Face-Slapping15 min read
April Fool's Return: The Coach Who Refused to Die
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April 1 arrived like a rumor that got louder and louder until it became roar. The clock turned midnight and someone pushed a post onto WB that exploded the small world I had been trying to keep steady.
"One hundred percent true! Former DreamChasers pro Isla Hayashi is back as DreamChasers' coach for the Summer Split!"
I watched comments spin like a storm.
"Is this real? Wasn't she—" someone wrote.
"She was in a car accident last year!" another replied.
"She became a vegetable, then woke up three months ago," a voice typed fast.
"Right, but her right hand has metal plates. How can she play?" someone argued.
"Whether she can play or not, I just want her alive," one fan posted.
They argued at the speed of wires. I closed my eyes and felt rain on my face even though I was under a roof. Outside, the sky thinned into the fake, polite drizzle of early April.
I had put lilies under a stone this morning and whispered a promise to a photograph that had yellowed around the edges.
"I'll rest another six months," I said to the stone. "Then I'll take the championship."
My voice tasted like the hospital's antiseptic. My right forearm hummed beneath the white sleeve—steel and pins that the surgeon had said would hold bone together. A miracle, they said. A miracle that came with limits.
"I'll be back," I told the photograph, and the words surprised me with their certainty.
I took a transparent umbrella, the driver called me "Mrs. Ricci" because that was what the press had already started to guess. I typed a short note to Chen Larsen.
—I'm on my way.
Chen had been the one who stuck by the team when the lights went out. He waited for me at the old gate in the new place they could afford. "You haven't changed," he said as I climbed from the car.
"I did," I said. "Inside."
He led me through a narrow lane by trees. The base smelled faintly of laundry and leftover fried rice—workman smells no sponsor pays for. The windows showed rows of monitors and empty chairs where we had once spent every night betting futures on a mouse click.
Inside the meeting room, five faces looked smaller than I remembered. Adrian was yapping into his phone, Erik was slouched and bored, Antonio had an annoyed crease between his brows, and the rest looked hollow like old trophies. Chen sat across from them, a manager's patience stretched thin.
"Why are we here?" Erik asked, yawning in the way of someone who had given up on wanting anything more than a paycheck.
"Friend called us," Adrian said. "Rumor mill said Isla Hayashi is back."
I walked in. The room did what rooms do when a memory returns to it: everything shifted softly to give the memory space.
"You're… Isla?" Erik said, like he was asking if I was a rumor.
"Yes," I said. "And the rumors about me being dead are unusable trivia."
Chen introduced me. "She's not only your coach. She's also the club owner."
The silence I had expected arrived—only softer. Then, one after another, excuses ran out. I set terms the way a surgeon sets a clamp.
"If you have fight in you, show it in the next two matches. If you want to leave, leave. I don't pay you to cry about possibilities. I pay you to fight."
They looked at one another. The long, guilty look of people who had been told the truth and preferred lies.
"Training," I said. "Now."
They obeyed. They were professionals when the music forced them into motion.
When the press asked later, they called it publicity: "Isla Hayashi back," they said like an April joke. I had let Chen leak one small, delicious item earlier. The rumor was mine: return as coach. It had exploded because people loved resurrection stories. If it drew heat to the team, I could turn heat into bread.
That first afternoon, Franz Ricci arrived like something the city owed me. He was everything the tabloids wrote and more—tall, perfectly folded edges, eyes that measured a person the way a chess player measures a board. People called him wealthy, charismatic; I called him Franz in private and Mr. Ricci in public. He had paid my medical bills when the hospital curator insisted on a single name on the paperwork. He had kept the beeping machines from my room and given orders that no one else did.
"You're awake," he had said that first morning, and I had been too exhausted to answer.
Now he walked in, put a hand at my lower back in a way that made Chen stiffen and the players blink. He said, "Worried someone would pick on you."
"You could have just sent money and been done," I said.
He smiled, a little fox-like, and said, "I wanted to be here."
