Monogatari Series - Volume 4 - Chapter 0.02

002

Making friends would lower my intensity as a human.

I think I said something of the sort.

As to when, it was right before spring break: Saturday, March 25th, in the afternoon of the day our school held its closing ceremony. I was wandering around aimlessly near the school I go to, Naoetsu High.

We’re talking about me, who has zero affiliation with any school club.

I really was just wandering around, for no reason whatsoever.

If you’re wondering if I was thrilled that spring break would start the next day, I was by no means excited.

As a rule, students are happy about any cluster of days off. Not just spring break, but summer break, winter break, Golden Week, and so on. Even I was happy for the most part that our third trimester was over and that spring break had begun, but at the same time, long vacations also meant having far more time on my hands than I knew what to do with.

Especially spring break, since we don’t even have homework.

Staying at home would feel a bit odd.

Anyway─with closing ceremonies over, I went to my classroom to receive my report card, and we were dismissed with an okay, see you next school year, but I hesitated to go straight home. Yet it wasn’t as if I had anywhere else to go, which meant loitering around school like some sort of suspicious fellow.

I had no particular goal.

I did it less to fill time than to kill time.

While I bike to school, my bicycle was actually still parked in the school lot─another expression of my intention to not go home yet.

You could say I was going for a walk.

Of course, I’m not the health-conscious type.

While it may have seemed like a good idea to kill time inside school if killing time is what I wanted to do, just as I found being at home odd, in its own way it was odd being at school too─though it may have been the afternoon after closing ceremonies, a lot of people were in the middle of their club activities.

I don’t like people who try hard.

Well, it’s not like the students at my school are that enthusiastic about their clubs. The only real exception was the girls’ basketball team after this monstrously huge rookie joined as the result of some sort of mistake. Most of the other clubs, even the sports teams, were the kinds of outfits that were actually happy to receive participation trophies.

And that’s why (well, there’s not any actual reason why) after aimlessly circling around the school a few times, I had begun to think that yeah, it really is about time for me to pick up my bike from inside the school and head home─I’m hungry, after all─when I came across an unexpected individual.

With it already being spring break, I frankly don’t know whether to describe myself at that time as a second-year or a third-year, but in any case, a celebrity in my grade─Tsubasa Hanekawa─was walking straight toward me.

I wondered for a moment what she was doing, with both of her hands held there behind her head, until I realized she seemed to be adjusting the position of her braid. She wore her long hair behind her in a braid. While braids themselves are already rare to begin with these days, she also wore her bangs in a straight line.

She was wearing her school uniform.

A completely unaltered skirt falling four inches below her knees.

A black scarf.

A school sweater on top of her blouse as designated by school regulations.

White socks and school shoes as designated by those same regulations.

The very picture of a model student.

A model student among model students, a class president among class presidents.

She and I were in different classes during both our first and second years, so I doubted she knew who I was, but I had heard about her class-presidential ways and doings.

Since the rumors had gone so far to find their way to me, someone grossly ignorant of school gossip, even taken with a grain of salt those ways and doings must have been quite something.

She would no doubt continue to be class president as a third-year.

Plus, she had good grades.

While it’s an odd way to put it, I’d heard that she was freakishly smart. Getting perfect marks in all of her classes was like nothing to her. Sure, when all the students take the same test, someone ending up in first place is as much of a given as someone else ending up in last place, but for two years, Tsubasa Hanekawa had always maintained her spot on top.

Though I had managed to get into a private prep school, Naoetsu High, I soon found myself in a position that you might call “left behind,” which meant there was a world of difference between us. In a way, you could call us polar opposites.

Hmph.

And so, she caught my attention for a moment.

We were in different classes, after all, so while I may have known of her, I rarely saw her─yet it was her who I happened to see at that moment, right after closing ceremonies had ended, and that did surprise me a little.

Well.

A rare coincidence, that’s all.

She seemed to have just left through the school gates, so upon further consideration, it wasn’t that strange to come across her, considering how I’d been loitering around the school for all that time.

Naturally, Hanekawa didn’t even notice me.

