Bowled Over

In which the canteen staff see what's going on

Managing the kitchen at Seidou High was nothing like running a minimalist public school canteen. In typical public institutions, students lived within walking or easy commuting distance, so they brought lunch boxes from home and ate them at their desks in the classrooms. Most cafeterias in such schools were thus equipped to cook and sell little more than snacks.

Seidou, however, was a different animal, and the manager of the catering team that ran its kitchen and three dining areas had known it from the start years ago, when her company was contracted to manage the food operations here. This famous baseball-focused school took in promising players from all over the country, housed many of them in the dormitories, and provided their full complement of daily meals.

Even those who weren't boarders, but were on the baseball team – about a hundred strong – ate every meal in the baseballers' canteen. Partly because the school wanted every player to eat well, and partly because of the gruelling training which ran from early in the morning until classes began, resumed three hours after lunch and went on into the evening. During term breaks, they trained from nine to six, then the demented ones trained some more, late into the night.

With such long and erratic hours from regular practice, intensive camps and matches with other schools, the baseballers had a separate eating area. The catering manager regularly reminded her staff how important it was to prepare highly nutritious meals for this lot of students, with an emphasis on proteins and carbs to give them enough energy. Food safety was crucial too – never was she, their boss, to be told that Seidou's star players had failed to make it onto the field because they were stuck in the loo with upset tummies from eating canteen grub.

The school also had a general cafeteria which sold lunch dishes and snacks to the rest of the students, many of whom were involved in activities linked to the baseball team, like band practice, cheerleading, logistical and managerial work. For this general eatery, the manager determined that meals must be nutritious and balanced, fit for active teenagers. Often, the baseball team's student-managers – a quartet of dedicated girls who reminded her of her own daughters when they'd been in their teens – would ask to use the cooked-food area in this eatery to make onigiri for the players slogging away on the training grounds.

The food meant for the general canteen was also served at the partitioned-off eating section for the teaching and administrative staff, with a few pricier extras, as adults could afford to pay more for their meals and had more sophisticated tastebuds than most kids.

So the caterers were kept busy. A number of years ago, the school had decided that it was unfeasible – and unfair to the catering staff – to have them on standby at unpredictable hours to serve the baseballers. It therefore became a practice in the players' canteen to have the kids on a duty rota to dish out the cooked items for their own teammates. It made sense, since the players' canteen didn't charge by the meal as the general canteen did – the school paid the caterers directly after charging each player a fixed fee every term for three daily meals. The canteen manager knew that Seidou generously subsidised this fee for students who were talented enough to be invited to join its baseball team, but whose families couldn't afford to enrol them in a private establishment like this.

One such kid was a first-year student from Nagano by the name of Sawamura Eijun. The caterers knew this because the boy had loudly and exuberantly declared his name and family background to them at his first stint behind the food counter during his first week at school. While they cleared trays from the general eatery and scrubbed pots in the work area next to the canteen, the lovable kid had gamely strapped on an apron, knotted a bandana over his head, and joined them several minutes before the crowd of players streamed in. He'd saluted the cook, chatted with the crew about their favourite old television shows full of samurai and shogun, amused them with his excitability and won them over with those wide eyes and that open face with not a shred of deceit in it.

Just like that, he became more than another figure in the crowd of teenagers for them. It was usually impossible for the canteen workers to bother with students' names – how could they remember so many, when kids came and went in a whirl of three short years? But as all seasoned adults employed in schools would tell you, some kids would always distinguish themselves in ways good or bad, and Sawamura Eijun was one of them.

Among the current lot in this canteen were a few others whose names the catering team knew. The third-year boy, Takigawa Chris Yuu, stood out for his good looks, unusual name and proper manners. Such a handsome youth, with beautiful, wavy brown hair and a lovely complexion, neither too ordinarily Japanese nor too strangely foreign – a perfect blend.

