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Satoshi blames his sister for the digital keyboard, which now sticks out from the wall like a plastic black iceberg in a sea of faded paint. Her lease had been up and she’d gone and found her new dream flat—complete with a gaggle of fashionable flatmates who construct their identities around the cigarettes they smoke—only to realize halfway through the move that sixty percent of the building’s inhabitants are senior citizens who would not appreciate her contemporary improv whatever in the middle of the night. Satoshi-kun, she’d said over the phone, be a dear and hold on to it for me.
What if my roommate minds, he’d asked.
His sister had laughed. He won’t mind.
Reika has never met Shirabu and had no reason to believe Shirabu wouldn’t mind, but that’s the way his sister operates. Besides, the keyboard is on Satoshi’s side of the room and Satoshi doesn’t know how to play it so Shirabu probably won’t get mad about it unless he has aesthetic objections. Satoshi remembers his curtain of brown hair. Shirabu won’t have aesthetic objections.
When Reika came to drop it off Satoshi had texted Shirabu to tell him. Shirabu has not replied, probably because he is somewhere staring at a corpse and taking notes. After the first few months of cohabitation Satoshi had given up on understanding Shirabu’s activities, knowing that if the police came to interrogate him about his roommate’s living habits, he would be a completely useless witness. How the hell do med students even live? Satoshi lives with one and he doesn’t know. He sits on the edge of the bed and stares at the keyboard some more. Maybe it would be fun to learn to play it. Shirabu wears headphones when he studies anyway.
The door swings open.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
Shirabu walks in a perfectly straight line past Satoshi then pauses. He turns his head in the direction of the digital keyboard. Looking at Shirabu look at it, Satoshi feels like he’s seeing it for the first time. White keys, black keys, white keys. The brightly-colored knobs stick out. The little screen you can use to pick a MIDI instrument is a dull green-gray. Now he wonders whether Shirabu might actually turn out to have aesthetic objections.
“That’s new,” he says. “Is it yours?”
“My sister’s.”
“Cool. You play?”
“No.”
Shirabu nods, digs a book and his headphones out of his messenger bag. He is going to study again. He will sit at his desk and take notes of his notes then review his flash cards and read some papers in Satoshi’s peripheral vision until he feels guilty enough about scrolling through Instagram that he, too, ends up cracking open a book and studying. Satoshi’s projected GPA has risen by zero point seven since he moved in with Shirabu at the start of the term. So has his blood pressure, from the stress he’s absorbing through osmosis.
Osmosis probably isn’t the right word, but if he’s saying this inside his head Shirabu can’t correct him. Satoshi goes to the keyboard and starts pressing the keys without turning it on. Shirabu uncaps a pen.
At first there are no noticeable changes in their little dorm ecosystem. By this Satoshi means there are no noticeable changes in Shirabu. Then again, there rarely are any.
Before they were roommates Satoshi had first gotten to know Shirabu from the university volleyball club, where Shirabu hovers in and out of membership due to his insane class schedule (de facto) and is listed as their reserve setter (de jure). Satoshi is a wing spiker and one year younger than Shirabu. He’d known him by name long before he first caught a glimpse of his absurd slanted bowl cut and immaculate nails because the seniors kept mentioning him in passing. They talked about his class schedule like it was a prison warden keeping Shirabu from coming to practice; for the longest time Satoshi had the mental image of a faceless man behind bars made of stethoscopes, extending his arm to the volleyball just beyond the reach of his fingers.
They had a practice match scheduled the day before their starting setter’s biochem final. When you are in university managing to schedule a practice match means that you will only find it smack dab in the middle of one player’s exam crunch period instead of four, so when Nakamura told him about his impending exam, their team captain, Maruyama, had shrugged and said, If Shirabu’s free that day, we shouldn’t have a problem.
The man who made it to the locker room just five minutes before the game started was still in a lab coat. Maruyama yelled good-naturedly at him to step on it, and he yelled back, his light brown hair swishing across his forehead as he ran across the court. Won’t he need to warm up, Satoshi had asked. Maruyama laughed. Forgot you’ve never played with Shirabu.
