If the early morning sunrise wasn’t enough to wake Sendoh up, it was definitely the early morning drag racers that did the trick. All sorts of shady characters- dropouts from school, punks, and practically everything- ruled Kanagawa’s roads. They operated all through the night without the slightest care for weather. They braved the rains, the frigid winds and even the frost as they zoomed down every little lane on their sports bikes that were designed to make loud and constipated noises. It was a sound like this that had penetrated Sendoh’s eardrums and forced him to rise and shine... Or rather, rise and glower.
“Those guys ought to be arrested,” Sendoh said contemptuously, watching as the last of a train of bikers whizzed past his house; “They ruin my sleep everyday!” To Sendoh, a criminal was a person who woke him up too early- Not to be confused with Rukawa’s definition of a criminal, which is anyone who wakes him up at all.
The thought of the reckless bikers still played on Sendoh’s mind, even as he was getting ready for school. Then he remembered that a certain somebody he knew was also a biker in the distant past. Mitsui-san, Sendoh thought, and chuckled to himself; If only all bikers were like him. He hadn’t accounted for the fact that Mitsui was anything but his present self back when he was a delinquent.
Sendoh admired his reflection in the mirror one last time, giving it a toothy grin and saying, ‘Lookin’ good!’ before exiting his bedroom and heading downstairs to grab a bite and head off on foot for school, as he always did.
As he neared the Ryonan School gates, Sendoh spotted Koshino. He lifted his hand to wave and greet him, but upon remembering something, brought it instead to scratch his head. Koshino narrowed his eyes in Sendoh’s direction, but said nothing, turning his nose up and walking away, leaving Sendoh to believe he must have said something seriously offensive about his parents.
Poor Sendoh was completely in the dark about his best friend’s sudden and unwarranted change of behavior. What’s wrong with him?- he thought.
To make things more uncomfortable for him, Koshino was in all of his classes. It was quite difficult even for the latter to pay attention to the teacher and look at the chalkboard without his vision colliding with a mass of spiky hair every time, and he periodically and involuntarily remarked ‘betrayer’, ‘double-crosser’ and ‘back-stabber’.
Sendoh tried to pretend Koshino wasn’t glaring daggers into the back of his head by winking at each of the bimbos of his class and creating enough noise in the form of moans and squeaks to cloud his mind completely and erase all thoughts of Koshino draped in a black-hooded cloak, carrying a scythe. Koshino regarded this activity in a different manner: Nasty transsexual fish! You think you can make me feel any more jealous by flirting with the witches and bitches of this shitty class? You’re even stupider than I thought when I’d caught you trying to open the gym-door the wrong way the other time. If Koshino had been a cat, he would have been hissing and spitting.
After class Sendoh made up his mind to get to the bottom of things and confronted a suspiciously evasive Koshino, cornering him against a locker. “Look,” he said, staring straight into Koshino’s eyes while the latter desperately tried to escape his iron-grip, “what exactly is your problem? You didn’t talk to me once these past few days and barely looked at me without glaring or muttering something under your breath.”
“Let go of me,” said Koshino coldly, still not meeting Sendoh’s gaze; “Let go, I say.”
“I won’t until I get an answer, Hiro.” said Sendoh determinedly.
“Then listen up, and listen well: The problem, Sendoh, is you. You and your swelled up head. You care only about yourself, right? You don’t give a shit about the rest of us, do you? I mean, what’s it to you if our team’s a mass of rubble and dying? One fine day you say ‘I don’t want to play basketball anymore’ and pretend that’s that. You turn your back and leave and pretend everything’s fine. But if you’d turned around even once you’d have seen a destroyed team. Hopes crushed to the ground. Just because you don’t want to play basketball doesn’t give you the right to assume the rest of us don’t either. You’re just a heartless, narcissistic, dream-crushing bastard, you know that, Akira Sendoh? And now if it’ll please you, I don’t want to talk with you anymore. Ever.” and saying so, Koshino broke free of Sendoh’s grip, which had become relaxed, owing to the fact that Sendoh was dazed to the ends of his wits, and stomped away in all dignity, officially severing all ties with Sendoh, his childhood friend.
Sendoh stared after him and continued staring even after he had disappeared. He didn’t present a most natural sight, standing in the middle of the hall and staring at the janitor’s room on the other side unblinkingly for ten minutes. He saw Hikoichi passing by and made to say something to him, but the former gave him a wistful smile and shrugged, going his own way.
“What have I done?” Sendoh asked himself.
Sendoh sat with his eyes closed on the steps that led down from Ryonan’s main building, enjoying the cool breeze that tickled his face. Everyone else was in their own club, and Sendoh thought almost regretfully that even he’d have been in his own club, practicing with his once-upon-a-time friends, and leading the team with pride. He hated to think how much Coach Taoka must have been torturing Koshino and the others at that very moment, out of frustration and despondency.
He got up after fifteen or so minutes when he realized that sitting on the stairs for a whole two hours will do the world no good. Not that his playing basketball did the world any better, argued Sendoh.
He decided to take a walk down the neighborhood, and pretty soon he found himself standing at the station with a ticket in his hand. Not long after, a green train appeared. The doors opened and a few passengers dressed in suits walked out before Sendoh and the few other passengers who were traveling downtown boarded.
In the train Sendoh noted with uneasiness the overwhelming female-population. And now that population was eying him hungrily, and Sendoh decided it wasn’t exactly the best day to be visiting Shohoku.
“One, two! One, two! One, two! Get your lazy butt off the bench, Sakuragi and practice!” yelled Miyagi. Sakuragi reluctantly got his lazy butt off the bench and joined his other condemned teammates to warm up. Shohoku’s ‘warm-up’ was often known to become ‘overheat’, and with a redhead on the team, doomsday was a lot closer than before.
