There is a sense of routine in everything that humans have ever done. A beat, a step, a thud, a whirr – they have been appointed with a constant measure embedded within. One can witness it in the ticking of the clock, the impatient drumming on the wooden surface, the throbbing apprehension upon receiving a solemn verdict. No one can ever deny the beat of the heart that syncs with the quick, competitive thuds made by the strong bounces of a sports ball.

 

A swift dive and counteract scoop of the arm gains the female the basketball. It plays by her hands, evading the sole opposition. Eyes narrowed with deep concentration, they are both engaged in an intellectual warfare on the sparse battlefield, to which a team of one would bring victory and loss simultaneously. While easily remaining a tension-filled situation, it is instinctive play that would determine one’s ability to keep up and surpass another. His jaw tightens involuntarily, denoting his seriousness and untamed desire to steal what was once his.

 

With eyes that click completely in the next instant, the ponytailed girl makes a spontaneous grin which causes momentary confusion enough for her to dribble pass haphazardly. Albeit the style of play proven not to be the strongest – as it could do with some improvement – but such an irregularity is handy rather frequently. Perhaps her younger years would have her worrying and half-frantic, fearing the possibility of a loose ball due to careless handling but the astute nineteen year old knows better than to indulge in something of featherweight essence.

 

A true player, by her own definition, is one who treats the ball of their sport as an extension of their anatomical expression. By then, an individual would be bound only by the irrefrangible rules and nothing more.

 

With determination marking the set of her brow, she lifts her hand to shoot for the basket. The eyes, they shake in sudden realisation after the precise release of the basketball that she had been a little too close. The speculations made are usually correct, and unfortunately, the occasion had sought to prove the apparent observation all the more. It is not an air ball, at the very least, for that would require one’s face to go into hiding for executing such poor play. Even so, this would mean that retaliation is needed to redeem the appalling mistake. However, her hands do not reach the rebound prize. The black-haired male takes it first with an agenda fixated at the prospect of success.

 

“If you would just excuse me,” he mentions casually with a dark wisp of a smirk, dribbling away to the basket he aims to win. She fires a look at him, yet knowing well that his playful taunt is one made in response to the callow change of expression she showed on her visage earlier. It is most certainly a method fair, yet astonishingly effective for enraging and outsmarting one’s able opponent.

 

Despite his unnerving speed, she does not give in to the increasing impossibility. The stark difference did not halt her great want to do something about it. Yet as he dunks the ball in, she knows the battle has been done with. He turns around, intending to flash her a rather impertinent grin that complimented him excessively, but shock registers his face when he notices that she is heading into the wire fence at an unstoppable motion.

 

“Hey you-“

 

Slammed into the dizzying middle of the situation, her head lolls back slightly before jerking upwards. The nineteen year old winces a little before the glance falls on the twenty-one year old’s back. The sun beats on his back mercilessly and it is with a coincidental crease that the name printed on his back exhibits a rumpled glisten. Her eyes crease with gentle mirth, the turning of his probably throbbing head having an angled look. “You might want to drop the act a little, or you might be accused of bullying a girl, Huang Zitao,” the nineteen year old jokes with a simple laugh. The dark haired boy chuckles deeply at that comment, muttering a prudish, “Be more careful on your part, you know?” which colours the light atmosphere.

 

He offers his hand, to which she takes to help herself to a more able position. A thank you is delivered, and it is intended for the parting of their hands, but most surprisingly, his grip does not undo itself. “You know…” he adds thoughtfully with the slight tilt of the head. “You play most extraordinarily despite being a wheelchair user.” The smile that lights up his face with childish wonder is surely one to remember.

 

As the pair had been duelling for quite a bit that morning, they have decided to take a break. He walks over to the vending machine and buys energy drinks, knowing their respective preferences by heart. He walks sloppily to the bench whilst she sat comfortably in the wheelchair. “Here,” muses Zitao, placing the cold can drink on her cheek. Startled at a minimal degree, she then accepts it without any dissent. “I could have gotten that basket, you know,” claims the nineteen year old as she opens the can drink. While it would sound like an excuse to any listener, the seemingly broody boy grins at that.

