Ogata Natsuko hitched her large duffel bag over her shoulder, pulling her cell phone out of her spandex and checking her messages. No new ones. She looked around the dreary world around her, awash in gray undertones, the lugubrious sky looked ready to spit out torrents of rain strong enough to whip her hair.
She stood at the corner of her school, peering out to the road beyond the parking lot in hopes of seeing her father's sleek sports car pulling into the school's district. No such luck. He was probably still at his game. If there was one thing she hated more than the fact that her father played go in general, it was that the games never had a set time. Sometimes they ended early, and sometimes ridiculously late. She understood the mechanics of the game and its courtesies, and knew that he was probably caught up in the after game match for his third title.
As she watched the clouds maunder about above her, she wondered if he won or not.
Won't that be great, she thought sarcastically, more go nerds to come up and talk to me.
The cheerleading competition was over, and she was stuck in the icy fall weather in her short skirt that left nothing to the imagination, and the tight cheerleading shirt with the school's logo across it. Her shoes were a bit too large for her feet, and were mangled and beat up from years of wearing them.
Finally, Natsuko decided that her father was going to be drastically late, and she might as well find somewhere warm to sit and pull out Daisuke's sweatshirt that he'd given to her at the competition. She'd been fooling around with him for a couple weeks now, but, like her father, never seemed to hold interest for very long. It was a curse, she groused, as she sat on the bench behind her and cuddled the over-sized sweatshirt in her hands, she could never make it past four months. Natsuko supposed that she couldn't really blame her father for divorcing her mother, when she knew the feeling of cooling emotions all too well herself.
She really was her father's daughter.
"Hey,"
She looked up then, trying to peer through the shifting mist. But there was nothing out there. Had she imagined that? Or was that part of the 3oh!3 song she was listening to?
"Ogata Natsuko, right?"
She whirled around then, meeting the gaze of a dark haired boy with intense eyes. He had the door open into the school, sending the heat to course out from the interior. He had her school's uniform on, but she'd never seen him before. Maybe he was in a lower year? No, he looked older, so maybe he was from the secondary school next door. The junior high and the senior high shared the same plot of land, but the senior high schoolers hardly ever crossed the stretch of grass and parking lot to the opposite end.
"That's me." She answered questioningly, keeping her voice void of any emotion.
"I'm Kuwabara." The boy grinned, looking a bit mischievous with his fox-like visage. "Kuwabara Kazuki."
She smiled coyly. Now she had a name to fit the cute boy in front of her. She had to admit, he certainly wasn't bad looking. Daisuke sure didn't hold a candle to his askew dark hair and artless quality. Natsuko had to admit that when it came to choosing boys she had shallow interests in mind. Nice looks, nice grades, nice smile, sporty, good at athletics, varsity. And from the looks of this boy, he seemed to check off everything on her list.
"It's nice to meet you," She pulled out a can of soda from her bag. "But I don't think I've ever seen you around before..."
"I'm a third-year at the senior high," He motioned to the building against the horizon that looked small in its place in the distance. "My younger brother goes here, so I was picking him up." He gave a sweep of the near deserted looking exterior, to which Natsuko assumed the interior matched. He shrugged. "I guess he got a ride himself."
"From your parents?" Natsuko mused, which was probably the most typical of explanations. The boy was eighteen, and from the lanyard sticking out of his pockets, drove his own car.
The boy scratched the back of his head. "Nah, my parents are in the Bahamas right now. We're staying with my grandfather, and well, he's got a bit of a backwards schedule."
Natsuko thought of her own father, who seemed to always be home when she least wanted him to and was always away when she needed him. Like, persay, right now.
"I know what you mean." She nodded empathetically.
"Anyway, so I was wondering if you needed a ride." He looked a bit sheepish as he elaborated. "I figure since you look pretty cold you've been out here for a while."
She smiled shyly at him, brushing out the sunny wisps of hair escaping from the ponytail atop her head and tucking them behind her ear. "That'd be really great."
He brightened. "Really?" Probably at the thought of having a cute cheerleader riding in his car.
"My dad," She began, sipping her drink and following him to the car. "Is always really late to pick me up or drop me off. Pretty hard to count on."
She sunk into the plush leather of the boy's car. It had a nice interior, and she was extremely pleased to see a massive hockey bag with sticks poking out in the back. A hockey player. She grinned, as he revved the engine, and pulled out of the parking lot in one fell swoop.
"So why does he have such a strange schedule?" Kazuki asked, although he paid more attention to the road than to her, but she didn't mind.
Natsuko flushed and looked out the window. She didn't like telling her friends—much less, a cute boy who had given her a ride—what her father does. "Err—he's probably at a match right now." She hoped he would leave it at that, and figure that her father was a soccer player or something like that.
