Making Things Right

In which the catering manager gets all worked up

She hadn't felt this enraged in years. In fact, the catering manager wasn't sure when she'd last been as furious as she was now. Must have been that time when an impatient stranger in a shop had shoved her youngest daughter aside roughly because the girl – only four years old then – had lingered a second too long in the narrow doorway, her attention caught by a pretty toy in the store's side-window display. She'd scooped her child up, kissed her better, and stormed after the man to give him a piece of her mind for being so unkind to a little girl.

This present incident did not involve her children, who were all strong young women now, capable of taking care of themselves. But she felt as upset as if someone had hurt her own flesh and blood, because it involved Sawamura-kun – the biggest-hearted, sweetest-natured kid she and her catering team had ever met in Seidou.

It had happened just this morning, and she might not ever have known if she hadn't come in today to cover the Sunday shift normally supervised by her assistant manager. Half her team took Fridays and Saturdays off while the other half – including herself – rested on Sundays and Mondays. However, her assistant had rung last night to say she was down with the beginnings of what promised to be a bad cold, so she'd come to work today in her place.

Even so, she might not have seen what had gone on if she hadn't run out of the kitchen in a vain attempt to catch up with the van driven by the oven repairman, who had left his mobile phone behind on one of the kitchen counters. Her futile dash after the vehicle disappearing into the distance had taken her past the training grounds, which were near the kitchen, players' canteen and dormitories.

It was when she'd given up the chase and was heading back to the kitchen that she'd spotted Sawamura in one of the fields and noticed that something was amiss. She didn't know a massive amount about baseball, but she had seen the kids practising often enough to know that Sawamura was throwing the ball in a strange way – not in his usual vibrant, whip-like manner from behind his back and over his head. He was pitching all funny, throwing from the side, a not-quite-right copy of the style used by Seidou's plump-faced second-year pitcher.

As she drew nearer to the fence out of curiosity, she realised that the way he was throwing the ball wasn't the only clue that something was wrong. It was also how the rest of the players and the coaches were standing there staring at him, disbelief evident on their faces.

Worst of all was the strained cheerfulness in Sawamura's smile, which looked horribly wrong paired with the alarmingly feverish expression in his eyes, all the flash and fire in those amber irises warped into an unsettling blend of humiliation and desperate gratitude. It wasn't anything like the kind of distress and self-directed anger she had seen in him and all the other players after Seidou had lost in the final game of the qualifiers for the summer Koushien tournament – that kind of misery and depression was normal after such a blow, and the players had overcome it one by one, some more quickly than others.

This was totally different. The boy looked as if something vital in him was starting to shrivel.

Someone – most likely Miyuki Kazuya, although she couldn't be sure, so stunned was she by the alien look in Sawamura's eyes – asked him whether this was his idea. His reply was something about it being "the sergeant" who'd helped him realise that he still had this means of being useful to the team. She saw a ripple of shock and unease as heads turned towards the new assistant coach – that odd-looking, heavy-gaited man who wandered around the school wearing shirts with tacky prints, stroking his chin and peering into every corner when he wasn't lounging on one bench or another. The initial bafflement that had been on the faces of the other players present suddenly changed, and she saw the spark of anger in several pairs of eyes – an emotion that immediately leashed itself the moment everyone else saw plainly that Kataoka-kantoku was the most furious of them all.

The head coach took the ire of everyone present and expressed it for them so that they wouldn't have to – and he did it without a word, by shooting a murderous look at the new assistant coach.

Some exchanges she couldn't follow about pitching style and game simulation then took place rapidly between the head coach, Sawamura and Miyuki-kun, with the final decision being that Sawamura must go back to pitching in his normal style at once. For good measure, Kataoka-kantoku turned another killer glare in the odd man's direction.

At first, the catering manager couldn't really understand it. She waited until she saw the familiar light return in a blaze to Sawamura's eyes, then she made her way back to the kitchen, thinking that perhaps the new assistant coach had been training Sawamura with some new method that the head coach disagreed with.

It wasn't until lunch hour that she learnt what had really occurred. The student on counter duty was the homely-looking Kariba Wataru, who had been catching Sawamura's pitches that morning, during that unsettling sequence. In the few minutes before the rest came in, while Kariba-kun was getting ready behind the counter, she asked him what had happened to Sawamura-kun.

In hushed tones, Kariba explained that the new assistant coach, Ochiai-san, had wandered into the indoor training area just after breakfast, while he was helping to catch for Sawamura. Ochiai had then basically told the pitcher that he was of no worth to the team since he couldn't overcome his phobia of pitching "to the inside corner" (which the manager more or less understood to be a throw with a trajectory that passed closest to the batter). So, Ochiai had said, Sawamura might as well make himself useful in practice by throwing in a way that would benefit the batters' preparations against the left-handed sidearm pitcher from the team they would next face.