Spiking, to Satoshi, is synonymous with moving the body consciously. The way you curl your legs and head and arm back just before your jump reaches its apex, the opposite of the way a human body is casually held when it stands idly; the redirecting of your strength to the center of your palm; the urgency to communicate with an inanimate object—the ball—as though you could share your sentience with it for the length of time it takes to decide where you want it to fall on the opposite side of the court. Usually Satoshi enjoys this assertion of will over reality.
With Shirabu on the court, the distinction between the two seemed to evaporate. Satoshi’s will had been reality had been will had been reality. Every ball came to the spot he wished to spike from. Every toss was perfectly timed to match his jump.
They’d lost. It wasn’t a surprise; the team they were playing against had the best university-level ace in the country, who had nodded once at Shirabu across the court before the match. The margin, though, wasn’t quite as bad as Satoshi thought it would be. They’d won one set, and the third set had ended at twenty-five to eighteen.
Shirabu had settled on the bench next to Satoshi, right after Satoshi watched him hold a stilted but cordial conversation with Sakusa. He took a swig of his water bottle with a tiny movement that caused the bottom of his bottle to draw a perfect sideways parabola in front of his face.
“We’ll never win any titles,” Shirabu said as he put his water bottle away, but he was smiling, and the way he exhaled the words seemed light with relief. Then he’d drifted out of the volleyball club’s—and by extension Satoshi’s—orbit until Satoshi’s roommate graduated, and he’d opened his door to a familiar brown bowl cut over sharp, considering eyes.
“Fujita, right?”
“Yeah,” Satoshi had said, barely believing his eyes even as the man who had finally shown him how to spike pulled a sleek black suitcase in from behind him. Shirabu was talking about how he’ll be moving his stuff in slowly over the first week of school, he hoped that would be okay, but all the while Satoshi could not stop staring at his hands, looking for the way they were shaped differently from other people’s—he’d been hoping something about the shape of his knuckles or the curve of his fingertips could give away things like starting second-year setter or team captain or a regular at Nationals. Months later, Satoshi is no closer to unearthing the secret of Shirabu’s hands, but he does learn some other things about him.
Shirabu is not a man who smiles often. Satoshi finds himself replaying that moment at the bench again and again just to remind himself that he has seen him smile. His default expression is that of someone sitting on the train just after rush hour, thinking of something else back at work or at home. He has a tiny iron he uses to smooth his shirts out, and if he’s in a charitable mood he’ll do some of your shirts for you, just because he finds it calming. He blasts what sounds like an entire chamber orchestra through his headphones when he’s studying. From the cushions Satoshi gathers that they’re supposed to be noise-cancelling, but Satoshi can hear his music anyway.
His boyfriend, a civil servant, keeps Shirabu updated on the bank holidays so Satoshi never gets up for a class he ends up not having to go to. Satoshi thinks it makes sense that Shirabu dates someone who works in the government. He pictures two figures in a restaurant—Shirabu with his birdlike bones facing a man with neatly-cropped hair wearing a suit jacket—discussing the stock market or something equally serious and grown-up over duck confit. As it happens, Shirabu holds most of his conversations with his boyfriend in the dorm room with his headphones on, so Satoshi only catches half of them. Most of them are not about the stock market. Shirabu’s boyfriend, apparently, plays DOTA. His name is Eita.
“Well, no,” Shirabu is saying into the receiver. “Don’t be ridiculous. Fujita’s studying. That would be rude of me.”
Satoshi is trying very hard to study but he is instead doodling a bunch of bunnies on the margins of his statics notes, because such is life.
“No, I don’t. I don’t know what you mean by ‘missing it,’ but—”
Here Shirabu pauses, because his boyfriend says something on the other end of the line. Shirabu sighs.
“Fine. Don’t say I never do anything for you. Only after Fujita’s done studying for today, though. He has exams next week.”
Satoshi swivels in his chair. Shirabu narrows his eyes at him from his place on his bed.
“Actually, I’m done studying, Shirabu-san. If you want to stream a movie with your boyfriend or something, I really don’t mind.”
Shirabu’s eyes narrow further.
“It’s not a movie,” Shirabu says. “He’s asking me to play.”
For a moment Satoshi entertains the thought that Shirabu’s civil servant boyfriend is on a team of volleyball-playing civil servants and they’re going to have a match against the team of volleyball-playing people who work in the private sector. “Play?”
“The keyboard.”
“Oh. I didn’t know you played.”
“You didn’t ask,” Shirabu says.