I didn’t seem to be in her field of vision, as engrossed as she was in fixing the position of her braid─and had I happened to be in it, Hanekawa and I wouldn’t normally so much as nod at each other, given our relationship (or lack therof).

Hah hah hah.

In fact, I thought that a model student like Hanekawa probably hated people with the kind of devil-may-care attitude that I had.

She was serious, and I was not.

Better if she didn’t know about me.

I’ll just let her pass by, I thought.

No reason to run away, either.

I kept walking forward, not missing a step, as if I hadn’t noticed her─and right as we were only five or so steps away each from passing by without incident, it happened.

I…doubt I’ll ever forget that moment as long as I live.

Out of absolutely nowhere─a gust of wind.

“Ah.”

I hadn’t been able to stay silent despite myself.

The front of Hanekawa’s rather long pleated skirt, hanging four inches below her knees, flew straight up in the air.

I assume that under different circumstances, she would have reflexively pushed it back down into place─but thanks to some unfortunate timing, both of her hands were behind her head, engrossed in the complex operation that was fixing the position of her braid. From where I stood, she almost looked like she was putting on a mildly affected pose, her hands clasped behind her.

And it was in that situation that her skirt was flipped up.

Its contents were put into plain sight.

They were certainly not gaudy─but they were the kind of elegant undergarments that refused to release one’s gaze once a pair of eyes was attracted to them.

They were a tidy and pure white.

It was not as if they were suggestively shaped. In fact, they seemed to be on the higher end of the surface area spectrum. A wide article, made of thick cloth─by no means lascivious, and in fact, if one were to speak of them in that way, it would be reasonable to call them demure.

Yet they were so white it was dazzling.

And they were anything but plain.

In the center, white string had been used to sew a complex embroidered pattern over a white canvas─no doubt intended to evoke flowers. The pattern, with its bilateral symmetry, acted to bring a sublime balance to the piece as a whole. And toward the top-center of the embroidery sat a small ribbon.

This one ribbon worked to further cement the impression of the whole.

What’s more, visible just above that small ribbon was her abdomen and her cute bellybutton. Yes, her skirt had been flipped so far up that those parts of her were now immodestly exposed. Had I wanted to, I could even have scrutinized the tails of her blouse, tucked into her skirt. I never knew that the shirttails of a blouse could appear so salacious.

The lining of a skirt was another fresh sight to my eyes. While I frequently caught sight of skirts, they seemed to be inviolable, mysterious existences─but I now felt as though, for the very first time, I understood the structure of this garment.

But most of all, it was exquisite how only the front section of her skirt was flipped.

Next to her pure-white undergarment stood something else so proudly white it was as if the two were in competition: her thighs, which had no small amount of meat on them. Sitting behind the two, her navy blue skirt placed them in relief and emphasized the contrast. You could say her skirt, longer than the average girl’s, was now serving like a blackout curtain to accentuate a graceful work of fine art. Even the skirt’s pleats came across like they might be made of a fine velvet.

And when coupled with that pose of hers, her hands joined behind her head, it practically seemed as if she was showing off her vaunted underwear to me. That was how she appeared in effect.

She─Tsubasa Hanekawa, did not move so much as a finger.

She must have been taken aback.

She stood in that pose, allowing her skirt to stay flipped, with everything down to her expression frozen in place.

In reality, I doubt that a solitary second went by.

But for me, it was like an hour─no, it felt so long I even began to imagine that my life might reach its natural end before this glimpse was over. This is absolutely not an exaggeration. In that moment, I experienced a lifetime.

My eyes were so captivated by her lower half that I felt as though my eyes were about to grow dry.

Of course, I understand─the gentlemanly thing to do in this kind of situation is to avert your eyes.

Of course I understand that.

In most cases, I probably would have done so. I even try my best to look down at my feet the entire while if a girl happens to be in front of me when I climb the stairs.

But at that moment in time, I was not so polished a man that I could promptly behave in said manner, utterly unprepared, upon being visited by such a blessing out of the blue.

It was like that image of Hanekawa was being burned into my retinas.

If I were to die at that moment and if my eyes were transplanted to another person, that someone would probably be haunted by visions of Hanekawa’s underwear for life.

