FIC: Rewind Forward (D1) 2/63
Title: Rewind Forward (2/63)
Author: Ociwen
Rating: NC17 (eventual)
Disclaimer: Konomi owns all.
Summary: Niou, meet Yagyuu.
Author's Notes: Spoilers for everything.
Yanagi, Sanada the crybaby and the girly-looking kid named Yukimura make the tennis team. The very first practice.
Yanagi drips with sweat. Sanada’s face is bright red and he’s panting. Yukimura breathes hard, but he’s grinning from ear to ear when the buchou shakes his hand and says, “You’re on the team, kid.” The captain nods to Sanada and Yanagi. “So are you guys. Maybe you two can play doubles. Nishiki, what do you think?”
Nishiki checks a list on a clipboard. “It depends on if you bring Suzuki and Sunohara back or not.”
Niou looks at the two players, both seniors, collapsed on the court, still in exactly the same spots on the ground where they ended their game, having lost 6-1 to Sanada-Yanagi pair. One of the seniors stares up at the brilliant blue sky, his eyes glazed over. The other one is hunched over, his back shuddering.
“I can’t believe I lost to freshmen,” he mutters.
“I can’t believe I didn’t make the team!” Marui complains.
Niou rolls his eyes. The brown Brazilian boy says, “Would you have wanted to play Yukimura? He’s horrible! He’s practically as good as Andy Roddick or something!”
“Or Anna Kournikova,” Niou says. He spends the rest of the practice picking up tennis balls with the other freshmen who don’t make the team, which is everyone except those three monsters. Niou doesn’t know exactly what to do and some of the seniors pick on the Brazilian kid when he picks up balls at the wrong time, so he watches what he should be doing and it becomes clear that he needs to either dodge their shots as fast as he can in between serves to pick up the stray balls, or just wait until the matches are done to fill his basket. It’s not hard, but his knees are skinned and his back hurts by the end of the hour.
Why am I doing this? he thinks. Niou doesn’t even really like tennis a heck of a lot. He just started to play at the streetcourts for the hell of it, like he showed up at the tennis practices at school because he can’t stand that flashy fatty with the pink hair. Still, it’s fun the rare chances that he gets to hit the balls.
And the fact that Sanada made the team. The crybaby. Someone needs to stick around to take him down a notch, now that’s Sanada’s all smug and pleased with himself and hanging out with that girly Yukimura like they are the bestest of team mates with Yanagi and the captain.
Niou reaches out to grab the last ball on his court when something pokes him in the arm. He looks over his shoulder to see Yukimura standing there, toeing Niou’s elbow with his sneaker.
“Hey,” Yukimura says.
Niou nods.
“I’m not a girl, by the way,” Yukimura says. “If you don’t believe me, I can show you.”
Niou stares at Yukimura a long moment. Yukimura’s hand is on the waistband of his pants. Niou stands up and refuses to look away. He’s won a thousand staring contests with his sister, he can win one against Yukimura. But Yukimura doesn’t look away either.
“That’s fine,” Niou says. “Show Sanada for all I care.”
“Yanagi has longer hair than me,” Yukimura says. He moves his hand to his side. Inside, Niou sighs with relief.
Niou nods again. “Yeah, maybe.”
“I’m glad we’ve cleared that up,” Yukimura says. “Maybe we’ll play some day, ne?”
Niou shrugs. He tosses his ball into the basket, but it misses and bounces off the edge. Yukimura swings his racket in a flash, fast enough to catch the ball, cradle it and do a fancy backwards swing. The ball arcs into the basket and lands perfectly.
Niou bites his lip to stop himself from smiling at how impressed he is by Yukimura’s trick. He doesn’t know what to think when Yukimura winks at him as he walks off the courts to the changerooms.
***
Niou’s job, like several dozen other freshmen on the tennis team is, every afternoon and every second morning, to run five laps, to do fifty racket swings, and then to pick up balls. If he’s lucky, sometimes the captain or the coach will take a group of freshmen to work on serves in twos, or maybe on volleys.
None of the freshmen are allowed in the regulars’ rooms. None of them are allowed in the weights rooms and there is a penalty of death (or so Marui claims) if any of them so much as touch one finger on the ball machines.
Except for Yanagi, Yukimura and Sanada.
“Stupid Sanada,” Niou mutters.
One morning, Niou sneaks into the school early. No one notices him. He’s still small enough to slip between a group of juniors from the chess club who meet in the mornings on the main floor in the cafeteria. He knows Sanada’s in class four, and their lockers are at the west side of the main floor. He knows Sanada’s locker, because he may have followed Sanada one afternoon and he may have written down the number. 552.
Niou breaks the lock. Sanada leaves the dial exactly seventeen numbers beyond the last in the combination. Niou’s hearing is good. Listen for the clicks, turn right, turn left, then pop. Off it comes.
Niou smiles to himself.
A senior walks by in the hallway. He stares down his nose at Niou. Niou hides his face behind the locker door until the senior rounds the corner.
“God, he’s so boring,” Niou says. There is a mirror on the back of the door, and beneath that, a copy of Sanada’s class schedule. Math, first. English second. Biology before lunch.
