Mai smiled. “Yes, but of course. Which is another way of saying that I’ll win for you as well, no?”
“You don’t listen, do you?” Then Satsuki-san suddenly turned in my direction. “Amaori.”
“Uh, yeah?”
I stepped closer, and she grabbed my chin. “Bwuh!” I spluttered.
“I don’t know what it is that’s on your mind, and I really couldn’t care less about whatever’s stopping you from focusing,” she said in a stern voice. “However, I need you to understand that making a choice wipes out all other options. Make sure that gets through your thick skull.”
Her eyes seemed to be staring deep into my very soul. “Swatshuki-shan…” I mumbled.
Satsuki-san snorted. “You look so ugly like this.”
“Um, rude?!” I screamed as I shook her off.
“Well, I say that. But I still haven’t given up.”
“Huh?”
And then she staggered away, leaving me with that final mysterious comment. My heart was pounding. Wh-what on earth was that all about?
But, yeah, okay. As Satsuki-san left, Ajisai-san called out to her cheerfully before joining the crowd of spectators once again. I looked at her worried expression, and then took a big gulp of air. I was biased, yeah. But I’d promised, hadn’t I? And Ajisai-san had chosen me—me, in all my indecisive, incompetent, half-assed glory—just like Satsuki-san had said. I’d made up my mind that this was important to me. And when it was this late in the game, that made my priorities undeniable.
“Mai!” I called, startling everyone around me. I’d never called her anything but Oduka-san at school before.
But Mai merely looked back at me with a smile. “Yes?”
The scales were finally lifted from my eyes. It was all about doing things for the ones I loved. It was all about doing things with the ones I loved.
“Mai,” I said, “let’s win this thing.”
Mai chuckled and placed her hand on my head. “I have it covered. I’m your Goddess of Victory, after all.”
That was just so cool that I found myself at a loss for words.
The game resumed with Class A’s ball. I gave Mai a simple rundown of our strategy so that she could fill in the spot left by Satsuki-san. But then when Kaho-chan dribbled past the line of our opponents, Takada-san stole the ball from her all too easily. Kaho-chan squawked.
“Oduka Mai!” Takada-san called.
“My goodness,” Mai said. “Eager to bring on the finale, are we?”
It was a one-on-one contest. Mai crouched low before Takada-san. It looked almost like a shoot-out that no one could intrude upon. Even the bystanders were fully silent, watching with bated breath.
“I’ll defeat you and reign supreme over the school!” Takada-san declared.
“To be frank,” Mai said, “I have no interest in this supremacy contest of yours at all.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“But if I lose, you see, my friends will be upset,” said Mai. “That’s why I have no choice but to play like I mean it.”
“No one asked you!”
Takada-san changed up the rhythm of her dribbling. Here it came again. I couldn’t so much as react, because by the time I even noticed what was going on, she took off in the opposite direction. I assumed the worst and ran in to cover for Mai.
“Watch and learn,” Mai said. And suddenly, the ball was in her hand.
“Wha—?!” Takada-san’s eyes bulged.
Mai dribbled her way down to the other side of the court.
“We won’t let you get away with this!” Haga-san cried.
“No matter how good you may be, we have numbers on our side!” said Kamesaki-san.
“Uh-huh. We’re gonna stop you for sure,” added Nemoto-san.
All three girls ran up to surround Mai. There was no way she could break out of that tight circle—but then, like a light shining through a copse of trees, Mai slipped past them all.
Last, Ace-san made to block Mai from the goal by jumping into the path of her ball, but Mai leaped, transferred the ball from one hand to another in midair, and…well, of course it went in. That move’s called a double clutch.
“All right,” she said. “Three minutes left now, is it?” Her blonde ponytail swayed like the tail of Pegasus. “A lead of three points is nothing, wouldn’t you say? Ah, and now they’re only ahead by one.”
God, Mai! Oh heck, what was I to do? I don’t think I’d ever seen her look this cool before. This freaking girl, I’m telling you. This freaking girl!
Takada-san had the ball. She shouted to Ace-san, the girl who’d accidentally hurt Satsuki-san. “She only got past us because we had our guard down! Even Koto Satsuki could have stopped that. Now, don’t just stand there all shocked. Get it together!”
