The pitch wasn’t really a pitch.
It was three cracked slabs of five-a-side concrete wedged behind the shuttered pachinko parlor, goalposts made of scaffolding pipe someone had welded crooked twenty years ago and never fixed, a floodlight that only worked if you hit the breaker box on the side just right.
Everyone called it Nishinari Rec anyway, the way people called Aunt Reiko’s counter a restaurant and called the triangle park a garden.
Names were something you could always afford even when you had nothing.
Sora ran him there on evenings, after the light went orange and the day was over, when he was available which used to be rare but not anymore.
Ever since they met, before deciding to take him in and settling here in Nishinari, during the occasional pop-ins he’d do at the orphanage.
He never called it training but He dressed it up as ‘helping me, or understanding the craft you’re good at’, which was a lie that wasn’t really a lie, a half-truth that had started becoming transparent enough to Rui these days because Sora’s passion for the sport was impossible to hide no matter how casually he tried to bury it.
He was just like him when he has the ball, love and care permeates through his body otherwise the ball wouldn’t listen to him like it did, happy and content.
“Again,” Sora said, passing the ball back with the side of his foot.
“Same side. Stay light and sharp, then cut in.”
Rui took it on the outside of his left, dragged it back, feinted the shoulder-drop Sora had drilled into him for a month straight until it stopped feeling like a trick and started feeling like breathing.
Sora didn’t move to stop him, he never really tried to stop him not with his feet at least, he just watched, arms loose, reading something in the movement that Rui wouldn’t understand the value of for years.
“Better.”
“You always say better.”
“Because it’s always true. Better than yesterday isn’t the same as good.” Sora nodded him on.
“Go again.”
They did this on nights the weather allowed and plenty it didn’t, Sora standing in the drizzle with his hands in his pockets like the cold was an idea he’d decided not to entertain, watching Rui run the same three moves over and over against a wall that didn’t complain about repetition the way people did.
Sometimes other kids from the block drifted over and got folded into a scratch match, six or seven boys chasing a ball across cracked concrete under a light that flickered every time a moth got too close to the bulb, and Sora would referee from the sideline with a stub of chalk he used to redraw the penalty box whenever the rain washed it out, dead serious about a line that meant nothing to anyone but him.
“Why do you even bother,” Rui asked once, maybe nine years old, sweating through his shirt, watching Sora crouch to redraw a sideline for the fourth time that week.
“Nobody cares if the box is straight.”
“I care.” Sora didn’t look up from the chalk.
“Doesn’t cost you anything to do a thing right even when nobody’s checking. Especially when nobody’s checking. That’s the only time it actually tells you something about yourself.”
Rui didn’t understand that either but he listened and made sure to remember, not like he could forget it even if he tried, like most things Sora said sideways like a half-lesson, half-talking-to-himself he delivered with the same flat calm whether he was discussing a football drill or telling off a landlord who’d tried to raise the rent on old Fujita-san’s room before Fujita-san had stopped getting up in the mornings.
A new day had arrIved and he had school today .School was different, Nishinari Elementary sat on the edge of the ward like it had been placed there reluctantly, a low concrete building with peeling paint and a rusted flagpole, and the teachers rotated through fast were nobody senior wanted this posting, so the school got the newly qualified, the ones still finding their feet, the ones who hadn’t yet learned which kids to expect things from and which ones to quietly write off before October.
Most of the kids came from poor families, families that lived close enough to poverty that the difference between having something and having nothing could change from month to month, and more often than not the children themselves carried the strange pride that came with having learned how to hide it.
They didn’t wear hand-me-downs when they could avoid it, didn’t shop at lost-and-found unless they absolutely had to, and acted like they belonged above the people whose lives looked just a little worse than theirs.
It was his final year in elementary and couldn’t wait to be done with the year.
Rui’s teacher, a young man named Endo who still ironed his shirts like he thought it mattered here, called on him more than the other kids, which Rui understood eventually wasn’t kindness so much as curiosity.
The same curiosity that made new substitute teachers pause on his face after calling his name during roll call, the same curiosity in the eyes of parents picking up other kids at the gate, doing the math on his hair and his skin and his features and not quite landing anywhere they were comfortable with.
“Where’s your family from?” Endo asked once, after class, not unkindly, just the way you’d ask about weather.
“Here,” Rui had replied.
“No, I mean” Endo gestured vaguely, at nothing, at everything about Rui’s face that didn’t fit the shape of the question he actually wanted to ask or the answer he got.
“Originally?”
Rui shrugged, because he genuinely didn’t have a better answer, and because Sora had taught him not in words, just in the particular stillness he modelled whenever someone asked him a question he’d decided wasn’t owed an answer to, that a shrug could close a door just as well as a sentence could.
Endo let it go.
Adults mostly did, eventually, once they realized the boy wasn’t going to hand them a story that made him make sense.
The kids were less patient about it, or more honest, depending on how you wanted to look at it Kenta and his corner by the Rec had a rotating cast of names for it that changed by the season, and Rui had learned the specific skill of hearing them and not letting his face show the landing, which was, in its own way, its own kind of training, running parallel to the drills on the cracked concrete, the same muscle worked from a different angle.
That evening he was back at the Rec, working on his first touch with Sora.
“You let them get to you today,” Sora said, watching Rui take a first touch harder than it needed to be, the ball skidding off his shin instead of dying under it.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Didn’t have to. It’s in your foot.” Sora crossed the pitch unhurried, stopped the ball with his foot before it reached the fence, held it there under his sole.
“What’d they say?”
Rui told him, the way you report weather.
Sora listened with his whole stillness, the way he listened to everything, and when Rui finished he didn’t say anything for a moment, just looked at him â really looked, the kind of look that made Rui feel, briefly, like the only thing in the entire ward that mattered.
“You know what I think?” Rui shook his head and Sora looked at him for a moment, then rolled the ball slowly beneath his sole.
“One day, you’re going to have people trying to tell you what kind of person you are.”
Rui frowned.
“What kind am I?” Sora shrugged, “That’s the problem. They’ll have already decided before you do, don’t let it happen.”
He kicked the ball gently toward him.
Rui trapped it and looked him in the eyes.
“How?” Sora’s eyes narrowed slightly, the corner of his mouth moving almost imperceptibly.
“Observe and scrutinise until you know the answer yourself.” Rui looked down at the ball and passed it back.
“And if they’re right?”
“Then you’ll know that too.”
Sora turned away and walked toward the other end of the pitch.
“Now get your first touch right. That shin’s costing you half a second and half a second’s the whole game.”
Rui got the ball, and got it right the second time, and if something in his chest had eased at the first thing Sora said, neither of them mentioned it, because that wasn’t how it worked between them as the important things got said in different ways except directly, in between drills, disguised as something else, and understood anyway.
The floodlight buzzed and flickered once, caught a moth, steadied.
Somewhere past the fence, the evening call of the noodle shop’s radio drifted over, some old enka song neither of them was listening to, and they played until it was too dark to see the ball and Sora said, the same as every night, “One more,” and meant at least three more times.
(Author)
Thank you for reading.
Constructive feedback to improve appreciated.