Saturday came the way everything comes in the outskirts: without warning and without mercy.
Rai woke up before the alarm clock he didn't have. The little room at the back of Marta's house—the old lady, as Leo called her—was smaller than a cell and smelled of mildew and kerosene. But it had a mattress, a roof, and silence. After nearly twenty years of sleeping with the sound of his own despair, silence was a luxury.
He lay there for a minute. Staring at the bare-tile roof, the cobwebs in the corners, the sliver of bluish light coming through the window without glass. His sixteen-year-old body was whole. No back pain, no locked knee, none of that weight on his shoulders that in his other life he'd thought was exhaustion, when it was really his entire life piled on top of him.
He closed his eyes. The Gift was there, quiet, like an ember buried under ash. He didn't need to stoke it. He only needed a field.
He got up. He put on the only pair of shorts that wasn't dirty and the T-shirt Leo had lent him—too big, faded, with the number 10 peeling off the back. Irony. Or destiny. Rai didn't know the difference and didn't care.
In the kitchen—if that two-meter room with a two-burner stove and a grimy sink deserved the name—Marta was already up. Small, wiry, with white hair tied in a tight bun and tiny eyes belonging to someone who had seen so much she'd stopped being impressed. She hadn't asked a thing when Leo showed up with Rai on the first night. She'd looked at the kid, looked at her grandson, and said only, “The mattress is behind the door.” No drama. No interrogation. In the outskirts, kindness was sometimes like that—quiet, practical, with no time for explanations.
“There’s coffee,” she said without turning from the stove. It wasn't a question. It was information.
Rai drank the coffee black, without sugar, standing up. It burned. Bitter enough to hurt his tongue. But it was real coffee, made by someone who wasn't him, in a house that wasn't his, and that had a taste no amount of sugar in the world could give it.
Leo appeared in the kitchen doorway with sleep creasing his face and the patched-up ball tucked under his arm. He slept with that ball. Rai had noticed the first night and hadn't said anything, because he'd slept hugging a ball too when he was a kid, before everything went away.
“Let's go,” Leo said, his voice still hoarse. “If we miss the time, Big Sergio won't even let us in.”
“Big Sergio?”
“The coach. Sergio Moreira. Everybody calls him Big Sergio.” Leo shoved a piece of stale bread into his mouth and spoke while chewing. “The guy's brutal. Like, really brutal. He yells, curses, sends people home in the middle of practice. But he's fair. If you can play, he sees it. Doesn't matter where you came from, who your father is, whether you have cleats or not. He sees it.”
Rai stored the name away. Sergio Moreira. Big Sergio. In his first life, he'd never heard that name. He'd never had the chance to.
They left. The sun was still low, weak, with that early-morning color that made it seem like the day hadn't decided yet whether it was going to happen. The neighborhood was quiet—just dogs, roosters, and the distant sound of a radio playing gospel in some house with its door open.
They walked for twenty minutes. Leo talked the entire way—about the kids who would be there, the tactical setup Big Sergio liked, what to do and what not to do. Rai heard everything and nothing. Because inside, in a place that was neither his head nor his chest, the Gift was waking up. Slowly. Like an animal that sensed its prey before seeing it.
Cruzeiro do Sul's field was something else.
It wasn't a dirt-field pitch with rotten wooden goalposts. It was a real field—grass, even if it was thin and full of bare patches. Iron goalposts with nets. Chalk lines drawn across the ground, half-faded but still there. Concrete bleachers on one side, only three steps, but bleachers. And people. A lot of people.
Rai counted. Around sixty, seventy kids. All between fifteen and seventeen. All with the same hunger in their eyes, the same tension in their shoulders, the same fear disguised as indifference. Some had cleats. Others, like him, were barefoot or wearing flip-flops. Some had come with their fathers, mothers, or uncles. Others had come alone. They had all come with the same thing: the hope that someone would look at them and see something.
Leo tensed up. Rai noticed. His crooked smile disappeared, his shoulders rose, and he started squeezing the patched-up ball harder. He'd been through this before. He'd already been cut. His body remembered, even if his mouth didn't say it.
“Relax,” Rai said quietly, just for Leo to hear.