“Nice,” Niou says.
Above the mirror is a cut-out picture from a newspaper of Roger Federer, and then above that a glossy ad from a magazine with Lleyton Hewitt. Sanada stacks his books on the shelves and there is a pair of sneakers in the bottom of his locker. No tennis bag, nothing.
How boring.
Niou had half been expecting to find a ratty teddy bear with stuffing pulling out from the snout, or maybe a cheesy manga volume.
Niou takes the ziplock bag from his pocket and slips an anchovy into each of Sanada’s sneakers. Not terribly original, but his mother didn’t have anything rotten in the back of the fridge this morning and he was too tired to stop at the convenience store to buy a jar of something slimy and smelly.
“…maybe we can play doubles in the prefecturals?”
Sanada’s voice. Niou would recognize the crack and squeak anywhere. He slams the locker shut and runs around the corner, just as Sanada and Yukimura walk down the corridor. It is so very tempting to peer around the corner, but too risky. Niou listens instead. Yukimura grunts something and Sanada opens his locker, completely oblivious.
But there is no sound of Sanada taking his sneakers out. Only the rustle of papers, the scrape of heavy textbooks on metal shelves and Sanada closing his locker.
“I don’t want to play doubles,” Yukimura says. “Maybe you and Yanagi could play instead. I want singles two at least.”
“Oh, okay,” Sanada sounds heartbroken. His voice cracks on the last syllable.
There are more people entering the school now. Juniors brush past Niou and seniors tromp up the stairways. Teachers walk quickly, arms full of folders of tests and quizzes and assignments.
“Good morning,” Niou hears someone say. He blinks because he’s heard that voice before, but he can’t place it.
“Good morning,” Sanada says.
And then around the corner, a megane dork walks. Straight into Niou. Niou stumbles backward, scrambling against the wall to keep his balance. The dork trips forward over his own feet. He lands in a heap at Niou’s feet. Glasses slide across the hallway, clattering the fragile frames against laminate.
The boy stands up, blinking myopically. He looks around, but his pupils don’t focus. Niou can see perfectly well that there are glasses four feet to his left, but the boy stares blankly.
“Pardon me, but…do you see my glasses?” the boy asks.
Niou takes a moment to think. He glances to his side, but the boy doesn’t even seem to be able to see his face. Niou could walk over and crush them. It wouldn’t take much. An accident, he could say.
But something tugs inside. What have you done this time, Masaharu? He can already hear his mother’s voice and see her frown when she would be told that Niou had broken some kid’s glasses and by the way, now his parents have to pay for replacements.
He’d be out of allowance for months.
Niou sighs. He bends down, picks up the glasses and waves them in front of the boy. “Here,” he says, rolling his eyes.
“Thank you,” the boy says. He puts the glasses on and his face softens with relief and familiarity from sight returned and glasses back on.
As far as Niou is concerned, the boy has become a megane dork once more.
Niou tosses his head back. “Yeah, whatever.”
It isn’t until the middle of lunch break that it occurs to Niou who the boy was.
The kid from tennis practice. The one who never returned to the tennis club after the first day.
Good thing because the dork would probably lose them on the court in the middle of a game.
“Can I have your last squid roll?”
Marui slides into the seat beside Niou, squeezing his ass onto the end of the bench. He grabs the squid roll before Niou’s chopsticks make it, and he pops it into his mouth.
Niou’s eye twitches.
“Asshole,” he says. “I didn’t say you could have that.”
Marui snorts. “I need the energy for tennis this afternoon.”
“I hope it gives you food poisoning,” Niou says.
“Screw you,” Marui says. He slides off the bench and gives Niou the finger. A bald brown head bobs above a crowd of freshmen girls and Marui wanders off, waving at Jackal and asking something about his shrimp chips.
Unfortunately, being in the youngest year at a new school means that Niou is one of the smallest there. Maybe a couple months ago he might have been able to sneak up on a third grader in elementary school and con his lunch money from him, but now Niou has to sit and suffer a growling stomach all afternoon.
Niou spends physics glowering at the back of Marui’s pink head. He pulls the ink from his ballpoint, fishes a dirty Kleenex from his pocket and chews. The spitball hits the bastard square in the back of the neck. Marui twitches. His hand moves around his neck, feeling for something. When he pulls the spitball off and stares at it in his hand, he turns and glares back at Niou.
“Fuck you,” he mouths.
“Fuck you,” Niou mouths back.
“Niou-kun, is there something you would like to say to the class?” the teacher cuts in.
Marui grins. Niou feels his face heat up, just a little.
“No, sensei, but I think Marui-kun does.”
Marui’s smile falls.
Niou beams back at him.
***
The first tournaments of the season begin in May. Permission slips are handed out by the fukubuchou and bus schedules are posted on the bulletin board in the changing room. Niou’s mother washes his uniform before each tournament and he walks to the campus on Saturday morning to make the bus. Only the regulars ever talk on the buses to the sportspark. Everyone else sits spaced out, their heads lolling backwards. Niou looks out the windows at the brilliant green trees and the silver sheen of office buildings lining the expressway. His eyes droop. He’d rather have slept in, but he’s expected to show up and cheer and if he doesn’t, well, he’ll be kicked out of the club.
