“Hyah!” Kaho-chan yelled. She looked like she was about to shoot, but then she passed the ball to me.
Eeep. I almost fell for that feint of hers. Just stay calm, I told myself. And shoot. Shoot.
Nice, it went in!
“4–0,” Kaho-chan said. She high-fived me.
Woo-hoo! My sister’s strategy worked like a charm. We’d win so long as we kept this up. This game was in the bag.
“The way you shoot one-handed is so cool, Amaori-san!” Hirano-san gushed.
“Oh, how the Quintet brings together the bonds of the ball…oh, god! I’m witnessing history in the making!” said Hasegawa-san.
I gave them both a thumbs-up and grinned. I couldn’t believe it. I was actually pulling off something athletic. Well, all I’d done was get in position and make a successful shot, but still!
My sister’s warning flashed through my mind. “The one flaw of this strategy is that you need to participate in both offense and defense, so it really eats up your stamina. You gotta keep a close eye on your base strength, okay?”
If this was a forty-minute game, there’d be no freaking way this strategy would work. But the interclass competition was ten minutes for the first half, an interval, and then ten minutes for the second half, so it was only half the length of a regular game.
“Let’s keep it up until the end!” I said.
We were off to a great start. My sister had told me, “If everyone’s motivated, not doing anything stupid to show off, following the strategy, and keeping teamwork as the number one priority, then your game’s good as won.” I wondered if that might actually be true. Or maybe it only worked out that way since everyone just kinda half-assed school events like this. But Class B was in it to win it too—maybe even more than we were.
So here’s how it turned out.
At this point, the score was 12–15.
They somehow managed to flip the score by the end of the first quarter. Our all-hands on defense strat had worked great for a while. But then…
My only miscalculation was that girl from the basketball club. Once Takada-san figured out our strategy and started directing the others, they made it their goal to have the basketball girl throw three-pointers from outside the line. And since she was on the basketball team, after all, she threw them as well as a hotshot sniper. She didn’t make a basket every time, but she was good enough that we couldn’t ignore her. We tried having Kaho-chan, the second-best person on our team, guard her, but then that left no one to stop Takada-san. Those two were top players, but we only had the one star player in Satsuki-san. They kept up a fierce guard on her too, meaning she wasn’t able to get as many points as we’d hoped. Since we’d all practiced a ton, we weren’t making any big errors or anything; but at the same time, that practice hadn’t made us stellar overnight either.
Just as Satsuki-san threw a layup and closed the lead by one point, Takada-san said, “Let’s end this here and make an overwhelming lead.”
She passed to Ace-san, and I had no idea which one was going to come at me. Plus, Satsuki-san had to stay near the hoop to catch the rebound. At this point, my only choice was to stop Takada-san myself!
“Why hello there, Amaori-san,” Takada-san said.
“C-Class A’s not about to lose on my watch,” I told her.
“Oh? Pity, that.”
Ace-san passed her the ball, and she glared at me. I cowered under the intensity of her eyes. This was a matter of life and death to her, according to Haga-san. I could feel something like stubborn obsession in her stare. The rhythm of her dribbling changed. Here she came.
“It’s a pity that you just aren’t up for the task,” she said.
“Wai—” I protested, but I couldn’t stop her. Takada-san slipped past me like it was nothing and made a jump shot. The ball rocked the net. She’d earned two points with that last goal, so the first half ended with the score at 14–17.
We had a two-minute interval, and then it would be time to settle the score in the second half.
I bowed before all the others and said, “I’m sorry.”
Satsuki-san, after wiping away her sweat with a towel, sighed and said, “What exactly are you apologizing for?”
“Urgh.”
It wasn’t just that I’d failed to stop Takada-san at the end there. It was the missing shots, the dropped passes…the whole shameful performance.
Suddenly, Satsuki-san placed her hand on my forehead.
“Huh?” I said.
“You aren’t running a fever again. I see.”
That startled me. “Why’d you think I would be…?”
“Because it appeared to me that you couldn’t focus when we were on the court.”
