The annual school festival looked less like an academic celebration and more like a neon-lit fever dream staged on the cracked asphalt of the old sports field.
Paper lanterns—hung by the student council with an excessive amount of clear packing tape—swayed precariously in the evening breeze, casting a warm, flickering orange glow over hundreds of teenagers in mismatched clothes. The air was a thick, greasy soup of smells: hot oil from the deep-fried fish ball stalls, sugary pink cotton candy, and the heavy sulfur from the faulty generator humming behind the equipment shed.
"Remember the formation," Krit whispered, his voice dropping into a low, gravelly drone that belonged in an action movie. He had a pair of plastic, light-up star sunglasses pushed up into his hair, which he'd won five minutes ago at a ring-toss booth. "Mali is the vanguard. She looks innocent. If anyone asks why we're loitering near the basketball booth, she's going to say she's looking for her lost pencil case."
"A pencil case? At a night festival?" Mali shot him a flat look, her arms crossed over her chest. She was wearing a loose denim jacket over her uniform skirt, her canvas bag stuffed with three heavily grease-stained paper bags of fried dough. "That is the worst cover story I've ever heard. If we want to look normal, we should just buy a ticket and throw the ball like regular human beings."
"We are not giving forty baht to the basketball team's budget," Krit said, scandalized. He turned to Phuwin, who was standing slightly behind a giant, inflatable cartoon mascot that was supposed to represent the school's sports spirit but actually just looked like a terrifying, cross-eyed bear. "Phuwin. Status report. How are the vitals?"
Phuwin didn't answer immediately. He was staring through the gap between the bear's giant vinyl arm and its torso, his eyes fixed on a stall wrapped in blue plastic tarps twenty yards away.
The sign above it read: HOOP DREAMS: 3 BALLS FOR 20 BAHT.
Standing behind the wooden counter, holding a megaphone with a cracked plastic handle, was a boy with broad shoulders and messy, sweat-dampened hair. He was wearing the red-and-white school jersey over a black hoodie, his sleeves pushed up to his elbows. He was laughing at something a senior had just said, his eyes crinkling up into those familiar, crescent-moon shapes that used to make Phuwin's stomach completely flip upside down.
He looked exactly the same. He didn't look like a guy who had spent his Thursday listening to Coldplay on a loop. He looked like a guy who had never had a sad thought in his entire life.
Phuwin reached into his shorts pocket, his thumb aggressively hammering the plastic frog.
Squeak. Squeak. Squeak.
"He's wearing the hoodie," Phuwin whispered, his voice dangerously small. "The one I borrowed in October. The one with the small bleach stain on the left cuff."
"The coward," Krit muttered, squinting toward the booth. "Using stolen goods for commercial gain. That's a human rights violation."
"I gave it back to him three weeks ago, Krit," Phuwin said, his throat swallowing hard. "In a paper bag. By the lockers."
"Doesn't matter. The energy is stolen," Krit declared. He reached out, grabbed Phuwin by the shoulder of his oversized shirt, and forcefully dragged him out from behind the inflatable bear. "Alright. Enough scouting. The wind is blowing, the lanterns are shaking, and my stomach is currently making sounds that indicate a need for immediate violence. Let's go."
"Wait—Krit, no!" Phuwin tried to plant his heels into the gravel, but Krit's grip was like iron, and Mali was already moving forward, her face set in a grim expression of determination.
They moved through the crowd like a small, unhinged wave.
As they neared the blue tarp booth, the noise of the festival seemed to fade out, replaced by the rhythmic, heavy thud-thud-thud of a basketball bouncing on the asphalt.
The boy with the megaphone turned his head.
His eyes scanned the crowd, moving past a group of middle-schoolers, past the girl selling shaved ice, and then—they stopped.
He saw Phuwin.
The laugh on his face didn't disappear instantly; it sort of froze, his mouth staying slightly open as his hand lowered the megaphone. For a fraction of a second, his eyes darted from Phuwin's face down to his clothes—specifically to the faded gray band tee that clearly belonged to Krit—before snapping back up.
The space between the two groups went dead silent, even though three feet away, a girl was screaming because she'd dropped her hot dog into the dirt.