Chen's jaw worked. "I don't—"
"Franz," I cut him off. "Introduce yourself properly."
He obliged. "I own the base now."
"Charming," Chen said. He was not used to being on the receiving end of a declaration like that. Who is used to that?
Franz and I had a contract that smelled of desperation and utility. He had offered a nest of support; I had given him an image he could wear. We married on paper. We slept apart by choice. He was my patron and my partner by arrangement. It was better that way. Complexity would only uglify the purpose.
"You are my husband," I told Chen out of the corner of my mouth just to confuse him.
"That's—" Chen looked as if a mouse had just run across the floor.
"It is," I confirmed aloud, and Franz only lifted his chin like a man reminding the world of an easy thing.
The next match was against the giant everyone loved this season, Franz's own team. The stadium waited like an audience charged enough to spark. I walked into the green rooms and felt a tide roll through the crowd. People screamed my name. I nodded and felt nothing like victory; I felt something cold and bright like resolve.
"You're here to watch," Franz whispered before we walked out to the velvet roar.
"I am here to win," I said. "And if I can't, I will teach the ones who can."
We lost the night—fairly. We lost with a dignity I suppose I could accept. The team had pulled together when the bell rang. We had not yet learned to be a machine, but we had shown teeth.
After the match, Franz offered to host dinner. He said, "Come with me. My treat."
"You treat," Chen muttered under his breath.
Dinner at the top-floor restaurant had servants passing dishes like small treasures. Franz took an interest in what I ate, ordered simple soups for my hand. He teased me, touched my fingers lightly, promised to "train me into a useful wife."
"Don't call me something to be trained," I told him.
"Then call me whatever you like," he said, like a man who had been given a choice and found the options delicious.
At home I practiced with my foot. The stupidity of putting a mouse under a toe was almost a joke, and yet necessity is a serious thing. I taught my toes the keys. I tried to shape a new dexterity from different muscles. Sometimes my foot cramped and I had to stop. Franz would press his palm to my ankle and say, "Rest," and some small portion of me softened.
I broadcast interviews. I took curated opportunities. A good image is a good weapon. One host asked, "Are you done with competing?"
"No," I said. "I will play again. I still have the right to try."
Guests wanted me to sign. Sponsors wanted me to be warm. The world wanted me to pick a role in someone else's script. I would not perform on their cue.
Outside the green rooms and bright lights loomed the usual crowd. The internet meaner had an appetite for vengeance. They had christened themselves judges, and they had no tolerance for me. One name among them shouted the loudest: Claudia Ryan.
She was the kind of friend who had easily become an enemy when the lights dimmed. She had once been the one we called at two in the morning to strategize. Now she stood under the spotlights of judgment and clicked send with a hatred she mistook for justice.
"You ruined my brother," she wrote once, in a post that had been cut and pasted a hundred times. "You signed him to a life of overwork. He broke. He died. He died because you wanted a team."
Words like knives have different edges. They are sharp where they land and blunt where they do not. That line, written by someone who had once laughed with me and who had stood at the same table and argued the same points, landed heavy. I knew what she intended—an accusation that would crowd the press and collapse the sympathy I had been rebuilding.
Chen told me in a low voice. "She's saying you pushed her brother too hard."
"She was there," I said. "She saw what she wanted to see."
Chen's hands trembled. "She has followers. She wants people to hate you."
"Let them," I said. "I have no patience for small cruelty aimed at large stages."
Claudia's accusations boiled into a siege. People called for apologies, faster than for solutions. They wanted someone to stoop so they could rise. I scheduled a press conference.
"Why would you give her the stage?" Franz asked.
"Because the stage will be hers either way," I answered. "I would rather set the coordinates."
The hall smelled of expensive coffee and cheap hope. Rows of phones and microphones aimed like small black birds. Claudias's tweets had booked seats in the form of camera flashes. I walked to the center and looked at the cameras.
"Isla," a reporter asked, "did you—"
"Yes," I said. "I will answer."
