook. Just the AV room, a plain corner room, not even longer than average by the length of one classroom.

Ah, another supernatural phenomenon, I thought, but no, that couldn’t be it. Ogi had just measured wrong, that’s all. She’d created a nonexistent space in the process of mapping out the school’s buildings.

There was nothing here.

Nothing happened here.

No hidden or locked room, no whodunnit.

No surprising truth─no class council and no majority vote.

All of it was in the past, over and done.

Still, I thought, I ought to let Ogi know─I’d have Kanbaru connect us next time we met since I didn’t have her contact info. Musing, I moved buildings and headed to my classroom.

I passed by the teachers’ room on the way… Komichi Tetsujo wouldn’t be there. No, she didn’t quit out of a guilty conscience or get dismissed after her wrongdoing was uncovered. It was for an auspicious reason, she was pregnant and on maternity leave─loved by her students, she received congratulations from all as she left. She wouldn’t be coming back to school before I graduated, even if you didn’t take into account the time she’d take off to care for her baby. I doubt Tetsujo and I would ever, in our lives, meet again.

I had no feelings about that.

After I saw her raise her hand from the back that day two years ago, she’d stopped being a teacher or a grownup to me─to be honest, I’m unsure how much of the truth of this case I’d known, whether in my conscious or subconscious mind, but if there was a reason I never spoke about her like she was a teacher throughout my tale, that would be it. Under no circumstances was I trying to cover for her, as Ogi put it. I bet it’d only net me an insincere reply if I told her, though. Ohhh, is that so? Verrry educational.

I walked past the teachers’ room with no change in my stride. I arrived at my current, third-year classroom─but as I tried to enter, I nearly bumped into Hanekawa, who’d just exited.

“Ah. ’Morning, Araragi.”

“Oh. Good morning, Hanekawa.”

“Bad timing.”

“Excuse me?”

“It might be better if you don’t go in there.”

“What?”

“Hup!” Hanekawa separated me from the classroom by pushing me away from it with both palms─the cutest palm strikes ever. Once we’d moved back several feet, she whispered into my ear, “Did you ever notice the one empty seat in our class, Araragi?”

“Hm? Mm. Yeah. I guess… I thought it was a back-up chair, what about it?” I replied, still clueless─an empty seat? “Why, did you come to class today to find a ghost sitting in it? You’ll need more than a ghost to scare me off at this point.”

“Not a ghost─a person was sitting in it. A classmate who hasn’t come to school in ages suddenly decided to show up today.”

“Huh…really? So then the seat belonged to this person. That’s a surprise, we had one more classmate than I thought. But why does that mean I shouldn’t go inside?”

“Because it’s Miss Oikura,” Tsubasa Hanekawa said. Solemnly, with a concerned look that seemed to presage a tragedy that was about to befall me. “Sodachi Oikura─seems to have been studying at home for two years, and as if in exchange for Miss Tetsujo, she’s back at school. You two are on bad terms, right?”