That is how shocking it was.

The underwear of a model student.

“………”

Hold on.

How long did I just go on describing a model student’s panties?

While I did return to my senses, by the time I did, Hanekawa’s skirt was already back in place.

It really had been an instant.

As for Hanekawa─she still looked taken aback. And she was looking at me.

She was staring at me.

“…Um.”

Ack.

How was I to respond?

What was I supposed to do at a time like this?

“I…didn’t see anything, you know?”

I tried a bald-faced lie.

But my bald-faced lie received no reply from Hanekawa. She only continued to stare at me as she finally finished adjusting her braid and brought her hands down to pat her skirt a few times.

Really? Now?

For just a moment, she took her eyes off of me and made as if to implore heaven. Then she looked at me again and said:

“Teheheh.”

A bashful laugh.

…Wow.

She laughs?

What a broad-minded woman, indeed a class president among class presidents.

“I don’t know what to say.”

Hop, hop, hop.

Hanekawa kept both of her feet together as she bounded toward me, seeming to use nothing more than the joints of her knees for movement.

We had been ten steps away from each other, but now we were down to three.

A bit on the close side.

“For something that’s meant to hide what you don’t want seen, skirts really are low security. Maybe I need the firewall of a pair of bike shorts after all?”

“Wh-Who knows…”

Her metaphor left me at a loss.

So what did that make me, a virus?

Fortunately for her─or possibly not, I’m not sure─no one else was around, including any other students from Naoetsu High.

It was just me and Hanekawa.

In other words, I was the only one to see her panties. While the fact made me feel a mild sense of superiority over the rest of mankind, let’s put that aside for now.

“A little while back, people liked talking about Murphy’s Law. Maybe I should chalk it up to that: The front of your skirt only gets flipped when your hands are behind you. You’re normally careful about the back of your skirt, but the front is actually more of a blind spot than you’d expect.”

“Yeah… Maybe.”

How should I know?

Or rather, yikes, how awkward.

I didn’t know if it was Hanekawa’s intention to make me feel like she was berating me in a roundabout way, but that’s how I felt. That said, and while it may not sound very convincing to you after I had looked that carefully at them, the fact that I had witnessed, even unintentionally, something that girls “don’t want seen” made me feel undeniably guilty.

Not only that, she was being so smiley…

Trying to make something out of it─please, stop!

“W-Well, don’t worry. I might’ve lied when I said I didn’t see them, but I couldn’t see them very well because they were shaded.”

Of course, that was another lie. I saw them ridiculously well.

“Hu-u-uh.”

Hanekawa tilted her head to one side.

“As a girl, it would make me feel much more at ease if you just said you got a good look at them if you really did.”

“W-Well, I really do wish I could say that to you, but I simply can’t tell you anything but the truth.”

“Is that so? You can’t?”

“Yeah. It’s too bad I can’t make you feel at ease. If only I could lie to you.”

Words from a man speaking nothing but lies for a while now.

“So this feeling I have that you spent about two pages giving a precise description of what was under my skirt, down to the fine details, is all my imagination?”

“Totally your imagination. Super-duper all your imagination. Until just now, I was painting a beautiful visual landscape using words pregnant with emotion.”

This, technically, was not a lie.

“Well, I should get going,” I said, casually raising a hand to sig-nal to Hanekawa that I had no intention of continuing our conversation, and began to step forward.

I walked away with quick steps.

Ah, I don’t know.

Hanekawa was probably going to head home, but I wondered if she was going to send a text message or something to her friends on her way back about how I saw her panties. While part of me doubted that a model student would do something like that, another part of me thought that she would do it precisely because she was a model student. No, Hanekawa probably didn’t know my name…but she would have to at least know that we were in the same year, no?

As rather overly self-conscious thoughts ran through my head, I began to slow my pace a bit, when─

“Wait up a second!”

I heard a voice from behind me.

It was Hanekawa.

She seemed to have chased after me, of all things.

“I finally caught up to you. You’re a fast walker.”

“…Weren’t you heading home?”