“Well, I don’t mind if you do.”
Satoshi helps him plug the keyboard in. Shirabu unplugs his headphones from his phone and sets the gadget up near the keyboard speaker. His fingers flutter over the keys. Weight shifts; a melody makes itself known. Then Satoshi watches Shirabu’s left hand touch the keyboard, barely. Suddenly there is a lush waterfall of sound in the room, notes tinkling over each other with all the clarity of glass, all the lightness of a windchime.
Reika had learned to play the piano over summers spent in their aunt’s house, with the help of her ears and sheer curiosity, and as a result she’d developed a distinctive way of holding her hand over the keys. Watching Shirabu, Satoshi is suddenly keenly aware of all the things Reika doesn’t do—the curving of each digit, subtle but consistent; the way he lifts his hands minutely so it looks like there’s a dance happening over the keys.
Abruptly, he stops.
“I fucked it up,” he grits out.
“I didn’t hear it, Shirabu-san.”
“Keep going,” Shirabu’s boyfriend urges from his phone’s speaker. “I have no idea where you think you fucked up.”
“I’m rusty,” Shirabu explains. “I haven’t played in a few years.”
“I couldn’t tell,” Satoshi goes.
Shirabu’s boyfriend says, “It doesn’t matter. You sound great.”
“No, I don’t. I’ll practice some more, then I’ll get back to you—”
“Kenjirou. That’s not what this is about,” the voice from the phone says. Satoshi looks away. He makes an excuse about going to a study group then leaves them to it. Before he closes the door, he lingers a little bit to hear Shirabu start to play again, then stop, then start again. He does sound great. Satoshi wonders if there’s anything in the shape of his hands that will give this away.
Now something changes. Every once in a while Shirabu sighs, leaves his books, and sits in front of the keyboard for a few minutes to an hour. His repertoire is not large. Satoshi quickly learns to identify the pieces by the fragments of them Shirabu plays. There is no set rhythm but the start-stop-start-stop-start pattern continues, so Satoshi is never quite sure if he’s ever heard any of the pieces as a whole yet, or if they’re all just bits of the same piece that Shirabu plays in no order in particular. Satoshi doesn’t get better at identifying where Shirabu thinks he fucks up, but he does start to hear the frustration in his voice easing as the voice from the phone coaxes him to keep going each time.
“One day, I want to hear you make a mistake and keep going.”
“You won’t hear me make a mistake,” Shirabu says, voice level.
“Okay, no. But one day maybe you’ll hear yourself make a mistake and just not stop.”
Neatly cropped hair, leather shoes, a gentle mouth. Satoshi imagines a man in powder blue button-downs who listens to Shirabu’s orchestral symphonies in his spare time and wears muted ties. He wonders how he met Shirabu. As far as Satoshi knows Shirabu exists only in the dorm, on campus, and in the library.
Maybe he’d gone to the university library to check out some journals. Maybe he’d been doing research for policy work, then stopped to ask a student about where he might find a place to sit and have a coffee. Maybe Shirabu had offered to accompany him. He thinks of the gentle energy of their phone calls; the voice, like the hand of a lover, drawing music out of Shirabu’s fingers, urging him to look past his missteps.
Satoshi doesn’t learn to identify the missteps by sound, but he does come to recognize the way Shirabu’s brows pinch together, ever-so-slightly, when he thinks he’s played the wrong note or gone off tempo. In this way maybe Satoshi is learning about music. Or maybe not, because the room still sings when Shirabu plays, in little truncated bursts like the chirping of a bird. Start. Stop. Start. Stop. Start. Stop. It’s not a rhythm Satoshi understands.
That is until the next time Shirabu manages to make it to practice; he sets, and Satoshi scores a point off it, and when he turns to high-five him he sees the pinch between Shirabu’s eyebrows. A ghost of a line, so translucent in the late afternoon light streaming in through the windows that he most certainly would have missed it if he hadn’t learned to identify it by watching Shirabu play. Shirabu high fives him anyway.
“He was kind of upset. Did I do something wrong?” he asks Maruyama.
Maruyama quirks a smile. “I know what you mean, but no. He’s just frustrated with himself. He thinks the toss wasn’t good.”
Satoshi blinks. “But it felt perfect.”