“All right, you guys! Now let’s play!” said Kogure’s successor, the new vice-captain, who was also as benevolent, Yasuda.
“Rukawa, an amateur like you ought to be playing with preschoolers. You’re only good at holding back geniuses like me.” said Sakuragi condescendingly to a subtly fuming Rukawa.
“Moron.” said Rukawa coolly.
“What did you say, you darned fox?” yelled Sakuragi in exasperation.
“Moron.” repeated Rukawa dryly, and Sakuragi was just about to bop him if it wasn’t for Yasuda’s timely intervention. Ever since he became vice-captain, some of his timorousness dissolved into his ego.
“Stop it, you guys. Sakuragi, Rukawa’s also a freshman-”
“Ha, ha, ha! Rukawa’s always a freshman! Even though we’ll be graduating in just a couple of months!” interjected Sakuragi rudely.
“As I was saying,” went on Yasuda, weighing each word down with dubiousness, for saying anything to Sakuragi required special guts, “Rukawa has to play on the freshmen’s team. And Rukawa,”- Yasuda turned to Rukawa- “Just ignore him, okay?”
“Right, let’s get practicing!” yelled Miyagi, seeming to the less happy section of the Shohoku team, which comprised all but him, to be possessed by Akagi’s ghost.
“Ayako, blow the whistle!” said Miyagi.
Ayako blew the whistle. She said grudgingly: “Just because you’re captain now doesn’t mean you can order me around, you know? You forget that I’ve been on this team longer than you.” She was alluding to those twenty minutes before Miyagi’s admission to the team.
Miyagi didn’t waste a second in rushing to Ayako and apologizing profusely for his thoughtless behavior.
“Lucky Gorilla wasn’t like that in his days,” said Sakuragi knowingly, and Rukawa nodded.
“What’re you looking at?” Ayako shot at the freshmen, who immediately went back to practice as if everything was hunky-dory. Ayako herself couldn’t help but blush in self-consciousness.
“Hey, y’all!”
Everyone turned to the gym-doors where a silhouette (with a suspiciously familiar mass of spiky hair) stood magnificently against the evening sun.
“Sendoh?” said Ayako in incredulity; “What’re you doing here?”
“Spying!” accused Sakuragi, pointing a condemning finger at him.
“Oh, no, no,” Sendoh said, defending himself, “I wasn’t spying.” He walked into the gym as if he owned the place.
“There’s no use lying to the genius, Sendoh- You were spying!”
“Look, Sakuragi, if I’d been spying, would I have walked through the door and said ‘Hey, y’all’?”
“He does have a point, you know,” said Ayako.
“Of course I do.” said Sendoh with dignity; “After all, I played point guard more than once! Geddit?” And he rolled over laughing at his own pun while the others watched the poignant sight with static emotion. Miyagi muttered something about being a point guard himself, but was ignored.
“So what are you doing here, Sendoh?” asked Ayako again, waving her paper-fan behind her back so that Sendoh couldn’t, but Sakuragi could, see it.
“Just passing by, you know?” said Sendoh casually.
“Uh, just passing by twenty miles away from Ryonan School, where you should be at this moment?” asked Ayako suspiciously.
“Nothing gets past you, Ayako!” said Sendoh in irritatingly false chirpiness.
“No, really. What brings you here?”
“Fine, I’ll tell you!” said Sendoh, slumping down on a bench and snatching bottle of Gatorade from the tray nearby, as if preparatory to narrating a long story of war or a frightful tale of an escapade and a near escape from death. The Shohoku team gathered around him expectantly.
“You see,” Sendoh began with a sigh, “I’m no longer the Sendoh you used to know.”
“You mean you got plastic surgery done?” said Yasuda, not suppressing a gasp.
“No you dolt, he means he’s married.” said Sakuragi, conking Yasuda with no regard for his vice-captain status.
“You’re both idiots.” said Ayako.
“Anyway,” went on Sendoh, “what I meant was that I’m no longer part of the Ryonan Basketball Team.”
Everyone gasped at this and Sakuragi goggled at Sendoh as though he was an abomination of a prehistoric rarity. “What do you mean, Spiky?” asked he; “You’re no longer a basketball player?”
“Yes, Sakuragi, that’s what I mean,” said Sendoh, leaning against the armrest of the bench, emitting another sigh in a manner that rendered him similar to an old man who was telling his son about his having lived enough and being tired of life.
A pregnant pause followed.
“Right, Sendoh,” said Ayako, recomposing herself; “I just want you to know that no matter what, we’re always here for you.” She patted Sendoh’s shoulder in a motherly fashion.
“So who’s the new captain now?” asked Sakuragi eagerly.
“Sakuragi, you inconsiderate dolt. Can’t you see this is a moment of intense emotion for him?” barked Ayako.
“Koshino.” Sendoh replied with bitterness.
“Koshino?” Ayako couldn’t help but be taken aback.
“Yes, Koshino.” said Sendoh, and the bitterness in his voice became evident, predisposing Sakuragi to believe that he was kicked out of the team and was now jealous of the new captain.
“So,” said Sakuragi, “were you kicked out of your team and is that why you’re jealous of Koshino?”
“I...” said Sendoh with more than obvious hesitance; “I... I left the team.”
Another round of dramatic gasping.
“You left the team?” asked Miyagi disbelievingly; “You left the team?”
Sendoh nodded solemnly.
Miyagi turned to Rukawa. “What do you know, Rukawa,” he said, “You don’t have a rival anymore!”
Rukawa didn’t seem very pleased being told this. He was a man of honor and didn’t depend on the elimination of the guy in the first position to win his race.
“Sendoh,” he said, “play one-on-one against me now.”
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