Also, the small-statured Kominato brothers – one from the third year, one from the first – with such fine, light-hued hair that it shone strawberry milkshake pink under the right lighting. Yet, unlike Chris-kun, these were junnihon boys, and the cook's assistant had recently wondered aloud to her co-workers if their odd tresses were the result of dye jobs gone badly wrong when they were babies, courtesy of a mother who had probably wanted daughters. Or poodles.

From the second year, the bespectacled, good-looking Miyuki Kazuya was well known as the outstanding catcher who was so brilliant that he had been featured in sports magazines at a tender age, but was rumoured to be clueless about how to interact normally with other human beings off the field.

Miyuki was growing more notable to the caterers now, thanks to Sawamura-kun. As the staff took particular note of Sawamura in the canteen even when he was not on counter duty, they saw that the catcher was drawn to the boy. In Sawamura's earliest days at Seidou, when the other baseballers had treated him in a dismissive manner as a loud nobody, he had mysteriously attracted the attention of Miyuki the ingenious social misfit, who was generally friendly but close to no one, and usually had nobody to linger over a meal with besides his wild-child classmate – the wiry boy with the grating, cackling laugh. But early in the term, ignoring the convention of sitting with one's year-mates at meals, Miyuki had actually approached Sawamura to sit with him one day – and to the amusement of the caterers, another first-year boy, the tall, quiet one said to be from Hokkaido, had physically interposed himself between Miyuki and Sawamura.

Perhaps, suggested the assistant manager to her supervisor, the Hokkaido boy liked Miyuki or Sawamura – or both. Teenage crushes were a funny thing, weren't they?

Then a few more weeks into term, the caterers found Sawamura on counter duty three days in a row.

"Sawamura-kun?" the manager addressed him. "Weren't you here yesterday? The duty rota says…"

"I swapped with Kanemaru, ma'am!" Sawamura announced brightly, gesturing towards a slightly bleached-haired boy who, the manager gathered, was the said Kanemaru.

"Why?" she asked, baffled, for most players treated counter duty as a chore, being worn-out enough from training.

Before Sawamura, who was turning red in the face, could yell out an answer, the manager's assistant drew her away from the counter and back into the kitchen, where they were busy marinating the diced chicken for the next meal.

"Shh…" her assistant whispered. "I think Sawamura-chan exchanged duties with his classmate so he could be extra-nice to Chris-kun again. I saw it yesterday and the day before, but I wasn't sure, so let's see if it happens again."

"The Takigawa boy?"

The assistant manager nodded, and they got back to work, but kept an eye on the queue of hungry players in the dining area. And when Takigawa Chris Yuu reached the head of the line, the catering team huddled in the doorway of the kitchen and watched as Sawamura proceeded to demonstrate how he felt about his third-year senpai by heaping his tray high with a mountain of rice and piles of meat and vegetables that overshadowed to a ridiculous degree the amounts he was dishing out for everyone else. Chris betrayed a tinge of pink high on his cheekbones, but otherwise accepted the offering quietly, instead of muttering in embarrassment as the assistant manager said he had a couple of days earlier.

Sawamura-kun, the manager realised, had a boy-crush on Chris-kun.

Miyuki seemed to take no interest in this, as he bent over his lunch as usual with his cackling wild-child classmate and occasionally checked that his first-year Hokkaido kouhai, whom he appeared to have been put in charge of mentoring, was eating properly.

But a few weeks later, Chris-kun started to return the food-affection. The Kanemaru boy was the go-between, handing Sawamura a heaped bowl of rice "from Chris-senpai", with the message that Sawamura must eat more now that he was training harder than before in the first string.

Why didn't Chris-kun give Sawamura-kun the rice himself? the manager wondered. Until she noticed that Chris, who normally wore a brooding expression on his face, was bright-eyed, almost smiling, and struggling to maintain a neutral mien when Sawamura cast his huge, shining eyes on him in a flood of open gratitude. It would have been impossible for him to deliver the rice himself without losing that neutrality completely, because Sawamura split the room into two groups – the scowling ones who looked as if they wanted to stuff him into a large cooking pot with the heat on so he would actually have a reason for being so noisy, and the smaller group that fought to keep their faces straight because his big-hearted character made them want to grin like idiots.

