Monogatari Series - Volume 17 - Chapter 2.11

011

“Ah…I’ve heard that question before. But what was the answer, I’ve forgotten.” Ogi tilted her head. “I want to say that what’s important here is that a character doesn’t always have to be on the flip side of a card showing a number? It didn’t interest me too much, but did the question shatter your heart into pieces yet again? Did it send a second arrow through your first-year middle-schooler heart?”

“Do you have to put it that way?”

Well, she was right.

If she wanted to call it a second arrow, that’s exactly what it was.

Now that I had my homework, I went home and thought about the problem as promised. The joy I felt when I came up with the answer drove me even further into joyful obsession.

To put it simply.

I’d become a slave to math.

“A slave─hmm. I was expecting a story of a gentle romance from your early days, but I see the ground has shifted. This is starting to sound like a manga ad for a massive test-prep company.”

“If you want to be objective about it, I was basically going to cram school. I kept on coming to these ruins from the end of first term all throughout summer break. I kept on studying with the mysterious girl.”

To be precise, it was more one-way than me studying with her. She taught me─taught me fun math that didn’t have much to do with my coursework.

She was also the one to teach me about the most beautiful formula in human history, Euler’s─and I can still rattle off all of this “math” that, if we’re being honest, is useless at school.

I hadn’t forgotten anything I learned there.

I’d forgotten just one thing.

The girl who’d taught it to me.

“It didn’t feel like studying to me at all. More like coming to play every day… Honestly, this place was our secret base. Or maybe a secret cram school?”

“Cram school… Which reminds me, wasn’t the abandoned building where my uncle lived for a while a former cram school?”

“Yeah. It managed to stay afloat until a few years ago, but sounds like pressure from a corporate chain that moved into town gave it financial troubles until it closed down.”

“Financial troubles. Then after it went down in flames, the building went up in flames. Tragic.”

“…”

Um.

It seemed to me like she’d gone out of her way to play up the tragic aspect…

“The same might befall this place someday if it stays abandoned,” noted Ogi. “You do hear about abandoned buildings getting burned down by suspicious fires all the time. Of course, by the looks of it, it might collapse before it goes up in flames. I can’t believe you were holding study sessions here almost every day.”

“Well, yeah. It does seem strange when I look back on it now…We could’ve used the public library, or the school library, lots of other options. But she was fixated on this place. She said she’d only study here.”

The next day.

Having solved my homework (in my own unique way, though I ended up being right when we compared answers), we met in our room in the derelict house, where she set out that rule. While she was usually kind, if also a bit precarious, that was the one time she made me promise sternly─there were conditions in order for these study sessions to continue.

Three conditions.

One of them being that they’d take place here─in the farthest room of the second floor of this derelict house.

“Three conditions… Hey, now, that wasn’t the deal. I mean, didn’t she offer just the day before to teach young Araragi to his heart’s content if he’d keep on loving math? How unfair. And contradictory. There’s no consistency here. The whole narrative’s falling apart.”

“You really are a nitpicker, aren’t you… Sure, looking back on it now, you’re right. Not one of the points in your little lecture is wrong. But isn’t it a very human thing to add on conditions?”

To repeat, she was a middle school first-year, someone in the same class as me─not any kind of officially licensed cram school instructor, so tacking on extra conditions didn’t put her in violation of any code of ethics.

“Is that so. Well, and the other two? That you’d pay her a fee? The way you’re paying Miss Senjogahara and Miss Hanekawa every month?”

“Don’t spread fake rumors. I’m not paying a monthly fee to Senjogahara or Hanekawa.”

“Ah, right─I guess Miss Senjogahara’s stance is that she won’t seek anything in return. I’m sure Miss Hanekawa is the same way.”

“…”

Actually, why did she know this about Senjogahara and Hanekawa when she’d never met them─even supposing she’d heard about them from Oshino or Kanbaru?

“Funny how you’re so insistent that you don’t pay them. It’d be even funnier if you said, I pay them in gratitude.”

“…So the second condition is that we’d keep our study sessions here a secret between us. That we wouldn’t tell anyone. As for the third condition─”

Don’t ask my name.

Don’t try to find out who I am.

Don’t ask me anything─except about math.

“That was it.”

“What was she, the math fairy?” Ogi blurted out her uncensored impression.

Well, I couldn’t blame her─not only had I been captivated by her aura, I’d been enchanted by math and how fun it was. I didn’t see it quite in the same way as Ogi, but when you boiled it down, it did sound like a fairytale.

The girl spoke and acted like someone from a dream world disconnected from ours.

“Did you ask why she was giving you these conditions? Why your secret meetings had to take place in this dilapidated house, or why you couldn’t tell anyone else about your study sessions, or why you shouldn’t look into her true identity? You must have asked?”

To listen to Ogi, no investigator worth her salt would be so amiss, but my unfortunate self, Koyomi Araragi, was no investigator.

“That went against condition three.” Don’t ask me anything. “That’s why I didn’t ask─I accepted the conditions, no ifs, ands, or buts.”

“Studying math and logic puzzles without those? You’re the type who walks straight into scams, I bet.”

“But I can also say that the girl never demanded anything else. Really, not a thing. Just the three conditions, along with what she said at the beginning. She never wanted anything like a private-tutoring fee or a monthly payment or tuition. I felt bad about her just teaching me and never doing anything in return, so I brought her some snacks one day, but she wouldn’t even allow me to offer them to her. ‘I’m not doing this─’”

I’m not doing this because I want to be rewarded.

You see.

All I want is for you to love math, Araragi.

There’s nothing I want but that.

I’m glad I’m getting to teach you math.

So please.

Don’t stop loving math.

“That’s what she said.”

