Che stood in the middle of Barrio Pérez, the ball balanced against his small palm like it was made of glass. Around him, the neighborhood breathed—vendors calling out prices, car horns cutting through humid air, someone's salsa music bleeding from a third-floor window. The ground beneath his bare feet was uneven: scattered puddles from last night's rain, cracked concrete, a crushed beer can half-buried in dirt.
He closed his eyes.
In his mind, the narrow streets of the barrio dissolved. The smell of exhaust and cooking oil faded. He stood now in the center of the pitch—not this broken field surrounded by chain-link and rust, but a real stadium. Rows and rows of faces. The roar wasn't just loud; it was a physical thing, pressing against his chest. His name echoing. Che. Che. CHE. The grass beneath his feet was perfect, emerald-green, unmarked. The goal posts gleamed white in the floodlights.
He smiled.
The impact came without warning.
A bicycle caught his shoulder, hard enough to spin him sideways. The ball fell from his grip and bounced twice before rolling into a puddle. The cyclist—a boy maybe fifteen—didn't slow down, just shouted something back over his shoulder that Che couldn't hear over the noise. The moment shattered. The stadium vanished.
Che stood there, chest heaving, watching the bicycle disappear into the maze of streets. He picked up the ball, water dripping from its worn leather surface. Around him, Barrio Pérez continued its chaos: a woman dragging a cart of laundry up narrow steps, three men standing outside a small colmadón arguing about football, children running between parked cars, the whole neighborhood moving, always moving, never still for more than a second.
He wiped the ball on his shirt and started walking.
The local cancha was ten minutes away if you knew the shortcuts through the alleys. Che knew them. The field wasn't much—potholes scattered across cracked asphalt, weeds pushing through the cracks, a goal made from bent rebar that had been that way for three years—but it was theirs. By the time Che arrived, his friends were already there.
Mateo was the first to spot him, jogging over with the ball already at his feet. Mateo was tall for twelve, with quick feet and a natural sense of where space was opening up. Beside him, Nico was smaller but sharper in his movements, the kind of player who always seemed to be one step ahead of where everyone thought he'd be. Tomás was the goalkeeper today, standing in front of the bent-rebar goal, bouncing on his toes.
"Che!" Mateo called, passing the ball to him. "Vamo'. We've been waiting."
Che trapped it, but the first touch was sloppy—the ball skipped off his boot instead of staying close. Nico grinned, already circling to press him.
They played like that for twenty minutes, the four of them moving in loose patterns across the broken field. Che joined the attack, ran the channels, received the ball in pockets of space, but he was always a step behind the rhythm. When he had time, he moved it too quickly, without enough touch. When he was pressed, he'd lose it trying to be too clever. Mateo had pace that left defenders in his wake. Nico had vision—he could thread passes through gaps Che didn't even see. Tomás made saves that looked impossible, flying across the goal mouth with a recklessness that somehow always worked out.
Che was in the middle somewhere, present but not dominant, useful but not essential. He knew it. They all did. But nobody said anything about it. They were just playing, just laughing, enjoying the afternoon before the heat became unbearable.
Then the older boys arrived.
There were six of them, maybe fourteen or fifteen, wearing the kind of confidence that came from size and years. They didn't ask to join. They just started walking toward the goal, and one of them—a boy with a shaved head and shoulders already broad with muscle—said something in Nico's direction that made the younger kids stop moving.
"We're using the field now," the boy said. It wasn't a question.
"We're in the middle of a game," Mateo said, but his voice was smaller than it had been moments before.
"I know," the older boy said. "That's why I'm telling you."
Nico looked at Che. Tomás looked at Che. Even Mateo, despite having said something first, seemed to be waiting.
Che thought: I can't lose it here.
"We're not done," Che said. His voice sounded thin in his own ears, but he kept it steady. "Winner stays on. You want the field? Beat us."
One of the older boys laughed—a sound like gravel shifting. The shaved-head boy didn't laugh. He just looked at Che for a long moment, taking in the small frame, the fragile-looking shoulders, the size of him. Then he shrugged, like he'd made a decision about something.
"Alright," he said. "Let's see what you've got."
They lined up. Three against six, essentially—Che, Mateo, Nico, and Tomás in goal against the six older boys, who moved across the field with the coordination of teenagers who'd been playing together for years. The difference in physicality was immediate and brutal. The older boys were faster, stronger, and they played with a directness that didn't leave room for the kind of playful experimentation Che and his friends relied on.