The fire returned to Ace-san’s eyes. Oh great, I thought. Now it’ll be harder to get past her. But Mai didn’t seem concerned in the slightest. Quite the opposite, in fact.
“Why, that’s because Satsuki is hardly athletic,” she said. “She’s quite the bookworm, after all.”
Kaho-chan waved her hand in a forceful “no” gesture. “Uh, if Saa-chan’s not athletic, what does that make us? Invertebrates?”
“Wow,” I said. “This is what happens when Mai gets serious!”
Kaho-chan and I were, at this point, 100 percent viewing her like we were part of the crowd. Hirano-san and Hasegawa-san, meanwhile, were so gaga over her that they had hearts in their eyes.
“Ooh, the queen of the Quintet,” Hirano-san squealed. “Oduka Mai-sama!”
“She’s just too beautiful,” Hasegawa-san said. “I wish I could take everything my eyes are seeing right now and save it on a hard drive.”
And then, before I even realized what was going on, Haga-san moved in to the center of Class B and instructed the others. “Even Oduka Mai can’t stop all of us. Let’s give an all-out offense our best shot!”
She was right. Takada-san switched up to guard Mai, so I took over watching Ace-san while Kaho-chan got to take a little breather. But they did whatever it took to score whenever someone passed the ball to them, so their lead didn’t shrink. Maybe because Class B was so focused—or so tenacious—they didn’t miss any more shots, thus robbing us of our chance to get rebounds. Now Class B was in perfect unity. Oh, the irony—Her Royal Majesty was just so strong that her very presence lit a fire under Class B.
“We gotta make sure Himi-chan wins!” Haga-san said.
“Uh-huh! And we only have a little more to go!” Nemoto-san responded.
Mai scored us a point, but Class B’s teamwork wrested the shot away. In a complete reversal from the first half of the game, it was now, oddly enough, a scramble for points just as Hirano-san’s strategy dictated. The match went first in our favor and then in theirs as we took turns attacking and defending, but the only major development was that time was running out.
36–37. And there was precious little time left, only enough for one more play.
The ball went to Takada-san. Once again, the person who faced her head-on was none other than Mai.
“Why is it always you?” Takada-san snarled.
Mai said nothing.
“Don’t they say that people who already have it all wind up with everything? Is that the way things work? Listen—someone like you will never be able to understand how I feel.”
“You are right,” Mai said. “I have been blessed with many privileges.”
“Exactly! Which is why I need to win! If I don’t, then I’ll have nothin—”
“And yet,” Mai said. She narrowed her eyes quietly and said in a low voice, “I must ask you to engage in self-reflection. Don’t you have something wonderful too? Don’t you have something that no one else can beat?”
I could hear the following unspoken words: That’s the thing that Renako taught me.
Then Mai stole Takada-san’s ball and dashed away. Takada-san’s eyes opened wide in surprise, and she whipped her head around.
And then there were Takada-san’s dear friends from Class B. “We’re going to stop you this time, I swear!” one of them cried. They blocked her path, looking almost as if they wanted to jump down her throat.
Mai danced past one and then the other. But before she could slip past the third, the other two stubbornly followed hot on her tail. Mai stopped. There was no more time. For a single moment, her eyes darted in both directions.
There I was, before the hoop. I knew. I knew she couldn’t force her way through the girls and make it to the hoop. That’s because this was a victory that all of us in Class A had to make together.
Mai threw the ball to me. Someone—a girl from Class B—screamed. “No, Amaori-san!” The voice of that girl who thought of Takada-san as a dear friend wound around my wrist like a thorny vine.
I got down into the right stance to make a shot, in the one-handed style I’d practiced. It felt hard to breathe.
Every single person out there wanted happiness. If not their own happiness, then someone else’s. Someone they loved. It was one of those things you put your heart and soul into.
“Please!” she called. “Please miss!”
But see, for me?
“Don’t let it go in!” she yelled.
It wasn’t about which of us was right or wrong.
“Miss, miss!”
I wanted my loved ones to be happy. And you know why? Because I’d already made my decision. I—me, not anyone else—had decided to try my best.