The foreign boy looked at his hands.
The kid who'd just invited them into the game hadn't been expecting that. An enthusiastic 'Yes!' had probably been seen as the default response, with 'Not right now' as an option. Simply raising both arms a little, rotating them to look at palms and brown fingers and those poorly-trimmed nails with the little points in the center -- that probably hadn't been anywhere on the list.
"You wanna play?" the local kid repeated. "Because we've gotta get started soon and if it's not two of you, we need to find someone else."
The Samoan visibly swallowed.
"Tell you in a minute?"
Which made the local boy shrug. "A minute," he said. "Fine. Just come down to the sidelines if you're in." And walked off to the nearest bench, sitting down so he could change his shoes.
The foreigner awkwardly looked towards Kanna. Fingers lifted, curled: follow me. And then he took a few steps away, with Kanna moving in his wake. Saikawa started to follow --
"Stay," Kanna said.
It was a hot day. That was a good reason for Saikawa to feel as if steam was starting to rise from her skin.
"Why do I have to --"
"-- he wants to ask me something," the white-haired girl stated. "You stay."
Something about the muted tone felt familiar. "I'm not a dog --"
"Stay."
Saikawa fumed. Came very close to grinding her teeth, and ultimately chose to disobey. Taking two furiously-stomping strides back towards the gate clearly wasn't 'staying' at all.
Kanna followed the foreign boy: just a few steps, and then they began to talk. Keeping the words in low tones. A private conversation.
Something which Kanna was conducting with a boy. One who had come out of nowhere (because that was Samoa now: the capital of Nowhere), who might be a rival looking for his chance to steal Kanna away...
Saikawa risked a small shift to the side. Then another. Strained ears which were used to reaching into the depths of scant decibels to fish out Kanna's muted tones, and --
"-- they're -- looking at me."
"Waiting. For you to tell them," declared Kanna's absolute certainty.
A little shakily, "It doesn't feel like that. Not all of it. Some of them are just -- looking..."
Gently, "You're foreign."
The boy sighed. It was a soft sound, and a weary one. It was also a sigh which came with a surprising amount of weight, and thick shoulders bowed inwards.
"I thought... I was going to be just like them. I was finally going to be just like --"
"It doesn't work that way," Kanna quietly told him. "You're who you would have been all along, if everything had been different. Who you are inside. It doesn't make you exactly the same. Because you're you. You're Spike. You're not them. You're just close enough to try."
I don't understand.
(Maybe she didn't want to understand.)
And now there was a little tremble of fear in his voice. "They -- won't know?"
"Not if you're careful." The small girl took a slow breath. "Spike, there's time. Before the shopping arcade, before you have to go home. Try."
She reached out for his right hand. Took it in her own, squeezed.
Don't.
Don't do that with him.
It hurts...
"Play," Kanna said. And the white-haired girl almost smiled.
He shivered a little, in the middle of a hot day.
"Do you know how?" Kanna checked.
"I think so," the foreign boy hesitantly decided. "We have something like this at home."
Something like this? What country didn't have football? Even Americans had it, although they called it by a stupid name. Saikawa was sure Samoa had a national team and if you were sending your squad out to compete with the rest of the planet, then they had to be playing by the same rules --
"That's the goal?" the foreigner asked. Pointed.
"Yes."
He looked at his hands again. Rotated them, wriggled brown digits. Overly-green eyes carefully inspected pointed fingernails.
"I think I'll be okay if they let me play goal," he decided. "Kanna, you're sure --"
"-- you play. I play," Kanna said. "Let's go tell them."
And that was exactly how it worked out. He played. She played. But since each team had been down by one, they wound up on opposite sides. The Samoan was in the goal and Kanna, who was typically in great demand for sporting events, wound up as an opposing striker.
There was also a place for Saikawa and because each team had been down by one, it was in the stands.
She fumed. She ground her shoes against the park's dirt. A girl who absolutely had at least a little violence in her gave brief thought towards tripping one of the players and then offering herself as a substitute: ideally, this would have put her on Kanna's team. But there was no getting past the numbers and after making multiple offers/threats to be the first person in after an injury, Saikawa stomped off to the bleachers.
It took longer than it should have. They'd originally come to the park in order to get a drink. Kanna and the foreign boy now had equal access to the fieldside water coolers: Saikawa didn't. So her first stomping destination was the vending machines, where she fiercely slammed coins into the slot and then got her favorite flavor in the hopes that it would bring the selection that much closer to selling out before the boy reached it.
And then she stomped up the metal stairs to sit on a too-hot bench, all while moving more slowly than she wanted to. But she had a good reason for slowing down. She was carrying some extra weight.