I opened the folder Chen had been carrying for a week. It was not proof of innocence in some abstract court. It was documentation: hospital intake times, operation logs, notes from the cardiologist. It was every name that had been stamped with my brother's—my teammate's—medical history she wanted to pull into theater.
"Claudia," I said, and the microphone gave my name a thin echo. "You said my team—and by extension I—killed your brother."
The room shivered with rumor. People leaned forward, hungry.
"You were wrong," I continued. "He died of an arrhythmia. He had a congenital problem. We watched him falter in slow motion. We fought to keep him alive. I paid for the hospital. I signed the forms. The team doctor warned him. The specialist warned us. He made choices that were his to make. But he was not a blank page upon which I wrote a sentence called guilt."
They filmed Claudia's face like study. She had come looking like anger dressed up in righteousness. Her hands caged a paper cup. She wore the bravado of a righteous woman and the tiredness of someone who expected attention.
"You are a coward to smear a dead man's memory for applause," I said.
For the first time the cameras did not only look at me. They turned to her. She smiled in the strained way of a person realizing the story had bent.
"Do you have proof?" she asked. Her voice trembled.
"I do." I lifted the file. "Names of every doctor. Times and signatures. Witness statements. A ledger of my donations to the hospital. A recording of the call the night he collapsed. I will publish everything after this press conference. My lawyer will make sure it is all public. You will be able to read everything. If you claim more, we will go to court."
The murmurs became a wave. A man in the back hissed, "Paper trail."
Claudia's face changed. First there was a little triumph—she thought the cameras would transcribe her pain into martyrdom. Then the triumph faltered when the weight of the documents became visible. Her mouth shaped denial, but the pixels already shifted against her.
"You think I—" She tried to say, but her throat closed.
"Stop," Chen said quietly, stepping forward until I stopped him with my palm. I did not want Chen to become my bodyguard. I wanted the truth to be the weapon, not force.
"I am not here to avenge a ghost," I said. "I am here to remove the fog. If you want answers, read the records. If you want spectacle, make one for yourself."
She laughed, but it sounded thin. She stood straighter like a man who had rehearsed courage out loud. The lights were hot. The journalist in the second row adjusted his camera.
"I will not be silenced," she said, and there was something like pleading in the words.
"You're not being silenced," I told her. "You're being held accountable for what you wrote. You claimed I was the cause of his death. The paper trail shows otherwise."
At that moment a young reporter raised up a phone and streamed. People under the broadcast saw my face and Claudia's hysteria in real time. They typed. Within minutes, the first of Claudia's old posts—ones she had taken down—were resurrected by someone who had saved screenshots.
"Look at this," someone called. "She posted private messages from the hospital to stoke anger. She encouraged donations to private accounts rather than the official fund. She asked people to 'make Isla pay.'"
Claudia's eyes darted. For a second I thought she might crumble. Then she blinked sharp. "Those messages were taken out of context," she said. "I—"
A phone camera captured the moment a small sound left her—like the sound a person makes when the last piece of paper is taken from beneath them. Around us, people shifted. Phones came up like a new kind of jury.
"Context," I said, and placed my own phone against the lectern. "I will play the recording of the call the night he collapsed."
I hit a button. A low, spooled voice filled the room. She could not contain herself now; her fingers went white around the paper cup. It was not the voice of a martyr. It was a woman who had been angry, who had made a story that made her feel big. The recording made her look small.
"Where did you get this?" she whispered.
"From the hospital," I said. "They kept it as part of the file."
Claudia's breath left like a leak. The first of the phones started to stream her face live. The crowd shifted toward me like a tide. I saw people take photos and then push them onto social feeds; I saw someone start to record, another person already typing “#ClaudiaExposed.”
"Do you deny you accused me of deliberately endangering him?" I asked.
"I—" She tried to cough up a sentence. "You pushed too hard. He was fragile. You should have let him stop."
"He was lucid the day before," I said. "I asked him twice to rest. He said no. He wanted the final match. He wanted to be known for something he loved. If you want someone to blame, tell me why you did not stop him when you could have found a doctor earlier than we did."