“Hmm? Well, I’ll go home eventually. And what about you, Araragi? Why are you heading back toward school?”

“………”

She had my name down.

Whaat?

It’s not like I was wearing a name tag.

“…Um, well, I was going back to pick up my bike,” I said.

“Aha! So you bike to school.”

“Well, yeah… My house is a little on the far side, and─”

Hold on, that wasn’t the issue. Though it did seem like she hadn’t known that I biked to school.

“…Why do you know my name?”

“What? Of course I know it. We go to the same school, don’t we?” Hanekawa said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

The same school…

She said it in the exact same way that someone might talk about knowing people in their own class. Who does that?

“Well, Araragi, you might not know about someone like me, but you’re pretty famous, after all.”

I couldn’t help but go, “Huh?”

No, you’re the famous one.

And me, of all people? My position within Naoetsu Private High School was like that of a rock on the side of the road─I wasn’t even certain if my own classmates knew my full name.

“Hm? What’s wrong, Araragi?”

“…”

“Araragi, with the ‘A’ written with the left radical for ‘mound’ together with the first character in ‘possibility,’ the two ‘ra’ written with the ‘good’ in ‘good boy,’ and the ‘gi’ you use to write ‘arbor.’ Your given name is Koyomi, as in the character for ‘calendar,’ right? So, Koyomi Araragi.”

“………”

Not only did she know my full name, she knew the exact characters used to write it.

Seriously?

She knew my name and my face. If she had a Death Note, I’d be dead…

Well, I was in the same position with regards to her too.

“You’re─Hanekawa.”

It wasn’t in the way of retaliation, nor was I trying to hold my own, but what I did was to utter those words to her without even acknowledging what she’d said.

“You’re Tsubasa Hanekawa.”

“Wow!”

Hanekawa looked honestly and plainly surprised.

“I’m amazed that you know someone like me,” she said.

“Tsubasa Hanekawa, who during final exams of the first trimester of our second year got only one answer wrong, a fill-in-the-blank, across every subject including health and PE as well as art.”

“What? That’s…hey, why do you know so much about me?”

Hanekawa grew only more surprised.

It didn’t seem to be an act.

“Wait… Are you stalking me, Araragi? Hah, maybe putting it that way makes it sound like I have too much of a persecution complex?”

“…No, not really.”

It seemed as if she didn’t realize she was famous.

She thought she was “normal.”

A regular girl who had nothing to recommend her but being on the serious side? Was that it?

Add to that the fact she was treating me like I was someone famous and it got a little nasty─of course, I did recognize that I had somewhat of a reputation as a washout.

But even so, why call her out on it?

I decided to just give her a bullshit answer.

“I heard about you from an alien friend.”

“What? You have friends, Araragi?”

“Ask about the alien bit first!”

I’m not the kind of person who normally flings retorts at people I’m meeting for practically the first time, but she managed to draw one out of me.

Even if she didn’t intend any malice by it, what a terrible thing to say.

“Er, well,” Hanekawa said uncomfortably. Even she must have realized what she’d just said. “You’re always alone, so I had the impression that you lived up in a world apart from everyone else.”

“You don’t actually think I’m that cool, do you?”

She did seem to know a little bit about me.

But not too much.

“Well, you’re right that I don’t have any friends. Which makes you so famous that even a friendless loser knows who you are,” I said.

“Oh, stop it.”

Hanekawa sounded a little bothered by this. Her, a woman who quickly shrugged off with a single embarrassed smile the contents of her skirt being exposed for the world to see.

“I don’t like jokes like that. Please don’t make fun of me.”

“…Oh.”

I decided to just nod, as objecting seemed likely to launch a full-on argument.

Sheesh.

The pedestrian crossing facing the school gates was red, and so I stopped there─and Hanekawa stood next to me.

…

Why follow me?

Did she forget something at school?

“Hey, Araragi,” she began to speak just as I was wondering why. “Do you believe in vampires, Araragi?”

“………”

What in god’s name was she talking about?

Then, a moment later, I came upon the answer.

Oh. While she was acting calm, she was actually embarrassed that I’d seen her panties.

That was no surprise, of course.

