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It was the day just before their final game against Inashiro. The clinging heat rose without end, accompanied by the promise of an approaching summit. Whether it was in the bullpen, the office, or the practice grounds, the mood was so tense no matter where Chris went, that he ended up taking a walk around the grounds.
It was then that in the same unsuspecting way evening crept upon you, he noticed: There were still patches of clover growing here and there that’d managed to survive the notorious Tokyo summer heat. There had to be thousands of them. They were mostly green, but somewhat faded from overexposure to the sun.
Pausing nearby the bullpen, in a flash of childhood nostalgia, he picked one, and straightening up, he twirled it by its stalk. He paused, and peered at it; somehow, it looked a bit different from the other clovers. It took another moment before it dawned on him that the clover he'd picked had four leaves.
It was his first time ever actually seeing one. He stared at it, counting the number of leaves again in his head to make sure.
No, it was without a doubt, four.
“Chris-senpai?”
Looking up, he saw Miyuki, fully dressed in protective gear, stepping out of the bullpen. Chris held up the clover.
“Is that… a four-leaf clover?” Looking bemused, Miyuki approached him. “I used to look for them when I was a kid. I never did find one though.”
“These are considered lucky, aren’t they?”
“So they say,” Miyuki answered. "Though I just wanted one because they’re rare.” But when Chris offered him the clover, he raised his hand in quick rejection. “You found it, senpai.”
“Miyuki-senpai?” This time, it was Sawamura’s curious voice that came floating out of the bullpen. “Where are you?”
“Oi, check this out, Bakamura,” Miyuki called back.
An instant later, Sawamura’s head popped out of the entrance. “Don’t call me that you stupid four… Chris-senpai!” His annoyed expression immediately melting away into a grin, he bounded out to where Chris and Miyuki were standing. “Oh? What’s that you have there?”
Chris smiled—it was impossible not to. “It’s a four-leaf clover.”
“What? Wow!” Sawamura turned to him in wide-eyed admiration. “Chris-senpai, you found this?”
“Hey, it could’ve been me,” Miyuki interjected.
Acting as though he hadn’t heard, Sawamura began to stroke his chin. “Well, of course, as expected of my master… I’d expect nothing less, nothing less...” He gave a sage-like nod. “Did you know, there’s a whole field of these growing around my home? But I’ve only ever found the normal ones—the three-leaf ones, I mean. It takes a real special kind of person to find a four-leaf clover, senpai!”
Chris felt his face go warm with embarrassment, as it usually tended to do around the excitable first year. “It's my first time finding one too.”
Sawamura waved it aside. “That’s what my grandpa said.” Making a stern face, he rasped in an impression of an older man, “‘Eijun, you listen to me. There are ten thousand three-leaf clovers for every four-leaf clover. It takes a special kind of person to find a four-leaf, and most people are three-leaf clovers. So stop wasting your time, and finish weeding the garden.’” Letting his face relax, Sawamura shook his head in disbelief. “My own grandpa called me a three-leaf clover, can you believe it?”
Crossing his arms, Miyuki smirked. “Sure can.”
Rounding on the catcher, Sawamura glowered. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Haha! Nothing to worry your little head over.”
Leaving the two to squabble back and forth in the background, Chris continued to spin the clover by its stalk between his fingers.
How auspicious, he thought. It was a good indicator of how tomorrow's game would turn out.
Of course, if he had been cut from a more superstitious cloth, he may have feared using up all his luck just by finding the unusual clover. But he wasn't, so unlike many of his teammates who found themselves tossing and turning, he slept easy that night.
The next day, after the game, as Chris sat through the long, silent bus ride back to the dorms, he reflected briefly and bitterly of the clover he had found.
Then, he heard a muffled sob in the seat behind him, and he realized —
Oh.
His last high school summer was over.
Naturally, Chris' father didn't take the news with the typical doom and gloom.
"No problem," he said in English through the phone. "Now we can focus 100% on your rehabilitation instead."
Chris felt his face turn pink though he was alone in the room, never mind that few on the team would have understood their conversation. "Don't say that in front of my teammates, dad," was his only response.
