The ball leaves the bat with that flat, ugly sound that means it's not going where it should. Tsubaki watches it anyway, eyes too slow, thoughts too loud. It lopes toward right like a lazy comet. She breaks into a run, cleats biting dirt, glove up—then thinks, without permission, of Kousei's face lately: the hollow under his eyes like someone erased sleep with an eraser and didn't bother to brush the crumbs away.
The ball smacks her palm, pops out, skitters. She curses, drops to a knee, scrapes it up, and fires to first. The runner's foot slaps the bag a heartbeat before the ball kisses leather.
"Safe!" the ump bark-sings. The other team whoops. Her dugout exhales the synchronized groan of eight people watching a sure out turn to mush.
"Argh, Tsubaki!" someone whines.
"Head in the game!" the coach calls, not unkindly, the way you call a dog back to the porch.
She flips the ball in her hand and forces a grin at the infield like, yep, my bad, won't happen again. Dust lifts off her knee in a brown ghost. Her shin stings. On the chain-link, Kashiwagi watches with her eyebrows staging a quiet interrogation. Tsubaki pretends not to see the question there. She takes the next hitter's stance inside her head, same as always: narrow your eyes; lean into the pitch; dare the world to throw you something you can't hit.
It works for nine seconds. Then a breeze pushes through the outfield and the trees past the fence shiver, and she's remembering a different fence, a different day—the school roof and how Kousei turned up with that dry, floaty voice that means he hasn't slept, pretending water is enough to glue somebody back together.
The inning ends. She jogs in with a smile that shows teeth and nothing behind them. The team crowds the bench, complaining in a friendly knot, already onto the next play. She nods and nods and hears none of it. When the coach calls her name she jumps like somebody snapped a rubber band against her wrist.
After, she changes fast, shoving her knee into the leg of her uniform pants and yanking them up like speed can undo the fumble. Outside, light has gone thin and clean, like the sky washed its face and refused to dry it. Kashiwagi peels off the fence and falls into step.
"You dropped an easy one," Kashiwagi says, because she is the kind of friend who doesn't put lace on things that don't need lace.
"I know," Tsubaki says, because she is the kind of person who will run through a wall if a friend points at it. "It had ugly spin."
"That ball was a potato, Su." Kashiwagi flicks her a look. "You okay?"
"Fine," Tsubaki says, too quick. "Just hungry."
They cross to the river because it's the long way home and the long way gives feelings more time to exhaust themselves. The Dare You Bridge sits like always, a concrete shrug over water. Three middle-schoolers stand on the rail, chests puffed, bravery on loan from each other. One leaps. A slap of water, then the muffled shout of cold pretending not to be cold.
Kashiwagi snorts. "You did that every summer. Dragged Arima up here by his scrawny collar and shoved him off, like—" she demonstrates—"boop."
Tsubaki bristles before she can stop it. "That's not what happened," she says. "He always smiled after. He had fun."
"Still mean," Kashiwagi says, without juice. Her eyes hold on Tsubaki's face a beat too long. "You've been... different."
"What does that mean?"
Kashiwagi picks a leaf out of her hair like she's tidying the sentence. "You usually bounce. Even when you're mad you bounce. Lately you look like someone put a wet towel over your head."
Tsubaki laughs. "That's a look?"
Kashiwagi doesn't laugh back. "Did something happen with Arima-kun?"
Tsubaki fumbles for her default joke and comes up with air. "Happen how? He's his usual weirdo self." She tries to make it light. It lands heavy. "He just—" She gestures vaguely at the air. "He looks tired."
"Everybody looks tired during exams."
"It's not that kind of tired." The words are out before she can corral them. She stares at the river to distract her mouth. "It's like his eyes are... I don't know." She forces a grin. "Ugh, listen to me. Who am I, a poet?"
Kashiwagi watches a kid climb back on the railing, tiny hands white on concrete. "You don't have to be a poet to notice your best friend looks rough."
The sentence hits like the ball she didn't catch, right in the meat of her glove. Tsubaki swallows. The water murmurs. The littlest boy jumps with his arms out like he's surrendering to gravity and daring it to be gentle. For a second she sees Kousei there, the old version with knees covered in summer and a face that looked surprised when he smiled. Then the picture swaps to him lately: cheekbones sharp like somebody scraped off the extra; that far-away look he gets where you can see the whole day squinting to keep him in focus.
"Maybe I pushed him too hard when we were little," she says, and her voice comes out sideways, like she threw it and missed. "Maybe that's why he never—" She shakes her head. "Whatever."
Kashiwagi's mouth does the careful line it does when she wants to say a hundred things and knows she will only get to say five. "You know you don't have to fix everything by kicking it," she says. "Sometimes you can just... stand next to it until it stops being scary."
"Standing isn't my brand," Tsubaki says, but it comes out thin.
They step off the bridge and onto the street that lifts toward the crossing. The signal's already dinging, the bar half down. At the corner, a boy in a high school uniform slings his bag higher on his shoulder and turns, broad grin, eyes creasing, the poster in the clubhouse of what "reliable" looks like.
