Chapter Two- Sodachi Riddle
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Sodachi Oikura hated me. With the kind of deep hatred you might feel for a homewrecker─in fact, I couldn’t help but wonder what you had to do to become so hated, or to hate so much. Think about her position. Hating a specific person to that degree had to be pretty stressful. Granted, I’m not the most likable person, neither too amiable nor attractive─but even then, I couldn’t recall doing anything that deserved being glared at with eyes like hers. Well, I suppose there’s one reason I’m aware of, which is that I was better than her at math─but it’s not as if that actually harmed her. And in retrospect, it feels like her glare was set on me from the first time I met her in Year 1 Class 3’s classroom, soon after we entered Naoetsu High─does that sound paranoid? It’s not as if she had access to my entrance exam results, I don’t even know myself what I got. And anyway, in terms of the final linked to that fateful meeting, I only happened to get a perfect score that time around. It wasn’t consistent─she must’ve had good days during first term and outscored me on quizzes, and math is a broad, catch-all term to begin with. Surely she understood some things better than me.
She couldn’t have honestly believed I was to blame for no one calling her Euler. Come to think of it, did a high school girl really want such a nickname? Wasn’t it just a pretext? No one can dispute Euler’s greatness as a mathematician, but what you go by is something else entirely. I respect Tsubasa Hanekawa, for example, but have no desire to be called Tsubasa or Hanekawa.
Oikura must have misunderstood me.
Just as I misunderstood her.
Misunderstandings tend to multiply.
That’s what I think─but there’s this other striking thought I have, something else that I think is strange, which is that while Sodachi Oikura hated me, I in no way hated Sodachi Oikura. I think that’s very unusual. In general, it’s really hard not to hate someone who hates you. Not that I liked her, of course─I’m not twisted enough to adore someone who glares at me all the time and subjects me to prickling acts of spite that might not be outright attacks. Such high-level twistedness isn’t for me. Still, while I found her attitude dislikable, I couldn’t say I hated it.
I couldn’t.
Why not?
A far more serious question, in a way, than why she hated me so: why couldn’t I hate her? In fact, temperamentally and philosophically “incompatible” with the Naoetsu High student body, I might’ve even held her in relatively high regard, though I’d never go so far as to say I had a good impression of her.
Thinking well of people just because they’re great at math, or love math─I’m not so good-natured, or simple. Maybe it was part of why I found it hard to repudiate her. But if I kept her in mind, if my memories never let go of her even after she stopped coming to school, after she couldn’t due to her own highly unsympathetic act of self-destruction, it involved something other than academics.
Or so I thought.
Vague, half-formed thoughts─about a girl I believed I’d never meet again. Yet running into her at school two years later forced me to face that old question.
Not just face.
I was pressed for an answer─for a solution. I’d come to know why she hated me, why I couldn’t hate her, what she was to me, what I was to her, what we weren’t to each other. Truths revealed after two years, as well as truths revealed after five.
Revealed.
And exposed.
Actually, we can cut out the hyperbole and suspense.
I can even divulge the solution right now. Turns out math was entrenched in our conflict, and I was, in fact, a sort of homewrecker to her─or worse. Also: some things, you never forget, and some things, you do forget.
When you can’t recall why someone hates you─it could be that you just forgot why.
Mathematically, then.
Or perhaps dramatically, in the manner of a mystery novel, I set forth this problem─prove the following:
Why, when Sodachi Oikura hates Koyomi Araragi, can Koyomi Araragi not hate Sodachi Oikura?
Ignore Ogi Oshino when answering this problem.
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