By the end of the week, Shirogane High had nine registered players, thirty-eight days until the deadline, and exactly zero new recruits.
"The flyers aren't working," Mikio said.
He was standing in the school corridor with a stack of paper in his arms, looking at the noticeboard. Yesterday there had been twelve flyers pinned there. *JOIN THE FOOTBALL CLUB. NO EXPERIENCE NEEDED. BE PART OF SOMETHING.* Ren had written the slogan himself, and Mikio had drawn a ball in the corner.
Now there were three. The rest had been torn down, and one of the survivors had a moustache drawn on the football.
"Somebody has a good eye for art," Ren said.
"Somebody has a bad eye for hope." Mikio sighed. "I counted. Forty-one students walked past that board at lunch. Not one stopped."
"Maybe they were in a hurry."
"They were laughing, Ren."
Ren looked at the flyers. He did not say anything, because Mikio was right. The football club at Shirogane was a joke that had been told so many times that nobody remembered the punchline.
"We could ask in person," he said slowly.
"You? Ask in person?" Mikio's eyebrows rose. "You said eleven words at the last class meeting."
"Twelve."
"Twelve, then."
"I'll say more."
"You'll say more," Mikio repeated, with the face of a man watching someone volunteer to walk into the sea.
They tried the second-years first. They tried the first-years next. Ren, standing awkwardly in the doorway of Class 2-C, said his piece in a quiet voice that nobody heard, and a boy at the back asked him to repeat it, and Ren repeated it, and the boy looked at the ceiling and said, "Football? Isn't that club dead?"
"It's not dead," Ren said.
"Then why are you looking for people?"
It was a good question. Ren had no good answer.
By the end of lunch break, they had been laughed at in three classrooms, ignored in two, and politely refused by a girl who said she was very interested but only if football involved less running.
They were sitting on the stairs behind the gymnasium with their lunch boxes on their knees when the shadow fell across them.
"You two look like a funeral."
Gōki stood on the step above them with his arms crossed. He had been at Shirogane for four days and had already been sent to the staff room twice for glaring at a teacher. He had a half-eaten bread roll in one hand.
"We're recruiting," Mikio said weakly.
"I saw. It's embarrassing."
"Do you have a better idea?"
Gōki finished the roll in two bites. "Yes."
"Which is?"
"Ask me to do it."
Ten minutes later, Gōki stood in the middle of the second-year corridor, one hand on his hip, and shouted, "Football club! Come and join! If you don't, I'll know who you are!"
The corridor went silent.
A first-year boy dropped his lunch tray. Somewhere a girl screamed, not in fear but in delighted horror. Mikio put his face in his hands.
"That," Ren said, "is not recruitment."
"It's a start."
"It's a threat."
"It's a very effective threat." Gōki grinned, and the scar on his eyebrow pulled tight. "Eleven people stopped to listen."
"Eleven people were frozen in terror."
"Same thing."
A teacher came running. The teacher took one look at Gōki, said, "Not again, Tachibana," and led him away by the sleeve. Gōki went along, unrepentant, waving at the crowd as if he were a celebrity.
Ren watched him go. He found, to his surprise, that he was fighting back a smile.
"He's going to get us all expelled," Mikio muttered.
"Probably."
"You're smiling."
"I'm not."
"You are."
It was in the middle of this argument that someone cleared his throat behind them.
"Excuse me. Are you Kageyama Ren?"
The boy standing there was small and thin, with round glasses and an enormous school bag that looked as if it weighed more than he did. He held a spiral notebook against his chest with both arms, the way a person might hold a shield.
"Yes?" Ren said.
"I'm Sano. Sano Hikaru. First-year, Class 1-D." The boy bowed, a quick, nervous bob. "I wanted to say I saw your match. The seven-a-side one. Against the visitors."
"You were there?"
"I watch all the practice matches. From the roof." Sano pushed his glasses up his nose. "I know that sounds strange."
"It sounds a little strange," Mikio admitted.
"I know." Sano went pink. "But I wanted to ask. About the goals."
"What about them?"
"Both of them were set up from the same pocket of space, between the visiting left back and centre half. The pocket opened because their pivot was dragged out of position by Sawada's run, which was a decoy." Sano flipped open his notebook, which was crowded with tiny, precise diagrams. "I have it all drawn here. Your second goal was a mirror of the first, except you changed the angle by about fifteen degrees. I wanted to ask if that was deliberate."
Ren stared at him.
Mikio stared at him.
"You drew that," Ren said slowly, "from the roof."
"I draw all of them." Sano swallowed. "I've drawn every Shirogane match for two years. I always sit in the same place. I don't know why. It just seemed like somebody should."
He turned the notebook toward them. Page after page of tiny pitches, tiny arrows, tiny numbers. A map of every defeat Shirogane had suffered, annotated with a quiet, merciless accuracy.
At the bottom of one page, in neat letters, Sano had written: *Left side overloaded. Number 10 drifts but nobody follows. Midfield disconnected between 60' and 75'.*
Ren read it twice. It was exactly what he saw in his head every match, and no one had ever written it down.
"Why are you showing us this?"
"Because I'd like to join," Sano said, very fast, as if the words might escape if he didn't push them out. "As a player, I mean. Not just the notebook. I'm not very good. I'm actually quite bad. But I know where everyone should be, and I thought maybe if somebody who knew where everyone should be was on the team, it would help."
There was a silence.
Then Mikio laughed, a bright, startled laugh, and clapped Sano on the back so hard the boy almost dropped his notebook.
"Welcome to the football club," he said.
"Really?"
"Really. We're terrible. You'll fit right in."
Coach Ishikawa signed the registration form at four o'clock that afternoon, in the clubroom, with the pen he used for everything. He looked at the name, then at the boy, then at the notebook sticking out of the boy's pocket.
"Sano Hikaru. Midfielder."
"Y-yes, Coach."
"Do you actually play football?"
"I've never started a match."
"Do you want to?"
Sano's glasses fogged up. "More than anything."
The Coach said nothing. He stamped the form and slid it into the folder with the others.
"Ten," he said quietly. "One more."
"One more," Ren agreed.
"Thirty-seven days."
Ren stood by the clubroom window, looking out at the wet pitch, where Gōki was running laps for his latest detention. He felt oddly calm. Ten out of eleven. A week ago it had been seven.
Beside him, Sano shuffled his feet. "Um. Kageyama-san?"
"Ren is fine."
"Ren. I was going to say. If you need an eleventh player, there's someone I've seen."
"Who?"
"I don't know his name. But I walk past the Minato fish market on my way home, and there's a boy there who works at his family's stall. He plays street football with the other kids on the loading dock at night." Sano hesitated. "He's very loud. He shouts at everyone. But when he plays..."
"What?"
"When he plays, nobody can get the ball off him."
Ren turned slowly from the window.
"Loud?" he said.
"Extremely."
"Fish market?"
"Yes."
A faint, impossible hope began to stir in Ren's chest, the same flicker he had felt in the dark on the street pitch, before the wall, before the pass.
"Show me," he said.