While I was not by any means famous, Hanekawa did know who I was─and she even understood the state of my personal relationships (that I had no friends).

She had probably heard rumors, and not good ones.

So it wasn’t strange for a model student to feel as though she’d made a slight blunder in allowing me a close, hard look…er, a happenstance glimpse of her underwear.

I came to the conclusion that she was following after me in order to deal with it.

Instead of parting ways right after I’d seen her panties, she was plotting to overwrite my memories by following me and talking to me like that.

Hah.

Nice try, model student.

Tossing out a bizarre topic like vampires wasn’t going to erase my memories.

“What about vampires?” I asked.

Sure, if that was going to make her feel better, I’d play along and discuss whatever she wanted. Talking to her for a short while about a fruitless topic was a small price to pay for getting to see her panties.

“Well, there have been some rumors lately that there’s a vampire here in town. They say not to walk around alone at night.”

“What a vague…and phony rumor,” I said, letting slip my honest impression. “Why would there be a vampire in a town in the middle of nowhere like ours?”

“Who knows.”

“Vampires are foreign yokai, right?”

“I don’t think that’s exactly what they are, but go on.”

“Whether you walked alone or with a group of ten people, if you had to face a vampire, I don’t think the outcome would change very much.”

“Well, that’s true.”

Ahaha, Hanekawa let out a little laugh.

A lighthearted laugh… It somehow didn’t seem like the kind of laugh she’d have.

I realized that I’d been feeling as though something was off for a while now.

I’d imagined Hanekawa to be a more self-important type after hearing people call her a model student, a class president among class presidents and all that.

If anything, she was weirdly affable.

“But there’ve been a lot of eyewitness reports,” she said.

“Eyewitness reports? Now that’s funny. Round up these gentlemen.”

“Well, these aren’t gentlemen.”

She explained that it was something being said among the girls at school.

“And not just the girls at our school─all the girls who go to school around here have heard about it. Actually, it’s a rumor that’s only spreading among the girls.”

But a vampire?

I was amazed that a rumor like that had taken root.

“They say the vampire is a beautiful blond woman, but with eyes so cold they make your spine freeze.”

“Those are really specific details, but how does that make her a vampire? Couldn’t she just be a normal person who stands out because she has blond hair?”

After all, we were in a boring suburban town.

A town out in the sticks, away from everything else.

You didn’t even see people with their hair dyed brown.

“But,” Hanekawa said, “according to them, when she was under a street lamp, though her hair was blindingly bright…she didn’t have a shadow.”

“Ah…”

Vampire.

While the word sounded old and hackneyed to me, it wasn’t as if I was that familiar with vampires. But I did recall hearing something like that, now that she mentioned it─vampires don’t cast shadows.

Why was that again? Because they don’t like the sun?

But then this had been at nighttime.

So she was in the light of a street lamp, but it still sounded like some trick of the eye─and besides, didn’t that very street lamp cry out that it was a made-up piece of scenery?

Made-up, or maybe just cheap.

“Well, yeah,” Hanekawa agreed. Despite my churlish reaction, she didn’t seem particularly offended.

She was good at talking and at listening.

“I think it’s a ridiculous rumor, too. But it’s good from a safety standpoint. Thanks to it, girls aren’t walking around by themselves at night anymore.”

“Well, I guess you’re right about that.”

“But personally,” Hanekawa said, lowering her voice a bit, “if there’s a vampire, I’d like to meet her.”

“…Why?”

It seemed as though my prediction may have been off.

I’d assumed she had brought up a fruitless topic in order to erase my memories of seeing her panties─but Hanekawa was sounding a little too enthused for that to be the case.

And anyway, telling a uniformed male student about a “rumor that’s only spreading among the girls” seemed odd when I thought about it.

“Won’t she suck your blood and kill you if you do?”

“Okay, I don’t want to get killed. So maybe it’s not accurate to say that I want to meet her. But I just thought it’d be neat if someone like that existed─an existence greater than humans.”

“An existence greater than humans? Like a god?”

“It doesn’t have to be a god.” Hanekawa went silent for a while, as if she was trying to pick her words carefully. Eventually, though, she said, “Because in so many ways, where’s the reward otherwise?”

