Calling The Shots: Chapter One

Bold is English

"We're here," expert attorney Doug Taylor says, sitting behind the wheel. The Mercedes-Benz rolls to a silent stop at the curb, not far from the school gate currently swarming with students. Allison emerges from the limousine, keeping her head straight. Her thick honey-brown hair falls over her shoulders in well-behaved waves.

"I had to pull a lot of strings to get you here," her father says, motioning at the school entrance close by. "Don't screw this up." He barely looks in her direction.

"Don't forget your bag," he says, this time in Japanese.

Settling the strap of her school bag on her shoulder, she shuts the car door before he can say anything else, then emerges onto school grounds.

Someone watches as she settles her bag in place again, straightening her uniform jacket and turning for the door to the genkan. Hanamiya thinks she looks very determined and somehow he finds that determination utterly sickening.

She doesn't glance in his direction.

He's certain she has no idea that he's following her.

And his mind is made up, just like that, in the sixty seconds it took to watch her emerge from the car, shut the door and turn to go. He has to destroy her confidence.

Allison couldn't believe it.

A handsome guy is actually making eyes at her. Guys like that don't make eyes at Allison. Guys like that make eyes at girls as gorgeous as they were. And no, its not that Allison is ugly. She's not. But she's not beautiful either. There is something much too… practical and self-sufficient about her. Something a little too focused, as well.

She's born on Canadian soil, now taken in by her estranged father living in Japan after her mother's unfortunate passing a year ago. She barely knows the language, she can't hold a pair of chopsticks and she can't seem to get the hang of Japanese manners.

As far as Allison is concerned, the teachers—and fellow students in her former school, repeatedly brought her down for petty reasons. So, really. It was probably only her imagination that Hanamiya is looking at her.

She pretends to check the time on her watch—and slides another glance in his direction. He's pretending to read the time, too. She knows he's pretending because, at the exact moment she glances his way, he sends a sideways look in her direction and one corner of that mouth of his quirks up in a teasing smile.

Maybe he's flirting with someone behind her. She turns her head enough that she can see over her shoulder. Nope. Nobody there. Just more shoes brimming the lockers—which, she firmly reminds herself, is what she should be focusing on.

She puts all her attention on the business at hand and banishes the impossibly smooth-looking guy from her mind. "Putting on slippers. What a stupid rule," a voice as warm and tempting as melted caramel teases her ear. "That's what you're thinking, right?"

Good gravy. He's right behind her. There's no doubt about it now. He's talking to her—and he had been giving her the eye.

Slowly, Allison turns to him. Jet-black hair, dark eyes, nice cheekbones, a perfectly formed jaw, a nose like a blade. Broad, broad shoulders.

He arches an ebony brow. "Well?"

She forces herself to suck in a breath and then ask warily, "What?"

"You're not from around here, are you?" His gaze flicks to her olive green eyes. Hanamiya wonders how they'd look paralyzed with fear. That particular image alone is enough to make him smile.

She knows him from somewhere. "Have we met before?"

He gives her a slow, once-over, followed by another speaking glance from those dark eyes. That glance seems to emit something dangerous. And then he laughs, a low, smooth laugh that startles her.

"If we met before, you wouldn't have forgotten me so easily," he sneers at her for a second, and it's so laughable how she misses that tiny detail. He knows her father—Doug Taylor, the defense attorney who always gets a 'Not Guilty' verdict in every case.

He happened to go against his old man, and the foreigner's actions put him behind bars for committing a small crime.

"I, um…"

She's totally speechless. And that's not like her. Enough with the stumbling all over herself. She sticks out her hand. "Allison Taylor."

"Hanamiya Makoto." He wraps his cold fingers around hers. "So. You're the new kid," he says in English, and she falls back a step because of it, coming up short against the lockers behind her.

"Those western eyes, and your name. You speak Japanese well enough, but with a certain informality… and is that North-American dialect I detect?"

"You're an expert on accents?"

"No. I'm smart. And observant, that's all."

He listens to her blabber on excitedly in English, just looking at her and hearing her annoying little voice—it'll make him cringe inwardly for the next, oh, say, half a century or so. Before she can continue her rambling streak, he interrupts. "Allison, you know your way around?"

The way he says her first name, with such impossible passionate intent, well, she likes it. She likes it way, way too much. "Ah, no," she confesses. "It can't be that hard though."

"You'll be fine on your own." He put a definite edge in his voice. Will she notice? Maybe. He tends toward sarcasm when he's bored—and she's really boring.

She studies Hanamiya for a moment, a direct, assessing kind of glance. "Are you pestering me on purpose?"

He seems amused. So she had picked up on his sarcasm. "I'm just teasing. Girls like that kind of thing."