"Hey!" Krit's voice boomed, completely shattering the heavy tension. He stepped right up to the wooden counter, slamming a twenty-baht coin onto the wood with enough force to make the pyramid of tin cans rattle. "Give me three balls. I'm here to bankrupt the athletic department."
The boy behind the counter blinked, his eyes shifting from Phuwin to Krit. He forced a quick, practiced smile onto his face, though his knuckles were white where he was holding the basketball.
"Krit," he said, his voice a little lower than usual. "Hey. Long time no see."
"Yeah, well, I've been busy doing math," Krit said smoothly, reaching across the counter and aggressively snagging three rubber basketballs before the guy could even hand them over. He tossed one to Mali, who caught it against her chest with a small gasp, and kept two for himself.
He didn't offer one to Phuwin. He kept his body positioned right between the two of them, a solid human wall of denim and attitude.
"You want to try, Phuwin?" the boy asked from behind the counter. He didn't look at Krit; his eyes were trying to find a gap in Krit's shoulder to lock onto Phuwin, his voice carrying a weird, hesitant weight that wasn't there five minutes ago. "I can… I can give you a free turn if you want."
Phuwin stood three feet back from the counter. His hands were buried deep in his pockets, his fingers squeezed around the plastic frog so hard the metal ring was digging into his skin.
He looked at the boy's face. He looked at the crescent-moon eyes that suddenly looked very tired, very small, and very human.
For five months, Phuwin had rehearsed this moment in his head. He had an entire script ready—speeches about betrayal, cold glances that would make the guy regret the day he ever pressed the 'unadd' button, or a brilliant, cutting joke that would prove he was completely over it.
But looking at him now, under the cheap orange lanterns and the smell of grease, the theatre just didn't come. The script was gone.
"No," Phuwin said.
His voice wasn't loud, and it wasn't angry. It was just the sound of a seventeen-year-old boy who was tired of holding his breath under water.
"I don't want a turn," Phuwin said softly. He gave a tiny, almost unnoticeable nod toward the hoodie with the bleach stain. "Have a good shift."
He turned around.
He didn't run, and he didn't look back. He just started walking toward the exit of the sports field, his oversized shirt shifting in the evening breeze, his head tilted slightly up toward the dark, starless Bangkok sky.
Behind him, there was a loud, chaotic SMASH.
Krit had thrown the first basketball. He hadn't even aimed at the tin cans; he had hurled it with maximum velocity directly into the wooden support beam of the booth. The ball had ricocheted wildly, knocking over the entire pyramid of cans, sending them clattering across the asphalt in a massive, deafening explosion of metal.
"Whoops," Krit's loud, entirely fake apology echoed across the field. "My hand slipped. Mali, run!"
Within two seconds, the sound of running sneakers caught up to Phuwin.
Krit grabbed his left arm, and Mali grabbed his right, their faces flushed and breathless as they aggressively dragged him through the school gates and out onto the main road, leaving the neon lights and the shouting basketball players behind.
They stopped under the dim yellow light of a bus stop, all three of them panting, their chests heaving from the sprint.
Krit adjusted his light-up star sunglasses, which were now crooked across his nose. "Did you see his face? The whole stack went down. Every single one. That's a strike."
"You're going to get us expelled," Mali gasped, her hands on her knees as she tried to catch her breath, though her eyes were bright with a wild, dangerous kind of laughter. "You literally broke their sign."
"They can deduct it from my brother's laundry money," Krit shrugged, leaning his back against the metal bus schedule.
Phuwin looked at the two of them. His throat felt tight, and his eyes were hot, but as he pulled his hands out of his pockets, he realized something. His thumb wasn't twitching anymore.
He reached out, caught Krit's crooked sunglasses, and pulled them straight.
"You're both terrible friends," Phuwin whispered, a single tear tracking down through the dust on his cheek, but his mouth was smiling—a real, wide, ridiculous smile that reached his ears.
"We're the best you've got, ghost boy," Krit grinned, reaching into his pocket and pulling out the plastic frog, tossing it back to Phuwin. "Now let's go find that wholesale store. My treat, as long as Mali pays."