Leo looked at him. He said nothing. But his shoulders dropped an inch.
Big Sergio showed up at exactly seven.
He was exactly what Leo had described, only worse. Big—not fat, big. Shoulders like someone who had carried the world and hadn't liked the weight. A sunburned face, thick mustache, tiny eyes that moved too quickly for a body that size. He wore a battered Palmeiras cap and had a whistle hanging around his neck that looked more like a weapon than an instrument.
He stopped in front of the seventy kids. He didn't smile. He didn't greet them. He looked from side to side, slowly, like a man counting cattle.
“I’m only saying this once,” his voice came out deep, without a microphone, and reached the far end of the field. “I’m not here to make friends. I’m not here to give anyone a chance. I’m here to find players. If you’re a player, I’ll see it. If you’re not, I’ll see that too, and you’ll leave. Simple as that.”
Silence.
“You’ll split into teams of five. Seven minutes per game. Whoever I call stays. Whoever I don’t call, thanks and good luck.”
Seven minutes. Rai did the math. Seventy kids, teams of five, seven minutes per game. Most of them would get one chance. One. Seven minutes to show an entire lifetime of desire.
In his first life, he would have trembled. His stomach would have turned, his legs gone weak, his head filled with bad thoughts. But he wasn't that kid anymore. He was a thirty-five-year-old man who had lost everything and discovered that losing everything was the only thing that truly freed you from the fear of losing.
He was in the third game. Orange team, wearing a smelly practice vest someone had thrown at him. Leo ended up on the same team—luck or destiny, it didn't matter.
The whistle blew.
And the Gift opened.
Not like on the dirt-field pitch, where he'd controlled it, rationed it, hidden it. Here, there was no hiding it. Seven minutes. Seven minutes to make a man who believed in nothing believe in him.
His first touch was a reception. A high ball crossed from the right, awkward, the kind of ball that dropped and bounced and nobody could control. Rai didn't think. His right foot rose, met the ball at the exact point—not up high, not on the ground, in that space between where the ball was still deciding what it would do—and killed it. The ball stuck to his foot as if it had been trained for that. As if it knew who it was going to.
Big Sergio didn't move. But his eyes stopped.
Rai turned. The Gift showed him everything at once—the five opponents, the four teammates, the spaces, the vectors, the passing lanes that existed and the ones that would exist two seconds from now. It was like playing chess while seeing ten moves ahead, except the board moved and the pieces had minds of their own.
He tapped it to Leo. Short, to his feet, no fancy moves. Leo received it in surprise—nobody passed to him at tryouts, he was always the last one to touch the ball—and returned it on instinct. Rai was no longer there. He'd moved into the space that was going to open before it opened, and when the ball arrived, he was already facing the goal with only the keeper in front of him.
He didn't shoot.
He saw the defender coming from behind. Saw the space closing. And saw, in the left corner of the field, Leo running alone, unmarked, with a look on his face that said he couldn't believe he was unmarked.
He passed. Low, firm, with just the right weight.
Leo shot it first-time. No thinking, no adjusting, no fear. The ball went into the corner. It wasn't pretty. It was efficient. It was a goal.
Leo stood still. Staring at the net. Staring at his own foot. As if the foot belonged to someone else.
Rai didn't celebrate. He walked back toward midfield, head down, as if nothing had happened. But inside, he was doing a calculation no one there could make: Leo needed that goal more than he did. Leo needed Big Sergio to see him scoring, not passing. Because nobody remembered passes. Everybody remembered goals.
Thirty-five years of life had taught him that. Sometimes the smartest play wasn't the one that made you shine. It was the one that made the right person shine at the right moment.
The seven minutes passed the way important things pass: far too quickly.
Rai touched the ball eleven times. He made three passes that became clear chances. He made one individual play that drew a “holy shit” from someone in the stands. And he didn't score a single goal.
But Big Sergio was watching. Rai knew it. He felt the weight of those little eyes on him the way he felt the sun on the back of his neck. The coach hadn't shouted, hadn't written anything down, hadn't made a single sign. He had only watched. With the same expression as someone who finds something he wasn't looking for.
