Sports Festival: She Dropped the Ball
Having poured every last ounce of strength into her buzzer beater, Yeoncheong was resting in the classroom behind the teacher's back. The bell that rang like clockwork every day was silent, so there was nothing to wake her mid-sleep.
When lunchtime arrived, Suyeon and Seoha came to fetch her. Suyeon cracked the classroom door open, poked just her head inside, and called out.
“Yeoncheong? Still asleep?”
No answer came. Suyeon and Seoha stepped into the classroom.
The scene that greeted them drew a quiet smile from both.
“Why does she always sleep in the most uncomfortable position ever?”
Yeoncheong was curled up asleep on her own desk — because she hadn't wanted to mess up anyone else's. She had surely started out with both legs drawn up against her body, but as time passed, the human instinct to seek out a comfortable position had taken over. One leg had splayed out sideways, leaving her in a half-hearted, precarious posture that looked ready to topple at any moment.
Yeoncheong slept on, oblivious to the world, even as the footsteps of the two approaching girls drew near. Suyeon crept quietly toward her friend, who was curled up like a shrimp, and crouched down beside her. A small gesture motioned Seoha over, and Seoha carefully settled in at Suyeon's side.
Between the low hum of the air conditioner, the sound of soft breathing drifted through the room, and the two of them whispered to each other in tiny voices.
“I have to wake her up, but I really don't want to. Right?”
Seoha gave the smallest of nods.
The sight of their friend sleeping so soundly, so utterly defenseless, was more than the word adorable could properly capture.
“Lunch break is long. Should we wait ten minutes before waking her?”
“Yeah, let's do that.”
Even if their classmates came back from the cafeteria at top speed, they'd have ten minutes. Suyeon agreed to Seoha's suggestion, then, as if suddenly remembering, pulled her smartphone from her pocket. There was no reason in the world not to capture a moment like this. Rarely for her, Seoha even asked her to send it later.
But the classroom was silent, and Yeoncheong had already recovered a decent amount of strength from her nap. At the whispering right in front of her face, her eyes fluttered slowly open.
With each blink, focus began to gather in those blue eyes. And then—
“Suyeon... and Seoha...?”
The moment she saw Suyeon and Seoha holding their smartphones inches from her face, Yeoncheong jolted upright in fright. The desk lurched with the sudden movement—
“Yeoncheong!”
“Agh!”
—and Yeoncheong fell straight to the floor.
The cafeteria, with most of the students already gone, was a far more pleasant place. The three of them ate lunch and returned to the classroom, where Hasol and Nayun — who had come back first — greeted them.
“You're late. Was it still crowded?”
Seoha shook her head and pointed at the pair beside her. Yeoncheong, clinging to Suyeon's side, kept repeating the same question over and over.
“There's really no photo?”
“I told you, no. I was about to take one and then you woke up.”
The back-and-forth showed no sign of ending. Nayun, who had been sitting in Yeoncheong's seat, asked, “Did you two fight?”
“No. We went to get her for lunch, but she was asleep. Suyeon tried to take a picture and Yeoncheong woke up.”
“Ah.”
Hasol and Nayun nodded, grasping the gist of what had happened.
Yeoncheong's relentless interrogation didn't stop until Suyeon finally showed her the gallery.
Before anyone knew it, only the afternoon of the sports festival remained. Students who had soaked up enough of the classroom's cool air began trickling out toward the athletic field one by one.
“Our class's game is up next?”
“Yeah, second-year kickball, the match for third place.”
Seoha, who was playing, had already headed out, and so had Hasol and Suyeon, who were refereeing the third-year dodgeball. With only the relay left on her schedule, Yeoncheong stayed until the very end before leaving the classroom with Nayun.
Nayun lifted her chin slightly and scanned the field.
“Looks like it's already started.”
“Already?”
Their footsteps quickened a little.
Even though a bit of lunch break remained, the athletic field was buzzing. Their classmates were out on the track despite the blazing sun. Just as Nayun had said — the players must have gathered quickly, because the game was already underway.
As Yeoncheong headed for the track, a question suddenly surfaced, and she voiced it.
“Now that I think about it — how did our class lose? Seoha's on the team, isn't she?”
