The swing hangs from nowhere and still knows how to creak. Metal chains go up into dark that doesn't have a ceiling. I am sitting on the narrow plank of wood and the light around me is a small island cut out of a much larger night. My shoes drag lines in dust that isn't dust. When I pump my legs, nothing moves. The swing obeys, but the world stays fixed, like the light is nailed to me and the rest of it refuses to come closer.
A shape peels away from the edge of the circle. The shape becomes a step, then a tail, then the soft black of a cat that learned to walk without noise. Its eyes are coins. It stops just short of the light and waits, making me say it first.
Chelsea
"Hey...."it says, and the voice is not a voice but I hear it. "Long time no see."
My throat tightens. I haven't had this one in a while, not since before everything got loud again. The swing sighs under me. I keep my hands tight on the chains. "Yeah," I say. "Long time."
The cat tilts its head the way living things do when they pretend not to already know the answer. "It's almost time," it says. "For the competition.... Again."
"Yeah," I answer, and the word tastes like metal. The light around us flickers once and decides to stay lit. "Again."
"You must push forward," it says. The words don't scold. They are a set of instructions, like how to breathe when you forget.
"I know."
It comes closer. The paws are silent. The shadow it drags behind it is not. It stops at my knee and lifts its face. "Your eyes are soulless."
I want to look away. There isn't anywhere to look. "They'll do the job," I say.
"Who are you?" The question is not a test. It lands inside my chest and echoes like a thing dropped down a well.
"It doesn't matter." My voice sounds like a boy who had to grow up in a hallway and decided he could do it fast. "It doesn't matter who I am. This isn't about me. This isn't my story to cope again."
The cat blinks slow, then slower, like the dark itself is considering whether to answer back. It quiets, and in the quiet I hear the small mechanical squeal of the swing chains arguing with time. The cat opens its mouth and the words arrive without effort.
"You are haunted," it says. "Eternally."
The light makes a shape of my hands, white against iron. The dark breathes in. The swing leans back just enough to feel like falling. I let go.
I blink into noise.
A whistle shrieks and a hundred other sounds rush in to fill the space around it: shoes biting grass, the low roar of a crowd trying to choose a shared heartbeat, the clatter of banners against railings, the soft thud of a ball being pushed from foot to foot by somebody who learned to dance on fields like this. Late afternoon is sitting on top of the school like a hat. I am in the stands with a case of stale air in my lungs and the feeling you get when a dream leaves fingerprints.
"GO FOR IT, WATARI!" Kaori's voice breaks the air in two. It has that perfect mix of cheer and command she keeps in her pocket for when the world needs to be told what to do. People flinch and then grin. Beside her, Tsubaki takes a breath like a pitcher and unloads a second shout that makes the first one proud. She throws her bruised foot into the air like a flag—tape peeking from under the sock, the whole ankle saying yes while it means no. The girls in front of us recoil like wild animals just snarled behind them, then laugh at themselves.
The field is green and honest. White lines keep their promises. Watari is a bright shape in the middle of it, number catching the sun, hair doing that thing where it pretends he woke up like this. He moves the way he always has when he gets to be all legs and sure decisions—cutting past one defender who arrived late, teasing the next with a tap that says, chase me if you want to be embarrassed. He pulls the ball with the outside of his foot and the crowd stands without knowing they did.
Kaori is all fists and angles. "Yes yes yes—" she chants. Tsubaki leans forward until the bench complains. Her eyes have that hard shine that means she would step onto the field with a bat if they let her and dare anyone to stop her. She hisses "Inside!" like he can hear her across twenty yards and a rulebook.
Sumiya banners flap with that last-game smell: fabric that survived a season, ink that didn't run, hands that didn't stop clapping even when their owners hoarse-whispered about homework on the way here. Daito's section hums in a single note like they practiced it. The scoreboard sits in the big blue like a truth that didn't need drama—0–1. That single digit hangs there, kicking its legs.
Watari takes the angle no one expects, outside instead of inside. Three touches, the third short and mean, and he's free. The keeper steps out because that's what you do when physics and fear tell you the same story. The last defender lunges. Watari lifts his head. I can see the thought move across his face like a cloud across a bright day.
He hits it.
For a second the ball is a line. It tears half a meter above the grass and refuses to dip. It reaches the left post like a magnet finding its opposite, smacks it with a noise that somehow sounds like a yes and a no, and spits back into a direction nobody asked for. The net shivers at wind that isn't there. The keeper turns to check a thing that doesn't need checking. Daito exhales as one body, the sound you hear when a cartoon bomb shows a fuse running out. The ref's whistle tries to be neutral about it and fails.