“Well.” Maruyama casts a sidelong glance at Shirabu, already walking off to the lockers. “Shirabu would say that you wouldn’t know. Or he’d think that, but he’d never tell you. You know he used to set for Ushijima Wakatoshi?”
“Right,” Satoshi says numbly.
That night Shirabu hammers out a frantic cacophony from the keyboard, then curses it for not having enough octaves for what he’s trying to do. He apologizes to Satoshi for the outburst. Satoshi goes to sleep. His bladder wakes him up sometime during the not-day hours—a glance at his phone tells him it’s four a.m. The room is shrouded in darkness, but at the end of it, at the desk right next to the keyboard, a pool of light rests above the book Shirabu is hunched over. It’s not a novel sight. Still, there’s something about the way Shirabu moves his pen over the paper that seems to indicate a new kind of frenzy.
“Are you okay?” Satoshi asks after he closes the bathroom door behind him.
“Fantastic,” Shirabu says in reply, not turning around. It sounds like of course the fuck not. It sounds like fuck off.
Satoshi goes back to sleep.
“You know, there was a time when I couldn’t stand hearing the sound of a piano,” Shirabu says apropos of nothing, the next day. “I guess that’s a sign that I actually did practice enough back then.”
Satoshi nods over his cereal. He is unsure of how to respond.
“Was there a time when you swore off volleyball too?”
Shirabu rolls his eyes. “What, am I that obvious?”
The toss had felt perfect, Satoshi remembers. What does it feel like, to know the things Ushijima Wakatoshi knows?
When exam season ends exuberance infuses the air at the dorms. People leave their doors open and chat across hallways. There are bottles of wine being carried around by people walking to other rooms; vacation plans fill the air; people forget to close the door when they make out, and Satoshi has to duck his head as he walks past very quickly. Shirabu calls his civil servant boyfriend more often just to tell him to shut up once they’re talking on the phone.
He’s pissed off about his grades. (One of them is a B plus.) He’s pissed off about his piano playing. (There’s an arpeggio he can’t get right.) He’s pissed off about volleyball. (Over six years of practice and I don’t know how to serve.)
“Fujita,” he says after he hangs up one day.
“Yeah?”
“You want to watch a band play live?”
This is how he ends up descending a staircase into a basement bar a few train stops from their dorm. Red light washes over everything, stripping the space of every bit of innocence it could have claimed—not that it looks like it wants to. Posters scream at him from their place on the walls. The air smells suffocatingly like smoke. The show has already started; they’re late, and Shirabu is doing a little run down the steps, towards the flood of noise welling up the staircase. Satoshi tries to place the Shirabu who wears lab coats and listens to chamber music here and finds it impossible. The only Shirabu that can exist here is this one, with the leather cuff firm around his wrist, his black shirt tucked into blacker jeans.
The man onstage has a hairstyle that should not work on a person. A lock of hair that comes down past his chin on one side of his face which has no equivalent on the other. There are spikes everywhere, although Satoshi cannot seem to see signs of hair gel holding them up. His many rings glitter as he adjusts the collar of his mesh top. He is wearing multiple belts which seem to have no discernible effect.
The overall look is so horrifying that Satoshi takes one look at him and then immediately refuses to perceive the whole. The frontman grins, wild and beautiful despite every unfortunate style choice, like he knows he’s hot enough to get away with whatever he’s wearing right now. Like he’s wearing it because of that, even.
“What is that outfit,” he whispers to Shirabu, horrified.
“Why would you think I have any idea?”
The frontman pulls the mic to his mouth. “How’s everybody doing?”
The audience cheers.
“Good, good. Me too. Us too.” Laughter comes out of the speakers. “Ready to be set free tonight?”
The crowd explodes.
When Reika had been fifteen and Satoshi thirteen, she’d had a phase when she’d go to the pinball machine every Saturday, taking him with her. She put the poor metal ball through hell. She’d slammed the buttons and sent it careening into the bumps on the board, the domes sticking out of the walls, the glittering lights. She’d racked up points, cackling, as Satoshi watched the ball whizz across the board faster and faster and faster, thrown again and again from the machine’s mouth.
This is how Satoshi feels. Shirabu, however, seems to be in his element; his eyes are wide open; he bounces from spot to spot with his elbows out. Under the red light it finally becomes clear that the lab coats and cashmere sweaters had been hiding an athlete’s body, hammered out through punishment. The speakers roar and Shirabu’s mouth opens like the sound is being torn out of him.
