Chapter 3

Allen spends the next year slapping balls until his palms bleed.

He still doesn't have a team – nobody to toss him the ball or pat him on the back – but Allen throws himself into his training with a kind of mad fanaticism anyway.

Every time he feels so exhausted he thinks his knees might give he remembers Hicks's face behind the shadows of the net and the sharp hiss of his voice.

What have you been doing for the past three years?

It's all the drive Allen needs to carry him through the rest of junior high.

It carries him all the way through graduation and then enrollment in high school.

It carries him right up to the gym door of Lyrewood even.

The drive to beat Hicks's pretty boy face into the ground and make him

recognize

him propels him up until the second where that gym door rattles open.

And then there's Hicks dressed in the exact uniform Allen's wearing; shoulders curved and neck arched perfectly backwards as he leaps for a ball mid-serve.

"You!" Allen shrieks as his visions of destroying Hicks and his title

of King of the Court

fade into dust before his eyes.

Hicks falters midflight, turning to look at Allen in amazement as his feet touch the ground again and the ball drops to hit him on the back of the head.

Allen wishes he could find that funny.

It's surprising how much he doesn't.

"You..." Hicks mutters and for a terrifying moment Allen thinks that Hicks has forgotten him, that while Hicks had been the drive behind Allen's mad flight to succeed he was barely a blip on the outside of Hicks's consciousness.

"You probably don't remember me," he starts, a mix between awkward and angry, to which Hicks cuts him off without missing a beat:

"I do."

He remembers him

.

Allen's heart does something a little funny in his chest – like a volleyball spinning much too high across the air – but when Hicks opens his mouth to spew out a verifiable landslide of insults it's pretty much downhill from there.

Allen hates this guy.

.

"Oi," Hicks says during one of their evening practices while they prepare for the three-on-three.

"Why do you want to play volleyball so badly?"

Allen is so surprised he misses the toss, wincing as it bounces badly off his arms and off to roll into the line of trees behind them.

"Huh?"

It was their second night of grudging practice and probably the first time Hicks had spoken to him with a sentence that didn't start with an insult.

So far he'd treated Allen like necessary baggage.

Allen was needed to obtain entry into the club, but he wasn't wanted.

He'd made that much at least clear.

"I mean," Hicks continues, apparently unconcerned he'd just called their hissy fit of a practice session to an unscheduled stop.

"It's not even like you're

good

at it.

You've got some nice reflexes, but no talent for the sport.

You'd work just as well in basketball or something."

For a moment Allen can't see through a haze of red rage.

How

dare

Hicks say something like that to him when Hicks has a long documented history of being completely insufferable?

Sure, Hicks might have the natural talent for the sport that Allen lacks, but his way with people has left that talent compromised.

Allen more than anybody knows how essential a team is to victory.

One person can't play the whole court on his own, no matter how hard he tries.

It's on the tip of tongue to blurt as much out when he comes to the realization that Hicks looks

curious

.

He's not being mean, Allen realizes, just obtuse that he's being rude.

Or maybe he simply doesn't care.

Regardless, Allen isn't a person given to prolonged fits of anger.

Usually he wasn't given to fits of anger at all, but Hicks was especially talented at drawing out the worst in people.

Or maybe it was just Allen.

"I don't get what you mean," he says after a moment of carefully considering Hicks's frustrated but not angry expression.

"I mean, I

kind

of get what you mean but not really."

"I mean," Hicks grits out between his teeth.

"It shouldn't matter to you whether you play volleyball or something else, right?

It'd be the same either way."

Allen looks at him for a moment – at the irritated slant of his eyes and the way his hair is falling unevenly across his forehead after three hours of tossing and slamming – and wonders if Hicks is actually this dumb.

"Yeah," Allen says after a pregnant pause.

"I suppose I could play another sport.

But I don't want to.

I mean, I don't really have a natural talent for anything in particular – not like you – so what does it matter if I pick one sport out of the rest?

I love volleyball and that's enough.

If you play a sport because you think you're obligated to, then aren't you just wasting everybody's time to begin with?"

Hicks stares at him blankly for a moment and Allen wonders if he's just said something really stupid.

(up close like this without balls flying every which way or one of them sniping at the other Allen realizes that Hicks is actually really attractive when he's not frowning.)

"You know," Hicks says after a moment longer of the absent rattle of the soccer club across the field packing up.

"You're kind of stupid."

"Oi," Allen snaps.

"But you're also kind of smart sometimes," Hicks adds grudgingly after a moment and it feels a little like something up near his spine must have toppled over like hastily spilled water because the shock of

Hicks

of all people complimenting him drips something cool under his skin.

"Oh," he says blankly and is suddenly very glad it's dark out because he's pretty sure he's blushing right now.

"Um.

Thanks?"

"Don't thank me," Hicks snaps, suddenly back to anger so quick he's going to give Allen whiplash or something.

"It wasn't a compliment."

"Are you sure?" Allen asks doubtfully.

"Because it kind of sounded like –."

"Go get the ball," Hicks growls and his tone leaves no room for argument.

Allen does just that – stumbling on the ground in the poor lighting and stubbing toes on roots and sticks as he scurries after the ball – not because he wants to but because part of him is still a little confused by their whole exchange just now.

It felt like – if even for a moment – that they had a connection.

Allen doesn't want to wreck whatever little progress they just made by opening his mouth.