 

“I know that you would have,” he asserts with such gentleness, with dark eyes that glance analytically in her direction. Like flowers, fragile and transient, there is a tentative peace that threatens to tilt unbalanced. His body turns rigid involuntarily, hoping that he had been capable enough to appease, because if it didn’t then-

 

“Screw my injury.”

 

And while it has been three years and a half since the pivotal event that changed affected lives for a time comparable to forever, the hurt; the resentment has hardly deteriorated in its value. She looks at him with unmasked bitterness, the split second glance at his toned legs is like a slap inflicted across the face. Words are not able to exist in the mind coherently and they are, at best, uselessly inchoate, yet while that stance of hers is inevitably venomous, it brings the twenty-one year old back in time.

 

Huang Zitao is no national athlete during his secondary school life, but he had the skills enough to represent the school as the first string players. Driven with passion for the sport, he didn’t exactly look out for other potential star players for analytical purposes at all. He focused only on the teams of his same category and age group. Therefore, in the mix of wins and losses at the regional competition, he would not have cast a lingering gaze at any females or young ones. An appraising thump on the back had gotten his attention. “Hmm?” the eighteen year old had mumbled, with a brow lifted.

 

His teammate had pointed at an ongoing game. A crowd was gradually growing in size. “There’s someone there that you’d might like to watch in action,” said the teammate. While Zitao didn’t think so, he went along anyway. Of all wonders, it was a girls’ basketball match between two schools. At first he thought maybe one of them represented the school he came from – therefore the apparent interest – but it was not so. A small and almost impatient frown darkened his features then. “I’d admit that they aren’t bad, but-“ was the main thought that surfaced and then it was rendered speechless as a ponytailed girl made a slam dunk, a score made in time for half-time.

 

The teenage Huang Zitao felt someone touching the bottom of his jaw and flinched. What in the world- “Someone’s amazed,” chuckled the teammate, denoting the broody boy’s wonderstruck expression. He shot a stern look at him but he did not deny the aforementioned statement either. The boy clenched his gaping jaw together and made his way through the crowd determinedly, eyes set on only one being.

 

Her.

 

“Impressive,” Zitao had murmured upon standing in front of her. Up close, it is with an abrupt realisation that the sixteen year old girl was not exactly tall, therefore making the feat even more commendable for the heightened odds. She had tilted her chin upwards to look at him. “Oh?” she replied with blank surprise. “Then a favour shall be done in return for you, Mister Huang. I like your stealth moves a whole lot, especially the one made during the final quarter.”

 

Some comment like that shouldn’t have caused the eighteen year old boy’s heart to swell with immense pride, but it did anyway. He cocked his head with a charming grin. “You’ve got spunk, girl,” he couldn’t help but to continue then. “Looks like I’ll be looking out for you.” She smiled, acknowledging the weighty honour of his words. As the younger one made footsteps angled away from his direction, he found himself pondering upon what he had just done. It was with a subconscious mind that he had muttered to his teammate that he wouldn’t be heading back for a little while. And it was without knowledge that before long, his heart had danced to the dribble of the basketball resounding throughout the full court.

 

His sole steps squeaked across the court a few nights later, his mind still thinking about the girl. He wondered as to why he did not ask for her number to keep in contact, or remember the name printed on the back. Perhaps it had been the inner attitude he beheld, one that never looked at his juniors despite the skill honed. Even so, the shot he perfected entered the hoop flawlessly, its bounce abating and the eventual return to his feet. “Hmm,” was a suspire expressed for the crowd of none, but it had been a soft, calculated applause that startled him. He turned around and froze.

 

The ghost – girl, really – of his dreams. Ahem, well. Of his daily musings would have been a more accurate description.