"Saito-senpai," Kashiwagi sings, because she enjoys causing tiny earthquakes.
"Tsubaki," he says, delighted like the name is his favorite word. "Your game?"
"Fine," she says, because she is not about to recap her potato error. "You?"
"Practice." He gestures vaguely, which for him means weights, drills, leaders' meeting, doing everything right because the whole team expects it of him. "You looked good out there."
Kashiwagi gives Tsubaki the tiniest hip-bump: say thank you to the compliment, gremlin.
"Thanks," Tsubaki says, trying to make her voice the right shape. She can feel the comparison factory spool up in her head without her permission. Saito's neatness. Saito's schedule. Saito's steady. Kousei's the opposite of a schedule, lately—he's light bulbs left on at the wrong hours; he's that strung-out look when you don't eat and pretend you did. And it annoys her that she keeps thinking about him at all right now, in this clean little moment where a boy who is not a problem is smiling at her like she's the easy part of his day.
Kashiwagi's phone buzzes. She glances down, makes a face that means her mom has activated the summon spell. "I'm going to sprint before 'dinner' turns into 'lecture'," she says. To Saito: "You two can talk about sports or whatever." To Tsubaki, sotto voce: "Text me."
Tsubaki makes a face back that means absolutely not and also definitely yes. Kashiwagi peels off at a diagonal, all elbows and contentment, leaving a tidy little silence in her wake.
They stand under the crossing gate with the world held on a string. The train's far yet; the bell keeps up its agreeable nag. Saito kicks the toe of his shoe against the curb once, casual, then shoves his hands in his pockets, suddenly less casual.
"So," he says. The word is small, the space after it bigger. "You seem... I don't know. You seem like you're thinking about something far away."
She huffs a laugh. "What gave it away? The potato?"
"The potato was a clue," he admits. He glances at the track, then back at her. "You're always moving forward like you know where the next step is. Today you looked like you were waiting for somebody to tell you where to put your foot."
She blinks. For no reason at all her throat warms. "Well," she says, aiming for flippant and landing somewhere near sincere. "Sometimes the ground isn't where you left it."
He nods, relief in that motion like he solved a minor equation. The bell clangs louder. The bars finish their slow fall. Wind starts up the track, carrying that far iron shush.
"Hey," he says, because apparently he has decided not to let the train speak for him. He pulls his hands out of his pockets like they weigh something. "Tsubaki. Do you want to—" He clears his throat, which is ridiculous because his voice never breaks when he's yelling at nine boys on a field. "Do you want to go out with me?"
The words land between them with surprising softness, as if they came wrapped. Heat rushes her face so fast she feels it in her ears. She scrambles for the usual joke and finds only one picture: Kousei's profile, tired and stubborn, walking beside a girl with a violin case like they were built to be a pair of parentheses. Annoyance flares—at herself, at him, at the way her brain is a feral cat that drags the same toy back to the porch no matter how many times she throws it into the bushes.
The train arrives as a warm moving wall. Air flips her hair into her mouth and she lets it, grateful for something to do. She looks at Saito. He looks at her. They both look away and then back at the exact same wrong moment and laugh, because their faces have decided to do the laughing for them. She does not know what she's going to say. She knows only that the question will sit in her pocket now, a coin she will keep worrying with her thumb until it's smooth.
The cars rattle past. Their reflections on the windows are two awkward people on a sidewalk who briefly look like they are in a music video. The last car goes, the bar lifts, the bell stops, the world remembers how to be normal. She opens her mouth—
—and closes it, because sometimes the next step doesn't require a sprint. Sometimes you can stand where you are and feel the ground hold.
She tucks a piece of hair behind her ear she doesn't need to tuck. Her cheeks are hot. His are, too. The silence is the good kind.
— — —
The ball hits the fence three inches from my head and makes the mesh sing. I don't jump. The notebook's edge is under my wrist; the page is a mess of arrows and boxes, the kind of drawing you do when the inside of your head feels like a crowded hallway and you're trying to put the people in line.
There's a thud and then Watari's face appears between diamonds of chain-link like a very loud saint stained into a very rude window. "RAA!" he yells, because subtlety never met him. "You're supposed to be watching me score! How can you read at a time like this?!"
"I'm not reading," I say. "I'm writing." I cap the pen anyway and look at him. His hair is a storm. There's a streak of grass across his cheek like paint. His eyes are incandescent. "You look extremely fired up."
"Extremely fired up is my middle name." He leans into the fence with both hands, cleats squeaking behind him. "No, seriously, I'm on fire. That performance? You two? How am I supposed to do anything today except be better?"
A small, dark thing flickers across the edge of my chest. The image is so fast it doesn't even earn a whole picture: the light on Kaori's cheek, the sentence she whispered, the way her knees forgot how to be knees. I know what it is. I let it pass. I push up my glasses and aim at the part of Watari that needs words.
"I have the two of you burned into my memory," he says, and he means it. "How could I forget it?"
He grins like the sun remembered a joke. "That's right. Save it. Engrave it." He slaps the fence as if to bless it. "Besides, when we win state finals, I'm going to have a whole harem chasing me down the street. Autographs, confessions, marriage proposals, the works."
