If We Exist

2.

It would be months before I befriended him—Yuri Karamov. There were several reasons for this. Karamov was not only a Brommian, but a known troublemaker with a strong aversion to school authority.

He and his gang of dimwit farmers would insist on playing ball against the Arash of class 2E during the breaks, even though they were a much stronger team and had more players to spare, in case of injury. But what the Brommian lacked in skill, they made up for in abundant fervour and arrogance. They played rough and dirty. Things almost always got heated on the football pitch and would even escalate into a physical confrontation.

Yuri and a kid named Millin Ibranov were always in the middle of some sort of brawl. Mr Unjis, their homeroom teacher, had made them a target for his wrath. He swore time and time again that he would teach them a lesson. And he might have. Mr Unjis was not one to miss out on an opportunity to whoop the Brommian, but they were stubborn. They never learned. They always returned to the pitch eager for a rematch.

Yuri Karamov was one of the best players on the field, and you could always tell where on the pitch he was by the slew of vulgarity he shouted at the Arash. The thought of befriending someone who called a classmate a sheep fucker, a cow piss drinker, and a dunga (which even I knew meant something vulgar in Brommin) across a sixteen meter wide football pitch—to the point where his shouts could be heard from inside the school—was unimaginable to my prudent self.

I witnessed these matches take place from my homeroom windows, situated on the east side of the building, overlooking the schoolyard, and beyond it; the small, patchy, football pitch.

I was no expert but even I could tell that what he did on the pitch was skilled. The way he dribbled past the players and took all the free kicks for his team, there was no other way of describing it. In those instances, he was cool. So unlike the boy who had only weeks prior been sitting drenched in the same car as me. His laughter echoed off the stone walls, and though he walked the hallways with the same bad posture, he seemed less pitiful than he'd been that stormy October morning.

I couldn't have explained to you what drew me to him. I just found him fascinating. Ever since that day, it seemed like I was always catching him around the corner. Always there, in my peripheral vision.

Buried in the folds of my subconscious was the awareness that I envied him. I didn't realise it then, but I do now. His easy-going manner, his abundant friends. The more I saw him play ball, the longer my eyes lingered on him, and my reservations grew.

I was nothing like him. For one, I almost never played outside. I had debilitating asthma and was known by everyone as the kid with the inhaler around his neck like a bell. This was the biggest, and perhaps the most cementing reason I couldn't befriend Karamov.

I had one friend, Adriana, but she didn't really count since she was my cousin. Plus, she wasn't a boy. Truth be told, I was afraid, afraid of being that kid—the one with no friends. But Adriana was popular, and so I used her as a shield, hoping nobody would notice that without her, I was a ghost haunting the hallways during the breaks. Inanimately spying on my peers from the windows.

Unfortunately, she couldn't be there all the time. There were days she was absent. One such day, I was dragging my feet towards the entrance, feeling weighed down by an inescapable solitude. The realisation that I had no one, not a single friend to ride home with, made me stall when, by chance, I caught sight of the football pitch. My feet redirected their path from the entrance. The pitch was rarely ever empty, even after school, and this was my chance to step inside it for the first time. For some reason, Yuri Karamov came to mind, and I couldn't help the smile that spread on my lips.

A deflated, worn-looking football rested against one of the goal posts. Without putting much thought into what I was doing, I started kicking it about. I tried faking dribbles I had seen Yuri and the other guys do. I did it in slow-motion as to not get too winded, but I had no idea if what I was doing was correct. Yet, more I feigned, the more I found myself enjoying it.