Suddenly the truth of the matter becomes apparent. He’s alive. Oh, fuck: Fujita Satoshi is alive. The frontman’s rings curve around his knuckles like fangs over the throat of prey. His coat whips around—a shadow with a soul. Satoshi stumbles back. From the mass of dark shapes, Shirabu’s eyes find him, bright and terrifyingly full of life. Then he looks away and melts into the storm.
Once Satoshi separates from the many-bodied beast of the crowd, everything becomes a little easier to bear, even the red light. Eventually the set list wraps up. Shirabu does not emerge from the crowd. When the bar empties, there is a single figure in front of the stage, still looking up at the frontman, who remains. The other members of the band have stepped off with their instruments. Two beacons. A drained ocean.
“Hi there,” says the man with the worst fashion sense in all of Japan.
“The next time you play here, I’m choosing your outfit for you.”
The frontman laughs. He lets go of the mic stand, jumps off the stage, lands in front of Shirabu. His hand curves around Shirabu’s waist. In response, Shirabu hooks a hand in his netlike top and pulls him into a kiss.
Satoshi wonders what happened to Eita-the-civil-servant. He’d called Shirabu on Tuesday, just before Shirabu had asked Satoshi to go with him to this show. Does Eita-the-civil-servant know that Shirabu kisses guitarists in underground bars? Does Eita-the-civil-servant know about the gleam of Shirabu’s eyes when he moves in a frenzied crowd?
Once he lets the guy go, Shirabu says, “I brought Fujita. You said you wanted to meet him.”
“Right.” The man turns to Satoshi. “Hey, thanks for bringing that keyboard into your dorm. Can’t tell you how good it feels to hear Kenjirou play.”
“Uh,” Satoshi says.
“Did you warn him,” the man says, eyes narrowed.
Shirabu shrugs. “I told him you’d be playing live music.”
“Oh, shit. Was that a little too much for a first meeting? Sorry. Should’ve met up with you in a cafe first or something.” He extends a hand. “You can call me Eita, by the way. Or Semi, if Eita makes you feel weird.”
“You’re Eita-the-civil-servant,” Satoshi blurts out.
Shirabu presses a hand to his mouth, but his eyes narrow with tamped-down laughter. Eita grins.
“Well, yeah.”
Now something changes again. Eita-the-civil-servant-who-shreds leads them both to an area left of the stage behind heavy velvet curtains. “This is why I booked this venue,” he explains as he pulls the fabric sideways. “You can have all the octaves you want.” Satoshi thinks of brittle black plastic, colorful little knobs, and watches Shirabu lift a hefty wooden fall board. White keys, black keys, white keys. Real ivory. Real strings inside. He settles on the leather-topped stool. His hands descend upon the keys.
Then, music.
By this time Satoshi knows the piece well enough to tell when Shirabu hits a note he doesn’t mean to hit or lingers too long on a particular chord. But he doesn’t stop. He keeps going, and going, and going, and going. The sound swells then thins out. The volume rises, then falls to a hush, a pitter patter of high sounds fading out of audible range. Shirabu lifts his hands from the keys. The silence is as lush as velvet.
“Told you. You sound great,” Eita-the-civil-servant-who-shreds says. Shirabu turns to him slightly; under the yellow light the shadow of Shirabu’s tiny smile announces its arrival. There is the sense that this is the tail end of a conversation Satoshi has not been part of, all this time. Satoshi is back to staring at his hands. What other secrets, then? The music, the tossing, the way Eita’s cheek fits perfectly against a palm.
They both turn to him. Satoshi remembers that he is here too.
“McDonald’s?” Eita asks.
None of the trains run this late so they take Eita’s car, a gray-rose sedan with fur-lined seats smelling slightly of cigarette smoke—”I don’t smoke but I know a lot of people who do,” Eita explains—before stumbling into the coldly lit lobby of the McDonald’s, their feet skidding over fake wood. Eita orders three meals and upsizes the fries. They fit into a booth, Satoshi facing Shirabu and Eita, whose shoulders rub together as they reach for various parts of the tray. Eita, as it turns out, had been the starting setter for Shiratorizawa before Shirabu. He’d known defeat first at those enigmatic hands. Then he’d gone and fell in love with the boy who wielded them.