Sawamura, already feeling useless after not being able to pitch as he normally did, had taken Ochiai's words to heart and actually believed that it was the only way he could help the team now – even though repeatedly pitching in a manner foreign to him could in fact damage his ability to pitch in his strongest, most natural style.

Fortunately, Kataoka-kantoku's anger had woken Sawamura up from the misapprehension that this was how he could best contribute to the team, and normal training had resumed right after that. Coach Ochiai, Kariba whispered even more softly, did not appear to care very much for Sawamura.

Oh, she was mad as hell now that she knew the truth. No one – least of all an adult who was supposed to be guiding and nurturing students – should speak cruel words aimed at crushing a child's spirit. Before hearing from Kariba, she had thought that maybe this new assistant coach was just a little too much on the strict side in training the players, but she now knew that Ochiai hadn't merely been too harsh or too hasty – he had truly not had Sawamura's best interests at heart.

If it weren't against her ethics as a food-and-beverage professional, she'd see to it that that man swallowed some nasty stuff like… like a hefty dose of laxatives the next time she had any control over what he ate in the staff canteen. Well, if she couldn't do that, then at least she would… she would make sure the next plate of food she served him had as much salt in it as rice, or… or that he received generous piles of fermented anchovies in his fruit smoothies.

How dare he hurt Sawamura-kun that way?

Until she could get back at Ochiai, however, the catering manager could only do what she did best – and that was to whip up something tasty. Just for Sawamura. She made space for herself in a corner of the kitchen, quickly measured out, melted and stirred together some of her best dessert ingredients, then went over to the preparation area of the general canteen, which wasn't in use on Sundays. There, she baked a quartet of rich chocolate cupcakes, sliding them out of the oven after 20 minutes, topping them with the fudgiest dark-chocolate mix she could concoct, and hurrying back to the players' canteen in time to see Sawamura slotting his lunch tray into one of the trolley-racks at the side of the canteen.

"Sawamura-kun!" she called, beckoning him into the kitchen area. "Come here a moment, will you?"

"Yes, ma'am!" he answered brightly, making her glad to see that the look in his eyes was back to normal. Like the other players, he'd changed out of his dirt-smeared training uniform for lunch, and was clad in clean sweatpants and a bright red T-shirt, which she hoped reflected a more cheerful state of mind.

She sat him down on a stool in front of a countertop, out of sight of the other players gradually filtering out of the dining area, and presented him with the cupcakes on a plate.

"Shh!" she whispered to him with a twinkle in her eye. "Don't tell your teammates. These are all for you – a special treat from me. Enjoy!"

The boy's face lit up like a Christmas tree, and his grin was as wide as she'd ever seen it. "For me? Thank you, ma'am! I never refuse dessert!"

"If you don't want to mess up your diet and your afternoon training by eating them all at once, I'll put the rest into a paper bag for you, so you can eat them later," she said, as the head cook, assistant cooks and dishwasher cast her questioning looks, no doubt wondering if something had happened for her to take Sawamura aside – the boy was a favourite with all of them, but they figured something unusual must have occurred for her to be spoiling him like this.

She wasn't sure if she should give them the details – some of her crew were not as restrained as she was, and she feared that if she told them the whole story, Ochiai would very soon be discovered on the verge of death in some Tokyo garbage dump site after having been extensively tortured with blunt forks, chopsticks and hot woks.

Sawamura devoured two cupcakes, pronounced them the best he had ever had, and happily received the remaining two "for teatime" in a doggy bag. By then, the canteen was empty, and the boy was glancing at the clock on the wall to make sure he wouldn't be late in returning to practice. No worries on that score – he had a quarter of an hour. And he wasn't the only one still in the vicinity, because Miyuki was walking back into the canteen now, obviously in search of him. The catcher hadn't changed back into his training gear yet – his head was bare, and he had on a royal-blue T-shirt and navy sweatpants.

"Sawamura," Miyuki said in a sober tone that the catering staff didn't usually hear him use in the canteen.

The manager made herself busy in the kitchen and flashed a warning look at her crew to stay put too, because Miyuki looked like he had something important to say to the pitcher, and if it was about the awful incident this morning, she didn't want to be in their way.

She could still see and hear them from where she was working, but she tried to look as occupied as possible with soaping and scrubbing, as she wanted to give them space. She'd been watching them for months, and had noticed that Chris-kun – who no longer ate in this canteen after the third-years' retirement from the baseball team – seemed to be hanging back for now, leaving the field to Miyuki where Sawamura was concerned; the cackling Kuramochi boy too had appeared of late to be giving his classmate some room for manoeuvre.