"Please don't say 'harem' within earshot of the coach," I say.
The universe, which enjoys good timing, appoints one of his center backs to be karma. The kid jogs up, reaches over, and bonks Watari on the back of the head with his hand. "Stop flirting with the fence," the teammate says. "Drills."
Watari makes a tragic noise like a hero dying in act three. "Fell betrayed by my own men," he says, and then the teammate hooks him by the elbow and tows him backward like a shopping cart. Watari keeps his eyes on me as long as he can. "Watch this next one!" he yells, pointing two fingers at his own face. "Eyes up! No notebooks!"
"Eyes up," I echo, and settle back onto the bench that used to be a bench and is now my desk. The field clatters with feet and shouts and whistles that mean do it again until 'again' stops existing. The notebook's spiral has carved a small arc into my forearm where it rested. I turn the page before the lines I already drew can trap me inside their geometry.
Tomorrow, Uncle.
I write the word like it is heavier than ink. Uncle doesn't have a lab in his pocket to give me. He has something better: thirty years' worth of people who pick up when he calls. He has a list of rooms where the air hums like thinking; he knows which doors stick and which doors swing if you lean on them just right. If I can get into one of those rooms—even as a shadow, even as the kid who holds lids and labels samples and shuts up—then proximity will do its quiet work. There's a kind of learning that you only get by standing next to a thing until it admits you exist.
I draw a box around tomorrow and draw lines out of it, spines of a fish: one line to the name I circled three times last week; one to a number I plan to call with my best voice; one to a favor I don't deserve but might be able to borrow. I don't need the perfect arrangement. I need motion. I need to get near the centrifuge, the incubator, the white bench that looks like a piano made angry. I need to trade the pictures in my head for the sound of machines doing their small, patient work.
The pen skates. The metronome in my skull ticks, not bossy, just there. On the field, Watari hauls down a cross he has no right to touch and blasts it with his whole heart. It skims high off the keeper's fingers, rattles the bar, and kisses out. He howls like a man who did, in fact, score. His teammates heckle him anyway. The coach blows two short bursts that say both good and again.
I look up long enough to watch him sprint after a lost cause like it owes him money. His legs are all bravado and joy. There is something so beautiful about how uncomplicated his energy is—no bargaining, no hoarding, just all of it given to the day like the day asked nicely. For a second I feel an ache that is not the ache I usually carry. This one is streaked with envy and gratitude in equal measure. I hope he keeps this piece of himself intact forever. I hope nothing gets the idea it can take it from him.
I drop my eyes back to the paper. The lines I drew earlier begin to look less like panic and more like scaffolding. If Uncle can put me in front of the right person, if I can be in a room where words like access and protocol and run time are the common language, then I can stop pacing the same square in my apartment pretending that thinking harder is the same as moving. This is not a poem. It's a schedule.
I make a list because lists bully chaos into being polite. Under TOMORROW: Meet Uncle at nine; bring the two-page summary I edited down until it hurt; wear the blazer that makes me look less like a sleep-deprived student and more like a person who could be allowed to hold glass; do not forget gratitude; do not forget to ask small, specific things instead of one big impossible one; say yes to anything that involves the phrase "come by."
I add: Text Tsubaki when I leave. If the rule is no vanishing, then no vanishing is a rule even when I'm chasing a door that moves. I write: Hospital visiting hours? and circle it. If they let me sit by the bed with a notebook and pretend to read while she sleeps, I will. Sometimes the only thing you can do is be furniture someone can lean against.
They made it to finals... but nervousness never left me. Kaori would expect his all. He couldn't give it he just couldn't.... Time was thin and short.... And then what he also has to watch her collapse again? The second time was enough. They got first place,wasn't that good enough?.
Watari finishes his sprint, hands on his knees, grinning like oxygen is a rumor. He glances toward me to make sure my head is up. I tilt the notebook so he can see a blank page and a pen. He puffs his chest and points at the goal like he put it there. A defender clips his ankle by accident; Watari almost falls and then decides not to.
I lean back and let the fence hold me. The mesh presses diamonds into my shoulders. A kid on the second field whiffs a shot so spectacularly the ball rolls directly across ours and causes chaos, which causes laughter, which causes the coach to look to the sky like he is checking for the possibility of patience.
The metronome ticks. Not now. Later. Move.
I cap the pen and slide the notebook into my bag like I'm putting something to bed. Tomorrow is a noun and then, if I'm lucky, a verb. I breathe in chalk and grass and sunburn and cheap whistle. I breathe out. The lines I drew on the page hum underneath my sternum, a blueprint I can carry without paper.
On the field, Watari takes off again, joy ridiculous, future imaginary and loud. At the hospital, a girl with a violin case is asleep or pretending to be. On a sidewalk somewhere, a friend with a crooked ponytail is standing under a crossing arm with her cheeks warm. Everyone is moving. It feels like the only true thing left in the world.
I look down at my hands and think of the bench I want and the bench I need, and I tell myself a simple sentence I plan to obey: Do the next small right thing. Then the next. Then the next.