Dog Days and Vitamin D

Leo's summer was supposed to be about getting shredded—his older brother's word, not his. That's why his bathroom counter was cluttered with supplements his mom swore were essential: protein powder that tasted like chalk, multivitamins the size of horse pills, and vitamin D gummies that sat untouched because who actually enjoys eating something that reminds them they're pasty indoors.

Instead, he'd somehow become the designated walker for Barnaby, his grandmother's ancient golden retriever who moved with the urgency of a sloth on sedatives.

"You're building character," his dad had said, which was parent code for "I don't want to do it."

The walks weren't terrible. Barnaby would stop approximately every seventeen feet to sniff something with the intensity of a bomb defusal expert, giving Leo plenty of time to overthink everything: his failed attempt to ask Maya to the movies, the fact that his voice still cracked when he got nervous, and how everyone else seemed to have their life together while he was just... waiting.

The cable guy was the only person who actually talked to him that summer.

"Working hard or hardly working?" the guy asked with a grin, sweat dripping down his face as he worked on the neighborhood's aging internet lines. Leo was sitting on his front porch, Barnaby snoring softly beside him.

"Barnaby's the one working," Leo said. "I'm just the emotional support human."

They talked for twenty minutes about nothing and everything—how the guy had dropped out of college to do this, how he didn't regret it, how life wasn't supposed to be a straight line.

"Everyone's just figuring it out," the cable guy said. "Even the people who look like they're not."

That night, Leo finally texted Maya. No excuse about vitamin supplements making him weird or Barnaby needing emergency walks. Just: want to hang out tomorrow?

She responded in thirty seconds.

Barnaby woofed in his sleep. Sometimes life was simpler than he made it out to be.