So Miyuki was being given his chance with Sawamura, and if he messed it up – or worse, if he messed Sawamura up, she would rap him over his pretty head with her heaviest wooden ladle, the consequences be damned.

"I just asked Kariba about this morning," Miyuki said, without so much as a shadow of his usual smirks or grins as he walked up to the first-year, who had stopped in his tracks by the side wall of the dining area when the older boy had first called his name.

"Yeah?" Sawamura was eyeing Miyuki rather warily, as if he wasn't sure that he wanted to talk to him alone.

"Don't ever do that again," the catcher told him, speaking low and firmly, fixing his brown eyes on his teammate as he stood directly in front of him.

"Do what?" Sawamura asked, cautiously.

"Don't ever be so shaken again that you believe it when someone tells you you're of no worth. Not ever again." Miyuki was keeping the volume and steadiness of his speech controlled, but the manager could hear the undertone of fury threatening to turn his voice shaky – she could identify it because she herself had swallowed a bucketful of that very same rage earlier to keep it under wraps. "Anyone can say anything, but don't you ever believe such words again."

She thought that at this show of support, Sawamura would blush, or laugh, or perhaps cry – as she'd seen him do at random moments. But to her surprise, he offered none of those expected reactions. Instead, he glared at Miyuki and growled: "Well, at least Droopy Brows was honest enough to tell me exactly what he was thinking, unlike some people."

Sawamura made to leave, but Miyuki, with all the swiftness of his athletic reflexes, slammed his palms against the wall on either side of Sawamura's head, forcing the pitcher back against that unyielding surface.

"Miyuki! W-what the hell…" Sawamura stammered.

Miyuki leaned in until his face was close to the pitcher's, the extra inch-and-a-half of height he had allowing him to tilt his head slightly down towards Sawamura, so their foreheads were almost brushing.

"I don't know how to do this," Miyuki muttered.

"Wh-what?"

"You were right."

"Huh?"

"You were right," Miyuki murmured. "About me not being honest with you. But I don't know how to do this – how to say or not say what I want to. There are things I can't utter because I'm afraid they'll mess you up, or that voicing them will mess me up, or they're things I shouldn't say because for some reason I can barely grasp, I've wound up as the captain of this team and I don't know how, but I'm now actually responsible for the lot of you."

"Miyuki…" Sawamura whispered, wide-eyed, startled, looking into those keen eyes a breath away from his own.

"Give me time. Will you do that? I want us not to mess up our autumn campaign. I want me not to mess up being the captain. I want me not to mess you up. Just… just let me be that usual snarky, nasty self that annoys you so much, for a bit longer? Until I see a way not to screw things up beyond repair?"

By now, the manager and her crew, despite their best efforts at restraint in the beginning, had caved in and were jammed in a crush in the kitchen doorway, fairly gawking.

Sawamura stared at Miyuki in astonishment, lost for words. Then his eyes softened, he swallowed a lump in his throat, and he slowly tipped his head forward to touch his forehead to Miyuki's.

They stayed that way for several long seconds before Sawamura said softly: "I'm pretty sure I'm not smart enough to understand everything you're saying, but I can feel that you mean every word."

"So…"

"S-so I'll wait. You can be as bloody annoying as you like until you sort out whatever that mess is in your head."

"And if you don't like hearing what I have to say when I'm ready to say it…?"

"We'll just… well, we'll just deal with it when it happens."

"In the meantime…"

"In the meantime, you'll irritate the hell out of me and I'll rattle every bone in your body when I grab you by the collar and shake the nastiness out of you."

"Sounds like a plan."

"And… and I'll let you call me stupid all you like but I won't believe you any more."

"Uh-uh – that's always a fact – you are pretty stupid," Miyuki smirked.

"Miyuki Kazuya, you bastard."

"Let's return to practice, idiot. We'll be late."

"Yeah? And who's the one who held me up here?"

"Is that chocolate cake I smell in that doggy bag?"

"Mitts off my cupcakes. They're mine."

Miyuki grinned and huffed, pushed himself back away from Sawamura and the wall, and walked beside the pitcher, bumping shoulders every few steps, as they left the canteen.

The catering manager and her crew inhaled again after having unconsciously held their breaths for about a minute, and she went back to work with the goofiest smile she'd allowed on her face in ages.

It looked like she wouldn't need to bring out that heavy wooden ladle after all.

But Ochiai would still be getting the more-salt-than-rice and fermented-anchovy-smoothie special treatment. Because it was always a bad idea to hurt the darling of people who had any say over what you put into your mouth.