Claudia's face betrayed her. I watched the color leave her cheeks. She had a brief moment of rage where she tried to flip the story, then the fabric of the narrative she had spun unraveled.
"People are watching," said a woman in the front row, her phone high. "She asked for private donations. She used her brother's name to start a petition."
A cluster of phones rose. The words were typed and sent: "She used a dead man's memory." The words began to feed back on themselves. The room felt like it was leaning toward a judgment beyond my own.
"Do you have anything else?" I asked.
She looked small and hungry, an animal before a mirror.
"I—" She reached out for something to hold on to and found nothing. "I'm hurting."
"I know." I stepped toward her. "But hurting does not justify lies."
Her chest convulsed. "You can't—"
Then she did something no one expected. She slid quite suddenly to her knees. The room stilled as light as if some older etiquette had been reactivated. She crumpled, hands clasped the lectern as if it were a shelf of last resort.
"Please," she choked, and there was no performance left in it. The camera saw a woman collapse the way fake champagne collapses under heat and a crowd felt a nuance that had been missing in all the typed columns: vulnerability.
"Please forgive me," she said. "Forgive me."
Phones hummed. Somebody laughed and then stopped. Others began to whisper. Cameras clicked with the ruthless calm of the press. People leaned in, some to film, some to scream in righteous triumph. Others held their phones like tiny altars.
Claudia's knees dirtied the stage. Her hands were white-knuckled. People around her looked away and then back as if the world had just become a different kind of circus. Someone recorded her, then started streaming. Another user put the clip on a trending feed. The city watched in small rectangles the way people watch storms on television.
She railed, then fell into pleas. "I didn't mean—" Her voice broke into wet fragments. "I wanted attention to help him. I didn't think—"
"Begging won't change the past," Chen said quietly from the side. He looked tired and sick in the way of someone who had carried a whole team on their shoulders and found those shoulders bruised.
Claudia saw the screens, then the faces, then the people who had come to see a spectacle but saw something more complicated: a person unmasked by their own designs.
For a long minute the room held its breath. Then someone started to clap—one hand slow, then another. It was not applause. It was measurement. People who had been hungry for revenge now paused. Some pressed record. Others walked away. Frances—Franz—stood beside me, silent. I felt small and enormous at once.
She crawled off the stage and tried to gather herself. Her smugness had been burned away into a raw hurt that made her shady motives look painfully human. She began to apologize again and again, not from courage but from the humiliation of being put on display.
"No one will take your lies as truth anymore," I said softly. "You will post your correction. You will support the fund properly and publicly. You will apologize—not a spectacle apology—but a public record for all to see."
She nodded until her chin rubbed her chest.
"When you want to be a crusader," I added, "try being one for the living, not the dead."
She raised a face red with shame and gratitude and real remorse—an ugly, human face—and asked, "What should I do?"
"Make amends the way adults can," I said. "Face the truth. Publish your chats. Return the private donations to the hospital. Sponsor an outreach so others won't be fooled into private accounts. And do not, under any circumstances, harass people online again."
Her voice was a little less coherent. "I will. I will."
The cameras clicked with the efficiency of small predators. People in the room murmured. Someone—one of the young journalists—pressed a microphone toward her and asked, "Are you sorry?"
She nodded until the room wavered.
"Sorry isn't the same as responsibility," one host said into his mic. "But it's the beginning."
Phones recorded it all—knees on the floor, the ring of live feeds, the first quiet apologies leaking into a net that ate and published. The next day, the clips spread like a marble rolling down steps. People commented, shared, edited. The sound of Claudia's collapse was on morning feeds, along with me saying my name and handing over documents.
I did not want a spectacle. But when someone uses grief like a weapon, the public eye is a necessary corrective. People will always make theaters of tragedy. Sometimes you have to set the stage so the truth is the only play running.
After the press conference, Chen asked, "Do you regret making it public?"
"No," I said. "I aim for a clean battlefield."
"That was public," he said.
"Publicness is a fact of being known," I said. "If you live in public, you must learn to have the truth travel before rumor does."