If Marui can show up, so can Niou.
Marui spends his morning snacking on bags of chips and crackers, rustling crinkling plastic twinkie and cake wrappers. Jackal sits with him. Niou sits by himself, close to the other teams. His cheers are half-hearted. Go go Rikkai Dai! Let’s go let’s go Rikkai Dai! He can cheer mechanically. He doesn’t need to think about it.
Still, the games are brilliant to watch.
Sanada and Yanagi play doubles two in the prefecturals. Compared to what Niou saw at the streetcourts and even at practices, they’re a little scary. Two shrimpy freshmen who play like singles players and yet seem to somehow crush two seniors from a nearby school. Yanagi is fast and silent. His serve is nothing special, but his volleys are like bullets, whipping the ball across the court and smashing baselines, smashing sidelines, whizzing beside the faces of their opponents. Yanagi seems to know exactly where to hit the ball so that the other players won’t make it. His lips move and he talks to himself and Sanada on the court, as though he’s calculating things. Math-like. Data-like.
Sanada is completely different. His serves are strong. He blows the racket of one of the other players completely away. He uses two handed shots a lot. Niou figures it’s for the power. Maybe next year Sanada will use one hand- his muscles bulge in his biceps, but he’s still a child like Niou, not like their senpais who have deep voices, big shoulders and who make nasty jokes about girls licking their penises in the showers.
Yuck!
Niou shudders at the thought.
Yukimura plays singles two. The captain takes singles one, of course.
A peanut vendor walks up and down the stands. He stops in front of Niou’s vision right as Yukimura starts his serve. Niou shifts in his seat, desperately leaning left and right and finally he’s able to get a glimpse.
He doesn’t know what to make of Yukimura’s tennis. It’s nasty- Yukimura likes to hit balls to the sidelines, swerving balls that skim the net. And he likes to hit balls to the other player’s blindspot. He grins when the other player fumbles.
But then the next game, the other team has service play and Yukimura completely changes tactics. His shots are strong, like Sanada’s. He dashes to the net, two hands on the racket shaft, way too close to the frame, but he punts balls and sends them flying. He uses the hadokyou that the seniors talk about, the big burly ones, except Yukimura’s a bit of a shrimp.
Yukimura’s sweatband falls over his eyes, but he seems to know exactly where to hit and where to run and in the middle of a volley, he fixes his headband with his left hand just as a lob comes at his other side.
He jumps up and slams his racket face against the ball.
Game, Rikkai Dai, 6-0.
After the captain takes his game, 6-3, Niou goes off to find the vendors. His stomach growls and he wants to get there before Marui, although Marui has probably already scouted out all the food stands ahead of time.
They play the second round this afternoon, expectations are high. They made it to the final four in the Nationals seventeen out of the last twenty years (according to Yanagi), so the prefectural level should be a piece of cake.
Niou follows his nose.
And the crowds of spectators.
The air is thick with the heavy scent of fried meat and the pathways are sticky with littered, melting crushed ice and soft drink cans. The day is getting hotter by the hour. Niou fans his face with his hand. His scalp itches. He probably needs to bleach his hair again soon, his mother was smiling at breakfast yesterday.
“I can see your natural hair again!” she said.
Niou scratches his temple. His hair is stiff and brittle and damp with sweat. He stands in line at the first stand he sees. It smells like meat buns, but there is a hot dog stand close by and it could be something else. His pocket jingles with the yen his mother gave him. One thousand yen, just to himself. As much as his sister gets a week for allowance.
Niou buys himself two meat buns.
He sits under a tree, unwrapping the steaming buns in the shade. He stretches his legs out, a nice change from the cramped and uncomfortable aluminum stands of the morning.
“Do you mind if I sit here?” Yanagi looks down at Niou.
Niou shrugs. “Doesn’t matter.”
Yanagi brushes his hand across the ground, wiping clean the twigs and damp leaves, then sits down. Niou chews on his meat bun. He doesn’t know what he should be saying to Yanagi- they never speak, they don’t share classes and Niou could care less about exactly how it must have felt to have played a real tournament game.
His eye twitches.
His scalp continues to crawl.
Maybe he could stick anchovies in Yanagi’s sneakers too.
Has Sanada ever found them?
“Genichirou found your present last week,” Yanagi says, right before he takes a cucumber roll out of his bento box.
Niou squints into the sun. A cicada hums in a bush behind him. Yanagi makes a noise.
“Genichirou?”
“Sanada.”
Oh.
Niou says, “Really?”
“In his shoes. After practice.”
“I didn’t notice,” Niou says.
“Probably not,” Yanagi says. The cicadas buzz louder. Yanagi’s shoulders stiffen. He opens his mouth to say something, but clenches his fist instead. “Excuse me.” Yanagi sets his lacquer bento box down and stomps over behind Niou, thrashing his arms wildly and kicking his legs, jumping up and down again and again until the cicadas stop.
Niou hears Yanagi’s sneakers crunching as he walks back over.
“I hate cicadas,” Yanagi says.
“Never would have guessed,” Niou says.