Saikawa angrily arranged herself on the hot bench. Slammed back most of the soda and, with absolutely no one paying attention to her, felt free to furiously burp.
She watched the game for a while. Most of her attention was on Kanna. The team definitely wasn't getting the ball to Kanna enough. That was how you scored. Saikawa liked to play center forward because that was the first step in giving Kanna a chance to shine. Kanna was as good at football as everything else, even if she had an odd reluctance to try heading the ball --
-- the striker position was really far too close to the opposing goalie for comfort. Close enough to talk --
-- she looked away.
(She hardly ever looked away from Kanna.)
Saikawa gazed across the park. Found the track section, and watched as kids ran past sweating adults. One of the youngest approached a self-designated finish line, put out an empty hand so she could pass an intangible object to someone who wasn't there.
Don't drop the baton.
It was a thought she didn't want to have. It shot through her with the speed of instinct and the strength of pain, carrying memory along in an unstoppable wave.
She was still waiting for the day when it didn't hurt.
Undōkai. The day of the school sports festival.
Saikawi wasn't popular. She had only one friend. But she could run, and that was why she was on the relay race team. Parents were crowded into the stands, her parents had come and her older sister was there, Miss Kobayashi had worked extra hours for a week so the programmer could clear the day to cheer for Kanna...
They would be racing together. Kanna had the anchor leg. Saikawa would be passing her the baton.
It would be an honor to win. A privilege to boost Kanna into the true victory. And when it came to moving through life together, Saikawa wanted to treat it as a preview.
So many adults, all watching during the first two legs. Saikawa was trying not to look at her parents while she waited. That was a distraction. Wait for the exact moment when she could start moving, receive a smooth handoff, try to open up a lead. Give Kanna that much more to work with --
-- and that was the signal, her chance to push, and she was running and her classmate was coming up behind her, Saikawa put her hand back, felt the aluminum rod slap her palm, closed her fingers around it and then she took off.
She could run. It was a good skill to have in a society where it so often felt like an entire educational system was trying to chase her down.
Moving around the circuit. Accelerating steadily. There was a runner from another class in front of her, and then there wasn't. Legs and arms and heart all pumping smoothly and there was Kanna up ahead, waiting to receive the baton. Saikawa was opening up a lead, she was getting ahead in front of her parents and Miss Kobayashi, she was proving herself and she pushed and she stumbled and in the moment it took to recover, the single instant required to rebalance herself, she dropped the baton.
It was over. She knew it. She could feel the hot tears surging across her eyes, the tidal wave of failure, and their class was going to lose, Kanna wouldn't win and it would all be Saikawa's fault. The entire schoolroom would blame her. Deservedly. She'd dropped the baton, the one thing you could never do and she'd done it, it was skittering away across the track as everyone passed her and she'd lost.
She was crying, in that very first moment of realization. Knowing it was over, and she was the reason why. A distant-feeling thought decided that if she had been a character in a sports anime, then this would have been the defining moment of her life. She would have fought to get past it in high school. Possibly still been thinking about it at the ancient age of thirty, and that was a horrible thing to carry into immortality.
She'd lost. For everyone.
But she was also a hopeless person who couldn't admit defeat. And, when necessary, cheated.
You couldn't really cheat in a relay race. But you could go grab the stupid baton and then run for your life.
She'd scrambled. Spotted where it had gone, managed to focus on the metal rod through the tears, ran and scooped and ran. And she'd been making up ground, closing some of that horrible lost distance as the hot liquid salt flowed down her face, but -- there wasn't enough track left. Just Kanna, starting to move in the lane after everyone else had already taken off and all Saikawa could do was hold out the traitorous rod --
"I'm sorry!" Pushed out of burning lungs, gasped through tears.
"Leave it to me." Steady, half-muted placidity.
Saikawa, spent and doubled over from the gravity of failure, had taken a few more staggering steps and then collapsed to her knees, tears falling into the dirt of the track.
Kanna had run --
-- after the comeback, the victory, when the entire class had been crowding around Kanna to cheer her at proximity... the white-haired girl had given Saikawa the credit. Said that if Saikawa hadn't kept pushing, hadn't closed so much of the gap, then Kanna never would have been able to finish it. And kids had yelled, parents had cheered, Saikawa's father had sobbed from happiness, and it had kept everyone else from blaming her.
It hadn't done a thing to prevent Saikawa from blaming herself.
If Kanna hadn't been running anchor -- if the baton hadn't been passed off to the perfect girl -- anyone else would have failed to close the final gap, and it would have all been Saikawa's fault.
She couldn't lose in front of Kanna.
She couldn't lose Kanna.
She couldn't drop the baton --
-- she looked away from the track area.
