Monogatari Series - Volume 17 - Chapter 2.02

002

It can be embarrassing to visit your alma mater─and I confess I’d never once returned to Public Middle School #701 since graduating. Despite it being in walking distance, I didn’t bring myself there for nearly three years─then again, it’s not like I had any particular reason to head back there after receiving my diploma. Only natural. I hadn’t belonged to any sort of club I could go back and visit as an alumnus, either.

In fact, you could say I’d started to forget that I was ever a middle schooler─but after taking one step through its nostalgic gates, a torrent of memories came rushing back to me. I remembered so many things all of a sudden─good things, bad things, things that didn’t matter, even awkward things.

I remembered.

What the disconnected memories had in common was probably embarrassment─but to my chagrin, none of the roused remembrances were of what Oikura hinted at.

I couldn’t conjure or come up with anything.

“Heheh. This is where you went to middle school? No wonder it feels so stately,” Ogi said, grinning next to me. Her attitude made it hard to tell how serious she was being, and I wondered whether she got it from her uncle.

There was nothing stately about it. MS 701 was as bland as could be. It was a plain, ordinary middle school in a provincial city, unworthy of special attention.

Then again, I did think it was special just because I’d gone there.

Is that what Ogi was getting at?

“It feels a little strange, though,” I said. “Even after I graduated from it, this middle school is still right here, doing its middle-school thing.”

“Of course it is. What kind of place exists for no one’s sake but your own? Just because a place is important to you, that doesn’t mean you’re important to it─you’re such a fool.”

A true fool, laughed Ogi.

Fine, maybe it was laughable─better than leaving her at a loss for words. It was about four in the afternoon, and the students, done with classes for the day, stared at us with suspicion as we stood by its gates. They left school like it was the most natural thing to do, the way I had─and tomorrow, they’d return like it was the most natural thing to do. Believing the cycle would last forever, not yet knowing that it’d come to a sudden end as soon as they graduated─

“Um. Remind me, do your two honorable younger sisters deign to grace this place with their presence?”

“Why so excessively polite when you’re talking about my sisters? No, they don’t─they’re at a private school.”

“Ah, right. Tsuganoki Second Middle’s Fire Sisters, was it? By the way, what is Tsuganoki Second Middle short for?”

“Tsuganoki Middle School #2… Anyway, my friend here at MS 701 is called Nadeko Sengoku, and…uh oh. Should’ve contacted her ahead of time so she could accompany us.”

Graduate or not, I felt a little awkward walking into the school. Any way you cut it, it’s such a crazy world out there. I probably wouldn’t be treated as some kind of suspicious individual, but some teacher might say something if we wandered about too much.

“We’re fine. Stand tall, there’s no need to be afraid. Just pretend it’s three years ago,” encouraged Ogi. Reservations about high schoolers stepping foot into a middle school weren’t for her─unlike me, she’d been a middle school student until the previous year. Maybe it wasn’t very worrying for her.

Still, and also unlike me, MS 701 was in no way her territory. She was totally ignorant of the place, never having seen, heard, or been to it before, so it made sense for her to be a little anxious, and yet─

“Haha! When you put it that way, I’m ignorant of most places. I don’t know anything,” Ogi said and resumed walking, with her small stride. “Let’s go. It’s far more suspicious for us to vacantly linger by the gates─you don’t want them calling a policeman on us, do you? We’ll be swift. In, and out. What you might call a touch-and-go. The shoe cupboards, was it?”

“Oh, yeah. The shoe cupboards.”

Ogi was on her way, and I followed behind, flustered. Like the day before, when I was locked in a room with her, the decisiveness and speed with which she acted was amazing. As someone liable to get lost in his own thoughts and entangled in speculation, her recklessness had me wrapped around her little finger. You could say she had me off balance─feeling the need to reclaim my status as her senior, I overtook her with long, fast strides.

“The shoe cupboards─that’s what Oikura said. Not that I’m positive she was telling the truth. This is Oikura we’re dealing with, she might’ve told some sort of irresponsible lie to torment me.”

“An irresponsible lie─that does seem possible. Yes, it does indeed. There are just so many liars out there in the world.” Ogi seemed to be enjoying herself. I won’t say she was acting like this was a picnic─it wasn’t her problem at the end of the day. “This shoe cupboard, then, will be nothing but a bunch of wasted leg work. Still a worthwhile afterschool activity, to have gotten the opportunity to accompany my dear senior Araragi.”

“Stop sounding like Kanbaru with that ‘dear senior’ and ‘opportunity to accompany’─why’d you ever respect me?”

“Please, be a little more self-aware. The stories I’ve heard of you facing aberrations here in this town for the past half-year make you worthy of quite a lot of respect. Are you trying to get me to go down the list, one by one? You must remember it all, it’s in your bones.”