“Yo!” a voice calls out. Niou squeezes his eyes shut. He quickly shoves the last half of his meat bun into his mouth and chews. It burns; tears prick his eyes, but damned if he is going to let Marui have any of his food.
Jackal the brown kid follows Marui, and there are a couple more freshmen with them, but Niou doesn’t remember their names or their tennis. They’re all just ballboys anyway. Jackal carries an armful of snacks, steaming and smelling of fried okonomiyaki and shivering fish flakes and mayonnaise. Marui chews on a wad of gum, stinking of fake green apples.
Niou hates the smell.
“Some game, huh?” Marui says.
Yanagi nods, but a small smile plays on his lips, as though he knows Marui is full of bullshit. The game wasn’t that remarkable- Niou knows that much. Yanagi and Sanada won because they’re great at tennis, genius freshmen like Yukimura.
The group of them sit and eat their lunch and drink their complimentary sportsades that have been handed out to participants at the tournament. Marui’s gushing gives way to the two other freshmen, who give play by play blows of a game Yanagi just played, except he was the one who played, not them, and they flap their arms a lot more than he ever did.
Seagulls and birds squawk in the trees. Pigeons try to scavenge the bits of hot dog that Jackal throws at their heads. They scatter, cooing and fluttering feathers in the air. Flies buzz around a garbage can, dipping in and out of half-drank fanta and coke cans. A team in green jerseys walks by; the flies swarm up when a boy throws a half-eaten apple inside.
“Man, those nachos look good,” Marui says loudly. He rubs his stomach, eyeing a passing player. “Where’d you get those?” he shouts.
The boy stops, his chip dripping with neon cheese. “Back there,” he nods.
Marui comes back with a tray of chips and plastic-looking cheese. Yanagi makes a noise. Niou watches him stand up, his eyes bulging slightly and his pallor a little greenish.
Yanagi runs off, knocking into Marui. They tumble into a mess of spilled cheese and dirt and leaves and crushed chips. Everything smells of the fake cheese. Yanagi groans, shaking his hands that ooze of the cheese. Marui scowls, shouting about his chips.
Yanagi manages to make it behind a tree before he pukes everything up.
He’s taken out of the afternoon games by three senpais and the fukubuchou. Yanagi shakes his head, “No, I can play. I’m fine,” he insists, but Marui has come back with new nachos in the meantime and Yanagi’s bent over a garbage can, heaving again.
Jackal frowns. Awkwardly, he pats Yanagi on the back until Sanada shows up. The team gathers around, a quick pep talk before the next set of matches. Niou isn’t on the team, sure, but he sticks around because no one elbows him off. Maybe the senpais assume he’s a friend of Yanagi’s.
“What am I supposed to play now?” Sanada whines.
“You’ll play doubles with Wataya,” the buchou says. “Don’t get in his way, stick to your side, and you’ll be fine.”
Sanada sends a pointed look to Yukimura, before sighing heavily. “Okay,” he grumbles.
Sanada still wins his game, and he wins 6-1, but he seems miserable. Niou watches him leave the court after playing. Yukimura says something from the bleachers, and ruffles Sanada’s hair. For an instant, Sanada’s sullen face vanishes, replaced with something Niou thinks is very odd. It’s not friendship; it’s a strange sort of light in his eyes that says a lot more.
“Interesting,” Niou whispers.
***
On Saturdays, club days, the tennis team has practice from 9 to 11:30. Niou shuffles downstairs to breakfast, eats two packages of instant ramen, and shuffles to the bus stop. His sister sleeps in. His brother sleeps in. He grinds his teeth with jealousy as he thinks about it on the bus. Stupid family, he thinks. He rubs his eyes, grabs his tennis bag, and shuffles onto the tennis courts. A half hour of warm-ups, and two hours of picking up balls. After, the first years sweep the courts and hit the showers.
They might be the last to the showers, but in the summer, it doesn’t matter if there is no hot water left. Niou’s back is caked with sweat, his t-shirt sticking to his skin. He scratches his scalp and wafts his armpits, damp with sweat, too.
“First years, gather round!” Three dozen pairs of feet slap across wet tiles, half of the boys naked, some with towels on the hips, some with towels on their heads, some slapping each other’s ass with towels, too.
Niou wears a towel around his waist. Some of the first years have spent the last few months shooting up, sprouting hairs, cracking voices. Niou is still as small and shrimpy as Marui, if half the weight. Compared to all the seniors and juniors with big cocks, Niou feels…childishly small. No need for any of them to see him and his lack thereof.
“Nationals are in three weeks,” the buchou says, reading off a chart. “Here are the permission forms- bring them back by next week.” Sheets are handed around the group, some fluttering to the floor, where they are pasted by the water. Niou folds his up, tucking it under his armpit.
“One of you will get to go to the Newcomer’s Tournament in September, just after. The regulars will be busy with training for the Nationals, and we don’t want you guys pissing around us, so you’ll be on C courts for the next month with the coach.”
“No more ball picking?” one boy whispers beside Niou.
“Finally!” another says with a grin.
Niou glances around the room. Marui stares at him, then raises an eyebrow.