Without my noticing…

The light had turned green.

But Hanekawa and I both stood there.

To be honest?

Not only did I have no idea what Hanekawa was saying, I didn’t even know what she was trying to say. It felt almost as if her reply had nothing to do with my question.

“Oh no, oh no,” she began to say, flustered. Had my expression betrayed my thoughts? “You know, Araragi, you’re surprisingly easy to talk to. My tongue slipped and I feel like I ended up saying something that didn’t make much sense just now.”

“Y-Yeah. Well, you don’t need to worry about it.”

“It’s strange that you don’t have any friends when you’re this easy to talk to. Why don’t you make some?”

It was a direct question.

She probably didn’t mean ill. I knew that much.

I hesitated to give an equally direct answer: The issue wasn’t my not making friends, it was my not being able to make any.

Which is why─I gave that answer.

“Making friends would lower my intensity as a human.”

“…What?” Hanekawa asked with a confounded expression. “Sorry, I don’t really understand.”

“Er… Well, you know, it’s like…”

Crap.

I had tried to say something cool, but didn’t have anything to follow it up with.

“In other words, if I had friends, I’d have to start worrying about them, right? If my friends were hurt, I’d feel hurt too, and if they felt sad, I’d feel sad too. You end up with more weak points, so to speak. I think that’s the same as becoming weaker as a person.”

“…But you have fun when your friends have fun, and you’re happy when your friends are happy, so it’s not all about becoming weaker, is it? You might gain more weak points, but you’d gain advantages, too.”

“No,” I replied, shaking my head, “I’d feel envious when my friends were having fun, and jealous when they were happy.”

“…How petty of you,” she nailed me.

Leave me alone.

“Even if what you said was true, that would average out to zero,” I said. “It wouldn’t make a difference whether you had friends or not. No─there are more bad things that happen in this world than good─so it’d be a net negative in the end, wouldn’t it?”

“Now that’s a cynical thing to say.”

Hanekawa took back what she said about me being easy to talk to.

What a limited-time evaluation, I thought─but that was fine.

It’s best to clear up those kinds of misunderstandings as soon as possible.

“You see, I want to become a plant,” I said.

“A plant?”

“That way I wouldn’t have to talk. Or walk, either.”

“Hmm.” Hanekawa did give me a cursory nod. “But you still want to be a living thing.”

“Huh?”

“In that case, you normally say that you want to become something inorganic. Like stone or iron.”

I felt as if something unexpected had been pointed out to me.

I wasn’t lying─I had honestly felt for a long time that I wanted to become a plant─but I hadn’t anticipated a counterargument from that angle.

I see. Inorganic, huh?

She was right, plants are alive.

“I was thinking of going to the library,” Hanekawa said.

“Hm?”

“While I was talking to you, I started to feel like I wanted to go to the library.”

“……”

What sort of mental circuitry was I dealing with?

She did say that she was going to go home eventually, so she must not have had any particular plans. While she had time, just as I did, you could either kill it wandering around outside of school or go to the library.

Maybe that was the wall separating the flunkeys from the model students.

“It’ll be closed tomorrow because it’s a Sunday, so I need to go by there today.”

“Hunh.”

“Do you want to come with me?”

“Why?” I asked with a sarcastic laugh.

The library.

I didn’t even know we had one of those things in our town.

“What’re you going to do at the library?”

“What else? Study.”

“‘What else’?” This time I was flabbergasted. “Sorry, but I’m not enough of an oddball to study on my own during spring break when we don’t even have homework.”

“But we’ll be taking entrance exams only next year, you know?”

“Entrance exams… Just graduating seems like a shaky prospect for me. It’s too late for me, I’m a lost cause. The most I can do is try not to be late for school too often next year.”

“…Hm,” Hanekawa mumbled, almost as if bored.

Why, I wondered. It couldn’t be that she wanted me to come with her. But Hanekawa didn’t say anything more.

Oh, well.

I knew she wasn’t some proud, self-important character, but I didn’t know what she was.

The light had been going from red to green to red again.

Now it was red.