(She still ran. She tried to run faster. She didn't know if it was enough.)
Her attention turned to the extra weight.
There were things you couldn't bring onto the football field. Kanna's little bag was being carried in a position of protection. The boy's backpack had been unceremoniously dropped by Saikawa's feet and if not for her desire to make sure Kanna had a decent lunch, she would have kicked it a few times.
Her left foot gave it a frustrated nudge. Something dense rattled within, and edged mass pressed against fabric and shoe.
Saikawa looked down.
It isn't snooping.
He's a stranger. Strangers can do bad things to girls, even when they're just boys.
I'm making sure he isn't carrying anything which might hurt her.
This is protection.
And thus self-blessed, she snooped.
The bentō boxes came out first, because that was going to be her excuse if anyone looked up at her: she'd been hungry. There was a brief temptation to pick one and sabotage it, but that would be an insult to Miss Tohru's cooking and besides, she couldn't fully guarantee that the boy would get it.
Once those were clear, she fished around a little more, searching for whatever had rattled against the box's edge. Nothing emerged, although the tactile inspection was allowing her to verify that the stitching on the backpack was simply exquisite --
-- no phone. A few coins. (She had no intention of taking any for herself: she wasn't stealing.) Some of the coins feel strange. There was definitely a few yen in there, but the others...
She risked raising one out of fabric-hosted shadows, just enough to get a look. It was golden, oddly heavy, and featured what she eventually decided was a very stylized horse. Samoan money. The fact that she couldn't read the word 'Samoa' on it anywhere was put down to the strangeness of foreign writing.
After a moment, she took her phone out and took a picture of both sides. Put the coin back down, while trying not to drip sweat into the backpack. Checked the field to make sure no one was watching her, saw that the boy was distracted by an incoming shot -- not one of Kanna's: he never would have blocked that -- and reached in again.
There.
A little pocket. No button. No zipper. It's just tensed fabric.
Squeeze the top to open it.
Reach in...
...why is he carrying a rock?
Maybe that was his true intent. Get Kanna out of sight, then hit her over the head with the most basic weapon to exist.
She angrily fished it out. Raised it to the hot light --
-- a grey so mild as to almost be clear, at least at the very top of the facets. Everything below that took on increasing tinges of purple, just like --
Her eyes are beautiful.
Her hair...
-- suffusion rushing through a receptive medium. (She was going on ten. Suffusion had been in the previous year's science classes.) That slow, increasingly-dense spread of color until the far tips became deep violet --
-- amethyst.
I saw it in the rockhound store. When I wanted to make jewelry for her.
Raw amethyst.
Why was the foreign boy carrying that? As a gift? What else was in there? How was he attempting to bribe Kanna? If he was carrying sweets --
-- a yell abruptly sounded from the field, and she dropped the stone back into its little pocket: most of the clunk which came from meeting its fellows was lost, along with the sound of crystal sliding along dense glass. All of her attention focused on the action --
-- Kanna had the ball. And white strands were flying, the glass beads which she loved so much were banging against her back as she ran towards the goal, steadily guiding the ball, the foreign boy was watching her closely, looking for a feint and none of the defenders could reach Kanna in time because the small girl was just that fast, she was running and accelerating and she had a clear shot --
Kanna kicked.
The boy lunged.
He'd anticipated her. (No one ever did that.) And the fast-moving ball, traveling almost too quickly to clearly see, went directly into his hands, he stopped it, began to bring it down --
-- but Kanna was still running.
She was very fast.
There were times when she was a little too fast to stop.
The girl went directly into the boy.
He dropped the ball. And for purposes of defending the goal, that was fine for his team: he'd already stopped it, had succeeded in taking something away from the perfect girl. The one who had just about rammed him and when it came to fouls, that was also fine: the kids called fouls on themselves, which meant it could take a lot more than a collision like two very small trucks coming together to bring a yellow card out.
It was okay if he dropped the ball.
There were no real issues with Kanna knocking him off his feet. She'd done it to larger kids, most of whom limped off towards the sidelines. Once they could move again.
But to just take the hit, to use emptied hands to grab onto Kanna as he went backwards, to have the two of them fall into the goal space together, a pair of bodies rolling around as a single unit while the boy laughed and --
-- Kanna was laughing.
Saikawa could hear it. The dress had been dirtied and the beads would probably need to have strands pushed back through the centers and Kanna, so muted and quiet, was -- laughing.
I always try to make her laugh.
Always.
It's hard. Just the "...oh!" is hard. And to make her laugh...
...and he just did it...
They kept rolling. Eventually stopped, with each falling onto their back, lying next to the other. Staring up at blue sky and giggling within the rising heat of the day.
That was when Saikawa decided she hated him.