 

“Your shock is most entertaining,” she had laughed, palms pressed together with supposed ebullience. “Oh come on now Mister Huang… Someone of such keen senses would have at least noticed sometimes.” His unabashed stare continued uninterrupted, ruminating on the words articulated. What had she meant by the word sometimes? Wouldn’t that mean-

 

“You’ve been here,” he uttered in a strange voice, one marked by crude astonishment and an indecipherable emotion. The quiet presence he had seen around the neighbourhood; it had belonged to this somewhat petite and pretty girl. She walked in casually from beyond the fence, in a style fashioned with a pale laziness, proposing a query that caused the ends of his mouth to curl upwards. “Play. With. Me,” she whispered with a glint of mischief in her eyes, and having noticed her ready apparel, the ball was picked and played upon.

 

The games, the matches, regardless of the hour that leant on the rise and setting of either the shining sun or the luminous moon, as long as they were both up for a quick challenge, they would meet up. While Huang Zitao never really made friends with anyone younger or of the opposite , this relationship is one that bloomed with a speed unparalleled. The eighteen year old grows to cherish the sixteen year old’s surprising moments of precious insight.

 

“Hey Mister Huang, do you know why we shouldn’t wish on shooting stars?” was one of the many queries expressed in a rhetoric manner. While he had not been a person who wasted time on wishing, it was a question that stumped.

 

But the good times didn’t last. In the months after, a horrific accident during a game played by the girl resulted in a bad fall, causing the bottom part of the spine to fracture and splinter. A complicated procedure paired with a sequence of hapless coincidences that ripped the dream of being an international female athlete as it rendered the owner paralysed from the bottom half. While the media eventually turned away from the incident, and while she continued to pursue the dream despite the new incapability with the older friend who proved valiant, nothing is ever quite the same again.

 

“The stars that shoot across the skies at night are dead, and so are the wishes then when we leave them for the celestial forces to decide,” was the wry response, one befitting of the situation that transpired. It had been replied with a tone of hurt, but the boy had not understood the gist of it back then. But slowly yet surely, he had.

 

The twenty-one year old blinks the past away, looking carefully at the girl who once placed her hopes and dreams on the stars that flew past and her great desire to run after them. The nineteen year old is still shattered by the dream that could never be, and the prospect of letting go seems rather bleak. With a surly look, the boy places his half-empty can drink aside and squatted before the wheelchair. “Come on, I’ll take you for a little ride,” offers Zitao. Bewilderment emanates from her. Evidently the main reason stems from the fact that he has never made such an outrageous request before.

 

“You’d… have to be cautious of my injury, you know,” she says, trying to bite back the negative tone but it does not work. It shows in the way her countenance is strained, the fists that are clenched. A small affirming, “Mmh,” is given and they subsequently proceed to a piggyback position. “You’re not heavy, by the way,” he adds.

 

“I don’t need to know that,” she asserts with a scowl. A gentle shrug is given before he expertly gets the basketball in his hands without losing too much balance. He dribbles slowly across the court even as she clings on to him. “Isn’t this a bit immature?” she questions. Zitao remains silent enough, passing the ball to her when they meet the hoop in extreme proximity.

 

“The girl I know wouldn’t miss the chance to dunk,” he muses. Encouraged by that simple comment, the nineteen year old takes a deep breath and slams the basketball in with much vigour. Huang Zitao winces as the pressure flattens his head and bounces away. At first she is shocked, filled with immeasurable guilt but noticing how he did not react verbally, it then seems like something else is being played at hand. “Zitao,” she mentions quietly in his ear. “Were you trying to cheer me up?” His cheeks paint a tinted red at her suggestion and the unnerving closeness.

 

“O-Of course not!” he embarrassingly stutters, to which she laughs easily. She lifts a hand to pat his semi-throbbing head with a scintilla of affection, and he growls involuntarily. Having random and unprecedented skinship really throws the older one off his course of thought.

 

“I swear that I will drop you.”

 

She merely giggles at that, knowing very well that despite his ultimatum, he is a black panther with a heart that is warmer and brighter than any fallen star.