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 Senjogahara’s face─I probably wouldn’t be able to. And that’s fine. Senjogahara 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.