Well, I mean… I looked away from her, but then Kaho-chan folded her arms. “Even if she was super-duper focused, this is Rena-chin we’re talking about, y’know?”
“That is true,” Satsuki-san acknowledged.
Was that her idea of backing me up? Well, thanks anyway, Kaho-chan…
“Anyway,” she said, “what’re we gonna do in the second half? I guess, like, stick to the strat but put more oomph in it and somehow turn this game around?”
“I think we’re too incompetent to manage that,” Satsuki-san said.
“What, you got any better ideas, huh, Saa-chan?”
“Isn’t this the time to discuss that?”
“True!” Kaho-chan recoiled like she’d been struck. Their slapstick antics made things feel a little less tense. “So, like, what’s the plan?”
Time was slipping away, and we hadn’t nailed down our core game plan yet. I noticed that Hirano-san kept glancing over at us. Ah ha! That was the characteristic behavior of an introvert trying to figure out when it’d be best to jump into a conversation.
“Hirano-san, do you have an idea?” I asked her.
“Huh? Oh, um, oh!”
When the conversation swung her way, all eyes turned to her. Oh shoot. Maybe that wasn’t a good thing!
Hirano-san looked dizzy, but she still managed to say, “I-instead of us all being on defense, what if we all went on the offensive?”
Then she squeezed her eyes shut, like she was amazed that she’d actually said it. I got it. There’s nothing scarier than the moment after you offer an opinion. That’s why I always had to follow it up with, “Oh, no, never mind. That wouldn’t work, sorry!”
Hirano-san flapped her hands. “Oh, um, never mind. Sorry, that wouldn’t work!”
Hasegawa-san nodded as Hirano-san said almost the exact same thing I was saying mentally. “I don’t know, I think it could work… What do you guys think?”
“It’s possible.” Satsuki-san looked contemplative. “The problem at hand is that we cannot stop our opponents’ offense, no?”
“Y-yes, exactly,” said Hirano-san. “So if we can’t stop their offensive even when we all work together, they’ll only get a bigger lead on us… Oh, but that’s pretty nervy of me to say when I’m no help at all. I’m sorry.”
Kaho-chan stepped in after Hirano-san earnestly apologized. “So you’re saying to stuff defense and make this a contest to see who can score the most points, huh? That’s bold, Hiranon!”
“H-Hiranon…?”
Hirano-san blinked in shock and turned to look at me as I’d been silent up to this point.
“Yeah,” I said. I looked back at her and forced myself to sound optimistic. “I think that’s a great idea!”
“Oh no, but…”
“I mean, if we keep going the way we’re going, we might lose anyway. So why not give this a shot? I’d hate to go down without a fight.”
Kaho-chan pumped her fist and cheered. Satsuki-san said, “I agree.” For a moment, Hirano-san looked like she didn’t know what to do, but then Hasegawa-san met her eye and nodded in encouragement.
“So now we need to nail down the details,” I said.
“O-okay!”
If I’d been in Hirano-san’s shoes, I absolutely never would’ve been able to share my idea with the Quintet like that. Hirano-san was so brave, especially considering how much she venerated Satsuki-san.
But she’d said it herself, right? She loved the Quintet. That’s why I wanted to win with her strategy and make good memories. I needed to get my head in the game too!
Yet when I looked at Class B, I saw them rallying each other and working their hardest to protect their lead. Both Class A—my crew—and Class B—Takada-san’s people—were good friends, well practiced for this competition, and strongly motivated to win. So what was the difference between us? I had no idea.
Come to think of it, Ajisai-san had once told me that I was nice to everyone. And I think Satsuki-san had once said that, like, being a shy introvert made me considerate and let me relate to everyone on the basis of their insecurities. At the time, I hadn’t really understood what they meant, but now, as we played this match, I got it. Only five students standing on the court right now could come away from this happy. The other five would feel the sadness of defeat. It was undeniably idiotic to let your sympathy for the losers influence your game, and I doubt that anything like that would have occurred to me if I’d been playing an online match against faceless opponents like I usually did. It really was better to not know anything about the person you were playing against.
I wasn’t nice. I was just stupid.