The whole world inhales and then falls apart in little side conversations. The girls behind us squeal and groan and then squeal again because the squealing belongs to them regardless of the score. Kaori shoves her hands into her hair and then drags them down her face like she can pull a different outcome out of her cheeks. "So close," she says, half prayer, half complaint. Tsubaki slaps her thigh and winces and glares at the thigh for being a snitch.
Watari rocks back onto his heels and goes down to one knee like someone cut a string. He doesn't swear. He doesn't yell. He looks at the goal like it's a math problem that almost solved itself and then decided to be difficult for the sake of the story. His chest lifts and falls. His mouth is set. He stays there for a beat and then two. Then he stands because time keeps going if you ignore it or not.
0-1 and on there last game of middle school. Guess they couldn't do it this time either huh.
The field goes quiet in pockets and loud in others. Our row is all punctuation. Kaori's voice drops to normal human levels. "He had it," she says, stunned at the cruelty of geometry. Tsubaki blows air out through her cheeks and says nothing because she has learned when saying nothing is the best way to keep from falling apart and she is not currently in a uniform that allows drama.
Watari finds a teammate who didn't handle the sound of that post as well as he did. The kid has his face hidden in his sleeve and looks like his bones are trying to leave him. Watari puts an arm around him and says something I can't hear. It's not the careful talk they teach. It's the honest kind you learn next to goalposts in winter, when your breath makes clouds and you decide who you're going to be next year while your grown-up hasn't arrived yet to drive you home. The kid snorts laughter into the fabric because you can't cry and laugh at the same time unless someone makes room for it.
The girls to our left compare angles and eyelashes. "He looked so dreamy," one says, like that was the point. "Even when he missed." Another says, "He looked like a movie," and then looks embarrassed because real life is standing right there.
Watari finally looks up. Crowd waves swarm and recede. His gaze lands on me and sticks for a second. He smiles, not the bright ad-smile, not the one he has when he throws a peace sign into a camera. It's smaller and better. It says: that sucked; I'm okay; don't you dare pity me.
I meet him at the barrier as the players drift toward the tunnel. Up close his face is all sweat and dust and ordinary courage. He smells like grass and effort. The underclassmen open a lane for him without knowing they're doing it. He rocks on his heels, still catching breath.
"You looked like a superstar out there," I say. The truth doesn't care about the scoreboard. "Even if you lost."
He huffs a laugh that feels like it had to be wrestled into being. "Thanks for cheering me on." He slants his head toward the stands where Kaori is still buzzing and Tsubaki is pretending not to test her ankle with her hand. "fan club is scary."
"Terrifying," I agree.
He glances back at the goal and then at me. Something in his eyes goes very clear, like a window after a storm. "I lost my chance to be a star," he says, and it isn't drama; it's math. Then he bumps his shoulder into mine, gentle and enormous at the same time. "But... it's all up to you now. See ya." He smirks a grin that is part facade and turns away.
He turns and hooks that same arm around his teammate again and they walk toward the tunnel with their heads together. I hear him say, "We'll try again harder in high school," and the other boy nods like he just got permission to keep his heart in his chest.
The field gets smaller by degrees. The crowd thins into lines. Cleanup starts with the speed of people who have done this ritual many times—unstick banner tape, gather stray cones, shake out a tarp that pretended to be important. Kaori skips down two steps and then thinks better of it and walks the last one like a person who's just remembered she isn't immortal. She bangs her shoulder into my arm and says, "Next time he scores three," like the universe takes orders from her if she's loud enough.
"Sure," I say. "You'll will it into being."
"Obviously." She grins, then looks past me. "Where is she—oh." Tsubaki is already next to me. I never heard her arrive.
"Hey," she says, looking out at nothing. Her voice is sanded down, casual in that way she uses when she's testing the ground before she steps. "Let's go home."
It's the sort of small sentence that means something large. She says it like we always do, like it's habit, food, a bus route. Her elbow bumps mine, quick and warm. She does not look directly at me while she asks. Her ankle is swelling under the sock in a way that would live rent-free in a trainer's nightmares. I see the way she keeps her weight a little to the outside to trick the pain into thinking it's involved. She notices me noticing and fixes her ponytail like that was the point of her hand being there.
"We can catch the river path before it gets weird," she adds, as if scheduling the walk makes the invitation reasonable.
"Yeah," I say. My mouth is dry. The dream sits in the back of my head and refuses to evaporate. I adjust my bag strap. "Okay."