That spot at the Newcomer’s Tournament is mine.
Author: Ociwen
Rating: NC17 (eventual)
Disclaimer: Konomi owns all.
Summary: Niou, meet Yagyuu.
Author's Notes: Spoilers for everything.
Yanagi, Sanada the crybaby and the girly-looking kid named Yukimura make the tennis team. The very first practice.
Yanagi drips with sweat. Sanada’s face is bright red and he’s panting. Yukimura breathes hard, but he’s grinning from ear to ear when the buchou shakes his hand and says, “You’re on the team, kid.” The captain nods to Sanada and Yanagi. “So are you guys. Maybe you two can play doubles. Nishiki, what do you think?”
Nishiki checks a list on a clipboard. “It depends on if you bring Suzuki and Sunohara back or not.”
Niou looks at the two players, both seniors, collapsed on the court, still in exactly the same spots on the ground where they ended their game, having lost 6-1 to Sanada-Yanagi pair. One of the seniors stares up at the brilliant blue sky, his eyes glazed over. The other one is hunched over, his back shuddering.
“I can’t believe I lost to freshmen,” he mutters.
“I can’t believe I didn’t make the team!” Marui complains.
Niou rolls his eyes. The brown Brazilian boy says, “Would you have wanted to play Yukimura? He’s horrible! He’s practically as good as Andy Roddick or something!”
“Or Anna Kournikova,” Niou says. He spends the rest of the practice picking up tennis balls with the other freshmen who don’t make the team, which is everyone except those three monsters. Niou doesn’t know exactly what to do and some of the seniors pick on the Brazilian kid when he picks up balls at the wrong time, so he watches what he should be doing and it becomes clear that he needs to either dodge their shots as fast as he can in between serves to pick up the stray balls, or just wait until the matches are done to fill his basket. It’s not hard, but his knees are skinned and his back hurts by the end of the hour.
Why am I doing this? he thinks. Niou doesn’t even really like tennis a heck of a lot. He just started to play at the streetcourts for the hell of it, like he showed up at the tennis practices at school because he can’t stand that flashy fatty with the pink hair. Still, it’s fun the rare chances that he gets to hit the balls.
And the fact that Sanada made the team. The crybaby. Someone needs to stick around to take him down a notch, now that’s Sanada’s all smug and pleased with himself and hanging out with that girly Yukimura like they are the bestest of team mates with Yanagi and the captain.
Niou reaches out to grab the last ball on his court when something pokes him in the arm. He looks over his shoulder to see Yukimura standing there, toeing Niou’s elbow with his sneaker.
“Hey,” Yukimura says.
Niou nods.
“I’m not a girl, by the way,” Yukimura says. “If you don’t believe me, I can show you.”
Niou stares at Yukimura a long moment. Yukimura’s hand is on the waistband of his pants. Niou stands up and refuses to look away. He’s won a thousand staring contests with his sister, he can win one against Yukimura. But Yukimura doesn’t look away either.
“That’s fine,” Niou says. “Show Sanada for all I care.”
“Yanagi has longer hair than me,” Yukimura says. He moves his hand to his side. Inside, Niou sighs with relief.
Niou nods again. “Yeah, maybe.”
“I’m glad we’ve cleared that up,” Yukimura says. “Maybe we’ll play some day, ne?”
Niou shrugs. He tosses his ball into the basket, but it misses and bounces off the edge. Yukimura swings his racket in a flash, fast enough to catch the ball, cradle it and do a fancy backwards swing. The ball arcs into the basket and lands perfectly.
Niou bites his lip to stop himself from smiling at how impressed he is by Yukimura’s trick. He doesn’t know what to think when Yukimura winks at him as he walks off the courts to the changerooms.
***
Niou’s job, like several dozen other freshmen on the tennis team is, every afternoon and every second morning, to run five laps, to do fifty racket swings, and then to pick up balls. If he’s lucky, sometimes the captain or the coach will take a group of freshmen to work on serves in twos, or maybe on volleys.
None of the freshmen are allowed in the regulars’ rooms. None of them are allowed in the weights rooms and there is a penalty of death (or so Marui claims) if any of them so much as touch one finger on the ball machines.
Except for Yanagi, Yukimura and Sanada.
“Stupid Sanada,” Niou mutters.
One morning, Niou sneaks into the school early. No one notices him. He’s still small enough to slip between a group of juniors from the chess club who meet in the mornings on the main floor in the cafeteria. He knows Sanada’s in class four, and their lockers are at the west side of the main floor. He knows Sanada’s locker, because he may have followed Sanada one afternoon and he may have written down the number. 552.
Niou breaks the lock. Sanada leaves the dial exactly seventeen numbers beyond the last in the combination. Niou’s hearing is good. Listen for the clicks, turn right, turn left, then pop. Off it comes.
Niou smiles to himself.
A senior walks by in the hallway. He stares down his nose at Niou. Niou hides his face behind the locker door until the senior rounds the corner.
“God, he’s so boring,” Niou says. There is a mirror on the back of the door, and beneath that, a copy of Sanada’s class schedule. Math, first. English second. Biology before lunch.
“Nice,” Niou says.
