Dreaming Boy Wakes Up

Chapter 17: Adjusting Well & Outing with the Gals.

"Adventures are better when shared with friends."

-anonymous

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Getting up at 7 in the morning is something I sadly would never get used to. Getting everything ready and heading to the school for basketball practice oddly was pretty exciting for me. Enough so that it would end up waking me up.

As I was walking I heard someone scream my name. It was Yamazaki who seemed insanely energetic for it being this early in the morning.

"Dude aren't you pumped up?! This is our first official practice! Look more alive Sajo!"

"Yeah, yeah it's still pretty early so you'll have to give me a minute.."

"Ah, come on man!"

He continued to bother me until we finally made it to the gym. There weren't as many guys there as there were during tryouts obviously, but the atmosphere was still pretty lively. We needed to get changed quickly though so I couldn't think about that too much.

•••

"Everyone gather around!"

Coach Tanaka had everyone gather up and of course we ran as quickly as possible. We were all excited to get started.

"Now, as you know we have twenty people here but only eleven will make the varsity team. The rest will be alternates and play some games in junior varsity. Is that clear?!"

""YES COACH!""

Getting used to yelling like that at an adult still was something I was working on. Everyone else on the team did it so naturally. I mean I could only imagine the look on my parents face if I ever did that. I'd be hung most likely with my sister being the one who did the job.

"Now I will have you all run scrimmages all day today. We will assess from there what all are this teams strengths and weaknesses. Understood?!"

""YES COACH""

We quickly got sorted out into different teams and I was asked to play point guard on one of them.

Safe to say that my time playing basketball was off to an interesting start..

•••

Practice went by pretty quickly with it mainly being scrimmages and conditioning. Thanks to me beginning to workout before this I was in decent shape. The coach even complimented me quite a bit and the older players who had been there before had a surprised look.

Did they expect me to be terrible or something?

I knew I still had much to prove but I was off to a good start.

After making it home and showering of course I finally decided to leave and head to work. I didn't get to see my sister today as she had already left by the time I got out of the shower.

She could've atleast waited for me to see her off right?

•••

Using summer break, I was getting myself some juicy allowance. I was working part-time at a one-person management second-hand bookstore, but in roughly one week after I started working there, I got the gist down.

Back in middle school, when I was secretly working part-time at a convenience store, I learned a lot about management and assorting and all that, but I feel like this and 'Come join the student council' are a bit different, don't you think. I was content with working here where the student council peeps couldn't annoy me.

I changed my way of approaching things, and arrived at the bookstore. I greeted the old man store owner, when I realized that the sound reaching my ears was different from before. It's playing some gentle pop songs, making me wonder if I accidentally walked into a rental CD shop...Not to mention that this is a pretty popular song.