Monogatari Series - Volume 8 - Chapter 1.12

012

I think this is a good time for me to discuss Araragi a bit.

To discuss Koyomi Araragi.

Koyomi Araragi, Miss Senjogahara’s boyfriend and my friend.

I actually knew about him from before spring break─I don’t know everything, but I did know about him.

He doesn’t realize it himself, but he’s quite the celebrity at Naoetsu High.

He stood out, you might say.

Like a sore thumb, to be honest.

He loves to treat me like a celebrity, but we could go toe-to-toe as far as that goes.

Though it’s more correct to say he’s feared.

Yes, people are afraid of him.

Just as I hated being treated like a model student, he hates being treated like a delinquent, but really, if you’re skipping school whenever you feel like it, not taking classes and tests seriously─or not even taking them at all─then I’m not the only one who’ll start thinking of you that way.

When I asked him after we became friends for details about what he did when he was skipping school and not caring about classes and tests, which is to say when I casually dug deeper into the matter, it all sounded close to the same as what happened during spring break and Golden Week.

All in all, it wasn’t as if turning into a vampire over spring break or becoming involved with aberrations had transformed his life; at the root, that had been Koyomi Araragi all along.

While his face turns sour and he begins to grumble whenever Karen and Tsukihi’s activities as the Fire Sisters come up, what they’re doing, likewise, is nothing more than a rehash of Araragi’s middle-school days.

No, according to his sisters, Araragi’s time in middle school was far more precarious. Extracurricular activities that barely toed the line of legality─nay, fighting on the opposite side of the law wouldn’t be too great of an exaggeration. Beyond being taken aback, I’m impressed by the fact that he managed to make it to high school alive.

Of course, while he might be doing the same thing in high school that he was in middle school, there does seem to be a major difference in his motivation.

He adamantly refuses to talk about it, even more than about spring break, and none of his current friends, myself included, know the details, but he appears to have experienced some psychological turning point around the time he was a freshman.

I guess it was why he became a “washout,” to use his word?

…I’m making it sound like a big deal, but maybe he couldn’t keep up academically, and that’s all it was. There’s no rule stating that changes in a person’s mindset have to be the outcome of some huge incident.

And either way, whether he changes or not, Araragi is Araragi.

He’s still him, even though he’s changed completely from the cool person he was when we first met.

No matter how much he changes, he’s Koyomi Araragi.

So these are nothing more than memories of his middle-school days, when his disposition was more hi-tension, upper, hotblooded─memories that Araragi, himself, has forgotten. In that sense, it could be a very normal event called settling down once you start high school.

Normal.

Mundane.

This event of his.

Or.

Spring break. And Golden Week too.

And maybe everything with Miss Senjogahara, with Hachikuji, with Miss Kanbaru, with Sengoku, and with Karen, too, was no match for all the things he experienced in middle school.

As for today, he was on the move again for some reason.

At some point down the line, I fell in love with him─but I’ll talk about when that happened a little later.