A hearty laugh sounded. "No problem. Now, why don't we go out for sushi tonight?"
One of Chris' favorite places to go was the local conveyer belt sushi bar. It had one of those gimmicky gacha prize slots for used plates. They had used to go all the time when he was a child, and it was one of the little, everyday things about Japan that he missed most when living in the States.
"I should stay with the team today for dinner," Chris said firmly. "We can go tomorrow. I'm gonna hang up now."
"Fine, fine. Don't forget to do the usual routine before bedtime—!" His father's voice cut off as he ended the call.
He could hear the others outside the room scrambling down the stairs for dinner, but for a moment, Chris stared down at the dark screen of his phone, thinking.
America.
The plan had been that once he graduated high school, he would play college baseball in the States, and then enter the minor leagues.
Chris slowly looked around his room at the empty bunk beds. While the dormitory had had its own share of discomforts, he had called it home for the last three years.
A knock rapped sharply on the door.
"Chris-senpai," called Kanemaru's voice. "Should I save you a seat?"
Immediately, Chris rose to his feet. This was no time to be feeling morose, he reprimanded himself. Not when he hadn't even played in the game that day—or any of the games, for that matter.
Dinner was, as expected, a grim and somber event where everyone avoided looking at each other. By no fault of the cafeteria staff, the tonkatsu tasted like gravel and went down as much..
"Get a good night's sleep," said Coach Kataoka in his equally textured tones. "Tomorrow will be a new day. And we will talk then."
Outside, the sky was dark and filled with stars that didn't seem to know they should have hidden for the night.
The vending machine by the stairwell clattered, and a figure bent over to scoop out a can of black coffee from the dispenser. Their shadows swayed in the flickering lamplight.
"Coffee?" asked Chris.
"Senpai," said Miyuki. He snapped the tab of the can, and held it out to Chris, who shook his head.
"I'm okay." He paused. "How are you holding up?"
Miyuki's mouth drew slightly back in what could've been a smile. "I'm managing." Throwing his head back, he took a long gulp of the dark liquid.
The second year catcher had been his usual stoic self on the bus. Out of the entire team, Chris would say Miyuki always seemed the least affected by their losses. He was always looking forward to the future with both feet planted firmly on the ground. It was part of what made him such a strong player.
Sometimes, that worried Chris.
"Don't stay up too late," was all he said.
Applications for American colleges weren't due until the fall, and with baseball practice no longer taking up all of his time, Chris suddenly found that he no longer had an excuse to decline his cousin's invitations to hang out.
"Honestly, you guys should've gone to Koushien," said Hiro, a self-professed baseball fanatic who'd been following Seidou's games. "The way your team was playing, you deserved it. Just had a streak of bad luck there at the end."
"Yeah," said Chris, putting down the menu. He looked around at the other occupants of the clearly ritzy restaurant, feeling out of place in his school uniform. "Uh…"
"Bad luck, that," Hiro repeated, lighting up a cigarette. Chris caught a glimpse of a tattoo under his sleeve, before it disappeared as Hiro exhaled. "I'm paying, so order anything you want."
Chris didn't know exactly what his cousin did for a living. But it was probably best not to get on his bad side.
On his way back home, stopped by a sense of restlessness, he visited a bookstore by the station. Some lingering nostalgia had him looking over at the self-help corner, before he headed to the section on botany.
His cousin's words— bad luck, that —had struck a chord in Chris, who wasn't superstitious, of course, but curious. It took some time to find in a section more concerned about plant biology, but he found it at last (closer to the section on astrology than he would care to admit)—a book on flower language, hanakotoba.
Clovers…
The last of the cicadas had quieted down for the year and sundown seemed just a little closer when Chris found out that Sawamura had a case of the yips.
Chris really should have seen it coming, and with anyone else, he would have made the appropriate arrangements beforehand. But this was Sawamura , the first year who had yanked Chris out of his own dark place, and the possibility that the boy was more human, more vulnerable, than he'd thought, had not crossed his mind.
Kanemaru's message glared from his glowing screen: 'At this rate, he's going to work himself to the ground.'
