OWARIMONOGATARI Part 1

012

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.