Above the mirror is a cut-out picture from a newspaper of Roger Federer, and then above that a glossy ad from a magazine with Lleyton Hewitt. Sanada stacks his books on the shelves and there is a pair of sneakers in the bottom of his locker. No tennis bag, nothing.
How boring.
Niou had half been expecting to find a ratty teddy bear with stuffing pulling out from the snout, or maybe a cheesy manga volume.
Niou takes the ziplock bag from his pocket and slips an anchovy into each of Sanada’s sneakers. Not terribly original, but his mother didn’t have anything rotten in the back of the fridge this morning and he was too tired to stop at the convenience store to buy a jar of something slimy and smelly.
“…maybe we can play doubles in the prefecturals?”
Sanada’s voice. Niou would recognize the crack and squeak anywhere. He slams the locker shut and runs around the corner, just as Sanada and Yukimura walk down the corridor. It is so very tempting to peer around the corner, but too risky. Niou listens instead. Yukimura grunts something and Sanada opens his locker, completely oblivious.
But there is no sound of Sanada taking his sneakers out. Only the rustle of papers, the scrape of heavy textbooks on metal shelves and Sanada closing his locker.
“I don’t want to play doubles,” Yukimura says. “Maybe you and Yanagi could play instead. I want singles two at least.”
“Oh, okay,” Sanada sounds heartbroken. His voice cracks on the last syllable.
There are more people entering the school now. Juniors brush past Niou and seniors tromp up the stairways. Teachers walk quickly, arms full of folders of tests and quizzes and assignments.
“Good morning,” Niou hears someone say. He blinks because he’s heard that voice before, but he can’t place it.
“Good morning,” Sanada says.
And then around the corner, a megane dork walks. Straight into Niou. Niou stumbles backward, scrambling against the wall to keep his balance. The dork trips forward over his own feet. He lands in a heap at Niou’s feet. Glasses slide across the hallway, clattering the fragile frames against laminate.
The boy stands up, blinking myopically. He looks around, but his pupils don’t focus. Niou can see perfectly well that there are glasses four feet to his left, but the boy stares blankly.
“Pardon me, but…do you see my glasses?” the boy asks.
Niou takes a moment to think. He glances to his side, but the boy doesn’t even seem to be able to see his face. Niou could walk over and crush them. It wouldn’t take much. An accident, he could say.
But something tugs inside. What have you done this time, Masaharu? He can already hear his mother’s voice and see her frown when she would be told that Niou had broken some kid’s glasses and by the way, now his parents have to pay for replacements.
He’d be out of allowance for months.
Niou sighs. He bends down, picks up the glasses and waves them in front of the boy. “Here,” he says, rolling his eyes.
“Thank you,” the boy says. He puts the glasses on and his face softens with relief and familiarity from sight returned and glasses back on.
As far as Niou is concerned, the boy has become a megane dork once more.
Niou tosses his head back. “Yeah, whatever.”
It isn’t until the middle of lunch break that it occurs to Niou who the boy was.
The kid from tennis practice. The one who never returned to the tennis club after the first day.
Good thing because the dork would probably lose them on the court in the middle of a game.
“Can I have your last squid roll?”
Marui slides into the seat beside Niou, squeezing his ass onto the end of the bench. He grabs the squid roll before Niou’s chopsticks make it, and he pops it into his mouth.
Niou’s eye twitches.
“Asshole,” he says. “I didn’t say you could have that.”
Marui snorts. “I need the energy for tennis this afternoon.”
“I hope it gives you food poisoning,” Niou says.
“Screw you,” Marui says. He slides off the bench and gives Niou the finger. A bald brown head bobs above a crowd of freshmen girls and Marui wanders off, waving at Jackal and asking something about his shrimp chips.
Unfortunately, being in the youngest year at a new school means that Niou is one of the smallest there. Maybe a couple months ago he might have been able to sneak up on a third grader in elementary school and con his lunch money from him, but now Niou has to sit and suffer a growling stomach all afternoon.
Niou spends physics glowering at the back of Marui’s pink head. He pulls the ink from his ballpoint, fishes a dirty Kleenex from his pocket and chews. The spitball hits the bastard square in the back of the neck. Marui twitches. His hand moves around his neck, feeling for something. When he pulls the spitball off and stares at it in his hand, he turns and glares back at Niou.
“Fuck you,” he mouths.
“Fuck you,” Niou mouths back.
“Niou-kun, is there something you would like to say to the class?” the teacher cuts in.
Marui grins. Niou feels his face heat up, just a little.
“No, sensei, but I think Marui-kun does.”
Marui’s smile falls.
Niou beams back at him.
***
The first tournaments of the season begin in May. Permission slips are handed out by the fukubuchou and bus schedules are posted on the bulletin board in the changing room. Niou’s mother washes his uniform before each tournament and he walks to the campus on Saturday morning to make the bus. Only the regulars ever talk on the buses to the sportspark. Everyone else sits spaced out, their heads lolling backwards. Niou looks out the windows at the brilliant green trees and the silver sheen of office buildings lining the expressway. His eyes droop. He’d rather have slept in, but he’s expected to show up and cheer and if he doesn’t, well, he’ll be kicked out of the club.