“From what the kids who were cheering said, it was apparently like playing with Seoha subtracted from the game.”
“With Seoha... subtracted?”
Yeoncheong tilted her head, echoing Nayun's words.
There'd been no reason to bench someone who played so well — Seoha wasn't even injured. But it didn't take Yeoncheong long to grasp exactly what playing without Seoha meant.
The defensive shift.
In baseball, it's the act of repositioning fielders based on a batter's hit distribution. There was no reason it couldn't work in kickball — kickball was still baseball. Kick a ball enough times, and every player has a direction the ball tends to fly.
Bottom of the third inning, score 0–0. One out, runner on first.
Seoha stepped up to the plate again, and at the sight of her, the opposing fielders began to move.
Usually a shift means leaning the fielders left or right, but...
Yeoncheong murmured as she took in the newly adjusted positions.
“Yikes... this is way too obvious.”
The clutch hit that flips a game, or drives the final nail into a lead — that was always Seoha. The reason was her distance, clearly on another level from everyone else's. Get hit by a ball enough times, and while you might never learn to avoid it entirely, you do learn how to take it a little less painfully.
The three existing outfielders were pushed even deeper, while the shortstop and third baseman drifted out to the outfield. The message was clear: singles were permitted, extra-base hits were not.
Nayun, who had likewise been studying the opposing fielders, spoke up.
“They've been doing that since the last game. Word is the homeroom teachers of that team and the last one are die-hard baseball fans.”
It had struck her as a pretty audacious strategy, but there was good reasoning behind it.
And Seoha was no fool.
Kicking hard didn't automatically mean a home run, and with the game still comfortably in hand, there was no need to send the ball flying anyway.
A light kick dropped the ball into a patch of empty field. But...
“Ah...”
A string of outs from the batters that followed brought the side change.
With Seoha's power suppressed to the absolute maximum, the game between the two classes stayed dead even.
But as is true of every sport:
Once the pillar called Seoha was sealed off, her classmates' momentum gradually sank along with it. Meanwhile, the opponents, whose strategy had worked to perfection, began slowly turning the tide.
Top of the fourth, 0–0. Two outs, runners on second and third.
The opponent's kick dropped neatly into the exact spot the fielders had just vacated, still sprinting to cover it. A lucky base hit. Two students crossed home, and the opponents pulled ahead.
The silence falling over Class 1 stood in stark contrast to the opposing class's celebration.
Bottom of the fourth, 0–2. Two outs, runners on first and second.
A cascade of errors from the opposition handed Class 1 its chance. When Seoha stepped to the plate once more, the opposing fielders all fell back exactly as before.
This time, Seoha too built up a running start and waited for the ball.
She charged at the ball as it rolled slowly toward her, struck it with perfect timing, and with a sharp thwack it sailed away in a towering arc.
Perhaps it was the sky's idea of a joke. The ball that had been stretching toward the fence met a headwind, and its momentum died. In the end, it dropped right into the glove of an opposing player who had been waiting for the bait to fall like a school of piranha.
A frustrating end to the inning.
Both teams came up empty through the fifth, and in the top of the sixth the opponents came to bat.
As if the heavens themselves were lending a hand, Class 1 found itself in a jam — but a spectacular defensive play held the opponents scoreless.
The final at-bat of the sixth. Score 0–2. Three outs remaining.
Yeoncheong's class had already chipped a run off an opponent drunk on the taste of victory.
The score now stood at 1–2, with all three outs still to play.
A spark of hope flickered back to life among the cheering students, and the opponents — having been scolded by their own classmates and teacher — refocused on the game.
The steadied opponents cleanly claimed one out. Amid the rising tension, Seoha came over to Yeoncheong.
“Seoha, that was so close.”
“It's not over yet.”
Yeoncheong explained the math to Seoha, who hadn't given up: for her turn at bat to come around, at least two runners would have to reach base safely.
“I know. Two just have to get on, right?”
As if Seoha's words had been heard by the heavens, the next batter — slapping away a routine ground ball — refused to give up on the sprint and made it safely to first.
The opposing homeroom teacher squeezed her eyes shut, tilted her head back to the sky, and swallowed a mouthful of profanity.
