AMACon Book 2 Extension

Runaway - 16 Days Prior

As usual, the sound of the showers coming from the tiled room and the pungent scent of sweat, smelly feet and body sprays filled the locker room that Friday. As usual, today's training menu was more on stamina building so we ran some laps around campus for an hour and a half then played a short game between the first and second string. As usual, we won. 2-1 with me assisting a header goal with a blunt cross from the right wing.

"Dude." A fist bumped my shoulder just when I was about use some body spray on my chest. "Hey." His voice has not changed since I first met him during the heat of my 4th year in summer camp. Still charming. Still energetic. Still annoying, as usual. "Hey dude." I snubbed him but I wasn't able to help myself from grinning. "Hey, Faulkerson don't play that game with me."

"What? What game?" I chuckled benignly, then asked. We have always been this way with each other. Throwing sarcastic remarks like daggers and evading them, taking them head on from time to time was a thing we did on a daily basis. "I told you not to talk to me when I outshone you in a game right?" I eyed. "C'mon Toph. You know I can't afford my grandness scathed by a useless ace."

"Ouch." Toph yelped. "Well there goes my ego."

Toph, short for Kristopher, is my best friend and I have no better words to describe him than this. I met him at summer camp when I was 10, we joined the same local soccer club when we reached 11 and were varsity players and close buddies since then. "So much for Toph the Fantasista." He said, then without asking for any permission, he took the body spray I just threw into my bag and smeared some of it on his armpits. As usual.

Toph the Fantasista. Kristopher was known even to the club teams from neighboring cities because of his out-of-this-world skills in dribbling the ball with his two feet. He could make his way through the toughest of defense lines in his sleep and make the girls go cray as he shows off his wide array of tricks midway into the game with his eyes closed. That's what makes a Fantasista. He makes the crowd go wild; enchanting them as he deceives the opponent's defenders with his witty ways and enthralls everyone in the bleachers with the best gift of all. He isn't our school's ace for show. Toph knows how to woo the ball with his feet—and boy does he know where to put it behind the net.

What most people don't know is that I was the one who gave Toph his nickname. It all started from our unmitigated addiction to our favorite cartoon show on Nickolodeon, Avatar: The Last Airbender and from there the rest is history. Toph is a name of a fictional character in the said cartoon series; a blind girl with extraordinary skills in the art of Earthbending.

Toph was a girl so I bet you could imagine the dreadful look on Kristopher's face when I started to call him so. But just as I thought he would, he came to like the name in the end of it all. Toph—the blind girl who could move mountains, bend metal, manipulate boulders and monoliths did all of those by feeling the tiny vibrations in the Earth with her bare feet. As expected, someone got stoked with the whole concept and started to ask people to call him Toph as his nickname because for a fact, he too had something in common to brag about—he could communicate to the ball with his two feet, fluently.

I, on the other hand, was our team's official right Sideback. Boring post if I were to ask. My job was quite simple. All I had to do was run back and forth the soccerfield; run up to join the offense and provide quality crosses or serve as an extra pawn to our passing system and to run back to protect the goal by marking the opponent's wing players and second strikers whilst maintaining our last line of defense. It was a simple duty but don't get me wrong, its one heck of a hectic job. I had to run to the deepest parts of the opponent team's side as fast as I can when commencing counter attacks and run back as swiftly as I could the moment I felt the opponent gaining momentum in attacking.