Wakashi stayed after practice again.
This had become a fact of his life now, the way hunger was a fact, or the sound of the sea at night through his thin apartment walls.
Practice ended, everyone left, and Wakashi stayed. It was not a decision he made each time. It was simply what happened, the way water finds the lowest point without being told to.
Today it was heading.
He had set it up himself — a simple rope strung between two of the goal posts at an awkward height, a ball tied loosely to it on a cord long enough that it swung with some natural movement but couldn't escape entirely.
A poor substitute for a real crossing partner, but Domoto had shown him the setup for solo heading work and Wakashi had built it the same evening without waiting to be told twice.
He had been at it for thirty minutes.
He was not improving.
Or rather — and this was the specific, maddening texture of his frustration — he was improving in the way that felt invisible from the inside.
He knew, technically, that he was connecting more consistently than he had two weeks ago.
Coach Inoue had said so in the flat, undecorated way Coach Inoue said everything.
But knowing it technically and feeling it were two entirely different countries, and Wakashi was living in the wrong one.
The ball swung. He jumped. Connected — but wrong, slightly behind the centre, the contact sending it skewing sideways instead of forward with power.
He grabbed the rope. Reset the ball. Stood back.
Breathed.
Again.
The ball swung. He jumped. This time too early, meeting the ball at the top of his jump rather than just past it, losing the whip of the movement, the header dying weakly instead of snapping.
He grabbed the rope.
Reset.
His jaw was tight. His neck ached. The light was getting low and orange over the top of the school building and he was standing alone on an empty practice ground losing an argument with a ball on a string.
"Your eyes are closing."
He spun around.
Hana stood at the edge of the practice ground, on the other side of the low fence that separated the male and female training areas.
She had her bag over one shoulder and her own ball tucked under her arm, which meant she had also stayed late, which meant she had apparently walked past the fence on her way out and seen him.
He did not know how long she had been watching.
He did not like that he did not know.
"What?" he said.
"Your eyes," Hana said,
with the measured patience of someone explaining something to a wall they were not entirely sure could hear.
"When the ball comes to you, your eyes close. Or they half-close. Just before contact."
Wakashi stared at her.
She stared back.
There was history in the space between them — the football, the confrontation, the new ball left without apology, the months of deliberate mutual non-acknowledgment at school.
He could see that she remembered all of it.
It was in her posture, the particular quality of her chin being slightly raised, the way her expression was professionally neutral in the way expressions are neutral when they are working hard at it.
She had not come here to extend warmth.
She had come here because she had seen something and the part of her brain that processed football apparently could not let it pass without comment, regardless of who the footballer was.
He understood that. Reluctantly. He operated the same way.
"My eyes don't close," he said.
"They do."
"I'd know."
"You wouldn't," she said, simply and without cruelty,
"because it happens in the half-second before contact. Your brain flinches before your body does. It's protective reflex. Very common in players who learned heading late."
A brief pause.
"Or players who were never taught properly."
The last sentence landed with a precision that was almost certainly deliberate.
Wakashi's jaw tightened. He turned back to the rope and the ball, resetting it with more force than necessary.
He heard the fence creak. Footsteps in the grass.
And then Hana was standing five feet away from him on his side of the fence, which she had apparently stepped over without asking permission, because she was that kind of person.
"Do it again," she said.
"I don't need—"
"I know you don't need anything," she said.
"Do it again."
He did it again.
The ball swung. He jumped. Connected — the same wrong contact as before, the ball skewing sideways.
"There," she said immediately, pointing.
"You saw it that time, yes? Your chin dropped just before the jump. When your chin drops, your eyes follow. You're trying to protect your face without knowing you're doing it."
Wakashi caught the swinging ball and held it, turning this over.
"Fix it how?" he said.
She set her own ball down at her feet and stepped closer to the rope, studying the setup with the eyes of someone assessing a problem rather than a person.
"Chin up, always. Even when it feels wrong. Even when the ball is coming fast."
She looked at him directly.
"You have to choose to keep your eyes open. It doesn't become automatic until you've trained it to be. Until then, it's a conscious decision every single time."
"And the contact point?"
She looked slightly surprised that he asked — a good question, a technical question, not a defensive one. Something shifted fractionally in her expression, though she kept her face largely composed.
"Here," she said,
touching her own forehead, just below the hairline.
"The flat surface. Most people think heading is neck strength. It isn't. Neck strength matters, but the contact point controls everything. Flat surface, you get direction. You get power. You get intention."