Not even two months ago, he would have heard it directly from the first year, who tended to sit on the upper bunk, his feet dangling over the edge, and unload about how the other first years on the team weren't studying for their exams.
It’s starting to get colder, Chris thought to himself, letting his heavy eyelids drop closed.
Somehow, it had been some time before Chris had joined the other third years for ramen.
He had not meant for it to happen, despite the increasingly reproachful messages from Jun, and when even Tetsu finally sent him a message asking him if he would be dropping by, Chris found himself rescheduling a physical therapy session.
"Well, well," said Ryousuke, his smiling eyes instantly picking Chris out as he ducked through the flaps. "You're a hard man to see these days."
Chris felt his face turn pink as the others simultaneously turned towards him. "Sorry, guys."
"At least he's here now," said Jun, waving his hand generously, an indication that all had been forgiven.
No longer united through their baseball and school uniforms, they made an odd assortment along the stools. Certainly, as much as Chris enjoyed Ryousuke's biting humor and Miyauchi's barefaced attitude, he did not imagine that they would have ever shared each other's company were it not for the sport that had brought them together from all over Japan.
"The team's still shaping up, but we were the same around this time," said Masuko.
A pause. And then —
"That's not true," Jun replied, in his usual blunt manner. "We had Tetsu."
At that, Masuko inclined his head, and the others muttered their assent: Miyuki was a brilliant catcher and a reliable batter, but his leadership capabilities had yet to shine through quite so readily.
"Miyuki will come through," said Tetsu, ever still their stalwart leader. "The coach chose him for a reason."
The others muttered their assent again.
The way home was long, lit by the glow of vending machines in dark alleys, and punctured by the sound of bicycle tires spinning over concrete.
When Miyuki finally approached Chris regarding Sawamura, he only wondered why it had taken so long.
Miyuki still looked uncomfortable in the third years' hallway, his words coming out hesitantly. "I hate to ask this of you, but… I think Sawamura needs to hear it from you."
He took Chris to the indoors practice grounds, where Sawamura was practicing by himself. His expression might as well have been a mirror of Chris when he had been in the earlier stages of his rehab.
At that, the only thing Chris could think was that they had all come so far—too far, to stop here.
When Chris stepped foot inside, Miyuki mysteriously disappeared, and he found himself alone in a sudden moment of blind panic.
But then Sawamura turned around, and caught sight of him. And in that one moment, light seemed to radiate from his entire being, as it had once done before, and Chris wondered why he had taken so long to reach out to him.
The cherry blossoms were blooming on the day they graduated.
A girl who had been in his second year class confessed to Chris in the courtyard behind the school.
The coach bowed to them as they left, tears streaming down his sun-weathered face.
Chris' father took him out for conveyer belt sushi, and when he got home, he took off his high school uniform for the last time.
Time passed, and summer came again, as it tended to do. Chris knew that in another blink of an eye, it would be autumn, and he would be on a plane flying across the wide ocean.
But for now, it was still a sunny day in June. Chris joined the busy crowd streaming into the stadium, and sat on the bleachers with some of the other alumni.
Down on the field, the Seidou team stood in a circle, with their captain confidently leading their famous chant. As the crowd applauded, their ace pitcher, bearing the number one jersey, jogged to the mound. Pointing to the sky, he shouted something that Chris couldn't hear but could imagine.
There was something sharp poking into Chris' pocket—his pocket journal. A dried four-leaf clover lay pressed between its pages; it was the only one of its kind he had ever found. He had brought it for luck, though he knew that the way the team was now, they would hardly need it.
(But of course, everyone could use some luck here and there.)
After all, four-leaf clovers represented luck and fortune. It was a commonly known and celebrated fact. Not so many people, however, knew what their more common form, the three-leaf clover, represented:
‘ Happiness .’
As the game progressed, in the heavy heat of the summer, Chris could feel the sweat running down his neck and the back of his shirt clinging to his back. Somewhere in the distance, away from the chatter of the crowd and the serenading of the cheer team, the cicadas were crying in the trees, their low sound drifting into the sky.
At the thought, Chris smiled, feeling a mixture of pride and relief.
And also, just a bit lonely.