Goldfish & Ghost Serves

The goldfish—named Neptune because I was fourteen and dramatic—swam in circles in his bowl on my nightstand, a constant reminder of the night I'd rather forget. The night Tyler and Ava invited me to the country club and I spent three hours watching them play padel while I sat in the shade, nursing a vitamin water and feeling like the world's biggest seventh wheel.

"You should've joined," Tyler had said afterward, all easy confidence and sweat-dampened hair. "You were totally overthinking it."

Easy for him to say. Tyler was captain of the padel team, naturally athletic, the kind of guy who didn't have to try. I was the girl whose mom packed spinach smoothies in her lunch every day because "growing bodies need nutrients." The girl who won a goldfish at the carnival booth because she couldn't land a serve to save her life.

But something shifted that summer. Maybe it was Neptune's judgmental fish eyes following me around my room. Maybe it was the way my mom started leaving daily vitamin gummies on the counter with sticky notes like "Today's going to be amazing!" Or maybe it was just that I got tired of watching from the sidelines.

I started showing up at the courts early. practicing my serve against the backboard until my arm ached. Tyler noticed first, nodding from across the net like he actually saw me. Then Ava started waving me over to their games, not out of pity but like I actually belonged.

The day I finally worked up the nerve to ask Leo—the quiet guy from my English class who always sat alone—to play padel with me, everything clicked. We were terrible. We lost every match. But we laughed through the whole thing, and when he offered me a spinach wrap from his lunch because "it's actually pretty good, I promise," something in my chest loosened.

Neptune's still swimming in circles. But I'm not just watching anymore. And that's got to count for something.