Chapter 8: Aang’s Airball

Fifteen months before the Great Comet. Southern Air Temple.

Gyatso told us during our morning meal.

He stood at the front of the communal hall with his hands together and that patient look he got before morning meditation. Most of the boys were still chewing. Aang had a fruit pie in each hand. The hall was warm from sixty sets of lungs and the kitchens behind the far wall, and the stone tables had that particular smooth-cool feeling they got on mornings when the sun hadn’t climbed high enough to heat the eastern windows yet.

“I have something to tell all of you,” Gyatso said. He found Aang in the crowd and held his gaze for a moment. “We have known for some time that the next Avatar would be born among us. We are sure now.” He rested his hand on Aang’s shoulder. “It is Aang.”

The hall went quiet. Aang was already smiling before Gyatso finished. The monks must have told him privately, because his face was ready. He looked around the room like he was waiting for people to clap. No one did.

I kept eating.

Dorje, sitting across the table, had his spoon halfway to his mouth and forgot about it. A kid two seats down whose name I could never remember said “no way” under his breath, which was the most honest reaction in the room.

Aang stood there at the front of the hall next to Gyatso with both fruit pies still in his hands. The silence went on long enough for me to watch the boys closest to him lean back in their seats. It was small, an inch or two, the kind of movement you’d miss if you weren’t looking for it.

Gyatso put his hand on Aang’s shoulder. “Finish your breakfast,” he said to the room. “The sun will not wait for us.”

The conversations came back in a trickle. They were different now. The voices were lower. When somebody laughed they looked around the room first. I finished my porridge. Aang sat back down at his usual spot. The boys on either side of him were still there. They hadn’t moved. But the ease was gone from the bench. Everyone was being polite on purpose.

Eleven years. Exactly on schedule.

I cleaned my bowl and left.

Aang played airball that afternoon. He played how he always played, which meant he was better than everyone else on the court by a margin that had always been obvious but was now, suddenly, uncomfortable.

The other kids still played with him. That was almost worse. The distance from the breakfast table had followed him onto the court. They let shots through that they would have blocked a week ago. When Aang scored, the cheering came a beat too late, like they had to remind themselves. When he passed the ball to Dorje, Dorje caught it and threw it back to him instead of taking the shot, and Dorje never passed up a shot in his life.

I was sitting on the wall above the court with my legs hanging over the edge. I’d stopped playing about twenty minutes in, which was normal for me. I’d been the kid who sat out early since I was eight and no one thought twice about it.

Choedon climbed up and sat beside me. She was one of Jampa’s friends from the Eastern Temple, visiting for the season, and she had a habit of saying whatever she was thinking before she’d finished thinking it. She had a good arm on the court too, which was the main thing I knew about most kids at the temple.

“This is painful to watch,” she said.

I looked at the court. Aang had just done something ridiculous with an air current that sent the ball through two kids’ legs and into the goal backward. He was grinning. He was the only one.

“It’s not fair,” Choedon said. She had her arms folded and her weight tilted back like she was bracing against something. “He didn’t ask for this. Now everyone’s going to pretend everything’s fine. It’s not fine. And yet—”

“Yeah,” I said.

She pointed her chin at the court. “Look at them. They’re playing airball with a title instead of a person.”

She was right about all of it. It was also completely irrelevant. What happened to Aang next had nothing to do with fairness, and I couldn’t tell Choedon why. So I sat on the wall and said “yeah” and watched Aang play airball with people who used to be his friends.

Over the following days it got worse.

Aang ate at his usual seat in the communal hall. On the first day the boys flanking him stayed put. By the third day one of them had moved to a different table. By the fifth the other one was sitting at the far end, close enough to claim he hadn’t moved but far enough that the empty bench between them was visible from across the room. Aang filled the space with conversation, his voice carrying across the table to people who weren’t sitting there anymore.