"Not me, obviously," Allison tells him off in broken Japanese. She walks away. Hanamiya follows her as if he's chained to her, keeping his dangerous eyes fixed on her as though he wants to eat her.

This will be interesting.

The following week, Allison slides through the morning and makes it into her afternoon English class with the clock pushing towards two. The teacher asks her to stand up and discuss the play everyone had been assigned to read. Hanamiya doesn't expect for Allison to have her stuff together, sitting at her desk near his, looking all stupid.

Then, she stands up and starts running it down. "Othello's a play about a colored general who was married to his Caucasian wife," she says. "The general was afraid and worried that his wife would leave him."

"Shakespeare described Othello as a Moor, but there's no reason to believe that his actual skin color was black. That probably wouldn't have been acceptable in Elizabethan England." The teacher is small, but when he gets mad, he can make himself look bigger.

"But Othello's picture on the cover showed he was a black man," she says.

"That's what the publisher assumed," Hanamiya interrupts with his all-knowing smirk. "We're studying the author, not the publisher, dumbass." His dorky followers took this as their cue to laugh as if she'd done something really stupid instead of making a simple mistake.

She sits down and glares daggers at the bad boy, silently wondering why the entire school kept humiliating her since day one. It's unsettling.

Once, a fellow student saw Allison without an umbrella and offered to walk through the rain with the exchange student under hers. But she experienced, firsthand, the kind students turning into stomach-churning brutes, reveling in the hilarity of harassing her.

Allison isn't too sharp, and the awkward difference in culture makes her an easy target. All she wants is to blend in and drift through school until she can go back home under her aunt's care.

It'll all be sorted out soon.

This isn't where she'll end up for the rest of her life.

She has to believe that.

Her beliefs crumble the following day. She comes to class to find her desk has been transformed into a memorial, with a wreath and a picture of her in the center, incense lit and a condolence card filled with mocking messages from students and some teachers, including her homeroom teacher.

"This is sick," Allison says on a choking voice, and covers her mouth. She indulges in bitter weeping, wetting her cheeks with her tears, running out the classroom.

The gymnasium is a roomy place. Allison expects the basketball team reigning on the court with the ball put into play. That's clearly not the case.

A chewing gum's pop sounds sharply.

Allison stops venturing further and turns her head to the source, facing the bleachers, and spotting five youngsters hanging about.

They don't seem intimidating from this distance; Hara is waving at her, his mouth covered in chewing gum. She wrinkles her nose in disgust. She can't believe this sorry bunch is the best-playing basketball team of Kirisaki Daīchi High:

Hanamiya Makoto, point guard

Furuhashi Kōjirō, small forward

Hara Kazuya, power forward

Seto Kentarō, center

Yamazaki Hiroshi, shooting guard

Allison feels Hanamiya check her out. She straightens her spine in defiance. Her father always measured a person's worth by their ability to toughen up. Doesn't matter how upset she is right now—never show your emotions to anyone.

"You look awful," Hanamiya openly laughs at her; Allison's tear-stained face and swollen eyes show that he finally broke her spirit.

"Stop fucking around, you hear me!" she yells in English.

"What did I possibly do wrong?" asks Hanamiya, feigning innocence.

"Don't play dumb with me! You're making my life a living hell!" declares Allison, desperation evident in her voice.

Hanamiya gazes darkly at her, but makes no comment.

Being on the other side of the world, Allison misses her mother; she can't think of nothing but her and her bright smile, and her heart is filled with memories that saddens her. "I just want it to stop," her eyes filling to the brim with tears as she speaks.

"Are you satisfied now, Hanamiya? Make the foreigner shut up, I'm trying to sleep," Seto complains. Hara overhears and appears ready to pitch in on the insults. "Dude, she looks like one of those little jumpy dogs with big eyes that can't get their barks straight."

"Just like you," Yamazaki throws back at him, slumping in his seat. "I'm sure you have the same shitty eyes when you bother to cut your hair."

"If I do that, there's no way I can avoid seeing your ugly mug, moron."

"Bring it on!" booms Yamazaki. "I'll rip out your damn hair!"

Hanamiya leisurely makes his way down the bleachers to the empty court.

He'd noticed she stopped sliding him blushing glances. Stopped seeing him as the impossible, wonderful, hot and handsome, smooth and sophisticated guy who appeared out of nowhere and swept her off her feet.

She tries not to be overly conscious of the boy standing before her.

"You'll leave me be. You won't bother me again. Ever." Her tone says he'll regret standing in her way. He shows no indication to back off.

"You're not off the hook, you know." He says it gently and quietly, for her ears alone. "I'm only getting started."