“In my bones.”

“Yes. I’m talking about your memories.”

“…”

True, I couldn’t claim the memories weren’t a part of me─I’d just have to overlook how unmistakably influenced by Kanbaru she sounded.

Overlook, or maybe put up with, or maybe ignore.

It was an issue I’d have to deal with someday, but the one I needed to address at the moment was Sodachi Oikura.

A serious issue I couldn’t simply put up with─an issue thrust before me with all the weight of her sudden appearance at school after two straight years of absence.

I couldn’t approach this with my guard down.

Sure, Oikura coming back to school before graduation and for the first time since that meeting was something to be celebrated, but─

“Heheh, what a strange coincidence. I suppose these things really do happen. You told me about her, and you were reunited the next day─a twist of fate indeed.”

“I admit I was surprised… I didn’t even know we were in the same class.”

That I didn’t was a shock in itself, of course, no matter how uninterested in my surroundings and disconnected from my class I might be. When I went and checked, though, her name really was on the roll. As this year’s class vice president at least in name, you could call my oversight a blameworthy case of negligence. Did I deliberately ignore it? Had I not noticed because─doing so would remind me of that day and the class council?

Of those memories?

“Heheh. Heheh. Heheheheh. Oh, life is just one surprise after the next. You never know what might happen─which is why it’s so much fun.”

“I’d call it the opposite of fun.”

Ogi seemed to be enjoying herself, but my heart was actually quite heavy─if what happened today was continuing on into tomorrow and beyond, this was no time to be worried about entrance exams. Right, what if today was just a warm-up─I had to deal with this asap, before the main event began.

“And thus─the getabako.”

“Yeah. The shoe cupboards.”

They weren’t “geta boxes” anymore─no middle schooler was going to wear wooden sandals to school in this day and age (I doubt the regulations even permitted it).

Ogi and I entered the building─and arrived in front of the shoe cupboard in question. Well, Oikura hadn’t directed me to the cupboard itself─but its contents.

Inside the cupboard…

“So, which one is it? Which did you use when you were a first-year?” asked Ogi.

“Oh… If we’re looking for the first-years’ corner…” I replied, guiding her.

Maybe corner wasn’t accurate (“area” would be more like it), but what could I do? The word came to my mouth and slipped out in the moment. It wasn’t worth correcting─so I led Ogi. Yes, around here, if nothing changed since my days…

“It’s actually surprising how well I remember─it’s like my body does, rather than my mind.” The school’s very existence had been hazy to me until just moments ago, but now that I’d gone and stepped foot inside, it was as if my feet knew the way─they moved of their own accord.

“Heheh. Is that so? Well, I understand the feeling, as someone who’s transferred all around─a memory that seemed to be nowhere in your conscious mind getting dug up all of a sudden. It really is such a flimsy thing… You think you remembered, or recalled, something, but that could be far from the truth,” Ogi said. Her strange and bothersome remark made me all the more anxious, but I identified the space I undoubtedly used at the time.

I identified it.

This seems obvious, but it was another student’s now, so it wasn’t as if the label read “Araragi” like five years ago. Still…

“This is it, huh? The spot where the new middle schooler Koyomi Araragi swapped his outdoor shoes for indoor slippers each and every day─how moving.”

“Moving? Me swapping one pair of footwear for another?”

“What kind of young gentleman were you?”

“Young gentleman…”

I was a middle schooler.

Come on.

That said, a high schooler can’t help thinking of a first-year middle schooler as young. And in fact, I was such a child then that I acted painfully childish─take the way I saw truth.

Or justice. I never doubted their existence.

I’d resolved to always do the right thing. Yes, just like my younger siblings, the Fire Sisters.

A bloated self-consciousness─what’s more childish than that?

“Oops. You’ve gone quiet all of a sudden. Is something the matter? Oh, you. Staying silent like that, you seem all the more manly. You’re going to make me fall in love with you at this rate.”

“Um, no…”

“You realize you’re in for a rough time if I do fall in love with you.”

“Yeah, I can definitely see that one.” I don’t know, but somehow hearing her praise me wasn’t embarrassing, unlike with Kanbaru. Part of it is that Ogi was clearly teasing me (or being malicious)─in that sense, I guess Kanbaru’s bombastic accolades were convincing (sincere?) to some extent… “I’m just wondering what to do─we’ve come here, just like Oikura said, but what’s next?”

The shoe cupboard. Inside─the one I used as a first-year middle schooler. I felt compelled to come and see, but now that I was here, all I remembered was its exact location.

This was our terminus─a dead end.

Why did Oikura want me to come here? Well, not that literally checking out my middle-school shoe cupboard was the point… But then, what was she trying to tell me?

