Apparently quite smart, she’s among the top in our year. Whenever test results are posted, Hitagi Senjogahara’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 Senjogahara 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. Senjogahara’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 Senjogahara 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, Senjogahara 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.