Da-vai! (Nine Innings and One More)

By eight o'clock the scoreboard at the municipal stadium in Hiratsuka said thirty-one degrees, and the cicadas in the trees behind the stands were already at full volume, as if summer had hired them for the day.

First round of the Kanagawa summer tournament: Shirahama against Nishi-Sagami Technical High. Our half of the stand was a slope of white shirts. The brass band tuned in the heat, sixty students fanned themselves with school caps, and the dance club shook silver pom-poms that flashed like a fish market at dawn. Fumika walked the rows handing out the words of the cheer songs, laminated.

"In case of rain," she said.

I looked at the sky, which was the colour of a hot plate. "Is rain likely?"

"Preparation is not about likelihood, Aliev-kun."

Kotone arrived at twenty past with a white sun umbrella and sat down beside Fumika. They didn't speak. Fumika took a cold bottle of barley tea out of her cool bag, without looking, and put it into Kotone's hands, and Kotone bowed to it. I took the seat on Kotone's other side, spread my towel on it, and did not sit on it again for three hours.

In the first inning a blue note landed on my knee. Not a haiku: You burn. A small tube of sunscreen followed it. By the fifth inning, when every uncovered boy in our stand had turned the colour of pickled ginger, I understood that she had been looking at my neck.

Down in the dugout Coach Kuroda turned, found me in the stand, and pointed at me, then at the outfield, then at his heart. Daichi said he still talked about the persimmon tree.

By the fourth inning we were losing 1–3, and the heat had got into the trumpets, which played slightly flat, like tired uncles at a wedding. Nishi-Sagami's stand was twice the size of ours, and their drums sounded as if they had never lost anything.

In the sixth, with a runner on first, our pitcher bounced one in the dirt. The runner broke for second. Daichi dropped to his knees, took the ball on his chest like a door taking a football, found it at his feet, came up and threw, all in one movement. The ball went past the pitcher's ear and into the shortstop's glove a metre before the runner's hand.

I was on my feet. I don't remember standing. Something came out of me that had last come out at the Pakhtakor stadium in Tashkent, when I was eleven and my father let me shout:

"Davay! DAVAY! DAVAY!"

It's Russian. In Tashkent everyone says it, taxi drivers, grandmothers, football crowds. It means come on, let's go, give it to them, I believe in you. It is the most useful word between the Caspian and China.

The rows around me stared. Then a first-year boy behind me tried it, carefully, like a new food: "Da-vai?" Then the girl beside him. Then the band's drummer, who has a gift, gave it a beat: DA-VAI, boom-boom, DA-VAI, boom-boom. By the seventh inning the whole Shirahama side, three hundred people counting parents and the old men from the shopping street, was chanting a Russian word none of them knew, and the trumpets had found a tune for it that sounded like a wedding in Samarkand. Even Kotone, under her white umbrella, was tapping the rhythm on her knee with two fingers.

I wrote it down that night, in the bath, on a damp orange note:

Summer stadium—

three hundred people shouting

a word they don't know

In the middle of the seventh a white armband came along the aisle: Student Council, on duty. Kaito Minase wore his summer shirt buttoned to the collar in thirty-one degrees and somehow looked cool, which seemed to break a law of physics. He bowed to the teachers, bowed to Fumika, and sat down, not in my seat, where my towel was, but in the one beyond it. One seat from Kotone.

"Shirase-san," he said, and held out a sports drink, beaded with cold, across my towel.

She took it with a small bow.

It was an ordinary sports drink. Blue label. I disliked it personally.

For a whole at-bat I watched the two of them instead of the game: her hands round the bottle, his calm profile, the empty seat between them that was mine. Then the stand exploded, and I turned round to find that we had made a double play and I had missed all of it.

"Aliev-kun," said Fumika, without looking at me. "The game is on the field."

Top of the ninth. Still 1–3. Two out, runners on second and third, and our number nine at bat, a first-year so small that his helmet wobbled when he breathed. He closed his eyes, I swear, and swung. The ball rose like a bad idea, hung, and dropped between three fielders who had each decided it belonged to someone else. Two runs. 3–3.

The stand made a sound I had only heard before at weddings, when the plov comes out.

Our pitcher held them in the ninth. In the tenth, by the rules of high-school baseball, each side starts with runners on first and second, to finish things before anyone dies of heat. A bunt moved ours to second and third. Then Daichi came up.

"DA-VAI!" roared three hundred people who had learned the word two hours before.

He didn't hit it hard. He hit it high, to deep centre, and the centre fielder caught it, and our runner on third was already running, and he slid in under the throw with his arms out like a man diving into the sea. 4–3.

Bottom of the tenth. Their runners on first and second, nobody out. A strikeout. A ground ball, runners moving up. Two out. Then their batter got under the ball and sent it straight up, a pop-up behind home plate, white against the white sky.

Daichi threw his mask away. He turned, circled, one glove up against the sun. Three hundred people stopped breathing at the same time. I counted: one, two, three, four.

It came down into his mitt.

Shirahama High had won a summer game for the first time in eleven years. Daichi fell to his knees at home plate and cried, in full catcher's gear, shin guards and all. In the dugout Coach Kuroda cried into his cap. Beside me, Kotone had closed her umbrella to clap, and I was crying too.

"It's sweat," I told Fumika, who had not asked.

Then the two teams lined up at home plate and bowed to each other, and the loudspeakers played the Shirahama school song, because in Japan the winners sing. Our team turned to face the stand, caps off, faces filthy, and sang it badly and at full volume. I didn't know the words. Fumika reached across and turned my laminated cheer sheet over. The school song was printed on the back.

"In case of victory," she said.

Outside the stadium the air smelt of hot asphalt and sunscreen. The team came out in their dirty uniforms and Daichi saw me and ran.

"SADO! Did you see?! Did you SEE?!"

"I saw, Daichi."

He stopped dead. "…You said Daichi."

"You won," I said. "I think we're past '-kun'."

He cried again, harder, into my shoulder, which smelt afterwards of dirt and victory.

That was when Minase came across the car park. He stopped in front of Kotone, which was also in front of me, and bowed.

"Shirase-san. The Sea Festival fireworks are on the second of August. Would you watch them with me?"

The noise did not stop. The band was loading drums into a van; someone was photographing the scoreboard. But around Kotone a small circle of silence opened, like the ring a pebble makes. Her hand tightened on the umbrella. Her ears went red, then white. Not here. Not in front of everyone. I could see her try, and I could see the words go back down into her chest.

Minase smiled, the perfect smile, the one his fan club put on banners. "Think about it." Then he turned to me. "Congratulations on your cheering, Aliev-kun. Very… international."

At her feet, in the shadow of the umbrella, the blue sports drink stood unopened. I noticed that, and I am not proud of how much I enjoyed noticing it.

Coach Kuroda gave me the empty seat on the team bus. "The Da-vai boy rides with us," he said, and nobody argued.

The bus smelt of sweat, liniment and fried chicken. Half the team was asleep before the motorway. Daichi sat beside me, still in his undershirt, his eyes red, holding his mitt on his knees like a sleeping cat.

"We won," he whispered. "I have to tell her now."

I nodded. But I was thinking about something else: that I had no idea what Kotone would say to Minase, and that I wanted to know more than I had ever wanted any exam result.