Simple. He played short, made space, made the others look better than they were. The Gift showed him everything—every possible pass, every run that would work, every play that would die—but he chose not to use it all. Not yet. Thirty-five years of life had taught him something no gift could teach: don't show everything you've got to people who don't yet know who you are.
When the sun began to sink and the kids started stopping, sweaty and out of breath, sprawled along the edge of the field drinking from dented bottles, the kid with the scar sat down beside him. In the dirt-field circuit, everyone called him Scar. Nobody knew his real name—or if they did, they didn't use it.
Up close, the scar was uglier than it had seemed. Thin, yes, but deep—it ran from the corner of his lip to the middle of his chin, as if someone had tried to split his face open and given up halfway through. The boy didn't seem ashamed of it. He wore it the way he wore his crooked smile: as part of who he was.
“Léo,” he said, holding out his hand. His real name, not his nickname. That meant something.
Raí shook it.
“Raí.”
“Raí what?”
“Just Raí.”
Léo looked at him with the gaze of someone measuring, weighing, deciding whether he was worth the investment of time. Raí knew that look. In the outskirts, trust isn't given—it's built, brick by brick, and the first brick is always silence. You keep quiet, observe, and wait for the other person to show who they are.
“How long have you been playing like that?” Léo asked, pulling a blade of grass from the ground and sticking it between his teeth.
“Forever.”
“Bullshit. Nobody's played like that forever. Where do you train?”
“Nowhere.”
Léo laughed. Not mockingly—in disbelief. The kind of laugh that comes out when reality doesn't make sense and the body needs some way to react.
“Man. You dribbled past Tiago, Menor, and Gordão in the same play. Tiago plays in Guarani's youth system. Menor already had a tryout with Corinthians. And Gordão… well, Gordão is Gordão, but he's a good goalie when he wants to be. And you got past all of them like they'd stopped moving.”
Raí didn't answer. He looked at the field. The sun was low and orange, and the shadows of the crooked goalposts stretched across the dirt like long arms. Beautiful. Sad. Both.
“Where do you live?” Léo asked.
The question fell like a stone.
Raí thought about lying. Thought about making up an address, a story, a life that would make sense to a sixteen-year-old kid. But the lie didn't come. Maybe because he was tired of lying—not in this life, but in the other one, where every day was a lie he told himself: I'm fine, tomorrow will be better, that's just how it is.
“Nowhere,” he said. And this time it wasn't a short answer. It was the truth.
Léo stopped chewing the blade of grass. He looked at Raí differently. Not with pity—in the outskirts, pity is an insult. He looked with recognition. With the kind of understanding only someone who's slept without a roof knows.
“Did your mom kick you out?”
Raí didn't answer. He didn't have to.
Léo stayed quiet for a while. The field emptied out. The kids left in groups of two or three, disappearing down the dirt streets with the ball tucked under an arm and the rest of the afternoon ahead of them. The silence grew wider, heavier, until only the two of them remained, sitting at the edge of the field beneath a sky changing color.
“My grandma has a little room in the back,” Léo said, as if he were commenting on the weather. “It's full of junk, but there's room for a mattress. She won't care. She never cares about anything, the old lady.”
Raí looked at the boy. He searched for the trap. In his first life, he'd learned that nothing given for free was ever really free—there was always a price, always something owed, always an “now you owe me.” But there was none of that in Léo's eyes. Only the simplest, rarest thing in the outskirts: solidarity without calculation.
“Why?” Raí asked.
Léo shrugged.
“Because you play like hell and have nowhere to sleep. You need another reason?”
Raí almost laughed. Almost. But what came out was something else—a knot in his throat that he swallowed quickly, before the kid could notice. Because in that simple sentence, tossed into the air as if it were nothing, there was more dignity than anything he'd received in nearly twenty years of adult life.
“Thanks,” he said. That was all. But Léo understood it wasn't just a thanks.
They got up. Léo picked up the patched ball—it was his, Raí realized now—and tucked it under his arm. They walked down the dirt street side by side, unhurried. The neighborhood slowly darkened, the yellow lights in the houses coming on one by one, the smell of food drifting through open windows.
“You know there's a tryout next week, right?” Léo said without looking at him.
Raí stopped.
“A tryout for what?”
“Cruzeiro do Sul. The city team. It's nothing major, but the coach knows people. Last year he sent two kids to Palmeiras's under-seventeens.” Léo kicked a pebble into the street. “I'm going to try. I try every year. Every year they cut me.”
He said it without bitterness. With the naturalness of someone who had already absorbed rejection as part of the process, like breathing, like waking up.
“But you”—he continued, and this time he looked at Raí. “They won't cut you.”
Raí felt the Gift stir. Not in his eyes, not in his feet—in his chest. As if the invisible lines he saw on the field had stretched beyond the game and were now showing him something else: a path. Not drawn on the ground, but through time. A sequence of steps that began right there, on that dirt street, with a scar-chinned kid and a patched ball tucked under his arm.
Tryout. City team. Coach who knows people. Under-seventeens.
In his first life, he hadn't even known this tryout existed. Nobody had told him. Nobody had brought him. Nobody had cared.
This time, someone cared.
“When?” he asked.
“Saturday. Seven in the morning. Campo do Cruzeiro, near the station.”
Raí looked up at the sky. The first stars were appearing, faint and almost invisible amid the city's light pollution. But they were there. Just as they had always been.
“I'll go,” he said.
Léo smiled. The crooked smile, the same as before, but this time there was something more behind it. Hope, maybe. Or something like hope—the version from the outskirts that doesn't dare call itself by name, that disguises itself as indifference so it won't hurt when things don't work out.
“Great,” Léo said. “Now come on, the old lady makes rice and eggs every night, and if we get home late, she gives the egg to the dog.”
They walked on. Night fell slowly. And for the first time in nearly twenty years—counting both lives—Raí wasn't alone.