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Not much could have dragged Furuya back to his old middle school where his teammates had refused to play with him. However, a nicely worded letter from the principal asking a ‘hometown hero’ to come and talk to a fresh crop of young players about the importance of working hard managed to do just that.
It was a lot smaller than he remembered.
Having just graduated from Seidou the week before, he couldn’t come up with a creative enough way to say no, so he put on the nicest (and cleanest) button up shirt he owned and prepared to enter the lion’s den once again.
The lecture went about as well as one would expect from terminally awkward Furuya Satoru, but the kids seemed to enjoy it and that was what really mattered. He could see the stars in their eyes, which were full of big dreams and unfettered drive to make them come true. Most, if any at all, would never get that far, but he hoped each and every one of them managed to beat the odds and do it anyway.
On his way back to his family’s home, however, Furuya passed by the old practice barn where he had sweated away several hours and plowed through even more boxes of balls to hone his speed on his own. He had no catcher other than a spare hockey net, but it did manage to let him know if he missed the strike zone by a mile with the hard clack of the ball hitting the back wall.
That very net (Furuya knew the patterned duct tape holding the bottom pads on well) saw use once again with a kid who couldn’t have been more than thirteen firing ball after ball into it with velocity which could have matched Furuya’s own at that age.
The rest of the team was outside on the field, getting to know one another and chattering about how they were going to go to nationals despite having no experience whatsoever. This girl, however, was plugging away at making it happen.
For a moment, he wondered why she was in basketball shorts and a ratty school shirt issued for gym class rather than a uniform, and it hit him. There were no rules saying girls couldn’t play on middle school baseball teams, but social rules didn’t allow that kind of thing at all. She could have been the greatest pitcher in the world and no one would look at her twice.
Irritation flared in Furuya’s belly, and he pushed the door open.
Her pitch landed right in the bottom inside corner of the strike zone, which would have made the best batters shank the hit and pop a meatball of a foul. Despite a brief pause while realizing she wasn’t alone, though, she showed no sign of acknowledging Furuya’s presence in her space. He wasn’t about to change it, so he grabbed an old crate and sat on it to watch every pitch go by.
When she finally ran out of balls to throw, she finally met Furuya’s gaze. “You’re that guy who came to talk to the baseball team, right?” Furuya nodded. “They’re outside.”
“I know.” He picked up a stray ball that had rolled out of the net and tossed it to her. “I’m done with them. I’m watching you now.”
“But I —” She sighed and shook her head. “There’s no point. I’ll never get to play regular baseball. I don’t even know why I bother.”
Furuya swallowed an uncomfortable knot of empathy, recalling his own experiences with those feelings all too well. However, he had come to terms with them long ago, and he decided to tell her what he had told himself every time he had to throw to an empty net or run alone in the snow.
“You do it because you have to.” A smile twitched on his lips when she gawked at him. “It doesn’t matter what other people think. Somewhere, there’s a place for you who will want you for who you are and make you even better.”
He stood and headed for the door. Over his shoulder, he added, “Don’t stop until you find it.”
With that, he left his old middle school grounds for good. He didn’t know the girl’s name (he probably would have forgotten it in ten seconds anyway), but he had a feeling that someday, he would hear it for the first time right where it belonged: at the top.