Monogatari Series - Volume 17 - Chapter 2.09

009

“Hah─ahaha,” Ogi laughed, having heard this much. “Comical, in a way. What a silly memory, I’d declare it to be nothing but the product of your delusions if you weren’t the lord and master of Miss Kanbaru, who I’m a big fan of.”

“Listen, call my memories silly if you want. But in exchange, retract the product of Kanbaru’s delusions that you just repeated about me being her lord and master,” I interrupted my story to respond to Ogi. “She and I have a healthy, wholesome junior-senior relationship.”

“Heh, is that so─I’d like my relationship with you to be that way too. Um, what were we talking about again? To summarize, a ghost girl who came creeping and crawling out of this derelict house sent you the letters?”

“No, no, that’s not it at all,” I said, flustered. “I didn’t have anything to do with aberrations until spring break between my second and third years of high school, when I was attacked by a vampire. This was a living, breathing human being, not a ghost─she hadn’t materialized on the spot, she just showed up before me and decided to wait inside.” A failure as a narrator, I’d spoken in a misleading way. “I would’ve figured it out with a closer look. Wait, no, I think I knew on first glance. I mean, she wore MS 701’s uniform, the school we just came from.”

“A school uniform? Oh, but now that you mention it, you did say that a first-year middle schooler sent the letters. Which would mean…that you and this girl were classmates?”

“Yes, it would.”

Yes.

That’s what it should mean─probably.

“You’re saying you made a girl wait for you here in this derelict house? You were one bad boy, even back then. What a ladykiller,” Ogi teased me off-hand. I wished she’d put a little more effort into it if she was going to. “Were those envelopes love letters, after all? Was it a sly strategy by this girl to lure you to a remote location and deliver you a glorious confession?”

“Glorious…”

What a bizarre way to put it. I couldn’t even tell if she was being facetious.

“It wasn’t a love letter. And of course, it wasn’t a sly strategy, either. Classmate or not, I was only meeting her for the first time. It’s not like we had any kind of interaction before that.”

“Hm. There’s no law against sending a love letter to someone you haven’t interacted with─if anything, they tend to get sent to people you don’t know all that well. But I suppose it’d be an odd love letter─using some sort of math problem to attract someone’s interest.”

“Yeah. And that wasn’t it at all. According to her, she sent letters to multiple other people. I was the only one to show up at the meeting spot.”

“The only one brazen enough.”

“Brazen? Well, I guess so.”

Aloof might’ve been the better word.

You could say I totally lacked the ability to sense danger.

Not only had I come to a derelict home because a letter had sent me there, I entered it because a strange girl invited me in. It was too risky an act for a child. Unsafe and imprudent, and that’s being generous. But it’s due to these dangerous acts─that I am who I am today.

“At the very least, I’d have started to dislike math if not for that summer─I’d have come to hate it. I doubt I would’ve been able to enter Naoetsu High.”

Which meant never meeting Hanekawa or Senjogahara─there’s no way to know for sure, but I’d probably be a very different person today.

That’s not something I’d want.

“I see, I think I’m starting to get a vague idea. Of what exactly Miss Oikura wanted to say─but I don’t get the full connection yet. I don’t want to jump to conclusions. Let me listen to my foolish senior’s story to the end.”

“Yeah…you should. The real heart of the story comes next.”

“Well, why don’t you just come out and say it? I promise not to think any less of you for it. Even if it was pure intellectual curiosity that got you to waltz up to this derelict house, you entered faithfully because this ghost girl was cute, didn’t you?”

“Could you not vulgarize my precious memories?!”

“Well…” Though I raised my voice, Ogi remained undaunted. She was so above it all. “That’s just how first-year middle school boys are. All you cared about was that this girl was cute. I’m not conceding this point to you. Young Araragi would have shown a little more caution otherwise. If it was a brawny bandit of a man who’d come out, would you have followed him in?”

“A brawny bandit? I’d run away like mad whatever the context is.”

“So, was this ghost girl cute?” pressed Ogi, as if her investigation hinged on this point. How crass… “Most boys wouldn’t stand a chance against a cute girl telling them let’s study and get smarter together─and that’s what happened, right? I can tell you’re trying to make it sound like either a heartwarming or a scary story, but in any case, this girl was sweet. End of story, yes?”

“Fine, I’ll admit that wasn’t completely out of the picture, so please leave it at that,” I surrendered. It felt like my memories had been sullied─but then again, it’s not like she could really sully or do much else to a memory I’d forgotten until a few moments ago. “But allow me to insist for the sake of my former self’s honor: I was also drawn to what she said about analyzing the problem. The letter was perfectly in tune with my tastes that way. To the point that I could hardly believe that anyone could ignore it.”

“Hardly believe, huh? I probably would have ignored it,” Ogi said dismissively. “Whatever the case, let’s hear the rest of your story. About your fateful summer escapade. About the rest─of your secret rendezvous with this mysterious girl.”

“…”

Her word choice, escapade, gave me pause, and secret rendezvous bothered me even more. Yes, maybe they described what happened, but I never thought of it in such furtive terms, nor felt ashamed or guilty about any of it.

And that’s why.

The right term for my meetings with the girl, which began that day─would be study session.