Kaori is already plotting detours for snacks that do not exist on any map, but her eyes flick to my face, a quick diagnostic. She looks me over with narrowed eyes likely deeming my current state Terrible upon closer looks.She doesn't say anything, which is its own kind of shout. Tsubaki, without looking, angles herself a little between me and the exit, the instinct she's had since we were kids and she decided I needed shepherding even when I insisted I didn't.
We start down the steps, moving with the river of people. I don't love being one more trickle in a group that's blending into the evening, but the rhythm of feet on concrete is steady and the air tastes like cut grass and cheap soda, which is another way of saying: ordinary. Kaori tells a story about a girl three rows up who tried to start a chant and cheered the wrong name and refused to stop because commitment is its own religion. Tsubaki makes the right noises in the right places. She falls a half-step behind to let an older couple through, then returns to the level of my shoulder without making it obvious she's watching the way I move.
Past the gate the light turns softer, the kind that forgives skin and benches. Vendors dismantle their small economies and pack hope back into crates. Daito kids are louder here, and the sound washes over us with the harmless arrogance of people who get to brag for a bus ride and then forget to brag later because life keeps happening. Watari's name pops from a cluster to our left and four first-years giggle like they just stole a word and need to hide it.
Kaori breaks off with a "I need carbohydrates," pointing at a stall that has warmed bread the color of good luck. "Don't you dare leave without me," she says, half to me, half to Tsubaki.
"Wouldn't dream of it," Tsubaki says, then watches her go. The smile falls off her face the way a glove comes off a hand—shaky but practiced. She tilts her head at the path. "Come on, Piano. Before she buys the stall out."
We walk. The path along the fence is uneven, the kind of uneven that makes you put attention into your ankles. Tsubaki does the calculus and adjusts. She keeps her voice light. "You looked tired when we got here," she says, as if commenting on weather. "Tired now, too."
"Yeah," I say. No point in pretending. "Didn't sleep great."
"You never do lately... at all"she says, and then, quieter, "and you look like you're trying not to fall down in public."
"I'm not that theatrical."
"Could've fooled me," she says, annoyed. She bumps me again. "Go home with me. Eat something that wasn't born in a vending machine. My mom is making food"
"I—"
My pocket vibrates.
It's not a polite buzz. It's the kind that says: move. I fish the phone out. The screen lights my fingers, makes them look like they don't belong to me. One new message. Unknown number that isn't unknown anymore.
'Get your scrawny ass over here, Little Einstein....'
Saitou
I feel the grin headline itself across my face before I mean it to. The timing is rude. The day is rude. I can hear Watari's shot hitting a post in the hollow between two heartbeats, and still, I smile. It's small at first, then bigger, not because the words are kind—they aren't—but because of what sits underneath them: the door, cracked open; the folder on the bench; the possibility that something I dragged out of the wrong year might matter in this one.
Tsubaki catches the change in my expression. She gives me a sideways look, careful. "What?"
"Errand," I say, keeping it light. "Family stuff. I'll walk you a bit, then cut across."
She nods once. Her mouth makes that line it makes when she wants to ask more and decides she won't. "Text when you get home," she says, like a habit she refuses to break.
"I will."
Kaori returns with bread that makes steam like conversation. "I got the good kind," she announces, and shoves a piece into my hand before I can pretend I'm not hungry. "We going?"
"In a second," I say. When she turns to argue with the vendor about change and Tsubaki glances down to retie a lace that doesn't need it, I thumb a reply fast, the words small against the bright: On my way.
The path takes a bend. The stadium sits behind us, a big oval full of almosts and one loud lesson. Up ahead the river shows a strip of itself between buildings and trees and looks like a ribbon someone put down and forgot. Tsubaki tugs on my sleeve—not enough to stop me, just enough to remind me where the ground is. "Come on," she says, gentle. "We'll see you off at the corner."
"Yeah." I pocket the phone. The cat from the dream steps beside my memory without making a sound. The light in the circle holds. The swing creaks once, then gets quiet, like it knows how to wait.
We cross the street together. The crosswalk man believes in himself. The air has that early-evening temperature that lets you pretend the day didn't have sharp parts. Kaori bumps my shoulder with hers and points the two of them toward the river path. "Don't get abducted by chores," she orders.
"Also.... Get some sleep please?"
"I'll try," I say knowing full well both of her fears will happen. She shoots me a lingering look her mind seemingly trailing off
Tsubaki lingers half a breath longer. "Eat," she says. "Sleep. Text."
"Okay miss bossy," I say, and she huffs but almost smiles.
They peel off. I watch them go until the crowd edits them into evening. Then I turn the other way, the phone a quiet weight against my leg, and start walking.