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Neither of them will remember this passing encounter.
On random days, the memory of getting hit by a ball to the head might taunt Vicki as she navigates the motions of this foreign high school’s currents. Over time, she might notice her body develop a subconscious self-defense mechanism when it comes to ball sports that she can’t ever explain or trace back to this warm, unassuming day.
Her hand, reaching to nurse the side of her throbbing head. Her eyes, squinting up at the sheepish silhouette whose head is haloed by the glaring sun. His face, a puzzle she can’t make sense of, cloaked in shadow and shielded by the pain in her head. These things are hazy streaks in the clockwork machinery of her mind, and though they are forever embedded in the nooks and crannies of her mental library, they hide in places she can neither reach nor even think to look.
Vicki’s got more things to worry about, anyway, having enrolled in Nekoma Metropolitan High School as a first-year transfer student from the Philippines—and she most certainly can’t be bothered to hold a grudge against the tall guy who accidentally hit her in the head with a volleyball. For one, the poor girl’s still struggling with the massive and daunting language barrier that sets her apart from her fresh-faced peers, try as she might to bridge the gap with her awkward, splintered Japanese. For another, well… she’s made zero friends thus far, and she definitely is not foolish enough to make an enemy in a land so far away from home.
Tetsurou’s story, too, is a play that hums a familiar tune. A first year himself, he chases his passions until he finds himself in the middle of a shiny eighteen-by-nine-meter court with a ball perpetually in his hands and his arms red with a satisfying sting. He craves the burning of his thighs and considers the wind nipping at his face a sweet treat to himself as he runs laps around the school perimeter.
It’s not in his best interest to mind anything else—not when he’s got to be stronger than his fears and better than the boy he was before to even be considered a player worthy enough to stand on his beloved court alongside the seniors he can’t even begin to reach. Oh, how badly it plagues him, this insatiable desire to play the sport, spin it in his hands, and see all the virtues it has to offer. All it had taken was for someone to lower the net for him, and just like that, he’s captivated—body and spirit.
Indeed, what a mystical twist of fate it is—two unassuming individuals crossing paths on this unassuming day. It doesn’t even last more than a minute: the ball shoots through the center of his flimsy block, arcs out of the court and hits the girl reading quietly under a nearby tree, after which Tetsurou runs out the gym to retrieve it, tucks it under his arm, and offers her a sheepish grin and an even more sheepish, “Sorry!”
Pressing her hand against the ache, Vicki looks up at him through her lashes and squints at the direct sunlight staring back at her from behind him and that strange mop of dark hair. She can’t make a face without being rude, and even worse, she can’t seem to find the right Japanese words to say, “It’s okay, but please be careful next time.” In the end, a tiny nod in response is all she manages, and there’s nothing left to do but hope it would be enough.
It is, much to her relief. He accepts the nod with grace and is about to say more when a barking voice calls from inside the gym, “You! First year! Don’t think you can be let off the hook just like that—get back here!”
Ah, his duties call for him, it seems, and so, too, does her book demand her attention once more.
Flashing her another apologetic smile, he squeezes the ball again where it is tucked between his waist and his arm, and turns on his heel to leave; Vicki, meanwhile, returns to her waiting book, the interaction already flung to the far corners of her mind as she is whisked back into the wonderful world of fantasy—and neither of them will ever remember this passing encounter.
Still, it’s the small moments that make up the larger picture, isn’t it? It’s the mundane events that build the story from the ground up and turn it into something beautiful, something memorable and engraved in the heart of legend.
They don’t know it, and probably never will, but this unremarkable encounter on this unremarkable day has inevitably set the course of their story in motion, the invisible, thankless cartographer mapping uncharted waters in the name of Vicki and Tetsurou, in which monsters both familiar and foreign lay in wait with opened maws ready to snap shut and feast on flesh at moment’s notice.
Yet it is also worth mentioning that for all to be said and done, there is paradise resting at the voyage’s culmination—though it is still being structured and reshaped to perfection. A distant promise that waits beyond horizons neither of them can yet imagine, assembled piece by piece through time’s patient hands.
And to think that it all begins with a single, passing encounter neither of them remember: a fleeting, uncelebrated crossing of paths that slips through memory’s grasp yet is destined to become the root of everything else that follows. Such is the peculiar grace of fate—what appears insignificant in its hour becomes, in retrospect, the first stone laid upon the road that leads them home.