The epilogue, or maybe just a log in this case?
Either way, I was the one to rouse myself the next day, not my little sisters Karen and Tsukihi─I did have some help from an alarm clock if we’re splitting hairs, but I think it still counts.
I was alone in my room, of course, with no childhood friend sharing it with me. Getting ready to leave the house, I saw my tall little sister, and my other little sister who was the exact same; I flipped the skirt of an expressionless doll, then headed to the bathroom mirror to straighten out my hair, when the doorbell rang.
It was Hitagi Senjogahara.
Not a second off our agreed-upon time. Did she wear a stopwatch for a wristwatch, or what? Either way, I stepped outside with a see ya later─
“Good morning, Koyomi,” she waved at me from the other side of the gate, her hair in pigtails.
I nearly lost my balance.
To go into more detail before I regain my balance, Hitagi Senjogahara had on pigtails, a miniskirt, a smaller t-shirt that emphasized her figure ever so slightly, and a shawl draped over her.
She looked like a nymph who’d fallen from heaven.
Oh no. I froze, afraid this entire dimension had been twisted in some way again, but…
“Just trying to imitate Miss Hanekawa is only going to leave me depressed. I thought I’d go big and went for a makeover. What do you think? Am I on point?” she explained.
If I had to pick one or the other, she was off point. I couldn’t figure out why her style was regressing the moment she graduated, but when I asked her, she replied:
“Mature isn’t such a compliment now that I’m not a high school student anymore, so I thought I’d go for a youthful look.”
It seemed Hitagi had her own thoughts about graduating from high school. What in the world was she thinking, though? Maybe it was a serious problem for a girl.
“Still, Hitagi. Isn’t your skirt too short? Your legs are extra-long to begin with, so it’s a pretty overboard look. You’re going to make your boyfriend worry.”
“Overboard? How rude. It’s fine, it might look like a skirt, but these are actually shorts where the fabric around the outside is designed to look like a skirt. It’s a marvelous garment that fulfills a lady’s desire to wear a cute skirt without showing off her underwear.”
“They make clothes like that?” The world was full of things I didn’t know─I shouldn’t have been satisfied simply wearing Ogi’s skirt… “Is it like a running skirt? Anyway, this is a big makeover for you.”
“Heh. Well, I wouldn’t have minded showing off even more skin when I consider the peaks of excitement I’ll be feeling when we find out you got into college.”
“Doesn’t that mean it’ll be hell on earth if I got rejected?”
Anyway, warming up to each other from having this conversation right off the bat, we left─to visit none other than my first-choice school, which had already accepted Hitagi Senjogahara.
Actually, that description is the other way around. The college was Hitagi Senjogahara’s first-choice school, and I’d done my best to get in so I could attend the same school as my girlfriend… But it’s easy for the order of things to get flipped around, and if I found myself on the wrong side of the school’s gates, I’d be the one turned inside out.
“So,” Hitagi fished for info as we walked to the bus stop, “how did it go this time around? I’d be happy to hear all about it, if you want to tell me. I think you might feel better if you did.”
“…I wouldn’t say an envious position, but you’ve certainly settled into a delicious one.”
In terms of resourcefulness, she was on a different level from the likes of Oikura. I wished I could be like Hitagi someday and just get to listen to stories of other people’s adventures from a safe distance.
“Well, you know,” she said. “If this were Columbo, my goal is to be the missus.”
“That’s as delicious as it gets.” A hall-of-fame role as far as never being in danger─though even Mrs. Columbo was once targeted by a killer.
“In other words, I may have allowed Hachikuji to be this town’s lord, but there’s no way I’d let anyone else be your lady.”
“I’m happy to hear that, but are you really telling me there was a time you were angling to become a god?”
No fact could raise more hairs.
In any case, I gave Hitagi an outline of the last couple of days─naturally, she’d experienced them as well, but when I’d surveyed Karen, Tsukihi, and Ononoki about the topic, their recollection of what had happened seemed vague.
Light had flooded the entire town, creating enough confusion to make you think you were in another world, and yet no one found it strange. They just went along with their lives, facing today as another day─looking to the future just a little bit more than yesterday.
I guess I shouldn’t expect anything else from a logical world?
Consistency worked itself out when it came to this kind of thing, it seemed─maybe Ogi was right and it was all just an issue of mindset, but at the same time, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was all very slipshod.
This left me with some thoughts I hadn’t sorted through as a first party in the matter, but Hitagi turned out to be right. I did feel a little better telling her about it all.
“You did a good job,” she said with a smile, applauding after she’d finished hearing me out─well, she clapped twice above her head and a little to the left, so it seemed more like a flamenco move than applause.
Or maybe she’d summoned ninjas?
“That was quite the satisfying story. I would say its message comes off a little too strong, though. Were you too fired up over your first case since graduating high school?”
“There’s no message. I’d be happy if it earned the label of a slapstick comedy now that it’s over.”
“You know, Koyomi, I actually kind of like the way you’re so aggressive about toeing the line between cheating on me and not. Keep on keeping me on pins and needles, okay?”
“What kind of woman are you? Hearing you say that puts me on pins and needles, if anything. And that wasn’t the point… Were you even listening?”
“Of course. I’d never fail to, Koyomi. You really have grown over the last year. You might require support, and from so many women too, but it’s as if you solved everything on your own.”
“On my own, no…”
I wasn’t sure how to count Ogi. She was a partner, but she was me.
Either way, though, I had everyone to thank.
“Oh, you’re always so modest. Look at how you’ve matured. Can I start calling you Daddy?”
“That’s not even funny. Who matures that much in a couple of days?”
“You know how people wonder why mirrors reverse left and right, but not up and down?”
If we were talking about lines, she shifted lines of conversation as smoothly as ever. “Oh, yeah… That’s like a trick question, right? Where if you put a mirror on the floor and stand on top of it, it does reverse up and down.”
“Yes. In other words, up, down, left, and right are all about perspective─but aren’t there facets of it that you’re still missing? I doubt you’ve forgotten everything you learned about science already─so you know how when we see things through our eyes, the eyeball acts as a lens that reflects the image it receives from light on the retina, reversing it?”
“Oh, yeah…” That was something I learned in human anatomy class during elementary or middle school, not while studying for college entrance exams, but I did recall─that while mirrors were mirrors, there was also the question of the lens. “And?”
“Well, it was just such a mystery to me as a child. Why don’t we see the world in reverse, even though it looks that way on the retina?”
“Oh, umm.”
Umm, what was the answer to that?
I felt like I’d read about it in a trivia book, not any textbook… That because up and down are relative just like left and right, our brains adjust what we see even if it’s upside down─or something?
“It’s a matter of practice, in other words,” Hitagi said. “Just like how you were so in love with the idea of being left-handed that you wore your watch on your right wrist and practiced writing with your left hand.”
“You aren’t going to let that one go, are you…”