Green Teeth and Golden Sets

The heat wave hit Mesa Verde the same week my life turned into a complete disaster. I was fifteen, practically invisible at school, and somehow I'd convinced myself that learning to play **baseball** would make me finally interesting to Sarah Chen.

"Just join the summer league," my dad said, like it was that simple. "You've got a natural swing."

My natural swing was mostly me flailing at pitches that weren't even close to the plate, but I didn't tell him that. Instead, I spent every afternoon at the community center, where the **padel** courts stood between the baseball diamond and the pool. That's where I saw him—Rico, the senior everyone talked about, playing padel like he'd invented the sport.

The third day, I was late to baseball practice because I'd stopped to watch Rico's match. My coach, a former minor leaguer who still wore his MLB ring to practice, stared at my grass-stained uniform.

"You smell like chlorine," he said.

"I... fell in the pool?" It came out more question than statement.

He didn't buy it. Neither did Sarah, who'd witnessed my dramatic fall from grace when I tripped over my own bat during warm-ups. The best part? My mom had started making these "healthy" **spinach** smoothies for "brain power"—her words, not mine—and I'd chugged one right before practice. Two front teeth. Completely green.

"Retro," Rico told me later, finding me behind the community center hiding from humanity. He was wiping down his padel racket, easy smile in place like he hadn't just witnessed my social suicide. "My cousin once played an entire baseball game with gum stuck in his hair. People still talk about it.

"That's supposed to make me feel better?"

"No." He tossed me a spare racket. "This will. You ever play padel?"

I hadn't. But by the end of July, I wasn't the terrible baseball player with green teeth anymore. I was the freshman who could hold his own on the padel court with Rico Martinez, who'd somehow become my actual friend. Sarah Chen thought my smoothie incident was "weirdly charming"—and she'd agreed to help me with my geometry homework in exchange for padel lessons.

Somehow, between the **swimming** pool humidity, the spinach-induced dental disasters, and the absolute catastrophe that was my baseball career, I'd accidentally figured out exactly who I was supposed to be. And for the first time, that felt like enough.