Lâm had always counted differently on court.
Not numbers exactly.
Tempo.
Steps before a screen. Shoulder angle before a cut. Breath before a defender committed. The half-second when a pass became possible and then died.
After rehab, counting changed jobs.
He counted shoes.
The Thälmann boy near the gate wore clean white sneakers with a black scratch near the heel. The same shoes appeared in the background of a clip from the registration hallway. Another pair stood near the clinic desk two days earlier when the receptionist printed the wrong schedule.
He counted timestamps.
The edited miss reappeared at 6:42 p.m. in one group chat, 6:44 in another, 6:47 with new captions, 6:51 under an anonymous account that had never posted before.
He counted adults who looked at his hand before his face.
Seven in three days.
That number made him angrier than the comments.
Mockery had teeth. Pity had fingers.
At home, he spread receipts, screenshots, and handwritten notes across his desk. His mother knocked once and asked if he wanted fruit.
"Later."
"Your hand?"
"Fine."
That lie had become easier. Functional, after all.
He photographed the page and sent it to Minh.
Then deleted the first message he wanted to send.
They're back.
Deleted.
Make them pay.
Deleted.
I can't do this.
Deleted.
He wrote facts instead.
Same shoes at gate and clinic.
Clip resurfaced from new account.
Someone requested rehab schedule again.
Do not react to captions.
He stared at the last line, then added:
I mean it.
Minh replied with only one word.
Understood.
Good.
Maybe.
Lâm leaned back and flexed his fingers. Pain answered late, like a person arriving after the argument ended.
On his wall, an old tournament poster curled at the corner. He had kept it because the player mid-jump still looked like a future.
Now the paper looked useful for writing on.
That thought hurt.
Not because it was dramatic.
Because it was practical.
He took the poster down and turned it over.
The back was blank.
Lâm wrote:
Routes.
Then he began drawing the city that had learned how to use his injury.
Counting gave Lâm somewhere to put hatred.
Raw hatred had no shape. It rushed everywhere, made him imagine faces under Minh's fists, made him hear the rim again, made sleep feel like a place where the ambush could repeat with better angles.
Numbers behaved better.
Times. Shoes. Gates. Receipts. The exact minute a Thälmann jacket appeared near the clinic desk. The number of steps between the elevator and the waiting room. The way one boy kept touching his left pocket before speaking, as if checking whether a folded instruction was still there.
Lâm wrote it all down because writing hurt less than shooting.
At first the notes looked obsessive. Then patterns began to appear.
The same student who lingered near the clinic also appeared near Huyền Kha's registration table in one school-event photo. The wrong rehab schedule had been printed only after a sponsor account accessed the appointment system. A delivery address connected to the exchange equipment matched an unused tutoring center, not a sports office.
Lâm stared at the page until the lines stopped being separate.
Basketball had trained him for this without asking permission. A court was a system. Five bodies created truth through spacing. A trap was only another play if you stopped staring at the ball.
He flexed his hand and felt pain answer.
"Fine," he told it.
If the hand could no longer release perfectly, it could still point.
That thought should have comforted him. Instead it made him feel older.
The notebook made him look calm from far away. Up close, the pages were ugly: uneven pressure, crossed-out insults, circles dug so deep the pen nearly tore through. Lâm was not cured by observation. He was only teaching rage to hold a pencil.
He wrote the last note twice because the first version sounded too much like a cry for help. The second sounded like scouting. Lâm chose the second, not because it was more honest, but because it would make Minh slower.
Lâm's counting made people uncomfortable because it did not look heroic.
Heroic grief shouted. Heroic grief trained in rain. Heroic grief promised revenge and gave readers something clean to want. Lâm's grief sat at a desk with a cheap pen and compared shoe scratches.
He preferred that. Heroic grief would have gotten him dragged into the trap by noon.
The clinic receptionist became part of the pattern by accident. She complained to a coworker that another school form had requested Lâm's appointment confirmation even after she had already sent it once. The coworker said sponsors always made paperwork worse. Lâm, sitting three chairs away with a therapy band around his fingers, wrote down the time.
11:42.
The Thälmann boy with scratched white sneakers had entered at 11:39.
No proof. Enough direction.
He asked the receptionist for a new copy of his appointment card and watched which printer she used. The wrong schedule from two days earlier had come from the side desk, not the front desk. That meant someone had not hacked deeply. They had stood close enough to request, distract, photograph, maybe bribe.
Ordinary corruption.
Ordinary was the word that kept returning.
The people who hurt him had not needed a secret mountain sect to find his rehab schedule. They needed a nervous clerk, a clean organizer, and the confidence that no injured boy would audit the room.
Lâm wrote one more note:
They think pain makes people look down.
That night he dreamed of a court drawn like a map. The hoop became a clinic desk. The three-point line became a service corridor. Every pass turned into a route someone else could intercept. When he woke, his hand was clenched around the bedsheet so tightly that opening it took almost a minute.
He did not show the dream to anyone, of course. Dreams were too easy for people to interpret kindly. Instead he copied the court-map idea into his notebook and pretended it was strategy. Maybe it was. Maybe strategy was only fear that had learned to draw straight lines.