If Marui can show up, so can Niou.
Marui spends his morning snacking on bags of chips and crackers, rustling crinkling plastic twinkie and cake wrappers. Jackal sits with him. Niou sits by himself, close to the other teams. His cheers are half-hearted. Go go Rikkai Dai! Let’s go let’s go Rikkai Dai! He can cheer mechanically. He doesn’t need to think about it.
Still, the games are brilliant to watch.
Sanada and Yanagi play doubles two in the prefecturals. Compared to what Niou saw at the streetcourts and even at practices, they’re a little scary. Two shrimpy freshmen who play like singles players and yet seem to somehow crush two seniors from a nearby school. Yanagi is fast and silent. His serve is nothing special, but his volleys are like bullets, whipping the ball across the court and smashing baselines, smashing sidelines, whizzing beside the faces of their opponents. Yanagi seems to know exactly where to hit the ball so that the other players won’t make it. His lips move and he talks to himself and Sanada on the court, as though he’s calculating things. Math-like. Data-like.
Sanada is completely different. His serves are strong. He blows the racket of one of the other players completely away. He uses two handed shots a lot. Niou figures it’s for the power. Maybe next year Sanada will use one hand- his muscles bulge in his biceps, but he’s still a child like Niou, not like their senpais who have deep voices, big shoulders and who make nasty jokes about girls licking their penises in the showers.
Yuck!
Niou shudders at the thought.
Yukimura plays singles two. The captain takes singles one, of course.
A peanut vendor walks up and down the stands. He stops in front of Niou’s vision right as Yukimura starts his serve. Niou shifts in his seat, desperately leaning left and right and finally he’s able to get a glimpse.
He doesn’t know what to make of Yukimura’s tennis. It’s nasty- Yukimura likes to hit balls to the sidelines, swerving balls that skim the net. And he likes to hit balls to the other player’s blindspot. He grins when the other player fumbles.
But then the next game, the other team has service play and Yukimura completely changes tactics. His shots are strong, like Sanada’s. He dashes to the net, two hands on the racket shaft, way too close to the frame, but he punts balls and sends them flying. He uses the hadokyou that the seniors talk about, the big burly ones, except Yukimura’s a bit of a shrimp.
Yukimura’s sweatband falls over his eyes, but he seems to know exactly where to hit and where to run and in the middle of a volley, he fixes his headband with his left hand just as a lob comes at his other side.
He jumps up and slams his racket face against the ball.
Game, Rikkai Dai, 6-0.
After the captain takes his game, 6-3, Niou goes off to find the vendors. His stomach growls and he wants to get there before Marui, although Marui has probably already scouted out all the food stands ahead of time.
They play the second round this afternoon, expectations are high. They made it to the final four in the Nationals seventeen out of the last twenty years (according to Yanagi), so the prefectural level should be a piece of cake.
Niou follows his nose.
And the crowds of spectators.
The air is thick with the heavy scent of fried meat and the pathways are sticky with littered, melting crushed ice and soft drink cans. The day is getting hotter by the hour. Niou fans his face with his hand. His scalp itches. He probably needs to bleach his hair again soon, his mother was smiling at breakfast yesterday.
“I can see your natural hair again!” she said.
Niou scratches his temple. His hair is stiff and brittle and damp with sweat. He stands in line at the first stand he sees. It smells like meat buns, but there is a hot dog stand close by and it could be something else. His pocket jingles with the yen his mother gave him. One thousand yen, just to himself. As much as his sister gets a week for allowance.
Niou buys himself two meat buns.
He sits under a tree, unwrapping the steaming buns in the shade. He stretches his legs out, a nice change from the cramped and uncomfortable aluminum stands of the morning.
“Do you mind if I sit here?” Yanagi looks down at Niou.
Niou shrugs. “Doesn’t matter.”
Yanagi brushes his hand across the ground, wiping clean the twigs and damp leaves, then sits down. Niou chews on his meat bun. He doesn’t know what he should be saying to Yanagi- they never speak, they don’t share classes and Niou could care less about exactly how it must have felt to have played a real tournament game.
His eye twitches.
His scalp continues to crawl.
Maybe he could stick anchovies in Yanagi’s sneakers too.
Has Sanada ever found them?
“Genichirou found your present last week,” Yanagi says, right before he takes a cucumber roll out of his bento box.
Niou squints into the sun. A cicada hums in a bush behind him. Yanagi makes a noise.
“Genichirou?”
“Sanada.”
Oh.
Niou says, “Really?”
“In his shoes. After practice.”
“I didn’t notice,” Niou says.
“Probably not,” Yanagi says. The cicadas buzz louder. Yanagi’s shoulders stiffen. He opens his mouth to say something, but clenches his fist instead. “Excuse me.” Yanagi sets his lacquer bento box down and stomps over behind Niou, thrashing his arms wildly and kicking his legs, jumping up and down again and again until the cicadas stop.
Niou hears Yanagi’s sneakers crunching as he walks back over.
“I hate cicadas,” Yanagi says.
“Never would have guessed,” Niou says.