She paused.
"What you're doing is letting the ball choose where it hits you. You need to choose where you hit the ball."
Wakashi looked at the spot she had indicated on her own head, then raised his hand to the same point on his.
Hard bone.
Flat.
He pressed his fingers against it and then looked at the hanging ball with something recalibrating behind his eyes.
"Try," she said, stepping back.
He tried.
Chin up. Eyes on the ball — actively on the ball, not passively, not allowing the flinch.
Choosing the contact point rather than receiving it.
The ball swung.
He jumped.
The contact was different.
Not perfect — nothing about Wakashi's heading was going to be perfect today — but different in kind, not just degree.
The ball went forward. Not with the full power his frame should eventually generate, but forward, directed, chosen.
He landed. Looked at the ball swinging on its cord.
He didn't say anything. He didn't need to.
"Better," Hana said,
which from her tone was also not nothing.
"Again," he said.
She stepped further back and watched him do it three more times.
Each one marginally cleaner than the last. On the fourth he lost concentration and the chin dropped and the ball skewed sideways again and he heard a short, quiet sound from her that was not quite a sigh.
"You lost it," she said.
"I know I lost it."
"Because you stopped deciding. You went back to letting it happen instead of making it happen."
He grabbed the rope. Reset. Breathed.
"Football at this level," Hana said,
and there was something different in her voice now — still precise, still unsentimental,
but no longer neutral in the way it had been at the start.
There was something in it that sounded like conviction.
Like belief.
The way people talk when they're speaking from somewhere real rather than performing competence.
"It doesn't happen to you. You make it happen. Every touch, every run, every header — you decide. You impose your intention on the ball. The moment you stop deciding, the game starts deciding for you."
Wakashi stood with his hand on the rope and looked at her.
She seemed to realize she had said more than she planned. The chin came up slightly. The neutrality reassembled itself.
"It's a basic principle," she said, more evenly.
"Where did you learn it?"
A short pause.
"Myself. Mostly." Another pause, smaller.
"And a lot of time on the beach."
They stood in the fading practice ground light for a moment without speaking.
The situation was strange and both of them knew it. They were not friends. They were not teammates.
Between them existed an unresolved collision — a ruined ball, a replacement offered without the words that should have accompanied it, a wound kept clean and cold for months.
None of that had been addressed. None of it had moved.
And yet here they were. On the same side of a fence. Talking about football in the specific, intimate way that people only talk about things they love.
"Your approach to heading," Hana said, returning to safer ground.
"You're throwing your whole body at it. You're using size instead of technique. It won't work consistently.
" She shifted the ball at her feet absently, a habit — the unconscious fidget of someone whose hands would rather hold a ball than hang at their sides.
"You need to use your whole body properly. Not just momentum. The run-up, the jump, the knee drive — everything adds to the header before your head even touches the ball."
"Show me the knee drive."
She looked at him. He looked at her.
Then, with the air of someone who had made a decision and was committing to it before thinking too hard about it, she turned to the hanging ball, stepped through a short approach, and jumped — one knee driving upward as she rose, generating height and power she shouldn't physically have for her size, contacting the ball cleanly and sending it snapping forward against the end of its cord with a clean, sharp crack.
She landed lightly.
"The knee isn't just for height," she said,
turning back.
"It shifts your centre of gravity forward. It puts your body behind the header rather than underneath it.
That's where the power comes from. Not your neck. Not your size.
" She looked at him with something approaching directness.
"Which means someone with your frame, if they do this correctly, should be able to head the ball with serious power. You have everything you need for it. You're just not using any of it right."
Wakashi absorbed this in silence.
"You could've just not said anything," he said after a moment. It wasn't an accusation. It was an observation.
Hana picked up her bag from where she'd set it on the grass. She tucked her own ball back under her arm with the ease of years.
"I could have," she agreed.
She walked back toward the fence, stepped over it with the same unceremonious ease as before, and turned back to look at him one more time from the other side.
"Chin up," she said.
"Every time. Don't negotiate with it."
Then she walked away toward the school gate, the ball under her arm, her footsteps even and unhurried, until the orange light took her and the practice ground was quiet again.
Wakashi stood in the empty field.
He turned back to the hanging ball.
Reset it. Stepped into his approach.
Chin up. Eyes open. Knee drive. Decide.
The ball snapped forward clean and hard — the best header he had produced all month.
He caught the swinging cord.
Stood still.
The practice ground was empty. Nobody saw it.
He reset the ball anyway.
Again.