Goldfish at the Plate

The sky turned that weird greenish color right before bad weather—like a bruise forming on an apple. I stood on the pitching mound, sweat dripping down my spine even though the air had gone cold.

"You gonna throw something or just stare at the clouds?" Maya called from behind home plate. She was wearing that hideous orange hoodie she refused to retire, the one that made her look like a traffic cone. A walking, talking traffic cone who also happened to be my best friend since fourth grade.

"Weather's coming," I said.

"No kidding, Captain Obvious. Weather's been coming for an hour. You've thrown exactly three pitches. Two balls and one that somehow hit the backstop." She grinned, and something in my chest did that thing it always did lately—like a tiny goldfish flipping over in its bowl, frantic and impossible to ignore.

The baseball felt slick in my hand. We'd been coming to this field since we were kids, back when Maya still played softball and I still believed practice made perfect instead of just making you tired. Now she just caught for me because she said my anxiety pitching was entertaining to watch.

"Remember when we won those goldfish at the carnival?" she asked suddenly, completely random as usual. "Mine lasted three years. Yours died in, like, two days."

"We don't talk about Jerry."

"Jerry the goldfish. You named him and everything. Gave him a funeral and everything."

I wound up and threw. The ball caught the corner of the strike zone with a satisfying thwack into her mitt.

"See? When you're not overthinking everything, you can actually pitch."

Lightning cracked across the sky—close enough that the hair on my arms stood up. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. BOOM. The storm was practically on top of us.

Maya scrambled up, grabbing her gear. "Race you to my car!"

"You're on!"

We sprinted through the first fat drops of rain, orange hoodie bobbing ahead of me, both of us slipping on the wet grass, laughing so hard we could barely breathe. And I thought—maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow—but someday I was going to tell her that Jerry the goldfish wasn't the only thing I'd been too scared to keep alive.

Some things were worth the risk of striking out.