Senjougahara Hitagi occupies the position of "the girl who's always ill" in our class. She's not expected to participate in P.E., of course, and is even allowed to suffer morning and school-wide assemblies in the shade, alone, as a precaution against anemia or something. Though we've been in the same class my first, my second, and this, my third and final year of high school, I've never once seen her engaged in any sort of vigorous activity. She's a regular at the nurse's room, and she arrives late, leaves early, or simply doesn't show up to school because she has to visit her primary care hospital, time and again. To the point where it's rumored in jest that she lives there.

Though "always ill," she is by no means sickly. She's graceful, like her thin lines could snap at a touch, and has this evanescent air, which must be why some of the boys refer to her as "the cloistered princess" half-jokingly, half-seriously. You could say earnestly. That phrase and its connotations aptly describe Senjougahara, I agree.

Senjougahara is always alone reading a book in one corner of the classroom. At times that book is an imposing hardcover, and at others it's a comic that could permanently damage your intellect to judge from its cover design. She seems to be one of those voracious readers. Maybe she doesn't care as long as there are words in it, maybe she has some sort of clear standard.

Apparently quite smart, she's among the top in our year.

Whenever test results are posted, Senjougahara Hitagi's name is one of the first ten on the list. Whatever the subject. It's presumptuous of me, who can't pass a non-math test, even to compare myself to her, but our brains must be structured in fundamentally different ways.

She doesn't seem to have any friends.

Not a single one.

I have yet to witness Senjougahara exchanging words with someone─the shrewd take might be that her constant reading is a behavior intended to tell you not to speak to her because she is reading, a way of building walls around herself. In fact, I've sat in the same classroom as her for two years and change, and can state with certainty that I've never spoken a word to her in that time. I can and do. Senjougahara's voice is synonymous, for me, with the reedy "I don't know" that she utters like a catchphrase whenever a teacher calls on her in class (whether or not it's a question she clearly knows the answer to, she only ever replies, "I don't know"). Schools are strange places where people without friends routinely form a sort of community (or a colony) of people without friends (myself included, until last year), but Senjougahara seems to be exempt from this rule too. Of course, it's not like she's getting bullied, either. She isn't being persecuted or avoided in any deep, or light, way as far as I can tell. Like that's her natural place to be, with a cool face, Senjougahara goes on reading in one corner of the classroom. She goes on building walls around herself.

Like it's natural for her to be there.

Like it's natural not to be here.

Not that it's any big deal. At our three-year high school, with two hundred students in each grade, you end up sharing a living space with about a thousand people in all during your stay if you include the graduating and incoming classes and the faculty. Start wondering how many of those people mean anything to you, and the answer is going to be bleak for just about anyone.

Even if I meet the odd fortune of sharing a class with someone for three years, and still don't exchange a single word with that person, I don't find it sad. I'd simply look back on it someday and think: Oh, yes, I guess that's how things were. I have no idea what I'll be doing a year down the line, after graduating from high school, but I certainly wouldn't be conjuring up Senjougahara's face ─ I probably wouldn't be able to.

And that's fine. Senjougahara must be fine with that, too. Not just her, but everyone at my school has to be fine with it. Actually, it's feeling gloomy about the matter that's fundamentally misguided.

That's what I thought.

But.

One such day.

To be precise, the eighth of May, after my hellish joke of a spring break came to an end, I became a third year, and my nightmarish fantasy of a Golden Week wrapped up.

I was dashing up the school stairs, latish as usual, and just reached a landing, when a girl came falling down from the sky.

That girl was Senjougahara Hitagi.

Again, to be precise, she wasn't so much falling down from the sky as simply falling backwards after having missed a step─and I'm sure I could've dodged her, but instead I reflexively caught Senjougahara's body.

It was probably the right decision over dodging her.

No, maybe it was the wrong one.

Why?

Because Senjougahara's body, which I reflexively caught, was so ─ incredibly light. Unfunnily, bizarrely, eerily light.

As if she wasn't here.

That's right.

Senjougahara weighed so little that she nearly didn't at all.