The games continued. Rai sat on the edge and watched. Leo sat beside him, still breathing hard, still with the ghost of the goal in his eyes.
“You gave me that goal,” Leo said quietly.
It wasn't a question.
Rai looked at the field.
“You were unmarked.”
“You could've shot. It was right there.”
“I could have.”
Leo fell silent. He chewed on the silence. Then:
“No one's ever done that for me.”
Rai didn't answer. He didn't need to. Because the truth was more complicated than Leo could understand: he hadn't done it out of kindness. He'd done it out of strategy. Calculation. Knowing that you got nowhere alone, and that the first step toward building something was making someone believe it was worth building together.
But he'd also done it for something else. Something he wouldn't admit even to himself: because in his first life, no one had ever done that for him.
The games ended. The sun was already high, white, merciless. The seventy kids were scattered across the field, some sitting, some standing, all wearing the same expression of someone waiting for the results of an exam that could change everything.
Big Sergio walked to the center of the field. He took off his cap. Scratched his head. Put the cap back on.
“When I call your name, stay. The rest of you, thanks.”
He began calling them. One by one. Each name was a sentence—for the ones who heard it, a life. For the ones who didn't, another year of waiting, another door closed, another “maybe next time.”
Leo squeezed the patched-up ball so hard his fingers turned white.
“Leonardo Souza.”
Leo didn't move. He looked at Rai. Looked at Big Sergio. Looked at Rai again. As if he needed confirmation that he'd heard right, that the world wasn't playing another trick on him.
“Go,” Rai said.
Leo stood. His legs were trembling. He walked toward the group of chosen players with the steps of someone walking across ground that could vanish at any moment.
Big Sergio kept calling. More names. More lives changing in real time.
And then:
“The barefoot kid in the yellow shirt.”
Silence.
Rai looked down. Faded yellow shirt. Bare feet. It was him. But Big Sergio didn't know his name. He hadn't signed up. He had no file, no documents, nothing. He'd simply stepped onto the field when they called the third game, and nobody had asked.
He stood.
Big Sergio looked at him. Up close, those little eyes were even smaller, almost disappearing beneath his thick brows. But what was inside them wasn't small. It was the look of someone who had seen a thousand kids and knew how to separate desire from talent, talent from the Gift, and the Gift from something that had no name.
“What’s your name?”
“Rai.”
“Rai what?”
“Just Rai.”
Big Sergio stood still for a second. Two. Looking. Measuring. Then he did something Leo would later say he had never done in ten years of tryouts.
He took off his cap.
Not to scratch his head. Not to adjust it. He took it off and held it in his hand, as if he needed a second with nothing between him and what he was seeing.
“You don't have documents, you don't have cleats, you didn't sign up. You stepped into the game without anyone calling you.” His voice was hard, but it wasn't anger. It was something else. “In thirty years of soccer, I've seen three kids play the way you played today. Three. One is in Europe. Another quit. The third one died.”
A pause.
“What are you going to be?”
Rai looked at Big Sergio. He looked with thirty-five-year-old eyes, with the weight of an entire life of closed doors, with the fire even death hadn't extinguished.
“The first.”
Big Sergio put his cap back on. He didn't smile. But his mustache twitched in a way that might have been the beginning of one.
“Monday. Six in the morning. If you're late, don't come back.”
He turned his back and walked away.
Rai stood in the middle of the field. The sun beat down from above, white and shadowless. Around him, the kids who hadn't been called were leaving slowly, the weight of no on their shoulders. And those who had been called looked at one another with that mixture of relief and terror belonging to people who knew that passing the tryout wasn't the end—it was the beginning of the hardest part.
Leo came running. His crooked smile was so wide that the scar stretched and almost looked beautiful.
“Bro. Bro. Did you hear what he said? Three kids. Three. In thirty years.” He was practically shouting. “And he took off his cap. He never takes off his cap. Never.”
Rai looked at Leo. Looked at the field. Looked at the white midday sky.
And this time, he smiled. For real. No almost.
Because there, on that field of thin grass with faded chalk lines, with a brutal coach who believed in nothing and a kid with a scar on his chin who believed in everything, his second life had truly just begun.