I thought that next time it turned green would be when I should leave─yes, that would be the perfect time.

I was sure Hanekawa thought the same.

She wasn’t someone who couldn’t suss the mood.

“Araragi, do you have a cell phone?”

“Well, yeah. Of course.”

“Can I borrow it?” she asked, then held out her hand.

I didn’t know what she was planning on, but I obliged, taking my phone out of my pocket and handing it to Hanekawa.

“Oh, isn’t this a new model?” she said.

“I upgraded just the other day. It’s my first new one in two years, so it has all these new features I don’t even know how to use.”

“You’re still young, don’t be so pathetic. If you’re saying things like that now, civilization is going to pass you by all the more once you become an adult. If you’re already on the wrong side of the digital divide, you won’t even be able to live a decent life in the future.”

“Well, in that case, I guess I’ll have to go live up in a mountain somewhere. Then, once civilization crumbles, I’ll come back to this town.”

“Exactly how long do you plan on living?” Was I immortal or what, she sighed.

Moments after our exchange, Hanekawa began messing with my phone.

While she may have been a class president among class presidents, the very picture of a model student, she was still a high school girl, and thus ridiculously fast at typing on a phone.

It wasn’t as if my phone contained any kind of personal information that I didn’t want other people seeing, but…don’t be messing with people’s phones, all right?

Or, I wondered, could she actually be suspecting me of having used my phone’s camera to sneak a picture when her skirt was flipped? If so, I wanted her to scour the thing. I wanted to wipe out such a disgraceful suspicion.

But at any rate, it must be hard being a girl, worrying about so many things all the time. If a guy had his fly open, all he had to do was claim that he was being a Sexy Commando or something.

…Or maybe not?

“Thanks. Here, you can have it back.”

Hanekawa returned my phone to me in no time at all.

“No pics, right?” I prompted.

“Huh?” She tilted her head. “Pics?”

“…Er, nothing.”

Oops.

Had I misread her?

Then what exactly had she been up to?

Hanekawa seemed to pick up on my puzzlement, because she pointed to the phone that I still held, unable to return it to my pocket, and said, “I put my number and email address in there.”

“You did what?”

“Too bad for you. You just made a friend.”

And then…

Before I could say a single word in response, she ran to the other side of the crossing; the light had turned green without my noticing.

That was how I was planning on leaving, and now it felt like she’d stolen my thunder─wait. Wasn’t she going to go to the library? No, since she’d decided to go to the library mid-conversation with me, her heading in the opposite direction now wasn’t strange at all.

When she crossed to the other side, Hanekawa turned back to me and waved a “See you later.”

I reflexively returned her wave.

Once she saw me waving my hand (like an idiot, I assume), she turned back around, made a right in front of the school gate, and walked off in a cheerful mood. She soon turned the corner and went out of sight.

After I was sure she was gone, I checked my phone.

To see it was true.

A “Tsubasa Hanekawa” had been registered in my contacts list.

A phone number, and an email address.

I had never used the contacts feature on my phone before. I remembered all the numbers I needed─though I don’t say this to brag about my memory. It’s not something I could brag about since the only ones I had memorized were my home phone number and my parents’ cell phone numbers. My sent and received call history was enough for any others.

I simply didn’t have many friends.

And that’s how “Tsubasa Hanekawa” became the first number to be registered on my phone.

“What’s her deal?”

Her actions─hovered beyond my comprehension.

A friend?

Is that what she said? A friend?

Did she mean it?

To begin with, while we may have known each other’s names, what was a young lady like her doing casually handing her contact info out to a guy she’d basically spoken to for the first time? Or was I just being old-fashioned about this?

I didn’t know.

But as much as I didn’t know, there was one thing I did know now.

Tsubasa Hanekawa: the model student among model students, the class president among class presidents, not only wasn’t a stuck-up, self-important character─

“…She’s pretty damn cool.”

A class president among class presidents.

Tsubasa Hanekawa: It was her, whom I happened across the afternoon of closing ceremonies, that I would meet again during spring break, though I had no way of knowing it at the time.

I didn’t even feel a sliver of a premonition.