Chris obviously fell squarely into the latter group, but as the adults knew, teens his age seemed to think they needed to project a serious image to be respected by others.

Having Kanemaru as messenger, however, made Chris-kun's gift of the bouquet… no, bowl... of rice more obvious to the others, and that was when Miyuki reacted. Each time the scenario occurred over the weeks that followed, Miyuki-kun would make an especial effort to pay extra attention to his Hokkaido charge, eyeing him like a grumpy bespectacled hawk as he ate, and prompting him to eat more. As if to distract himself from what was transpiring between his senpai and his other kouhai.

Honestly, if the canteen staff hadn't been experienced enough to have heard, for years, the constant admonition of senior players to their juniors to "make sure you finish three bowls of rice", they'd have thought the older kids were in a competition to fatten the younger ones up for the kill.

Speaking of killing, another player paid plenty of dangerous-looking attention to Sawamura-kun – Miyuki's cackling classmate, who was clearly wrestling-mad and singled out Sawamura for the most exotic moves. At first it looked like bullying, which got the adults' hackles up, but then it started to look like horseplay disguising a sort of warped affection. It gradually occurred to the caterers that perhaps, to the wiry wild child, love was all about twisting the extremely flexible object of his affections into a pretzel – without, of course, ever realising that he was wordlessly confessing: I want to get my hands and legs all over you but I haven't the emotional vocabulary to say so in a normal way, so I'm just going to immobilise you with my best camel clutch hold. Squirm away beneath my body, Bakamura!

The holds were evolving. They had begun at the start of term as clear-cut wrestling techniques, but increasingly, there were oddly un-wrestling-like moves, with the older boy sometimes even seizing Sawamura-kun's face. If he noticed that they had an audience, he would shift the hold so it seemed he was merely squashing Sawamura's cheeks to keep him silent. But the adults saw that before the grip shifted, it would often have started out with his fingers on the younger boy's chin, as if he unconsciously wanted to tip his kouhai's face up and…

… ah, but it hadn't got that far yet. Pity. Would have made quite a picture, that – horseplay transforming into foreplay – and Sawamura-kun's reactions were sure to be spectacular. Not to mention Miyuki's and Chris'.

The caterers also observed that, strangely enough, Sawamura himself didn't initiate physical contact – he never started the wrestling scraps with his cackling senpai, and seldom touched even his fellow first-years despite his frequent squabbles with the Hokkaido boy about some mysterious tyre and who would become the team's ace. But there was one exception to his mostly-hands-off behaviour – Miyuki.

The bespectacled boy had ways of winding up the younger kid that no one else was capable of doing to the same degree. A quiet word here and a smirk there, and suddenly, Sawamura would be flying at Miyuki, grabbing the older boy by the front of his shirt or sweater, and shaking him like a (solidly built) rag doll. It happened with surprising regularity, but despite Miyuki's fearsome reputation for possessing a set of powerful shoulders and arms that could fire deadly-accurate missiles from home plate clean across the diamond, the second-year never resisted but simply lapped it all up – Sawamura's growls, Sawamura's shaking, Sawamura's explosive protests about whatever had come out of Miyuki's prettily-shaped mouth to rile him.

He seemed… to be enjoying it.

The catering manager had seen enough mealtime shenanigans to think she was jaded with it all, but she'd been mistaken. The scene was becoming watchable, thanks to the endearing Sawamura-kun, who had become a focal point for at least three boys who seemed to be struggling with the unwelcome knowledge that they might possibly be trying to get into another boy's pants. Hmm, thought the manager, the mix of items on the menu this year is looking quite tasty…