“You’re only making her sound more like the math fairy…or maybe less of a test-prep ad and more of a manga guide to learning math. Oh, or could it be a science-minded mystery full of math-based tricks?”

“This story doesn’t pass muster as a science-minded mystery, does it? It’s too illogical. The study sessions end up coming to a sudden end one day, too─leaving behind unsolved mysteries.”

“They never got solved?”

“If anything, I was only left with more questions. But anyway, I agreed to all the conditions and started coming to these ruins every day.”

“Every single day? Literally?”

“Every single day. Literally.”

“Huh─how singleminded of you.”

Ogi sounded impressed, and in fact, I was surprised by my own actions, describing them out loud like this. While I’m devoted to studying for my entrance exams, I’m still not as fervent about my studies as I was then.

Strictly speaking, of course, our sessions weren’t my studies. It was more the kind of trivia a middle schooler loves than it was math─making me a bit like a game-obsessed kid.

Karen and Tsukihi, the Fire Sisters─though they weren’t called that at the time, both being in elementary school─even complained that I stopped being as friendly once I started middle school and didn’t play with them anymore.

That aspect of our poor sibling relationship was improving lately─but while I’d chalked up its deterioration to a typical shift in attitude between elementary and middle school, now that I considered it, the sudden “unfriendliness” might have been due to the fact that I’d silently gone off somewhere every day that summer.

It seemed likely─which meant that at the time, I was so engrossed in math that I couldn’t be bothered with anything else, even my own family.

“Your story starts to take on a new light if you weren’t considerate of your own surroundings─if it got so bad that it had a negative effect on your regular life. At the very least, it’d be more of a ghost story than a heartwarming tale. Were you okay?” asked Ogi, a note of concern in her voice.

In other words, the situation, looked at objectively, worried even a girl who tended to find everything amusing.

“Well, of course you were okay. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here talking to me now.”

“If it kept on going, then who knows─but like I said earlier, these study sessions came to a sudden end one day.”

“An end.”

“Yes. An abrupt end. On the last day of summer break. I visited this place like always, but─”

012

Young Araragi visited the derelict house like always, but that day, the girl who never failed to arrive before him─so she could finish preparing for their session─wasn’t there.

That day─for the first time.

Young Araragi found this a little odd, of course, but interpreted the situation in an idyllic manner. Well, he thought, given enough meetings, this was bound to happen sooner or later. He sat and waited for the girl.

No doubt, he optimistically believed, the “math” she was teaching him today took a long time to prepare, hence her tardiness. He even grew excited─but no matter how much time passed, no matter how long he waited, she wouldn’t come.

Only after the sun had set did young Araragi belatedly begin searching the home─but she was nowhere to be found. She wasn’t hiding somewhere to scare him.

He ended up returning to the room─the farthest one on the second floor, and spent the final night of his summer break there. Raised by his parents to accept correctness as one of his principles, he was staying the night away from home without permission for the first time─sadly to no avail.

His unauthorized sleepover left him empty-handed.

Morning came, but she did not come.

Young Araragi needed to go to school, so he had no choice but to leave the derelict house behind─of course, once the start-of-term ceremony ended, he’d stop by his home then return to the ruins, before the day was out. That was his plan, but he had the vague feeling that it would be futile.

Because during his night there, he found an envelope beneath the low table. An envelope, sloppily Scotch-taped to the back side of the low table where young Araragi and the mysterious girl studied. An envelope that resembled the ones that had been deposited in his shoe locker.

No letters were written on the front, nor was it addressed or signed. The same envelope, but blank─and it was empty too.

Just like the b envelope from before.

It was empty─a wrong answer.

He wasn’t so wise a boy as to take its meaning, or perhaps it had no meaning at all─but Koyomi Araragi, first-year middle schooler, had a thought.

It’s over.

I won’t be learning any more math from her here.

Such was his suspicion─and indeed, I was right.

Not only did I revisit the empty home that day, I continued to do so on days after that, just as I’d promised and at the time I’d promised, but she never came to teach me about how fun math could be.

I kept up my visits.

Stubbornly. Persistently.

But at some point, I ceased to.

If any one thing made me stop, it might have been the realization that the girl didn’t seem to be one of my classmates.

Based on the third condition, I didn’t look into her identity for quite a while after she vanished, but I came to the end of my rope at last and began investigating the other classes.

As someone without any sort of a network, of course, it was a passive investigation that involved sneaking peeks into other classes─but the girl I’d met for so many hours one summer was neither a classmate nor even an upperclassman.

She wore a MS 701 uniform, she had on a first-year’s pin, and those letters had been placed in my shoe locker, so I’d assumed that she was a classmate─but given the fact she wasn’t there at school, perhaps she’d been an outsider.

Not just from outside my school.

For all I knew, she’d come from outside this world.

A ghost in a haunted house─I didn’t really think that, but it was as if her entire existence had vanished, and young Araragi─yes, it made him quiver.

He was scared.

That, probably, was when she began to scare him.

Thus─he stopped going near the abandoned home.

Thus─he forgot about her.

But─the one thing he didn’t forget was the math he learned from her there, and young Araragi’s grades began to rally after second term, supported most of all by his math scores.

In other words, his life had reverted to the state it was in before he started visiting the rundown home─nothing had changed in the long run, but one thing was different for certain.

For the most part, young Araragi kept up his steadfast pursuit of the right and just─at times going overboard and facing terrible repercussions for it─but when it came to math and math alone, he pursued fun.

If not for that foundation.

Once that class council meeting shattered his sense of justice─most likely there’d have been nothing left of his heart.

Math could be fun.

Life could be fun.

The world could be fun. It’s because she taught him this─that I am who I am today.

I was made up of that summer.