Within two minutes, the shaved-head boy had the ball at the top of the box. He didn't dribble or create space—he just lowered his shoulder and pushed forward, walking through Che's attempted press like Che was made of air. By the time he'd created a yard of space, he was already shooting. Tomás got a hand to it, but the boy's strike was hard and true. The ball went in off the post.
One-nil.
They scored again five minutes later, a simple cutback from the right that the boy's friend buried past a diving Tomás. Then again. By the time the shaved-head boy scored himself—a powerful run down the left channel that left Mateo completely stranded—it was four-nil, and the game had stopped being a contest. It had become a display of dominance.
When the older boys finally got bored and let them leave, Che and his friends sat at the edge of the field, catching their breath, not quite making eye contact with each other. The heat of the afternoon pressed down on them. Someone's salsa music drifted from a nearby apartment, tinny and persistent.
"Your brother's getting bigger," Nico said finally, his voice trying for casual. "Did you see his shoulder?"
"Yeah," Mateo said. "That's not even fair."
"We'll get better," Che said.
Nico laughed—not cruelly, just the sound of exhaustion and defeat. "Che, we're never going to play like that. They're teenagers. We're still just kids."
"I'm going to be a pro," Che said. It came out before he'd really decided to say it. "I'm going to play for Nacional. Maybe Uruguay too."
The silence that followed was immediate and complete. Even the salsa music seemed to pause.
Then Mateo snorted. "Che, you couldn't even trap the ball properly today."
"Yeah," Nico said, grinning now. "And you're like four feet tall."
"Three-foot-eleven," Tomás added, which made Nico laugh harder.
Che felt heat rise in his face, but he didn't argue. He just sat there, listening to them, watching the light change as the afternoon moved into evening. The neighborhood around them was shifting too—vendors packing up their carts, the rhythm of the streets slowing as people moved indoors, the heat finally beginning to ease.
By the time darkness settled completely over Barrio Pérez, Che was walking home through streets that had transformed. The vendors were gone. The colmadones had their gates half-closed. Lights came on in windows, and the sounds became more intimate—family conversations, children being called inside, the hum of refrigerators and televisions.
He reached his building and climbed the narrow stairs. The apartment was small—two bedrooms, a kitchen the size of a closet, a living room where his grandmother's bed had been placed because she couldn't climb stairs anymore. His mother was in the kitchen, her nurse's uniform still on, her hair tied back, her face tight with the kind of exhaustion that came from ten-hour shifts at the hospital.
"Where were you?" she asked. Not angry, but not calm either. The tone that meant she'd been worried and was converting it into something else.
"Playing football," Che said.
"Until now?" She glanced at the clock on the wall. "Che, you have homework. You have school tomorrow. You can't just disappear for hours."
"I'm home now," Che said.
His uncle Marcos was on the couch with one of Che's older cousins, Matías, watching a match. His other cousins—Sofia and Diego, both younger than Che—were already in the bedroom they all shared. His grandmother was asleep in her bed in the corner, her breathing shallow and rattling.
"Go," his mother said. "Homework. I want to see it done before bed."
Che went to the small table in the kitchen and pulled out his books. His mother moved around him, preparing dinner from what was available—rice, beans, some chicken she'd bought on sale. The apartment filled with the smell of onions and garlic.
He opened his math textbook. The problems were straightforward—fractions, basic algebra. His mind worked through them quickly, finding the patterns, solving them one after another. By the time his mother called everyone to eat, he'd finished the math and was halfway through Spanish homework, reading comprehension questions about a story he'd already understood on the first read.
His mother sat beside him while they ate, monitoring his progress through the remaining assignments. She didn't say much, just watched his work. But there was something in her attention that felt like pressure—not the violent kind, but the constant, invisible kind that built up over time.
"You're making mistakes," she said, pointing to a calculation in his notebook.
"No, I'm not," Che said. "That's the right answer."
"Check it again."
He checked it. It was right. He showed her the work step-by-step, but she was already moving on, already thinking about the next assignment, the next test, the next opportunity for him to prove himself capable of something larger than himself.
"University entrance exams start earlier every year," she said. "If you don't stay sharp now, at twelve, it won't matter how smart you are later. You need to build the foundation."
Che didn't respond. He just finished his rice and went back to his homework.
Later, lying in the darkness of the shared bedroom with Sofia already asleep beside him and Diego snoring softly on the other side, he thought about the stadium again. The roar of the crowd. His name echoing. The perfect grass.
He closed his eyes.
But this time, instead of the pitch coming clearly into focus, it flickered—bright one moment, distant the next. Somewhere in the apartment, his grandmother coughed. His uncle's television was still on in the living room, the sounds of the football match drifting through the thin walls.