Chapter 4:
Ever15
THE BOUNCE of a basketball was a perfect match for my uncontained impatience. I liked the way its heavy thud, thud seemed to reverberate in my heart.
Evidently, the cicadas weren’t used to waking up early, because there weren’t many chirping at dawn. I walked across town with what felt like a curtain of faded heat affixed over my eyes. Only the bounce of the ball seemed to have the power to tear through summer’s breath. When I left the house, it was the only thing I took with me—spurred by something that had been smoldering in my gut since well before school shut down. The humidity was out in full force, but at least I was spared from the brunt of the sunlight.
Several minutes after I left the house, I began to wonder if my parents would yell at me for leaving without telling them, and my stomach clenched. But I didn’t have the energy to go all the way back to talk to them, or even to look them in the eye. I was aware that I was mired in the world’s most unsubtle rebellious phase, but it kept me bogged down, and I couldn’t climb out of the feeling.
Having traveled a considerable distance from my house, I crossed a big, long bridge. Well, maybe not big, but definitely tall. At the bottom of the concrete spiral was a grimy bench and a basketball court, neither of which anyone ever bothered to clean. Dribbling the ball against the hexagonal tile, I checked to see if anyone else was around. Nope. This early in the morning, the place was deserted, save for maybe the occasional dog walker.
Slowly, I approached the hoop, and once I was within range, I casually took a shot. With a loud clang, the ball hit the edge of the ring and fell. I recovered the ball on the first bounce, then aimed my second shot, this time with proper positioning. The hoop here was a little different from the ones at my school, so I needed to make small adjustments.
Shooting drills were the one part of practice I actually made time for. Why? Because they were the most fun. I used to like dribbling because I could measure my improvement, but once my teammates started getting mad at me for “hogging the ball,” I lost interest. More accurately, my heart still raced every time the ball hit the floor, but I was less invested in overtaking my opponents. Thus my enjoyment of basketball was relegated to shooting drills.
The simple action of throwing the ball offered immediate results. This, I suspect, was why I stayed with it for as long as I did. I was a kid who wanted everything within eyeshot, and because of that, I agonized needlessly over the hazy uncertainty of my own future. Ironic, isn’t it? A girl who could only ever see five feet in front of her, yet she was focused on the distant horizon.
But while I knew it was precisely this contradiction that was stressing me out, there was nothing I could do. I was powerless to change the source of my turmoil. I couldn’t stop my social circle from dwindling.
I jumped, I shot, I fetched. As I repeated the steps between ball and hoop over and over, I grew tired, but more importantly, my mind stopped wandering. If I had to guess, it was in pursuit of that very escapism that I loved sleeping so much.
Despite all my dutiful shooting drills, however, I never got the chance to make a single winning shot in all three years of junior high. After I got into an argument with the coach, I was benched—permanently. But I didn’t regret it much. Looking back, it was the right call. After all, I simply never developed a desire to achieve something as part of a team. But now I had a gradually improving skill with nowhere to put it to use.
“Ooh, it went in.”
Just then, perhaps owing to a brief lapse in roadway noise at just the right time, I heard someone mutter under their breath. I stopped dead in my tracks and whirled around to find that, out of the blue, someone was sitting on that grimy bench—a woman who was clearly older than me, dressed in a kimono. Our eyes locked.
She was wearing clothes I never encountered in my day-to-day life, and her facial features made my vision pitch sideways. But she showed no alarm at our eye contact; she simply offered a friendly gesture in the form of a smile.
To be clear, she was a total stranger. Her vibe was unlike anyone I’d ever passed on the street. It felt like I was looking at an ice sculpture—maybe that was the best way to describe her refinement. To be blunt, she was a city girl in a hick town.
But what exactly was this woman doing here? Even if she just wanted to spectate, frankly, I was deeply uncomfortable with being watched. I had no reason to strike up a conversation with her, either. So I went and retrieved my ball. As I was picking it up, I casually glanced over my shoulder. Naturally, she was still there.
She kept watching me, her smile never wavering. Awkward. Surely, she could tell from my glare that I didn’t want her there, but she seemed immune to it—almost like she wasn’t really seeing me at all. For that matter, how could she bring herself to sit on that dirty old bench without batting a lash? Her kimono looked expensive, yet she showed no interest in taking proper care of it.