No such luck.
"Really? What match?" He swerved into the far left lane, and pitched the car into fourth gear. "This exit?"
She paused. This was the right exit for her house, but her father wouldn't be there, and would probably be angry if she explained that she got a ride from some boy she didn't know. "No..." She gave a sigh. "Keep going straight." To the Go Institute it was. So much for not telling him.
She took a breath. "My dad's a go player."
"I know." Not even a pause.
"Yeah, its so boring I don't know how he stands it. He always gets mad that even his own daughter doesn't get the game. I think he was hoping for a son like Touya Akira to worship go religiously—" She paused then, and whirled around to look at him. "Wait. You knew?"
He nodded, looking amused. "Of course. Ogata Juudan."
"If you knew that," She began slowly. "Then why did you ask what match?"
Kazuki gave her a strange look, as if she should know this already. "Well, isn't he in the Honninbo league right now? And I know he's challenging for the Tengen Title some time this week, I was pretty sure it was today. That's probably why he was so late to pick you up..."
"You follow go?" She asked curiously.
He smiled then, taking his eyes off the road for a moment to watch her bewildered face. She sure was pretty, with beautiful long blonde hair tied up with a sparkling bow at the top of her head, bangs pulled behind her ear.
"No, not so much following as playing." He said with mirth, when he watched the surprise light up on her face.
"Eh?" She blinked large brown eyes at him. "You play?"
"Taking the pro exam this year!" Kazuki smiled, running a hand through tousled hair as he slowed to a stop for the light.
"Oh." Subdued, she didn't know what else to say. She'd never imagined that there were young go players, let alone, cute young go players. "So what got you into it?" She asked with genuine interest.
He shrugged nonchalantly. "My grandfather I guess. I always thought it was cool, the flow of the stones, defending territory—" He stopped then with a chuckle. "I probably sound like a nerd."
She shook her head. Actually, "Not at all." She insisted, and suddenly wondered the mechanics of that. All her life, she had spent babysitting Kaoru and Chiharu at the go institute, sick of the place and its uninteresting walls, uninteresting game, uninteresting life. She went out of her way to reject go whenever her father brought it up, to the point that he didn't talk about it unless it was to inform her he was going to be somewhere. Go had always been boring and nerdy, like the kids who went up and asked her to join the school team. She supposed she was good, and probably would be one of the best if she hadn't dropped it many years ago.
Perhaps, she mused, watching Kazuki's tousled hair in the wan, wintry light of the street lamps passing by them, her idea of what was "nerdy" and what wasn't was a bit shallow.
"Here we are!" He smiled then, and she abruptly broke out of her musings, to see the large lettering board of the go institute, which held all the schedules. She scanned them, and found the one she was looking for. Tengen title match.
"The Go Institute?"
"I figured that's where you wanted to go." He locked his car as the two made their way to the entrance in the brisk air. "I mean, your dad's still in there discussing the match. Probably will be for a while."
She sighed then. That meant staying here longer then she wanted to. Again.
Kazuki caught her upset visage out of the corner of her eye, and wrapped his arm around her to give her a comforting pat. Natsuko blushed. "Hey, it's not gonna be that boring...I think you'd actually understand it."
"I don't think so." She began slowly, if not adamantly. "I'd rather just wait out here."
He frowned, looking worried. "Are you sure?"
"Positive." The thought of sitting on her knees watching the recreation of a game and being altogether bored didn't sound like a good way to spend her evening. She'd probably end up listening to her iPod in a corner somewhere with a melon juice, texting her friends.
"Well, alright." He waved goodbye, as he got onto the elevator. "If you change you mind," He began as the elevator doors started to slide. "It's on the sixth floor!"
She waved. "Alright, thanks!" Fat chance of that happening.
As the doors closed, she wandered about, looking for a vending machine. She found one in one of the nondescript hallways that lead out of the lobby shop. She wrestled change out of the tightness of her spandex—curse the lack of pockets in cheerleading outfits!—and picked out a can of melon juice.
As she waited for the slow machine to process her order, she heard the sound of the TV behind her.
"And the Juudan makes an effective pincer right here, cutting of Kurata's hand and slicing his territory in half—
"Amazing if I do say so myself. What a match! Wouldn't you agree, Tashikawa-san? And look here to this kosumi, I'm surprised to have even thought of that..."
At the commentators voices she looked up, noticing the lounge area with the TV mounted to the wall showing the Tengen match. She sat down and made herself comfortable, ignoring the buzzing in her hand from a text message, and instead, sipped her drink and watched the game play out.
Maybe it wasn't that much of a fat chance after all.