“Yo!” a voice calls out. Niou squeezes his eyes shut. He quickly shoves the last half of his meat bun into his mouth and chews. It burns; tears prick his eyes, but damned if he is going to let Marui have any of his food.
Jackal the brown kid follows Marui, and there are a couple more freshmen with them, but Niou doesn’t remember their names or their tennis. They’re all just ballboys anyway. Jackal carries an armful of snacks, steaming and smelling of fried okonomiyaki and shivering fish flakes and mayonnaise. Marui chews on a wad of gum, stinking of fake green apples.
Niou hates the smell.
“Some game, huh?” Marui says.
Yanagi nods, but a small smile plays on his lips, as though he knows Marui is full of bullshit. The game wasn’t that remarkable- Niou knows that much. Yanagi and Sanada won because they’re great at tennis, genius freshmen like Yukimura.
The group of them sit and eat their lunch and drink their complimentary sportsades that have been handed out to participants at the tournament. Marui’s gushing gives way to the two other freshmen, who give play by play blows of a game Yanagi just played, except he was the one who played, not them, and they flap their arms a lot more than he ever did.
Seagulls and birds squawk in the trees. Pigeons try to scavenge the bits of hot dog that Jackal throws at their heads. They scatter, cooing and fluttering feathers in the air. Flies buzz around a garbage can, dipping in and out of half-drank fanta and coke cans. A team in green jerseys walks by; the flies swarm up when a boy throws a half-eaten apple inside.
“Man, those nachos look good,” Marui says loudly. He rubs his stomach, eyeing a passing player. “Where’d you get those?” he shouts.
The boy stops, his chip dripping with neon cheese. “Back there,” he nods.
Marui comes back with a tray of chips and plastic-looking cheese. Yanagi makes a noise. Niou watches him stand up, his eyes bulging slightly and his pallor a little greenish.
Yanagi runs off, knocking into Marui. They tumble into a mess of spilled cheese and dirt and leaves and crushed chips. Everything smells of the fake cheese. Yanagi groans, shaking his hands that ooze of the cheese. Marui scowls, shouting about his chips.
Yanagi manages to make it behind a tree before he pukes everything up.
He’s taken out of the afternoon games by three senpais and the fukubuchou. Yanagi shakes his head, “No, I can play. I’m fine,” he insists, but Marui has come back with new nachos in the meantime and Yanagi’s bent over a garbage can, heaving again.
Jackal frowns. Awkwardly, he pats Yanagi on the back until Sanada shows up. The team gathers around, a quick pep talk before the next set of matches. Niou isn’t on the team, sure, but he sticks around because no one elbows him off. Maybe the senpais assume he’s a friend of Yanagi’s.
“What am I supposed to play now?” Sanada whines.
“You’ll play doubles with Wataya,” the buchou says. “Don’t get in his way, stick to your side, and you’ll be fine.”
Sanada sends a pointed look to Yukimura, before sighing heavily. “Okay,” he grumbles.
Sanada still wins his game, and he wins 6-1, but he seems miserable. Niou watches him leave the court after playing. Yukimura says something from the bleachers, and ruffles Sanada’s hair. For an instant, Sanada’s sullen face vanishes, replaced with something Niou thinks is very odd. It’s not friendship; it’s a strange sort of light in his eyes that says a lot more.
“Interesting,” Niou whispers.
***
On Saturdays, club days, the tennis team has practice from 9 to 11:30. Niou shuffles downstairs to breakfast, eats two packages of instant ramen, and shuffles to the bus stop. His sister sleeps in. His brother sleeps in. He grinds his teeth with jealousy as he thinks about it on the bus. Stupid family, he thinks. He rubs his eyes, grabs his tennis bag, and shuffles onto the tennis courts. A half hour of warm-ups, and two hours of picking up balls. After, the first years sweep the courts and hit the showers.
They might be the last to the showers, but in the summer, it doesn’t matter if there is no hot water left. Niou’s back is caked with sweat, his t-shirt sticking to his skin. He scratches his scalp and wafts his armpits, damp with sweat, too.
“First years, gather round!” Three dozen pairs of feet slap across wet tiles, half of the boys naked, some with towels on the hips, some with towels on their heads, some slapping each other’s ass with towels, too.
Niou wears a towel around his waist. Some of the first years have spent the last few months shooting up, sprouting hairs, cracking voices. Niou is still as small and shrimpy as Marui, if half the weight. Compared to all the seniors and juniors with big cocks, Niou feels…childishly small. No need for any of them to see him and his lack thereof.
“Nationals are in three weeks,” the buchou says, reading off a chart. “Here are the permission forms- bring them back by next week.” Sheets are handed around the group, some fluttering to the floor, where they are pasted by the water. Niou folds his up, tucking it under his armpit.
“One of you will get to go to the Newcomer’s Tournament in September, just after. The regulars will be busy with training for the Nationals, and we don’t want you guys pissing around us, so you’ll be on C courts for the next month with the coach.”
“No more ball picking?” one boy whispers beside Niou.
“Finally!” another says with a grin.
Niou glances around the room. Marui stares at him, then raises an eyebrow.
That spot at the Newcomer’s Tournament is mine.