Satoshi feels like he’s getting somewhere. From where, he doesn’t really know.
When Shirabu had first moved in, Satoshi had been struck by how little of him seemed to exist in the room, in comparison to his old roommate. Shirabu’s sweaters remained folded in his wardrobe, away from the rest of the room, whereas Satoshi often left his hoodie draped over his chair or the end of his bed; Shirabu’s books were arranged neatly on his shelf whenever he wasn’t using them to study, whereas Satoshi’s old roommate had left papers strewn across the floor, all over his bed. Looking at Shirabu now, with his hair slightly misty around him and Eita’s leather-clad arm around his shoulder, he feels like he’d accidentally tugged on a string hanging out of the bottom of Shirabu’s wardrobe. Things are spilling out. He has his arms out in an attempt to catch them.
Eita asks about Shirabu’s habits. Does he sleep? Yes, Satoshi says. What does he eat? Potato salads, bentos with fluffy clouds of egg, chicken onigiri. How’s he at volleyball practice?
Oh, Satoshi thinks. He tells Eita. Shirabu sighs and makes a face.
“He’s still like that about the tosses, huh. Sometimes,” Eita is saying around a french fry, “you’ve got to accept that good things are only as good as they are. Not as good as they could be.”
Shirabu rolls his eyes but leans his head against Eita’s shoulder anyway.
“He graduates and he suddenly thinks he’s got the monopoly on wisdom,” he says flatly. “Once I’m officially an M.D. I’ll have a license to declare you full of shit and believe me, I will do it.”
Shirabu had been the captain of a losing team for a year. For other people this might not be a big deal—other people are captains of losing teams all the time. Take the best setter in Miyagi, Oikawa Tooru. But Shirabu was captain of Shiratorizawa, and Shiratorizawa was not a losing team until he became its captain.
There did not exist a causal link between these two things. Or, at least, Shirabu’s own meticulous assessments of them did not allow him to draw any conclusions. He led practices; he rallied the team; he spoke to them when they needed to be spoken to. Not much had changed about Shiratorizawa, despite Coach Washijou’s sunnier demeanor after the disastrous Karasuno match, the beginning of the end—they were still a team that was essentially a machine made of the best parts you could find in Miyagi. You’d be hard-pressed to find a spiker better than Goshiki and not many blockers could measure up to Taichi. That was the problem—Shiratorizawa was merely the sum of its excellent parts. Most of the other teams were wising up, becoming far more than that. The contagion had appeared in Aoba Jousai first, but there it had failed to take hold. Then it spread to Karasuno. Then, the rest of Miyagi.
After they’d lost to Aoba Jousai (who had gone on to lose to Karasuno, who had gone on to lose to Date Tech), Shirabu had called Goshiki to the locker room. Will you be the captain? he’d asked. Goshiki, who had grown up more than any teenage boy had any right to in less than a year, had said yes. Right afterwards, he’d burst into tears. Shirabu had held him, felt the warm deluge of water against his own skin, through the uniform he meant to pass on. By that time he had removed himself from volleyball in many ways—not enough to make him a worse player or a bad captain, but just enough that when it became apparent that they wouldn’t be going to Nationals, Shirabu was already thinking of entrance exams. He told the juniors the things they needed to know, wondering if there was something he needed to know. If knowing it sooner would’ve changed anything.
He’d called Eita. He had still been Semi-san, then. Eita had helped him practice his serves. Eita had talked to him about volleyball, about winning. More importantly, Eita had talked to him about losing. Shirabu had chosen him because the idea of admitting the reality of the situation to Tendou or Oohira or—perish the thought—Ushijima had shot ice through his blood vessels, coating his fingertips with invisible frost. Eita had been a safe bet. Eita had been a third-year who wasn’t quite like the other third-years. What kind of judgment could Shirabu be afraid of, from him? He’d spent at least a year making it known that he wasn’t going to turn away from Shirabu’s missteps. No reason to stop now.
“That’s it, I guess,” Shirabu had said over the phone after they lost their Nationals qualifiers match. Four words to wrap it up. An ending.