“What next? There’s only one thing to do next. Look inside.” Before I could stop her, unhalting, untroubled, and unstraying, Ogi─put a hand on the space I used during my first year of middle school.

She popped it open.

Even as I turned pale, taken aback─yes, according to Oikura, the contents were the issue, so we’d have had to at some point. But it belonged to someone else now─an adorable (or maybe not) first-year middle schooler, a stranger. Entering the grounds without permission was a problem to begin with, but we were dealing with a student’s shoe locker here. You didn’t have to be particularly considerate of privacy issues to know it shouldn’t be tossed open, thus my cold feet. I’d felt like our investigation had hit a brick wall, but Ogi had gone up to this wall, to this terminus and dead end, and hopped over it with ease like a hurdle in an obstacle race.

Fearsome, the Oshino bloodline.

They didn’t think twice about jettisoning a little bit of their ethics for the sake of an investigation─I had a similar thought the day before, but she really was born to be inquisitive.

Prompt in assessment and decision.

Her capability for resolute action seemed to engulf all else. Couldn’t she at least warn me first, though?

“Haha. You say that, but don’t tell me you were going to wait for the student whose shoe box this is to show up, so you could explain the situation and ask for permission to look inside.”

“Um, that seems like a sensible plan to me?”

“You’re so patient─one of your virtues, but no matter how patient you are, time waits for no man. If we lay in wait for a middle schooler, we’d be full-fledged suspicious individuals at that point. Think about your bright future, which you’d be throwing down the drain.”

“Okay, but isn’t it an even bigger problem to open a middle schooler’s shoe locker without permission?”

“It’s okay, I’ll lie if they find us and say I wanted to drop a love letter into the kid’s box. There’s no law out there that says I can’t lie, not when the world is so full of liars. You can be my trusty senior who agreed to tag along with my timid self.”

“Oh, okay. Yeah, a good setup. I like my role, too. But you know, Ogi, it might be a girl using that box now, given the penmanship.”

“Then you were the one planning to drop off the love letter. I’ll be your junior who’s tagging along.”

“A high school senior bringing along one of his juniors to drop off a love letter to a first-year middle schooler? Feels like you’ve flipped a great setup into an awful one… Come on, that’s too fatal a drop for me and my role.”

“Ah, what’s this? There are indoor slippers in here, which means its current user has already left. It’d have been impossible to get permission in advance. Why care when you get results. Hm? What do we have here?”

Having noticed something, she stuck her hand inside. My request flew into the ether as Ogi, for whom “not caring if you get results” was a commendable attitude, moved once more to promptly assessed and decided action, but what could it be? Something suspicious about the slippers?

What she extracted from the cupboard, however, wasn’t footwear.

Three.

There were three─envelopes.

“En…velopes?”

Huh?

We’d been kidding, but love letters, in this day and age? Billets-doux? And three of them? What, was the user of this box, mister first-year middle schooler who’d already gone home, popular with the ladies?

Kids these days…

Was he the protagonist of a light novel?

Was that kind of story unfolding at my old middle school?

“Mmm, no. Sorry to interrupt you when you’re feeling so giggly, but these don’t seem to be love letters─and they’re all from the same person, anyway.”

“All three? Well, if that’s what you say… And also, I’m not feeling giggly, but whatever, you shouldn’t be grabbing someone’s private correspondence. You need to put them back right now.”

I had to scold her. We hadn’t come to my alma mater to infringe on the privacy of middle schoolers.

Yet she was utterly nonchalant. “I dunno. Take a look at these envelopes─they’re labeled a, b, and c in big letters on the front. By hand, too. The handwriting seems to belong to one person, but who’d use this kind of lettering on a love letter?”

What kind of love-lettering would that be, Ogi mumbled.

Yes, it did seem off, or rather, odd─all the more so since each letter was written exactly as you’d see it in math class if it were a variable. Now, first year of middle school, that’s right around the time you go from arithmetic to mathematics, which meant it was about when you’d start using that kind of notation─still, hold on.

“Still, you shouldn’t look at someone’s private letters without permission. Listen to me, I don’t care if it’s for the sake of fieldwork─”

“But…these letters are addressed to you.”

Ogi turned the envelopes around.

And yes, it said: To Koyomi Araragi, 1-3.

All three of them.

“What…”

“Hmmmmm. What could we possibly have here? My, myyyy, how straaaange. Ohhh, it just doesn’t make sense,” Ogi cried out with an unsettling smirk─and that’s when I remembered, like I’d been hit by a bolt of lightning.

What Oikura was trying to say.

I remembered.

Almost to the point of forgetting everything else.

How true.

It really is such a flimsy thing─human memory, as dodgy as my life itself.