He kept showing up to airball. Every afternoon, right after training, he was on the court with a ball in his hands, and every afternoon the game got a little worse. Kids started apologizing when they blocked him, which you never apologize for in airball because blocking is half the game. One of the younger kids, a gangly boy who tripped over his own feet twice a game on his best day, scored on Aang, and the look on his face was pure panic.

Aang saw it. I know he saw it because of what he did next. He scored three goals in a row, each one flashier than the last, the ball doing things in the air that no one his age should be able to make it do. The last one involved a spin that generated enough wind to push two defenders sideways. He landed it and said “did you guys see that?” and nobody answered.

Then one afternoon I was walking past the court and Aang was standing at the edge of it with his arms at his sides. The other kids had their air scooters out. Aang had taught them the trick months ago, and while he was away training with Gyatso, which for all I knew meant playing Pai Sho and eating fruit pies, they’d turned it into a game of their own.

“Great!” Aang said. He spun up his own scooter and balanced on top of it. “I want to play.”

The kid closest to him, a boy about thirteen whose name I didn’t know well, looked at the ground for a second. “Now that you’re the Avatar, it’s kind of an unfair advantage for whichever team you’re on.”

“But I’m still the same,” Aang said. “Nothing’s changed. So, what, I can’t play?”

“That’s the only fair way.”

Aang stood there. His scooter fizzled out under his feet and the ball of air slowly dissolved into the afternoon wind. “Oh,” he said. “Okay.”

“Sorry, Aang,” another kid said from behind him.

Aang walked off the court. He walked normally, at a normal speed, his hands at his sides. He didn’t look back. I’d seen him bounce, run, flip, ride air scooters down staircases, and do handstands on railings for as long as I could remember. I had never once seen him just walk.

Later that day I sat in the corridor outside the training courtyard. Aang walked past with a lemur on his shoulder, one of the ring-tailed ones from the upper garden. He was talking to it quietly, how he talked when he didn’t know anyone was around. The lemur chirped and Aang laughed. It was the first real laugh I’d heard from him in weeks.

He didn’t notice me. I was just another kid in a corridor. That was fine by me.

My training group met on the south terrace after the fourth bell, the same time we always met. Gyatso sat on his bench with his hands on his knees, watching.

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The terrace looked different now than it had a year ago. The cushions and chalk marks were gone. Gyatso had changed everything.

Dorje and Lhamo were sparring in the center of the terrace, throwing compression bursts at each other while moving. Dorje’s footwork had gotten good enough that he could throw while circling, keeping his center low and leading with his hips like Gyatso had shown us. His shots came out clean even on the turn. Lhamo was faster but sloppier, her bursts spreading wide when she pivoted. She compensated with power. A near miss from Lhamo at close range could rattle your teeth.

Rinzen held an air wall at the far end, the flat compressed barrier that Gyatso had built the whole defensive side of our training around. Rinzen’s wall was the best in the group. He could hold it for almost a minute, which was longer than I could manage. He hated heights and loved standing his ground. The air wall was built for him. Jampa was on Compression still, throwing at a section of the wall Dorje had outgrown. His hold was up to six seconds and his shots left marks from ten feet. A year ago that would have impressed me. Today it was baseline.

I was working on something different. I held my hands up and pulled, trying to thin the air between my palms instead of compress it. Six months of this and the pocket still wouldn’t hold. I could feel it forming, the air going thin and strange between my fingers, but within two or three seconds the surrounding air rushed back in and filled the space like water into a hole in sand.

“You are still gripping,” Gyatso said from the bench. He hadn’t moved. “Use your breath instead of pushing out with your muscle. The space will empty on its own.”

I tried it. I breathed in and the air between my palms thinned. Four seconds before it collapsed.

“Better,” Gyatso said. “Again.”

Five seconds the next time. The air between my hands felt thin and strange, like holding something made of nothing. On the terrace behind me Dorje landed a burst on Lhamo’s shoulder and she spun with it instead of bracing, redirecting the force into her own return shot that caught Dorje in the ribs. He doubled over laughing.

“That one hurt,” he said, straightening up and rubbing his side.

“Your fault you dropped your wall,” Lhamo said.