“Yeah. That’s it.” At this time Eita had still been in college. Shirabu had imagined him in a hoodie and pajama pants, speaking into the mic of his earphones as he typed up an essay due the next day. There was always the sound of typing in the background. “Or not. Think you can like volleyball even if it’s not the best version of it you could possibly play? Even if your spikers aren’t Tsutomu or Wakatoshi? Are you still gonna play when you go to college?”
“We’ll see.”
“I managed it.”
“Are you baiting me, Semi-san?”
A laugh.
“Is it working?”
At his graduation, Eita had gifted him with a recording—Horowitz at Carnegie Hall, heights Shirabu would never reach. Shirabu had let it slip that he’d taken piano lessons until he started school at Shiratorizawa. From then on Eita wouldn’t leave him alone about it.
Years poured in. Years wasted, if you thought about it. Shirabu was never going to do anything with the ability to kind of play a little bit of Liszt. Eita had said Shirabu was going to do something—he was going to play, of course. (Eita was a self-taught guitarist, and so only associated music with passion.) Hard vinyl in cloth-like paper went from the hands of one setter to another.
The record was heavy in his hand when Coach Washijou approached them, smiling softly like Shirabu wouldn’t still remember the most fierce version of him fifty years down the line. The man who taught Shiratorizawa greatness. Never mind that he was sometimes cruel, or spiteful, or unrelenting in his demands—he’d taught Shirabu how to set for Ushijima Wakatoshi. For that, Shirabu would always owe him far too much.
Eita made his excuses and left. Shirabu stood, looking at Coach Washijou. Waiting.
“You did well, Kenjirou,” he’d said. A quiet whisper of acceptance. It was the worst thing anyone had ever said to Shirabu about his tenure as Shiratorizawa’s captain. It was the worst thing he had ever heard about volleyball. He swallowed it down and went home.
He’d already started packing for college. Shirabu sat among the open boxes containing the bits of his life. Clothes, books, pictures—they’d been in his room at home, then at Shiratorizawa, then at home again. Next year they would be somewhere else, the foggy specter of nondescript college dorms. Shirabu never felt much of an emotional connection to the places his things were housed in. Yet the thought of his room at Shiratorizawa—identical to every other room there, especially since Shirabu had never been the type of person to decorate—made him feel like saltwater was flooding his throat.
The recording in his hand. Years poured in. The volleyball in the corner of his room, poised to roll innocently when he went to approach it. The uniform with number one written on its back. The gold medal from the 2012 Miyagi representative qualifiers. Years poured in. Years wasted?
How long does it take to get over a defeat? The answer is: it depends. What kind of defeat are you talking about? Is it the slow kind that comes in waves? The first wave: failing to qualify. The second wave: turning the television on to watch another team walk for Miyagi, again. The third wave: you did well . Satoshi turns over the elements of Shirabu’s story again and again long after Eita-the-civil-servant-who-shreds had left in his smoky sedan. Upon reaching their room, Shirabu had taken a shower then he’d fallen asleep almost immediately.
Satoshi sits awake in his bed for the remaining hour before the sun rises and dawn comes peeking through their window. He spends the sixty-odd minutes looking at the keyboard in front of him, fuzzy in the darkness. White keys, black keys, white keys. Nothing but plastic. Only the most tenuous of strings connects it to Shirabu’s time as Shiratorizawa’s setter, to his future as a doctor. Only the threads of borderline obsession. Endless repetition. The thin line between fulfillment and pain.
Shirabu had gone to a twenty-four-hour konbini to buy himself some coffee and Eita had whispered his thanks to Satoshi again.
“Sometimes, with him, it’s hard to tell whether or not you should be worried,” Eita had said, glancing at Shirabu through the glass.
Shirabu comes to practice on Saturday. He’s just finished his exams so he has some free time, he tells them. As soon as med school picks up again he won’t be coming around. Don’t get used to practicing with me, he warns, but no one in the volleyball gym acts like they’d heard him.
“Three-on-three?” Maruyama asks.
Shirabu nods as he goes to the corner to do some stretches.
Halfway through the second set, Shirabu tosses to Satoshi; the toss is too high, a little too slow. Satoshi gets blocked and the ball hits the floor right next to the space his foot lands on. He and Shirabu look at each other, then back at the opponent’s side of the court.
“Whoops,” Shirabu says with a little shrug, face impassive. It isn’t the way he looks right after he pauses with his fingertips still touching the keys. Satoshi guesses that settles the question.
They keep going.