One runner down. Seoha's prophecy needed one more — and the out count stood at two.
“Anyway, that's why I came. I wanted to borrow some of your luck.”
Seoha looked at Yeoncheong without even glancing at the game.
“Luck?”
“Yeah. Comeback luck.”
She meant the luck of Yeoncheong, who had staged a miraculous reversal that very morning. Yeoncheong nodded readily.
“What should I do? Would holding your hand work?”
“Hmm... hug me.”
Seoha spread her arms wide. It wasn't what Yeoncheong had expected, and she hesitated — and in that very moment, another out was recorded.
Nayun, her eyes flicking between the game and the two of them, offered a comment.
“You hugged me just fine. What are you being shy about?”
“Hey, that time I was just caught up in the momen—”
The sentence never found its period. At Nayun's light shove, Yeoncheong toppled forward — straight into Seoha's arms.
The soft, yielding sensation against her chest flustered her at first. But then came the sound of a heartbeat pounding — she couldn't tell whether it was her own, or Seoha's, or both of theirs at once.
Then came that distinctive scent of Seoha's skin, threaded with the faint beginnings of sweat. As their scents and warmth mingled, Yeoncheong decided this was probably enough and tried to pull away.
But Seoha showed no sign of letting go — if anything, her arms tightened, wrapping Yeoncheong in a firm embrace.
These were all the sensations she'd felt nothing of when she'd hugged Nayun, swept up in the joy of victory. By the time Yeoncheong's face had flushed hot enough to be mistaken for heatstroke, Seoha wore a satisfied smile.
“Any advice, by chance?”
“Advice...”
Yeoncheong, her mouth pressed against Seoha's shoulder, thought for a moment, then lifted her head. Hiding her crimson face in Seoha's silk-black hair, she whispered into her ear.
“Really?”
“Yeah. The odds are pretty good.”
“...Okay. I trust you.”
The instant Seoha and Yeoncheong separated — as if on cue — the batter two spots ahead of Seoha sprinted safely to first, leaving exactly one out on the board.
Now it was Seoha's turn.
Nayun handed over a water bottle with a snicker, and Yeoncheong pressed the cold plastic against her burning cheeks.
“So what advice did you give her?”
“You'll see.”
Having cooled both cheeks, Yeoncheong took a long drink.
This time, the defense waited for Seoha. Only when she backed off the plate and wound up for a powerful kick did the shortstop finally move out to the outfield to plug the gap.
The umpire signaled that the pitch could be thrown. The ball rolled toward her, skipping over a small bump in the dirt. Seoha charged forward and struck it.
The ball that should have stretched forward instead shot almost straight up. It climbed endlessly, hung suspended at its peak as if frozen in place, then began to fall.
It looked, at a glance, like a perfectly ordinary pop fly. Just as their cheering classmates started to groan in disappointment, Yeoncheong murmured:
“There it is.”
Yeoncheong rose from her seat and moved toward the field. Then she shouted at the classmates standing frozen in place.
“Guys! Everybody run!”
Bewildered, the classmates were startled into motion by her cry and began running all the same. The opposing homeroom teacher, who had been basking in the sweetness of victory, belatedly registered what was happening.
“Everyone! You HAVE to catch that one! Drop it and it's over!”
At the teacher's shout, the fielders nearby converged on the ball. But with it accelerating as it fell, none of the students dared reach out their hands so easily.
Just before it hit the ground, someone thrust out a hand in a panic—
—and the ball bounced off the dirt, popping back up over the students' heads. The runners, who had been jogging at a leisurely pace, finally broke into a sprint. Someone scooped up the ball and hurled it home, but by then the game was already over.
“AAAGH! Unbelievable! I have to watch my team lose on an error even at SCHOOL?!”
Perhaps an old trauma had resurfaced — the opposing homeroom teacher's anguished scream rang out across the athletic field.
As everyone rushed toward Seoha, the hero of the walk-off, Nayun stared at Yeoncheong with wide eyes.
“You knew it would turn out like this?”
“Obviously. A ball kicked that high is scary even for a guy to catch.”
It was a lesson learned from experience.