He smiled in a small, tired way. "You are not a gentle animal."
"No," I agreed. "I am an animal who kept coming back."
Days later the internet would encode this as "Claudia kneels." Some would say I had humiliated her. Others would say she deserved it. I only knew one thing: truth, when carried well, stops a certain kind of cruelty.
In the weeks after, the team trained. I signed contracts with the sponsors who respected my terms. I lived the marriage that was comfortable in the way of umbrellas in storms: shelter without suffocating.
I played small matches with a new account and taught my toes to move like fingers. A young support player found me in those games, a hotpot shop girl's daughter who called herself Kenna online. She had a quick laugh and quicker fingers and an argument in her voice that made me want to give her more than a nickname.
"Add me," she said one night over voice. "I'll be your support."
"Kenna," I said, "you understand what 'support' requires."
"You mean abuse other people's feed?" she replied. "I do a better job of support than your average boot."
"Good," I said.
We climbed the ladder together. She had learnings to make and brashness to polish. She called me "sis" and I called her "Kid." She carried her little fire pot dreams into the game—she ran a shop in the real world—and she brought the kind of hunger that is not merely for success but for the right to be seen.
Recruiting was messy. I watched trials that felt like auditions for anything but team trust. We sifted through raw talent and polished ego. I hunted for coordinated thinkers, not lone stars. People came with resumes and charm, and I found the ones who returned after losses and promised better.
The last match of the split came with low expectations. We had never been a good season. We had never been a season that would go down in history. We were a team that had learned to show up anyway.
I sat in the booth and drew a line. "This is your chance to be something," I told them before the game. "I can be a coach and a boss and an owner, but I can't fight your inner battles for you."
They fought. They lost and learned. And when the lights went down, I felt something like a river underneath my feet—the current was different, but it flowed. We would not be remembered for a single season. We would be measured by how we kept coming back.
At night, Franz would bring soup and say, "How could anyone blame you?"
"People make stories," I told him. "All I do is try to write the ending."
"You write pretty well," he said.
We were married on paper, partners in a business-of-hearts arrangement. We were careful about the contract that said we would not cross lines unless either of us wanted to. We were kinder than that contract predicted. The world continued to type at us and at itself. We took phone calls and made plans.
Kenna called me her idol and I taught her how to be ruthless in kindness.
Claudia wrote an apology publicly and attended the hospital board meeting to move funds into public accounts. She watched, and sometimes the watching was the only penance.
"Do you regret?" Franz asked one midnight.
"Regret or not, I'm awake," I said. "I answered my own question."
"That's enough," he said, folding his hands like a man who owned a continent and still kept small moments.
"There's one more thing," I told Chen later. "Find players who want to be inside this team for reasons bigger than their names."
He nodded. "I'll start today."
I looked at the base that no one thought would survive. People had stood on this floor and promised riches. We had none of those promises yet. We had scrapes and faith and a few thousand dollars from a man who thought I was worth saving.
"One day," I said, "we will stop being a cautionary tale and start being a story the young ones tell to make themselves brave."
They laughed, quietly, and went back to work.
Some people call my return an April joke. Others think it was a miracle. I know none of that matters. The day I buried a false death and stepped into a living flame, I decided to burn only what needed burning.
When the internet calmed and the teams shifted, there were small victories and many losses. But every morning I put on a shirt and practiced my keys with foot and hand, and sometimes that felt like enough.
The last thing I remember that season was a small, stubborn light over the team's practice room. It was the kind of light that did not announce itself. It simply kept being present.
"Isla," Kenna said into the headset the one night our matches stretched late, "you're my hero."
I clicked my tongue. "Not heroes," I said. "We are people who refuse to stay down."
"And Franz?" she asked.
"Franz is my partner in a contract of support," I said.
"You two look like lovers online."
"Then keep watching," I said and laughed.
The work continued. The story did not end in a final line. We were moving forward—sometimes clumsy, sometimes bright—and that alone was victory enough.
The End
— Thank you for reading —